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
The very rapid increase of the rabble in the capital particularly,
which is thus presupposed, is also demonstrable otherwise. The
increasing number and importance of the freedmen are shown by the very
serious discussions that arose in the previous century,(43) and were
continued during the present, as to their right to vote in the public
assemblies, and by the remarkable resolution, adopted by the senate
during the Hannibalic war, to admit honourable freedwomen to a
participation in the public collections, and to grant to the
legitimate children of manumitted fathers the insignia hitherto
belonging only to the children of the free-born.(44)
The majority of
the Greeks and Orientals who settled in Rome were probably little
better than the freedmen, for national servility clung as indelibly
to the former as legal servility to the latter.
