The _inquilini_ and _coloni_ of the last century of the republic were free, rent-paying farmers (who paid the rent in money), or free laborers. When, after the time of Sylla, the republican oligarchs partially enslaved these farmers, the rent had to be paid in kind, in sign of dependence, if not of absolute bondage. The colonists settled by the emperors also had to pay tribute and submit to various other servitudes; and thus the once free colonists were, by a slow but uninterrupted process, transformed into bondmen, serfs and slaves. As in the last days of the republic, so under Augustus and his successors, the free yeoman or colonist, in order to avoid being violently expelled from his homestead and shut up in the _ergastulum_ with the chattels, frequently sold himself and his little property, on certain conditions, to the rich and powerful slaveholder, and thus secured patronage and protection. In proportion as exaction, oppression and lawlessness increased under the emperors, so also did the forced or voluntary submission of colonists to influential slaveholders. As the imperial tax-gatherer was wont to sell the children of the poor for tax or tribute, the peasant often preferred to become a slave in order to obtain protection from his master, who became responsible to the treasury for the taxes of the bondman and his lands. Frequently whole villages of colonists thus gave up their rights for the sake of patronage and protection. The exchequer had a roll inscribed with the names of all the colonists on the domains belonging to the state, the cities, or to private individuals. From this census for taxation was derived the legal designation, and afterward the condition of _adscriptus_. And the imperial government, whose sole object was to gather taxes and have responsible tax-payers, had little if any objection to this transformation of colonists and their homesteads into the bondmen of the rich. The change was not made at once by any special law,[16] but was brought about by the slow progress of social decomposition. When the serfdom of the colonists first became an object of jurisprudence--a little before and under Theodosius--it had already existed as a fact; and _ex facto nascitur jus_ was an old axiom of the civil law. By and by slaves proper--that is, movable chattels, not persons attached to the soil--both in the city and on the lands, were taxed on the plantation roll; and Constantine prohibited the sale of chattels from one province to another, most probably with the view of facilitating their control by the tax-gatherer. Rapacious taxation, the first outgrowth of imperial despotism which was originated by the slaveholders, forced into the grip of the oligarch all that remained of free soil and independent labor, or what was intended to be such by the colonizing emperors. The same cause also disorganized the ancient municipal regime in the cities of Italy and throughout the Roman world.