Everything about Novus Homo totally explained
Novus homo (or:
homo novus,
Latin for "new man"; plural
novi homines) was the term in
ancient Rome for a man who was the first in his family to serve in the
Roman Senate or, more specifically, to be elected as
consul. When a man entered public life on an unprecedented scale for a high communal office then the term used was
novus civis (plural:
novi cives) or "new citizen."
History
According to tradition, both Senate membership and the consulship were restricted to
patricians. When
plebeians gained the right to this office during the
Conflict of the Orders, all newly-elected plebeians were naturally
novi homines. As time went by,
novi homines became more and more rare as some plebeian families became as entrenched in the Senate as their patrician colleagues. By the time of the
First Punic War, it was already a sensation that
novi homines were elected in two consecutive years (
Gaius Fundanius Fundulus in
243 BC and
Gaius Lutatius Catulus in
242 BC). In
63 BC,
Cicero became the first
novus homo in more than thirty years.
In the late
Roman Republic period, the distinction between the classes became less important. The consuls came from a new elite, the
nobiles (
noblemen), an artificial
aristocracy of all who could demonstrate direct descent in the male line from a consul such families, patrician or plebeian, that had produced a consul tended to reduce the distinction between patricians and plebeians in the late Republic.
List of novi homines
Topos of the "New Man"
The literary theme of
Homo novus, or "how the lowly-born but inherently worthy man may properly rise to eminence in the world" was the
topos of
Seneca's influential Epistle XLIV, and— at the endpoint of
Late Antiquity— a subject in
Boethius'
Consolation of Philosophy (iii, vi). In the Middle Ages
Dante's
Convivio (book IV) and
Petrarch's
De remediis utriusque fortunae (I.16; II.5) take up the subject, and
Chaucer's
Wife of Bath's Tale.
In its Christian renderings, the theme suggested a tension in the
scala naturae or
great chain of being, one that was produced through the agency of Man's
free will.
The theme came naturally to
Renaissance humanists who were often
homines novi rising by their own wits in a network of
noble courts that depended on the highly literate new men to run increasingly complicated chancelries and create the cultural propaganda that was a contemporary vehicle for noble fame, and that consequently offered a kind of intellectual
cursus honorum. In the fifteenth century
Buonaccorso da Montemagno's
Dialogus de vera nobilitate treated of the "true nobility" inherent in the worthy individual;
Poggio Bracciolini also wrote at length
De nobilitate, stressing the Renaissance view of human responsibility and effectiveness that are at the heart of Humanism:
sicut virtutis ita et nobilitatis sibi quisque existit auctor et opifex Briefer summaries of the theme were to be found in
Francesco Patrizi,
De institutionae republicae (VI.1), and in
Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo's encyclopedic
Speculum vitae humanae. In the sixteenth century these and new texts came to be widely printed and distributed. Sánchez de Arévalo's
Speculum was first printed at Rome, 1468, and there are more than twenty
fifteenth-century printings; German, French and Spanish translations were printed.
Jerónimo Osório da Fonseca's
De nobilitate (Lisbon 1542, and seven reprintings in the sixteenth century), stressing
propria strennuitas ("one's own determined striving") received an English translation in 1576.
The Roman figure most often cited as an
exemplum is
Gaius Marius, whose speech of self-justification was familiar to readers from the set-piece in
Sallust's
Bellum Iugurthinum, 85; the most familiar format in the Renaissance treatises is a
dialogue that contrasts the two sources of nobility, with the evidence weighted in favour of the "new man".
Further Information
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