Nobiles

The nobiles (SG nobilis) were members of a social rank in the Roman Republic indicating that one was "well known".^[1] This may have changed over time: in Cicero's time, one was notable if one descended from a person who had been elected consul.^[2] In earlier periods and more broadly, this may have included a larger group consisting of those who were patricians, were descended from patricians who had become plebeians via transitio ad plebem, or were descended from plebeians who had held curule offices.^[3]

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History

The nobiles emerged after the Conflict of the Orders established legal equality between patricians and plebeians, allowing plebeians to hold all the magistracies; the state of being "known" was connected to the nobiles's rights to funeral masks (Latin: imagines) and actors in aristocratic funeral processions.^[4] However, the term is largely unattested to in the middle Republic, having been introduced in the late Republic as a description rather than a status.^[5] Earning such a mask required holding one of the qualifying curule magistracies.^[6]

These elections meant the republican nobility was not entirely closed.^[7] Nor in the republic did nobiles enjoy special legal privileges. In the later Republic, one who became noble was termed a novus homo (English: new man), an unusual achievement.^[8] Two of the most famous examples of these self-made "new men" were Gaius Marius, who held the consulship seven times, and Cicero. While wholly new men were rare, the political elite as a whole turned over as some families were unable to win elections over multiple generations and other families became more prominent, creating slow-moving and osmotic change.^[9]

The prestige of the nobiles was connected directly to their election to high office by the people.^[10] During the Roman Republic, the nobiles never held less than about 70 per cent of the consulships over longer periods; by the time of Cicero, the nobiles as a whole held more than 90 per cent of the consulships, a proportion "remarkably untouched by the most violent political crises".^[4] The narrowing of what made someone part of the nobiles occurred around the time of the constitutional reforms of Sulla with its "much larger senate with a proportionately smaller circle of elite senators... many new Italians in the Sullan senate, and the increased number of praetors" leading the elite to close ranks to preserve their prestige.^[11]

During the time of Augustus, a nobilis enjoyed easier access to the consulship, with a lowered age requirement perhaps set at 32. Women who descended from Augustan consuls were also regarded as belonging to the Roman nobility.^[12] The term still referred to descendants of republican and triumviral consuls, but by the Antonines, most noble families had died out; one of the last were the Acilii Glabriones who survived into the 4th century.^[4]

References

Citations

^ Brunt 1982, p. 11.
^ Brunt 1982, p. 1.
^ Brunt 1982, p. 1. The curule offices were those of dictator, magister equitum, censor, consul, praetor, and curule aedile.
^ ^a ^b ^c Badian 2012a.
^ Millar, Fergus (2002). Rome, the Greek World, and the East. University of North Carolina Press. pp. 126–27. ISBN 978-0-8078-4990-3.
^ Flower 2010, pp. 155–56. "It was the mask and the chair that traditionally identified a man, and his family, as part of the political elite".
^ Burckhardt 1990, p. 84.
^ Badian 2012b.
^ Burckhardt 1990, p. 86.
^ Flower 2010, p. 46.
^ Flower 2010, p. 156–57.
^ Syme, Ronald (1989). The Augustan Aristocracy. Clarendon Press. pp. 50–52. ISBN 978-0-19-814731-2.

Sources

Badian, Ernst (2012a). "nobilitas". In Hornblower, Simon; Spawforth, Antony; Eidinow, Esther (eds.). The Oxford classical dictionary (4th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-954556-8. OCLC 959667246.
Badian, Ernst (2012b). "novus homo". In Hornblower, Simon; Spawforth, Antony; Eidinow, Esther (eds.). The Oxford classical dictionary (4th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-954556-8. OCLC 959667246.
Brunt, PA (1982). "Nobilitas and Novitas". The Journal of Roman Studies. 72: 1–17. doi:10.2307/299112. ISSN 0075-4358. JSTOR 299112.
Burckhardt, Leonhard A (1990). "The Political Elite of the Roman Republic: Comments on Recent Discussion of the Concepts "Nobilitas and Homo Novus"". Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte. 39 (1): 77–99. ISSN 0018-2311. JSTOR 4436138.
Flower, Harriet (2010). Roman republics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-14043-8.

Hans Beck: Karriere und Hierarchie. Die römische Aristokratie und die Anfänge des „cursus honorum“ in der mittleren Republik, Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2005.
Hans Beck: Die Rolle des Adligen. Prominenz und aristokratische Herrschaft in der römischen Republik. In: Hans Beck, Peter Scholz, Uwe Walter (eds.): Die Macht der Wenigen. Aristokratische Herrschaftspraxis, Kommunikation und „edler“ Lebensstil in Antike und Früher Neuzeit, Oldenbourg, Munich 2008, 101–123.
Jochen Bleicken: Die Nobilität der römischen Republik. In: Gymnasium 88, 1981, 236–253.
Klaus Bringmann: Geschichte der Römischen Republik. Von den Anfängen bis Augustus. Beck, Munich 2002.
Matthias Gelzer: Die Nobilität der römischen Republik. Teubner, Leipzig 1912.
Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp: Die Entstehung der Nobilität. Studien zur sozialen und politischen Geschichte der Römischen Republik im 4. Jahrhundert v. Chr. Steiner, Stuttgart 1987, ISBN 3-515-04621-6.
Fergus Millar: The Political Character of the Classical Roman Republic, 200–151 B.C. In: Journal of Roman Studies 74, 1984, 1–19.
R. T. Ridley: The Genesis of a Turning-Point: Gelzer's "Nobilität". In: Historia 35, 1986, 474-502.

This page was last edited on 30 September 2023, at 12:37

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