man law; he only has
the right of marrying legally, of becoming the father of a family,
that is to say, of being master of his wife and his children, of
making his will, of buying or selling. These were the private
rights.

Those who were not citizens were not only excluded from the army and
the assembly, but they could not marry, could not possess the absolute
power of the father, could not hold property legally, could not invoke
the Roman law, nor demand justice at a Roman tribunal. Thus the
citizens constituted an aristocracy amidst the other inhabitants of
the city. But they were not equal among themselves; there were class
differences, or, as the Romans said, ranks.

=The Nobles.=--In the first rank are the nobles. A citizen is noble
when one of his ancestors has held a magistracy, for the magisterial
office in Rome is an honor, it ennobles the occupant and also his
posterity.

When a citizen becomes aedile, praetor, or consul, he receives a
purple-bordered toga, a sort of throne (the curule chair), and the
right of having an image made of himself. These images are statuettes,
at first in wax, later in silver. They are placed in the atrium, the
sanctuary of the house, near the hearth and the gods of the family;
there they stand in niches like idols, venerated by posterity. When
any one of the family dies, the images are brought forth and carried
in the funeral procession, and a relative pronounces the oration for
the dead. It is these images that ennoble a family that preserves
them. The more images there are in a family, the nobler it is. The
Romans spoke of those who were "noble by one image" and those who were
"noble by many images."

The noble families of Rome were very few (they would not amount to
300), for the magistracies which conferred nobility were usually given
to men who were already noble.

=The Knights.=--Below the nobles were the knights. They were the rich
who were not noble. Their fortune as inscribed on the registers of the
treasury must amount to at least 400,000[120] sesterces. They were
merchants, bankers, and contractors; they did not govern, but they
grew rich. At the theatre they had places reserved for them behind the
nobles.

If a knight were elected to a magistracy, the nobles called him a "new
man" and his son became noble.

=The Plebs.=--Those who were neither nobles nor knights formed the
mass of the people, the plebs. The majority of them were peasants,
cultivating