Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/86

66 excluded from the membership of the community. On this account the Roman burgesses assumed the name of the "fathers" (patres), or the "fathers' children" (patricii), inasmuch as they all, and only they, were or could be in the eye of the law fathers, and they alone, in the eye of the law, had a father. The clans, with all the families that they contained, were incorporated with the state just as they stood. The spheres of the household and the clan continued to subsist within the state; but the position which a man held in these did not affect his relations towards the state. The son was subject to the father within the household, but in political duties and rights he stood on a footing of equality. The position of the protected dependents naturally underwent a change to the effect that the freedmen and clients of every patron received on his account toleration in the community at large; they continued, indeed, to be immediately dependent on the protection of the family to which they belonged, but the very nature of the case implied that the protégés of members of the community could not be wholly excluded from the worship and the festivities of the community, although, of course, they were not capable of the proper rights or liable to the proper duties of burgesses. This remark applies still more to the case of the protected dependents of the community at large. The state thus consisted, like the household, of the persons properly belonging to it and of dependents, of "burgesses" and of "settlers" or metœci.

As the clans resting upon a family basis were the constituent elements of the state, so the form of the body-politic was modelled after the family both generally and in detail. The household was provided by nature herself with a head in the person of the father, with whom it originated, and with whom it perished. But in the community of the people, which was designed to be imperishable, there was no natural master; not, at least, in that of Rome, which was composed of free and equal husbandmen, and could not boast of a nobility by the grace of God. Accordingly it appointed from its own ranks a "leader" (rex) and "commander" (dictator), a "master of the people" (magister populi), who was the master in the household of the Roman community. That this was indeed the true nature of his position is evident, for at a later period there were to be found in, or beside his residence, the always blazing hearth, and