United States or Bulgaria ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
This remark applies still more to the case of the protected dependents of the community at large. The state thus consisted, like the household, of persons properly belonging to it and of dependents of "burgesses" and of "inmates" or metoeci . The King
For instance, nothing is more certain than that the Roman plebeians were a growth originating within the Roman commonwealth, and yet they everywhere find their counterpart where a body of -metoeci- has arisen alongside of a body of burgesses. As a matter of course, chance also plays in such cases its provoking game. The Settlements of the Latins Indo-Germanic Migrations
The plebeians had hitherto been metoeci who were subjected to their share of taxes and burdens, but who were nevertheless in the eye of the law really nothing but tolerated aliens, between whose position and that of foreigners proper it may have seemed hardly necessary to draw a definite line of distinction.
While a complete legal equality therefore had subsisted within the old burgess-body, the new burgess-body or former metoeci came to be in this way divided from the first into a number of privileged families and a multitude kept in a position of inferiority.
It is to be regretted certainly that on this very point tradition leaves us without precise information. The analogy also between the so-called Servian constitution and the treatment of the Attic metoeci deserves to be particularly noticed. Athens, like Rome, opened her gates at a comparatively early period to the metoeci , and afterwards summoned them also to share the burdens of the state.
At an immemorially early period there was introduced into Roman law the principle on which rested the whole legal position of the metoeci , that, when a master on occasion of a public legal act such as in the making of a testament, in an action at law, or in the census expressly or tacitly surrendered his -dominium-, neither he himself nor his lawful successors should ever have power arbitrarily to recall that resignation or reassert a claim to the person of the freedman himself or of his descendants.
I. VI. Dependents and Guests. I. VII. Relation of Rome to Latium I. VI. Class of Metoeci Subsisting by the Side of the Community Religion Roman Religion The Roman world of gods, as we have already indicated, was a higher counterpart, an ideal reflection, of the earthly Rome, in which the little and the great were alike repeated with painstaking exactness.
By degrees, however, the body of metoeci outgrew these fetters; they began to acquire and to alienate in their own name, and to claim and obtain legal redress from the Roman burgess-tribunals without the formal intervention of their patron.
Although, moreover, the institution of the centuries was not intended to curtail the political privileges exclusively possessed by the burgesses as hitherto represented in the curies, yet it was inevitable that those rights, which the burgesses hitherto had exercised not as the assembly of curies, but as the burgess-levy, should pass over to the new centuries of burgesses and metoeci . Henceforward, accordingly, it was the centuries whose consent the king had to ask before beginning an aggressive war.
Each of these four levy-districts had to furnish approximately the fourth part not only of the force as a whole, but of each of its military subdivisions, so that each legion and each century numbered an equal proportion of conscripts from each region, in order to merge all distinctions of a gentile and local nature in the one common levy of the community and, especially through the powerful levelling influence of the military spirit, to blend the metoeci and the burgesses into one people.
Word Of The Day