Note 727 — Chapter XI · THE STATE (B) STATE AND HISTORY (continued 2)

From the end of the fourth century the nobility developed into a closed circle of families that had, or claimed to have, consuls among their ancestors. The more strictly this condition was enforced, the more frequent were the falsifications of the old consul-lists in order to “legitimize” rising families of strong race and talent. The first (and truly revolutionary) outburst of forgery occurs in the epoch of Appius Claudius the Censor, when the curule ædile C. Flavius, the son of a slave, put the list in order—that was the time when even royal cognomina were discovered amongst plebeian families. The second was in the days of the battle of Pydna (168), when the dominance of the nobility began to assume Cæsarian forms (E. Kornemann, Der Priesterkodex in der Regia, 1912, pp. 56, et seq.). Of the 200 Consulates between 232 and 133, 159 fell to 26 families, and thereafter blood-quality being exhausted, but the form as such being all the more studiously preserved in consequence—the rise of novi homines like Cato and Cicero became a rare phenomenon.