of those who had been curule magistrates to a seat and vote in the senate,(11) had converted the senate from a council summoned by the magistrates and in many respects dependent on them into a governing corporation virtually independent, and in a certain sense filling up its own ranks; for the two modes by which its members obtained admission—­election to a curule office and summoning by the censor—­were both virtually in the power of the governing board itself.  The burgesses, no doubt, at this epoch were still too independent to allow the entire exclusion of non-nobles from the senate, and the nobility were perhaps still too judicious even to wish for this; but, owing to the strictly aristocratic gradations in the senate itself—­in which those who had been curule magistrates were sharply distinguished, according to their respective classes of -consulares-, -praetorii-, and -aedilicii-, from the senators who had not entered the senate through a curule office and were therefore excluded from debate—­the non-nobles, although they probably sat in considerable numbers in the senate, were reduced to an insignificant and comparatively uninfluential position in it, and the senate became substantially a mainstay of the nobility.

The Nobility in Possession of the Equestrian Centuries

The institution of the equites was developed into a second, less important but yet far from unimportant, organ of the nobility.  As the new hereditary nobility had not the power to usurp sole possession of the comitia, it necessarily became in the highest degree desirable that it should obtain at least a separate position within the body representing the community.  In the assembly of the tribes there was no method of managing this; but the equestrian centuries under the Servian organization seemed as it were created for the very purpose.  The 1800 horses which the community furnished(12) were constitutionally disposed of likewise by the censors.  It was, no doubt, the duty of these to select the equites on military grounds and at their musters to insist that all horsemen incapacitated by age or otherwise, or at all unserviceable, should surrender their public horse; but the very nature of the institution implied that the equestrian horses should be given especially to men of means, and it was not at all easy to hinder the censors from looking to genteel birth more than to capacity, and from allowing men of standing who were once admitted, senators particularly, to retain their horse beyond the proper time.  Perhaps it was even fixed by law that the senator might retain it as long as he wished.  Accordingly it became at least practically the rule for the senators to vote in the eighteen equestrian centuries, and the other places in these were assigned chiefly to the young men of the nobility.  The military system, of course, suffered from this not so much through the unfitness for effective service of no small part of the legionary cavalry, as through the destruction