sary 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
-gentilitas- of heritage and of tutelage--after the model of the
corresponding relations among the burgesses.

Similar consequences to some extent were produced by the exercise
of the -ius hospitii-, in so far as by virtue of it foreigners settled
permanently in Rome and established a domestic position there. In
this respect the most liberal principles must have prevailed in
Rome from primitive times. The Roman law knew no distinctions of
quality in inheritance and no locking up of estates. It allowed
on the one hand to every man capable of making a disposition the
entirely unlimited disposal of his property during his lifetime; and
on the other hand, so far as we know, to every one who was at all
entitled to have dealings with Roman burgesses, even to the foreigner
and the client, the unlimited right of acquiring moveable, and
(from the time when immoveables could be held as private property
at all) within certain limits also immoveable, estate in Rome. Rome
was in fact a commercial city, which was indebted for the commencement
of its importance to international commerce, and which with a noble
liberality granted the privilege of settlement to every child of an
unequal marriage, to every manumitted slave, and to every stranger
who surrendering his rights in his native land emigrated to Rome.

Class of --Metoeci-- Subsisting by the Side of the Community

At first, therefore, the burgesses were in reality the protectors,
the non-burgesses were the protected; but in Rome as in all communities
which freely admit settlement but do not throw open the rights of
citizenship, it soon bec