The nobiles are predominant: yet in the last generation of the Free State, after the ordinances of Sulla the Dictator, there were many senators whose fathers had held only the lower magistracies or even new-comers, sons of Roman knights. […] As in its beginning, so in its last generation, the Roman Commonwealth, ‘res publica populi NotesPage=>011 1 P. […] Sulla the Dictator, himself a patrician and a Cornelius, did his best to restore the patriciate, sadly reduced in political power in the previous generation, not so much through Marius as from internal disasters and the rise of dynastic houses of the plebeian nobility. […] Certain of the Lentuli had served under Pompeius in Spain and in the East:2 five consulates in this generation rewarded their sagacity. 3 With these four families was now joined the faction of Cato. […] The province could boast opulent and cultivated natives of dynastic families, Hellenized before they became Roman, whose citizenship, so far from being the recent gift of Caesar, went back to proconsuls a generation or two earlier.