ted slaves or strangers needing protection;
their ranks included the former burgesses of the Latin communities
vanquished in war, and more especially the Latin settlers who lived
in Rome not by the favour of the king or of any other burgess, but
by federal right. Legally unrestricted in the acquiring of property,
they gained money and estate in their new home, and bequeathed, like
the burgesses, their homesteads to their children and children's
children. The vexatious relation of dependence on particular
burgess-households became gradually relaxed. If the liberated slave
or the immigrant stranger still held an entirely isolated position
in the state, such was no longer the case with his children, still
less with his grandchildren, and this very circumstance of itself
rendered their relations to the patron of less moment. While in
earlier times the client was exclusively left dependent for legal
protection on the intervention of the patron, the more the state
became consolidated and the importance of the clanships and households
in consequence diminished, the more frequently must the individual
client have obtained justice and redress of injury, even without
the intervention of his patron, from the king. A great number of
the non-burgesses, particularly the members of the dissolved Latin
communities, had, as we have already said, probably from the outset
not any place as clients of the royal or other great clans, and
obeyed the king nearly in the same manner as did the burgesses. The
king, whose sovereignty over the burgesses was in truth ultimately
dependent on the good-will of those obeying, must have welcomed the
means of forming out of his own -proteges- essentially dependent
on him a body bound to him by closer ties.

Plebs

Thus there grew up by the side of the burgesses a second community
in Rome: out of the clients arose the Plebs. This change of name
is significant. In law there was no difference between the client
and the plebeian, the "dependent" and the "man of the multitude;"
but in fact there was a very important one, for the former term
brought into prominence the relation of dependence on a member of
the politically privileged class; the latter suggested merely the
want of political rights. As the feeling of special dependence
diminished, that of political inferiority forced itself on the
thoughts of the free --metoeci--; and it was only the sovereignty
of the king ruling equally over all