The essays collected in this volume investigate the mechanisms of social inclusion and exclusion of the elites in the Roman world, as they emerge from the documentary bases and the manuscript tradition. In the reconstruction of the dynamics of mobility - ascent, affirmation, decline- of some families of senators, equites and curiales of particular prestige attested between the first imperial age and Late Antiquity, one never misses the red thread of the ductile and powerful Roman pragmatism of government capable to devise and model legal criteria and instruments and ideological to ensure consensus and longevity at the most mighty empire of classical antiquity.