of the family and the clan by the unprivileged class would be
perfectly natural.
The absurdity of excluding the plebeians from all but a merely theoretical citizenship, based on the negative fact of freedom, seems to have become apparent before the close of the monarchical period. The aim of the reforms associated with the name of Servius Tullius appears to have been the imposition of the duties of citizenship upon the plebeians. Incidentally this involved an extension of plebeian privilege in two directions. First, it was necessary to unify the plebeian order by putting the legal status of the clients on a level with that of the unattached plebeians; and again enrolment in the army involved registration in the tribes and centuries; and as the army soon developed into a legislative assembly meeting in centuries (comitia centuriata), the whole citizen body, including plebeians, now acquired a share of political power, which had hitherto belonged solely to the patricians. At the close of the monarchy, the plebeian possessed the private rights of citizenship in entirety, except for his inability to contract a legal marriage with a patrician, and one of the public rights, that of giving his vote in the assembly.[1] But in the matter of liability to the duties of citizenship, military service and taxation, he was entirely on a level with the patrician. This position was probably tolerable during the monarchy, when the king served to hold the power of the patrician families in check. But when these families had expelled the Tarquins, and formed themselves into an exclusive aristocracy of privilege, the inconsistency between partial privilege and full burdens came to be strongly felt by the plebeians.
The result was the long struggle for entire political equality of the two orders which occupies the first few centuries of the republic (see Rome: History, § II. “The Republic”). The struggle was inaugurated by the plebeians, who in 494 B.C. formed themselves into an exclusive order with annually elected officers (tribuni plebis) and an assembly of their own, and by means of this machinery forced themselves by degrees into all the magistracies, and obtained the coveted right of intermarriage with the patricians. Admission to the higher magistracies carried with it admission to the senate, and by the close of the struggle (about 300 B.C.) the political privilege of the two orders was equalized, with the exception of certain disabilities which, originally devised to break the political monopoly of the order, continued to be attached to the patricians after the victory of the plebs. They were excluded from the tribunate and the council of the plebs, which had become important instruments of government, and were only eligible for one place in the consulship and censorship, while both were open to plebeians. It is possible, though far from certain (see Senate), that the powers of the interregnum and the senatorial confirmation (patrum auctoritas) necessary to give validity to decisions of the people, remained the exclusive privileges of the patrician members of the senate. But while the patrician disabilities were of a kind that had gained in importance with the lapse of centuries, these privileges, even if still retained, had become merely formal in the second half of the republican period. Since the plebeian element in the state had an immense numerical preponderance over the patrician these disabilities were not widely spread, and seem generally to have been cheerfully borne as the price of belonging to the families still recognized as the oldest and noblest in Rome. But the adoption of P. Clodius Pulcher into a plebeian family in 59 B.C. with a view to election to the tribunate shows that a rejection of patrician rights (transitio ad plebem) was not difficult to effect by any patrician who preferred actual power to the dignity of ancient descent. It was not so easy to recruit the ranks of the patricians. The traditions of early Rome indeed represent the patricians as receiving the Claudii by a collective act into their body; but the first authenticated instance of the admission of new members to the patriciate is that of the lex Cassia, which authorized Caesar as dictator to create fresh patricians. The same procedure was followed by Augustus. Later on, the right of creating patricians came to be regarded as inherent in the principate, and was exercised by Claudius and Vespasian without any legal enactment, apparently in their capacity as censor (Tac. Ann. xi. 25; Vita M. Antonini, i.). Patrician rank seems to have been regarded as a necessary attribute of the princeps; and in two cases we are told that it was conferred upon a plebeian princeps by the senate (Vita Juliani, 3; Macrini, 7). A comparison of this procedure with the original conception of the patriciate as revealed by the derivation of the word, is significant of the history of the conception of nobility at Rome, and illustrative of the tenacity with which the Romans clung to the name and form of an institution which had long lost its significance. After the political equalization of the two orders, noble birth was no longer recognized as constituting a claim to political privilege. Instead of the old hereditary nobility, consisting of the members of the patrician clans, there arose a nobility of office, consisting of all those families, whether patrician or plebeian, which had held curule office. It was now the tenure of office that conferred distinction. In the early days of Rome, office was only open to the member of a patrician gens. In the principate, patrician rank, a sort of abstract conception based upon the earlier state of affairs, was held to be a dignity suitable to be conferred on an individual holder of office. But the conferment of the rank upon an individual as distinct from a whole family (gens) is enough to show how widely the modern conception of patrician rank differed from the ancient. The explanation of this is that the plebeians had long been organized, like the patricians, in gentes, and nothing remained distinctive of the old nobility except a vague sense of dignity and worth. (A. M. Cl.)
II. Under Constantine an entirely new meaning was given to the word Patrician. It was used as a personal title of honour conferred for distinguished services. It was a title merely of rank, not of office; its holder ranked next after the emperor and the consul. It naturally happened, however, that the title was generally bestowed upon officials, especially on the chief provincial governors, and even among barbarian chieftains whose friendship was valuable enough to call forth the imperial benediction. Among the former it appears to have become a sort of ex officio title of the Byzantine vicegerents of Italy, the exarchs of Ravenna; among the barbarian chiefs who were thus dignified were Odoacer, Theodoric, Sigismund of Burgundy, Clovis, and even in later days princes of Bulgaria, the Saracens, and the West Saxons. The word thus acquired an official connotation. The dignity was not hereditary and belonged only to individuals; thus a patrician family was merely one whose head enjoyed the rank of patricius. Gradually the root sense of “father” came to the front again, and the patricius was regarded as the “father of the emperor” (Ammian Marc. xxix. 2). With the word were associated such further titles as eminentia, magnitudo, magnificentia. Those patricians who were purely honorary were called honorarii or codicillarii; those who were still in harness were praesentales. They were all distinguished by a special dress or uniform and in public always drove in a carriage. The emperor Zeno enacted that no one could become patricius who had not been praefectus militum, consul or magister militum, but less careful emperors gave the title to their favourites, however young and undistinguished. The writ in which the title was conferred was called a diploma.
A further change in the meaning of the name is marked by its conferment on Pippin the Frank[2] by Pope Stephen. The idea of this extension originated no doubt in the fact that the Italian patricius of the 6th and 7th centuries had come to be regarded as the defensor, protector, patronus of the Church. At all events, the conferring of the title by a pope was entirely unprecedented; previously its validity had depended on the emperor solely. As a matter of fact it is clear that the patriciate of Pippin was a new office, especially as the title is henceforward generally patricius Romanorum, not patricius alone. It was
