Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/220

lands; and beyond doubt with this very state of things was connected the fact that the Roman clientship was not personal, but that from the very first the client along with his gens intrusted himself for protection and fealty to the patron and his gens. This earliest form of Roman landholding serves to explain how there sprang from the great landlords in Rome a landed, while there was no urban, nobility. As the pernicious institution of middlemen remained foreign to the Romans, the Roman landlord found himself not much less fettered to his land than was the lessee and the farmer; he saw to and took part in everything himself, and the wealthy Roman esteemed it his highest praise to be reckoned a good landlord. His house was on his land; in the city he had only a lodging for the purpose of attending to his business there, and perhaps of breathing the purer air that prevailed there during the hot season. Above all however these arrangements furnished a moral basis for the relation between the nobles and the common people, and so materially lessened its dangers. The free tenants on sufferance sprung from families of decayed farmers, dependents, and freedmen, formed the great bulk of the proletariate (P. 93), and were not much more dependent on the landlord than the petty temporary lessee inevitably is with reference to the great proprietor. The slaves tilling the fields for a master were beyond doubt far less numerous than the free tenants. In all cases where an immigrant nation has not at once reduced to slavery a population en masse, slaves seem to have existed at first only to a very limited amount, and consequently free labourers seem to have played a very different part in the state from that in which they subsequently appear. In Greece "day-labourers" (θῆτες) in various instances during the earlier period occupy the place of the slaves of a later age, and in some communities, among the Locrians for instance, there was no slavery down to historical times. Even the slave, moreover, was ordinarily of Italian descent; the Yolscian, Sabine, or Etruscan war-captive must have stood in a different relation towards his master from the Syrian and the Celt of later times. Besides, as a tenant he had in fact, though not in law, land and cattle, wife and child, as the landlord had, and after emancipation was introduced (P. 165) there was a possibility, not remote, of working out his freedom. If such then was the footing on which landholding on a large scale stood in the earliest times, it was far from being a manifest