Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/218

198 gods, and not the farmer only, but also his slave and his ox, reposed in holiday-idleness.

Such, probably, was the way in which the ordinary Roman farm was cultivated in the earliest times. The next heirs had no protection against bad management except the right of having the spendthrift who squandered his inherited estate placed under wardship like a lunatic (P. 161). Women moreover were in substance divested of their personal right of disposal, and, if they married, a member of the same gens was ordinarily assigned as husband, in order to retain the estate within the gens. The law sought to check the overburdening of landed property with debt partly by ordaining, in the case of a debt secured over the land, the immediate transference of the ownership of the object pledged from the debtor to the creditor, partly in the case of a simple loan, by the rigour of the proceedings in execution which speedily led to actual bankruptcy; the latter means however, as the sequel will show, attained its object but very imperfectly. No restriction was imposed by law on the free divisibility of property. Desirable as it might be that co-heirs should remain in the undivided possession of their heritage, even the primitive law was careful to keep the power of dissolving such a partnership open at any time to any partner; it was good that brethren should dwell together in peace, but to compel them to do so was foreign to the liberal spirit of Roman law. The Servian constitution moreover shows that even in the regal period of Rome there were not wanting small cottagers and garden-proprietors, with whom the mattock took the place of the plough. It was left to custom and the sound sense of the population to prevent excessive subdivision of the soil; and that their confidence in this respect was not misplaced, and landed estates ordinarily remained entire, is proved by the universal Roman custom of designating them by permanent individual names. The community exercised only an indirect influence in the matter by the sending forth of colonies, which regularly led to the establishment of a number of new full hides, and frequently perhaps also to the suppression of a number of minor properties, the small landholders being sent forth as colonists.

It is far more difficult to perceive how matters stood with landed property on a larger scale. That there were such larger properties to no inconsiderable extent cannot be doubted from the position of the equites in the Servian con-