public dominion that the Roman devoted his energies of body and mind, to the neglect of private excellence and domestic peace. He served his party more zealously than he served his country, and sacrificed to its triumph more noble thoughts and more generous deeds than any state could have ever been imagined, even under heathenism, to prohibit as perilous to its general prosperity. It is easy to discern that the condition of a people, thus doubly harassed by public duties, must have been embittered by much suffering and many imperfections amongst its individual members; and it will hence be comparatively simple to comprehend the principles and the circumstances which are now to be described.

3

The personal relations existing amongst the freeborn Romans and between the Patricians and their clients have long since been defined; but in the two centuries between the Patrician revolution and the completion of Plebeian liberty by the Ogulnian laws, other classes have appeared, and so increased, that we can go no farther without some knowledge of their distinctions and their numbers.

The freedmen and their families constituted an intermediate class between the free and the slaves by birth. Set at liberty, sometimes by the generosity or the justice of his master, and sometimes by the public authorities, the freedman was then invested with rights which varied according to the time and the

3 "For Romans in Rome's quarrel Spared neither land nor gold,

Nor son nor wife, nor limb nor life"; nor in their own quarrels, either,

might have been added by Mr. Macaulay.

4 See Book I. ch. 4.

degree of selfishness, even in those who have longest. suffered from the selfishness of others, but, much more practically, by means of the particular principles at this time prevalent in public life at Rome. The man who sought to do his duty was not instructed to make himself better, or to increase the happiness of those who were dependent upon his labor or his affection; he saw but one way to distinction, and that he pursued, with the name of his country on his lips, over the corpses of the battlefield, or through the passions of the Forum. The hope he lived for, according to the laws of his gods and his ancestors, was glory; nor was it often allowed him to see that the good or the glory of any other individual was necessary to be consulted with his own. All the self-forgetfulness to which he could attain was when the claims of his country or of his party reached his ear; the loudest appeal of his fellow-men, as such, upon his justice or his love was never raised above a whisper, nor ever heard but as a menace. In respect to his party, he was bound to make every effort that could increase its authority, which was never to be surrendered or divided amongst its adversaries, nay, which, as sometimes happened, was to be refused its own partisans, especially if of a lower order. Any natural benevolence of the public man gave way to these uniform aims, comprised, as partly stated, in political power, that is, in civil authority and in military dominion, the same whether individually, factiously, or, as would be said, patriotically, desired. Perhaps the course of the popular

struck from the roll of the Senate; and the freedmen themselves were deprived of the political influence they had suddenly acquired, by being thrown together into the four City Tribes, in which they might preponderate without exercising any appreciable influence upon the decisions of the assembly, wherein they had so small a part. It is probable, to say the least, that the freedmen and the sons of freedmen, notwithstanding these reforms, were left by the Censors in quite as elevated a position as they then could fill with any advantage to themselves or to the Commonwealth; but there was no provision for their future advancement, of which, on the contrary, the possibility might rather seem to be denied. This want of concern, not for the present, but for the future, welfare of the great body of the people, including, at least, the lower Plebeians besides the class adduced above for the sake of illustration, was as injurious to the party by whom as to that towards whom it was shown. Instead of encouraging continual growth in freedom amongst the inferior orders, it seems as if the popular party, forgetful of their name and place, had stood, as full-grown trees are sometimes seen, absorbing the moisture of the earth and diverting the sunshine in the skies from the lowlier plants, which, though incapable of pushing up their branches all at once, were designed to lift their breathing leaves nearer and nearer to the air and height of the older foliage.

This spirit in the popular party is intelligible, not only on the general principles which account for any

method of his emancipation. He still, however, remained in an inferior condition, bound in private to his recent owner and then to his owner's heirs in the relation of client to patron, while, in public, he was excluded from military service, and, indeed, from any service which was accounted honorable, until the later times, when the fleets were manned and the legions occasionally filled by his class. The inferiority of the father was visited upon his children; however virtuous or fortunate he might have been, he had no name to leave behind him, and one generation, at least, was to be passed before his descendants could lift their heads and take the places of freemen. The acts of Appius Claudius, in his censorship, esteemed the most unwarrantable, were, as may be remembered, his appointment of freedmen's sons to the Senate, and his distribution of freedmen themselves throughout the Tribes. Yet, in the early times, when the slaves in Rome had often been born free, or sprung from parents of free birth in other places, the freedmen would be generally of such a spirit as to make a formidable addition to any party they might resolve to join. They and the poorer Plebeians were now united, as has been mentioned, with the extreme Patricians.

The more general class to which the freedmen were but exceptions was that of the slaves. Less numerous while captured from the thinly peopled towns in the neighbourhood of Rome than when ob

5 Liv., XL. 18, XLII. 27, etc.

6 Ibid., X. 21, XXII. 11, etc.

tained throughout all Italy, and especially from foreign countries, the slaves were also less corrupted and much less degraded than their successors in later times. The prisoners, few and almost kindred as they were, of the early wars, were divided amongst many Roman households, in which they were condemned to scarcely greater toils' than those their masters themselves performed. It was not, perhaps, until the slave became a freedman that he began to be most restless; the loss of liberty being more easily endured than the intermediate condition to which he was raised by emancipation. This, however, is to be predicated of the slaves only in the earlier ages, when the distinction between them and their masters was merely that between the conquerors and the conquered. A different picture will be necessarily presented hereafter; but it is, for the present, sufficient to recognize the blot upon the liberty of the Commonwealth in the existence of a class to which an inferior, and, as it must have been in many instances, a hopeless, position was assigned amongst the victorious nation.

8

The aliens' formed another inferior class; including, at first, all who were not citizens, or, more cor

7 The occupations of private slaves were those of laborers, domestics, mechanics, and, in after times, of professional and even learned men. The public slaves were employed upon the great roads and buildings, as well as in the service of the magistrates, and afterwards in the navies and armies of the Commonwealth.

8 "Quasi secundum genus hominum." Florus, III. 20. The slave was not so by nature, however, as in Greece, but by his misfortune and his master's right.

9 Or strangers : 66 Liv. III. 5, etc.

peregrini."