Wait Council of Clans

[Fyraltari]

You said, and I quote, "every patrician family had people in the senate and that’s who it was supposed to represent."

The only way every family would always have representatives would be by law.

no, they would just need to each have at least one member reach enough to be on the album, which until the rise of the Equites, I would be surprised to learn they didnt'.

And that is not even going into the idea that the Senate represented the patrician families alone. It was the SPQR, the Senate of the Peoples of Rome, not the Senate of the Patricians of Rome. From the start, it represented the entirety of the population of Rome (unequally, I'll grant you, but the whole thing).

"Senatus PopulusQue Romanum" "The Senate And the Roman People" as in the two are distinct and separate.

"The Senate of the People of Rome" would be "Senatus Populi Roma" and thus SPR, not SPQR.

The Senate, I stand by that, was meant to represent the original gentes who evolved into the patricians. True, social pressure forced it to be more inclusive than that, but it was never the assembly of the roman people, that's the comices' job (and the plebeian counterpart to the Senat was the plebeian council).