noun
adjective
definition
Of or concerning the plebs, the common citizens of ancient Rome.
definition
Of or concerning the common people.
definition
Common, particularly vulgar, crude, coarse, uncultured.
Examples of plebeian in a Sentence
Such an immigrant, therefore, must have become at once a free plebeian citizen of Rome.
Incidentally this involved an extension of plebeian privilege in two directions.
But the Kabuki-za and its yakusha (actors) remained always a plebeian institution.
If so, there would be no place in Athens for those great plebeian houses, once patrician in some other commonwealth, out of which the later Roman nobilitas was so largely formed.
The nobles not only had privileges of rank and dignity, but substantial power over the plebeian or peasant class (macehualli).
Plebeian handicrafts assert their right to be represented on an equality with learned professions and wealthy corporations.
He probably also instituted the "plebeian" games.
The agricultural plebeian of old Rome and the feudal noble of contemporary Europe were both of them at Venice impossible characters.
Of one family, of the plebeian Claudian gens, only a single member, Gaius Claudius Cicero, tribune in 454 B.C., is known.
The proud Arabic lords could not acquiesce in paying to a plebeian...
The distinction between patrician and plebeian, domestic slavery, and beating and slicing to death were abolished.
The election of a plebeian to the office for the first time in 337 was certainly opposed by the consul who presided at the election, but there appears to have been no legal obstacle to it.
For these settlers he has to find British wives, and to this end collects 11,000 noble and 60,000 plebeian virgins, who are wrecked on their passage across.
Whether we regard him as a priest who published poem after poem in praise of an adored mistress, as a plebeian man of letters who conversed on equal terms with kings and princes, as a solitary dedicated to the love of nature, as an amateur diplomatist treating affairs of state with pompous eloquence in missives sent to popes and emperors, or again as a traveller eager for change of scene, ready to climb mountains for the enjoyment of broad prospects over spreading champaigns; in all these divers manifestations of his peculiar genius we trace some contrast with the manners of the, 4th century, some emphatic anticipation of the 16th.
The pureblood Ruman population, noble and plebeian, inhabited the cities and towns or larger villages; the peasantry were mostly of Little Russian and Hungarian race, and were in a servile condition.
We see indeed faint traces of distinction among the patricians themselves, which may lead us to guess that the equality of all patricians may have been won by struggles of unrecorded days, not unlike those which in recorded days brought about the equality of patrician and plebeian.
That is to say, it consisted of the remains of the old patriciate, together with those plebeian families any members of which had been chosen to curule offices.
Livy could never get rid of the idea that the old struggle between patrician and plebeian was something like the struggle between the nobility and the people at large in the later days of the commonwealth.
Returning home, he was appointed tutor to the sons of Henry II., by one of whom (Charles IX.) he was afterwards made grand almoner (1561) and by the other (Henry III.) was appointed, in spite of his plebeian origin, commander of the order of the Holy Ghost.
Since the plebeian element in the state had an immense numerical preponderance over the patrician these disabilities were not widely spread, and seem generally to have been cheerfully borne as the price of belonging to the families still recognized as the oldest and noblest in Rome.
As a man he shows many of the strong qualities of the old Roman plebeian - the aggressive boldness, the intolerance of superiority and privilege, which animated the tribunes in their opposition to the senatorian rule.
Their narrative is unmethodical and inartificial; their style is tame and plebeian; their conception of biography is that of a collection of anecdotes; they have II.
The Ogulnian law in the same year increased the number to nine, five plebeian being added to the four patrician members.
Mummius was the first novas homo of plebeian origin who received a distinctive cognomen for military services.
The Banda-manna saga (1050-1060), the only comedy among the sagas, is also a northern tale; it relates the struggles of a plebeian who gets a chieftancy against the old families of the neighbourhood, whom he successfully outwits; Ol-kofra pattr is a later imitation of it in the same humorous strain.
They looked down on the Syrian, they thought the Berber a lout and a plebeian, they scorned the renegade, and called him a slave and son of a slave.
Behetrias, called plebeian lordships, were districts and townships of peasants who were bound to have a lord, and to make him payments in money or in kind, but who had a varying freedom of choice in electing their lord.
After the war Laelius advanced from plebeian aedile (197) to praetor in Sicily (196) to consul (190 ).
No general law was ever passed to abolish the privileges of the patricians; still less was any law ever passed to abolish the distinction between patrician and plebeian.
While at Rome the distinction of patrician and plebeian was never wiped out, while it remained to the last a legal distinction even when practical privilege had turned the other way, at Athens, after the democracy had reached its full growth, the distinction seems to have had no legal existence whatever.
Yet even in good writers on Roman history the words "patrician" and "plebeian" are often misapplied by being transferred to the later disputes at Rome, in which they are quite out of place.
The process which at Rome gradually gave the plebeian a political advantage over the patrician was carried at Florence to a far greater length at a single blow.
The gens contained a patrician and a plebeian family; the chief representatives of the former were the Pulchri, of the latter the Marcelli (see Marcellus).
These were the inauguration of the rex sacrorum and the flamens, and that abjuration of hereditary worship (detestatio sacrorum) which was made by a man who passed from his clan (gens) either by an act of adrogation (see Roman Law and Adoption) or by transition from the patrician to the plebeian order.
Mommsen that the plebeian order had its sole origin in the clients who attached themselves in a position of semi-freedom to the heads of patrician houses, and gradually evolved a freedom and citizenship of their own (see Patron And Client).
First, it was necessary to unify the plebeian order by putting the legal status of the clients on a level with that of the unattached plebeians; and again enrolment in the army involved registration in the tribes and centuries; and as the army soon developed into a legislative assembly meeting in centuries (comitia centuriata), the whole citizen body, including plebeians, now acquired a share of political power, which had hitherto belonged solely to the patricians.
The proud Arabic lords could not acquiesce in paying to a plebeian like Hajjaj, invested with absolute power by the caliph, the strict obedience he required.
This was the growth of the new nobility of Rome, that body, partly patrician, partly plebeian, to whom the name nobilitas strictly belongs in Roman history.
These were naturally those families which had been patrician in some other Italian city, but which were plebeian at Rome.
But there was still the difference that in the old state of things the plebeian was shut out by law, while in the new state of things no law shut out the new man.
They were originally two in number, called " plebeian " aediles.
Patrician rank seems to have been regarded as a necessary attribute of the princeps; and in two cases we are told that it was conferred upon a plebeian princeps by the senate (Vita Juliani, 3; Macrini, 7) .
Not long after his arrival in Sijistan, Ibn Ash`ath, exasperated by the masterful tone of Hajjaj, the plebeian, towards himself, the high-born, decided to revolt.
Just as the old patricians had striven to keep plebeians out of high offices, so now the new nobles, patrician and plebeian alike, strove to keep "new men," men who had not the jus imaginum, out of high office.
The word "plebeian," in its strict sense, is no more contemptuous than the word commoner !in England.
When one branch of a family was admitted and one shut out we have an analogy to the patrician and plebeian Claudii, though the distinction had come about in quite another way.
The earlier centuries were called sex suiragia (" the six votes"); and at first consisted exclusively of patricians, while those of Servius Tullius were entirely or far the most part plebeian.
In theory, the twelve plebeian centuries were open to all freeborn youths of the age of seventeen, although in practice preference was given to the members of the older families.
Writers, savants, poets, artists, noble and plebeian, layman and cleric, without any previous concert, or obvious connexion, were working towards that ideal of political liberty which was to unite all the Magyars.
More than Naevius and Plautus he represented the pure native element in that literature, the mind and character of Latium, the plebeian pugnacity, which was one of the great forces in the Roman state.