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We have already indicated that the plebeian party carried within it that character from the first as well as, and in some sense still more decidedly than, the patriciate; for, while in the old body of burgesses an absolute equality of rights prevailed, the new constitution set out from a distinction between the senatorial houses who were privileged in point of burgess rights and of burgess usufructs, and the mass of the other citizens.

When the Paduans, before their city was as yet invested, saw the arrival within their walls of these chosen youths of the Venetian patriciate, with their numerous troop of friends and followers, they considered Padua as good as saved; and when the imperial army, posted before the place, commenced their attacks upon it, they soon perceived that they had formidable defenders to deal with.

Immediately, therefore, on the abolition of the patriciate and the formal establishment of civic equality, a new aristocracy and a corresponding opposition were formed; and we have already shown how the former engrafted itself as it were on the fallen patriciate, and how, accordingly, the first movements of the new party of progress were mixed up with the last movements of the old opposition between the orders.

This Patriciate state did not last long. In the sixth century a motley crowd of Longobards and Saxons and Slavs and Avars invaded Italy, destroyed the Gothic kingdom, and established a new state of which Pavia became the capital. Then at last the imperial city sank into a state of utter neglect and despair. The ancient palaces had been plundered time and again. The schools had been burned down.

The idea of his frivolity had, no doubt, to do with his personal designation, which represented as yet, for our young woman, a little confusedly a connection with an historic patriciate, a class that, in turn, also confusedly, represented an affinity with a social element that she had never heard otherwise described than as "fashion."

Its patriciate, its people, its government were not what government or people or patriciate were in other countries of Western Christendom. The difference lay not in any peculiar institutions which it had developed, or in any novel form of social or administrative order which it had invented, but in the very origin of the State itself.

Thus, by birth as well as nature, Caesar felt called to dominion; and at the same time he was perfectly aware of the decadence of the Roman patriciate, and of the necessity for being popular in order to become master. With this double instinct he undertook the conquest of the Gauls as the surest means of achieving conquest at Rome.

They promised each other to find out why, and they never did so, but satisfied themselves by assigning it to the exclusive use of the slim maidens and massive matrons of the old Nuremberg patriciate, whom they imagined trailing their silken splendors under its arch in perpetual procession.

But by our constitution the supreme dignity of the patriciate frees a son from power immediately on the receipt of the imperial patent; for who would allow anything so unreasonable as that, while a father is able by emancipation to release his son from the tie of his power, the imperial majesty should be unable to release from dependence on another the man whom it has selected as a father of the State? 5 Again, capture of the father by the enemy makes him a slave of the latter; but the status of his children is suspended by his right of subsequent restoration by postliminium; for on escape from captivity a man recovers all his former rights, and among them the right of paternal power over his children, the law of postliminium resting on a fiction that the captive has never been absent from the state.

I even I alone became the whole multitude. I was no longer just mine own self, but I was all of us who looked, who heard and saw and did not yet understand.... A multitude was looking through my eyes ... a multitude heard through mine ears ... I was the crowd of poor, of helpless slaves, and I was the whole of the patriciate of Rome.