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3dly. Tithes, levied only on lands held in usufruct, as estates belonging to temples. 4thly. A protection tax , paid by the settlers, or Metoeci, common to most of the Greek states, but peculiarly productive in Athens from the number of strangers that her trade, her festivals, and her renown attracted. The policy of Pericles could not fail to increase this source of revenue. 5thly.
II. III. Censorship, the Magistrates, Partition and Weakening of the Consular Powers II. III. Laws Imposing Taxes I. VI. Class of Metoeci Subsisting by the Side of the Community I. V. The Housefather and His Household, note II. III. Praetorship II. III. Praetorship, II. V. Revision of the Municipal Constitutions, Police Judges II. VII. Subject Communities
The exclusion of this multitude from the public assembly, although it bore part of the public burdens, might be tolerated as long as that public assembly itself had no very material share in the working of the state machine, and as long as the royal power by the very fact of its high and free position remained almost equally formidable to the burgesses and to the metoeci and thereby maintained equality of legal redress in the nation.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Nevertheless the number of the metoeci was of necessity constantly on the increase and liable to no diminution, while that of the burgesses was at the utmost perhaps not decreasing; and in consequence the metoeci necessarily acquired by imperceptible degrees another and a freer position.
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