patriciate.  Then admission to the patriciate was not in law foreclosed; now the highest object of plebeian ambition was to be admitted into the dumb appendage of the senate.  The nature of the case implied that the governing aristocratic order, so far as it admitted plebeians at all, would grant the right of occupying seats in the senate not absolutely to the best men, but chiefly to the heads of the wealthy and notable plebeian families; and the families thus admitted jealously guarded the possession of the senatorial stalls.  While a complete legal equality therefore had subsisted within the old burgess-body, the new burgess-body or former —­metoeci—­ came to be in this way divided from the first into a number of privileged families and a multitude kept in a position of inferiority.  But the power of the community now according to the centuriate organization came into the hands of that class which since the Servian reform of the army and of taxation had borne mainly the burdens of the state, namely the freeholders, and indeed not so much into the hands of the great proprietors or into those of the small cottagers, as into those of the intermediate class of farmers—­an arrangement in which the seniors were still so far privileged that, although less numerous, they had as many voting-divisions as the juniors.  While in this way the axe was laid to the root of the old burgess-body and their clan-nobility, and the basis of a new burgess-body was laid, the preponderance in the latter rested on the possession of land and on age, and the first beginnings were already visible of a new aristocracy based primarily on the actual consideration in which the families were held—­the future nobility.  There could be no clearer indication of the fundamentally conservative character of the Roman commonwealth than the fact, that the revolution which gave birth to the republic laid down at the same time the primary outlines of a new organization of the state, which was in like manner conservative and in like manner aristocratic.

Notes for Book II Chapter I

1.  I. IX.  The Tarquins

2.  The well-known fable for the most part refutes itself.  To a considerable extent it has been concocted for the explanation of surnames (-Brutus-, -Poplicola-, -Scaevola-).  But even its apparently historical ingredients are found on closer examination to have been invented.  Of this character is the statement that Brutus was captain of the horsemen (-tribunus celerum-) and in that capacity proposed the decree of the people as to the banishment of the Tarquins; for, according to the Roman constitution, it is quite impossible that a mere officer should have had the right to convoke the curies.  The whole of this statement has evidently been invented with the view of furnishing a legal basis for the Roman republic; and very ill invented it is, for in its case the -tribunus celerum- is confounded with the entirely different -magister equitum- (V.  Burdens Of The Burgesses f.), and then the right of convoking the centuries which pertained to the latter by virtue of his praetorian rank is made to apply to the assembly of the curies.