Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/110

90 The amalgamation of two substantially similar commonwealths produced rather an increase in the size than a change in the intrinsic character of the existing community. A second process of importance, which was carried out far more gradually, and had far deeper effects, may be traced back, so far as the first steps in it are concerned, to this epoch; we refer to the amalgamation of the burgesses and metœci. At all times there existed side by side with the burgesses in the Roman community their bondmen the "listeners" (clientes), as they were called, from their being dependents on the several burgess-households, or the "multitude" (plebes, from pleo, plenus), as they were termed negatively with reference to their want of political rights. The elements of this intermediate stage between the freeman and the slave were, as has been shown (P. 64), already in existence in the Roman household: in the community this class could not but acquire greater importance in fact and in law, and that for two reasons. In the first place the community might itself possess half-free clients as well as slaves; especially after the conquest of a town and the breaking up of its commonwealth it might often appear to the conquering community advisable, not to sell the mass of the burgesses formally as slaves, but to allow them the continued possession of freedom de facto, so that in the capacity as it were of freedmen of the community they entered into relations of clientship to the state, or in other words to the king. In the second place, the very nature of the community as such, and its authority over individual burgesses, implied a power of protecting their clients against an abusive exercise of the dominial rights still vested in them de jure. Already at an immemorially early period there was introduced into Roman law the principle on which rested the whole legal position of the metœci, that when a master on occasion of a public legal act—such as in the making of a testament, in ail action at law, or in the census—expressly or tacitly surrendered his dominium, neither he himself nor his successors at law should ever have power arbitrarily to recall that resignation or reassert a claim to the person of the freedman himself or of his descendants. The clients and their posterity did not by virtue of their position possess the rights of burgesses or those of guests; for to constitute