h the
patrician families, all of whom were now probably entitled to carry
images of their ancestors. Moreover, it was now settled that the
offices of state to which these hereditary privileges were attached
should include neither the lower nor the extraordinary magistracies
nor the tribunate of the plebs, but merely the consulship, the
praetorship which stood on the same level with it,(7) and the curule
aedileship, which bore a part in the administration of public justice
and consequently in the exercise of the sovereign powers of the
state.(8) Although this plebeian nobility, in the strict sense of the
term, could only be formed after the curule offices were opened to
plebeians, yet it exhibited in a short time, if not at the very first,
a certain compactness of organization--doubtless because such a
nobility had long been prefigured in the old senatorial plebeian
families. The result of the Licinian laws in reality therefore
amounted nearly to what we should now call the creation of a batch of
peers. Now that the plebeian families ennobled by their curule
ancestors were united into one body with the patrician families and
acquired a distinctive position and distinguished power in the
commonwealth, the Romans had again arrived at the point whence they
had started; there was once more not merely a governing aristocracy
and a hereditary nobility--both of which in fact had never
disappeared--but there was a governing hereditary nobility, and the
feud between the gentes in possession of the government and the
commons rising in revolt against the gentes could not but begin
afresh. And matters very soon reached that stage. The nobility was
not content with its honorary privileges which were matters of
comparative indifference, but strove after separate and sole political
power, and sought to convert the most important institutions of the
state--the senate and the equestrian order--from organs of the
commonwealth into organs of the plebeio-patrician aristocracy.

The Nobility in Possession of the Senate

The dependence -de jure- of the Roman senate of the republic, more
especially of the larger patricio-plebeian senate, on the magistracy
had rapidly become lax, and had in fact been converted into
independence. The subordination of the public magistracies to
the state-council, introduced by the revolution of 244;(9) the
transference of the right of summoning men to the senate from the
consul to the censor;(10) lastly