What is "predecessors"

Usage examples of "predecessors".

Reason to drink hemlock, the first Reason-oriented societies now turned on their mythic predecessors with a vengeance.

From this complacence, the critics have been emboldened to assume a dictatorial power, and have so far succeeded, that they are now become the masters, and have the assurance to give laws to those authors from whose predecessors they originally received them.

I, like my divine predecessors, would have delegated it to a senator of consular rank.