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Attributed by Livy to the sixth Roman king, Servius Tullius, [3] the urban tribes were named for districts of the city and were the largest and had the least political power. In the later Republic, poorer people living in the city of Rome itself typically belonged to one of these tribes. [ 4 ]
A Roman denarius of 63 BC: a voter casting a ballot. A tribus, or tribe, was a division of the Roman people for military, censorial, and voting purposes. When constituted in the comitia tributa, the tribes were the voting units of a legislative assembly of the Roman Republic.
Many slaves were created as the result of Rome's conquest of Greece, but Greek culture was considered in some respects superior to that of Rome: hence Horace's famous remark Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit ("Captured Greece took her savage conqueror captive"). The Roman playwright Terence is thought to have been brought to Rome as a slave ...
Many of the ancient patrician gentes whose members appear in the founding legends of Rome disappeared as Rome acquired its empire, and new plebeian families rose to prominence. A number of patrician families such as the Horatii, Lucretii, Verginii and Menenii rarely appear in positions of importance during the later republic.
The rise of the barbarian kingdoms in the territory previously governed by the Western Roman Empire was a gradual, complex, and largely unintentional process. [11] Their origin can ultimately be traced to the migrations of large numbers of barbarian (i.e. non-Roman) peoples into the territory of the Roman Empire.
Nearly all of these peoples and tribes spoke Indo-European languages: Italics, Celts, Ancient Greeks, and tribes likely occupying various intermediate positions between these language groups. On the other hand, some Italian peoples (such as the Rhaetians , Camuni , Etruscans ) likely spoke non- or pre-Indo-European languages .
Lintott notes that "the tribe was the critical indicator of Roman citizenship" for the adult sons of Roman fathers and also for "those incorporated into the citizen body from the outside". A man who came of age was enrolled as an adult in the tribe of his father, and could change it only through adoption into another family.
In ancient Rome, a gens (/ ɡ ɛ n s / or / dʒ ɛ n z /, Latin:; pl.: gentes [ˈgɛnteːs]) was a family consisting of individuals who shared the same nomen gentilicium and who claimed descent from a common ancestor.