Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/85

Rh found a reception with a foreign protector, and those slaves in respect to whom their master had for the time being waived the exercise of his dominium, and so conferred on them practical freedom. This relation had not properly the character of a relation de jure, like the relation of a man to his guest or to his slave: the client remained non-free, although good faith and use and wont alleviated in his case the condition of non-freedom. Hence the "listeners" of the household (clientes), together with the slaves strictly so called, formed the "menials" (familia) dependent on the will of the "burgess" (patronus, like patricius). Hence, according to the original law, the burgess was entitled partially or wholly to resume the property of the client, to reduce him on emergency once more to the state of slavery, to inflict even capital punishment on him; and it was simply in consequence of a distinction de facto that these patrimonial rights were not asserted with the same rigour against the client as against the actual slave, and that, on the other hand, the moral obligation of the master to provide for his own people and to protect them acquired a greater importance in the case of the client, who was de facto in a more free position, than in the case of the slave. More especially must the de facto freedom of the client have approximated to freedom de jure in those cases where the relation had subsisted for several generations: when the emancipator and the emancipated had themselves died, the dominium over the descendants of the emancipated person could not be, without flagrant impiety, claimed by the heirs at law of the emancipator; and thus there was gradually formed within the household itself a class of persons in dependent freedom, who were different alike from the slaves and from the members of the gens entitled in the eye of the law to full and equal rights.

On this Roman household was based the Roman state, both as respected its constituent elements and its form. The community of the Roman people arose out of the junction (in whatever way brought about) of such ancient clanships as the Romilii, Yoltinii, Fabii, &c.; the Roman domain comprehended the united lands of these clans (P. 38). Whoever belonged to one of these clans was a burgess of Rome. Every marriage concluded in the usual forms within that circle was valid as a true Roman marriage, and conferred rights on the children begotten of it. Whoever was begotten in an illegal marriage, or out of marriage, was