The populus at this stage, then, is not "the people" in the modern sense; it is the aggregate of the privileged curiæ, and does not include the plebs,[20] which at this stage is not even part of the army. But a separate quasi-plebeian class, the clientes of the patricians, are in a state of special dependence upon the latter, and in a subordinate fashion share their privileges.
The clientes have very much the air of being primarily the servile or inferior part of the early clan or gens, as distinct from its "gentlemen." Cp. Burton, Hist. of Scotland, viii, 524-25, as to the lower and the higher (duniewassal) orders in the Scottish Highland clans. "In the old life of the pagus and the gens the weaker sought the protection of the stronger by a willing vassalage" (Greenidge, Roman Public Life, p. 6). The clientes are the nominal as distinct from the real "family" of the chief or patronus. M. Delaunay (Les Institutions de l'ancienne Rome, as cited, i, 27) thinks with Mommsen (so also Dupond, pp. 20-21) that they were mainly freedmen, but gives no evidence. As to the meaning and etymology of the word (clientes from cluere or cliere, "to listen" or "obey"), cp. Newman, Regal Rome, p. 49; Ortolan, p. 29; Mommsen, Römisches Staatsrecht, III, i, 1887, p. 63. The theory that the plebeians were all clientes (Ortolan, pp. 25, 27) seems untenable, though Mommsen (Staatsrecht, III, i, 63) pronounces that "all non-patricians were clients"; and Meyer (ii, 521) appears to acquiesce. Only in theory can the mass of the plebs have been clients at any time. Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, pp. 277-78. The clientes, it seems clear, were as such admitted to the comitia, whereas the plebs were not. See the citations of Fustel de Coulanges from Livy, ii, 56-64; also iii, 14 (Dupond, p. 22, doubts the fact). On any view, the clientela rapidly dwindled, passing into the plebs (cp. Dupond, p. 23; Livy, vi, 18). As to its early status see Fustel de Coulanges, p. 273 sq. Ortolan, after representing all plebeians as clients, speaks (p. 31) of plebeians belonging to no gens (so Aulus Gellius, x, 20).
Wealth is not yet a matter of land-owning—the main element of property is cattle;[21] and the bulk of the land is ager occupatorius, a great "common" on which all men's cattle feed. The voteless free plebeian has simply his home and homestead, "toft and croft," the latter being two yokes (= five roods) of land, on which he raises the grain and olives and vegetables that feed his household.[22] This goes to his heir. Here arises another problem. E.W. Robertson (as last cited) decides that the "two yokes" can have been only "the homestead, and could not have included the farm or property attached to it." The heredium, he holds, following Pliny (Hist. Nat., xix, 19), and citing Livy (vi, 36), was only in the hortus, the house and garden, "and not in the arable or pasture land." But surely the arable was on a different footing from the pasture land (ager compascus). Corn was not grown in common, unless it were by the gentes (Mommsen, vol. i, pp. 38, 72, 193). The solution seems to be that given by Greenidge, that as "the heredium consisted only of two jugera (Festus, p. 53), an amount obviously insufficient for the maintenance of a family," "there must have been ager privatus as well, owned by some larger unit, and this unit would naturally have been the gens" (Roman Public Life, p. 15).
Among general historians of Rome Mommsen seems to be the first to note this circumstance, and he gives neither details nor evidence. Schwegler, discussing (i, 619) the theory of Puchta that there was no private property in Rome before the "arrival" of the plebs, admits that among the ancient Germans the land was yearly apportioned among the groups as such, but finds that "Roman tradition tells of nothing of the kind." (So Greenidge, p. 15.) In any case, Mommsen, while insisting that "the fields (sic) of the gentes (Geschlechts-Genossen) in the earliest period lay together" (Staatsrecht, III, i, 24; cp. p. 94), admits that such gentile ownership had at an early stage disappeared (früh verschwundenen). There was then no communal tillage in the historic period. Cincinnatus, in the legend, returns to the plough on his own croft. Further, the early complaints cited by Livy as to the "two yokes" being "hardly enough to raise a roof on or to make a grave in" were addressed by the tribunes on behalf of plebeians to patricians who each had above five hundred yokes. The non-client plebeians then had no share in the land of the gentes or clans, being themselves in large part dispossessed by conquest.
Meyer (ii, 519) pronounces that the plot of two yokes was, "of course, no farm, but a kitchen-garden," adding: "It is also the personal land of the small farmers and day-labourers who look after the lands of the large landholders, not the original private holding in contrast to the mark belonging in common to the gens (Geschlecht) or commune (Gauverband)." But on the previous page Meyer says that "the land was settled not by the gentes, but communally (genossenschaftlich) by unions of equal freemen." If these, then, were the curiæ (the Mark, says Meyer in this connection, did not belong to the gentes), they did not include the plebs; and we come back to the datum that the free plebeian had no means of support save his five roods and what beasts he had on the public pasture. The pasture-land, again, is surmised by Mommsen (ch. xiii, p. 201) to have been small in area relatively to the arable-land communally owned and cultivated by the gentes or clans—a proposition irreconcilable with the evidence as to the quantity of cattle. As to the two yokes of land, Schwegler decides (i, 618) that it was "nowise inadequate" as arable-land, in view of the extraordinary fruitfulness of Italy, and, further, of the circumstance that "the free burghers had also the use of the common land" (for pasture). We are to remember that Italian land could yield two crops in a year. (Niebuhr, Lebensnachrichten, ii, 245, cited by Schwegler.)
On the general problem as to why or how the land once communally tilled ceased to be so, we have still no better light than the old generalisation of Hobbes in reply to his own question: "Upon what impulsives, when all was equally every man's in common, men did rather think it fitting that every man should have his inclosure?" "I found," he puts it, "that from a community of goods there must needs arise contention whose enjoyment should be greatest, and from that contention all kind of calamities must unavoidably ensue." [Epistle Dedicatory to Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Civil Society (translation of De Cive), 1651. Cp. Goldwin Smith, The United States, 1893, p. 23.]
The patrician, of course, had a larger homestead, at least "four yokes" in the earlier stages; later seven; later still twenty-five.[23] But the patricians were "a class of occupying landholders rather than proprietary landowners."[24] The "public land" was literally so, save in so far as the patricians would have the ampler (and often untaxed or low-rented) use of it for their much larger herds;[25] or, it may be, for cultivation by their clients or slaves. Heredia, however, were saleable, and herein lay one usual path to the dispossession and enslavement of freemen; while at all stages there went on that pressure of population on means of subsistence which underlies all economic history.
Thus far, however, mere conquest has done less to impoverish and enslave the mass than the economic process is to do later. The conquerors, probably highland herdsmen to begin with, take estates for themselves, but leave the mass of the conquered in possession or use of land for which they pay tribute, and upon which they can independently live.[26] And thus far they live mainly as small pastoral farmers.[27]
Trade and artisanship were for long but slightly developed, and were mainly in the hands of slaves, dependent "clients," or foreigners; and artisans and aliens were not admitted into the legions.[28] The ruling caste occupied, potentially[29] if not constantly, the city proper, the two or three fortified hills[30] on which at this stage it stands. They were certainly not the founders. The Palatine and the Quirinal hills had been occupied by Latins and Sabines respectively long before the time traditionally assigned to the "founding" of Rome; and there were communities there before them. Modern excavators trace many successive strata of civilisation before that which we call the Roman; and the probability is that the Romans of history, like the kindred Sabines, conquered a previous city "aristocracy" of kindred race, whose place and possessions they took. The previous inhabitants had presumably grown weak for self-defence by reason of some such disintegrating economic evolution as was soon to affect the conquerors themselves. Such a disintegration may well have taken place in the case of Alba Longa, of which the prior supremacy seems entirely credible.[31] But before Alba Longa there had been a civilisation[32] on the Roman hills which perhaps outwent in economic evolution anything attained in the Roman period until the last century of the Republic.
This was already inferred in the eighteenth century by Ferguson (History of the Roman Republic, 1783, ch. i, note; perhaps following Maffei [1727], cited by Schwegler, i, 807), from the nature of the remains of the great cloacæ, which he held could not have been built by any of the early Roman kings. That view is since adopted by various authorities; see Middleton's Remains of Ancient Rome, 1892, i, 104-107; and Robiou et Delaunay, Les Institutions de l'ancienne Rome, 1884, vol. ii, ch. i, § 1. Cp. Merivale, General History of Rome, pp. 9-11; Burton, Etruscan Bologna, 1876, pp. 170-74. Livy (i, 38) ascribes great cloacæ to the legendary Tarquin the elder. Professor Ettore Pais, on the other hand, confidently decides that the cloaca maxima belongs to the republican period, and dates it about 170 B.C. In any case, we know that an ante-Roman civilisation underlies the historic, and may now decide with Mr. Mahaffy that "as civilisation of some kind was vastly older on the Hill of Troy than any of us had imagined, so the site of every historic city is likely to have been the habitation of countless generations" (Survey of Greek Civ. 1897, p. 28).