116. Manumission of Slaves Very Common.—A Roman slave’s legal position may be miserable, but usually he is not under that fearful stigma of race and color weighing upon the slaves of another era. His complexion and his brain power do not differ essentially from his master’s.[65] If he is a Greek or Levantine, often his mental acuteness may be greater than that of his lord. An intelligent slave under not too harsh a master will devote himself to the latter in every possible way, expecting pretty certainly the great reward for faithfulness and zealous service—freedom. Of course, many dull hardened wretches, especially upon the farms, will die as the toiling chattels they have lived; but freedom comes often enough to make manumission something for which to hope eagerly.

Often the death of a master is the signal for a grand enfranchisement of all the older members of his familia. It costs nothing thus to reward faithful service at the expense of your heirs; and it is a fine thing to have a long file of newly created freedmen, all wearing the tall red caps of “liberty,” march in your funeral procession. Everybody will praise your “generosity,” and the freedmen can be expected to cherish their lord’s memory. Incidentally, also, there are few better ways of punishing a generally incompetent slave than having him ostentatiously refused freedom when all his comrades go about rejoicing.

117. The Ceremony of Manumission.—Nevertheless, many slaves need not wait for their masters to die. They are perhaps suffered to work at a trade, and accumulate their “peculium,” and then very likely to purchase their own and their wives’ and children’s liberty. With rich masters of the better sort, it is also a gracious act at certain intervals to select a few extra-deserving slaves and say to them the blessed words, “Come with me to the prætor!”

When they are all before the magistrate a solemn legal formality is gone through. One of the official lictors steps forward, gives a light tap with his rod upon the head of each slave and says loudly, “I declare this man is free!” The master laying hold of the slave and turning him around, replies, “And I desire that this man should be free!” adding a slight blow on the cheek; whereat the magistrate declares officially, “And I adjudge that this man is free.” This completes the “manumission”; then home the happy “freedman” (libertinus) goes to be greeted with the congratulations of his former fellow-slaves, showers of sweet cakes, dates, and figs and all kinds of humble rejoicings.

118. The Status of Freedmen. Their Great Success in Business.—Henceforth, the ex-slave is the freedman of his former master. He takes the first part of his master’s name; thus that Cleander, manumitted a few years ago by Publius Junius Calvus, now swells about proudly as Publius Junius Cleander. His children will henceforth be Junii, no less lawfully than Calvus’s children; with a result that the gentile names of some of the proudest houses in Rome are now also borne by families perforce acknowledging swart Africans or tow-headed Batavians as very near ancestors.

Once escaped from actual slavery a great career in life can open before an energetic freedman. If his ex-master is a Roman citizen, he also is now a Roman citizen without any naturalization process. True he is under a social stigma. Not merely he, but his children also, are excluded from the Senate and all the higher offices of the state; but an ex-slave is not likely to suffer from thinness of skin. Compelled in his youth to use his wits and put forth all his energies, he now often possesses abilities, often not very refined or delicate, which carry him far in trade, general business, and finance.

Usually before a master manumits a slave it is arranged that he shall remain in the mansion as some kind of an invaluable “man of business” for handling a large estate. Many a senator is like Cicero, in all private affairs completely at the mercy of a confidential alter ego, a freedman like Cicero’s able and beloved Tiro. Practically every dignitary in Rome will refer his business matters to “my freedman,” a shrewd consequential fellow, probably of Græco-Levantine origin, who has the right to use his patron’s seal ring, and who knows all the family secrets. Supple, obsequious, and indispensable, he is certain of a great legacy when his patron dies; and if the patron is childless, he often becomes his heir. There are, indeed, plenty of cases where a slave-boy who entered a house as a valet, first earned freedom, then became a general confidant, and ended not merely with inheriting the house itself but with marrying the late owner’s widow.

119. Humble Types of Freedmen.—Of course, the bulk of freedmen have no claim to such expectations. They are petty shop keepers or skilled craftsmen. They make up the great bureaus of upper clerks in the huge government offices on the Palatine. Everywhere they compete, as a rule very successfully, with the free born, and, of course, they add to the cosmopolitan multitudes in Rome.

An ex-slave cannot avoid becoming substantially the client of his former master. He is supposed to show his patron and his patron’s family constant respect and usually a certain amount of service without compensation. Thus a while ago Calvus manumitted a very faithful slave-physician. It was stipulated that he should continue to physic the familia without charge. For a freedman to show himself neglectful of these obligations, above all to do anything to injure his ex-master, is the depth of depravity. The legal penalties for such “ingratitude” are very severe, and in extreme cases the actual act of manumission itself can be cancelled.

120. Wealth and Power of Successful Freedmen.—Nevertheless, top-lofty freedmen abound. Their ready wits bring them riches—the power before which all the Empire bends. Once more Juvenal describes an obnoxious type: “Though I’m born on the Euphrates, a fact which the little windows [holes for earrings] in my ears would prove if I denied it—yet am I the owner of five shops which bring me in 400,000 sesterces [$16,000] per year. What better thing does a senator’s robe bestow? Therefore, let everybody give way to one who but yesterday with the chalked feet of a slave entered our city.” Freedmen, of course, get ahead marvellously because nothing is too sordid if only it promises gain. “He [a certain freedman],” says Petronius, “started with an as [large copper coin], and was always ready to pick a quadrans [farthing] out of the filthy mire with his teeth. So his wealth grew and grew like a honey comb!”

Very probably, the ideal set before this species of persons is that of becoming all-powerful imperial freedmen, such as that pair, Pallas and Narcissus, who literally ruled the Roman Empire through their patron, Claudius. Trajan and Hadrian have, indeed, greatly reduced the power of freedmen around the Palace, turning the great secretarial offices over to equites, but there are still ex-slaves in the service of “Cæsar,” who have only a little less influence than that mighty Claudius Etruscus who died of old age under Domitian after having served six Emperors. He began life in Rome as a slave boy from Smyrna. Tiberius manumitted him. He rose to become practically the head of the Treasury. His wealth was great, but his integrity matched his vast power, and few senators had such commanding influence in the government as he possessed.

121. Importance of Freedmen in a Roman Family.—In such a house as that of Calvus there are neither imperial ministers nor miserly speculators. The freedmen are honored and trusted members not of the slave familia but of the actual “family.” When they are sick Calvus and Gratia are greatly concerned, as was Pliny the Younger over the illness of his beloved reader, Zosimus. If there is any domestic crisis, their counsel is sought and they take a zealous interest in the education of their lord’s children.

On the other hand, on the nearby Flora Street spreads the huge garish palace of the ex-slave Athenonius, who won his freedom by catering to a foolish master’s worst passions, and then gathered enormous wealth by speculating in Egyptian corn. “Freedmen’s riches” have become a proverb. Not all freedmen are by any means wealthy, but enough of them have risen to the seats of the mighty to make every toiling slave dream dreams and see visions of something better than a dishonored, servile grave.

122. The Status of Provincials. The Case of Jesus.—All freedmen are Roman citizens, albeit citizens under a formal handicap, but in a city like Rome there are always many free persons who are not citizens at all—visiting provincials. Every year the Emperors issue some edict granting the franchise to a new group of non-citizens, but the numbers of the latter in all the provinces of the Empire is still great.[66] At Rome their position is ordinarily comfortable enough, although if arrested, they are liable to a more summary trial than Roman citizens and in case of famine or public disturbance they are liable to sudden expulsion from the city (as Claudius expelled the Jews) without any redress. The real disadvantage which they endure is that they cannot be appointed to any kind of public office under the Roman government. They are also sometimes under a legal handicap in making and enforcing commercial contracts; and last but not least in their own provinces they cannot “appeal to Cæsar” (if in an “Imperial” province) or to the Senate (if in a “Senatorial” province) against the decision, however arbitrary, of the Roman governor.

If you search the public records at the great Tabularium (Public Record Office) by the Forum, you can find for example the report of the trial of a certain Jew, one Christus, who was accused of sedition in Judæa, about a hundred years before our visit to Rome. The procurator Pilatus yielding to popular clamor had him executed ignominiously by crucifixion. This was, of course, within Pilatus’s legal authority. Christus was only a provincial and he could take no appeal.

The status of the provincials depends much on whether their communities enjoy any treaty with or charter from Rome. Athens and a few other favored places are nominally “equal allies” with full rights of self-government, and their citizens can claim a favored position among the mass of provincials. Other places possess charters giving great privileges but revocable in case of gross abuse.

The bulk of the provincials are mere “stipendiaries,” often permitted local self-government, but subject to Roman taxation, and to the complete jurisdiction of the Roman governor. Under the Empire these governors are only by exception corrupt and arbitrary, but their decisions must usually be final.

123. Great Alien Colonies in Rome.—Apart from the great alien slave population there are inevitably large groups of resident aliens in various parts of the capital. There is a Little Syria, Little Egypt, Little Spain, and a Little Greece as surely as in certain great cities of a later civilization, but the most famous and conspicuous is the great Jewish colony.

This exists mainly in the Trans-Tiber district under the shadow of the Janiculum, although Jews are allowed to settle and to do business in any section of the city. The total number of free Jews in Rome has been set at 35,000 in Augustus’s day, and it received a great reinforcement through the captives of Titus, many of whom regained their liberty. The Jews are obliged to pay to the Capitoline Jupiter that tribute which they formerly paid to their Temple in Jerusalem, but otherwise they are not harassed by the government. For the most part, however, they are very poor; few of them are great bankers or merchants, but nearly all the rest are petty shopkeepers and peddlers—also a great many are alleged to increase their living by fortune-telling and by like dubious arts.

124. The Roman Plebeians, the “Mob” (Vulgus).—Greatly surpassing the resident aliens in number are inevitably the ordinary Roman plebeians. It is a fine thing in the provinces to boast, “Civis Romanus sum,” but in the capital many a freedman, many an upper-slave of a magnate even, looks down with scorn on a large fraction of this “common herd” (grex) that still claims to form “the Roman People.” However, if you are really a Roman citizen entitled to wear a toga, and to share in the grain doles and other public distributions, you can really live on very little. Somehow you must find means for the rental of a sleeping garret in an insula, but the daytime you can spend hanging around the fora, porticoes, or the entrances to the circuses and gladiator schools, playing morra and checkergames (see p. 205); idling in the great public baths; frequenting every possible public exhibition in the theater or amphitheater and often getting a bare income by toadying most abjectly to the rich.

Everybody despises this Roman “mob,” and yet cringes to it. Its yells across the circus send the blood from the cheeks of very tyrannous emperors. The mild Italian climate renders an existence amid dirt and sunshine, eked out by very little labor, decidedly tolerable.[67] Assuredly very many of these “citizens” are simply honest thrifty industrialists, trades people, or professional men, holding their own stubbornly against the competing slaves, freedmen, and aliens. Nevertheless, the proportion of undesirables is dangerously great. Many of the idle plebeians are the sons of freedmen, who have inherited their parents’ non-Italian vices but who have not been under their necessity of hard work and faithfulness; and when one examines the moral and social qualities of the alleged heirs of the virtuous old-time plebeians the idea of “restoring the Republic,” still sighed after by a few aristocratic philosophers, appears absolutely laughable.[68]

125. The Desirability of Roman Citizenship. The Case of St. Paul.—It is as contrasted with the status of provincials that Roman citizenship still preserves its remarkable value. A citizen can, indeed, no longer go to the Republican assemblies to elect magistrates and vote on proposed statutes, but he has his personal and property rights protected by the best kind of “Quiritian” law. The government is never, indeed, iniquitous enough to enact that, as between Roman and provincial, the judge must always decide for the former, nevertheless the advantages of the citizen are great.

A Roman can command all sorts of protection not open to provincials. The judge will almost inevitably be a little prejudiced in his favor. If arrested, a citizen can ordinarily demand the right to give bail. It is a gross outrage to “examine him by scourging.” He cannot be put to torture. If he is finally sentenced to die, he cannot be crucified, but ordinarily must be beheaded—a very merciful end. Particularly, unless the case is extremely clear, in matters touching his life and status as a citizen he can appeal from the decision of a provincial governor to “Cæsar” or to the Senate (if in a province governed by that body).

If we visit the Record Office again, this matter is clearly illustrated. About twenty-five years after the crucifixion of Christus, one of his followers, a certain Paulus, was also arrested in Jerusalem on much the same charges of attempted sedition and inciting disturbance. But Paulus, when arrested, promptly pleaded his Roman citizenship. Vainly the local mob clamored for his life even as they had demanded that of Christus. When the local procurator Festus hesitated to set him at liberty, the prisoner demanded to be sent to Rome—and thither at great trouble and expense he had to be shipped; to be tried ultimately before the Prætorian Præfect sitting as Nero’s deputy; and the charges were dismissed and he was set at liberty.[69] If he had not been a Roman, assuredly the weak-kneed governor of Palestine would have sacrificed him “to please the Jews” just as Pilatus sacrificed Christus.

126. Clientage: Its Oldest Form.—Between the poorest classes of plebeians, sleeping within porticoes and despised by the superior slaves, and those dignified well-to-do gentlemen who have almost the means to pass as equites, there are, of course, an infinite number of social strata. The most important section of the better plebeians is undoubtedly to be numbered among the clients.

Clientage is a very old Roman institution. The kings and nobles of Rome in the very twilight of history had their clients. Those were the days when poor plebeians had little or no legal protection unless they enlisted the patronage of a magnate. They entered his gens (inner-clan), followed him in war, voted (when they obtained the vote) in his interest, assisted him in certain money matters, in short, became members of his household although very much better off than the slaves. In return the patron was bound to defend their legal rights in the courts and to protect them from all forms of outrage. Men were proud to confess themselves as clients of a Fabius or an Æmilius. But by the end of the Republic the institution had practically disappeared in its original form. There was little legal discrimination then against poor citizens, and about all the real clients who now remained were freedmen, who, as just seen, were bound to be loyal and helpful to their patroni.

127. The New Parasitical Clientage: the Morning Salutation.—Now, however, a new and wholly parasitical clientage has come into being. Early every morning the clients can be seen hurrying down Mercury Street in their hastily donned togas. Sometimes a patron lives a great distance across the city; sometimes a fawning myrmidon hopes to visit two patrons in the same morning and get a double reward. Calvus does not rejoice in a great horde of clients, but being a senator his dignity requires that he should maintain perhaps a score of them.

These clients are an assorted lot. Some are merely cheap hangers-on, some are adventurers visiting Rome and expecting to prosper by earning the favor of the great, there is also a mediocre poet who hopes for a tidy gift some day because of laudatory verses about his “Rex” and the latter’s family, there are several distant relatives of the Calvi, poor relations to whom the doles are a form of pension; and finally there are two or three men of good family and tolerable incomes who actually dance attendance on Calvus just to get a little extra pocket money.

The clients gather in the vestibule at dawn, rubbing their eyes, rearranging their hastily donned togas, and each trying to induce the not very civil porter to permit him to enter first. At last the word is passed to the door that, “The patron is ready.” The valves open; the clients swarm inside together. Publius Calvus dressed for the morning is standing in the rear of his atrium, just behind the pool of the impluvium. At his elbow is his nomenclator, the slave who “knows everybody,” to whisper a name in case he should not connect it promptly with a face.

“Ave, patrone, ave!” cries each client coming up in turn. “Ave, Marce!” or “Sexte!” or “Lucie!” answers Calvus with a more or less formal smile.

If his mood is very gracious, each client is allowed to seize his hand, and two or three in extra favor are suffered to kiss his cheek. The nomenclator meantime prompts him in undertone, “Ask about his wife,” “Congratulate him on his niece’s marriage,” etc. And if that evening there are not more important guests in view, the senator will delight the souls of several by saying affably, “Come to-night to dinner.” The clients in any case congratulate themselves that their patron is not like some of those very haughty parvenus, who simply hold out their hands to be kissed and never speak a word, and who like to be called “dominus,” as if their clients were merely slaves.

128. The Dole to Clients (the Sportula).—After the clients will appear more pretentious visitors—equites and fellow senators—who call to see Calvus on business. Their own clients are probably waiting listlessly in the street, while Calvus’s dependents have to stand respectfully near their lord until an upper slave beckons them toward the office—the tablinum. He has a list in his hand and checks off all present as might a master the pupils in his school, and then comes the reward which brought all these toga-wearing gentry thither, a distribution of money.

In former years every client had received an actual portion of victuals, known as sportula from the “little basket” which everybody brought to bear the viands hence. But this custom of distributing actual food was inconvenient, and far more pleasing is an actual gift of money. Only regularly listed clients can receive this; and no client, sick or lazy, can send a deputy.[70] He must appear in person or stand his loss. At length, to every lawful retainer present is carefully counted out a hundred quadrantes, small coppers (rather under 25 cents), and besides the clients entertain a few hopes of a fairly liberal present at New Year’s Day, and at some other festivals, and as seen, in a kind of rotation they are invited at broad intervals to dinner.

129. Attendance by Clients in Public. Insults They Must Undergo.—After the sportula has been paid, the clients look anxiously toward Calvus. Will he tell them, as he does about half of the time, “Nothing more to-day,” and let them scatter down the streets? Not so; “My litter” he orders. The clients are obliged to march before and behind, along with the slaves, helping to elbow aside the crowd, while the senator visits other senatorial houses, next his banker at the Forum, and then the law courts for a consultation, and so goes his round. If he detains the clients through the noon hour, he is obligated to give them some kind of luncheon; but he can command the attendance of them all even up to the tenth hour, when he may turn them loose to refresh themselves in the public Baths of Titus, after they have left him perhaps at the more select Baths of Agrippa.

As for the clients invited to Calvus’s dinner, if the fare is plainer than on the night of a high banquet, there is at least no insulting discrimination. A decent patron and patrona are bound to show themselves “friends” of their clients and to keep up a pretence of democratic manners. But as stated earlier (see p. 120), many a vulgar plutocrat, feeling that he has paid good money to get a proper retinue to follow him to the Forum, delights to insult his clients’ feelings when he invites them. The host enjoys his fine white loaf, while the client’s is almost too hard to break; the host a splendid lobster garnished with asparagus, the client “a crab on a tiny plate hemmed in by half an egg”; the lord “noble mushrooms,” the client “toadstools of doubtful quality,”—and all other treatment is to match. Yet such is the servility and pettiness of many that they will endure all this and worse merely in order to boast the next day of “last night when I dined with my friend the senator——!” “You think yourself a citizen and the guest of a grandee,” cries the indignant poet. “He thinks, and he’s nearly right, that you’ve been captured by the fine smell from his kitchen.”

Clientage then is a typical institution of imperial Rome—a means for letting rich men flatter their desire for a huge company of obsequious attendants by trading on the wretched ambition of so many to appear to be on familiar terms with the great. It multiplies the horde of shabby-genteel persons around the city, and the vast number of those who flee from their greatest aversion—honest work.

130. The Decurions: the Notables of the Chartered Cities.—Above the run of clients or even of the better plebeians is the actual nobility. Strictly speaking only the senators and equites are reckoned in this group, but always in Rome are sojourning a certain number of other men who hold themselves decidedly better than any plebeians—the decurions from the enfranchised towns covering all Italy and dotted over the entire Empire.[71]

The decurions are the notables of the smaller chartered cities. In their own communities they are local senators and enjoy in a small way the position of an actual Senator in Rome.[72] Nobody can be elected decurion without a reasonable property qualification, in many cities 100,000 sesterces ($4000), and from their body of wealthy dignitaries the local public assemblies still elect (even under the Empire) city magistrates, duumvirs, ædiles, etc., who take the place in each community of the old consuls and censors of Republican Rome.

Since the loyalty of the population and the popularity of the imperial régime often depends on this very influential class of decurions, the government makes much of them; allows them high-sounding titles and tinsel honors, and any who visit Rome are given social precedence directly behind the actual equites. Furthermore, many high Roman nobles themselves are proud to be enrolled as patrons and honorary decurions of the Italian towns, looking after the interest of their client communities in the capital, and, if they visit the smaller cities, being received as particular guests of honor. The number of decurions, however, in Rome itself is always small, although their importance everywhere else in the Empire is vast, and they virtually form a third order of nobility.

131. The Equites: the Nobles of the Second Class.—Everywhere around the metropolis you meet the second-class nobles—the Equites.[73] This “Splendid Order” dates, of course, from the oldest days when to keep a cavalry horse implied having considerable property. The equites sank to unimportance in the prosperous era of the Republic, but were revived to great power by Gaius Gracchus; they were later reorganized and made an effective part of the new imperial régime by Augustus.

The dividing line between Senators and Equites is not always sharp. Young men of senatorial family who renounce a political career have to “make narrow their purple stripe,” as did Ovid, and without disgrace appear henceforth as second-class nobles. Supposedly no persons but the sons of free-born men are eligible for enrollment as equites, but the members of the old-line families fume vainly at the way the Emperors (who have complete dispensing power) will grant “the right of the gold ring,” not merely to the sons of freedmen, but sometimes even to downright ex-slaves. There are in truth very few equites in Rome who do not reckon a slave among their not remote grandparents.

The equites are all carefully enrolled in a public bureau under imperial control, and one of the surest holds which the Emperor possesses upon the government lies in the fact that he can refuse enrollment arbitrarily to any young man and thereby practically exclude him from any kind of high public office except in the municipal towns, or from any military rank above that of centurion. The senators, all the more important officials, and all the commissioned officers of the army are equites, although their greater honors cause them to ignore the lesser, while if the Emperor has an eligible son or heir, he is often proclaimed the princeps juventutis (“Chief of the Roman Youth”) and is nominally the first member of the Equestrian Order.

132. Qualifications and Honors of the Equites.—To be enrolled as an eques one must possess besides unstained birth (with exceptions above noted), a good public reputation, and taxable property worth at least 400,000 sesterces ($16,000); sufficient therefore to pass for a tolerably rich man. The honor comes for life, subject to demotion, however, for disgraceful conduct, or lapse into poverty. A son normally inherits his father’s status, if his own share of the patrimony comes to over 400,000 sesterces; and of course, to make up that magic figure many plebeians pinch and slave.

The honors of an eques are great in any age laying such stress on outward praise and glory. Besides the right to the plain gold ring, the narrow purple stripe running down the front of the tunic proudly proclaims the fact, “I am of the nobility.” The equites also enjoy fourteen rows of seats in the public games and theater directly behind the four front ones reserved for the senators. They provide a large fraction of all the jurors in the great civil tribunals which handle most of the litigation.[74] Very many of the great imperial ministries and superintendencies are reserved for them, for the Emperor does not like to trust the senators too implicitly, and some of the smaller provinces have equestrian “Procurators” as their governors, as also does the enormously wealthy province of Egypt.

The majority of the equites, however, are in private life. Senators ought not (except through convenient middlemen) to engage in commerce and trade. Not so the equites—the powerful bankers with whom the imperial treasurer may confer; the owners of the peaceful armadas that enter Puteoli or Ostia; the proprietors of the finer retail establishments along the Sæpta Julia as well as of the huge wholesale houses; the directors of the vast brickyards, and other highly developed industries; the owners of so many of the squalid but profitable insulæ—nearly all will show their “Angusticlave”—their narrow purple stripe. Equites appear at banquets with senators without the least awkwardness; and they like to be addressed by fine booming titles: insignes, primores, illustres, or, if holding high office, eminentissimi, but in most cases as splendidi; and “splendid” they appear to the envious slaves and plebeians.

133. Review of the Equites. Pretenders to the Rank.—The equites are still in theory a military body. Every 15th of July, unless the review is deliberately omitted, all members who are physically able are supposed to procure horses and take part in a grand parade before the Emperor. Sometimes there are at least 5000 equites in the procession. The Emperor still has the right of the ancient censors to brand a man as a bad citizen by the public command, “Sell your horse!” as he rides by the reviewing stand;[75] but the parade has now become merely an unpleasant formality for portly men unaccustomed to horseback, and old gentlemen are usually excused.

In so large a body of “gentry,” however, imposture becomes fairly common. Nearly every Emperor issues an edict for the purging of the order, and every now and then some adventurous nobody is divested of his “narrow stripe.” Calvus came home lately from the Flaminian Circus laughing heartily. Just behind his senatorial tier a perfumed and beringed fellow set off with a splendid lacerna sat down saying loudly, “Now at last, thanks to our Cæsar, due honors have come to the Roman equites, and the vulgar are kept away”; but hardly had he spoken ere a lynx-eyed usher identified him and amid the jeering of hundreds “forced that very fine lacerna to get up!”

134. The Senatorial Order. The First-Class Nobility.—The first class in the nobility is the Senatorial. The actual functioning of the Senate which is still a most venerable and powerful council will be told later (see p. 334); here we have to see its members merely in social and unofficial life. They number six hundred and entrance into their gilded circle comes usually by a kind of hereditary right. The sons of a senator can almost always count on becoming senators themselves if the family fortune is not too impaired and they have not fallen under imperial disfavor. To win the honor you must either be elected (by the Senate itself) to some one of the old Republican offices—quæstors, ædiles, prætors, consuls, etc.,—which carried a life seat in the Senate with them, or be appointed outright by fiat of the Emperor. The latter, furthermore, is always pushing forward his favorites by “inviting” the senators to elect them to office, and the “Conscript Fathers” never disregarded such a broad hint from “Cæsar.”

135. Social Glories of Senators.—Senators alone are eligible for the highest commands in the army, for the governorships for the more important provinces, except Egypt, and for most of the other exalted offices which do not involve a vulgar handling of money. The Emperor himself ranks as the head of their noble body. Even when he is at bitter odds with them, he must not forget that they share part of his glory. Still is told the story of how one of Nero’s parasites raised a laugh from the tyrant one day. “I hate you, Cæsar!” he announced. “And why is that?” “Oh, just because you are a senator.”

All the senators are officially the “friends,” amici, of the monarch.

These great nobles are entitled to visit the Emperor in the palace somewhat as clients visit their patron. He is expected to extend his hand to them; to treat them as a kind of social equals; and to allow the more important of them to kiss him. They and their wives must be invited to all the greater palace banquets. Finally all the better monarchs are expected to take oath at the beginning of their reigns that they “will never put any senator to death”—that is, that the Senate shall be the supreme judge over its own members.

Although parvenus are promoted by even the best of emperors, the senatorial families average much older than do the equestrian; and it is still a very desirable thing to boast of “ancient blood and the painted visages of one’s forebears.”

136. The Senatorial Aristocracy Greater than the Senate.—The “Senatorial Aristocracy,” nevertheless, is something greater than the actual membership of the great council itself. Not merely the sons but all the male descendants of a senator to the third degree are reckoned as equal socially to the actual “Conscript Fathers,” though many such connections dress merely as equites with the narrow stripe. This may be from “lack of ambition” or it may be from desire to engage in trade. Gratia has two brothers. One is a senator, his wealth invested in lands, and at present he is imperial legate over part of Britain. The second is technically only an eques, busy with enormous financial transactions with Alexandria; but the second is the richer and probably the more influential man of the two. Of course, all the wives of senators rank with their husbands, and every cousin, niece, or nephew of the latter feels a reflected luster. The six hundred senators are, therefore, the center of an upper aristocracy with at least six thousand actual members.

137. Insignia, Qualifications, and Titles of Senators.—The actual senators make no concealment of their honors. They have their special shoes (see p. 95), and most important of all they have the broad purple stripe running down the front of their tunics, the precious laticlave, distinguishing them instantly from the equites. Nobody, furthermore, can be enrolled as senator unless he possesses the taxable fortune of at least 1,000,000 sesterces ($40,000); and this insures that he is a passing rich man, above petty bribes and able to live with the dignity becoming a Lord of the Empire.

The public glories of these dignitaries match their fortunes. At all the public games and spectacles the senatorial tiers are directly behind the Emperor’s loge. In the public feasts the senators are not merely entitled to the seats of honor, but frequently to extra-generous portions of the food. If a senator tours the provinces, he can command every kind of servile attention, even if the Emperor refuses him the “right of free legation”—the privileges of traveling with the honors of an ambassador. Finally if he is arrested, not merely is he ordinarily tried before his peers—in the Senate; he is subject to much lighter penalties than the run of citizens in case of conviction.[76]

Finally the senators have a title of nobility which they are able to command practically as a formal right[77]—vir clarissimus—“Very distinguished Lord” or “Your Magnificence.” Gratia, like every senator’s wife, is a femina clarissima; even her small sons can be addressed pompously as pueri clarissimi. To the multitude who make way for their litters, the rank of clarissimus appears the acme of attainable happiness.

The political power of the Senate has waned, but emperors are only mortal individuals. They come and go; the existence of the great, proud, wealthy, landed aristocracy seems to go on forever. Emperors usually succeed so far as they win its loyalty and favor; they somehow fail, and are branded across history as tyrants (often cut short by dagger thrusts) when they earn its hate. In an Empire of nigh one hundred millions the six thousand of the Senatorial Order form the normal apex of the human pyramid. It is a fine thing to be a senator.