This aptly brings us to our last point in this chapter. As the Roman oligarchy stood to the people, so Rome herself stood as an oligarchy to the populations of her Empire. The Roman citizen was the one most highly privileged person in the civilised world of that day. The great prize of his citizenship was not, as we might suppose it would be, the right to vote in the assemblies, to choose magistrates and pass or reject laws, nor the right to hold office if elected, for to that distinction very few could aspire; it was really the legal protection of his person and his property wherever he might be in the Empire. No one could maltreat his person with impunity; a fact well illustrated in the life of St. Paul (Acts xxii. 25 foll.). He could do business everywhere with the certainty that his sales, purchases, contracts, would be recognised and defended by Roman law, while the non-citizen had no such guarantees for his transactions. No other city in the Mediterranean had a citizenship to compare with this in practical value, for the Roman law was gradually becoming the only system of law with a real force behind it. To live a life of security and prosperity you must be a Roman citizen. We, in these days of comparative enlightenment, might perhaps imagine that with a gift like this citizenship in their hands the Romans would have been quick to reward their faithful Italian allies, who had served in their armies all through these wars, by lifting them to their own level of social and political privilege. But if so, we should be ascribing to the human nature of Roman times a degree of generosity and sympathy which was, in fact, almost unknown. We might fancy that they would have grasped the fact that their old city-state had outgrown its cradle, that Italy and not the city of Rome now really supplied the force with which the world was ruled, and that they would put the Italians on the same level of advantage as themselves, at least as regards the protection of person and property. But after the war with Hannibal the tendency was rather in the other direction. All allied Italian cities continued to have to supply contingents to Roman armies and fleets; yet Rome offered them no privileges to make up for these burdens, and her magistrates got more and more into the habit of treating them as inferiors. The Latins, too, that is the old cities of the Latin league, and the colonies with Latin _right_, as it was now called, who already had some of the privileges of citizenship, were carefully prevented from acquiring more, from becoming full citizens of Rome. In this exclusive policy, which seems to us mean and ungrateful, the Roman government undoubtedly lost a great chance, and had to pay dearly later on for her negligence.