... ever experienced —in the crisis after the battle of Cannae—they cancelled the quite legally conducted election of the officer who was in all respects the ablest—the plebeian Marcellus—to the consulship vacated by the death of the patrician Paullus, solely on account of his plebeianism. At the same time it is a significant token of the nature even of this reform that the right of precedence in voting was withdrawn only from the nobility, not from those of the highest rating; the right of prior voting withdrawn from the equestrian centuries ... — The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen