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But, apart from these minor benefits, the mass of the Plebeians did not share to any very large extent in the triumph of their order. The true reason of the individual Roman being thus thrust into the background can only be given by a review of the causes, soon to be treated, which moulded both the theory and practice of the developed Roman constitution. It must suffice here to trace the painfully inadequate results which were secured by these centuries of agitation by a glance at the distribution of power in the Roman state, at the date of the war with Pyrrhus, or the outbreak of the struggle with Carthage.

The old nobility had relaxed its exclusive hold of office, but only to give room for the still firmer grasp of a new. This was an aristocracy of mixed origin, composed indifferently of the leading patrician and plebeian families. The test of nobilitas was the capacity to point to ancestors who had held office which carried with it the right to sit on the curule chair. Its outward sign was the possession of the so-called jus imaginum. The imagines themselves were portrait-masks in wax, modelled from the face of the dead, and their primary use was for the purpose of funeral ceremonies. The original was moulded to be placed on the face of the deceased, and so to perpetuate his life in another world; but a copy was kept to give verisimilitude to his fictitious resurrection, which the burial of one of his descendants demanded. At such funerals actors were hired to represent the mighty dead; they wore their imagines, and were adorned with the insignia of the offices which these had filled in life, with the toga praetexta of the consul or praetor, the purple robe or the toga picta of the censor, and they sat on curule chairs round the Forum to listen to the orator who reminded them of their own great deeds.[498] As such a public funeral in the Forum was a concession of the state, the prospective right of having one’s mask exhibited, which constituted the jus imaginum, was a strictly legal privilege. It was possessed by all those who had been in possession of the toga praetexta and the sella curulis[499]—the dictator, master of the horse, consul, censor, praetor, and curule aedile. But, even apart from the occasions of such solemn mummery, the imago was a sign of the rank of its possessor. When not funereally employed it was suspended on a bust in the wings of the central hall (atrium) of the noble’s house. Beneath each portrait ran an inscription (titulus or elogium), which gave the names and deeds of the person represented. The portraits were joined by lines along the walls which showed the stemma or family tree. It is possible that this display in the atrium was looked on as a public exhibition, and it may originally have been limited by law; but in later times it seems best to conclude that the funerary exhibition alone was the subject of the specific jus.[500] But this outward token of nobility, which at Rome took the place of the modern title of honour, was of importance as emphasising the distinction between the nobiles and the ignobiles, in drawing the plebeian aristocracy closer to the patrician, which before the date of the Licinian laws had been in exclusive possession of this right, and in asserting the hereditary claim to office which the Roman electorate was only too ready to recognise. The acceptance of the claim was less dangerous than it is in most modern states, since primogeniture was not recognised in the transmission of honours,[501] and it was the capable and not the elder son whom the vote of the comitia raised to the curule chair. The claim too might become dimmed by disuse, and the Plebeian whose immediate ancestors had held high rank showed a brighter scutcheon than the Patrician who was connected with a noble stemma by ignoble links.[502] But the Patriciate itself conferred a kind of nobility, and one that, whatever its basis, might have been justified by office, for there could have been few members of the order who could not point to curule ancestors in the past. Although the Plebeian who first secured curule office, and thus ceased to be ignobilis, was called a novus homo, the designation seems never to have been applied to the member of a patrician gens.[503] Nobility, if once secured, could never be lost; but the hereditary claim to the suffrage of the electors was of little avail if unaccompanied by exceptional merit or by wealth. The claims of the latter were in fact given a kind of legal recognition by the rule established about the time of the first Punic war, that the cost of the public games should not be defrayed exclusively by the treasury.[504] The aedileship, whether curule or plebeian, was, as we shall see, not an obligatory step in the ascending scale of the magistracies; but, as it was held before the praetorship and the consulship, it is obvious that the brilliant display given to the people by the occupant of this office would often render fruitless the efforts of his less fortunate competitors, and that this legitimised bribery would exclude from office both the poorer nobiles and the struggling novus homo.[505]