ONE OF THE ways the Senate wielded power was by keeping tight control on who would be elected to the highest magistracies. By the mid-200s the Conflict of the Orders had destroyed most distinctions between patrician and pleb. But as one elite aristocracy falls, another is always right there to take its place, and a new distinction emerged: any family—patrician or pleb—that could claim a consular ancestor was now referred to as nobile. Men born without consular ancestors were derisively called novus homo, or New Man. This new patrician/pleb nobility worked hard to ensure that their families
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