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It is this simple continuance of the old social organization which the barbarians elsewhere overthrew that explains the peculiar character of the Venetian patriciate. In all other countries of the West the new feudal aristocracy sprang from the Teutonic invaders. In Italy itself the nobles were descendants of Lombard conquerors, or of the barons who followed Emperor after Emperor across the Alps.
All such scruples of conscience, the honesty of which in themselves we do not mean to doubt, were precluded, when once they granted to the plebeians -en masse- at the right time the patriciate.
In the mighty successes which the Roman community externally achieved during the century from the last Veientine down to the Pyrrhic war we perceive that the patriciate has now given place to the farmers; that the fall of the highborn Fabian would have been not more and not less lamented by the whole community than the fall of the plebeian Decian was lamented alike by plebeians and patricians; that the consulate did not of itself fall even to the wealthiest aristocrat; and that a poor husbandman from Sabina, Manius Curius, could conquer king Pyrrhus in the field of battle and chase him out of Italy, without ceasing to be a simple Sabine farmer and to cultivate in person his own bread-corn.
The palace of Diocletian had but one occupant; after the founder no Emperor had dwelled in it, unless we hold that this was the villa near Salona where the deposed Emperor Nepos was slain, during the patriciate of Odoacer. The forsaken palace seems, while still almost new, to have become a cloth factory, where women worked, and which therefore appears in the "Notitia" as a Gynæcium.
He tried to revive the patriciate; he wanted to have, cooperating with him, a governing class with the ancient sense of responsibility and turn for affairs. But what survived of the old aristocracy was wedded to the tradition of Republicanism, which meant oligarchy, and doing just what you liked or nothing at all. The one thing they were not prepared to do was to cooperate in saving Rome.
The distinction between Quirites and soldiers became more and more deeply rooted in the minds of the burgesses. Government of the Patriciate Time however was required for the development of these consequences of the new republicanism; vividly as posterity felt its effects, the revolution probably appeared to the contemporary world at first in a different light.
Of course the conquered, whether transferred or not, were ordinarily compelled to occupy the legal position of clients; but particular individuals or clans occasionally had burgess-rights or, in other words, the patriciate conferred upon them.
All such scruples of conscience, the honesty of which in themselves we do not mean to doubt, were precluded, when once they granted to the plebeians -en masse- at the right time the patriciate.
The fact of his increasing the number of patrician families had no reference to the constitution; so far in fact were the patricians from having any advantages over the plebeians that the office of the two oediles Cereales, which Cæsar instituted, was confined to the plebeians a regulation which was opposed to the very nature of the patriciate.
Whether this distinction between these "curule houses" and the other families embraced within the patriciate was ever of serious political importance, cannot with certainty be either affirmed or denied; and as little do we know whether at this epoch there really was any considerable number of patrician families that were not yet curule. II. II. The Valerio-Horatian Laws I. XII. Foreign Worships
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