As for the clients invited to Calvus’s dinner, if the fare is plainer than on the night of a high banquet, there is at least no insulting discrimination. A decent patron and patrona are bound to show themselves “friends” of their clients and to keep up a pretence of democratic manners. But as stated earlier (see p. 120), many a vulgar plutocrat, feeling that he has paid good money to get a proper retinue to follow him to the Forum, delights to insult his clients’ feelings when he invites them. The host enjoys his fine white loaf, while the client’s is almost too hard to break; the host a splendid lobster garnished with asparagus, the client “a crab on a tiny plate hemmed in by half an egg”; the lord “noble mushrooms,” the client “toadstools of doubtful quality,”--and all other treatment is to match. Yet such is the servility and pettiness of many that they will endure all this and worse merely in order to boast the next day of “last night when I dined with my friend the senator----!” “You think yourself a citizen and the guest of a grandee,” cries the indignant poet. “_He_ thinks, and he’s nearly right, that you’ve been captured by the fine smell from his kitchen.” Clientage then is a typical institution of imperial Rome--a means for letting rich men flatter their desire for a huge company of obsequious attendants by trading on the wretched ambition of so many to appear to be on familiar terms with the great. It multiplies the horde of shabby-genteel persons around the city, and the vast number of those who flee from their greatest aversion--honest work. =130. The Decurions: the Notables of the Chartered Cities.=--Above the run of clients or even of the better plebeians is the actual nobility. Strictly speaking only the senators and equites are reckoned in this group, but always in Rome are sojourning a certain number of other men who hold themselves decidedly better than any plebeians--the _decurions_ from the enfranchised towns covering all Italy and dotted over the entire Empire.[71] The decurions are the notables of the smaller chartered cities. In their own communities they are local senators and enjoy in a small way the position of an actual Senator in Rome.[72] Nobody can be elected decurion without a reasonable property qualification, in many cities 100,000 sesterces ($4000), and from their body of wealthy dignitaries the local public assemblies still elect (even under the Empire) city magistrates, duumvirs, ædiles, etc., who take the place in each community of the old consuls and censors of Republican Rome.