Sicily, has misunderstood the Latin formula in civitatem recepti, which was the lot of the conquered Latins; and translated it as if it had been in urbem recepti.1

Against Puchta, who imagines that this transplantation was intended to keep the conquered people in check, Ihne argues that the uniform policy of an aristocracy was the very opposite. They dreaded a mass of population in a town, and by scattering it in the country, (doxiouòs) made it powerless. That the obedient clients should have been town-artizans and shopmen, but the unruly plebeians country-people, is the reverse of all that Greek or Mediaval experience would suggest. Extreme oppression may, no doubt, rouse a peasantry or small farmers into rebellion; but a town population is always the soonest enfranchised from an aristocracy. A priori probability would lead us to conclude, that the bond of clientship was most powerful towards the country-people, and that those plebeians who were artisans or traders, were first to effect their emancipation from it.

And here it may be suitable to name a theory of Ihne's, which is recommended by great simplicity and probability. He conceives, that when the plebeians found it impossible to gain legal redress against their patrons, inasmuch as their cause could only come into the court under the patron's sanction and name, they demanded Tribunes, who should be to the plebs collectively in the place of Patrons; so that a plebeian who chose to disown his clientship, might not find himself cast out of the pale of the law. This appears happily to account for the very singular form of the office, by which the plebs sought to defend itself.

But to return to Niebuhr's views. He teaches, that the Albans, whom Tullus conquered and transplanted, were made patricians, but that Ancus could not be so liberal, since the patrician tribes were now full, and the number three was too sacred to alter: he adds, that these Albans were made into the tribe of Luceres; from which Göttling, Huschke, and Becker, have justly dissented.

As for the supposed fact, which in Niebuhr's view is so important, that never once is any contest between patricians and

1 The fact that the Aventine was. afterwards given to the plebeians, might then induce legend to fix on this as the

part of the city which Ancus gave to the Latins.

clients whispered; knowing what we do of the avarice and cruelty of the old patricians, it would be puerile to believe that their conduct to their clients was really exemplary. This ought in itself to have led to the conclusion, that Niebuhr's fact is nothing but a verbal one. There is no contest recorded of the clients against the patricians, simply because, when the contest arises, the clients are called by the generic term plebeians. At the same time, Livy (v1. 18) makes Manlius say to the plebs, Quot clientes circa singulos fuistis patronos, tot nunc adversus unum hostem eritis; so that the imaginary fact falls to the ground. But, having seen how little positive support Niebuhr has for these points, we may now draw attention to the extreme improbabilities with which his theory is encumbered.

If there was a time when Rome consisted of patricians and clients, without plebeians, the clients must of necessity have been chiefly country-people. In fact, there was originally little of manufactures and commerce in the city; and we cannot conceive of the mass of the people as having been any thing but a peasantry; the army also must have consisted of these clients. If so, how could the clients, a little later, have been as it were driven out of the country, and out of the regular army, by the intrusive plebeians?

Again, if Rome, under Tullus, adopted Albans into the state without inventing a new order, we want more definite testimony than Niebuhr can produce, to make us believe that the Latins conquered by Ancus were so differently treated.

Again: Is it credible that the patricians gave to those conquered people freehold land-seven jugera each, when they kept them out of the pale of the constitution; and when they did not allow to themselves, lords and masters as they were, any freehold land at all, except the miserable two jugera? How unintelligible is it, that when the entire state was under their controul, they did not confer on themselves a freehold right over the public2 land, but were satisfied to hold it in mere occupation!

Niebuhr's opinion about the two was their private property; and this and the seven jugera, may not seem well founded; yet as regards the last objection, Ihne's own theory needs for defence a supplement which will equally shelter Niebuhr's, viz. the patricians did maintain that the old public land

was a safer policy with them, than to pass an enactment to this effect, which would have seemed to admit that hitherto it had not been private. Nothing but the growing strength of the plebeians defeated them.

In this view, it is wonderful that the plebeians could have made an outcry to possess freeholds, if they knew that that was beyond the pretensions even of the patricians.

Farther, if it be true that the strength of the patricians depended on their retinues of armed clients, why did they allow this important body of men gradually to vanish by the time that the history gets clearer? If indeed the clients are the oppressed plebeians themselves, then of course, as they gradually win their rights, they break away from the unpleasant tie; but if, as Niebuhr thinks, the clients bore no part of the oppression which fell on the plebeians, the whole course of their history is a riddle.

Finally, it is extremely difficult to believe, either, that the clients were free from all military duties, or, that they served against the enemy in the sole character of retainers to their patrons, and not in the regular army as soldiers of the state. Niebuhr believes the latter, partly on the evidence of certain descriptive passages of Dionysius, and partly because he holds that the clients were not enrolled in the tribes. Yet in deference to the passages of Livy already referred to,-on which he lays great stress, he believes that the clients voted in the Comitia Centuriata. Now if any thing is clear concerning these early comitia, it is, that their arrangement was in close analogy to that of the national army; so it is not to be endured in a modern theory, to represent the clients as admitted into the Comitia Centuriata and yet excluded from the army.

Most of these difficulties are of Niebuhr's creation, and do not exist in the views held by all antiquity. But connected with these are real difficulties of the historians, (concerning which, all that we can say is, that Niebuhr has not relieved them,) in relation to the debts which so long afflicted the Roman commons. The following circumstances appear remarkable.—In later times the patricians are not money-lenders: that occupation belonged peculiarly to the knights: yet in the early days the patricians are the great usurers. Neither gold nor silver money as yet existed: heavy copper was the current coin: yet the patricians seem to have an unlimited command,-not over substance merely, such as cattle and stuff,—but over cash, which they lend with wonderful freedom to the plebeians, even after times of such general ruin as the Gallic invasion. Ancient writers assert that trade was forbidden to Roman citizens;

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and though this is almost certainly an error, it seems to be true that it was forbidden to the noble patricians: how then can they have acted as money-lenders for usury, to men who stood in no relation to them,-as in Niebuhr's view was the case with the plebeians? Stranger still, no such thing appears as a knight lending money on interest; much less any of the rich plebeians whom Niebuhr concedes to have existed. And while nobody but patrician nobles lend, nobody but plebeians borrow. In short, we do not seem to read so much of individual lenders and borrowers, as of the patricians, as a class, becoming creditors, and the plebeians, as a class, debtors. Niebuhr has conjectured that the real creditors were often plebeians or foreign bankers, who transferred their rights over the debtor to the patricians, in order to recover the debt more easily; but this, if systematic, must surely have slipt out somewhere in the history. So arbitrary a notion serves only to attest to us how sharply its inventor felt the pinch of the common representation.

To relieve this difficulty, Ihne has advanced a theory, which well deserves to be considered. He believes that the mass of the plebeians were farmers of the soil, paying rent to the patricians as to landlords: that the land, however, was in theory and in right the property of the state, from which the patrician had no right to expel a tenant. Nevertheless, when the rent was in arrears, the tenant was liable to arrest; and as this happened frequently, the patricians took advantage of it to use the land as absolutely their own, by entrusting it to other parties, tenants at will, who paid whatever rent the patrician chose to exact. Such conduct was, in the opinion of the plebeians, an invasion of the public land; grassari in agrum publicum; possidere agrum publicum per injuriam, (Liv. v1. 5; 11. 41; iv.51;) and it gave rise to the struggle on their part to have land ceded to them absolutely as freehold, by which they would get rid of their landlord or patronus, for ever. The division of the Aventine by the Icilian law was the first example of land in freehold being legally conceded to the plebeians; hence the extreme importance of that measure as a precedent.

In regard to the law of debt, Ihne endeavours to mediate between Niebuhr and Savigny. He holds that in the earliest times only the person of the debtor was answerable, this being looked on as a moral punishment; which also operated to induce the debtor to pay if able. A patron had no right to in

stitute a civil action against his client who was in arrears for rent, because, the land being public property, the neglect to pay was a criminal offence, not a mere private wrong; so that the debtor was liable, not only to be arrested, imprisoned, and sold, but to be put to death. The severity of this law seems to attest that the plebeian tenants were a conquered race. Of course a tenant in arrears to the state would lose all rights as a citizen (which was the case even in Athens,) until he had paid every thing; but his connection with his land was not severed, and his debt descended to his children. Still the creditor gained little by the Addictio of the debtor, who might not be forced to work, and who seldom brought a large sum, if sold; while to kill him was useless cruelty. Hence the patricians brought in the principle of making the debtor's property answerable, in which case he was called Nexus, and was liable to be set to work as a slave. This state of things was in theory milder, but in fact worse than the former; and by the operation of it the plebeians were rooted up from the land, which was falling into the hands of the rich, as actual proprietors. But this course of events was stopped by the Lex Potelia, B. C. 326, which for ever forbade the process of Nexus. Such is Ihne's view of this tangled subject; but he does not add any other proof of the justness of his distinctions, than the appeal to their intrinsic probability. We presume, however, that he has been guided to his hypothesis by the classical passage (Dionys. VI. 83,) which becomes very clear by means of it. "We give consent that all who owe money and cannot pay, be forgiven their debt; and if any are under personal arrest for being behind the legitimate days, (of payment,) these we vote to be set free; and such as have been cast in private suits and given over to their plaintiffs, these also we will to be free, and that the awards against them be annulled." Here, the first class are debtors against whom has been no process as yet; the second are addicti, under arrest for not paying the state rent to their landlords; the third are nexi for private suits. The second class are not borrowers, it will be observed, nor is the fact of their being in arrears a private wrong; for in this they are contrasted with the third class. This agrees, so far, exceedingly well with Ihne's theory; but the interference of the Prætor to compel and ratify the Nexus, which, according to this view, Dionysius must imply, is contrary to what is generally believed.