is to say, of being master of his wife and his children, of making his will, of buying or selling.  These were the private rights.

Those who were not citizens were not only excluded from the army and the assembly, but they could not marry, could not possess the absolute power of the father, could not hold property legally, could not invoke the Roman law, nor demand justice at a Roman tribunal.  Thus the citizens constituted an aristocracy amidst the other inhabitants of the city.  But they were not equal among themselves; there were class differences, or, as the Romans said, ranks.

=The Nobles.=—­In the first rank are the nobles.  A citizen is noble when one of his ancestors has held a magistracy, for the magisterial office in Rome is an honor, it ennobles the occupant and also his posterity.

When a citizen becomes aedile, praetor, or consul, he receives a purple-bordered toga, a sort of throne (the curule chair), and the right of having an image made of himself.  These images are statuettes, at first in wax, later in silver.  They are placed in the atrium, the sanctuary of the house, near the hearth and the gods of the family; there they stand in niches like idols, venerated by posterity.  When any one of the family dies, the images are brought forth and carried in the funeral procession, and a relative pronounces the oration for the dead.  It is these images that ennoble a family that preserves them.  The more images there are in a family, the nobler it is.  The Romans spoke of those who were “noble by one image” and those who were “noble by many images.”

The noble families of Rome were very few (they would not amount to 300), for the magistracies which conferred nobility were usually given to men who were already noble.

=The Knights.=—­Below the nobles were the knights.  They were the rich who were not noble.  Their fortune as inscribed on the registers of the treasury must amount to at least 400,000[120] sesterces.  They were merchants, bankers, and contractors; they did not govern, but they grew rich.  At the theatre they had places reserved for them behind the nobles.

If a knight were elected to a magistracy, the nobles called him a “new man” and his son became noble.

=The Plebs.=—­Those who were neither nobles nor knights formed the mass of the people, the plebs.  The majority of them were peasants, cultivating a little plat in Latium or in the Sabine country.  They were the descendants of the Latins or the Italians who were subjugated by the Romans.  Cato the Elder in his book on Agriculture gives us an idea of their manners:  “Our ancestors, when they wished to eulogize a man, said ‘a good workman,’ ‘a good farmer’; this encomium seemed the greatest of all."[121]

Hardened to work, eager for the harvest, steady and economical, these laborers constituted the strength of the Roman armies.  For a long time they formed the assembly too, and dictated the elections.  The nobles who wished to be elected magistrates came to the parade-ground to grasp the hand of these peasants ("prensare manus,” was the common expression).  A candidate, finding the hand of a laborer callous, ventured to ask him, “Is it because you walk on your hands?” He was a noble of great family, but he was not elected.