Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/512

 506 MUNICIPAL EEGIME DISAPPEAES. BOOK V did not exist in any manner. In the eyes of the Ro- man jurisconsult, a provincial was neither husband nor father, — that is to say, the law recognized neither liis marital nor hia paternal authority. For him property did not exist. It was a double impossibility for him to become a proprietor; it was impossible by reason of his personal condition, because he was not a Roman citizen, and impossible by reason of the condition of tho land, because it was not Roman territory, and the law admitted the complete I'ight of ownership only within the limits of the arjer Homanus. For the lawyers taught that the land in the provinces was never private property, and that men could have only the possession and usufruct thereof.' Now^ what they said in the sec- ond century of our era of the provincial territoiy had been equally true of the Italian soil before Italy ob- tained the Roman franchise, as we shall i^resently see. It is certain, then, that the people, as fast as they en- tered ihe Roman empire, lost their municipal religion, their government, and their private law. We can easi- ly believe that Rome softened in practice whatever was destructive in this subjection. We see, indeed, that, though the Roman laws did not recognize the paternal authority in the subject, they allowed this authority «ti]l to subsist in practice. If they did not permit a certain man to call himself a proprietor of the soil, they still allowed him the jjossession of it; he cultivated his land, sold it, and devised it by will. It was not said that this land was his, but they said it was as good as his, /)?-o suo. It was not his property, dominium^ but it was among his goods, in honis * Rome thus invented ' Gaius, II. 7. Cicero, Pro Flacco, 32.
 * Gaius, I. C2; II. 6, 6, 7.