Gens
In the Roman Empire , the word gens ( Latin , literally "[the] gender"; plural: gentes ) was originally used as a name for a clan or group of families (see also gender (genealogy) ) who believed in a common male ancestor whose name bore the noun gentile . According to the Roman naming convention of the time between 200 BC. In AD 100 and AD 100, the name der gens was the second part of a man's three-part name. For example, Gaius Iulius Caesar belonged to the gens Iulia , Marcus Licinius Crassus to the gens Licinia . Later, gens also referred to in a broader sense a tribe or people whose common descent was assumed; therefore gens became part of the term ius gentium , of international law .
Roman gentes
Originally the Roman gentes were settlements organized in families, although the term is probably not as old as the Romans thought. Few of them derived from individual cults or ceremonies, the names were mainly of a personal or family nature. The gentes usually had no cult, legendary founder. The clan assemblies are not reported to have passed legally binding resolutions.
Relations between the gentes had long been an essential factor in Roman politics ; members of the same gens belonged to the family and were therefore often political allies. The originally forbidden marriages between plebeians and patricians led to the extinction of several patrician families. That in 445 BC Lex Canuleia approved marriages between patricians and plebeians and allowed plebeian gentes to rise to the ruling class , which led to the emergence of nobility .
Among the patrician gentes there were the gentes maiores and minores . The former were Rome's leading families of the Aemilians , Claudians , Cornelier , Fabier and Valerier , who claimed some privileges of a religious and secular kind for themselves, the latter were those who had declined socially and politically over the course of time. There were also plebeian gentes such as the Sempronians or the Livians , who also attained the highest offices and great esteem.
Basically every Roman citizen belonged to a gens . At least since the Constitutio Antoniniana (212 AD), the gens became meaningless for the vast majority of Romans; In the Western Roman Senate aristocracy, this concept was (formally) adhered to until the 6th century.
Barbaric gentes
With regard to the so-called migration period , the gentes were viewed in older research as homogeneous "peoples" and a biological descent of the various associations ( Goths , Lombards , Franks , but also the Huns ) assumed. This view, which has long been formative, has been questioned and ultimately refuted in the context of modern research approaches.
According to today's dominant research opinion, the Germanic “tribes” (Latin: gentes or nationes ) of the time of migration did not represent constant units or communities of descent, although ancient sources sometimes suggest this. Rather, for example, Gothic associations also joined Rugier or Heruler ; Individual individuals and entire groups could repeatedly change their affiliation. Recent research has shown that similarities in language, clothing or weapons alone are hardly meaningful for an ethnic classification.
The core idea of modern research (based on the long-time influential ethnogenesis approach) is that one cannot assume a primordial, timeless and static development of peoples, but rather groups from the Barbaricum in late antiquity could unite and separate again in a dynamic social process . Only then did they develop their own identity, which was expressed, for example, in stories of origin (see Origo gentis ). According to this, peoples and tribes are heterogeneous, not biologically determined communities, but the result of a more complex historical-social development. The emergence of the Germanic-Romanic empires in the early Middle Ages also took place in this context. In recent times the concept of identity has been used above all in order to better do justice to the development of the gentes in a continuous process of identity formation.
See also
literature
- Patrick J. Geary: Barbarians and Ethnicity. in: Peter Brown et al. (Ed.): Late Antiquity. A Guide to the Postclassical World. Cambridge / MA 1999, p. 107ff. (Introduction to the Gentes of the Migration Period and their ethnogenesis .)
- Bernhard Linke : From Kinship to the State. The emergence of forms of political organization in early Roman history . Stuttgart 1995. (Important but controversial study on the early Roman gentes .)
- Christopher J. Smith: The Roman Clan. The Gens from Ancient Ideology to Modern Anthropology . Cambridge 2006. (Standard work on the Roman gentes . Smith argues that the gens was in fact of little relevance to the Roman aristocracy and that the patriciate, moreover, was only “a fiction of its own making”.)
Individual evidence
- ↑ See, for example, the overview in Walter Pohl : Identity and contradiction. Thoughts on a history of meaning in the early Middle Ages. In: Walter Pohl (Ed.): The search for the origins. On the importance of the early Middle Ages. Vienna 2004, p. 23ff.
- ^ Walter Pohl: Telling the Difference: Signs of Ethnic Identity . In: Walter Pohl, Helmut Reimitz (eds.): Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of Ethnic Communities, 300-800. Suffering u. a. 1998, p. 17ff.
- ↑ See Helmut Castritius: Tribal formation, ethnogenesis. In: Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde . Volume 29. Berlin / New York 2005, pp. 508-515, here pp. 509-511.
- ^ Walter Pohl: Identity and contradiction. Thoughts on a history of meaning in the early Middle Ages. In: Walter Pohl (Ed.): The search for the origins. On the importance of the early Middle Ages. Vienna 2004, p. 23ff.