The comparative inconvenience of these forms had led to other simpler modes of manumission—by announcement of the freedom before friends (_inter amicos_), or through a letter to the slave bidding him live as a freeman (_per epistolam_), or even by inviting him to dine as a freeman at his master’s table (_per mensam_).[524] Manumission effected in this informal way, though protected by the civil courts, did not confer the political rights of citizenship. The citizen who was made such by manumission was a _libertinus_; all others were, at the close of the Republic, free-born (_ingenui_). The distinction conferred by _ingenuitas_ was, as we shall see, an important one, since this condition was a requisite for the army, the magistracy, and the higher orders (_ordines_) of the state. But the conception of “free birth,” though a simple one at the end of the Republic, is one that has had a history, and _ingenuitas_ did not at all times bear the same meaning. At the end of the fourth century B.C. an _ingenuus_ was one who was sprung, not merely from free but from free-born ancestors, for the term _libertinus_—always its antithesis—was used to cover, not merely the manumitted slave, but his descendant in the first degree.[525] Before the close of the Republic the son of a freedman or of a freed-woman was _ingenuus_, the only condition being “birth in a state of freedom.”[526] The status of the mother alone was taken into consideration, that of the father being neglected, and the condition of marriage, which could not be taken into account if one of the parents was unfree, was necessarily not required. Legal marriage must in early times have been a condition of _ingenuitas_ in the plebeian, as it certainly was in the ancient patrician community. But before the close of the Republic this condition too was disregarded, and illegitimate children (_spurii filii_) were placed on a level, as regards honours and offices, with those born from wedlock.[527] It was one of the many triumphs of the law of nature over the law of the state. The rights (_jura_) of the citizen in the developed Republic were those which we have enumerated as belonging to the free Plebeian of the monarchy,[528] with most of the exclusively patrician privileges added. They included the rights of marriage and of commerce, with their consequences, the _patria potestas_ and the right of making testaments, and in addition, the power of occupying domain land and the rights of suffrage and of office. The Patricians still possessed some minor privileges,[529] and the old theory was still upheld which reserved the _auspicia_ for the _patres_. But, with Plebeians in possession of the _imperium_, this doctrine was maintained by the fiction which gave the occupant of a “popular” and, as it still continued to be called, “patrician” magistracy the patrician _auspicatio_.