Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

To an outsider, it might appear as though all a nobleman had to do was stay in his bed, “and electoral honours would be given to him on a plate”13—but nothing in Rome was ever given to anyone in that way. Nobility was perpetuated not by blood but by achievement. A nobleman’s life was a strenuous series of ordeals or it was nothing. If he failed to gain a senior magistracy or—worse—lost membership of the Senate altogether, a nobleman’s aura would soon start to fade. If three generations passed without notable successes, then even a patrician might find that he had a name known only “to historians and scholars, and not to the man in the street, the average voter, at all.”