Novus homo
A Roman man first in his family to reach the Senate or consulship.
Novus homo (plural: novi homines or homines novi) 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. The concept was notable because it marked a break from the traditional restriction of high office to patricians, and later to established noble families.
History
In the Early Republic, both Senate membership and the consulship were traditionally limited to patricians. During the Conflict of the Orders, plebeians gained access to these offices, making all newly elected plebeians novi homines. Over time, some plebeian families became as entrenched as patricians, and novi homines grew rarer. By the First Punic War, it was a sensation that novi homines were elected consul 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 to be consul in more than thirty years. By the Late Republic, the distinction between orders faded, and a new elite of nobiles—those with direct male-line descent from a consul—emerged.
Topos of the "new man"
The literary theme of the homo novus—how the lowly born but inherently worthy man may properly rise to eminence—was the subject of Seneca's Epistle XLIV. In Late Antiquity, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy (iii, vi) took it up, and in the Middle Ages it appeared in Dante's Convivio (book IV), Petrarch's De remediis utriusque fortunae (I.16; II.5), and Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale. Christian renderings of the theme suggested a tension in the scala naturae, or great chain of being, produced through Man's free will. The theme naturally appealed to Renaissance humanists, who were often homines novi rising by their own wits in noble courts that depended on literate new men to run chancelries and create cultural propaganda, offering a kind of intellectual cursus honorum. In the fifteenth century, Buonaccorso da Montemagno's Dialogus de vera nobilitate treated true nobility inherent in the worthy individual; Poggio Bracciolini's De nobilitate stressed human responsibility and effectiveness, stating that each person is the author and maker of his own nobility and virtue. Briefer treatments appeared in Francesco Patrizi's De institutionae republicae (VI.1) and Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo's Speculum vitae humanae. In the sixteenth century, these and new texts were widely printed and distributed; Sánchez de Arévalo's Speculum, first printed at Rome in 1468, saw over twenty fifteenth-century printings and translations into German, French, and Spanish. Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier (1528) discussed the requirement that a courtier be noble (I.XIV-XVI), and was translated into French, Spanish, English, Latin, and other languages. Jerónimo Osório da Fonseca's De nobilitate (Lisbon 1542, with seven sixteenth-century reprintings) stressed propria strennuitas, or one's own determined striving, and received an English translation in 1576. The Roman figure most often cited as an exemplum was Gaius Marius, whose speech of self-justification was familiar from Sallust's Bellum Jugurthinum, 85. The most common format in Renaissance treatises was a dialogue contrasting the two sources of nobility, with evidence weighted in favor of the new man.
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