Chapter II: The Growth of the Republican Constitution (3)

The old nobility had relaxed its exclusive hold of office, but only to give room for the still firmer grasp of a new. This was an aristocracy of mixed origin, composed indifferently of the leading patrician and plebeian families. The test of _nobilitas_ was the capacity to point to ancestors who had held office which carried with it the right to sit on the curule chair. Its outward sign was the possession of the so-called _jus imaginum_. The _imagines_ themselves were portrait-masks in wax, modelled from the face of the dead, and their primary use was for the purpose of funeral ceremonies. The original was moulded to be placed on the face of the deceased, and so to perpetuate his life in another world; but a copy was kept to give verisimilitude to his fictitious resurrection, which the burial of one of his descendants demanded. At such funerals actors were hired to represent the mighty dead; they wore their _imagines_, and were adorned with the insignia of the offices which these had filled in life, with the _toga praetexta_ of the consul or praetor, the purple robe or the _toga picta_ of the censor, and they sat on curule chairs round the Forum to listen to the orator who reminded them of their own great deeds.[498] As such a public funeral in the Forum was a concession of the state, the prospective right of having one’s mask exhibited, which constituted the _jus imaginum_, was a strictly legal privilege. It was possessed by all those who had been in possession of the _toga praetexta_ and the _sella curulis_[499]—the dictator, master of the horse, consul, censor, praetor, and curule aedile. But, even apart from the occasions of such solemn mummery, the _imago_ was a sign of the rank of its possessor. When not funereally employed it was suspended on a bust in the wings of the central hall (_atrium_) of the noble’s house. Beneath each portrait ran an inscription (_titulus_ or _elogium_), which gave the names and deeds of the person represented. The portraits were joined by lines along the walls which showed the _stemma_ or family tree. It is possible that this display in the _atrium_ was looked on as a public exhibition, and it may originally have been limited by law; but in later times it seems best to conclude that the funerary exhibition alone was the subject of the specific _jus_.[500] But this outward token of nobility, which at Rome took the place of the modern title of honour, was of importance as emphasising the distinction between the _nobiles_ and the _ignobiles_, in drawing the plebeian aristocracy closer to the patrician, which before the date of the Licinian laws had been in exclusive possession of this right, and in asserting the hereditary claim to office which the Roman electorate was only too ready to recognise. The acceptance of the claim was less dangerous than it is in most modern states, since primogeniture was not recognised in the transmission of honours,[501] and it was the capable and not the elder son whom the vote of the _comitia_ raised to the curule chair. The claim too might become dimmed by disuse, and the Plebeian whose immediate ancestors had held high rank showed a brighter scutcheon than the Patrician who was connected with a noble _stemma_ by ignoble links.[502] But the Patriciate itself conferred a kind of nobility, and one that, whatever its basis, might have been justified by office, for there could have been few members of the order who could not point to curule ancestors in the past. Although the Plebeian who _first_ secured curule office, and thus ceased to be _ignobilis_, was called a _novus homo_, the designation seems never to have been applied to the member of a patrician _gens_.[503] Nobility, if once secured, could never be lost; but the hereditary claim to the suffrage of the electors was of little avail if unaccompanied by exceptional merit or by wealth. The claims of the latter were in fact given a kind of legal recognition by the rule established about the time of the first Punic war, that the cost of the public games should not be defrayed exclusively by the treasury.[504] The aedileship, whether curule or plebeian, was, as we shall see, not an obligatory step in the ascending scale of the magistracies; but, as it was held before the praetorship and the consulship, it is obvious that the brilliant display given to the people by the occupant of this office would often render fruitless the efforts of his less fortunate competitors, and that this legitimised bribery would exclude from office both the poorer _nobiles_ and the struggling _novus homo_.[505]

The idea of a privileged nobility, which closed its ranks to new men, had become fixed by the date of the second Punic war.[506] By the close of that war the old stock had reached its maturity and had begun to decline; and, although men like Cato or Cicero might force themselves to the front by pertinacity and ability, or the belief in privilege might be rudely shaken by the people’s thrusting into the coterie a Varro or a Marius, the aristocrats came to look on the introduction of new blood as a pollution to the order.[507] Time, which purifies all things, had made the slave-blood of the successful Plebeian as blue as that of the descendant of kings by whom he sat.

But, in spite of this unholy alliance of the ancient foes, the distinction between the orders never was abolished. In Cicero’s time the separate rights of the Patricians could still be enumerated and defended by the orator. Besides the shadowy and ineffective powers of the _patrum auctoritas_ and the _interregnum_, they possessed half the places in the great priestly colleges, which were shared between the orders, and certain priests—the Rex Sacrorum, the three great Flamines and the Salii—were chosen exclusively from their ranks.[508] The place of the Patriciate in the theory of the constitution—as illustrated by the _auctoritas_ and the _interregnum_—is, as we shall see, very great indeed; but this theoretical importance conferred very little power, and the Plebeians, with their exclusive magistracies closed to the _patres_, with one place reserved for them in the consulship and censorship and the other accessible to their order, had won in the long race for honours.