order—the populus, patres, patricians—has all the characteristics which we commonly expect to find in a privileged order. It is a minority, a minority strictly marked out by birth from other members of the commonwealth, a minority which seems further, though this point is less clearly marked, to have had on the whole the advantage in point of wealth. When we are first entitled to speak with any kind of certainty, the non-privileged class possess a certain share in the election of magistrates and the making of laws. But the privileged class alone are eligible to the greatest offices of the state; they have in their hands the exclusive control of the national religion; they have the exclusive enjoyment of the common land of the state—in Teutonic phrase, the folkland. A little research shows that the origin of these privileges was a very simple one. Those who appear in later times as a privileged order among the people had once been the whole people. The patricians, patres, housefathers, goodmen—so lowly is the origin of that proud name—were once the whole Roman people, the original inhabitants of the Roman hills. They were the true populus Romanus, alongside of whom grew up a secondary Roman people, the plebs or commons. As new settlers came, as the people of conquered towns were moved to Rome, as the character of Romans was granted to some allies and forced upon some enemies, this plebs, sharing some but not all of the rights of citizens, became a non-privileged order alongside of a privileged order. As the non-privileged order increased in numbers, while the privileged order, as every exclusive hereditary body must do, lessened, the larger body gradually put on the character of the nation at large, while the smaller body put on the character of a nobility. But their position as a nobility or privileged class arose solely because a class with inferior rights to their own grew up around them. They were not a nobility or a privileged class as long as there was no less privileged class to distinguish them from. Their exclusive possession of power made the commonwealth in which they bore rule an aristocracy; but they were a democracy among themselves. We see indeed faint traces of distinction among the patricians themselves, which may lead us to guess that the equality of all patricians may have been won by struggles of unrecorded days, not unlike those which in recorded days brought about the equality of patrician and plebeian. But at this we can only guess. The Roman patricians, the true Roman populus, appear at our first sight of them as a body democratic in its own constitution, but standing out as an order marked by very substantial privileges indeed from the other body, the plebs, also democratic in its own constitution, but in every point of honour and power the marked inferior of the populus.
The old people of Rome thus grew, or rather shrank up, into a nobility by the growth of a new people by their side which they declined to admit to a share in their rights, powers and possessions. A series of struggles raised this new people, the plebs, to a level with the old people, the populus. The gradual character of the process is not the least Patricians. instructive part of it. There are two marked stages in the struggle. In the first the plebeians strive to obtain relief from laws and customs which were actually oppressive to them, while they were profitable to the patricians. When this relief has been gained by a series of enactments, a. second struggle follows, in which the plebeians win political equality with the patricians. In this second struggle, too, the ground is won bit by bit. No general law was ever passed to abolish the privileges of the patricians; still less was any law ever passed to abolish the distinction between patrician and plebeian. All that was done was done step by step. First, marriage between the two orders was legalized. Then one law admitted plebeians to one office, another law to another. Admission to military command was won first, then admission to civil jurisdiction; a share in religious functions was won last of all. And some offices, chiefly those religious offices which carried no political power with them, always remained the exclusive property of the patricians, because no special law was ever passed to throw them open to plebeians. In this gradual way every practical advantage on the part of the patricians was taken away. But the result did not lead to the abolition of all distinctions between the orders. Patricians and plebeians went on as orders defined by law, till the distinction died out in the confusion of things under the empire, till at last the word “patrician” took quite a new meaning. The distinction, in truth, went on till the advantage turned to the side of the plebeians. Both consuls might be plebeians, both could not be patricians; a patrician could not wield the great powers vested in the tribunes of the commons. These were greater advantages than the exclusive patrician possession of the offices of interrex, rex sacrorum and the higher flamens. And, as the old distinction survived in law and religion after all substantial privileges were abolished, so presently a. new distinction arose of which law and religion knew nothing, but which became in practice nearly as marked and quite as important as the older one.
This was the growth of the new nobility of Rome, that body, partly patrician, partly plebeian, to whom the name nobilitas strictly belongs in Roman history. This new nobility gradually became as well marked and as exclusive as the old patriciate. But if differed from the old patriciate in this, that, while the privileges of the old patriciate rested on law, or perhaps rather on immemorial custom, the privileges of the new nobility rested wholly on a sentiment of which men could remember the beginning. Or it would be more accurate to say that the new nobility had really no privileges at all. Its members had no legal advantages over other citizens. They were a social caste, which strove to keep, and which largely succeeded in keeping, all high offices and political power in its own hands. Such privileges, even of an honorary kind, as the nobles did enjoy by law belonged to them, not as nobles, but as senators and senators’ sons. Yet practically the new nobility was a privileged class; it felt itself to be so, and it was felt to be so by others. This nobility consisted of all those who, as descendants of curule magistrates, had the jus imaginum—that is, who could point to forefathers ennobled by office. That is to say, it consisted of the remains of the old patriciate, together with those plebeian families any members of which had been chosen to curule offices. These were naturally those families which had been patrician in some other Italian city, but which were plebeian at Rome. Many of them equalled the patricians in wealth and antiquity of descent, and as soon as inter marriage was allowed they became in all things their social equals. The practical result of the Licinian reform was that the great plebeian families became, for all practical purposes, patrician. They separated themselves from the mass of the plebeians to form a single body with the surviving patricians. just as the old patricians had striven to keep plebeians out of high offices, so now the new nobles, patrician and plebeian alike, strove to keep “new men,” men who had not the jus imaginum, out of high office. But there was still the difference that in the old state of things the plebeian was shut out by law, while in the new state of things no law shut out the new man. It needed a change in the constitution to give the consulship to Lucius Sextius; it needed only union and energy in the electors to give it to Gaius Marius.
The Roman case is often misunderstood, because the later Roman writers did not fully understand the case themselves. Livy could never get rid of the idea that the old struggle between patrician and plebeian was something like the struggle between the nobility and the people at large in the later days of the commonwealth. In a certain sense he knew better; at any rate, he often repeats the words of those who knew better; but the general impression given by his story is that the plebeians were a low mob and their leaders factious and interested ringleaders of a mob. The case is again often misunderstood because the words “patrician” and “plebeian,” like so many other technical Roman and Greek words, have come in modern language to be used in a. way quite unlike their original sense. The word “plebeian,” in its strict sense, is no more contemptuous than the word commoner in England. The plebs, like the English commons, contained families differing widely in rank and social position, among them those families which, as soon as an artificial barrier broke down, joined with the patricians to form the new
