of nobility, which at Rome took the place of the modern title of honour, was of importance as emphasising the distinction between the _nobiles_ and the _ignobiles_, in drawing the plebeian aristocracy closer to the patrician, which before the date of the Licinian laws had been in exclusive possession of this right, and in asserting the hereditary claim to office which the Roman electorate was only too ready to recognise. The acceptance of the claim was less dangerous than it is in most modern states, since primogeniture was not recognised in the transmission of honours,[501] and it was the capable and not the elder son whom the vote of the _comitia_ raised to the curule chair. The claim too might become dimmed by disuse, and the Plebeian whose immediate ancestors had held high rank showed a brighter scutcheon than the Patrician who was connected with a noble _stemma_ by ignoble links.[502] But the Patriciate itself conferred a kind of nobility, and one that, whatever its basis, might have been justified by office, for there could have been few members of the order who could not point to curule ancestors in the past. Although the Plebeian who _first_ secured curule office, and thus ceased to be _ignobilis_, was called a _novus homo_, the designation seems never to have been applied to the member of a patrician _gens_.[503] Nobility, if once secured, could never be lost; but the hereditary claim to the suffrage of the electors was of little avail if unaccompanied by exceptional merit or by wealth. The claims of the latter were in fact given a kind of legal recognition by the rule established about the time of the first Punic war, that the cost of the public games should not be defrayed exclusively by the treasury.[504] The aedileship, whether curule or plebeian, was, as we shall see, not an obligatory step in the ascending scale of the magistracies; but, as it was held before the praetorship and the consulship, it is obvious that the brilliant display given to the people by the occupant of this office would often render fruitless the efforts of his less fortunate competitors, and that this legitimised bribery would exclude from office both the poorer _nobiles_ and the struggling _novus homo_.[505] The idea of a privileged nobility, which closed its ranks to new men, had become fixed by the date of the second Punic war.[506] By the close of that war the old stock had reached its maturity and had begun to decline; and, although men like Cato or Cicero might force themselves to the front by pertinacity and ability, or the belief in privilege might be rudely shaken by the people’s thrusting into the coterie a Varro or a Marius, the aristocrats came to look on the introduction of new blood as a pollution to the order.[507] Time, which purifies all things, had made the slave-blood of the successful Plebeian as blue as that of the descendant of kings by whom he sat.