The honours and powers of the provincial council were long sufficient to compensate the decurio for the heavy demands made upon his generosity. To all but comparatively few the career of imperial office and distinction was closed. His own town became each man’s “patria,” as Como was even to a man like Pliny, who played so great a part in the life of the capital.(1219) There is the ring of a very genuine public spirit and a love for the local commonwealth in a host of the inscriptions of that age.(1220) The vastness and overwhelming grandeur of a world-wide Empire, in which the individual citizen was a mere atom, made men crave for any distinction which seemed to raise them above the grey flat level which surrounds a democratic despotism. And even the ordinary decurio had some badges to mark him off from the crowd. The pompous honorific titles of the Lower Empire, indeed, had not come into vogue. But the Curial had a place of honour at games and festivals, a claim to a larger share in the distributions of money by private benefactors, exemption, as one of the _honestiores_, from the more degrading forms of punishment, the free supply of water from the public sources,(1221) and other perquisites and honours, which varied in different localities. The powers of the Curia were also very considerable. The duumvirs indeed possessed extensive prerogatives which strong men may have sometimes strained.(1222) But there was a right of appeal to the Curia from judicial decisions of the duumvirs in certain cases. And their control of games and festivals, and of the finances of the community, was limited by the necessity of consulting the Curia and of carrying out its orders.(1223) In the _lex Ursonensis_ we find a long list of matters on which the duumvirs were obliged to take their instructions from the Curia.(1224) The quorum needed for a valid decision varied in different places. In the election of a patron a quorum of two-thirds of the decurions was legally required.(1225) The names of the duoviri appeared at the head of every curial decree, as those of the consuls in every senatusconsultum.
After the local aristocracy of curial rank came, in order of social precedence, members of the knightly class and the order of the Augustales. In the latter half of the first century equestrian rank had been conferred with perhaps too lavish a hand. And satire was never tired of ridiculing these sham aristocrats, Bithynian knights as they were called, often of the lowest origin, who on public occasions vulgarly asserted their mushroom rank.(1226) In particular, the army contributed many new knights to the society of the provincial towns. A veteran, often of humble birth, who had risen to the first place among the sixty centurions of a legion, was, on his discharge with a good pension, sometimes raised to equestrian rank. He frequently returned to his native place, where he became a personage of some mark. Such men, along with old officers of higher grade, frequently appear in the inscriptions invested with priesthoods and high magistracies,(1227) and were sometimes chosen as patrons of the community.(1228) Many of them were undoubtedly good and public-spirited men, with the peculiar virtues which the life of the Roman camp engendered. But some of their class also displayed that coarse and brutal self-assertion, and that ignorant contempt for the refinement of culture, on which Persius and Juvenal poured their scorn.(1229)