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Please note that Mommsen uses the AUC chronology (Ab Urbe Condita), i.e. from the founding of the City of Rome. You can use this reference table to have the B.C. dates
From: The History of Rome, by Theodor Mommsen
Translated with the sanction of the author by William Purdie Dickson
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Page 5
In the first place the community might itself possess half-free clients as well as slaves; especially after the conquest of a town and the breaking up of its commonwealth it might often appear to the conquering community advisable not to sell the mass of the burgesses formally as slaves, but to allow them the continued possession of freedom -de facto-, so that in the capacity as it were of freedmen of the community they entered into relations of clientship whether to the clans, or to the king. In the second place by means of the community and its power over the individual burgesses, there was given the possibility of protecting the clients against an abusive exercise of the -dominium- still subsisting in law.
At an immemorially early period there was introduced into Roman law the principle on which rested the whole legal position of the μέτοικοι, that, when a master on occasion of a public legal act--such as in the making of a testament, in an action at law, or in the census--expressly or tacitly surrendered his -dominium-, neither he himself nor his lawful successors should ever have power arbitrarily to recall that resignation or reassert a claim to the person of the freedman himself or of his descendants.
The clients and their posterity did not by virtue of their position possess either the rights of burgesses or those of guests: for to constitute a burgess a formal bestowal of the privilege was requisite on the part of the community, while the relation of guest presumed the holding of burgess-rights in a community which had a treaty with Rome.
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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/rome/1-06-burgesses-reformed-constitution.asp?pg=5
