plebs
plebs,the name given to the mass of Roman citizens, as distinct from the privileged patricians, perhaps related to the Greek term for the masses, plēthos. A modern hypothesis that the plebs was racially distinct from the patricians is not supported by ancient evidence; and the view of some ancient writers (Cicero (Marcus Tullius) Rep 2. 16; Dionysius Halicarnassius 2. 9; Plutarch Romulus 13) that the plebeians were all clients of the patricians in origin may simply be an overstatement of the truism that clients were plebeians. Although we can confidently believe in the differentiation of an aristocracy of wealthier and more powerful families in the regal period, a clear-cut distinction of birth does not seem to have become important before the foundation of the republic, except perhaps in the field of religion, where the view that the plebeians did not originally have gentes, lineages (Livy 10. 8....
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