law. Those Plebeians who had never been, or who had ceased to be, entirely dependent on a patronus for the exercise of their legal rights, would practically have belonged to this latter class. Before the reform of Servius, which gave them political privileges, they might have been called cives; it is only after this reform that they could have been called quirites. It was, perhaps, in consequence of this change in the constitution that cives replaced quirites as the designation of the full citizens with reference to all their rights.
If we ask what the original rights of the citizen of Rome were, it is impossible to frame a simple category applicable to all the cives. Taking our stand at a period just before the Servian reforms, we find that private rights were possessed in varying degrees by all the members of the community. These rights are generally summed up as those of trade and of marriage (commercii et conubii). The first is the legal capacity to acquire full rights in every kind of property, to effect its acquisition, and to transfer it by the most binding forms, and to defend the acquired right in one's own person by Roman process of law (legis actio). This commercium was possessed equally by the Patricians and the free Plebeians. It was no infringement of the right of commerce that the right of occupying domain-land wrested from the enemy may for a long time have been possessed only by the dominant order;[1] for such land was not acquired, but only held on a precarious tenure from the state, and the privilege was, perhaps, one of fact rather than of law. The jus conubii is the right to conclude a marriage which is regarded as fully valid by the state (matrimonium legitimum or jure civili), and which, therefore, gives rise to the patria potestas. This right was possessed by the Patricians and by at least the free Plebeians, but by each class only within itself. There was no right of intermarriage between the orders, and the member of each effected his position as a father by a different ceremony.[2] The rights consequent on membership of a clan—those of inheritance and of religious communion—were, as we saw, probably shared with the Patricians by those Plebeians at least whose ancestors had never been in a condition of clientship.
Public rights—those of voting, of serving as a fully-equipped soldier in the legions, and probably of holding office as a delegate
