plebeians

Gibbon anticipated — and Augustus mastered — something very much like Trump’s false bonding with plebeians:

But there are good deals for us plebeians if you know where to look.

The point, mostly, is that people have trouble letting go — and we plebeians watching them are split between hurrying them out the door and grabbing their sleeves so they won’t leave.

Unfortunately he did not get into the weird naked rituals or anything else of interest to us plebeians.

With its intransigent hero, its struggles between Rome’s patricians and plebeians and its austere language, it is more often thought to be a somewhat forbidding work.