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;[125] 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.[126] 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 of the king—were possessed exclusively by the Patricians; and to these privileges we must add the right of holding the fullest communion with the gods (_jus auspiciorum_). _Auspicium_, or the divination by birds, came eventually to be applied to any circumstance that might be interpreted as an expression of the will of the gods. The capacities of human beings with reference to these signs are partly a right of invoking, partly a power of interpreting them. Both the right and the power rest on the assumption that there is a medium of intercourse between the national gods and the citizens of the state,[127] and the peculiarities of the conception which the Romans formed of this divine patronage are shown by their views both of the nature of the revelation and of the qualifications requisite for the “medium.”