Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/112

92 intercourse, and which with a noble liberality granted the privilege of settlement to every offspring of an unequal marriage, to every manumitted slave, to every stranger who, surrendering his rights at home, emigrated to Rome, and in fact to a great extent even to the foreigner, who retained his rights as a burgess in a friendly community.

At first, therefore, the burgesses were in reality the master-protectors, the non-burgesses were the protected; but in Rome, as in all communities, which do not throw open the rights of citizenship, it soon became a matter of increasing difficulty to harmonize this relation de jure with the actual state of things. The flourishing of commerce, the right of settling in the capital secured to all Latins by the Latin league, the greater frequency of manumissions as prosperity increased, must have occasioned even in peace a disproportionate increase of the number of metœci. That number was further augmented by the greater part of the population of the neighbouring towns subdued by force of arms and incorporated with Rome, which, whether it was transferred to Rome or remained in its old home now reduced to the rank of a village, ordinarily exchanged its native burgess-rights for those of a Roman metoikos. Moreover the burdens of war fell exclusively on the old burgesses and were constantly thinning the ranks of their patrician descendants, while the metœci shared in the results of victory without having to pay for it with their blood.

Under such circumstances the only wonder is that the Roman patriciate did not disappear much more rapidly than it actually did. The fact of its still continuing for a prolonged period a numerous community can scarcely be accounted for by the bestowal of Roman burgess-rights on several distinguished foreign gentes, which upon emigrating from their homes or upon their cities being conquered received the Roman franchise—for such grants appear to have occurred but sparingly from the first, and to have become always more rare, the more the privilege increased in value. A cause of greater influence, we venture to conjecture, was the introduction of the civil marriage, by which a child begotten of patrician parents living together as married persons although without confarreatio, acquired full burgess-rights equally with the child of a confarreatio marriage. At least it is probable that the civil marriage, which already existed in Rome before the Twelve Tables but was certainly