Pliny: Natural History, Vol. IX (Loeb)

PLINY: NATURAL HISTORY

31 admitted to this duty, and the regulation has survived to the present day that no one newly admitted to citizenship shall serve as a justice on one of the panels. The panels themselves also were distinguished by various names, as being of the tribuni aerarii tribunes of the treasury, and of the selected, and of the justices. Moreover, beside these, nine hundred others were named, selected from the whole body to guard the ballot-boxes at the elections. This order too was divided by a proud usurpation of titles, since one man would call himself one of the nine hundred, another one of the select, another a tribune.

32 VIII. Finally, in the ninth year of the principate of Tiberius the second Roman Emperor, the Equestrian order was unified, and a regulation was established regarding the authority of the rings in the consulship of Gaius Asinius Pollio and Gaius Antistius Vetus, in the 775th year since the foundation of the city. A matter that may surprise us is that this was done for a virtually futile reason: when Gaius Sulpicius Galba, seeking youthful fame in the eyes of the emperor by punishing tavern-keepers, complained in the senate that peddling tradesmen charged with that offense commonly defended themselves with their rings. For this reason, it was decreed that no one should have the right to wear the gold ring unless he were himself a free-born man, whose father and paternal grandfather had also been free-born, and whose census had been 400,000 sesterces Roman silver coins, and who had sat in the fourteen rows under the Julian law regarding the theater.

33 Afterward, people began to flock to obtain this badge.

A.D. 14-37.

A.D. 22.