Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/361

 CHAP. TI. THE CLIENTS BECOME FREE. 355 them. The name still exists, but not elientship. For there is nothing more distinct from the clients of the primitive period than these plebeians of Cicero's time, who called themselves the clients of some rich man in order to have the right to the sportula. There were those who more nearly resembled the ancient clients; these were the freedmen.' No more did one freed from servitude at once become a free man and a citizen at the end of the republic, than in the first ages of Rome. He remained subject to a master. Formerly they called him a client, now they call him a freedman ; the name only is changed. As to the master,, his name does not even change; formerly they called him patron, and they still call him by the same name. The freedman, like the client of earlier days, remains attached to the family ; he takes its name, like the an- cient client. He depends upon the patron ; he owes him not only gratitude, but a veritable service, whose measure the master himself .fixes. The patron has the fight to judge the freedman, as he had to judge the client; he can remit to slavery for the crime of in- gratitude." The freedman, therefore, recalls the ancient client. Between them there is but one difference : elientship formerly passed from father to son ; now the condition of freedman ceases in the second, or, at far- thest, in the third generation. Clientship, then, has not disappeared; it still seizes a man at the moment when ' The freedman became a client. The identity of these twtr terms is marked in a passage of Dion3-sius, IV. 23. V. 1, 4-. Suetonius, Claudius, 25. Dion Cassius, LV. The legislation was the same at Athens ; sec Lysias and IlyperiJes in Harpocration, v. 'Anooraaiov. Demosthenes in Aristogitonemy and Suidas, v. 'AvayKaiov.
 * Digest, XXV. tit. 2, 5 ; L. tit. IG, 195. Valerius Maxiaius^