Patricians

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Patricians

in ancient Rome the term seems originally to have encompassed the entire native population of the clan commune that constituted the Roman people (Populus Romanus Quiritium), as opposed to the plebeians. After the separation of noble aristocratic families from the tribe, the patricians became a clan aristocracy.

Beginning in the sixth century B.C., in the period of the formation of class society and the state, the patricians became the ruling class-estate of the Roman Republic. The economic foundation of their power was the exclusive right to use public lands (the ager publicus). After the plebeians were included in the Roman people and were granted equal rights with the patricians (the beginning of the third century B.C.), the top strata of the patricians—the patriciate—and plebeians merged to form the nobility. Under the empire, a new patriciate developed, consisting of the privileged members of the senatorial estate and natives of Italy and the provinces who were elevated to patrician status by the emperor.

References in periodicals archive ?

Among her topics are the changing social and political position of Florentine patricians from 1530 to 1970, patricians as patrons and collectors, the brokerage activities of Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger and the exchange of cultural gifts, and the patricians' contribution to cultural events the Medici organized for public ceremonies and in honor of visiting guests.

Florentine Patricians and Their Networks: Structures Behind the Cultural Success and the Political Representation of the Medici Court (1600-1660)

Drawing on critical studies of early modern masculinity, Quaintance examines how the textual trafficking of women's bodies, particularly within the circle of writers affiliated with Venetian patrician and poet Domenico Venier (whose entourage included eminent literary figures, including Torquato Tasso and Pietro Aretino), both upheld and resisted gender norms in sixteenth-century Venice, during a period when the boundaries separating puttane, meretrici, and cortigiane remained unclear.

Courtney Quaintance. Textual Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice

In fact, 60 percent of the women investigated by the Avogadori had fathers who were patricians or nobles of the Republic (some were illegitimate daughters), or Venetian cittadini, and 58 per cent came from Venice.

Marriage, Manners and Mobility in Early Modern Venice

Bonus: equestrians (horseback riders); patricians (aristocrats, or people who act like them); consul (government officials who serve in foreign countries, responsible for helping their nation's citizens visiting or working in that country)

On the level: reading an organization chart

So it's off to Britain with Falco, his wife Helena, their two baby daughters, Helena's two patrician brothers, Maia, a nanny with an attitude, and Nux, the dog.

A Body in the Bathhouse

For another, the Roman constitution failed to give equal protection to all Roman citizens, institutionalizing the patrician aristocracy and ensuring that Rome would always have a ruling class.

Lessons of Rome: the rise and fall of the Roman Republic provides lessons that hint at flaws in modern political policies

24) In Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines, 1900-1950, he compared his adopted home to the old patrician societies of Europe: "the scene and its components were patrician rather than aristocratic; .

The reactionary loyalties of John Lukacs

Just as well because in the end even his pathetic patricians rise up to stab their manic ruler to death.

Crazy Caligula is crackling drama; LAST NIGHT'S FIRST NIGHT

Does our people's president, then, clog patricians with leaden taxation?

Founders befuddled. (Up front: news and opinion from independent minds)

Indeed, it can be seen that regular sacrifices made by farmers to their patricians for the village rites have always been small enough to allow for money to be earned and yet, at the same time, symbolically powerful enough to tie individual farms, farmers and herds to the moral economy of the ancestors and to the latters' mythical landscape.

Sacred cows of 'development': the ritual incorporation of a dairy project in the eastern interior of Fiji (c.1980-1997)

That film held more surprises than this one, which has delivered all of its worthwhile barbs long before a group of monstrous patricians sits down to enjoy a strange, gamy ham for dinner.

GAMY `POETS' TRIES TO SERVE UP FULL PLATE OF DARK COMEDY

Bush wrapped himself in the genteel, compassionate cloak of noblesse oblige acquired at birth by patricians of his ilk.