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
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Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.”
—Neal Cassady (1926–1968)
“We have got rid of the fetish of the divine right of kings, and that slavery is of divine origin and authority. But the divine right of property has taken its place. The tendency plainly is towards ... “a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.””
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)