nobiles

Roman nobility. When the plebeians obtained the right to hold the consulship, the exclusively patrician nobility gradually gave way to the a mixed patricio-plebeian nobility. A family became nobilis, or ennobled, when one of its members was consul, and this distinction made it easier for subsequent members of the family to gain office.

Thus, through the last two centuries of the Roman Republic, the consulship was dominated by a comparatively small number of families. Newcomers could break into the circle (including the censor Cato, the consul Marius, and the orator Cicero), but they almost always needed the support of at least some nobiles. Under the principate the political importance of the nobiles declined sharply, and the old families had mostly died out or become insignificant by the time of the emperor Vespasian (reigned AD 69–79) who was himself of non-noble birth. Galba (AD 68–69) was the last direct descendant of a republican noble family to be emperor.