plebeians

plebeians, plebs (Lat. sing. noun, ‘the common people’), name given to the body of Roman citizens other than the privileged patricians. In the early republic the plebeians were excluded from religious collegia, magistracies, and perhaps from the senate, and from intermarriage with patricians by a law of the Twelve Tables. The ‘conflict of the orders’ in the fifth and fourth centuries BC was a successful struggle to have these civil disabilities abolished. See also TRIBUNES OF THE PLEBS.