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or the early ages of the republic, our chief informants, Cicero, Livj, 

 Dionysius and others, had but a very confused notion, derived, not 

 from personal acquaintance (for the old clientship had long vanished), 

 but from fragmentary traditions, and from an imperfect study of their 

 own antiquities. No wonder then that the notions of modern writers 

 should have been still more confused, vague, and arbitrary. It is on 

 this subject that Niebuhr has established one of his most successful 

 theories (successful in point of popularity), differing from the general 

 notion of our antient authors, intended to throw a new and brilliant 

 light upon the antient history of Rome, but in my opinion, neither jus- 

 tified by evidence and general probability, nor reconcileable with 

 authenticated facts; nor lastly, clear, consistent, and intelligible in 

 itself. 



The clients of antient Rome are by all classical writers identified 

 with the Plebeians, without however including them all. A client, 

 accordingly, must be a Plebeian, but not every Plebeian a client. The 

 clientship connects a man personally with an individual Patrician, who 

 thereby is constituted his patron, but it does not alter his rights or 

 duties, his social or political station as a Plebeian. The clientela there- 

 fore is a personal connection, involving certain rights between client and 

 patron as two individuals, but not constituting the whole body of clients, 

 a distinct class of citizens in the state ; it gives them collectively no 

 rights, no duties ; the constitutional law ignores them as clients, as well 

 as it ignores the Patricians as patrons. There is no legal distinction 

 between a Patrician who has a client or clients, and one who has 

 none ; no more is there a line of separation in all purely constitutional 

 matters between a client and an independent Plebeian. Yet the union 

 between patron and client was not voluntary ; it was at first introduced 

 by law, and our informants tell us that all the Plebeians were at first 

 distributed by Romulus to the several Patricians as their clients ; more- 

 over, the connection was hereditary, and imposed certain burthensome 

 duties on the client, some of them very similar to the duties of medi- 

 aeval vassals to their lords. We may safely take it for granted that the 

 clientship was established by the conquering tribe, and that it was 

 intended chiefly to benefit the ruling body. To the patronus indeed it 

 enjoined the legal protection of his client ; it obliged him to watch over 

 his client's rights, to guard him from oppression, and to represent him 

 in the courts of law. This sounds very well, but in truth it amounts 

 to this, that the client was entitled to as much protection by the law 

 as the patron saw fit to grant him. He was not allowed to appear 

 personally in court, and to conduct his own case ; redress of grievances 

 against his own patron of course was quite out of the question ; •' he 



