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86 nobles were too proud, when not too profligate, to be willing or wholesome counsellors of Cæsar: and even had they been better or more capable men than they were, he might have feared to draw them too near his person, inasmuch as the great families of Rome were never, at least under the Julian and Claudian emperors, Cæsar's well-wishers. Not until a bourgeois class of senators came in with the Flavian dynasty, was it easy to find, fit for high office, men of decent parentage or ordinary ability. The names of the freedmen show that if not Greeks by birth, they generally sprang from a Grecian stem. Unfortunately for both Cæsar and Rome, it was easy enough to meet with clever Greeks, but not with honest ones.

So long as he kept on good terms with the soldiers, an emperor had little to dread from the ambition of his freedmen, at least as regarded his own position. For neither a servile senate nor a well-fee'd prætorian cohort would have ventured to proclaim the emancipated son of a slave, Cæsar. Claudius gave scarcely more offence to the nobles by conferring on Gauls the full privileges of Roman citizens, than he did by permitting his freedman Polybius to walk in a procession between the two consuls. The odium incurred by royal favorites in modern times—the David Rizzios, the Buckinghams, and others—will enable us to form some idea of the feelings of Rome towards Pallas and Narcissus. The arrogance of these "new men" was on a par with their wealth. An anecdote by Tacitus shows their pride and opulence. A scion of the noble house of the Scipios did not blush to move for a vote of thanks in the senate to the freedman Pallas. Public thanks,' said this precious re-