Plebs Sentence Examples

The territory of Veii was three years afterwards divided among the Roman plebs.

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.

When the number of flamens was raised from three to fifteen, those already mentioned were entitled majores, in contradistinction to the other twelve, who were called minores, as connected with less important deities, and were chosen from the plebs.

Such a distinction of caste is regarded by Ballanche as the original state of historical society; and history, as a whole, he considers to have followed the same course as that taken by the Roman plebs in its attempts to attain equality with the patriciate.

Maybe I can get used to waiting along with all the other plebs.

Subsequently he became quaestor in Asia and tribune of the plebs in Rome.

Further, C. Scribonius Curio, Caesar's general in Africa, had openly proposed, 50 B.C., when tribune of the plebs, that Numidia should be sold to colonists, and the king reduced to a private station.

The spectators were seated in its terraces; women and plebeians (plebs) were confined to the topmost tier of seats.

The Roman patricians, the true Roman populus, appear at our first sight of them as a body democratic in its own constitution, but standing out as an order marked by very substantial privileges indeed from the other body, the plebs, also democratic in its own constitution, but in every point of honour and power the marked inferior of the populus.

Sparta to the last remained what Rome was at the beginning, a city with a populus (8,uos) but no plebs.

But during his tenure of power all the magistrates of the people were regarded as his subordinates; and it was even held that the right of assistance (auxilium), furnished by the tribunes of the plebs to members of the citizen body, should not be effectively exercised when the state was under this type of martial law.

The body politic consisted, after as before, of the king and the whole mass of Magyar freemen or nobles, descendants of Arpad's warriors, theoretically all equal in spite of growing inequalities of wealth and power, who constituted the populus; privileges were granted by the king to foreign immigrants in the cities, and the rights of nobility were granted to non-Magyars for special services; but, in general, the non-Magyars were ruled by the royal governors as subject races, forming - in contradistinction to the " nobles "- the mass of the peasants, the misera con/ribuens plebs upon whom until 1848 nearly the whole burden of taxation fell.

The manner in which he turned against his former associates (although he probably had no choice in the matter) alienated the sympathies of the plebs; and Marius, feeling that his only chance of rehabilitation lay in war, left Rome for Asia, where he endeavoured to provoke Mithradates to hostilities.

The assumption that Latin was properly the language of the Latian plain and of the Plebs at Rome, which the conquering patrician nobles learnt from their subjects, and substituted for their own kindred but different Safine idiom, renders easier to understand the borrowing of a number of words into Latin from some dialect (presumably Sabine) where the velars had been labialized; for example, the very common word bos, which in pure Latin should have been *vos.

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.

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.

Raised by Caesar's influence to the offices of quaestor, augur, and tribune of the plebs, he supported the cause of his patron with great energy, and was expelled from the senate-house when the Civil War broke out.

On the contrary, in respect of powers the tribunes of the plebs stood on a level with the consuls.

They were the true populus Romanus, alongside of whom grew up a secondary Roman people, the plebs or commons.

As new settlers came, as the people of conquered towns were moved to Rome, as the character of Romans was granted to some allies and forced upon some enemies, this plebs, sharing some but not all of the rights of citizens, became a non-privileged order alongside of a privileged order.

A series of struggles raised this new people, the plebs, to a level with the old people, the populus.

The plebs, like the English commons, contained families differing widely in rank and social position, among them those families which, as soon as an artificial barrier broke down, joined with the patricians to form the new older settlement, a nobility which had once been the whole people, was gradually shorn of all exclusive privilege, and driven to share equal rights with a new people which had grown up around it.

The four Ionic tribes at Athens seem to have answered very closely to the three patrician tribes at Rome; but the Athenian demos grew up in a different way from the Roman plebs.

On the whole it seems most likely that, while the kernel of the Roman plebs was rural or belonged to the small towns admitted to the Roman franchise, the Attic demos, largely at least, though doubtless not wholly, arose out of the mixed settlers who had come together in the city, answering to the p rotKot of later times.

The Spartans answer to the patricians, the 7reploLKOC to the plebs; the helots are below the position of plebs or demos.

The so-called cities (7rbXas) of the TEpioucot answered pretty well to the local plebeian tribes; the difference is that the 7repioLKOC never became a united corporate body like the Roman plebs.

Only at Rome, where there was a plebs to be striven against, these distinctions seem to have had a tendency to die out, while at Sparta they seem to have had a tendency to widen.

The plebs did not gather round the patres, neither were they conquered by the patres; the patres were developed by natural selection out of the plebs, or, more strictly, out of the ancient populus.

Milo was tribune of the plebs in 57 B.C. He took a prominent part in bringing about the recall of Cicero from exile, in spite of the opposition of Clodius.

Cicero and Livy bear testimony to the disappearance of a free plebs from the country districts and its replacement by gangs of slaves working on great estates.

Thus has been preserved an absolutely unique historical document of great importance, recounting (I) the numerous public offices and honours conferred on him, (2) his various benefactions to the state, to the plebs and to his soldiers, and (3) his military and administrative services to the empire.

Presently other settlers, perhaps not always Greek, gathered round the original Syracusan people; they formed a distinct body, Siiµos or plebs, personally free, but with an inferior political franchise or none at all.

In 495 he was consul, and his cruel enforcement of the laws of debtor and creditor, in opposition to his milder colleague, P. Servilius Priscus, was one of the chief causes of the "secession" of the plebs to the Sacred Mount.

The decemvirate, one of the triumphs of the plebs, could hardly have been abolished by that body, but would naturally have been overthrown by the patricians.

As Romulus and Numa represent the Ramnes and Tities, so, in order to complete the list of the four traditional elements of the nation, Tullus was made the representative of the Luceres, and Ancus the founder of the Plebs.

Of the two latter titles, the first is derived from the name of Venus Genetrix, the ancestress of the Julian house, the second indicates that the colonists were drawn from the plebs Urbana.

It was, therefore, a word that might be employed to denote an organized gathering of a portion of the Roman people such as the plebs, and in this sense is contrasted with comitia, which when used strictly should signify an assembly of the whole people.

The organization which gave rise to the comitia centuriata was the result of the earliest steps in the political emancipation of the plebs.

But its aristocratic organization, based as this was on property qualifications which gave the greatest voting power to the richest men, prevented it from being a fitting channel for the expression of plebeian claims. Hence the plebs adopted a new political organization of their own.

The tribunate called into existence a purely plebeian assembly, firstly, for the election of plebeian magistrates; secondly, for jurisdiction in cases where these magistrates had been injured; thirdly, for presenting petitions on behalf of the plebs through the consuls to the comitia centuriata.

The stages of the process (marked by the Valerio-Horatian laws of 449 B.C., the Publilian law of 339 B.C., and the Hortensian law of 287 B.C.) are unknown; but it is probable that the two first of the laws progressively weakened the discretionary power of senate and consuls in admitting such petitions; and that the Hortensian law fully recognized the right of resolutions of the plebs (plebiscita) to bind the whole community.

Its utterances (plebiscite) had the full force of law; it elected the tribunes of the plebs and the plebeian aediles, and it pronounced judgment on the penalties which they proposed.

If the judices here mentioned are the centumviri, it is clear that they formed a tribunal which represented the interests of the plebs.

Hence the plebs had an interest in securing their decisions against undue influence.

The only other central authority in the state was the king's council or court (Pend, witan, plebs, concilium).

Their political constitutions were aristocratic; that is, the franchise was confined to the descendants of the original settlers, round whom an excluded body (Ffflos or plebs) was often growing up. The ancient kingship was perhaps kept on or renewed in some of the Siceliot and Italiot towns; but it is more certain that civil dissensions led very early to the rise of tyrants.

In 462 B.C. a tribune proposed that the appointment of a commission to draw up a code expressing the legal principles of the administration was necessary to secure for the plebs a hold over magisterial caprice.

But their rule then became violent and tyrannical, and they fell before the fury of the plebs, though for some reason, not easily understood, they continued to have the support of the patricians.

The priestly board of decemvirs (sacris faciundis) was an outcome of the claim of the plebs to a share in the administration of the state religion.

It superseded Babylon as the industrial focus of Babylonia and counted some 600,000 inhabitants (plebs urbana) according to Pliny, N.H.

The logical consequence of this view is that the plebs as an order in the state is of considerably later growth than the beginning of the city, the patricians being originally the only freemen and the only citizens.

It may therefore be assumed that long before the clients obtained the right to hold land in their own names and appear in the courts in their own persons there was a free plebs existing alongside of the patricians enjoying limited rights of citizenship. But it is equally certain that before the time of Servius Tullius the rights and duties of citizenship were practically exercised only by the members of the patrician clans.

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.

Admission to the higher magistracies carried with it admission to the senate, and by the close of the struggle (about 300 B.C.) the political privilege of the two orders was equalized, with the exception of certain disabilities which, originally devised to break the political monopoly of the order, continued to be attached to the patricians after the victory of the plebs.