Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/570

Rh 526 N O B I L I T Y New nobilitas strictly belongs in Roman history. This new nobility, nobility gradually became as well marked and as exclusive as the old patriciate. But it differed from the old patriciate in this, that, while the privileges of the old patriciate rested on law, or perhaps rather on immemorial custom, the privileges of the new nobility rested wholly on a sentiment of which men could remember the beginning. Or it would be more accurate to say that the new nobility had really no privileges at all. Its members had no legal advantages over other citizens. They were a social caste, which strove to keep, and which largely succeeded in keeping, all high offices and political power in its own hands. Such privileges, even of an honorary kind, as the nobles did enjoy by law belonged to them, not as nobles, but as senators and senators sons. Yet practically the new nobility was a privileged class ; it felt itself to be so, and it was felt to be so by others. This nobility consisted of all those who, as descendants of curule magistrates, had the jus imaginum, that is, who could point to forefathers ennobled by office. That is to say, it consisted of the remains of the old patriciate, together with those plebeian families any members of which had been chosen to curule offices. These were naturally those families which had been patrician in some other Italian city, but which were plebeian at Rome. Many of them equalled the patricians in wealth and antiquity of descent, and as soon as inter marriage was allowed they became in all things their social equals. The practical result of the Licinian reform was that the great plebeian families became, for all practical purposes, patrician. They separated themselves from the mass of the plebeians to form a single body with the sur viving patricians. Just as the old patricians had striven to keep plebeians out of high offices, so now the new nobles, patrician and plebeian alike, strove to keep &quot; new men,&quot; men who had not the jus imaginum, out of high office. But there was still the difference that in the old state of things the plebeian was shut out by law, while in the new state of things no law shut out the new man. It needed a change in the constitution to give the consul ship to Lucius Sextius ; it needed only union and energy in the electors to give it to Caius Marius. The Roman case is often misunderstood, because the later Roman writers did not fully understand the case them selves. Livy could never get rid of the idea that the old struggle between patrician and plebeian was something like the struggle between the nobility and the people at large in the later days of the commonwealth. In a cer tain sense he knew better ; at any rate, he often repeats the words of those who knew better ; but the general impression given by his story is that the plebeians were a low mob and their leaders factious and interested ring leaders of a mob. The case is again often misunderstood because the words &quot;patrician&quot; and &quot;plebeian,&quot; like so many other technical Roman and Greek words, have come in modern language to be used in a way quite unlike their original sense. The word &quot;plebeian,&quot; in its strict sense, is no more contemptuous than the word commoner in England. The plebs, like the English commons, contained families differing widely in rank and social position, among them those families which, as soon as an artificial barrier broke down, joined with the patricians to form the new nobility. The whole lesson is lost if the words &quot; patrician &quot; and &quot; plebeian &quot; 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 o losen to the purely patrician office of interrex, or flamen of Jupiter. Yet even in good writers on Roman history the words &quot; patrician &quot; and &quot; plebeian &quot; are often misapplied by being transferred to the later disputes at Rome, in which they are quitT ovst of place. We may now compare the history of nobility at Rome Compari- with its history in some other of the most famous city- son tie- commonwealths. Thus at Athens its history is in its ^ veen main outlines very much the same as its history at Rome an( j up to a certain point, while there is nothing at Athens Athenian which at all answers to the later course of things at Rome. nobilitie. 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 Clisthenes 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 along side 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 fore fathers, but the poor man may haply become richer. The Athenian euTrarpt Sai, 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 dis tinction 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 neces sarily 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 Caius Licinius ; we have no exact parallel to the state of things when Quintus Metellus shrank from the thought of the consulship of Caius 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 i would be the Athenians and the demos the