from Augustus to Gordian III. That the town was the scene of the martyrdom of St Andrew is purely apocryphal, but, Hke Corinth, it was an early and effective centre of Christianity; its archbishop is mentioned in the lists of the Council of Sardica in 347. In 551 it was laid in ruins by an earthquake. In 807 it was able without external assistance to defeat the Slavonians (Avars), though most of the credit of the victory was assigned to St Andrew, whose church was enriched by the imperial share of the spoils, and whose archbishop was made superior of the bishops of Methone, Lacedaemon and Corone. Captured in 1205 by William of Champlitte and Villehardouin, the city became the capital and its archbishop the primate of the principality of Achaea. In 1387 De Heredia, grand master of the order of the Hospital at Rhodes, endeavoured to make himself master of Achaea and took Patras by storm. At the close of the 15th century the city was governed by the archbishop in the name of the pope; but in 1428 Constantine, son of John VI., managed to get possession of it for a time. Patras was at length, in 1687, surrendered by the Turks to the Venetians, who made it the seat of one of the seven fiscal boards into which they divided the Morea. In 1714 it again fell, with the rest of the Morea, into Turkish hands. It was at Patras that the Greek revolution began in 1821; but the Turks, confined to the citadel, held out till 1828.
PATRIARCH (M.E. and O. Fr. patriarche, Lat. patriarcha, Gr.
πατριάρχης, from πατριά, clan, and ἀρχή, rule), originally the
father or chief of a tribe, in this sense now used more especially
of the “patriarchs” of the Old Testament, i.e. Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob, with their forefathers, and the twelve sons of Jacob.
In late Jewish history the title “patriarch” (Heb. nāsī, prince,
chief) was given to the head of the sanhedrim in Palestine, and
is sometimes, though wrongly, applied to the “exilarch,” a
head of the Jewish college at Babylon.
In the early centuries of the Christian Church the designation “patriarch” was applied, like “archbishop,” to bishops of the more important sees as a merely honorary style. It developed into a title implying jurisdiction over metropolitans, partly as a result of the organization of the empire into “dioceses,” partly owing to the ambition of the greater metropolitan bishops, which had early led them to claim and exercise authority in neighbouring metropolitanates. At the Council of Chalcedon (451) the patriarchs still bore the title of “exarch”; it was not till the 7th century that that of “patriarch” was fixed as proper to the bishops of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, “exarch” being reserved for those of Ephesus and Caesarea, who had fallen to a lower rank. In the West the only patriarch in the fully developed sense of the Eastern Church has been the bishop of Rome, who is patriarch as well as pope.
PATRICIANS (Lat. patricius, an adjectival form from pater,
father; not, as some say, from pater and ciere, to call), a term
originally applied to the members of the old citizen families of
ancient Rome (see I. below). Under the later Roman Empire the
name was revived by the Byzantine emperors as the title of a new
order of nobility. Subsequently it was used as a personal title
of honour for distinguished servants of Constantine I. and his
successors, and was conferred on barbarian chiefs (II. below).
It was afterwards conferred by the popes on the Frankish
kings. In the medieval Italian republics, e.g. Genoa and
Venice, the term was applied to the hereditary aristocracy
(patrizio), and in the free cities of the German Empire it was
borne by distinguished citizens (patrizier). In Italy it is still
used for the hereditary nobility. From these specific uses the
word has come into general use as a synonym of “aristocrat”
or “noble,” and implies the possession of such qualities as are
generally associated with long descent, hereditary good breeding
and the like. In Church history a sect founded by Patricius
(c. 387), teacher of Symmachus the Marcionite, are known as
the Patricians; they believed that all flesh was made by the
devil. The name is also, though rarely, applied to the Roman
Catholic body in Ireland regarded as the followers of St Patrick.
I. From the earliest period known to us the free population of Rome contains two elements, patricians and plebeians, the former class enjoying all political privileges, the latter unprivileged. The derivation and significance of the two names have been established with certainty. The patricians (patricii) are those who can point to fathers, i.e. those who are members of the clans (gentes) whose members originally comprised the whole citizen body. The plebeians (plebs, plebes) are the complement (from root pleo, fill, see Plebs) of the noble families possessing a genealogy, and include all the free population other than the patricians. It has been held by T. Mommsen that the plebeian order had its sole origin in the clients who attached themselves in a position of semi-freedom to the heads of patrician houses, and gradually evolved a freedom and citizenship of their own (see Patron and Client). The logical consequence of this view is that the plebs as an order in the state is of considerably later growth than the beginning of the city, the patricians being originally the only freemen and the only citizens. But this view is untenable on two grounds. First, in the struggle between the two orders for political privilege we find the clients struggling on the side of the patricians against the main body of the plebeians (Livy ii. 56). Again, a method of taking up Roman citizenship which is well attested for a very early period reveals the possibility of a plebeian who does not stand in any relation to a patron. When an immigrant moved to Rome from one of the cities of the Latin league, or any city which enjoyed the jus commercii with Rome, and by the exercise of the right of voluntary exile from his own state (jus exulandi), claimed Roman citizenship, it is impossible to suppose that it was necessary for him to make application to a Roman patron to represent him in his legal transactions; for the jus commercii gave its holder the right of suing and being sued in his own person before Roman courts. Such an immigrant, therefore, must have become at once a free plebeian citizen of Rome. It may therefore be assumed that long before the clients obtained the right to hold land in their own names and appear in the courts in their own persons there was a free plebs existing alongside of the patricians enjoying limited rights of citizenship. But it is equally certain that before the time of Servius Tullius the rights and duties of citizenship were practically exercised only by the members of the patrician clans. This is perhaps the explanation of the strange fact that the clients, who through their patrons were attached to these clans, obtained political recognition as early as the plebeians who had no such semi-servile taint. At the time of the Servian reforms both branches of the plebs had a plausible claim to recognition as members of the state, the clients as already partial members of the curia and the gens, the unattached plebeians as equally free with the patricians and possessing clans of their own as solid and united as the recognized gentes.
But not only can it be shown that patricians and plebeians coexisted as distinct orders in the Roman state at an earlier date than the evolution of citizenship by the clients. It has further been established on strong archaeological and linguistic evidence that the long struggle between patricians and plebeians in early Rome was the result of a racial difference between them. There is reason to believe that the patricians were a Sabine race which conquered a Ligurian people of whom the plebeians were the survivors (see Rome: History). Apart from the definite evidence, the theory of a racial distinction gains probability from the fact that it explains the survival of the distinction between the patricii, men with a family and genealogy, and the rest of the citizens, for some time after the latter had acquired the legal status of patres and were organized in gentes of their own; for on this theory privilege would belong not to all who could trace free descent but only to those who could trace descent to an ancestor of the conquering race. The family organization of the conquering race was probably higher than that of the conquered, and was only gradually attained by the latter. Thus descent from a father would be distinctive enough of the dominant race to form the title of that race (patricii), and when that term had been definitely adopted as the title of a class its persistence in the same sense after the organization
