And has this been discussed with the root behind res PUBLICA as per POPULUS -- and what about the adjective R in SPQR -- it's not just populus but populus romanus. And would the patres be considered POPULUS in, say, regal days? Input? Feedback? Thanks  Yes. This is a good place to slow the vocabulary down. Res publica is not merely “state,” and populus is not merely “population.” Res publica is literally the public thing, the public affair, the common matter, the res that belongs not to a private domus or gens but to the politically organised civic body. But that civic body is not any aggregate of inhabitants. It is the populus Romanus. The adjective Romanus in SPQR is doing real work. Senatus populusque Romanus is not “senate and people” as two sociological masses in the abstract; it is the Senate and the Roman people, a historically constituted, legally recognised, ritually legible civic agent. Rome is not just where they live. Romanus marks the public person under which the collective can will, command, vote, declare war, make treaties, and possess a res publica.  This matters for the Hortensian point. The question is not simply whether populus means “everybody.” It is whether the plebs, acting in their assembly, can produce an utterance that counts as the will or law of the populus Romanus as such. The Lex Hortensia does not merely extend a warm moral vocabulary. It alters the institutional path by which the Roman people may be made to speak. In Gricean terms, the utterer-status changes. A plebiscitum, previously vulnerable to being heard as the resolution of a part, is now to be heard as law binding the whole. The meaning of populus is therefore not just lexical but procedural: who may count as the public speaker when Rome says “we”? The R in SPQR prevents a sentimental reading of populus. It is not the universal people, humanity, or the crowd. It is the Roman people, constituted by citizenship, ritual, military obligation, voting order, legal capacity, and memory. The phrase senatus populusque Romanus is a formula of corporate personality. It presents two organs, or two named components, under one public identity. The Senate deliberates and advises; the populus commands, elects, legislates, ratifies, judges, or is represented as doing so, depending on period and procedure. But the whole formula is Roman through and through. It is not peoplehood before law; it is peoplehood as already juridically and historically shaped. On the regal period, yes, the patres would be part of the populus in the broad civic sense, but not identical with it. The old Roman picture distinguishes patres, clientes, plebs, curiae, gentes, and the king’s imperium in ways that are partly historical, partly annalistic reconstruction, and partly later Roman self-explanation. In regal days, “the people” as a political body is normally imagined through the curiate assembly, the populus organised by curiae. The patres are the leading fathers of gentes and the source of the Senate’s early authority, but they are not the populus tout court. They are within the populus Romanus as its aristocratic and advisory or senatorial element, while also standing over against the rest by rank, ancestry, sacral prestige, and access to office or auspices. So one should resist two simplifications. First, populus is not simply plebs. The plebs are a component that becomes increasingly central and politically articulate, but populus Romanus is the civic whole. Second, populus is not simply patres. The patres are foundational and privileged, but the formula of the public thing needs more than the fathers. The whole drama of the early Republic is that these terms are unstable in practice. The patres would like to speak as if their order guards the public thing; the plebs insist, by secession and legislation, that the public thing cannot be public if the plebeian body is merely used but not heard. This is why res publica is conceptually tied to populus but not reducible to it. The res publica is the common affair of the populus Romanus, but it is administered, interpreted, defended, and often monopolised by institutions that claim to know better than the whole people what the public thing requires. That is the Roman ambiguity. The public thing is “of the people,” yet the people may need magistrates, Senate, auspices, priests, laws, assemblies, and procedures before it can act as a people. In Gricean terms, there is no bare collective meaning. There are authorised forms of uptake by which a collective utterance becomes valid. The Hortensian settlement then becomes a semantic-political correction. The plebs’ secession says, by action, that “public” cannot coherently mean patrician-administered commonality while excluding the force that makes common life possible. The Lex Hortensia answers by altering the force of plebeian enactment. It does not abolish all hierarchy, and it certainly does not create modern democracy. But it makes it much harder to say that a plebiscitum is merely the utterance of a lower part. After Hortensius, the plebeian legislative voice can bind the Roman civic whole. That changes what it is, practically, for the populus Romanus to speak. A dry Speranzian formula might be this: populus in Rome is not a head-count but a public grammar. Romanus tells us whose grammar it is; res publica tells us what is at stake when that grammar operates; SPQR tells us that the Roman public speaker is never a simple one-mouth creature. The patres were certainly in the populus, but they were not allowed, forever, to mean the populus. The Lex Hortensia is one of the moments at which Rome learns, reluctantly and procedurally, that the public thing must sometimes be saved from the fathers by allowing the people to count as the People.