antiquus

Antiquus, antiqua, antiquum, first-and-second declension, formed on ante: what stands in front of you in time. As a plural noun antiqui means the ancients, the writers and authorities of the past, and that is how this corpus usually uses it.

Two things worth knowing. Antiquus is old in the sense of belonging to a former age, where vetus is simply old in years, so vinum vetus is aged wine and mos antiquus is an ancestral custom. And the comparative antiquior often means "more important" rather than "older", because a Roman argument treated the prior claim as the stronger one. English takes antique, antiquity and antiquarian; the false friend is antic, which came in through Italian and means the opposite of dignified.