CHAPTER IV
THE GOVERNING ARISTOCRACY
Above the men of business of equestrian rank, in social standing
though not necessarily in wealth, there was in Cicero's time an
aristocracy which a Roman of that day would perhaps have found it a
little difficult to explain or define to a foreigner. Fortunately all
foreigners coming to Rome would know what was meant by the senate,
the great council which received envoys from all nations outside the
Empire; and the stranger might be told in the first place that all
members of that august assembly, with their families, were considered
as elevated above the equestrian order, and as forming the main body
of the aristocracy proper. But if the informant were by chance a
conservative Roman of old family, he might proceed to qualify this
definition. "There are now in the senate," he might say, "plenty of
men who are only there because they have held the quaestorship, which
Sulla made the qualification for a seat, and there are many equites
whom Sulla made into senators by the form of a vote of the people;
such men, even the great orator Cicero himself, I do not reckon as
really members of the nobility, because they do not belong to old
families who have done the State good service in past time.
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