Yet the Augustales, in spite of the vulgar ostentation and self-assertion, which have characterised similar classes of the _nouveaux riches_ in all ages, were a very important and useful order. They overspread the whole Roman world in the West. Their monuments have been traced, not only in almost every town in Italy, and in great provincial capitals, like Lyons or Tarraco, but in Alpine valleys and lonely outposts of civilisation on the edge of the Sahara.(1234) Their special religious duties involved considerable expense, from which no doubt the more aristocratic class were glad to be relieved. They had to bear the cost of sacrifices and festivities on certain days in honour of dead emperors. They had to pay an entrance fee on admission to the college, which the ambitious among them would often lavishly exceed.(1235) They were organised on the lines of other colleges, with patrons, quinquennales, and other officials. They had their club-houses where their banquets were regularly held, they possessed landed property, and had their common places of burial.(1236) But their expenditure and their interests were by no means limited to their own immediate society. They regarded themselves, and were generally treated as public officials, ranking next to the magistrates of the Curia. They had the right to wear the purple-bordered toga, and to have lictors attending them in the streets.(1237) Places of honour were reserved for them at the games and festivals. Although as a class they were not eligible for a seat in the Curia, or for the municipal magistracies, yet the _ornamenta_, the external badges and honours attached to these offices, were sometimes granted even to freedmen who had done service to the community. Thus an Augustal who had paved a road at Cales received the _ornamenta_ of a decurio.(1238) And another, for his munificence to Pompeii, by a decree of the Curia, was awarded the use of the _bisellium_, a seat of honour which was usually reserved for the highest dignitaries.(1239) But the ornaments and dignities of their own particular college became objects of pride and ambition. Thus a man boasts of having been made _primus Augustalis perpetuus_, by a decree of the Curia.(1240) A worthy of Brundisium received from the Curia a public funeral, with the ornaments and insignia of an Augustal.(1241) In this way, in a society highly conventional, and dominated by caste feeling, the order of the Augustales provided both a stimulus and a reward for the public spirit of a new class, powerful in its wealth and numbers, but generally encumbered by the heritage of a doubtful origin. It was a great elevation for a man, who, perhaps, had been sold as a boy in some Syrian slave market into the degradation of a minion, and who had emerged, by petty savings or base services, into the comparative freedom of a tainted or despised trade, to find himself at last holding a conspicuous rank in his municipality, and able to purchase