A more real historical difficulty with respect to the original connotation of these words, is to determine whether they denoted the whole people, Plebeians as well as Patricians. Roman records do not use _populus_ as equivalent to the patrician community alone; but these records all refer to a time after the Plebeians had won political rights, at least the rights of serving in the legions and of voting. If _populus_ and _quirites_ denoted the aggregate of fighting, and therefore privileged, men, they must have originally referred exclusively to the patrician community. After the Servian constitution the words denote the whole people (_universus populus_). _Populus_ and _plebs_ are henceforth only distinguished as the whole to the part—the distinction being necessary, since the Plebs continued to form a corporation apart, and this corporation excluded the patrician families.[123] So, in a later official formula, _senatus populusque Romanus_ denotes two corporations, the latter composed of all the members of the state, but in this the individual members of the smaller corporation are included. _Civis_, a word of uncertain origin, signifies less definitely than _quirites_ the possession of active political rights. Hence its application to women and to the partially-privileged members of the state—to those who were, at certain periods of Roman history, given rights in private law, while debarred from the exercise of the suffrage or the attainment of office. It is possible that the distinction between the full citizen (_civis optimo jure_) and the partial citizen (_civis non optimo jure_), although probably not a primitive,[124] may yet be an ancient conception of Roman law. Those Plebeians who had never been, or who had ceased to be, entirely dependent on a _patronus_ for the exercise of their legal rights, would practically have belonged to this latter class. Before the reform of Servius, which gave them political privileges, they might have been called _cives_; it is only after this reform that they could have been called _quirites_. It was, perhaps, in consequence of this change in the constitution that _cives_ replaced _quirites_ as the designation of the full citizens with reference to all their rights.