When the ruling order did not
disdain to settle the funeral arrangements for different ranks and to
decree to the man who had been censor a purple winding-sheet, it could
not complain of the freedmen for desiring that their sons at any rate
might be decorated with the much-envied purple border. The robe, the
ring, and the amulet-case distinguished not only the burgess and the
burgess's wife from the foreigner and the slave, but also the person
who was free-born from one who had been a slave, the son of free-born,
from the son of manumitted, parents, the son of the knight and the
senator from the common burgess, the descendant of a curule house from
the common senator(49)--and this in a community where all that was
good and great was the work of civil equality!

The dissension in the community was reflected in the ranks of the
opposition. Resting on the support of the farmers, the patriots
raised a loud cry for reform; resting on the support of the mob in
the capital, demagogism began its work. Although the two tendencies
do not admit of being wholly separated but in various respects go hand
in hand, it will be necessary to consider them apart.

The Party of Reform
Cato

The party of reform emerges, as it were, personified in Marcus Porcius
Cato (520-605). Cato, the last statesman of note belonging to that
earlier system which restricted its ideas to Italy and was averse to
universal empire, was for that reason accounted in after times the
model of a genuine Roman of the antique stamp; he may with greater
justice be regarded as the representative of the opposition of the
Roman middle class to the new Hellenico-cosmopolite nobility. Brought
up at the plough, he was induced to enter on a political career by the
owner of a neighbouring estate, one of the few nobles who kept aloof
from the tendencies of the age, Lucius Valerius Flaccus. That upright
patrician deemed the rough Sabine farmer the proper man to stem the
current of the times; and he was not deceived in his estimate.
Beneath the aegis of Flaccus, and after the good old fashion serving
his fellow-citizens and the commonwealth in counsel and action, Cato
fought his way up to the consulate and a triumph, and even to the
censorship. Having in his seventeenth year entered the burgess-army,
he had passed through the whole Hannibalic war from the battle on the
Trasimene lake to that of Zama; had served under Marcellus and Fabius,
under Nero and Scipio; and a