Page:Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic.djvu/40



CHAPTER II.

ROMAN PARTIES AND STATESMEN.

81-71 B.C.

HEN Cicero entered on public life the government was in the full possession of the "Optimates" or Notables, and of the Senate in which they reigned supreme. These Nobles inherited the splendid traditions of their ancestors who had made Rome great in the century of the Punic and Macedonian wars. At that epoch a ring of great families, some patrician and some plebeian, had been set in a position of eminence, not by any invidious prerogative, but by the natural process of the working forces of the constitution. Every man was "noble" who could count curule magistrates among his ancestors, and he was most noble whose hall showed the greatest number of family portraits of consuls and censors. Power and influence accrued to the men who had 24