to attain. For obvious practical reasons I have added some notes on Latin orthography. The passages are mostly of my own selection; but a few have been taken from examination papers, or collections based on examination papers. H. N. INTRODUCTION. I. POLITICAL AND SOCIAL IDEAS. A CITY community, the roles of the Greeks, is in Latin called populus. Populus is the whole community, embracing all orders of citizens, and including, therefore, patricians and plebeians as its constituent parts. Gens stands in two relations to populus. It means either a family included in the sphere of the populus, as the gens Fabia, or gens Cornelia at Rome; or a tribe or nation, including several populi or city communities. Thus Vergil in his tenth Aeneid (v. 205), speaks of the populi sub gente quaterni, or four populi for each of her own gentes, which owned the supremacy of Mantua; and Livy (4, 56) says, eorum (Antiatium) legatos utriusque gentis (i.e. Aequorum et Volscorum), populos circumisse. It is important to notice that the plural populi is B always used in the strictly plural sense of communities, cities, never in the sense of a single community. When Vergil at the beginning of his fourth Georgic, says poetically, that he will tell of totius gentis Mores ac studia ac populos ac proelia; he means that his theme will include the townships or communities of the bees. Natio, which like gens, means a nation or tribe, is generally applied to non-Italian races. Exterae gentes, exterae nationes, and other expressions of the kind, are common in Cicero. We have noticed that populus means the whole community, not any part of it. Publicus (=poplicus) and popularis means, therefore, what affects or belongs to the whole people. This brings us to the consideration of the important expression, res publica. Res, in all probability, meant originally wealth or possessions, and so, by an easy transition, came to be used for power. Its meaning soon extended, very much as did the meaning of the English word power. In old Latin (as in Plautus), res often meant the state; and so Ennius said of Fabius Maximus, that unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem. Thus, res Romana, res Albana, would be used for the Roman or Alban state or power. Res publica then properly means the power of the populus. And as, where the power of a people is, there is its main interest or concern, res |
