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The nobiles (sg. nobilis, transl. 'noble', 'noteworthy') were members of a social rank in the Roman Republic indicating that one was "well known". This may have changed over time: in Cicero's time, one was notable if one descended from a person who had been elected consul. 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.

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. 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. Earning such a mask required holding one of the qualifying curule magistracies.

These elections meant the republican nobility was not entirely closed. 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. 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.

The prestige of the nobiles was connected directly to their election to high office by the people. 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". 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.

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. 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.

See also

• Cursus honorum

References

Citations

1. Brunt 1982, p. 11.
2. Brunt 1982, p. 1.
3. Brunt 1982, p. 1. The curule offices were those of dictator, magister equitum, censor, consul, praetor, and curule aedile.
4. ^ Badian 2012a.
5. Millar, Fergus (2002). Rome, the Greek World, and the East. University of North Carolina Press. pp. 126–27. ISBN 978-0-8078-4990-3.
6. 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".
7. Burckhardt 1990, p. 84.
8. Badian 2012b.
9. Burckhardt 1990, p. 86.
10. Flower 2010, p. 46.
11. Flower 2010, p. 156–57.
12. 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.

Further reading

• 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.

• Social classes in ancient Rome