d; 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, 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 nobi