Accueil
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_de_Ste._Croix
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/2925749/9a42e1
"As far as I am aware, it is the first book in English, or in any other language I can read, which begins by explaining the central features of Marx's historical method and defining the concepts and categories involved, and then proceeds to demonstrate how these instruments of analysis may be used in practice to explain the main events, processes, institutions and ideas that prevailed at various times over a long period of history - here, the thirteen or fourteen hundred years of my 'ancient Greek world'." (IX)
"This book, on the contrary, is an attempt to see the ancient Greek world in very close relation with our own and is inspired by the belief that we can learn much about each by careful study of the other." (p.XI)
" [Chapter VI: Rome the Suzerain]
"The Roman lawyers 'hardly touched upon those questions which seem vital to us' (CRL 545), such as the protection of workers, or of'the poor lessees of flats or agricultural land'. (I have already referred, in IV.iii above, to the severity of the Roman law ofleasing, locatio conductio.) But when Schulz says again that 'The lawyers wrote and worked for the class of the beati possidentes to which they themselves belonged and their social sense was ill developed' (ibid.), we may be tempted to comment that the 'social sense' of these lawyers was all too well developed: they were thinking, as we ought to expect, in terms of the interests of the class to which they themselves and their clients belonged. Law, indeed, has 'just as little an independent history as religion' (Marx and Engels, German Ideology)." (p.330)
"One other feature of Roman law needs to be mentioned here: the discrimination on grounds of social status, based to a high degree upon distinctions of class in my sense, which I describe in VIIl.i below. These manifested themselves chiefly, it is true, in the criminal field (where, as I have pointed out, Roman law remained a rather disreputable affair); but they also entered into the administration even of the ius civile, in the sense in which I am using that term, for instance by attaching greater weight to the evidence given by members of the upper classes. [...] The inbuilt disposition of Roman law to respect and favour the propertied classes became more explicitly institutionalised during the Principate. Thus, as A.H. M.Jones has said, 'There was one law for the rich and another for the poor', although in the purely civil sphere 'it was not so much the law that was at fault, as the courts'." (p.331)
"Imperial powers - the British until recently, the Americans today- are easily able to fancy themselves morally superior to other peoples.
Romans often pretended that their empire had been acquired almost against their own will, by a series of defensive actions, which could be made to sound positively virtuous when they were represented as undertaken in defence of others, especially Rome's 'allies'. Thus according to Cicero, in whom we can often find the choicest expression of any given kind of Roman hypocrisy, it was in the course of 'defending their allies', sociis defendendis, that the Romans became 'masters of all lands' (De rep. 111.23/35). 5 The speaker in the dialogue, almost certainly Laelius (who often represents Cicero's own views), goes on to express opinions - basically similar to the theory of'natural slavery' - according to which some peoples can actually benefit from being in a state of complete political subjection to another (cf. VII.ii below, with my ECAPS 18 and its n.52). Anyone innocent enough to be disposed to accept the view of Roman imperialism that I have just mentioned can best enlighten himself by reading Polybius, who was an intimate of some of the leading Romans of his day (roughly the second and third quarters of the second century B.C.) and well understood the Roman will to conquer the known world, even ifin his mind it was more clear and definite than we perhaps have reason to believe. (I give the main Polybian passages in a note.)
In fairness to Cicero, we must not fail to notice that on several occasions in his letters and speeches he shows a real awareness of the hatred Rome had aroused among many subject peoples by the oppression and exploitation to which she had exposed them: he speaks of iniuriae, iniquitas, libidines, cupiditates, acerbitas on the part of the leading Romans who had governed them (cf. Tac., Ann. 1.2.2, and the passages cited in n.19 to Section v of this chapter). But nearly all that I would have wished to say about Roman imperialism in the late Republic (and much more) has been admirably expressed by Brunt in an important recent article (LI), the purpose of which was 'to explore the conceptions of empire prevalent in Cicero's day'. I agree with Brunt that the Romans had managed to persuade themselves that their empire was 'universal and willed by the gods' ; and I particularly like his statements that 'the peculiar Roman conception of defensive war ... covered the prevention and elimination of any potential menace to Roman power' (LI 179), and that Rome's 'reactions to the possibility of a threat resembled those of a nervous tiger, disturbed when feeding'." (p.331)
"It is only too easy for those who insist on accurate technical definition of the terms 'Patricians' and 'Plebeians' to say blandly that they have nothing to do with property or economic position, or class in my sense (as defined in II.ii above). Technically, this is quite correct: we are dealing here, not with 'classes' but with 'orders', juridically recognised categories of citizens. But of course the Patricians were able to gain access to, and ultimately to monopolise, political power at Rome because they were by and large the richest families - in the mainly agrarian society of early Rome, the largest landowners above all. (Here some ofBickerman's analogies from mediaeval European communes are useful, although some of the towns he refers to had a high proportion of wealthy merchants among their great men, as Rome never did.) The richer a family was, the more chance it would have, other things being equal, of gaining political influence. Of course not quite all the wealthiest families would acquire patrician status, and some of the families which did so may not have been among the very richest ; but the equation, Patricians = largest landowners, must have been broadly true over all, and when a family did become patrician and thus gained access to the small circle that enjoyed political privilege, it would naturally have every opportunity to consolidate and improve its own position vis-a-vis Plebeians. The Patricians, of course, were always few in number: 'after 366 only twenty-one clans [gentes] are attested, of which some were tiny, and not more than another score before that date' (Brunt, SCRR 47). Some of the Patricians, however, had large numbers of humble plebeian 'clients' (clientes): men bound to them by personal ties involving obligations on both sides which it was considered impious to disregard." (p.334)
"The Plebeians were not at all, as on the whole the Patricians were, a homogeneous group. Their leaders were mainly rich men who could aspire to the highest positions in the state, even the consulship, and were interested mainly in gaining access to office and to the Senate (the ius honorum) and thus to political power and the chance of strengthening their own position. The rank-and-file had totally different objectives, which can be broadly summarised under three heads: (1) political, (2) juridical, and (3) economic. In (1) the political field they would normally support the aspirations of their leaders to state office, in the hope (vain, as events were to prove) that plebeian oligarchs would treat the mass of plebeians better than patrician oligarchs would. Their two main objectives in the political field, however, were very different: they wanted recognition of their own Assembly (the concilium plebis) as a supreme legislative body equal with the comitia populi Romani; and they wanted a strengthening of the powers of their own peculiar officers, above all those of their tribunes, about whom I shall have something to say in the next paragraph. In (2) the juridical field, they wanted the laws (and the rules of procedure, the legis actiones etc.), originally unwritten and locked up in the breasts of the patrician magistrates, to be published, as they were inc. 450, in the form of the 'Twelve Tables' (but the legis actiones only in 304); and they wanted their right of appeal against legal decisions of a magistrate (the provocatio) affirmed, in the teeth of patrician opposition - laws on this point, according to the tradition, had to be re-enacted more than once. In (3) the economic field, which for the mass of the Plebeians was probably even more important than the other two, they wanted three things: relief from the very harsh Roman law of debt, involving enslavement of defaulters (cf. III.iv above); distributions ofland, either in the form of colonies in conquered territory or viritim (by individual distributions); and finally a less oppressive enforcement of the obligation to perform military service, which remained a very serious burden right down to the last years of the Republic, as Brunt in particular has demonstrated in his Italian Manpower (esp. 391 ff.; cf. his SCRR 11-17, 66-
. Rome was continually at war, and the bulk ofher army was Plebeian. (Marx noted that it was 'wars through which the Roman Patricians ruined the Plebeians, by compelling them to serve as soldiers, and which prevented them from reproducing their conditions of labour, and therefore made paupers of them': Cap. III.598-9.) The most effective weapon the Plebeians could use, therefore, as they realised from the very start, was the secessio, the strike against conscription: the sources refer to no fewer than five occasions when this weapon is said to have been used with effect, three of which (in 494, 449 and 287) are probably genuine.
The tribunes (tribuni plebis) were a most extraordinary feature of the Roman constitution, demonstrating the deep conflict ofinterests inside the body politic. The first tribunes were created, according to the tradition, as a result of the earliest plebeian 'secession' in 494, when it was not so much that the Patricians accepted their existence (as a sort of anti-magistracy) and their inviolability (sacrosanctitas, later given legal recognition) as that the Plebeians took a collective oath to lynch anyone who attacked them! At first, one might say, they stood to official state magistrates almost as shop stewards to company directors ; but gradually, although they never acquired the insignia and trappings of state magistrates, their position became more and more assimilated to that of'magistrates of the Roman People' in almost all respects, except of course that they were drawn from Plebeian families only, and that they could not preside in the comitia populi Romani but only in the concilium plebis (see above). Their powers included the right of vetoing any act of the comitia or of a magistrate (intercessio) ; rescuing any Plebeian - later, any citizen - menaced by a magistrate (ius·auxilii Jerendi); and, as part of their right to exercise coercitio, the ability to arrest and imprison any magistrate, even the consuls themselves. The tribunes' power of veto extended to obstructing military levies; and on at least two occasions in the middle of the second century they went so far as to arrest and imprison consuls who persisted with a call-up-not only in 138 B. C., represented by Cicero as the first time such a thing had happened (De leg. III.20; cf. Livy, Per. 55), but also earlier, in 151 (Livy, Per. 48). It is worth mentioning that the tribunes' power to summon meetings was not limited to the concilium plebis: they also had the right to summon and preside over contiones, public meetings not designed (as were the comitia and concilium plebis) for legislation or official elections, but corresponding rather to the pre-election meetings of British political parties, or (it has been suggested) to the modem 'press conference'. 3 This power of convening contiones was vitally important, because according to Roman constitutional law any meeting not presided over by a magistrate (or a tribune) was an illegal assembly." (pp.334-336)
"The political class struggle, however, was masked as class struggles so often have been - by the fact that it was formally a struggle between 'orders', and was therefore led on the Plebeian side by men who were qualified to become members of the oligarchy in every respect save the purely technical, legal one, that they were not Patricians but Plebeians. It is legitimate to see the 'conflict of the orders' as involving a series of tacit bargains between the two different Plebeian groups: first, the leaders, who had no important economic grievances or demands and whose aims were purely political (and usually, no doubt, selfish), concerned with the removal of a strictly legal disqualification for offices which they were otherwise well qualified to hold ; and secondly the mass of Plebeians, who hardly suffered at all as Plebeians, because the legal disqualifications of Plebeians as such were for posts the vast majority of them could not hope to fill in any event. Thus it was in the interest of each of the two main groups within the Plebeians to join with the other: the mass of the Plebeians would help their leaders to achieve office so that they might be more influential as their protectors, and the leaders would obtain the essential help of the masses for their own advancement by holding out the hope that they would ensure the fulfilment of their aspirations for an improvement in their condition. The 'conflict of the orders' was both a conflict between 'orders' and a class struggle, in which - exceptionally, as far as Roman history is concerned - the lower classes, or at least the upper section of the lower classes, played at times quite a vigorous part." (p.336)
"It is also salutary to read the accounts in Livy and Dionysius of the murder or judicial murder of a number of prominent political figures, whether Patrician or Plebeian, who were felt by the leading Patricians to be too sympathetic to Plebeian grievances: these accounts reveal that the Roman ruling class was prepared to kill without mercy anyone who seemed likely to prove himself a genuine popular leader and perhaps fulfil the role of a Greek tyrant of the progressive type (cf. V.i above). Such a man could be conveniently accused of aspiring to make himself king, rex - in the precise sense of the Greek tyrannos. Cicero was fond of mentioning three famous examples of such men who in the early Republic 'desired to seize regnum for themselves': Spurius Cassius, Spurius Maelius, and Marcus Manlius Capitolinus, whose traditional dates are 485, 439 and 384, and whose stories have recently been well re-examined by A. W. Lintott. We should remember, in this connection, that Cicero, for example in Laelius 40, also denounced Tiberius Gracchus for trying to seize regnum for himself and indeed 'for a few months' succeeding; and that the tribune C. Memmius, a popularis (see Section v of this chapter), could speak sarcastically in 111 B.C. of the restoration to the plebs ofits proper rights as being in the eyes of his opponents a regni paratio, a plot to make oneself rex." (p.337)
"During the last century of the Republic we find a new social group emerging and becoming very prominent: the equestrians (equites, or equester ordo). I must not take time to trace the curious evolution of this body, originally the citizen cavalry (for eques means literally 'horseman'; hence the common translation, 'knights'), in later times specially associated with state contracts and above all the farming of taxes, and from the time of Gaius Gracchus (B.C. 123-122) onwards given one special constitutional function and one only: that of providing at first all, and later some, of the iudices or commissioners of the quaestiones, the standing tribunals which judged certain important cases (both criminal and civil, according to our classification) in the Late Republic. The qualification for membership of this class (the equestrians) was a financial one: the possession of property of a certain minimum value - in the last years of the Republic and in the Principate, HS 400,000. (The senators, on the average, were of course even richer than the equestrians, but during the Republic, strangely enough, there seems not to have been in theory a still higher financial qualification for becoming a senator.) Like the senators, the equestrians enjoyed certain social privileges: wearing the gold ring, sitting in special seats at the theatre. But, apart from the additional 'weighting' given to their votes in the comitia centuriata by their exclusive possession of no fewer than eighteen centuries, their only political privilege (an important but strictly limited one) was serving as commissioners on the quaestiones. Before the courts of law they, like the senators, were not in theory in a better position than the ordinary citizen. And their families had no privileges at all; nor was equestrian status hereditary, in theory, although of course in practice the property which gave access to the ordo equester tended to pass from father to son, and if there was only one son his chances of succeeding to his father's rank would be high." (pp.338-339)
"Against the old view of the equestrians as primarily 'business men', it has been demonstrated beyond doubt by Brunt, Nicolet and others that, like senators, they were essentially land-owners, who might make large profits out of finance and moneylending (not 'trade': they hardly ever appear in the role of merchants) but would normally invest those profits in land (see n.4 again). The allegedly rooted opposition between senators and equestrians is a myth developed by historians in modern times on the basis of a few ancient texts which provide far too flimsy a basis. Compared with the fundamental opposition of interest between landowners and financiers (the latter virtually always also landowners) on the one hand, and peasants and artisans (not to mention slaves) on the other, the internal squabbles within the dominant class, whether between senators and equestrians or between other groups, could be no more than superficial disagreements about the division of the spoil of the world.
Senators and equestrians, then, were the two orders, ordines. When it is used in a strict and full political sense, the term ordo, 6 in the late Republic, commonly denotes only the ordo senatorius and the ordo equester. We hear of'uterque ordo', each of the two orders; and when Cicero speaks of the concordia ordinum, or harmony of the orders, as his political ideal, he means simply senators and equestrians. In our terminology the plebs was an 'order' in the early Republic, as against the Patricians, but the supposed 'ordo plebeius' seems not to have been an expression that was ever used in the Late Republic." (p.340)
"Rome, of course, was never a democracy or anything like it. There were certainly some democratic elements in the Roman constitution, but the oligarchic elements were in practice much stronger, and the overall character of the constitution was strongly oligarchical. The poorer classes at Rome made fatal mistakes : they failed to follow the example of the poorer citizens in so many of the Greek states and demand an extension and improvement of political rights which might create a more democratic society, at a time when the Roman state was still small enough to make a democracy of polis-type (ifl may call it that) a practical possibility. Above all, they failed to obtain (probably even to demand) a fundamental change in the very unsatisfactory nature and procedure of the sovereign Assemblies, the comitia centuriata and comitia tributa (concilium plebis). These allowed no debate (see the preceding section of this chapter); they were subject to all kinds of manipulation by the leading men, and they employed a system of group voting, which in the case of the centuriate Assembly (the most important one) was heavily weighted in favour of the wealthy, although apparently rather less so after a reform in the second half of the third century B.C. Instead of working towards thoroughgoing constitutional reforms, the Roman lower classes tended to look for, and put all their trust in, leaders whom they believed to be, so to speak, 'on their side' - men who in the Late Republic were called populares (demotikoi in Greek) - and to try to put them in positions of power. One explanation of this failure, I believe, was the existence at Rome, in a whole series of insidious forms, of the institution of patronage and clientship, from which most of the Greek cities (Athens especially) seem to have been largely free, but which played a very important part in Roman social and political life, and which came gradually to pervade the Greek world after it had been brought under Roman rule." (pp.340-341)
"From the earliest times until the Later Empire we hear of formal clientship, the clientela, a social institution very difficult to describe accurately. It first appears among the so-called 'Laws of the Kings' (leges regiae), its foundation being attributed to Romulus by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Ant. Rom. 11.9-10); and we find it referred to in two of the surviving laws in the Twelve Tables of 451-450 B.C., one section of which provides that a patron who acts fraudulently towards his client is to be 'accursed' (VIII.21: sacer esto). 11 Cicero could say that the Plebeians were originally clients of the Patricians (De rep. 11.16), 12 and doubtless many of them were - if so, this would have been a complicating factor in the 'conflict of the orders', for of course the very existence of the clientela, in its complete form, tended to make the clientes dependent upon and subservient to their patroni. One special form of the clientela became, from its very nature, most strictly formulated, and it alone is the subject of frequent attention in the Roman lawbooks: this was the relationship of the freedman to his former master, who became his patronus and to whom he owed a whole series of obligations. Other forms of clientship and patronage could be ill-defined, and my own feeling is that the nature of the bond might differ widely in individual cases. It could be very strong: as late as the end of the fourth century of the Christian era we hear from Ammianus that the vastly rich praetorian prefect, Sextus Petronius Probus, 'although he was magnanimous enough never actually to order a client or slave of his to do anything illegal, yet if he found that one of them had committed a crime, he defended the man in defiance of justice and without any investigation or regard for what was right and honourable'." (p.341)
"When Sherwin-White himself tries to illustrate what he sees as an explicit declaration of the doctrine of the relationship of Rome to her allies as a form of clientela (RC2 187-, the word used by the Roman Senate (in 167 B.C.) is not in fact clientela but a quite different metaphor: tutela, the term used by Roman lawyers for the 'guardianship' of minors and women (Livy XLV.18.2). There is, however, at least one case in which the words patrocinium and clientela are used (or represented as being used) by a leading Greek state to describe its relationship to Rome. In Livy (whose source is doubtless Polybius), the ambassadors from Rhodes in 190 B.C., after speaking of their country's amicitia with Rome, and her having undertaken the preservation of their libertas against royal domination, go on to speak ofRome's patrocinium over them and of their having been received into the.fides and clientela of the Romans (XXXVII.liv.3, 15-17). I must add that it was by no means only the Roman state as such and some of its subjects that developed relationships to which the metaphor of clientship might be thought appropriate: individual Romans, especially conquering generals, became hereditary patroni of cities and even whole countries which they had captured or benefited - for example, traditionally Fabricius Luscinus (from 278 B.C.) of all the Samnites, and certainly M. Claudius Marcellus (from 210 B.C.) of the whole of Sicily.
I believe that the existence in Roman society of forms of patronage and clientship with very deep roots had great political as well as social consequences. Even during the Republic, when political activity by the lower classes was still possible in some degree, many individuals, out of obedience to their patrons or in deference to their known attitude, must have been diverted from participating actively in political class struggle, and even induced to take part on the side of those having interests directly opposed to their own. One of the proverbs in the collection of Publilius Syrus, a late Republican, declares that 'To accept a favour [benljicium] is to sell one's freedom' (61); and another asserts that 'To ask a favour [an officium] is a form of servitude' (641) ! Under the Principate, as we shall see in the last two sections of this chapter, such political influence as the lower classes had had soon largely disappeared, and the ways in which patronage could be valuable to a great man changed." (p.342)
"A real gentleman would expect to be called his patron's 'friend' (amicus), not his 'client', even if that patron was the emperor himself. We know of innumerable occasions from the late Republic onwards when great men busied themselves in the interests of those in a less substantial position than themselves, above all in writing letters of recommendation on their behalf." (p.343)
"The Roman upper classes shared Poly bi us' low opinion of the common people and felt no compunction at all about using religion in the service of politics and government: this was taken for granted as a necessity by many writers, including Cicero, Livy, Seneca, and above all the great authority on Roman religion, Varro, against whom St. Augustine later delivered a devastating polemic.
A religious weapon that could be held in reserve for an extreme emergency was the use of the auspices (auspicia), which might be employed to invalidate the election of some magistrate disliked by the oligarchy, or to put an end to popular Assemblies that were about to pass legislation objectionable to the oligarchy (especially of course agrarian reforms), or to annul such legislation retrospectively. It was surely of such powers that C. Memmius was thinking, when in his tribunate in 111 he spoke of all things at Rome, 'divine as well as human', as having been under the control of a few (Sall., BJ 31.20: divina et humana omnia penes paucos erant). Let us note the value placed upon the auspices by that most articulate of all members of the Roman governing class, Cicero.
For him, in speech after speech, the leges Aelia et Fufia, which facilitated the use and abuse of the auspices in the interests of the governing class, were 'laws of the greatest sanctity'; they were 'very beneficial to the state', 'bulwarks and walls of tranquillity and security' ; they were 'the firmest bastions of the state against the frenzy of the tribunes', which they had 'often hampered and restrained'; and as for their repeal in 58, by a law promoted by Cicero's enemy Clodius, 'is there anyone who does not realise that by this one bill the entire State has been subverted?'. In one of his so-called 'philosophical' works, containing legislation for his ideal state, Cicero is insistent that his magistrates should have the auspices, so that plausible methods may exist of hindering unprofitable assemblies of the people ; and he adds, 'For the immortal gods have often restrained, by means of the auspices, the unjust impetuosity of the people'! (De leg. III.27). It was through the auspices that the oligarchs may have felt they had the immortal gods most effectively in their pockets." (pp.343-344)
"Rome made sure that Greece was kept 'quiet' and friendly to her by ensuring that the cities were controlled by the wealthy class, which now had mainly given up any idea of resistance to Roman rule and in fact seems to have welcomed it for the most part, as an insurance against popular movements from below." (p.344)
"Cicero, who boasts so often of his own rectitude and would have been careful not to do anything actually illegal during his proconsulship of Cilicia, makes it clear in his correspondence that he himself derived from his governorship a personal profit of no less than HS 2,200,000 (his own figure, in Ad jam. V.xx.9; Ad Att. XI.i.2), or a little over 90 talents. He himself describes this profit, no doubt quite correctly, as made 'legitimately' ('salvis legibus', Ad jam. V.xx.9). He had even incurred the resentment of his staff ('ingemuit nostra cohors'), by paying back into the Treasury another HS 1,000,000 which they felt ought to have been divided among them." (p.347)
"Cults of the City of Rome, in the form of the goddess Roma (a Greek invention, of course) or festivals called Romaia, were set up in many Greek cities, especially in Asia Minor, for much the same reasons as the numerous cults of Hellenistic kings and of other benefactors [...] sometimes in the hope of future benefits, or from sheer apprehension, sometimes out of genuine gratitude or goodwill. The earliest known of these cults, instituted at Smyrna in 195 (see Tac., Ann. IV.56.1), involved not merely a cult statue but an actual temple: it was a clear 'appeal for intervention and protection'. Cults of individual Roman generals and proconsuls began at the same time in Greece itself, with Flamininus [...] and eventually became very common all over the Greek world: even the infamous Verres had his festival, the Verria, at Syracuse." (p.348)
"Greek democracy was gradually extinguished utterly, the Romans ensuring a continuance of the process which had already begun under Macedonian rule; and of course this made it increasingly difficult, and ultimately impossible, for the humble to offer effective resistance to the powerful save by extra-legal means such as rioting and the lynchiflg of unpopular officials. Rome always exacted tribute, except from the limited circle of Greek civitates liberae et immunes, whose status was precarious even if they were civitates foederatae [...] If a Greek city which came under Roman rule was already exploiting its working population as far as it was safe to do so, the tribute, and of course the additional exactions made by Roman officials and tax-farmers, will have had to come out of the pockets of the propertied class, at least in part; but no doubt the burdens on the peasantry were as a rule simply increased, to cover the tribute and the other Roman burdens." (p.349)
"Gracchus was concerned with social problems: the impoverishment of the citizens, the growth of slave estates, the decline of the peasantry which had always been the backbone of the Roman economy (SCRR 77). The motives of the Gracchi and of the other great populares of the Late Republic are comparatively unimportant, and they can rarely be reconstructed with any confidence. What makes these men figures of real historical significance is the fact that they provided the essential leadership without which the struggles of the lower classes could hardly have emerged at all at the political level." (pp.351-352)
"Only once in the Late Republic, as far as I know, do we hear of those in weakness and poverty being warned that they ought not to put their trust in the promises of rich and prosperous men, and that only a man who was poor himself would be a faithful defender of their interests. This, according to Cicero; was said by Catiline ('that nefarious gladiator', as he calls him) in a speech made in 63 at a private gathering in Catiline's own house and later openly avowed by him in a session of the Senate (Cic., Pro Mur. 50-1). In a moving letter to Catulus, preserved by Sallust, Catiline asserted that it had been his habitual practice to uphold the interests of the poor in public life (publicam miserorum causam pro mea consuetudine suscepi: Cat. 35.3). If this is true, it becomes even easier to understand the extreme detestation with which Catiline was finally regarded by Cicero and his like, and the vilification to which they subjected him." (p.352)
"There are certain features of the policies of the populares which tend to appear again and again: agrarian measures of one kind or another, including above all the distribution of land to the poor or to army veterans, whether in individual lots or in the form of colonies; the supply of com to poor citizens living at Rome, either free or at a low price (frumentationes); the relief of debt; and defence of the democratic elements in the constitution, such as they were, especially the privileges of the tribunes and the right of appeal (provocatio). All these policies were anathema to the oligarchs.
The populares, then, served,faute de mieux and sometimes no doubt against their will, as leaders of what was in a very real sense a political class struggle: a blind, spasmodic, uninformed, often misdirected and always easily confused movement, but a movement with deep roots, proceeding from men whose interests were fundamentally opposed to those of the ruling oligarchy, and who were not concerned (as were sometimes the equestrians, whom I shall mention later) with the mere exclusiveness, corruption and inefficiency of the senatorial government but with its rapacity and its utter indifference to their interests.
I submit that the sudden growth of perhaps not very remarkable men such as Saturninus, Sulpicius Rufus, Catiline and Clodius5 (not to mention the Gracchi) into figures of some historical importance is more easily understandable if we recognise the existence among the poorer classes in the Roman state, especially perhaps the much-abused 'city mob' of Rome itself, of a permanent current of hostility to senatorial misrule and exploitation - hostility which might be repressed for quite long periods by a mixture of sternness and condescending patronage, and which is both minimised and vilified in the oligarchical tradition, but which nevertheless remained a potent force in Roman politics, available to any leader who incorporated in his programme one or more of the few simple policies I outlined at the end of the last paragraph, which would be regarded as the hallmarks of a real popularis. But except in so far as they tried to promote the power of the popular Assembly at the expense of the Senate and magistrates (as for example did Tiberius Gracchus, Satuminus and perhaps Glaucia, and even Julius Caesar in his consulship in 59 B.C.), it would be misleading to call the populares 'democrats'. As their name implied, they were essentially those who either were, or represented themselves as being or were believed to be, in some respects 'on the side of the common people', against the ruling oligarchy." (pp.353)
"There is plenty of evidence to show that a large number of the common people, both in Rome itself and in Roman Italy, regarded the populares as their leaders, supported them, and often revered their memories when they were done to death - as many of them were: in particular Tiberius Gracchus, Gaius Gracchus, Satuminus and Glaucia, Sulpicius Rufus, Marius Gratidianus, Catiline, Clodius and Caesar." (p.353)
"After the death of Gaius (in 122) the Roman people demonstrated their respect for the brothers by setting up statues of them, regarding the places where they had been murdered as sacred and bringing first-fruits of everything there; many came to sacrifice and worship at these places, as if they were visiting shrines of gods." (p.354)
"Sallust, who often weakens his picture with facile moralising, sometimes realised the truth, as when he wrote: 'Every man who was most opulent and most capable of inflicting harm passed for a "bonus" because he defended the existing state of affairs'." (p.355)
-Geoffrey E. Maurice Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests, New York, Cornell University Press, 1981, 732 pages.
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/2925749/9a42e1
"As far as I am aware, it is the first book in English, or in any other language I can read, which begins by explaining the central features of Marx's historical method and defining the concepts and categories involved, and then proceeds to demonstrate how these instruments of analysis may be used in practice to explain the main events, processes, institutions and ideas that prevailed at various times over a long period of history - here, the thirteen or fourteen hundred years of my 'ancient Greek world'." (IX)
"This book, on the contrary, is an attempt to see the ancient Greek world in very close relation with our own and is inspired by the belief that we can learn much about each by careful study of the other." (p.XI)
" [Chapter VI: Rome the Suzerain]
"The Roman lawyers 'hardly touched upon those questions which seem vital to us' (CRL 545), such as the protection of workers, or of'the poor lessees of flats or agricultural land'. (I have already referred, in IV.iii above, to the severity of the Roman law ofleasing, locatio conductio.) But when Schulz says again that 'The lawyers wrote and worked for the class of the beati possidentes to which they themselves belonged and their social sense was ill developed' (ibid.), we may be tempted to comment that the 'social sense' of these lawyers was all too well developed: they were thinking, as we ought to expect, in terms of the interests of the class to which they themselves and their clients belonged. Law, indeed, has 'just as little an independent history as religion' (Marx and Engels, German Ideology)." (p.330)
"One other feature of Roman law needs to be mentioned here: the discrimination on grounds of social status, based to a high degree upon distinctions of class in my sense, which I describe in VIIl.i below. These manifested themselves chiefly, it is true, in the criminal field (where, as I have pointed out, Roman law remained a rather disreputable affair); but they also entered into the administration even of the ius civile, in the sense in which I am using that term, for instance by attaching greater weight to the evidence given by members of the upper classes. [...] The inbuilt disposition of Roman law to respect and favour the propertied classes became more explicitly institutionalised during the Principate. Thus, as A.H. M.Jones has said, 'There was one law for the rich and another for the poor', although in the purely civil sphere 'it was not so much the law that was at fault, as the courts'." (p.331)
"Imperial powers - the British until recently, the Americans today- are easily able to fancy themselves morally superior to other peoples.
Romans often pretended that their empire had been acquired almost against their own will, by a series of defensive actions, which could be made to sound positively virtuous when they were represented as undertaken in defence of others, especially Rome's 'allies'. Thus according to Cicero, in whom we can often find the choicest expression of any given kind of Roman hypocrisy, it was in the course of 'defending their allies', sociis defendendis, that the Romans became 'masters of all lands' (De rep. 111.23/35). 5 The speaker in the dialogue, almost certainly Laelius (who often represents Cicero's own views), goes on to express opinions - basically similar to the theory of'natural slavery' - according to which some peoples can actually benefit from being in a state of complete political subjection to another (cf. VII.ii below, with my ECAPS 18 and its n.52). Anyone innocent enough to be disposed to accept the view of Roman imperialism that I have just mentioned can best enlighten himself by reading Polybius, who was an intimate of some of the leading Romans of his day (roughly the second and third quarters of the second century B.C.) and well understood the Roman will to conquer the known world, even ifin his mind it was more clear and definite than we perhaps have reason to believe. (I give the main Polybian passages in a note.)
In fairness to Cicero, we must not fail to notice that on several occasions in his letters and speeches he shows a real awareness of the hatred Rome had aroused among many subject peoples by the oppression and exploitation to which she had exposed them: he speaks of iniuriae, iniquitas, libidines, cupiditates, acerbitas on the part of the leading Romans who had governed them (cf. Tac., Ann. 1.2.2, and the passages cited in n.19 to Section v of this chapter). But nearly all that I would have wished to say about Roman imperialism in the late Republic (and much more) has been admirably expressed by Brunt in an important recent article (LI), the purpose of which was 'to explore the conceptions of empire prevalent in Cicero's day'. I agree with Brunt that the Romans had managed to persuade themselves that their empire was 'universal and willed by the gods' ; and I particularly like his statements that 'the peculiar Roman conception of defensive war ... covered the prevention and elimination of any potential menace to Roman power' (LI 179), and that Rome's 'reactions to the possibility of a threat resembled those of a nervous tiger, disturbed when feeding'." (p.331)
"It is only too easy for those who insist on accurate technical definition of the terms 'Patricians' and 'Plebeians' to say blandly that they have nothing to do with property or economic position, or class in my sense (as defined in II.ii above). Technically, this is quite correct: we are dealing here, not with 'classes' but with 'orders', juridically recognised categories of citizens. But of course the Patricians were able to gain access to, and ultimately to monopolise, political power at Rome because they were by and large the richest families - in the mainly agrarian society of early Rome, the largest landowners above all. (Here some ofBickerman's analogies from mediaeval European communes are useful, although some of the towns he refers to had a high proportion of wealthy merchants among their great men, as Rome never did.) The richer a family was, the more chance it would have, other things being equal, of gaining political influence. Of course not quite all the wealthiest families would acquire patrician status, and some of the families which did so may not have been among the very richest ; but the equation, Patricians = largest landowners, must have been broadly true over all, and when a family did become patrician and thus gained access to the small circle that enjoyed political privilege, it would naturally have every opportunity to consolidate and improve its own position vis-a-vis Plebeians. The Patricians, of course, were always few in number: 'after 366 only twenty-one clans [gentes] are attested, of which some were tiny, and not more than another score before that date' (Brunt, SCRR 47). Some of the Patricians, however, had large numbers of humble plebeian 'clients' (clientes): men bound to them by personal ties involving obligations on both sides which it was considered impious to disregard." (p.334)
"The Plebeians were not at all, as on the whole the Patricians were, a homogeneous group. Their leaders were mainly rich men who could aspire to the highest positions in the state, even the consulship, and were interested mainly in gaining access to office and to the Senate (the ius honorum) and thus to political power and the chance of strengthening their own position. The rank-and-file had totally different objectives, which can be broadly summarised under three heads: (1) political, (2) juridical, and (3) economic. In (1) the political field they would normally support the aspirations of their leaders to state office, in the hope (vain, as events were to prove) that plebeian oligarchs would treat the mass of plebeians better than patrician oligarchs would. Their two main objectives in the political field, however, were very different: they wanted recognition of their own Assembly (the concilium plebis) as a supreme legislative body equal with the comitia populi Romani; and they wanted a strengthening of the powers of their own peculiar officers, above all those of their tribunes, about whom I shall have something to say in the next paragraph. In (2) the juridical field, they wanted the laws (and the rules of procedure, the legis actiones etc.), originally unwritten and locked up in the breasts of the patrician magistrates, to be published, as they were inc. 450, in the form of the 'Twelve Tables' (but the legis actiones only in 304); and they wanted their right of appeal against legal decisions of a magistrate (the provocatio) affirmed, in the teeth of patrician opposition - laws on this point, according to the tradition, had to be re-enacted more than once. In (3) the economic field, which for the mass of the Plebeians was probably even more important than the other two, they wanted three things: relief from the very harsh Roman law of debt, involving enslavement of defaulters (cf. III.iv above); distributions ofland, either in the form of colonies in conquered territory or viritim (by individual distributions); and finally a less oppressive enforcement of the obligation to perform military service, which remained a very serious burden right down to the last years of the Republic, as Brunt in particular has demonstrated in his Italian Manpower (esp. 391 ff.; cf. his SCRR 11-17, 66-
. Rome was continually at war, and the bulk ofher army was Plebeian. (Marx noted that it was 'wars through which the Roman Patricians ruined the Plebeians, by compelling them to serve as soldiers, and which prevented them from reproducing their conditions of labour, and therefore made paupers of them': Cap. III.598-9.) The most effective weapon the Plebeians could use, therefore, as they realised from the very start, was the secessio, the strike against conscription: the sources refer to no fewer than five occasions when this weapon is said to have been used with effect, three of which (in 494, 449 and 287) are probably genuine.The tribunes (tribuni plebis) were a most extraordinary feature of the Roman constitution, demonstrating the deep conflict ofinterests inside the body politic. The first tribunes were created, according to the tradition, as a result of the earliest plebeian 'secession' in 494, when it was not so much that the Patricians accepted their existence (as a sort of anti-magistracy) and their inviolability (sacrosanctitas, later given legal recognition) as that the Plebeians took a collective oath to lynch anyone who attacked them! At first, one might say, they stood to official state magistrates almost as shop stewards to company directors ; but gradually, although they never acquired the insignia and trappings of state magistrates, their position became more and more assimilated to that of'magistrates of the Roman People' in almost all respects, except of course that they were drawn from Plebeian families only, and that they could not preside in the comitia populi Romani but only in the concilium plebis (see above). Their powers included the right of vetoing any act of the comitia or of a magistrate (intercessio) ; rescuing any Plebeian - later, any citizen - menaced by a magistrate (ius·auxilii Jerendi); and, as part of their right to exercise coercitio, the ability to arrest and imprison any magistrate, even the consuls themselves. The tribunes' power of veto extended to obstructing military levies; and on at least two occasions in the middle of the second century they went so far as to arrest and imprison consuls who persisted with a call-up-not only in 138 B. C., represented by Cicero as the first time such a thing had happened (De leg. III.20; cf. Livy, Per. 55), but also earlier, in 151 (Livy, Per. 48). It is worth mentioning that the tribunes' power to summon meetings was not limited to the concilium plebis: they also had the right to summon and preside over contiones, public meetings not designed (as were the comitia and concilium plebis) for legislation or official elections, but corresponding rather to the pre-election meetings of British political parties, or (it has been suggested) to the modem 'press conference'. 3 This power of convening contiones was vitally important, because according to Roman constitutional law any meeting not presided over by a magistrate (or a tribune) was an illegal assembly." (pp.334-336)
"The political class struggle, however, was masked as class struggles so often have been - by the fact that it was formally a struggle between 'orders', and was therefore led on the Plebeian side by men who were qualified to become members of the oligarchy in every respect save the purely technical, legal one, that they were not Patricians but Plebeians. It is legitimate to see the 'conflict of the orders' as involving a series of tacit bargains between the two different Plebeian groups: first, the leaders, who had no important economic grievances or demands and whose aims were purely political (and usually, no doubt, selfish), concerned with the removal of a strictly legal disqualification for offices which they were otherwise well qualified to hold ; and secondly the mass of Plebeians, who hardly suffered at all as Plebeians, because the legal disqualifications of Plebeians as such were for posts the vast majority of them could not hope to fill in any event. Thus it was in the interest of each of the two main groups within the Plebeians to join with the other: the mass of the Plebeians would help their leaders to achieve office so that they might be more influential as their protectors, and the leaders would obtain the essential help of the masses for their own advancement by holding out the hope that they would ensure the fulfilment of their aspirations for an improvement in their condition. The 'conflict of the orders' was both a conflict between 'orders' and a class struggle, in which - exceptionally, as far as Roman history is concerned - the lower classes, or at least the upper section of the lower classes, played at times quite a vigorous part." (p.336)
"It is also salutary to read the accounts in Livy and Dionysius of the murder or judicial murder of a number of prominent political figures, whether Patrician or Plebeian, who were felt by the leading Patricians to be too sympathetic to Plebeian grievances: these accounts reveal that the Roman ruling class was prepared to kill without mercy anyone who seemed likely to prove himself a genuine popular leader and perhaps fulfil the role of a Greek tyrant of the progressive type (cf. V.i above). Such a man could be conveniently accused of aspiring to make himself king, rex - in the precise sense of the Greek tyrannos. Cicero was fond of mentioning three famous examples of such men who in the early Republic 'desired to seize regnum for themselves': Spurius Cassius, Spurius Maelius, and Marcus Manlius Capitolinus, whose traditional dates are 485, 439 and 384, and whose stories have recently been well re-examined by A. W. Lintott. We should remember, in this connection, that Cicero, for example in Laelius 40, also denounced Tiberius Gracchus for trying to seize regnum for himself and indeed 'for a few months' succeeding; and that the tribune C. Memmius, a popularis (see Section v of this chapter), could speak sarcastically in 111 B.C. of the restoration to the plebs ofits proper rights as being in the eyes of his opponents a regni paratio, a plot to make oneself rex." (p.337)
"During the last century of the Republic we find a new social group emerging and becoming very prominent: the equestrians (equites, or equester ordo). I must not take time to trace the curious evolution of this body, originally the citizen cavalry (for eques means literally 'horseman'; hence the common translation, 'knights'), in later times specially associated with state contracts and above all the farming of taxes, and from the time of Gaius Gracchus (B.C. 123-122) onwards given one special constitutional function and one only: that of providing at first all, and later some, of the iudices or commissioners of the quaestiones, the standing tribunals which judged certain important cases (both criminal and civil, according to our classification) in the Late Republic. The qualification for membership of this class (the equestrians) was a financial one: the possession of property of a certain minimum value - in the last years of the Republic and in the Principate, HS 400,000. (The senators, on the average, were of course even richer than the equestrians, but during the Republic, strangely enough, there seems not to have been in theory a still higher financial qualification for becoming a senator.) Like the senators, the equestrians enjoyed certain social privileges: wearing the gold ring, sitting in special seats at the theatre. But, apart from the additional 'weighting' given to their votes in the comitia centuriata by their exclusive possession of no fewer than eighteen centuries, their only political privilege (an important but strictly limited one) was serving as commissioners on the quaestiones. Before the courts of law they, like the senators, were not in theory in a better position than the ordinary citizen. And their families had no privileges at all; nor was equestrian status hereditary, in theory, although of course in practice the property which gave access to the ordo equester tended to pass from father to son, and if there was only one son his chances of succeeding to his father's rank would be high." (pp.338-339)
"Against the old view of the equestrians as primarily 'business men', it has been demonstrated beyond doubt by Brunt, Nicolet and others that, like senators, they were essentially land-owners, who might make large profits out of finance and moneylending (not 'trade': they hardly ever appear in the role of merchants) but would normally invest those profits in land (see n.4 again). The allegedly rooted opposition between senators and equestrians is a myth developed by historians in modern times on the basis of a few ancient texts which provide far too flimsy a basis. Compared with the fundamental opposition of interest between landowners and financiers (the latter virtually always also landowners) on the one hand, and peasants and artisans (not to mention slaves) on the other, the internal squabbles within the dominant class, whether between senators and equestrians or between other groups, could be no more than superficial disagreements about the division of the spoil of the world.
Senators and equestrians, then, were the two orders, ordines. When it is used in a strict and full political sense, the term ordo, 6 in the late Republic, commonly denotes only the ordo senatorius and the ordo equester. We hear of'uterque ordo', each of the two orders; and when Cicero speaks of the concordia ordinum, or harmony of the orders, as his political ideal, he means simply senators and equestrians. In our terminology the plebs was an 'order' in the early Republic, as against the Patricians, but the supposed 'ordo plebeius' seems not to have been an expression that was ever used in the Late Republic." (p.340)
"Rome, of course, was never a democracy or anything like it. There were certainly some democratic elements in the Roman constitution, but the oligarchic elements were in practice much stronger, and the overall character of the constitution was strongly oligarchical. The poorer classes at Rome made fatal mistakes : they failed to follow the example of the poorer citizens in so many of the Greek states and demand an extension and improvement of political rights which might create a more democratic society, at a time when the Roman state was still small enough to make a democracy of polis-type (ifl may call it that) a practical possibility. Above all, they failed to obtain (probably even to demand) a fundamental change in the very unsatisfactory nature and procedure of the sovereign Assemblies, the comitia centuriata and comitia tributa (concilium plebis). These allowed no debate (see the preceding section of this chapter); they were subject to all kinds of manipulation by the leading men, and they employed a system of group voting, which in the case of the centuriate Assembly (the most important one) was heavily weighted in favour of the wealthy, although apparently rather less so after a reform in the second half of the third century B.C. Instead of working towards thoroughgoing constitutional reforms, the Roman lower classes tended to look for, and put all their trust in, leaders whom they believed to be, so to speak, 'on their side' - men who in the Late Republic were called populares (demotikoi in Greek) - and to try to put them in positions of power. One explanation of this failure, I believe, was the existence at Rome, in a whole series of insidious forms, of the institution of patronage and clientship, from which most of the Greek cities (Athens especially) seem to have been largely free, but which played a very important part in Roman social and political life, and which came gradually to pervade the Greek world after it had been brought under Roman rule." (pp.340-341)
"From the earliest times until the Later Empire we hear of formal clientship, the clientela, a social institution very difficult to describe accurately. It first appears among the so-called 'Laws of the Kings' (leges regiae), its foundation being attributed to Romulus by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Ant. Rom. 11.9-10); and we find it referred to in two of the surviving laws in the Twelve Tables of 451-450 B.C., one section of which provides that a patron who acts fraudulently towards his client is to be 'accursed' (VIII.21: sacer esto). 11 Cicero could say that the Plebeians were originally clients of the Patricians (De rep. 11.16), 12 and doubtless many of them were - if so, this would have been a complicating factor in the 'conflict of the orders', for of course the very existence of the clientela, in its complete form, tended to make the clientes dependent upon and subservient to their patroni. One special form of the clientela became, from its very nature, most strictly formulated, and it alone is the subject of frequent attention in the Roman lawbooks: this was the relationship of the freedman to his former master, who became his patronus and to whom he owed a whole series of obligations. Other forms of clientship and patronage could be ill-defined, and my own feeling is that the nature of the bond might differ widely in individual cases. It could be very strong: as late as the end of the fourth century of the Christian era we hear from Ammianus that the vastly rich praetorian prefect, Sextus Petronius Probus, 'although he was magnanimous enough never actually to order a client or slave of his to do anything illegal, yet if he found that one of them had committed a crime, he defended the man in defiance of justice and without any investigation or regard for what was right and honourable'." (p.341)
"When Sherwin-White himself tries to illustrate what he sees as an explicit declaration of the doctrine of the relationship of Rome to her allies as a form of clientela (RC2 187-
, the word used by the Roman Senate (in 167 B.C.) is not in fact clientela but a quite different metaphor: tutela, the term used by Roman lawyers for the 'guardianship' of minors and women (Livy XLV.18.2). There is, however, at least one case in which the words patrocinium and clientela are used (or represented as being used) by a leading Greek state to describe its relationship to Rome. In Livy (whose source is doubtless Polybius), the ambassadors from Rhodes in 190 B.C., after speaking of their country's amicitia with Rome, and her having undertaken the preservation of their libertas against royal domination, go on to speak ofRome's patrocinium over them and of their having been received into the.fides and clientela of the Romans (XXXVII.liv.3, 15-17). I must add that it was by no means only the Roman state as such and some of its subjects that developed relationships to which the metaphor of clientship might be thought appropriate: individual Romans, especially conquering generals, became hereditary patroni of cities and even whole countries which they had captured or benefited - for example, traditionally Fabricius Luscinus (from 278 B.C.) of all the Samnites, and certainly M. Claudius Marcellus (from 210 B.C.) of the whole of Sicily.I believe that the existence in Roman society of forms of patronage and clientship with very deep roots had great political as well as social consequences. Even during the Republic, when political activity by the lower classes was still possible in some degree, many individuals, out of obedience to their patrons or in deference to their known attitude, must have been diverted from participating actively in political class struggle, and even induced to take part on the side of those having interests directly opposed to their own. One of the proverbs in the collection of Publilius Syrus, a late Republican, declares that 'To accept a favour [benljicium] is to sell one's freedom' (61); and another asserts that 'To ask a favour [an officium] is a form of servitude' (641) ! Under the Principate, as we shall see in the last two sections of this chapter, such political influence as the lower classes had had soon largely disappeared, and the ways in which patronage could be valuable to a great man changed." (p.342)
"A real gentleman would expect to be called his patron's 'friend' (amicus), not his 'client', even if that patron was the emperor himself. We know of innumerable occasions from the late Republic onwards when great men busied themselves in the interests of those in a less substantial position than themselves, above all in writing letters of recommendation on their behalf." (p.343)
"The Roman upper classes shared Poly bi us' low opinion of the common people and felt no compunction at all about using religion in the service of politics and government: this was taken for granted as a necessity by many writers, including Cicero, Livy, Seneca, and above all the great authority on Roman religion, Varro, against whom St. Augustine later delivered a devastating polemic.
A religious weapon that could be held in reserve for an extreme emergency was the use of the auspices (auspicia), which might be employed to invalidate the election of some magistrate disliked by the oligarchy, or to put an end to popular Assemblies that were about to pass legislation objectionable to the oligarchy (especially of course agrarian reforms), or to annul such legislation retrospectively. It was surely of such powers that C. Memmius was thinking, when in his tribunate in 111 he spoke of all things at Rome, 'divine as well as human', as having been under the control of a few (Sall., BJ 31.20: divina et humana omnia penes paucos erant). Let us note the value placed upon the auspices by that most articulate of all members of the Roman governing class, Cicero.
For him, in speech after speech, the leges Aelia et Fufia, which facilitated the use and abuse of the auspices in the interests of the governing class, were 'laws of the greatest sanctity'; they were 'very beneficial to the state', 'bulwarks and walls of tranquillity and security' ; they were 'the firmest bastions of the state against the frenzy of the tribunes', which they had 'often hampered and restrained'; and as for their repeal in 58, by a law promoted by Cicero's enemy Clodius, 'is there anyone who does not realise that by this one bill the entire State has been subverted?'. In one of his so-called 'philosophical' works, containing legislation for his ideal state, Cicero is insistent that his magistrates should have the auspices, so that plausible methods may exist of hindering unprofitable assemblies of the people ; and he adds, 'For the immortal gods have often restrained, by means of the auspices, the unjust impetuosity of the people'! (De leg. III.27). It was through the auspices that the oligarchs may have felt they had the immortal gods most effectively in their pockets." (pp.343-344)
"Rome made sure that Greece was kept 'quiet' and friendly to her by ensuring that the cities were controlled by the wealthy class, which now had mainly given up any idea of resistance to Roman rule and in fact seems to have welcomed it for the most part, as an insurance against popular movements from below." (p.344)
"Cicero, who boasts so often of his own rectitude and would have been careful not to do anything actually illegal during his proconsulship of Cilicia, makes it clear in his correspondence that he himself derived from his governorship a personal profit of no less than HS 2,200,000 (his own figure, in Ad jam. V.xx.9; Ad Att. XI.i.2), or a little over 90 talents. He himself describes this profit, no doubt quite correctly, as made 'legitimately' ('salvis legibus', Ad jam. V.xx.9). He had even incurred the resentment of his staff ('ingemuit nostra cohors'), by paying back into the Treasury another HS 1,000,000 which they felt ought to have been divided among them." (p.347)
"Cults of the City of Rome, in the form of the goddess Roma (a Greek invention, of course) or festivals called Romaia, were set up in many Greek cities, especially in Asia Minor, for much the same reasons as the numerous cults of Hellenistic kings and of other benefactors [...] sometimes in the hope of future benefits, or from sheer apprehension, sometimes out of genuine gratitude or goodwill. The earliest known of these cults, instituted at Smyrna in 195 (see Tac., Ann. IV.56.1), involved not merely a cult statue but an actual temple: it was a clear 'appeal for intervention and protection'. Cults of individual Roman generals and proconsuls began at the same time in Greece itself, with Flamininus [...] and eventually became very common all over the Greek world: even the infamous Verres had his festival, the Verria, at Syracuse." (p.348)
"Greek democracy was gradually extinguished utterly, the Romans ensuring a continuance of the process which had already begun under Macedonian rule; and of course this made it increasingly difficult, and ultimately impossible, for the humble to offer effective resistance to the powerful save by extra-legal means such as rioting and the lynchiflg of unpopular officials. Rome always exacted tribute, except from the limited circle of Greek civitates liberae et immunes, whose status was precarious even if they were civitates foederatae [...] If a Greek city which came under Roman rule was already exploiting its working population as far as it was safe to do so, the tribute, and of course the additional exactions made by Roman officials and tax-farmers, will have had to come out of the pockets of the propertied class, at least in part; but no doubt the burdens on the peasantry were as a rule simply increased, to cover the tribute and the other Roman burdens." (p.349)
"Gracchus was concerned with social problems: the impoverishment of the citizens, the growth of slave estates, the decline of the peasantry which had always been the backbone of the Roman economy (SCRR 77). The motives of the Gracchi and of the other great populares of the Late Republic are comparatively unimportant, and they can rarely be reconstructed with any confidence. What makes these men figures of real historical significance is the fact that they provided the essential leadership without which the struggles of the lower classes could hardly have emerged at all at the political level." (pp.351-352)
"Only once in the Late Republic, as far as I know, do we hear of those in weakness and poverty being warned that they ought not to put their trust in the promises of rich and prosperous men, and that only a man who was poor himself would be a faithful defender of their interests. This, according to Cicero; was said by Catiline ('that nefarious gladiator', as he calls him) in a speech made in 63 at a private gathering in Catiline's own house and later openly avowed by him in a session of the Senate (Cic., Pro Mur. 50-1). In a moving letter to Catulus, preserved by Sallust, Catiline asserted that it had been his habitual practice to uphold the interests of the poor in public life (publicam miserorum causam pro mea consuetudine suscepi: Cat. 35.3). If this is true, it becomes even easier to understand the extreme detestation with which Catiline was finally regarded by Cicero and his like, and the vilification to which they subjected him." (p.352)
"There are certain features of the policies of the populares which tend to appear again and again: agrarian measures of one kind or another, including above all the distribution of land to the poor or to army veterans, whether in individual lots or in the form of colonies; the supply of com to poor citizens living at Rome, either free or at a low price (frumentationes); the relief of debt; and defence of the democratic elements in the constitution, such as they were, especially the privileges of the tribunes and the right of appeal (provocatio). All these policies were anathema to the oligarchs.
The populares, then, served,faute de mieux and sometimes no doubt against their will, as leaders of what was in a very real sense a political class struggle: a blind, spasmodic, uninformed, often misdirected and always easily confused movement, but a movement with deep roots, proceeding from men whose interests were fundamentally opposed to those of the ruling oligarchy, and who were not concerned (as were sometimes the equestrians, whom I shall mention later) with the mere exclusiveness, corruption and inefficiency of the senatorial government but with its rapacity and its utter indifference to their interests.
I submit that the sudden growth of perhaps not very remarkable men such as Saturninus, Sulpicius Rufus, Catiline and Clodius5 (not to mention the Gracchi) into figures of some historical importance is more easily understandable if we recognise the existence among the poorer classes in the Roman state, especially perhaps the much-abused 'city mob' of Rome itself, of a permanent current of hostility to senatorial misrule and exploitation - hostility which might be repressed for quite long periods by a mixture of sternness and condescending patronage, and which is both minimised and vilified in the oligarchical tradition, but which nevertheless remained a potent force in Roman politics, available to any leader who incorporated in his programme one or more of the few simple policies I outlined at the end of the last paragraph, which would be regarded as the hallmarks of a real popularis. But except in so far as they tried to promote the power of the popular Assembly at the expense of the Senate and magistrates (as for example did Tiberius Gracchus, Satuminus and perhaps Glaucia, and even Julius Caesar in his consulship in 59 B.C.), it would be misleading to call the populares 'democrats'. As their name implied, they were essentially those who either were, or represented themselves as being or were believed to be, in some respects 'on the side of the common people', against the ruling oligarchy." (pp.353)
"There is plenty of evidence to show that a large number of the common people, both in Rome itself and in Roman Italy, regarded the populares as their leaders, supported them, and often revered their memories when they were done to death - as many of them were: in particular Tiberius Gracchus, Gaius Gracchus, Satuminus and Glaucia, Sulpicius Rufus, Marius Gratidianus, Catiline, Clodius and Caesar." (p.353)
"After the death of Gaius (in 122) the Roman people demonstrated their respect for the brothers by setting up statues of them, regarding the places where they had been murdered as sacred and bringing first-fruits of everything there; many came to sacrifice and worship at these places, as if they were visiting shrines of gods." (p.354)
"Sallust, who often weakens his picture with facile moralising, sometimes realised the truth, as when he wrote: 'Every man who was most opulent and most capable of inflicting harm passed for a "bonus" because he defended the existing state of affairs'." (p.355)
-Geoffrey E. Maurice Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests, New York, Cornell University Press, 1981, 732 pages.
