Gens

In the Roman Empire, the word gens (plural gentes ) originally used as a term for a family or group of families whose name, nomen gentile wore in the belief in a common male ancestor. According to Roman naming convention of the time between 200 BC and 100 AD, the name of the gens was the second part of the three-part name of a man. How about Gaius Julius Caesar belonged to the gens Iulia, Marcus Licinius Crassus to assets Licinia. Later assets designated in a broader sense, a tribe or a people whose common ancestry was adopted; gens therefore part of the term ius gentium was, of international law.

Roman gentes

Originally the Roman gentes structured settlement associations in families, although the term is not as old as the Romans supposed. Derived in a few of individual cults or ceremonies, the names were primarily personal or domestic nature. The gentes reported usually no cultic revered, legendary founder of gatherings of the clans is not reported to have taken any legally binding decisions.

The relations of the gentes had long been a major factor in Roman politics, members of the same gens were part of the family and therefore were often political allies. The originally not allowed marriages between patricians and plebeians led to the extinction of several patrician families. The v. in the year 445 AD adopted, marriages between patricians and plebeians gestattende Lex Canuleia let plebeian gentes ascend to the leadership, which led to the creation of the nobility.

Among the patrician gentes were the gentes maiores and minores. The former were Rome's leading families of Aemilius, Claudius, Cornelius, Fabians and Valerii, who complained some privileges religious and secular nature itself, the latter were the socially and politically descended over time. There were also plebeian gentes as the Sempronier or Livii, which also gained high office and great reputation.

Basically belonged to every Roman citizen of a gens. Ever since the Constitutio Antoniniana (212 AD) was the gens meaningless for the vast majority of the Romans; in the Western Roman senatorial aristocracy was considered (formally ) to this concept firmly to the 6th century.

Barbaric gentes

In addition, especially in the Germanic space formation and partly fictitious, claiming to be affected common ancestry associations were referred to by the Romans as gentes in the sense of people, especially in the age of migration. This, the now Christian Romans were compared antithetical: The ( se ) gentes were regarded as barbaric, most heterodox peoples had to defeat the each late antique imperial gentium as victor omnium ( conqueror of all nations ) or domitor gentium ( Bezähmer of peoples ). This corresponds to the Gentiles gentes of the Vulgate, which goes back to the Israelites facing the peoples of the Old Testament about the Greek ethne (peoples) of the Septuagint.

As a gentile empires recent research therefore referred the kingdoms of this ( barbarian ) peoples, especially those of the Franks, Goths, Burgundians, Vandals, Lombards to previously weströmischem ground.