Orders and ladders

Four service hierarchies ran side by side in the Roman empire, and a person's place in one said almost nothing about their place in another. This page sets them out together — senatorial, equestrian, municipal-and-colonial, and the emperor's own household — at the same scale, from the same kind of evidence, with the same rules about what may be counted.

The rule this page follows. A rung shows a number only where a source states one. Where the sources order the grades but never count them — the whole familia Caesaris column, most of the municipal one — the space is left visibly empty. An empty cell here is a finding about the evidence, not a gap in the research.

Width bars encode one unit only — posts held at one time, empire-wide — so they appear on the senatorial and equestrian rungs alone. Per-town and per-magistrate counts carry a number but no bar.

Crossings

The four ladders were not sealed. These are the movements between them for which there is a text — an individual who crossed, a law that regulated the crossing, or a title that appears on both sides of a boundary. Nothing here is a general tendency inferred from silence.

Money

The one axis on which all four orders can be compared directly, because three of the four sources state sums in the same unit. It is also the axis on which the distance between them is starkest.

What this axis is and is not

Method & limits

Apparatus

Every figure and quotation on this page, with its source, page and confidence tier. Sortable by order.