Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/114

94 in consequence diminished, the more frequently must the individual client have obtained justice and redress of injury, even without the intervention of his patron, from the king. A great number of the non-burgesses, particularly the members of the dissolved Latin communities, were probably from the first clients, not of any private person at all, but of the king for the time being, and thus they served only the single master to whom the burgesses also, although in different fashion, rendered their obedience. The king, whose sovereignty over the burgesses was in truth ultimately dependent on the good-will of his subjects, must have welcomed the means of forming out of his own dependents a body bound to him by closer ties, whose gifts and lapsed successions replenished his treasury (even the protection money which the metœci paid to the king (P. 80) may have been connected with such a relation), whose taskwork he could lay claim to in his own right, and whom he found always ready to swell the train of their protector.

Thus there grew up by the side of the burgesses a second community in Rome: out of the clients arose the plebs. This change of name is significant. In law there was no difference between the client and the plebeian, the "dependent" and the "man of the multitude;" but in fact there was a very important one, for the former term brought into prominence the relation of dependence on a member of the politically privileged class: the latter suggested merely the want of political rights. As the sense of a special dependence became less, that of a political inferiority forced itself on the thoughts of the free metœci; and it was only the sovereignty of the king ruling equally over all that prevented the outbreak of political conflict between the privileged and the non-privileged classes of the community.

The first step, however, towards the amalgamation of the two portions of the people scarcely took place in the revolutionary way which their antagonism appeared to foreshadow. The reform of the constitution, which bears the name of King Servius Tullius, is indeed, as to its historical origin, involved in the same darkness with all the events of a period, respecting which we learn whatever we know, not by means of historical tradition, but solely by means of inference from the institutions of later times. But its character testifies that it cannot have been a change demanded by the plebeians, for the new constitution assigned to them