Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/96

76 for in that case they would certainly have made the number of subdivisions uneven.

Complete as was the sharply defined contrast between burgess and non-burgess, the equality of rights within the burgess-body was as complete. No people has ever, perhaps, equalled that of Rome in the inexorable rigour with which it has carried out these principles, the one as fully as the other. The sharpness of the distinction between burgesses and non-burgesses is nowhere perhaps brought out with more clearness than in the treatment of the primitive institution of honorary citizenship, which was originally designed to mediate between the two. When a stranger was, by resolution of the community, adopted into the circle of the burgesses, he might, indeed, surrender his previous citizenship, in which case he passed over wholly into the new community; but he might also combine his former citizenship with that which had just been granted to him. Such was the primitive custom, and such in Hellas it always remained, where, even in later ages, the same person not unfrequently held the freedom of several communities at the same time. But the greater vividness with which the conception of the community as such was realized in Latium, could not tolerate the idea that a man could simultaneously belong in the character of a burgess to two communities; and accordingly, when the newly-chosen burgess did not intend to surrender his previous franchise, it attached to the nominal honorary citizenship no further meaning than that of an obligation to befriend and protect the guest (jus hospitii), such as had always been recognized as incumbent in reference to foreigners.

But this rigorous retention of barriers against them that were without was accompanied by an absolute banishment of all diversity of rights among the members included in the burgess community of Eome. We have already mentioned that the distinctions existing in the household, which of course could not be set aside, were at least ignored in the community; the son, who as such was subject in property to his father, might, in the capacity of a burgess, come to have command over his father as master. There were no