the untiring exertions of an anxious government. But this government finally came to lean on what it had fostered. The same tendencies, still very imperfectly understood, which changed professions into corporations, trades into guilds, and made even military service a hereditary burden, fastened on the towns, and the government sought to find in them a class which would be solely responsible for local and imperial duties. This was found ultimately in the local Senate—the order of decuriones or curiales—which had always formed the pivot of municipal administration controlled or created by Rome, but which now tended to become sharply severed from the other classes in the communities, and, while solely endowed with the privileges of office, held these privileges at a tenure which it would gladly have surrendered. The legal texts of our period do not yet show the crushed and broken aristocracy of a later date; but they reveal the beginning of the movement which was to lead men to regard membership of the Senate as certain ruin, and to flee from office as though it were the plague. In the first place, the local magistracy was ceasing to be a stepping-stone to the Senate. There is a tendency to recruit the order through an adlectio of otherwise unqualified members,[1] a tendency which reveals an anxiety to preserve the maximum numbers of the order. This admission is effected by the board itself, and prepares us for the practice of the later Empire by which the order recruits itself from all qualified persons who are bound to serve. In another way also the earlier relation of magistrate to senate was being reversed. The principle of the earlier law, in accordance with which the previous possession of office is a necessary qualification for the curia,[2] has been changed for one in accordance with which none but a decurion can be a magistrate. A definite grade of municipal nobility has been evolved, an official caste has been created, and the decurions are sharply severed from the Plebs.[3]
- ↑ See Marquardt Staatsverw. i. p. 190; Kuhn Verfassung des römischen Reichs i. p. 238. Cf. Plin. ad Traj. 112 (113) "ii quos indulgentia tua quibusdam civitatibus super legitimum numerum adicere permisit." Contrast with this the principle of admission to local senates recognised by the lex Julia Munic. l. 85 "nei quis eorum quem . . . legito neve sublegito . . . nisi in demortuei damnateive locum."
- ↑ Lex Julia Munic. l. 135 "II vir(atum) IIII vir(atum) aliamve quam potestatem, ex quo honore in eum ordinem perveniat."
- ↑ Paulus in Dig. 50, 2, 7, 2 "Is, qui non sit decurio, duumviratu vel aliis honoribus fungi non potest, quia decurionum honoribus plebeii fungi prohibentur."
