So I've been reading SPQR - A history on ancient Rome by Mary Beard and ran across mention of some footwear worn by Patricians that Plebeians were not allowed to wear. I'll include the paragraph below for context. I was wondering if anyone could tell me what this footwear was and why they would find it important that only Patricians could wear it?
In 494 BCE,plagued by problems of debt, the plebeians staged the first of several mass walkouts from the city, a combination of a mutiny and a strike, to try and force reform on the patricians. It worked. For it launched a long series of concessions which gradually eroded all the significant differences between patricians and plebeians and effectively rewrote the political power structure of the city. Two hundred years later there was little to patrician privilege beyond the right to hold a few ancient priesthoods and to wear a particular form of fancy footwear.
She's talking about a particular type of the calceus, the public footwear of the Roman citizen. The calceus was not at all, however, the prerogative only of the patrician order. It was primarily worn by equites and higher, as these were the men engaged in public business, but by definition these are not patricians. There were three types of calceus, the most important of which were the patrician type and the senatorial type. This patrician type is what Beard is talking about. I'm not sure I'd call it "fancy," though, the calceus in all its forms was basically just an ankle boot