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Consequently if, as seems to have been the case, the tribes did include all landowners, they must have extended far beyond the bounds of the city. Our authorities knew them at a time when their names indeed survived, but when they had become strictly divisions of the city, by the complete separation of the country from the urban tribes. If we believe in the urban character of the four original tribus, we must accept the clearly expressed but generally discredited belief preserved by Dionysius that besides these four tribes, which comprehended only the city, Servius established twenty-six others which took in the country districts.[274]

The view that the four tribes[275] comprised the country districts is preferable, and is not incompatible with the fact that they certainly designated parts of the city, nor even with the possibility of their having been engrafted in some way on the older divisions of the Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres.[276] Local creations of an artificial character, independent of juxtaposition, are not unknown in early legislations; they are found in the almost contemporary work of Cleisthenes of Athens. But even this hypothesis is unnecessary; each tribe may have stretched continuously with fairly definite boundaries beyond the city walls. The country portions of these tribes were for a moment wholly lost by the disastrous wars which followed the expulsion of the kings, and when the ager Romanus was again regained, a new organisation was adopted The territory outside the walls was parcelled out into country tribes,[277] and these grew in number as Rome’s conquests spread. The four Servian tribe-names were kept as designations only of regions within the city.