industry with sublime contempt, and traced themselves to Aemilius Paullus or Scipio, or even to Aeneas or Agamemnon.(1426) The organisation of industry through the colleges attained an immense development in the Antonine age, and still more in the third century, after the definite sanction and encouragement given to these societies by Alexander Severus. The records of the movement are numerous, and we can, after the scholarly sifting of recent years, now form a tolerably complete and vivid conception of these corporations which, springing up at first spontaneously, in defiance of government, or with its reluctant connivance, were destined, under imperial control, to petrify into an intolerable system of caste servitude in the last century of the Empire of the West.(1427) The sodalitia and collegia were of immemorial antiquity. Certain industrial colleges and sacred sodalities were traced back to Numa, and even to the foundation of Rome.(1428) In the flourishing days of the Republic they multiplied without restraint or suspicion, the only associations at which the law looked askance being those which met secretly or by night. It was only in the last century of the Republic that the colleges came to be regarded as dangerous to the public peace, and they were, with some necessary exceptions, suppressed by a decree of the Senate in 64 B.C. They were revived again for factious or revolutionary purposes in 58 B.C. by Clodius.(1429) The emperors Julius and Augustus abolished the free right of association, except in the case of a few consecrated by their antiquity or their religious character.(1430) And it was enacted that new colleges could not be created without special authorisation. In the middle of the second century, the jurist Gaius lays it down that the formation of new colleges was restrained by laws, decrees of the Senate, and imperial constitutions, although a certain number of societies, both in Rome and the provinces, such as those of the miners, salt workers, bakers, and boatmen, were authorised.(1431) And down to the time of Justinian, the right of free association was jealously watched as a possible menace to the public peace. The refusal of Trajan to sanction the formation of a company of firemen in Nicomedia, with the reasons which he gave to Pliny for his decision, furnishes the best concrete illustration of the imperial policy towards the colleges.(1432) That the danger from the colleges to the public order was not an imaginary one, is clear from the passage in Tacitus describing the bloody riots between the people of Nuceria and Pompeii in the reign of Nero, which had evidently been fomented by “illicit” clubs.(1433) It is seen even more strikingly in the serious troubles of the reign of Aurelian, when 7000 people were killed in the organised outbreak of the workmen of the mint.(1434) Yet it is pretty clear that, in spite of legislation, and imperial distrust, the