noun
Examples of plebeians in a Sentence
A third statute disqualified plebeians from being elected to canonries or bishoprics.
The distinction, in truth, went on till the advantage turned to the side of the plebeians.
They separated themselves from the mass of the plebeians to form a single body with the surviving patricians.
But we see no sign of the growth of a body made up of patricians and leading plebeians who contrived to keep office to themselves by a social tradition only less strong than positive law.
The Catuli and Metelli, among the proudest nobles of Rome, were plebeians, and as such could not have been chosen to the purely patrician office of interrex, or of Jupiter.
But something like a new nobility presently grew up among the commons themselves; there were popolani grossi at Florence just as there were noble plebeians at Rome.
Though patrician in sympathy, he saw the necessity of making concessions to the plebeians and was instrumental in passing the Licinian laws.
They were created in the same year as the tribunes of the people (494 B.C.), their persons were sacrosanct or inviolable, and (at least after 471) they were elected at the Comitia Tributa out of the plebeians alone.
And it is instructive to observe that when the plebeians extorted their full share of political power they also demanded and obtained admission to every priestly college of political importance, to those, namely, of the pontiffs, the augurs, and the XV viri sacrorum.
At first he was conspicuous for his aristocratic pride and bitter hatred of the plebeians.
When it was decided to elect decemvirs for another year, he who had formerly been looked upon as the champion of the aristocracy, suddenly came forward as the friend of the people, and was himself re-elected together with several plebeians.
But no sooner was the new body in office, than it treated both patricians and plebeians with equal violence, and refused to resign at the end of the year.
By his theory of the disputes between the patricians and plebeians arising from original differences of race he drew attention to the immense importance of ethnological distinctions, and contributed to the revival of these divergences as factors in modern history.
He conquered the Latins, and a number of them he settled on the Aventine formed the origin of the Plebeians.
In the first place the plebeians gained full rights of ownership and transfer, and could thus become freeholders of the land which they occupied and of the appurtenances of this land (res mancipi) .
The office was probably open in quite early times to both patricians and plebeians.
When the number was raised from, two to four in 421 B.C. the office was thrown open to the plebeians.
So popular were the decemvirs that another board of ten was appointed for the following year, some of whom, if the extant list of names is correct, were certainly plebeians.
Five of the decemvirs were patricians, and five plebeians.
We have long known that the connubium was the cause of a long and determined struggle between the patricians and the plebeians in Rome.
From the earliest period known to us the free population of Rome contains two elements, patricians and plebeians, the former class enjoying all political privileges, the latter unprivileged.
At the time of the Servian reforms both branches of the plebs had a plausible claim to recognition as members of the state, the clients as already partial members of the curia and the gees, the unattached plebeians as equally free with the patricians and possessing clans of their own as solid and united as the recognized gentes.
But not only can it be shown that patricians and plebeians coexisted as distinct orders in the Roman state at an earlier date than the evolution of citizenship by the clients.
It has further been established on strong archaeological and linguistic evidence that the long struggle between patricians and plebeians in early Rome was the result of a racial difference between them.
The absurdity of excluding the plebeians from all but a merely theoretical citizenship, based on the negative fact of freedom, seems to have become apparent before the close of the monarchical period.
The aim of the reforms associated with the name of Servius Tullius appears to have been the imposition of the duties of citizenship upon the plebeians.
But when these families had expelled the Tarquins, and formed themselves into an exclusive aristocracy of privilege, the inconsistency between partial privilege and full burdens came to be strongly felt by the plebeians.
The struggle was inaugurated by the plebeians, who in 494 B.C. formed themselves into an exclusive order with annually elected officers (iribuni plebis) and an assembly of their own, and by means of this machinery forced themselves by degrees into all the magistracies, and obtained the coveted right of intermarriage with the patricians.
They were excluded from the tribunate and the council of the plebs, which had become important instruments of government, and were only eligible for one place in the consulship and censorship, while both were open to plebeians.
The cheek-bones are high; the nose inclined to flatness; the mouth thin-lipped and refined among patricians, and wide and full-lipped among plebeians; the ears are small, and the brow fairly well developed.
A persistent opponent of the plebeians, he resisted the proposal of Terentilius Arsa (or Harsa) to draw up a code of written laws applicable equally to patricians and plebeians.
Actual history exhibits the conflict of two great principles, which may be said to be realized in the patricians and plebeians of Rome.
Christian revenged himself by executing the magnate Torben Oxe, who, on very creditable evidence, was supposed to have been Dyveke's murderer, despite the strenuous opposition of Oxe's fellow-peers; and henceforth the king lost no opportunity of depressing the nobility and raising plebeians to power.
This was the age of plebeians, to the great indignation of the duke and peer Saint Simon.
The military The return rule of the marquis de Sgur eliminated the plebeians of feud.2!from the army; while the great lords, drones in the Isin tothe hive, worked with a kind of fever at the enforcement offensive.
But such measures were not attempted, evidently because the wealthy plebeians themselves had no less interest in these abuses than the patricians.
The spectators were seated in its terraces; women and plebeians (plebs) were confined to the topmost tier of seats.
His name is associated with the Licinian or Licinio-Sextian laws (proposed 377, passed 367), which practically ended the struggle between patricians and plebeians.
He entrusted them to the care of two patricians; after 367 B.C. ten custodians were appointed, five patricians and five plebeians; subsequently (probably in the time of Sulla) their number was increased to fifteen.
If the conclusions suggested under Sabini may be accepted as sound we should expect to find the Volsci speaking a language similar to that of the Ligures, whose fondness for the suffix -sco- we have noticed (see Ligures), and identical with that spoken by the plebeians of Rome, and that this branch of Indo-European was among those which preserved the original Indo-European Velars from the labialization which befell them in the speech of the Samnites.
And some offices, chiefly those religious offices which carried no political power with them, always remained the exclusive property of the patricians, because no special law was ever passed to throw them open to plebeians.
During his tribuneship (232 B.C.), in spite of the determined opposition of the senate and his own father, he carried a measure for distributing among the plebeians the alter Gallicus Picenus, an extensive tract of newly-acquired territory to the south of Ariminum (Cicero, De senectute, 4, Brutus, 14).
He erected the Circus Flaminius on the Campus Martius, for the accommodation of the plebeians, and continued the military road from Rome to Ariminum, which had hitherto only reached as far as Spoletium (see Flaminia, Via).
For, on the expulsion of the thirteen from the palace, a council of 124 plebeians created a new magistracy of twelve difensori (defenders), no longer drawn exclusively from the order of the twelve, but composed of five of the popolo minuto, or lowest populace (now first admitted to the government), four of the twelve, and three of the nine.
This comitia must originally have been composed exclusively of patricians; but there is reason to believe that, at an early period of the Republic, it had, in imitation of the centuriate organization, come to include plebeians (see Curia).
Continued agitation to this effect resulted in an agreement in 452 B.C. between patricians and plebeians that decemvirs should be appointed to draw up a code, that during their tenure of office all other magistracies should be in abeyance, that they should not be subject to appeal, but that they should be bound to maintain the laws which guaranteed by religious sanctions the rights of the plebs.
It is significant that both these confidential agents were plebeians.
The plebeians (plebs, plebes) are the complement (from root pleo, fill, see Plebs) of the noble families possessing a genealogy, and include all the free population other than the patricians.
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.
In the first the plebeians strive to obtain relief from laws and customs which were actually oppressive to them, while they were profitable to the patricians.