There was a further extension of the conubium when Rome, in the middle of the fourth century before Christ, admitted to its citizenship some of the Italian, especially Latin, towns which it had subdued. The bestowal of the citizenship on the _libertini_, or freedmen, still further extended the conubium. In 89 B.C. the Italians received the conubium by the Lex Julia and Plautia. During the later days of the Republic, and in the time of the Empire, the citizenship was conferred on men in various parts of the world, and especially on various towns in the provinces. Soldiers also, who had served for a certain time, and had allied themselves to foreign women, had these alliances converted into legitimate marriages. In fact, the right of intermarriage had become of much less value. In early days the privileges of patricians were great, and it was worth while to take care that these should be secured only to genuine patrician offspring, especially as only genuine patrician offspring could perform due sacrifice and worship to the gods of the family and the State. Even in the days from the Punic wars to the end of the Republic, Roman citizenship was at once valuable and honourable; for the Roman citizen paid no taxes, and in an indirect way might share in the plunder of the world, and he enjoyed peculiar advantages in the eye of the law. But these advantages vanished with the advance of the Empire, which reduced all to a dead level of subjection, and at length, in 212 A.D., one of the most hated of tyrants, Caracalla, conferred the citizenship on all the inhabitants of the Roman Empire, and with it the conubium. After this, any man might marry any woman, and the factitious distinctions which had ruled the ancient world vanished for ever. The world owes no gratitude to Caracalla for this grand consummation; for his only motive in conferring the citizenship on all was that all might be compelled to pay taxes, and that aliens might not escape, as some of them had hitherto done. The outline of the history of what we may call the external emancipation of woman now given is, we have no doubt, substantially correct and based on trustworthy sources; but when we come to deal with the moral progress of women, and their position in the midst of Roman society, great difficulties meet us, which attach to all early Roman history.