even the oldest law was careful to keep the power of dissolving
such a partnership open at any time to any partner; it was good that
brethren should dwell together in peace, but to compel them to do
so was foreign to the liberal spirit of Roman law. The Servian
constitution moreover shows that even in the regal period of Rome
there were not wanting cottagers and garden-proprietors, with whom
the mattock took the place of the plough. It was left to custom and
the sound sense of the population to prevent excessive subdivision
of the soil; and that their confidence in this respect was not
misplaced and the landed estates ordinarily remained entire, is
proved by the universal Roman custom of designating them by permanent
individual names. The community exercised only an indirect influence
in the matter by the sending forth of colonies, which regularly led
to the establishment of a number of new full hides, and frequently
doubtless also to the suppression of a number of cottage holdings,
the small landholders being sent forth as colonists.

Landed Proprietors

It is far more difficult to perceive how matters stood with landed
property on a larger scale. The fact that such larger properties
existed to no inconsiderable extent, cannot be doubted from the
early development of the -equites-, and may be easily explained
partly by the distribution of the clan-lands, which of itself
could not but call into existence a class of larger landowners
in consequence of the necessary inequality in the numbers of
the persons belonging to the several clans and participating in
the distribution, and partly by the abundant influx of mercantile
capital to Rome. But farming on a large scale in the proper
sense, implying a considerable establishment of slaves, such as we
afterwards meet with at Rome, cannot be supposed to have existed
during this period. On the contrary, to this period we must refer
the ancient definition, which represents the senators as called
fathers from the fields which they parcelled out among the common
people as a father among his children; and originally the landowner
must have distributed that portion of his land which he was unable
to farm in person, or even his whole estate, into little parcels
among his dependents to be cultivated by them, as is the general
practice in Italy at the present day. The recipient might be the
house-child or slave of the granter; if he was a free man, his
position was that