Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/314

 308 THE EEVOLUTIOXS. BOOK IV. In an old prayer, which was still repeated in the time of the Punic wars, the gods were asked to be projntious " to the people and the plebs." ' The plebs were not, therefore, comprised in the people, at any rate not originally. The people comprised the patiicians and the clients: the plebs were excluded. What constituted the peculiar character of the plebs was, that they were foreign to the religious organiza- tion of the cit3% and even to that of the family. By this we recognize the plebeian, and distinguish him from the client. The client shared at least in the wor- ship of his patron, and made a part of the family and of the gens. The plebeian, at first, had no worship, and knew nothing of the sacred fomily. What we have already seen of the social and religious state of ancient times explains to us how this class took its rise. Religion was not propagated ; born in a family, it remained, as it were, shut in there ; each family was forced to create its creed, its gods, and its worship. But there must have been, in those times, so distant from us, a great number of families in which the mind had not the power to create gods, to arrange a doctrine, to institute a worship, to invent hymns, and ' Livy, XXIX. 27 : Ut ea milii popiilo plehique Romanes bene verrunctnt. Cicero, pi'o Murena, I. Ut ea res mihi magistra- tvique meo, populo plehique Romance bene atque feliciter eve- niat. ^laerobius {Satu7-n., I. 17) cites an ancient oraclo of the prophet Marcius, which had the words, Prator qui jus populo plebique dabit. That ancient writers have not always paid attention to this essential distinction between populus and plebs ought not to surprise us, when we recollect that the dis- tinction no longer existed at the time when they wrote. In Cicero's age tiie plebs had for several centuries legally made a part of the populus. But tiie old formulas which Livy, Cicero, and Macrobius cite, remain as memorials of the time when the two classes were not yet confounded.