138 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
criminal past and those in demeaning occupations, such as auctioneers and
undertakers, were excluded.^23
These requirements were designed to ensure that local councils were
composed of men of property, whose social standing was not in question.
Sometimes, however, people were admitted who were not highly approved
in the Roman value system. The third- century jurist Callistratus wrote that,
although traders should not be barred absolutely from the local council, ‘yet
I believe it to be dishonourable for persons of this sort, who have been
subject to the whippings [of aediles in the marketplace], to be received into
the order, and especially in those cities that have an abundance of honourable
men ( honesti viri ). On the other hand, a needful shortage of the latter men
requires even the former for municipal offi ce, if they have the resources’
( Digest 50.2.12). Wealth was permitted to override other criteria of social
acceptability for strictly practical reasons. Not only were councillors and
magistrates unpaid; they were actually required to contribute fees to the
public treasury on entry into the council or into an offi ce or priesthood.
Their wealth was used in addition for other, voluntary expenditures to
justify their privileged status in the community, and was the ultimate surety
for the tax payments due to the imperial treasury.^24
The three elite orders comprised only a tiny fraction of the population of
the empire. Below them in the offi cial hierarchy came the great mass of the
humble free, and at the bottom of the heap, the slaves. Within the former
category the principal legal divisions lay between freeborn and freed, and
between citizen and non- citizen. The formal legal disabilities of being a
freedman were not in practice very inhibiting: a slave properly manumitted
by a citizen became a citizen, but was barred from the elite orders, from
service in the legions and from legitimate marriage to senators.^25
The citizen/non- citizen distinction lost much of its signifi cance in the
course of the Principate. At fi rst Roman citizens, at any rate those residing
in the city of Rome, remained in possession of at least the vestiges of the
rights they had enjoyed under the Republic, and the benefi ts that accrued
from empire. Gradually the exclusivity on which privileges were based was
lost, as the citizen body grew to incorporate provincials, a development
culminating in Caracalla’s grant of citizenship to virtually all free inhabitants
of the empire in AD 212. As the distinction between victor and conquered
disappeared, the legal divisions within the population tended to be
overshadowed by social divisions based on the elite system of values. The
result was the emergence by the reign of Hadrian of the formal distinction
between the elite and the humble masses ( honestiores and humiliores ).^26 The
privileged honestiores included the three aristocratic orders and veterans,
rewarded for their service in protecting the social order. The remainder of
the free population fell into the category of humiliores , the legal disadvantages
of which will be considered shortly.
In applying this rough, binary classifi cation to the free population, we run
the risk of oversimplifying and thus distorting the social reality. In particular,