• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Class Distinctions under the Empire

Although the government of Rome is called republican, and although the old distinction between patricians and plebeians had long since ceased to be of political importance, still there were differences of position between even the cives óptimo iure that are entirely foreign to modern ideas of republican equality. The government was really aristocratic; and the preservation of its democratic features was due solely to the fact that there were two aristocracies, one of office-holders and the other of capitalists, which struggled most bitterly with each other during the last years of the Republic.

The Roman nobility under the Empire was a hereditary rank, based not upon birth but upon the holding of office. Any man who held any curule office, i.e., any dictator, consul, censor, praetor or curule aedile, secured to his descendants to the last generation the right (ins imaginum) to display in their halls and carry at funerals a wax mask representing his features. The possession of such a mask, or in other words descent from a curule magistrate, was the patent of nobility, and all descendants of curule magistrates were, therefore, nobles (nobiles). The dignity of a noble depended upon the number of such masks that he could display.

Sulla had increased the number of senators [Ordo Senatorius] from 300 to 600 life-members, and had chosen the new members from ex-curule magistrates. He also provided that all holders of curule offices, or even of the quaestorship, should be ipso facto members of the senate. Such proved to be the influence of the senate over the elections that it was able virtually to restrict the holding of office to persons of its own choice. The candidates supported by the senators were naturally members of their own families (therefore nobles), and so it came about that the Senatorial Order and the Nobility were one and the same thing.

Of course there might be exceptions. In the first place a man not a noble might be elected to office in spite of the senate. Such men (e.g., Cato the censor, Marius and Cicero) were contemptuously called Homines Nom, "Men without Ancestry" and although their descendants would be nobiles, they were not so themselves. In the second place there were always nobles who had not been elected to office, and were not therefore of the senatorial order. But men of these two classes were comparatively so few in number that for practical purposes the Nobilitas and the Ordo Senatorius may be considered as identical. The senators wore as insignia the tunica laticlavia (with a broad purple stripe), and those who had also held curule magistracies wore the mulleus, a purple shoe.

The Knights had grown up since the second Punic war as a class of capitalists, bound loosely together by community of interests. These were men who preferred trade and speculation to politics, and had amassed large fortunes by their business ventures. Until the time of Gracchus their position had been ill defined though their influence had been considerable. He won their support by securing the passage of a law by the people giving the right of serving on juries, which had formerly belonged to the senatorial order exclusively, to those persons not senators who were worth not less than 400,000 sesterces ($20,000). This gave the state a new order; and the nobles, prevented by law from engaging in trade, found themselves confronted by an aristocracy of wealth, which they in turn excluded from political preferment. To this second order the 20 name Ordo Equester was given, not that it had anything to do with military service, but because its census (400,000 sesterces) was the same that had in early times entitled a citizen to serve in the cavalry. The insignia of the knights were a gold ring and the tunica angusticlavia (with two narrow purple stripes).

Below the Nobles and the Knights came the great mass of the citizens, the Commons. They did not really form an order, had no insignia, and no distinctive name. They were called slightingly the Plebs, and flatteringly the Populus; but there were powerful plebeian families among the knights and nobles, and both these classes were also covered by the name Populus. The condition of the commons in Cicero's time was pitiable. The combinations of capital shut them out of commerce and manufacture, while the competition of slave labor almost closed agriculture and the trades against them. Some found employment in the colonies and provinces, some eked out a scanty living on their farms, some made war their trade; but the idle and degraded flocked into the capital to live on the cheap grain provided by the treasury, and to sell their votes to the highest bidder.

It must be remembered, however, that no citizen was absolutely excluded from either of the ordines. The meanest citizen could become a Knight by amassing the required sum of 400,000 sesterces, and the poorest could make himself a senator and his descendants noble by beating the senatorial candidate for a quaestorship, and then gaining a curule office.

Nothing certain is known of the number of citizens at this time. The census of 241 showed 260,000 citizens of military age. That of 70, when the franchise had been extended over all Italy, showed 450,000, but probably only those were counted who presented themselves at Rome for the purpose. These figures would give a total free population of about 780,000 and 1,350,000 respectively for the area covered by each census. The census of 28 gave 4,063,000 for all Italy; but it is a matter of dispute whether this was the sum of the whole population, or of those only of military age.