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 nobility. The whole lesson is lost if the words “patrician” and “plebeian” are used in any but their strict sense. The Catuli and Metelli, among the proudest nobles of Rome, were plebeians, and as such could not have been chosen to the purely patrician office of interrex, or flamen of Jupiter. Yet even in good writers on Roman history the words “patrician” and “plebeian” are often misapplied by being transferred to the later disputes at Rome, in which they are quite out of place.

We may now compare the history of nobility at Rome with its history in some other of the most famous city-commonwealths. Thus at Athens its history is in its main outlines very much the same as its history at Rome up to a certain point, while there is nothing at Athens which at all answers to the later course of things at Rome.

At Athens, as at Rome, an old patriciate, a nobility of older settlement, a nobility which had once been the whole people, was gradually shorn of all exclusive privilege, and driven to share equal rights with a new people which had grown up around it. The reform of (q.v.) answers in a general way to the reform of Licinius, though the different circumstances of the two cities hinder us from carrying out the parallel into detail. But both at Rome and at Athens we see, at a stage earlier than the final reform, an attempt to set up a standard of wealth, either instead of or alongside of the older standard of birth. This same general idea comes out both in the constitution of Servius and in the constitution of Solon, though the application of the principle is different in the two cases. Servius made voting power depend on income; by Solon the same rule was applied to qualification for office. By this change power is not granted to every citizen, but it is put within the reach of every citizen. No man can change his forefathers, but the poor man may haply become richer. The Athenian , who were thus gradually brought down from their privileged position, seem to have been quite as proud and exclusive as the Roman patricians; but when they lost their privileges they lost them far more thoroughly, and they did not, as at Rome, practically hand on many of them to a new nobility, of which they formed part, though not the whole. While at Rome the distinction of patrician and plebeian was never wiped out, while it remained to the last a legal distinction even when practical privilege had turned the other way, at Athens, after the democracy had reached its full growth, the distinction seems to have had no legal existence whatever. At Rome down to the last it made a difference whether the candidate for office was patrician or plebeian, though the difference was in later times commonly to the advantage of the plebeian. At Athens, at any rate after Aristides, the eupatrid was neither better nor worse off than another man.

But, what is of far greater importance, there never arose at Athens any body of men which at all answered to the nobilitas of Rome. We see at Athens strong signs of social distinctions, even at a late period of the democracy; we see that, though the people might be led by the low-born demagogue—using that word in its strict and not necessarily dishonourable meaning—their votes most commonly fell on men of ancient descent. We see that men of birth and wealth often allowed themselves a strange licence in dealing with their low-born fellow-citizens. But we see no sign of the growth of a body made up of patricians and leading plebeians who contrived to keep office to themselves by a social tradition only less strong than positive law. We have at Athens the exact parallel to the state of things when Appius Claudius shrank from the thought of the consulship of Gaius Licinius; we have no exact parallel to the state of things when Quintus Metellus shrank from the thought of the consulship of Gaius Marius. The cause of the difference seems to be that, while the origin of the patriciate was exactly the same at Rome and at Athens, the origin of the commons was different. The four Ionic tribes at Athens seem to have answered very closely to the three patrician tribes at Rome; but the Athenian demos grew up in a different way from the Roman plebs. If we could believe that the Athenian demos arose out of the union of the other Attic towns with Athens, this would be an exact analogy to the origin of the Roman plebs; the  would be the Athenians and the demos the Atticans ( ). But from such glimpses of early Attic history as we can get the union of the Attic towns would seem to have been completed before the constitutional struggle began, That union would answer rather to the union of the three patrician tribes of Rome. Such hints as we have, While they set before us, just as at Rome, a state of things in which small landed proprietors are burthened with debt, also set before us the Attic demos as, largely at least, a body of various origins which had grown up in the city. Cleisthenes, for instance, enfranchised many slaves and strangers, a course which certainly formed no part of the platform of Licinius, and which reminds us rather of Gnaeus Flavius somewhat later. On the whole it seems most likely that, while the kernel of the Roman plebs was rural or belonged to the small towns admitted to the Roman franchise, the Attic demos, largely at least, though doubtless not wholly, arose out of the mixed settlers who had come together in the city, answering to the  of later times. If so, there would be no place in Athens for those great plebeian houses, once patrician in some other commonwealth, out of which the later Roman nobilitas was so largely formed.

Thus the history of nobility at Athens supplies a close analogy to the earlier stages of its history at Rome, but it has nothing answering to its later stages. At Sparta we have a third instance of a people shrinking up into a nobility, but it is a people whose position differs altogether from anything either at Rome or at Athens. Sparta is the best case of a nobility of conquest. This is true, whether we look on the  as Achaeans or as Dorians, or as belonging some to one race and some to the other (see ). In any case the Spartans form a ruling body, and a body whose privileged position in the land is owing to conquest. The Spartans answer to the patricians, the  to the plebs; the helots are below the position of plebs or demos. The only difference is that, probably owing to the fact that the distinction was due to conquest, the local character of the distinction lived on much longer than it did at Rome. We hardly look on the Spartans as a nobility among the other Lacedaemonians; Sparta rather is a ruling city bearing sway over the other Lacedaemonian towns. But this is exactly what the original Roman patricians, the settlers on the three oldest hills, were in the beginning. The so-called cities ( ) of the  answered pretty well to the local plebeian tribes; the difference is that the  never became a united corporate body like the Roman plebs. Sparta to the last remained what Rome was at the beginning, a city with a populus ( ) but no plebs. And, as at Rome in early times, there were at Sparta distinctions within the populus; there were  and , like the majores and minores gentes at Rome. Only at Rome, where there was a plebs to be striven against, these distinctions seem to have had a tendency to die out, while at Sparta they seem to have had a tendency to widen. The Spartan patriciate could afford to disfranchise some of its own members.

The other old Greek cities, as well as those of medieval Italy and Germany, would supply us with endless examples of the various ways in which privileged orders arose. Venice, a city not exactly belonging to any of these classes, essentially a city of the Eastern empire and not of the Western, gives us an example than which none is more instructive. The renowned patriciate of Venice was as far removed as might be from the character either of a nobility of conquest or of a nobility of older settlement. Nor was it strictly a nobility of office, though it had more in common with that than with either of the other two. As Athens supplies us with a parallel to the older nobility of Rome without any parallel to the later, so Venice supplies us with a parallel to the later nobility of Rome without any parallel to the earlier. Athens has Fabii and Claudii, but no Catuli or Metelli; Venice has Catuli and Metelli, but no Fabii or Claudii.

In one point, however, the Venetian nobility differed from either the older or the newer nobility of Rome, and also from the older nobilities of the medieval Italian cities. Nowhere else did nobility so distinctly rise out of wealth, and that wealth gained