ame a matter of increasing difficulty to
harmonize this relation -de jure- with the actual state of things.
The flourishing of commerce, the full equality of private rights
guaranteed to all Latins by the Latin league (including even the
acquisition of landed property), the greater frequency of manumissions
as prosperity increased, necessarily occasioned even in peace a
disproportionate increase of the number of --metoeci--. That number
was further augmented by the greater part of the population of the
neighbouring towns subdued by force of arms and incorporated with
Rome; which, whether it removed to the city or remained in its old
home now reduced to the rank of a village, ordinarily exchanged its
native burgess-rights for those of a Roman --metoikos--. Moreover
the burdens of war fell exclusively on the old burgesses and were
constantly thinning the ranks of their patrician descendants, while
the --metoeci-- shared in the results of victory without having to
pay for it with their blood.

Under such circumstances the only wonder is that the Roman patriciate
did not disappear much more rapidly than it actually did. The fact
of its still continuing for a prolonged period a numerous community
can scarcely be accounted for by the bestowal of Roman burgess-rights
on several distinguished foreign clans, which after emigrating
from their homes or after the conquest of their cities received
the Roman franchise--for such grants appear to have occurred but
sparingly from the first, and to have become always the more rare
as the franchise increased in value. A cause of greater influence,
in all likelihood, was the introduction of the civil marriage,
by which a child begotten of patrician parents living together as
married persons, although without -confarreatio-, acquired full
burgess-rights equally with the child of a -confarreatio- marriage.
It is at least probable that the civil marriage, which already
existed in Rome before the Twelve Tables but was certainly not an
original institution, was introduced for the purpose of preventing
the disappearance of the patriciate.(4) To this connection
belong also the measures which were already in the earliest times
adopted with a view to maintain a numerous posterity in the several
households.(5)

Nevertheless the number of the --metoeci-- was of necessity
constantly on the increase and liable to no diminution, while that
of the burgesses was at the utmost perhaps not decreasin