What was the importance of the patrician class in the Roman Empire?

Question

This is a question that has puzzled me in my research of the history of the Roman Empire.

During the Roman Republic the Patrician class was obviously of paramount importance, & history of the Republic is often taught in terms of the Plebeian class wresting political power from the Patricians. However, following the establishment of the Empire, being a member of the Patrician class was less important than being somehow aligned with the imperial family -- be it the Julio-Claudians, the Flavians, or Antonines.

Augustus had reordered the Roman establishment so that he had some form of control over every possible threat to his rule: over the Senate, the priestly colleges, & especially the military. Moreover, the Patrician class had dwindled in numbers by that point to being as few as 16 in the first century BC (if I remember correctly), & most of them had become relatively impoverished & no longer had members in the Senate. For example, Augustus subsidized the Quinctilii, a Patrician family that had lost its relative wealth over the generations; this was the family the general Varus, who lost the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, belonged to. Almost all of the major priesthoods were staffed mostly, if not entirely, of Plebeian families; not much later, these priesthoods drew from non-Italians to fill out their ranks. Being a Patrician had come to be of marginal importance.

Yet not only Augustus, but later emperors such as Claudius, Vespasian & others, made an effort to replenish the numbers of the Patrician class. For example, the Acilii Glabriones who were Plebeian in the 2nd century BC, had been adlected/elevated into the Patrician class by Marcus Aurelius' time.

So, what practical purpose did the patrician class have in the Empire? Or were the Emperors simply trying to preserve some relic of the Republic for antiquarian reasons?

Answer 1

Good question. I don't claim to know the full answer, but this quote from Mary Beard's SPQR might shed some light.

IN 212 CE the emperor Caracalla decreed that all the free inhabitants of the Roman Empire, wherever they lived, from Scotland to Syria, were Roman citizens. It was a revolutionary decision, which removed at a stroke the legal difference between the rulers and the ruled, and the culmination of a process that had been going on for almost a millennium. More than 30 million provincials became legally Roman overnight.

...

Citizenship, once granted to all, became irrelevant. Over the third century CE, it was the distinction between the honestiores (literally ‘the more honourable’, the rich elite, including veteran soldiers) and the humiliores (literally ‘the lower sort’) that came to matter and to divide Romans again into two groups, with unequal rights formally written into Roman law. It was, for example, only honestiores who were exempted, as all citizens once had been, from particularly cruel or degrading punishments, such as crucifixion or flogging. The ‘lower sort’ of citizens found themselves liable to the kind of penalties that had previously been reserved for slaves and non-citizens. The new boundary between insiders and outsiders followed the line of wealth, class and status.

It sounds like the patrician class persisted by another name. This is about 200 years after Augustus though, so there's a big gap to filled in by another repondent.