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Updated: June 28, 2025
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.
The expulsion of the Tarquins was not, as the pitiful and deeply falsified accounts of it represent, the work of a people carried away by sympathy and enthusiasm for liberty, but the work of two great political parties already engaged in conflict, and clearly aware that their conflict would steadily continue the old burgesses and the metoeci who, like the English Whigs and Tories in 1688, were for a moment united by the common danger which threatened to convert the commonwealth into the arbitrary government of a despot, and differed again as soon as the danger was over.
Hitherto, particularly when new domains were acquired by conquest, allocations of land had been regularly arranged, in which all the poorer burgesses and metoeci were provided for; it was only the land which was not suitable for agriculture that was annexed to the common pasture.
I. VI. Class of Metoeci Subsisting by the Side of the Community I. XI. Guardianship By a similar adjustment the Icelandic law makes twelve rams equivalent to a cow; only in this as in other instances the Germanic law has substituted the duodecimal for the older decimal system. I. XIV. Decimal System 19. comp. I. XIII. Culture of the Olive
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.
But when the community itself was called regularly to elect and to decide, and the president was practically reduced from its master to its commissioner for a set term, this relation could no longer be maintained as it stood; least of all when the state had to be remodelled on the morrow of a revolution, which could only have been carried out by the co-operation of the patricians and the metoeci . An extension of that community was inevitable; and it was accomplished in the most comprehensive manner, inasmuch as the collective plebeiate, that is, all the non-burgesses who were neither slaves nor citizens of extraneous communities living at Rome under the -ius hospitii-, were admitted into the burgess-body.
It is easy to understand how this should have turned materially to the advantage of the capital, which alone in Latium offered the means of urban intercourse, urban acquisition, and urban enjoyments; and how the number of metoeci in Rome should have increased with remarkable rapidity, after the Latin land came to live in perpetual peace with Rome.
Hitherto the metoeci had been politically nothing, the old burgesses had been everything; now that the former were embraced in the community, the old burgesses were overcome; for, however much might still be wanting to full civil equality, it is the first breach, not the occupation of the last post, that decides the fall of the fortress.
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 that prevented the outbreak of political conflict between the privileged and the non-privileged classes. The Servian Constitution
This state of things continued until the lower class gained more property and more knowledge; and the example of the colonial settlements, where there was greater equality, re-acted on the parent state. The struggle of the lower ranks for freedom was of long continuance. In all Greek cities, there were Metoeci, or resident foreigners without political rights, and also slaves from abroad.
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