BOOK II. THE POSITION AND INFLUENCE OF WOMEN IN ANCIENT ROME. CHAPTER I. THE GOOD SIDE. In early Rome we find the same state of matters as we have found in Greece. The city is the unit. This city-State consists of citizens who have all equal rights and privileges. All outside of the city have at first no rights within its territories, and if they come within the city, they have no claim to justice or consideration except what they can obtain through a citizen. In all ancient cities there was always a large number of slaves, men or women who either themselves or whose ancestors had been taken captive in war or stolen from their homes. Thus there were three classes of the population--citizens with full rights and privileges, aliens with no rights of their own, and slaves who were regarded as mere property. But the development of the city of Rome follows a different course from that of the Greek cities. The Romans gradually extended the privileges of citizenship till the unit was no longer a city, but a nation, and finally it became the civilized world. Aliens make no prominent figure in Rome, as they did in Athens, unless we consider the plebeians as aliens, and in the process of time the plebeians became citizens, and every civil distinction between them and the original citizens vanished. Besides, the Censor had the right to put the name of an alien on the list of citizens, and no doubt many foreigners became Roman citizens in this way. The slaves also had a more advantageous position in Rome. The road to citizenship was at an early period laid open for them. Their masters manumitted many of them, and they became freedmen. These freedmen came to be numerous and influential, and the Censor Appius Claudius in 312 B.C.[67] admitted them all to the full rights of citizenship. They were not, indeed, allowed to enjoy the honours of the State, but this same Appius Claudius granted to the sons of freedmen admission into the Senate, and his right-hand man, Cn. Flavius, curule ædile of the year 304, was the son of a freedman. Thus, in course of time, the slave became the freedman, the freedman’s son became an _ingenuus_, or freeborn citizen, with all the rights and privileges of Roman citizenship.