typified by the name of Romulus was not accompanied by any large alien intermixture with the primitive Latin population. The existence of Sabine gods like Sancus, or Sabine ritual as typified in Numa Pompilius, is no more evidence of Sabine intermixture than the early reception of Hellenic deities is of Greek; and though it is possible that a Sabine tribe once settled on the Quirinal, and it is almost certain that at the close of the monarchical period an Etruscan dynasty ruled in Rome, yet the language, religion, and political structure of the early state were of a genuinely Latin type. There was, indeed, contact with peoples more developed in material civilisation or more gifted in their spiritual life, and to this contact the debt of Rome was great. Rome adopts the Chalcidian alphabet; she receives early Greek divinities such as Hercules, Castor, and Pollux ; she models her statue of Diana on the Aventine on that of Artemis at Massilia; she imitates the Greek tactical organisation in her early phalanx. But it is very doubtful whether the obligation extended to the reception of the political ideas of Hellas. Parallels between Roman and Hellenic organisation may be observed in certain institutions such as the equites and the census; but these are military rather than purely political, and in all the fundamental conceptions of public law-the rights of the citizens individually and collectively, the power of the magistrate and the divine character even of secular rule-Rome differed widely from the developed Greek communities with which she was brought into contact, and seems in her political evolution to have worked out her own salvation. The more developed civilisation of Etruria doubtless filled up certain gaps in her political and religious organisation both by contact and by rule. The strength of the religious guilds (collegia) of Rome may be due in part to an imitation of the Etruscan hierarchy; the refinements of the science of augury may also be Tuscan; and tradition, as we shall see, derives from the same source the insignia of the Roman king.

§ 2. The Elements of the Population-Patricians, Plebeians, Clients

The free population of Rome as a developed city-state was composed of the two elements of Patricians and Plebeians. The ultimate source of this distinction, which is undoubtedly 1 Cf. Niese Grundriss der röm. Gesch. pp. 20 sq.

anterior to the foundation of the city, can only be a matter of conjecture; but the origin of the Patriciate may probably be explained as the result partly of earlier settlement, partly of superior military prowess. The warriors within the pale receive the new settlers, but only on certain conditions; these conditions are perpetuated and become a permanent badge of inferiority. The happiest guess of the many made by Roman antiquarians as to the origin of the Patricians was that they were originally the "free-born men (ingenui), the men who could point to fathers (patres) and in their turn become full heads of families 1

-the men in short who, at a time when the family with its juristic head, and not the mere individual, was the true unit of life, were the only full citizens of Rome. Such men alone could be partners in the true ownership of property, or sue and be sued in their own right,2 and such an exclusive right to a full personality in private law they claimed in virtue of their public services or privileges the duty of taking the field on horseback or in heavy armour, the right of uplifting their voices in the assembly when they acclaimed a king or ratified a law.

The whole free community, other than the patres or Patricians, is regarded as the "complement" of the latter, "the multitude" (plebs, plebeii) which, with the fully privileged class, makes up the state. It is possible that, in a very primitive stage of Roman history, these Plebeians may all have been in the half-servile condition of clientship; but, even when the earliest records of Rome are revealed to us, this has ceased to be the case. Not only has the son of the original client evolved a freedom of his own, but a man may become a plebeian member of Rome without subjecting himself to the degradation of clientela. No less than five ways are described or can be imagined in which the noncitizen could become a citizen, and at least one of these reveals the possibility of the perfectly free Plebeian. In the old life of the pagus and the gens, the weaker sought protection of the

1 Cincius ap. Festum p. 241 "Patricios Cincius ait in libro de comitiis eos appellari solitos, qui nunc ingenui vocentur." Cf. Liv. x. 8 (300 B.C.; from the speech of Decius Mus) § 9 "Semper ista audita sunt eadem, penes vos auspicia esse, vos solos gentem habere, vos solos justum imperium et auspicium domi militiaeque"; § 10 "en unquam fando audistis, patricios primo esse factos non de coelo demissos sed qui patrem ciere possent, id est nihil ultra quam ingenuos?"

2 Mr. Strachan-Davidson remarks (Smith Dict. of Antiq. ii. p. 354) that, on the evolution of the rights of the plebeians, these too should have been patricii, but that the word patricius survived as a "token of an arrested development."

3 Plebs is connected with the root which appears in compleo, impleo, πλños.

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stronger by a willing vassalage, which ripened, when the state was formed, into the Plebeiate which had its origin in clientship. A similar position was ultimately gained by the descendant of the manumitted slave. The stranger (hostis) from a city which had no treaty relations with Rome, or no relations which guaranteed a mutual interchange of citizenship, must, if he wandered to this new home, also make application to a patron and become his client. It is less certain what was the fate of the inhabitants of a conquered city who were violently deported to Rome. The annalists, indeed, represent such men as being received into the citizen body, and as becoming members of the tribe and the curia; but it is probable that in the prehistoric period they became clients, immediately of the king to whom they had made their subjection, ultimately perhaps of patrician houses to which he chose to attach them as dependants.2 In all these cases clientship may have been the original lot of the Plebeian ; but this could hardly have been the fate of the immigrant who moved to Rome from a city which already possessed the jus commercii with that state, and by the exercise of the right of voluntary exile from his native land (jus exulandi) claimed the Roman civitas. The existence of such relations between Rome and cities of the Latin league is attested for a very early period, and they may even have been extended to cities outside the league.3 As the jus commercii implies the right of suing and being sued in one's own person before Roman courts, there seems no reason why such an immigrant should make application to a Roman patron; but, if he did not, he was in the chief aspects of private law a perfectly free man, and

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1 Liv. i. 28 "populum omnem Albanum Romam traducere in animo est, civitatem dare plebi, primores in patres legere" Dionysius (ii. 35) represents the people of Caenina and Antemnae as being, after their subjection, enrolled εἰς φυλὰς καὶ φράτρας.

2 Cf. Dionysius' account of Romulus' institution of clientship (ii. 9 аракатαθήκας δὲ ἔδωκε τοῖς πατρικίοις τοὺς δημοτικούς, ἐπίτρεψας ἑκάστῳ ὃν αὐτὸς ἐβούλετο νέμειν προστάτην πατρωνείαν ὀνομάσας τὴν προστασίαν).

3 The jus commercii has been read into the relations of Rome with Carthage as depicted in Polybius' second treaty [Polyb. iii. 24, 12 év Zɩkeλíą, ĥs Kapxndóviol ἐπάρχουσι, καὶ ἐν Καρχηδόνι πάντα καὶ ποιείτω καὶ πωλείτω (the Roman) ὅσα καὶ τῷ πολίτῃ (the Carthaginian) ἔξεστιν]. But jurisdiction here may have been the work of some international court, and the jus commercii, without the jus exulandi, would hardly have made a foreign immigrant a citizen of Rome.

Cicero shows that there was a controversy whether applicatio was consistent with exilium (de Orat. i. 39, 177), "Quid? quod item in centumvirali judicio certatum esse accepimus, qui Romam in exilium venisset, cui Romae exulare jus

illustrated a status to which the quondam-client must from an early period have tended to approximate. Where the right of intermarriage (jus conubii), as well as the right of trade, was guaranteed in a treaty between Rome and some other town, it is questionable whether this gift ever implied the possibility of matrimonial union with members of the Patriciate. It is at least certain that, at the time of the Twelve Tables (451 B.C.), and therefore probably from a very early period, a disability common to all the Plebeians was that they might not intermarry with members of patrician clans. Yet, although there was this great gulf parting the two orders, it was possible for either class to be transferred to the status of the other. We shall see that tradition represents a vote of the Patricians in their assembly as a means sufficient to recruit their order by the addition of a new family; while, after the Plebs had evolved an assembly of its own, a transitio ad plebem might be effected by an act of that body.1 Adoption from a patrician into a plebeian family produced the same result.

That the clientship of which we have spoken was not peculiar to Rome, but was an old established Italian institution, is a truth reflected in the legend of the gens Claudia which moved from Regillum to Rome with a vast multitude of dependants. It is separated by but a thin line from slavery. While the latter was based on conquest in war, the former was probably the result of voluntarily-sought protection in the turmoil of a migratory life, or perhaps at times the consequence of the suzerainty of a powerful village being extended over its weaker neighbours. In the developed state the principal object of this relation is legal representation by the patronus, for the client possesses no legal personality of his own. For the condition of the client we can but appeal to that of the slave and the son

esset, si se ad aliquem quasi patronum applicavisset intestatoque esset mortuus, nonne in ea causa jus applicationis, obscurum sane et ignotum, patefactum in judicio atque illustratum est a patrono?"

1 Zonaras vii. 15. P. Clodius first tried this method; when it was opposed he resorted to the artifice of adoption. Courtly writers imagined a transitio for the plebeian Octavii, Suet. Aug. 2 "Ea gens a Tarquinio Prisco rege inter minores gentes adlecta . mox a Servio Tullio in patricias transducta, procedente tempore ad plebem se contulit."

2 Liv. ii. 16 (504 B.C.) “Attus Clausus (driven out from Regillum) magna clientium comitatus manu Romam transfugit. His civitas data agerque trans Anienem Appius inter patres (i.e. the Senate) lectus haud ita multo post in principum dignationem pervenit." Cf. Suet. Tib. 1.

of the family. Such property as he possessed may have been merely a peculium, the small accumulation of cattle and means of husbandry which his master allowed him to form; had the client wronged a citizen, we may assume that his body might be surrendered in reparation of the damage (noxae deditio); the origin of Roman occupation of land on sufferance (precario) may perhaps be traced to the permission by the patron to till a little plot of land which might be resumed at will;1 in default of direct heirs (sui heredes) such personal belongings as the client possessed may have fallen to the members of the protecting clan (gentiles), for it was to the clan rather than to the family that he was attached.

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The description which we possess of the mutual obligations of patrons and clients, although it contains many primitive elements, obviously refers to a time when the client was allowed to possess property of his own and was often a man of considerable wealth, but when, in spite of this power, he does not seem to have appeared in person in the public courts. It was the duty of the Patricians to interpret the law to their clients, to accept their defence in suits, and to represent them when they were plaintiffs. The client, on the other hand, was bound to help to dower the daughter of the patron if the latter was poor; to pay the ransom if he or his son were captured by enemies; and, if his lord was worsted in a private action or incurred a public fine, to defray the expense from his own property. If any of these duties were violated by the client, he was held guilty of treason (perduellio), and as the secular arm suspended him from the unlucky tree, so the religious power devoted to the infernal gods the patron who had woven a net of fraud for his dependant.1 Even after the effective infliction of religious sanctions had disappeared, the duty to the client ranked only second to that which was owed by a guardian to his ward.5 The earliest

1 Savigny Recht des Besitzes (7th ed.) p. 202. On the general condition of the client see Ihering Geist des röm. Rechts i. p. 237.

2 Dionys. ii. 9, 10.

3 ἐξηγεῖσθαι τὰ δίκαια . . . δίκας λαγχάνειν . . . τοῖς ἐγκαλοῦσιν ὑπέχειν (Dionys. ii. 10). If representation in the civil courts is meant, it must have resembled that of the paterfamilias, who sues in his own right, for procuratory was unknown in early Roman procedure (Just. Inst. iv. 10 "cum olim in usu fuisset alterius nomine agere non posse").

4 Verg. Aen. vi. 609 "fraus innexa clienti." Cf. Servius ad loc. 5 Gell. v. 13 "Conveniebat

ex moribus populi Romani primum juxta parentes locum tenere pupillos debere, fidei tutelaeque nostrae creditos; secundum