priscus

Priscus, prisca, priscum, first and second declension, from the same root as prior and primus: belonging to the earlier time.

It is not a neutral synonym for antiquus. Priscus points at what has gone and is no longer done, so it carries either reverence - prisca virtus, prisca fides, the plain decency of the ancestors - or a faint smell of the museum, depending on the speaker. Antiquus is the flatter word for "old". The masculine plural prisci on its own means "the men of old". It survives as a Roman cognomen in Tarquinius Priscus, "Tarquin the elder", and, through the derivative pristinus, as English pristine, which has drifted from "of the earliest sort" to "spotless".