In Rome, no fortune could turn a plebeian into a patrician
Patrician status in ancient Rome came only by birth. By the late Republic plenty of plebeian senators were just as rich, and some patrician lines had sunk into poverty, but money never changed the label. One ambitious aristocrat, Publius Clodius Pulcher, went the other way and had himself adopted into a plebeian family.
Livy and Cicero tell the same origin story: Romulus named a hundred men to the first Senate, called them fathers, or patres, and their descendants became the patricians. Others think the word marked men who could point to fathers within the original clans that made up the citizen body. Later arrivals were sometimes admitted, including families from Alba Longa after Tullus Hostilius destroyed it, and the Claudii, who came to Rome in 504 BC. Cassius Dio noted that patricians wore laced shoes marked with a letter recalling those first hundred senators.
In the early Republic the gap was wide. Only patricians could become consul, censor or dictator, and every priesthood, including pontifex maximus, was theirs, on the belief that they alone could read the auspices and speak properly with the gods. They also held the best land. The Twelve Tables, written down partly because plebeians demanded to know the law, even banned marriage between the classes.
The long Conflict of the Orders chipped away at those privileges. The plebeians created their own council and tribunes. The Lex Canuleia of 445 BC permitted intermarriage; the Licinian-Sextian laws of 367 BC opened the consulship; a law of 342 BC demanded that one consul be plebeian, though it was often ignored for decades. In 300 BC the Lex Ogulnia admitted plebeians to the augurs, expanding the college from four to nine, and in 287 BC the Lex Hortensia made plebeian assembly decisions binding on everyone.
The result was a strange inversion. The office of tribune of the plebs was closed to patricians, which is why Clodius arranged his adoption. Famous old clans such as the Horatii and Verginii faded, while civil wars and proscriptions pushed other patrician houses to the edge, some surviving only through adoption. Large clans like the Cornelii and Valerii endured into the Principate, and the title lived on as an honour in the Eastern Empire and among the leading families of Venice and Genoa.
Source: Patrician (ancient Rome)
