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{{Short description|Social rank of ancient Rome}}{{Italic title}}The nobiles ({{singular}} nobilis) were members of a social rank in the Roman Republic indicating that one was “well known”.{{sfn|Brunt|1982|p=11}} This may have changed over time: in Cicero’s time, one was notable if one descended from a person who had been elected consul.{{sfn|Brunt|1982|p=1}} 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.{{harvnb|Brunt|1982|p=1|ps=. The curule offices were those of dictator, magister equitum, censor, consul, praetor, and curule aedile}}.

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 () and actors in aristocratic funeral processions.{{sfn|Badian|2012a}} 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.BOOK, Millar, Fergus,books.google.com/books?id=SIJYTTARlJ8C&dq=%22Thirdly%2C+the+much-used+term+%22the+patrician-plebeian+nobility%22%22&pg=PA126, Rome, the Greek World, and the East, 2002, University of North Carolina Press, 978-0-8078-4990-3, 126–27, en, Earning such a mask required holding one of the qualifying curule magistracies.{{harvnb|Flower|2010|pp=155–56|ps=. “It was the mask and the chair that traditionally identified a man, and his family, as part of the political elite”.}}These elections meant the republican nobility was not entirely closed.{{sfn|Burckhardt|1990|p=84}} Nor in the republic did nobiles enjoy special legal privileges. In the later Republic, one who became noble was termed a novus homo (), an unusual achievement.{{sfn|Badian|2012b}} 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.{{sfn|Burckhardt|1990|p=86}}The prestige of the nobiles was connected directly to their election to high office by the people.{{sfn|Flower|2010|p=46}} 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”.{{sfn|Badian|2012a}} 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.{{sfn|Flower|2010|p=156–57}}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.BOOK, Syme, Ronald,books.google.com/books?id=fj8oQ4lzteIC&dq=%22The+word+’nobilis,’+not+possessing+or+needing+a+legal+definition%22&pg=PA50, The Augustan Aristocracy, 1989, Clarendon Press, 978-0-19-814731-2, en, 50–52, 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.{{sfn|Badian|2012a}}

See also

• Cursus honorum

References

Citations

{{Reflist|15em}}

Sources

• ENCYCLOPEDIA, Badian, Ernst, nobilitas, The Oxford classical dictionary, 2012a, Simon, Hornblower, Antony, Spawforth, Esther, Eidinow, 978-0-19-954556-8, 4th, Oxford, 959667246, Oxford University Press,
• ENCYCLOPEDIA, Badian, Ernst, novus homo, The Oxford classical dictionary, 2012b, Simon, Hornblower, Antony, Spawforth, Esther, Eidinow, 978-0-19-954556-8, 4th, Oxford, 959667246, Oxford University Press,
• JOURNAL, Brunt, PA, 1982, Nobilitas and Novitas,www.jstor.org/stable/299112, The Journal of Roman Studies, 72, 1–17, 10.2307/299112, 299112, 0075-4358,
• JOURNAL, Burckhardt, Leonhard A, 1990, The Political Elite of the Roman Republic: Comments on Recent Discussion of the Concepts “Nobilitas and Homo Novus”,www.jstor.org/stable/4436138, Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, 39, 1, 77–99, 4436138, 0018-2311,
• BOOK, Flower, Harriet,books.google.com/books?id=p2eYDwAAQBAJ, Roman republics, 2010, Princeton University Press, 978-0-691-14043-8, Princeton,

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.

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