BOOK XXXIII. vii. 30-viii. T^2 



admitted to tliis duty ; and the regulation has 

 survived to the present day that nobody newly 

 admitted to citizenship shall serve as a justice 011 one 

 of the panels. The panels themselves also were 

 distinguished by various designations, as consisting 

 of TriJDunes of the Money," Selected Members and 

 Justices. Moreover beside these there were those 

 styled the Nine Hundred, selected from the whole 

 body as keepers of the ballot-boxes at elections. 

 And the proud adoption of titles had made divisions 

 in this order also, one person styHng himself a 

 member of the Nine Hundred, another one of the 

 Select, another a Tribune. 



\TII. Finally in the ninth year in office of the 

 Emperor Tiberius the Order of Knights was united a.d. 14-3; 

 into a single body ; and in the Consulship of Gaius ^D- 22. 

 Asinius Polho and Gaius Antistius Vetus, in the 

 775th year since the foundation of Rome, a regulation 

 was estabUshed authorizing who should wear rings ; 

 the motive for this, a thing that may surprise us, 

 was virtually the futile reason that Gaius Sulpicius 

 Galba had made a youthful effort to curry favour 

 \nth the emperor ^ by enacting penalties for keeping 

 eating-houses and had made a complaint in the 

 senate that peddling tradesmen when charged with 

 that offence commonly protected themselves by 

 means of their rings.'' Consequently a rule was 

 made that nobody should have this right except one 

 who was himself a free-born man whose father and 

 father's father had been free-born also, and who had 

 been rated as the owner of 400,000 sesterces ^ and had 

 been entitled under the JuHan law as to the theatre 

 to sit in the fourtcen front rows of seats. Sub- 

 sequently people began to apply in crowds for this 



27 



