Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/362

 356 THE REVOLUTIONS. BOOK IV. servitude gives liim up; only it is no longer hereditary. This alone is a considerable change ; but we are unable to state when it took place. We can easily discover the successive improvements that were made in the condition of the client, and by what degrees he arrived at the right to hold property. At first the chief of the gens assigned him a lot of land to cultivate; ' he soon became the temporary possessor of this lot, on condition that he contributed to all the expenses of his former master. The severe conditions of the old law, which obliged him to pay his patron's ransom, the dowiy of his daughter, or his legal fines, clearly j3rove that when this law was written he was already the temporary possessor of the soil. The client made one further step of progress; he obtained the right of transmitting, at his death, this lot to his son ; in default of a son, the land returned, it is true, to the patron. But now comes new progress: the client who leaves no son obtains the right of making a will. Here custom hesitates and varies ; sometimes the patron takes half the property, sometimes the will of the tes- tator is fully respected ; in any case his will is never invalid.' Thus the client, if he cannot yet call himself a proprietor, has, at least, as extended an enjoyment of property as is possible. True, this was not complete enfranchisement. But no document enables us to fix the epoch when the clients were definitively detached from the patrician families. There is a passage of Livy (II, 16) which, if we take it literally, shows that from the first years of the republic the clients were citizens. There is a ' Festus, T. Paires. ' Institutes of Justinian, III. 7.