Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/111

Rh a burgess a formal bestowal of the privilege was requisite on the part of the community, while the relation of guest presupposed the holding of burgess-rights in a community which had a treaty with Rome. What they did obtain was the possession of a freedom protected by statute, while they continued to be de jure non-free. Accordingly for a lengthened period their relations in all matters of property were, like those of slaves, regarded in the eye of the law as relations of the patron, and it seems to have been necessary that the latter should represent them in processes at law; in connection with which the patron enjoyed the correlative privilege of levying contributions from them in case of need, and of calling them to account before him criminally. Gradually, however, the body of mœtici outgrew their fetters; they began to acquire and to alienate in their own name, and to claim and obtain legal redress from the Roman tribunals without the formal intervention of their patron.

Equality of rights with the burgesses as respects marriage and inheritance was far sooner conceded to foreigners (P. 42) than to those who were strictly non-free and belonged to no community; but the latter could not well be prohibited from contracting marriages in their own circle, and from forming the legal relations arising out of marriage—those of marital and paternal power, of agnatio and clanship, of heritage and of tutelage—after the model of similar relations among the burgesses.

Similar consequences to some extent were produced by the exercise of the jus hospitii, in cases where upon that footing foreigners settled permanently in Rome, and established a domestic circle, and perhaps even acquired immoveable estate there. In this respect the most liberal principles must have prevailed in Rome from primitive times. The Roman law knew no distinctions of quality in inheritance, and no locking up of estates; it allowed on the one hand, to every man capable of making a disposition, the entirely unlimited disposal of his property during his lifetime; and, on the other hand, so far as we know, to every one who was at all entitled to have dealings with Roman burgesses, even to the foreigner and the client, the unlimited right of acquiring moveable, and (from the time when immoveables could be held as private property at all) also immoveable, estate in Rome. Rome was in fact a commercial city, which was indebted for the commencement of its importance to international