novus homo

Novus homo (or: homo novus, Latin for "new man"; plural novi homines) was the term in ancient Rome for a man who was the first in his family to serve in the Roman Senate or, more specifically, to be elected as consul.

History

According to tradition, both Senate membership and the consulship were restricted to patricians. When plebeians gained the right to this office during the Conflict of the Orders, all newly-elected plebeians were naturally novi homines. As time went by, novi homines became more and more rare as some plebeian families became as entrenched in the Senate as their patrician colleagues. By the time of the First Punic War, it was already a sensation that novi homines were elected in two consecutive years (Gaius Fundanius Fundulus in 243 BC and Gaius Lutatius Catulus in 242 BC). In 63 BC, Cicero became the first novus homo in more than thirty years.^[1]

In the late Roman Republic period, the distinction between the classes became less important. The consuls came from a new elite, the nobili (noblemen), an artificial aristocracy of all who could demonstrate direct descent in the male line from a consul^[2] such families, patrician or plebeian, that had produced a consul tended to reduce the distinction between patricians and plebeians in the late Republic.

List of novi homines

• Gaius Duilius (elected 260 BC)
• Gaius Fundanius Fundulus (elected 243 BC)
• Gaius Lutatius Catulus (elected 241 BC)
• Gaius Flaminius (elected 223 BC & 217 BC)
• Marcus Porcius Cato (the Censor/Elder) (elected 195)
• Lucius Licinius Lucullus (elected 151 BC)
• Gaius Marius (elected 107 BC, 104 BC-100 BC, 86 BC)
• Gnaeus Mallius Maximus (elected 105 BC)
• Gaius Coelius Caldus (elected 94 BC)
• Marcus Tullius Cicero (elected 63 BC)
• Gaius Pomponius Graecinus (appointed 16 AD)
• Gaius Cornelius Tacitus (appointed 97 AD)

Topos of the "New Man"

The literary theme of Homo novus, or "how the lowly-born but inherently worthy man may properly rise to eminence in the world" was the topos of Seneca's influential Epistle XLIV,^[3] and— at the endpoint of Late Antiquity— a subject in Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy (iii, vi). In the Middle Ages Dante's Convivio (book IV) and Petrarch's De remediis utriusque fortunae (I.16; II.5) take up the subject, and Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale.

In its Christian renderings, the theme suggested a tension in the scala naturae or great chain of being, one that was produced through the agency of Man's free will.^[4]

The theme came naturally to Renaissance humanists who were often homines novi^[5] rising by their own wits in a network of noble courts that depended on the highly literate new men to run increasingly complicated chancelries and create the cultural propaganda that was a contemporary vehicle for noble fame, and that consequently offered a kind of intellectual cursus honorum. In the fifteenth century Buonaccorso da Montemagno's Dialogus de vera nobilitate treated of the "true nobility" inherent in the worthy individual; Poggio Bracciolini also wrote at length De nobilitate, stressing the Renaissance view of human responsibility and effectiveness that are at the heart of Humanism: sicut virtutis ita et nobilitatis sibi quisque existit auctor et opifex^[6] Briefer summaries of the theme were to be found in Francesco Patrizi, De institutionae republicae (VI.1), and in Sánchez de Arévalo's encyclopedic Speculum vitae humanae. In the sixteenth century these and new texts came to be widely printed and distributed. Sánchez de Arévalo's Speculum was first printed at Rome, 1468, and there are more than twenty fifteenth-century printings; German, French and Spanish translations were printed. Jerónimo Osório da Fonseca's De nobilitate (Lisbon 1542, and seven reprintings in the sixteenth century), stressing propria strennuitas ("one's own determined striving") received an English translation in 1576.

The Roman figure most often cited as an exemplum is Gaius Marius, whose speech of self-justification was familiar to readers from the set-piece in Sallust's Bellum Iugurthinum, 85; the most familiar format in the Renaissance treatises is a dialogue that contrasts the two sources of nobility, with the evidence weighted in favour of the "new man".

Notes

External links

• Dictionary of the History of Ideas: "Renaissance Idea of the Dignity of Man"

Further reading

• Wiseman, T.P. New Men in the Roman Senate, 139 B.C.-14 A.D ((Oxford Classical and Philosophical Monographs) New York: Oxford University Press) 1971. Wiseman treats the phenomenon in the broader sense, of senators from families of non-senatorial rank, and the political realities.

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