Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/354

 848 THE KEV0LUTI0X8. BOCK IV. ancients, " assigned portions of land to their inferiors, as if they had been their own children." ' So, too, wo read in the Odyssey, " A kind master gives his servant a house and a field;" and EumsBus adds, a "desired wife," because the client could not yet marry without the consent of the master, and it was this master who chose his companion for him. But this field, where, thenceforward, his life was passed, where he found all his labor and all his enjoy- ment, was not yet his property. For this client did not possess that sacred character which enabled him to hold property. The lot that he occupied continued to be bounded by the sacred landmarks — the god Termi- nus, whom the family of the master had formerly placed there. These inviolable bounds attested that the field, attached to the family of the master by a sacred tie, could never become the absolute property of a freed client. In Italy the field, and the house which the villicus — the client of the patron — occu- pied, contained a sacred fire, a Lar familiaris ; but this fire did not belong to the cultivator; it was the mas- ter's fire.^ This established at the same time the right of property in the patron, and the religious subordina- tion of the client, who, so long as he belonged to the patron, still followed the patron's worship. The client, as soon as he came into possession of property, suffered from not being the proprietor, and aspired to become such. It became his ambition to remove from this field — which seemed to be his by the right of labor — those sacred bounds which made it forever the property of the former master. ' Festus, V. Patres.
 * Cato, De Re Rust., 143. Columella, XI. 1, 19.