Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/247

VIII for in defending great men who were attacked in the law-courts, the young orator could not fail to improve his own chance of rising to greatness.

To illustrate the paramount social influence of this new nobility, which thus secured for it as a class the almost exclusive possession of the executive in the State, we need only glance at the circumstances of the three most famous "new men" who reached the consulship between 200 and 60 B.C. The first of these was M. Porcius Cato (Cato the elder), consul 195, a farmer at Tusculum, who entered public life through the influence of a friend and neighbour belonging to the renowned family of the Valerii Flacci. The second was Gaius Marius, of an obscure family of Arpinum. This man, who reached the consulship in 105 comparatively late in life, was first noticed by the younger Scipio in the Numantian war as a young officer of ability, and obtained the tribunate of the plebs in 119 B.C. with the help of L. Cæcilius Metellus, with whose family the Marii had long been in some way connected as adherents. The third, M. Tullius Cicero, also a native of Arpinum, owed his rise chiefly to his own ability as a pleader, but also in no small measure to the notice taken of his father and himself by men of family and influence in the time of his boyhood. And indeed when Cicero became a