Nobiles

Template:Short description Template:Italic title The nobiles (Template:Singular nobilis, Template:Translation) were members of a social rank in the Roman Republic indicating that one was "well known".Template:Sfn This may have changed over time: in Cicero's time, one was notable if one descended from a person who had been elected consul.Template:Sfn 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.<ref>Template:Harvnb.</ref>

HistoryEdit

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 nobilesTemplate:'s rights to funeral masks (Template:Langx) and actors in aristocratic funeral processions.Template:Sfn 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.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Earning such a mask required holding one of the qualifying curule magistracies.<ref>Template:Harvnb</ref>

These elections meant the republican nobility was not entirely closed.Template:Sfn Nor in the republic did nobiles enjoy special legal privileges. In the later Republic, one who became noble was termed a novus homo (Template:Langx), an unusual achievement.Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn

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

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.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> 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.Template:Sfn

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Nobiles

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HistoryEdit

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