Talk:Social class in ancient Rome

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome. To participate, improve this article or visit the project page for more information.

I felt it more accurate to divide the article by class and not by time frame, as the rights and responsibilities of the various classes changed at different times. The facts in this article are taken from Livy, Tacitus, and Petrarch, and from asides in the poetry of Juvenal and Horace. --Charlene.vickers 01:15, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Proleteriat?

True, the entire class has a single vote in the comitia tributa, but still don't they deserve some mention? pookster11 05:27, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Article needs completely rewritten

The current version of this article is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Roman class system. The Patricians weren't whoever was in the ruling class, they were a select group of families who could claim descent from the founders of Rome. The plebeians were everyone else. The five property divisions of the census were entirely independent of the patrician/plebeian divide and were not based on ancestry. There were many Senators who were plebeian, and they didn't lose their plebeian status when they gained political office. Some religious offices remained open to patricians only - a son of Pompey or Cicero or Marius couldn't be flamen dialis or a pontifex, for example. I'm gathering sources for a rewrite, because as it stands the article's totally misleading. --Nicknack009 21:30, 2 July 2006 (UTC)