41 



was bound to contribute to the marriage portion of his patron's daughter, 

 if the patron was poor, and to his ransom, or that of his children, if 

 they were taken prisoners ; he paid the costs and damages of a suit 

 which the patron lost, and of any penalty in which he was condemned ; 

 he bore a part of the patron's expenses incurred by his discliarging 

 public duties, or filling the honourable places in the state." * 



All this is distinctly stated by Dionysius and others, but we want to 

 know more. We want to know by what material tie this moral con- 

 nection between patrons and clients was maintained — what was the 

 economical substratum of the political right. We are acquainted with 

 similar institutions in the middle ages ; we know what were the duties 

 of serfs and villains towards their lords ; but we know also that there 

 was a material substratum for these duties ; we know that the serf paid 

 his dues and services, not merely in consideration of the protection of 

 the lord, but in consideration of the land, of which he was the lord's 

 tenant ; we know that, wherever serfdom has not degenerated into per- 

 sonal slavery, the obligation to pay and serve, the subjection of the serf, 

 the whole connection between him and the lord, ceases as soon as the 

 tenure of land forms no longer the connecting link between the two 

 parties. To the present day the Cumberland " statesmen," as they are 

 called, who hold small farms on a tenure which, besides an annual quit 

 rent, involves personal service on the lord's land during a specified 

 number of days in the year, are free from all obligations as soon as they 

 quit their farms. 



Wus there, then, we may ask, no similar arrangement in Rome? 

 So much indeed we may conjecture from a general probability, that 

 in such a purely agricultural state as Rome, the majority of the 

 clients, if not all, were agriculturists; and in confirmation of this 

 supposition, we learn from Festus,f that the Patricians assigned patches 

 of land to the poorer class (tenuioribus) as to their own children, and 

 that from this practice they were called " patres." There can be no 

 doubt that these poorer people were clients, and the patres, patroni ; and 

 we may consider it therefore as established, that, as a rule, the clients 

 were the tenants of their patrons, an arrangement in itself so natural as 

 hardly to require any proof. Now we can understand how the client- 

 ship should be hereditary ; for there certainly existed an hereditary right 

 of possession in the cultivator to his farm. We can also understand 

 how, by degrees, an independent plebs could be formed, for every cause 

 that separated a man from his plot of land created an independent Ple- 

 beian, whether it was prosperity or misfortune that drafted him from the 

 country into the growing town, there to subsist on his handiwork, trade, 



• Dion. II. 9. + S. V. patres ed. Muller. 



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