As regards the rating of the highest class, the elder Pliny[521] states it at 110,000 asses, which may be a copyist’s error for 100,000 or for 120,000; the estimate of Paulus Diaconus[522] is 120,000 and of Gellius[523] 125,000. If the manuscripts have correctly preserved these numbers, they may represent computations based on a varying number of iugera, from twenty-two to twenty-five[524] at the rate of 5000 asses a iugerum—a valuation which may have been given in the original annalistic source (Fabius Pictor). From the fact that Pliny assigns this rating to Servius as author, and that Gellius speaks of it in the past, we must infer that it was not due to a relatively late change. Indeed the rating must have remained unaltered to the time of Polybius,[525] who states that those appraised at 10,000 drachmas wore the cuirass—according to Livy[526] and Dionysius,[527] the distinctive equipment of the first class.[528] In the same age the Voconian law, 169, provided that a man registered by the censors as worth 100,000 asses or more should not bequeath his property to a woman.[529] While speaking in favor of the measure the elder Cato expounded the distinction between the classici and those who were “infra classem.”[530] Strictly following Cato’s definition, Gellius[531] explains the classici as those of the first class in contrast with the members of the lower classes, who are infra classem. Evidently the classici are to be identified with those rated at 100,000 asses, as given by Gaius.[532] The sum of 100,000 sesterces, in place of asses, represented by later writers[533] as the one fixed by this law, is due either to a late interpretation or to an amendment.[534] The minimal qualification of the first class must therefore have continued unchanged from 269 to the passing of the Voconian law, 169, and the composition of the _History_ of Polybius.[535] From the latter event to the tribuneship of Tiberius Gracchus little time was left for an increase, which certainly the Gracchi and their successors would take no interest in bringing about. Further depreciation in the weight of the _as_, by the reduction to a half ounce through the Papirian law of 89,[536] had no effect on the valuation, as the standard was the silver sesterce, the _as_ having merely the fiduciary value of a quarter sesterce. Apart from the accounts of Livy and Dionysius already considered, no reference is made to the valuation of the intermediate classes, unless it be a passage in Livy[537] to the effect that freedmen possessing country estates worth at least 30,000 sesterces were enrolled in the rural tribes by the censors of 169, which is interpreted by Mommsen[538] to refer to the qualification of the second class. This is true if, as has been assumed above, the censors still reckoned two and a half asses to the sesterce.[539] VII. _Belot’s Theory as to the Ratings_