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These patricians shall learn that all great gifts do not spring from birth that genius has a nobility which can match that given by kings." Rachael started up in her excitement, flung the shawl away, and stood a priestess where she had just cowered like a wounded animal. "Now we shall be all the world to each other, and walk through this proud life of yours, fairly mated.
"He is of your Order, then?" she asked abruptly. "He was yes." "Oh, ha!" cried Cigarette, with her old irony. "Then he must be always, mustn't he? You think too much of your blue blood, you patricians, to fancy it can lose its royalty, whether it run under a King's purple or a Roumi's canvas shirt. Blood tells, they say! Well, perhaps it does. Some say my father was a Prince of France maybe!
To thisepoch therefore we may trace back in the views and feelings of the people both the invidiousness of the distinction between patricians and plebeians, and the strict and haughty line of demarcation between -cives Romani- and aliens.
Appius Claudius, who had the reputation of being the bitterest enemy of the people in Rome, gave it as his opinion that the Senate would destroy itself and ruin the State utterly if it permitted the people to assume the power of trying patricians and voting on their trials; while the older men, and those who were more inclined to the popular side, thought that this power would render the people gentle and temperate, and not savage and cruel.
Vainly the patricians exerted all the means at their command in opposition to these legislative proposals; even the dictatorship and the old military hero Camillus were able only to delay, not to avert their accomplishment.
If he stirred, if he regarded the patricians at all, if he thought that there existed any other party in the state but the commons, let him set before his eyes the banishment of Gnæeus Marcius, the condemnation and death of Menenius.
The plebeians had now returned to the city, headed by their ten tribunes, a number which was never again altered so long as the tribunate continued in existence. It remained for the patricians to redeem the pledges given by their agents Valerius and Horatius on the other demands of the plebeian leaders. The first thing to settle was the election of the supreme magistrates.
For a considerable time the terror seemed equally distributed among all ranks; gradually it began to be directed entirely against the commons. While they spared the patricians, arbitrary and cruel measures were taken against the lower classes. As being persons with whom interest usurped the force of justice, they all took account of persons rather than of causes.
The Senate appointed another dictator, but he made that very Licinius Stolo, the leader of the popular party, his master of the horse, and thus enabled him to pass a law which was especially distasteful to the patricians, for it forbade any one to possess more than five hundred jugera of land.
In "Quo Vadis" the whole alta Roma, beginning with slaves carrying mosaics for their refined masters, and ending with patricians, who were so fond of beautiful things that one of them for instance used to kiss at every moment a superb vase, stands before our eyes as if it was reconstructed by a magical power from ruins and death.