The History of Rome

Dependents and Guests

This amalgamation of two substantially similar commonwealths produced rather an increase in the size than a change in the intrinsic character of the existing community. A second process of incorporation, which was carried out far more gradually and had far deeper effects, may be traced back, so far as the first steps in it are concerned, to this epoch; we refer to the amalgamation of the burgesses and the metoeci. At all times there existed side by side with the burgesses in the Roman community persons who were protected, the "listeners" (clientes), as they were called from their being dependents on the several burgess-households, or the "multitude" (plebes, from pleo, plenus), as they were termed negatively with reference to their want of political rights[1]. The elements of this intermediate stage between the freeman and the slave were, as has been shown[2] already in existence in the Roman household: but in the community this class necessarily acquired greater importance de facto and de jure, and that from two reasons. In the first place the community might itself possess half-free clients as well as slaves; especially after the conquest of a town and the breaking up of its commonwealth it might often appear to the conquering community advisable not to sell the mass of the burgesses formally as slaves, but to allow them the continued possession of freedom de facto, so that in the capacity as it were of freedmen of the community they entered into relations of clientship whether to the clans, or to the king. In the second place by means of the community and its power over the individual burgesses, there was given the possibility of protecting the clients against an abusive exercise of the dominium still subsisting in law.  At an immemorially early period there was introduced into Roman law the principle on which rested the whole legal position of the metoeci, that, when a master on occasion of a public legal act - such as in the making of a testament, in an action at law, or in the census - expressly or tacitly surrendered his -dominium-, neither he himself nor his lawful successors should ever have power arbitrarily to recall that resignation or reassert a claim to the person of the freedman himself or of his descendants. The clients and their posterity did not by virtue of their position possess either the rights of burgesses or those of guests: for to constitute a burgess a formal bestowal of the privilege was requisite on the part of the community, while the relation of guest presumed the holding of burgess-rights in a community which had a treaty with Rome. What they did obtain was a legally protected possession of freedom, while they continued to be de jure non-free. Accordingly for a lengthened period their relations in all matters of property seem to have been, like those of slaves, regarded in law as relations of the patron, so that it was necessary that the latter should represent them in processes at law; in connection with which the patron might levy contributions from them in case of need, and call them to account before him criminally.  By degrees, however, the body of metoeci outgrew these fetters; they began to acquire and to alienate in their own name, and to claim and obtain legal redress from the Roman burgess-tribunals without the formal intervention of their patron.

In matters of marriage and inheritance, equality of rights with the burgesses was far sooner conceded to foreigners[3] than to those who were strictly non-free and belonged to no community; but the latter could not well be prohibited from contracting marriages in their own circle and from forming the legal relations arising out of marriage - those of marital and paternal power, of agnatio and gentilitasof heritage and of tutelage - after the model of the corresponding relations among the burgesses.