Gens - Patrician and Plebeian gentes

Patrician and Plebeian gentes

Certain gentes were considered patrician, and others plebeian. According to tradition, the patricians were descended from the "city fathers", or patres; that is, the heads of family at the time of its foundation by Romulus, the first King of Rome. Other noble families which came to Rome during the time of the kings were also admitted to the patriciate, including several who emigrated from Alba Longa after that city was destroyed by Tullus Hostilius. The last known instance of a gens being admitted to the patriciate prior to the 1st century BC was when the Claudii were added to the ranks of the patricians after coming to Rome in 504 B.C., five years after the establishment of the Republic.

Numerous sources describe two classes amongst the patrician gentes, known as the gentes maiores, or major gentes, and the gentes minores, or minor gentes. No definite information has survived concerning which families were numbered amongst the gentes maiores, or even how many there were. However, they almost certainly included the Aemilii, Claudii, Cornelii, Fabii, Manlii, and Valerii. Nor is it certain whether this distinction was of any practical importance, although it has been suggested that the princeps senatus, or speaker of the Senate, was usually chosen from their number.

For the first several decades of the Republic, it is not entirely certain which gentes were considered patrician and which plebeian. However, a series of laws promulgated in 451 and 450 B.C. as the Twelve Tables attempted to codify a rigid distinction between the classes, formally excluding the plebeians from holding any of the major magistracies from that time until the passage of the Lex Licinia Sextia in 367 B.C. The law forbidding the intermarriage of patricians and plebeians was repealed after only a few years, by the Lex Canuleia in 445 B.C.

Despite the formal reconciliation of the orders in 367, the patrician houses, which as time passed represented a smaller and smaller percentage of the Roman populace, continued to hold onto as much power as possible, resulting in frequent conflict between the orders over the next two centuries. Certain patrician families regularly opposed the sharing of power with the plebeians, while others favored it, and some were divided.

Many gentes included both patrician and plebeian branches. These may have arisen through adoption or manumission, or when two unrelated families bearing the same nomen became confused. It may also be that individual members of a gens voluntarily left or were expelled from the patriciate, along with their descendants. In some cases, gentes that must originally have been patrician, or which were so regarded during the early Republic, were later known only by their plebeian descendants.

By the first century B.C., the practical distinction between the patricians and the plebeians was minimal. Nonetheless, with the rise of imperial authority, several plebeian gentes were raised to the patriciate, replacing older patrician families that had faded into obscurity, and were no longer represented in the Roman senate. Although both the concept of the gens and of the patriciate survived well into imperial times, both gradually lost most of their significance. In the final centuries of the Western Empire, patricius was used primarily as an individual title, rather than a class to which an entire family belonged.