Latin lessons for latter-day plebs The Pope is a pleb. I do not say this because I am a Protestant. It is just that the Pope, like all Catholics, belongs to the plebs sancta - "the holy people" - as they are referred to in the Latin Mass. That Catholic definition is one of the few surviving uses that preserve the uncritical sense of the original word before it was borrowed for snobbish insults. Incidentally, in Latin, the word is plebs in the singular, and plebes in the plural, while those drawn from the plebs class were called plebeianus, or plebeian. By classical standards, Andrew Mitchell's alleged use of the word pleb in an altercation with Downing Street police officers this month was incorrect as well as disgusting. In the terms of the ancient world, not only is the policeman a pleb but also the Conservative chief whip himself, his fellow MPs and most of the House of Lords. Perhaps only a few dukes and the Queen and her immediate family are not plebs - although they are far too grand to use such a horribly de haut en bas term. In Rome, the plebeians were really the squeezed middle: the free, landowning citizens, with vast numbers of slaves beneath them and the patricians, a tiny elite cadre, above. There was not much social mobility, either; plebeian and patrician status was inherited from generation to generation. Pretty much every citizen was a pleb, even very grand ones such as Pompey, the military leader who was Julius Caesar's rival, and the great orator Cicero, also an opponent of Caesar. Not that that stopped a sort of self-hating snobbery emerging. Cicero may have been a pleb but still he talked about the sordida plebs - "the disgusting poor" - in a 1st-century BC version of Mr Mitchell's self-hating rant. The word's origins are hard to nail down, but plebs was certainly used in the Roman republic of the 5th century BC. The fact that there was no emperor around then did not prevent rigid class divisions; you only have to go to France today to see you do not need a monarch to produce endemic snobbery. Still, modern snobbery has nothing on the Roman version. Our class system may be deep-rooted but we do not have earls controlling the strings of power in one tiny political party, with massed ranks of commoners in the opposition. That is essentially what happened during the so-called Struggle of the Orders in Rome in the 4th and 5th centuries BC, when the patricians did all they could to keep the plebs from power. Plebeians could not be priests or magistrates, nor could they marry into the patrician class. But gradually the plebs fought back, getting their hands on all major offices of state after decades of protest. At one point they carried out the first ever sit-down strike. As early as the 5th century BC, they had their own political representatives, the Tribunes of the People. The law against intermarriage with patricians was overturned and, in 367BC, they got access to the top job in the Roman republic: the consulship. You can compare the decline of Roman patricians with that of our own hereditary peers - once an extremely strong body with automatic entitlement to political power, now reduced to their titles and a few honorary offices (apart from that rump left in the House of Lords). By the 2nd century BC, the patricians still called themselves that but there was nothing they could do that the plebeians could not, a few hereditary priesthoods apart - not unlike those hereditary roles carried out by the Marquess of Cholmondeley and the Duke of Norfolk at British coronations. Still, just because we have largely eradicated new hereditary peerages and got rid of most hereditary aristocratic power, that does not mean the old class divisions do not go on humming away, as they did in ancient Rome. A viscount is still a viscount; and the divisions between patricians and plebeians remained throughout ancient Roman history, even after practically all the legal differences had long been removed. Outward signs of those class divisions were treasured in the later years of imperial Rome, particularly when it came to dress. Only the imperial family could wear the purple gown, coloured with expensive Tyrian dye produced by crushing thousands of sea snails. Those divisions had been worn so deeply into Roman life and language that they had their effect on this old imperial backwater long after the legionaries fled Britain in 410. The word "pleb" retained semi-official status in Britain right into the 20th century. At Westminster School - alma mater of Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister - the sons of tradesmen were still called plebs in 1902, to distinguish them from the offspring of the nobility and gentry. In America, first years at military academies were still called plebes - good, correct Latin there - in the last century. Through the 20th century, the word was employed as derogatory slang - James Joyce and H.G. Wells used it that way in their books. In his 1962 novel, A Murder of Quality, John le Carré wrote, "Mrs Rode's quite decent . . . in a plebby sort of way: doyleys and china birds." But these were the last gasps for pleb as an official, or unofficial, term. It had all but died out by the 1970s - except among chief whips and popes. The writer is the author of "Amo, Amas, Amat . . . And All That: How to Become a Latin Lover