Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/185

Rh burgess. Accordingly emancipation must have been at first simply a fact, not a right; and the master cannot have been debarred from the possibility of again at pleasure treating freedman us a slave. But there was a departure from this principle in cases where the master came under obligation not merely towards the slave, but towards the community, to leave him in possession of freedom. There was no special legal form, however, for thus binding the master (the best proof that there was at first no such thing as an emancipation); but those methods which the law otherwise presented, testament, action, or census, were employed for this object. If the master had either declared his slave free when executing his last will in the assembly of the people, or had allowed his slave to claim freedom in his own presence before a judge or to get his name inscribed in the valuation-roll, the freedman was regarded not indeed as a burgess, but as free in relation even to his former master and his heirs, and he was accordingly looked upon at first as a client, and in later times as a plebeian (P. 90).

The emancipation of a son encountered greater difficulties than that of a slave; for while the relation of master to re was accidental, and therefore capable of being dissolved at will, the father could never cease to be father. Accordingly in later times the son was obliged, in order to get free from the father, to enter first into slavery and then to be emancipated as from that condition; but in the period now before us no emancipation of sons can have yet existed.

Such were the laws under which burgesses and clients lived in Rome. Between these two classes, so far as we can see, there subsisted from the beginning the fullest equality of private rights. The foreigner on the other hand, if he had not betaken himself to a Roman patron and so lived as a client, was beyond the pale of the law, both in person and in property. Whatever the Roman burgess took from him was as rightfully acquired as was the shell-fish belonging to nobody which was picked up by the sea-shore. Only, in the case of ground lying beyond the Roman bounds, while a Roman burgess might take practical possession of it, he could not be regarded as in a legal sense its proprietor; for it was the community alone that could advance the community's bounds. The case was different in war: whatever the soldier who was fighting in the ranks of the levy gained, Whether moveable or immoveable property, fell not to him,