They all vied with one another to display their loyalty to the emperor by participating enthusiastically in his cult. There was no pretense of parity in these friendships, since accepting clientage was itself a tacit admission of inferiority. Lesser aristocrats and freedmen competed with one another by building their own networks of loyal clients from the lower classes. As the Roman senator and historian Tacitus explained, the “good” people in a city were defined by their attachment and pistis to the great families, while the “bad” took no part in the patronage system, either because they had
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