utions to the people, of
public sales to the citizens who also extended their possessions outside of
Roman[17] territory, or else the new conquests were abandoned to municipia,
given up to colonies, or became a part of that which was called _Ager
Publicus_. In fine, it was a fundamental principle of the public law of
Rome that the lands and the persons of the people conquered belonged to the
conqueror, the Roman people, who either in person or by their delegates
disposed of them as it seemed best. Among the ancients war always decided
concerning both liberty and property.

The result of all these facts was that the Roman territory was made the
object of a division or a primitive distribution either among the three
races of the first population, or a little later among the citizens or
inhabitants. This very same principle has been frequently observed in
recent times in regard to confiscated[18] territories and conquered
peoples.

Now what was the allotment of the first distribution of land?

Upon this topic the ancient authorities are blind and confusing to such an
extent as to be wholly inadequate for the solution of the difficulty. Among
the more recent authorities, two opposing systems have been sustained, the
one represented by Montesquieu, and the other by Niebuhr. (1) According to
Montesquieu, the kings of Rome divided the land into perfectly equal lots
for all the citizens and the title of the law of the Twelve Tables relative
to successions was for no other object than to establish this ancient
equality of the division of lands.[19] (2) Niebuhr,[20] on the contrary,
claimed that territorial property was primitively the attribute of the
patriciate and everyone who was not a member of this noble race was
incapable of possessing any part of the territory. From this theory the
author deduced numerous consequences which are important both to law and
history. Neither of these systems is free from errors. Montesquieu seems to
have made no difference between patrician and plebeian in using the term
_citizen_, while it is no longer disputed that the plebeian was not a
burgess and consequently had no civic rights save those granted to him by
the ruling class. His idea of goods must have, at least, become chimerical
at a very early date, as this equality was so little suspected by the
ancients that Plutarch,[21] after having spoken of the efforts of Lycurgus
to overturn the inequality of wealth among the Spartans, accuses