VI. THE ROMAN CONSTITUTION

IN the time of Cicero the Roman " State" had technically a republican constitution, that is, every citizen had a share in the government. But not every citizen had an equal share, partly from fixed constitutional prin. ciples, and partly from differentiations in social prominence which affected constitutional rights.

I. CITIZENSHIP AND ORDERS IN THE STATE

Accordingly there were among Roman citizens three social (and in a manner political) ranks (ordines): the Senatorial Order (ordo senatorius), the Equestrian Order (ordo equestris), and the People (populus, in the narrower sense). The first two of these made up the Roman aristocracy.

I. SENATORIAL ORDER. - The Ordo Senatorius was strictly speaking only another name for the Senate, the members of which, by virtue of their life tenure of office, their privileges and insignia, and their esprit de corps, formed a kind of Peerage. The list of Senators, regularly numbering 300, was in early times made up by the Censors at their discretion from among those who had held high magistracies. But after the reforms of Sulla (B.C. 80) every person who had held the quæstorship - the lowest grade of the regular magistracy (see below, p. 57) · was lawfully entitled to a seat in the Senate. This aristocracy was therefore an official or bureaucratic class. Their number fluctuated, running up to five or six hundred.

Nobility, however, did not really depend on holding offices oneself, but on being descended from an ancestor who had held a curule office.1 When any person not so descended was chosen a magistrate, he was called a novus homo,2 and, though he of course became a member of the Senatorial Order, he was not regarded as a noble. His posterity, however, would belong to the nobility. But such instances were very uncommon; for the Senate and the magistrates had such control over the elections that it was very difficult for any person not already a member of the nobility to be chosen to any office entitling him to enter the Senate. Hence the Senatorial Order and the Nobility were practically identical, and "new men

1 Whoever held any curule office — that is, dictator, consul, interrex, prætor, magister equitum, or curule ædile-secured to his posterity the ius imaginum; that is, the right to place in the hall and carry at funeral processions a wax mask of this ancestor, as well as of any other deceased members of the family of curule rank. The privilege was highly prized.

2 Examples are Cato the Censor, Marius, and Cicero.