had at length so enhanced the value of citizenship that the masses were unwilling except on the rarest occasions to share its advantages with others.[2177] Any attempt, therefore, on the part of aliens to usurp the rights of the city was resented. In 187 we find the senate appointing the praetor Q. Terentius Culleo extraordinary commissioner for determining by investigation who from the Latin towns had recently usurped the citizenship, and for expelling from Rome those found guilty of the offence.[2178] Soon afterward the people extended their power over such cases; in 177 a second expulsion of the Latins was brought about by a consular law of C. Claudius Pulcher.[2179] The same spirit prompted the citizens to limit the political rights of freedmen. There can be no doubt that early Rome was as liberal in the treatment of this class as of aliens. From earliest times they had a right to acquire land; and such proprietors were undoubtedly enrolled in the tribes in which their estates were situated.[2180] From the beginning, however, custom deprived them of the ius honorum[2181] and of conubium. The former they acquired along with the other plebeians, although they were less readily admitted to the actual enjoyment of it;[2182] the latter they continued to lack.[2183] They were exempt, too, from ordinary military service.[2184] In time their condition became worse. C. Flaminius as censor in 220, in the interest of the rural plebs,[2185] began arbitrarily to assign all the libertini, whether they had lands or not, to the four city tribes,[2186] doubtless at the same time to the supernumerary centuries of the comitia centuriata.[2187] But the sons of freedmen, themselves originally libertini,[2188] came in time to be looked upon as ingenui, with the same legal rights as the old citizens. This change seems to have been effected by the plebiscite of Q. Terentius Culleo, 189, for compelling the censors to admit to the senate the sons of free parents—undoubtedly those sons of libertini who were born after the emancipation of the father.[2189] The law must have involved the principle of treating such persons as citizens optimo iure, and have therefore required their enrolment in the country tribes, provided they owned land. As the acquisition of full rights came only with the death of the father, which made the son sui iuris, the application of the principle must have required the enrolment of the fathers along with the sons in the rural tribes; in other words, it recognized as citizens optimo iure those libertini who had children,[2190] on the basis of the existing custom of enlisting such persons in military service at crises.[2191] The political connections of the author of this statute leads us to interpret it as a measure of the oligarchs for strengthening their position by the votes of their dependents.[2192]