because the senators began under that name
to take regular tribute from their clients. But the retinue of
clients was above all serviceable to the ruling class as a means of
commanding the comitia; and the issue of the elections shows clearly
how powerfully the dependent rabble already at this epoch competed
with the independent middle class.

The very rapid increase of the rabble in the capital particularly,
which is thus presupposed, is also demonstrable otherwise. The
increasing number and importance of the freedmen are shown by the very
serious discussions that arose in the previous century,(43) and were
continued during the present, as to their right to vote in the public
assemblies, and by the remarkable resolution, adopted by the senate
during the Hannibalic war, to admit honourable freedwomen to a
participation in the public collections, and to grant to the
legitimate children of manumitted fathers the insignia hitherto
belonging only to the children of the free-born.(44) The majority of
the Hellenes and Orientals who settled in Rome were probably little
better than the freedmen, for national servility clung as indelibly
to the former as legal servility to the latter.

Systematic Corruption of the Multitude
Distributions of Grain

But not only did these natural causes co-operate to produce a
metropolitan rabble: neither the nobility nor the demagogues,
moreover, can be acquitted from the reproach of having systematically
nursed its growth, and of having undermined, so far as in them lay,
the old public spirit by flattery of the people and things still
worse. The electors as a body were still too respectable to admit of
direct electoral corruption showing itself on a great scale; but the
favour of those entitled to vote was indirectly courted by methods far
from commendable. The old obligation of the magistrates, particularly
of the aediles, to see that corn could be procured at a moderate price
and to superintend the games, began to degenerate into the state of
things which at length gave rise to the horrible cry of the city
populace under the Empire, "Bread for nothing and games for ever!"
Large supplies of grain, cither placed by the provincial governors at
the disposal of the Roman market officials, or delivered at Rome free
of cost by the provinces themselves for the purpose of procuring
favour with particular Roman magistrates, enabled the aediles, from
the middle of the sixth century, to furnish g