[221qqwe]

It's interesting that options for Patricians were so severely restricted. After Questorship 2 out 4 Aedile spots were reserved for Plebians and of course they were also barred from being elected as Peoples's Tribunes (10 other spots).

Seems like a form of ancient "affirmative action". I guess it's more likely that were able to just skip a step and jump straight to Praetor and the weren't that many Patricians left by the late republic. Then again it's interesting that these laws were instituted in the first place (IIRC one the Consuls had to be a Plebian as well).

[HDMI_Cable]

I guess the real question is whether those offices were proportionate to the amount of patricians. If there were only 100 patrician families, and by the Middle Republic many of those families had died out, then perhaps the patricians remaining would have found those offices sufficient (even though they shared them with plebians).

[whakim]

These restrictions originated during the Struggle of the Orders, when the patrician/plebeian distinction was extremely important (at least as far as we can tell - most of our sources for this period were writing much later). By the middle and late Republic (the period which TFA mostly covers), many of the old patrician families seem to have declined making the restrictions much less relevant.