activities. And it was precisely this security that formed the basis on which the one people that had remained "in form" rose to its grandeur.
On the one hand, it had developed within the Plebs, formless and long weakened in its race-impulses by the mass-intake of freedmen,[1] an upper stratum distinguished by great practical aptitudes, rank, and wealth, which joined forces with a corresponding stratum within the patriciate. Hence there came into existence a very narrow circle of men of the strongest race-quality, dignified life, and broad political outlook, in whom the whole stock of experience in governing and generalship and negotiation was concentrated and transmitted; who regarded the direction of the State as the one profession worthy of their status, considered themselves as inheritors of a privilege to exercise it, and educated their children solely in the art of ruling and the convictions of a measurelessly proud tradition. This nobility, which as such had no constitutional existence, found its constitutional engine in the Senate, which had originally been a body representing the interests of the patricians (that is, the "Homeric" aristocracy), but in which from the middle of the fourth century ex-consuls — men who had both ruled and commanded — sat as life-members, forming a close group of eminent talents that dominated the assembly and, through it, the State. Even by 279 the Senate appeared to Cineas, the ambassador of Pyrrhus, like a council of kings, and finally its kernel was a small group of leading men, holding the titles "princeps" and "clarissimus," men in every respect — rank, power, and public dignity — the peers of those who reigned over the empires of the Diadochi.[2] There came into being a government such as no megalopolis in any other Culture whatsoever has possessed, and a tradition to which it would be impossible to find parallels save perhaps in the Venice and the Papal Curia of the Baroque, and there under a wholly different set of conditions. Here were no theories such as had been the ruin of Athens, none of the provincialism that had made Sparta in the long run contemptible, but simply a praxis in the grand style. If "Rome" is a perfectly unique and marvellous phenomenon in world-history, it is due, not to the Ro-
- ↑ According to Roman law, the freed slave at once acquired citizenship, with some few limitations. As the slave-material came from all over the Mediterranean region and most of all from the East, it was a vast rootless mass that collected in the four urban tribes, alien from all the tendencies of the old Roman blood; and it quickly destroyed these when, after the Gracchan movement, it had succeeded in bringing its weight of numbers to bear with effect.
- ↑ From the end of the fourth century the nobility developed into a closed circle of families that had, or claimed to have, consuls among their ancestors. The more strictly this condition was enforced, the more frequent were the falsifications of the old consul-lists in order to "legitimize" rising families of strong race and talent. The first (and truly revolutionary) outburst of forgery occurs in the epoch of Appius Claudius the Censor, when the curule ædile C. Flavius, the son of a slave, put the list in order — that was the time when even royal cognomina were discovered amongst plebeian families. The second was in the days of the battle of Pydna (168), when the dominance of the nobility began to assume Cæsarian forms (E. Kornemann, Der Priesterkodex in der Regia, 1912, pp. 56, et seq.)- Of the 200 Consulates between 232 and 133, 159 fell to 26 families, and thereafter — blood-quality being exhausted, but the form as such being all the more studiously preserved in consequence — the rise of novi homines like Cato and Cicero became a rare phenomenon.
