the revolution even in this respect bore by no means the character
which we are accustomed in the present day to designate as democratic.
Pure personal merit without the support of birth and wealth could
perhaps gain influence and consideration more easily under the regal
government than under that of the patriciate. Then admission to
the patriciate was not in law foreclosed; now the highest object of
plebeian ambition was to be admitted into the dumb appendage of
the senate. The nature of the case implied that the governing
aristocratic order, so far as it admitted plebeians at all, would
grant the right of occupying seats in the senate not absolutely to
the best men, but chiefly to the heads of the wealthy and notable
plebeian families; and the families thus admitted jealously guarded
the possession of the senatorial stalls. While a complete legal
equality therefore had subsisted within the old burgess-body, the
new burgess-body or former --metoeci-- came to be in this way divided
from the first into a number of privileged families and a multitude
kept in a position of inferiority. But the power of the community now
according to the centuriate organization came into the hands of that
class which since the Servian reform of the army and of taxation had
borne mainly the burdens of the state, namely the freeholders, and
indeed not so much into the hands of the great proprietors or into
those of the small cottagers, as into those of the intermediate class
of farmers--an arrangement in which the seniors were still so far
privileged that, although less numerous, they had as many voting-
divisions as the juniors. While in this way the axe was laid to the
root of the old burgess-body and their clan-nobility, and the basis
of a new burgess-body was laid, the preponderance in the latter rested
on the possession of land and on age, and the first beginnings were
already visible of a new aristocracy based primarily on the actual
consideration in which the families were held--the future nobility.