trictly superintended that of effigies
of the dead. With this privilege were associated various external
insignia, reserved by law or custom for such magistrates and their
descendants:--the golden finger-ring of the men, the silver-mounted
trappings of the youths, the purple border on the toga and the golden
amulet-case of the boys (4)--trifling matters, but still important in
a community where civic equality even in external appearance was so
strictly adhered to,(5) and where, even during the second Punic war,
a burgess was arrested and kept for years in prison because he had
appeared in public, in a manner not sanctioned by law, with a garland
of roses upon his head.(6)

Patricio-Plebian Nobility

These distinctions may perhaps have already existed partially in the
time of the patrician government, and, so long as families of higher
and humbler rank were distinguished within the patriciate, may have
served as external insignia for the former; but they certainly only
acquired political importance in consequence of the change of
constitution in 387, by which the plebeian families that attained
the consulate were placed on a footing of equal privilege with 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 starte