Canutia (gens)

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The gens Canutia or Cannutia was a plebeian family at Rome. The gens appears toward the end of the Republic, and is best known from two individuals, the orator Publius Canutius, and Tiberius Canutius, tribune of the plebs in 44 B.C., the year of Caesar's assassination. A Gaius Canutius mentioned by Suetonius is probably the same person as Tiberius; the reference to Canutius in Tacitus' Dialogus de Oratoribus may refer to either Publius or Tiberius, or perhaps to a different person altogether. [1] [2] [3]

The plebs were, in ancient Rome, the general body of free Roman citizens who were not patricians, as determined by the census. The precise origins of the group and the term are unclear, though it may be that they began as a limited political movement in opposition to the elite (patricians) which became more widely applied.

Ancient Rome History of Rome from the 8th-century BC to the 5th-century

In historiography, ancient Rome is Roman civilization from the founding of the Italian city of Rome in the 8th century BC to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD, encompassing the Roman Kingdom, Roman Republic and Roman Empire until the fall of the western empire. The civilization began as an Italic settlement in the Italian Peninsula, conventionally founded in 753 BC, that grew into the city of Rome and which subsequently gave its name to the empire over which it ruled and to the widespread civilisation the empire developed. The Roman empire expanded to become one of the largest empires in the ancient world, though still ruled from the city, with an estimated 50 to 90 million inhabitants and covering 5.0 million square kilometres at its height in AD 117.

In ancient Rome, a gens, plural gentes, was a family consisting of all those individuals who shared the same nomen and claimed descent from a common ancestor. A branch of a gens was called a stirps. The gens was an important social structure at Rome and throughout Italy during the period of the Roman Republic. Much of an individual's social standing depended on the gens to which he belonged. Certain gentes were considered patrician, others plebeian, while some had both patrician and plebeian branches. The importance of membership in a gens declined considerably in imperial times.

See also

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology , William Smith, Editor.
  2. ↑ Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, De Claris Rhetoribus, 4.
  3. ↑ Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Dialogus de Oratoribus , 21.

PD-icon.svg  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain :  Smith, William, ed. (1870). "article name needed". Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology . 

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William Smith (lexicographer) English lexicographer

Sir William Smith was an English lexicographer. He also made advances in the teaching of Greek and Latin in schools.

<i>Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology</i> encyclopedia/biographical dictionary

The Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology is an encyclopedia/biographical dictionary. Edited by William Smith, the dictionary spans three volumes and 3,700 pages. It is a classic work of 19th-century lexicography. The work is a companion to Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities and Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography.


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