Note 113 — Chapter II · THE SOCIAL COMPOSITION OF THE PRIMITIVE POPULUS

Plut. Q. R. 58: Those who were first constituted senators by Romulus were called patres and patricii as being men of good birth, who could show their pedigree. In its adjectival and adverbial uses ingenuus connotes not the quality of free birth, but respectability, nobility. The original meaning is “born within,” hence indigenous, native; cf. Forcellini, Totius Latinitatis Lexicon, s. v. In this sense it could not apply to the patricians, who generally claimed a foreign origin. But native is superior to alien; doubtless in this secondary meaning of excellence it attached to the nobility, the close relation of the word to gens (family, lineage) attracting it in that direction. Afterward it was so democratized as to include all the freeborn. With this meaning we find it as early as Plautus, Mil. 784, 961. According to Dionysius, ii. 8. 3, the identification of patricii with ingenui in its sense of freeborn was accepted not by the most trustworthy historians, but by certain malicious slanderers: “Some say they were called patricians because they alone could cite their fathers, the rest being fugitives and unable to cite free fathers.”