Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/113

Rh not an original institution, was introduced for the very purpose of preventing the disappearance of the patriciate. Connected with this were also the measures which were already in the earliest times adopted with a view to maintain a numerous posterity in the several households (P. 61); and it is even not improbable, that for a similar reason all children of patrician mothers, begotten in unequal marriage or out of marriage, were admitted in later times as members of the burgess-body.

Nevertheless the number of the metœci was constantly on the increase, and liable to no special diminution, while that of the burgesses was, at the utmost perhaps, not decreasing; and in consequence the metœci necessarily acquired by imperceptible degrees another and a freer position. The non-burgesses were no longer merely emancipated slaves or strangers needing protection; their ranks included the former burgesses of the Latin communities vanquished in war, and, more especially, the Latin settlers, who lived in Rome, not by the favour of the king or of any other burgess, but by federal right. Legally unrestricted in the acquiring of property, they gained money and estate in their new home, and bequeathed, like the burgesses, their homesteads to their children and children's children. The depressing relation of dependence also on particular burgess-households became gradually relaxed. If the liberated slave or the immigrant stranger still held an entirely isolated position in the state, such was no longer the case with his children, still less with his grandchildren, and this very circumstance of itself rendered their relation to the patron of less moment. While in earlier times the client was exclusively left dependent for the protection of his rights on the intervention of some patron, the more the state became consolidated, and the importance of the clanships and households became