he burgess-cavalry
into a mounted guard of nobles redounded not more decidedly to the
injury of the commonwealth than to the advantage of the nobility,
which acquired in the eighteen equestrian centuries a suffrage not
merely separate but giving the tone to the rest.

Separation of the Orders in the Theatre

Of a kindred character was the formal separation of the places
assigned to the senatorial order from those occupied by the rest of
the multitude as spectators at the national festivals. It was the
great Scipio, who effected this change in his second consulship in
560. The national festival was as much an assembly of the people as
were the centuries convoked for voting; and the circumstance that the
former had no resolutions to pass made the official announcement of a
distinction between the ruling order and the body of subjects--which
the separation implied--all the more significant. The innovation
accordingly met with much censure even from the ruling class, because
it was simply invidious and not useful, and because it gave a very
manifest contradiction to the efforts of the more prudent portion of
the aristocracy to conceal their exclusive government under the forms
of civil equality.

The Censorship a Prop of the Nobility

These circumstances explain, why the censorship became the pivot of
the later republican constitution; why an office, originally standing
by no means in the first rank, came to be gradually invested with
external insignia which did not at all belong to it in itself and with
an altogether unique aristocratic-republican glory, and was viewed as
the crown and completion of a well-conducted public career; and why
the government looked upon every attempt of the opposition to
introduce their men into this office, or even to hold the censor
responsible to the people for his administration during or after his
term of office, as an attack on their palladium, and presented a
united front of resistance to every such attempt. It is sufficient
in this respect to mention the storm which the candidature of Cato for
the censorship provoked, and the measures, so extraordinarily reckless
and in violation of all form, by which the senate prevented the
judicial prosecution of the two unpopular censors of the year 550.
But with their magnifying the glory of the censorship the government
combined a characteristic distrust of this, their most important and
for that very reason most dangerous, instrument. I