, and above all, the legal recognition
of the right of those who had been curule magistrates to a seat and
vote in the senate,(11) had converted the senate from a council
summoned by the magistrates and in many respects dependent on them
into a governing corporation virtually independent, and in a certain
sense filling up its own ranks; for the two modes by which its members
obtained admission--election to a curule office and summoning by the
censor--were both virtually in the power of the governing board
itself. The burgesses, no doubt, at this epoch were still too
independent to allow the entire exclusion of non-nobles from the
senate, and the nobility were perhaps still too judicious even to wish
for this; but, owing to the strictly aristocratic gradations in the
senate itself--in which those who had been curule magistrates were
sharply distinguished, according to their respective classes of
-consulares-, -praetorii-, and -aedilicii-, from the senators who
had not entered the senate through a curule office and were therefore
excluded from debate--the non-nobles, although they probably sat in
considerable numbers in the senate, were reduced to an insignificant
and comparatively uninfluential position in it, and the senate became
substantially a mainstay of the nobility.

The Nobility in Possession of the Equestrian Centuries

The institution of the equites was developed into a second, less
important but yet far from unimportant, organ of the nobility. As the
new hereditary nobility had not the power to usurp sole possession of
the comitia, it necessarily became in the highest degree desirable
that it should obtain at least a separate position within the body
representing the community. In the assembly of the tribes there
was no method of managing this; but the equestrian centuries under
the Servian organization seemed as it were created for the very
purpose. The 1800 horses which the community furnished(12) were
constitutionally disposed of likewise by the censors. It was, no
doubt, the duty of these to select the equites on military grounds and
at their musters to insist that all horsemen incapacitated by age or
otherwise, or at all unserviceable, should surrender their public
horse; but the very nature of the institution implied that the
equestrian horses should be given especially to men of means, and it
was not at all easy to hinder the censors from looking to genteel
birth more than to capacity, and from a