Origin
According to Livy, the first 100 men appointed as senators by Romulus were referred to as "fathers" (patres), and the descendants of those men became the Patrician class. The patricians were distinct from the plebeians because they had wider political influence, at least in the times of the Republic. As the middle and late Republic saw this influence gradually stripped, non-patricians (i.e. plebeians) were granted equal rights on a range of areas, and quotas of officials, including one of the two consulships, were exclusively reserved for plebeians.
Read more about this topic: Patrician (ancient Rome)
Famous quotes containing the word origin:
“Someone had literally run to earth
In an old cellar hole in a byroad
The origin of all the family there.
Thence they were sprung, so numerous a tribe
That now not all the houses left in town
Made shift to shelter them without the help
Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The origin of storms is not in clouds,
our lightning strikes when the earth rises,
spillways free authentic power:
dead John Brown’s body walking from a tunnel
to break the armored and concluded mind.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)
“The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.”
—Georges Bataille (1897–1962)