ABSTRACT
Few will doubt the importance of social mobility as a significant aspect of life in Roman Italy during the principate. The rise of members of the lower classes, especially freedmen, was a commonplace in Roman literature, and even a brief look at the epigraphic evidence conveys a similar impression of strong mobility in the towns of imperial Italy. There has been a long tradition, going back to the tirades of the Roman satirists against wealthy freedmen, for perceiving these examples of social mobility as departures from the normal and-when appearing in greater numbers-as signs of general instability and change in society. Imperial Italy has thus been construed as a virtual battleground between nobles and newcomers, the latter forcing their way into the domains of the old aristocracies. The paradigmatic examples of Italian municipalities struck by such turmoil have been provided by Pompeii and Ostia. A deep crisis has been traced in the last decades of Pompeii, which saw the old élite, after generations of stable rule, being overtaken by new families risen from humble, often servile, backgrounds. Likewise in Ostia the dominance of an old aristocracy seems to have been broken under the Flavians, when outsiders and descendants of freedmen entered the ordo decurionum.
