ABSTRACT
ROME was at first, in respect of the development of political rights, nothing more than an agglomeration of gentes, that is to say of enlarged families, which included all those who had descended from a common ancestor and honoured the same dead. In his Cité Antique, Fustel de Coulanges has laid stress upon this early religious constitution. To the patricians forming the gens were subordinated the clientes, a kind of serfs who remained under the authority of the father of the family. They lived with him or around him and cultivated the fields in common. The clientes never owned the land on which they worked; they did not even own the movable articles with which their cabins were furnished or which were necessary to their work, their peculium, or savings, even, could be taken from them, and when the community of the land came to an end their servitude was not thereby lessened; they remained holders, with a precarious title and paying rent.
