Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/246

222 entrust those persons with power whose ancestors have already held it. We see here, in fact, a new hereditary nobility — not a nobility of patrician descent, though the spirit of patricianism is evidently not extinct, but a nobility resting its claims chiefly on service done to the State. The patrician Cornelii, Valerii, Claudii, and others, and the plebeian Licinii, Fulvii, or Junii, have done good service to the State in former generations, and it may be expected that they will continue to do it; for the traditions of wisdom and valour are in these families, as the images of their ancestors are in their halls. The old instinct of respect for noble descent has transferred itself to this new nobility; the Roman people, always true to its veneration for a certain type of civic excellence, in which marked individuality was not prominent, believed that this type could best be secured in its leaders by seeking it where it had already been found. And so it came about that a "new man," one whose family had never yet been prominent in public life, rarely found his way to high office. If he did so, it was only as the result of pre-eminent military services, or by the aid of some influential noble in persuading the people of the validity of his claim. At a later date the art of oratory came also to be reckoned as one of the aids of a novus homo;