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142 On the Roman Coloni. became coloni on the estates of the rich ^^^ Others again underwent the hardest fate of all, being received at first as free strangers, and then reduced to an actual state of slavery ^^. Now the second of these classes is to our purpose ; and what is said of it certainly shews that it must have been possible for a person to become a colonus by his own act. At the same time nothing is stated touching the conditions and limi- tations under which he could do so : and above all we are still left in doubt whether the practice spoken of was sanctioned by lawj or was merely a prevalent abuse, which however might always be legalized in course of time by prescription (see p. 121) : at least the oppression exercised on the third of the abovementioned classes must indisputably have been merely a prevalent usurpation, that is, a piece of open injustice, not a proceeding according to law. A very natural hypothesis would be to suppose that the original coloni were either all or in part slaves, who were set free under the abovementioned restrictions ; and the use of the name patronus for the landlord (see note 41) might be cited in support of this view. Such a modified system of manumission however would have been something entirely new^ and without any precedent in the ancient institutions. The simplest and easiest way of accounting for the origin of the coloni would be, if we could prove that such a state of hereditary dependence had existed immemorially in par- ticular provinces : in that case it might not only have continued to subsist under the Roman dominion, but also have been extended to other parts of the empire ^^. There seems however to be an utter want of historical evidence for such an assumption. Gothofredus conjectures^^ that the original coloni were 116 Fundos majorum expetunt, et coloni divitum fiunt— jugo se inquilinae abjectio- nis addicunt, in banc necessitatem redacti ut extorres non facultatis tantum, sed etiam conditionis suae, — et lerum proprietate careant, et jus liber tatis amittant. 17 Quos esse constat ingeniios^ vertuntur m servos. If one does not attend to the abovementioned classification, the whole passage becomes unintelligible. In this way it has been misunderstood by Naudet, Administration — sous les regnes de Diocle- tien etc. T. ii. p. 108. IS This opinion is advanced by RudorflT in the Rhenish Museum for Philology, ii. p. 178, but very justly as a mere conjecture, not as a possitive assertion. 1^ Parat. Cod. Theod. (v. 9) p. 496, and Comm. ad. L. un. C. Theod. de inquil. V. 10.