L'ASSASSINIO DI GIULIO CESARE
Michael Parenti
Recensione
Il saggio di Michael Parenti ci porta a una riflessione che supera i confini dell'antichità per interrogare la modernità sul senso profondo del potere e della giustizia sociale.
La tesi centrale dell'opera è che la caduta della Repubblica Romana non fu causata dall'ambizione di un singolo uomo, ma dalla miopia e dall'avidità di un'élite che scambiò i propri profitti per il bene comune e preferì la guerra civile alla rinuncia a una minima parte dei propri privilegi.
La figura di Cesare, pur con le sue ombre di conquistatore imperiale, emerge come quella di un politico capace di comprendere che la stabilità di una nazione dipende dalla dignità della sua base sociale e non solo dalla ricchezza dei suoi vertici.
Parenti ci invita a riconsiderare quante volte, nella storia successiva, i tentativi di ridistribuire il potere e la ricchezza siano stati etichettati come demagogia o tirannia da coloro che detenevano il monopolio del discorso storico.
Resta aperta una domanda fondamentale che collega la Roma di allora alla nostra epoca: è possibile mantenere una struttura democratica o repubblicana quando le disuguaglianze economiche diventano così estreme da svuotare di significato ogni istituzione legislativa?
Perché l'assassinio di Giulio Cesare fu un colpo di stato contro il popolo romano
L’eredità distorta: la critica alla storiografia dei gentiluomini
Il quindici di marzo del 44 a.C., all’interno di una sala adiacente al teatro di Pompeo, il Senato romano attendeva l'arrivo di Giulio Cesare con un’apparente calma che nascondeva pugnali pronti all'azione.
Quello che la storiografia tradizionale ha spesso celebrato come un atto eroico di tirannicidio per la salvezza della libertà repubblicana viene radicalmente reinterpretato dal recentissimamente scomparso Michael Parenti nel suo saggio L’assassinio di Giulio Cesare. Una storia di popolo nella Roma antica.
L'autore sostiene che l'uccisione di Cesare non fu il gesto disinteressato di nobili patrioti, ma un assassinio politico perpetrato da un’oligarchia intenzionata a proteggere i propri smisurati privilegi materiali contro un leader che stava attuando riforme a favore delle masse indigenti.
L'opera di Parenti si configura quindi come una storia dal basso che sfida millenni di narrazioni elitarie, ponendo al centro dell’analisi il conflitto di classe che dilaniava la tarda Repubblica romana.
Parenti inizia la sua analisi con una sferzante critica a quella che definisce la “storiografia dei gentiluomini”, un genere letterario prodotto per secoli da studiosi appartenenti o affiliati alle classi superiori.
Storici come Edward Gibbon, pur dotati di immenso talento, hanno percepito la realtà romana attraverso il filtro della propria posizione sociale, identificandosi con l’aristocrazia senatoria e guardando con disprezzo alle aspirazioni democratiche della plebe. Questa unanimità di pregiudizi è stata scambiata per oggettività, portando alla creazione di un paradigma in cui l’impero è visto come un’entità governata da virtù e saggezza, ignorando sistematicamente le sofferenze delle popolazioni conquistate, l’orrore delle schiavitù e la brutale repressione dei riformatori interni.
Gli storici classici, da Cicerone a Mommsen, hanno costantemente dipinto il popolo comune di Roma come una massa ignorante, volubile e pericolosa, spesso etichettandola con termini spregiativi come feccia o plebe parassitaria.
Questo atteggiamento riflette il timore delle élite verso qualsiasi sfida al loro ordine sociale, equiparando ogni tentativo di ridistribuzione della ricchezza al caos e alla perdizione. Parenti osserva che persino autori moderni continuano a perpetuare lo stereotipo della folla romana interessata solo al pane e ai giochi, senza mai interrogarsi sulle ragioni materiali e sistemiche che spingevano i proletari a lottare per la propria sopravvivenza.
La base della piramide: proletari, schiavi e la miseria urbana
Per comprendere il contesto delle riforme di Cesare, bisogna considerare le condizioni di vita della plebe urbana e degli schiavi, che costituivano la base della piramide sociale romana.
Roma era circondata da anelli di baraccopoli dove migliaia di proletari vivevano ammassati in condomini fatiscenti di sette o otto piani, privi di servizi igienici, acqua corrente e ventilazione. Questi edifici, spesso costruiti con materiali scadenti dai proprietari di immobili, tra cui figurava lo stesso Cicerone, erano soggetti a crolli frequenti e incendi devastanti che trasformavano le abitazioni in trappole mortali. Mentre i ricchi vivevano in un’opulenza incredibile, i poveri lottavano quotidianamente con la fame, le malattie come il tifo e la violenza delle strade.
Il sistema si reggeva sul lavoro degli schiavi, il cui trattamento è stato spesso edulcorato dagli “storici dei gentiluomini” come una forma di servitù benevola.
Al contrario, Parenti evidenzia come la schiavitù romana fosse un’istituzione coercitiva e disumanizzante, in cui gli esseri umani venivano trattati come merci deteriorabili, soggetti a fustigazioni, mutilazioni e sfruttamento sessuale sistematico. Gli schiavi non erano solo forza lavoro nelle miniere o nelle grandi piantagioni chiamate latifondi, ma rappresentavano un investimento che i padroni proteggevano con il terrore, arrivando a giustiziare tutti gli schiavi di una casa se il padrone veniva ucciso da uno solo di loro.
Questa realtà di sfruttamento estremo generava una costante tensione sociale e frequenti rivolte, come quella celebre di Spartaco, che venivano represse con una crudeltà inaudita dall’aristocrazia senatoria.
L’illusione repubblicana: un sistema progettato per l’oligarchia
La Repubblica romana, lungi dall’essere una democrazia nel senso moderno del termine, era una struttura politica progettata per garantire il predominio di poche famiglie aristocratiche.
Sebbene esistessero assemblee popolari, il sistema di voto era truccato a favore delle classi possidenti, rendendo quasi impossibile per la plebe far valere i propri interessi senza ricorrere a mobilitazioni di massa o agitazioni di piazza. Il Senato deteneva il controllo effettivo sulla politica estera, sulle finanze e sull’amministrazione delle province, utilizzandole come fonti inesauribili di arricchimento personale per i propri membri.
L’ideologia dei nobili presentava i propri interessi speciali come il bene generale dello Stato, una tecnica di offuscamento che Parenti vede ripetersi in ogni classe dominante della storia.
Gli optimates, ovvero la fazione senatoria conservatrice, consideravano qualsiasi interferenza con le loro prerogative economiche come un attacco alla libertà repubblicana, termine che per loro significava esclusivamente la libertà dell’aristocrazia di accumulare ricchezza senza restrizioni.
Quando il sistema legale non era più sufficiente a bloccare le istanze popolari, l’oligarchia non esitava a sospendere la costituzione attraverso il senatus consultum ultimum, un decreto che autorizzava i magistrati alla repressione violenta e all’omicidio politico.
L’ascesa dei “Populares” e la reazione violenta del Senato
Prima di Cesare, una lunga serie di leader popolari aveva tentato di sfidare il potere senatoriale, finendo quasi invariabilmente assassinati.
Tiberio Gracco, nel 133 a.C., propose una legge agraria per ridistribuire le terre pubbliche abusivamente occupate dai ricchi ai veterani e ai poveri; per tutta risposta, fu massacrato insieme a centinaia di suoi sostenitori da una banda di senatori e i loro scagnozzi prezzolati. Dieci anni dopo, suo fratello Gaio Graccosubì la stessa sorte dopo aver promosso riforme ancora più radicali, inclusa la vendita di grano a prezzi sussidiati e l’estensione dei diritti civili.
Parenti sottolinea come questi riformatori vengano costantemente liquidati dagli storici classici come demagoghi ambiziosi, ignorando che le loro proposte rispondevano a bisogni umani disperati e legali.
L’assassinio dei Gracchi aprì un secolo di violenza politica in cui ogni tentativo di riforma economica veniva etichettato come aspirazione alla tirannia.
Personaggi come Clodio, che organizzò i lavoratori in gilde e combatté per distribuzioni gratuite di grano, sono stati descritti dalla storiografia come capibanda anarchici, mentre i sicari degli optimatesche li uccisero sono stati celebrati come salvatori della patria.
In questo clima di repressione sistematica, Giulio Cesare emerse come l’ultimo e più potente dei populares, capace di unire al programma di riforme sociali il comando di un esercito veterano.
L’uomo e il simbolo: tra virtù privata e propaganda elitaria
Michael Parenti dedica una riflessione profonda alla figura umana di Cesare, spogliandola dalle incrostazioni della propaganda senatoria che lo dipingeva come un mostro di ambizione e immoralità.
Cesare era un uomo di eccezionale intelligenza, un oratore che persino Cicerone dovette ammettere essere brillante e lucido, e un leader che, a differenza di molti suoi contemporanei aristocratici, rifuggiva il lusso eccessivo e manteneva una sobrietà nel bere che irritava i suoi avversari.
Proprio l'astio degli optimatesalimentò narrazioni sulla sua presunta dissolutezza sessuale o sulla sua effeminatezza, strumenti retorici comuni nell’arena politica romana per screditare chiunque sfidasse l'ordine costituito.
Tuttavia, Parenti non cade nell'agiografia, ricordando come Cesare fosse comunque un prodotto della sua classe e del suo tempo, un conquistatore capace di tremende atrocità, quasi un genocidio, in Gallia, un proprietario di schiavi e che utilizzava i propri familiari per matrimoni combinati a scopo politico.
La vera colpa di Cesare agli occhi dell'oligarchia non era però la sua condotta morale, bensì la sua incorruttibilità rispetto al programma dei populares; egli non poteva essere comprato né indotto a tradire le masse, a differenza di figure come Pompeo che si erano lasciate arruolare come braccio armato del Senato.
Parenti contrappone questa integrità alla tanto decantata rettitudine di figure come Catone il Giovane, dipinto dalla storiografia come un modello di virtù repubblicana ma rivelatosi, a un’analisi più attenta, un uomo capace di giustificare il voto di scambio se utile ai propri fini, un forte bevitore e un individuo che trattava i propri legami familiari come transazioni commerciali.
Il programma di Cesare: un’offensiva contro l’accumulazione
Il cuore del saggio di Parenti si concentra sul dettaglio delle riforme che resero Cesare intollerabile per l’élite finanziaria e terriera di Roma.
Durante i suoi anni di potere, egli non si limitò a vuote promesse, ma attuò una serie di misure concrete per alleviare la miseria cronica della plebe urbana e rurale.
Fondò colonie per 80.000 cittadini poveri, distribuì terre fertili in Campania a migliaia di famiglie indigenti con almeno tre figli e impose ai grandi proprietari terrieri di impiegare almeno un terzo di lavoratori liberi nelle loro tenute, una misura drastica volta a combattere la disoccupazione dilagante causata dall’abuso della manodopera servile. Cesare colpì direttamente il cuore degli interessi finanziari riducendo i debiti di un quarto, proibendo l’usura estrema e cancellando gli interessi arretrati accumulati dall’inizio della guerra civile.
Intervenne nel mercato edilizio rimborsando un intero anno di affitto per le abitazioni popolari, una misura che colpì proprietari di immobili rapaci come lo stesso Cicerone.
Avviò grandi opere pubbliche per dare impiego ai disoccupati, finanziando queste iniziative con le ricchezze accumulate nelle sue campagne e con tasse sulle merci di lusso importate dai ricchi.
Oltre alle riforme economiche, Cesare dimostrò un’apertura culturale senza precedenti per l’epoca, concedendo la cittadinanza a medici e insegnanti stranieri, garantendo diritti religiosi alla comunità ebraica di Roma e progettando biblioteche pubbliche sul modello di quella di Alessandria.
Anche l’apertura del Senato a uomini di umili origini, centurioni o figli di schiavi liberati, venne percepita dai nobili di antico lignaggio come un affronto mortale, una “lordura” che contaminava la purezza dell’assemblea oligarchica per antonomasia.
Queste riforme, lungi dall’essere passi verso una democrazia assoluta, erano tentativi di stabilizzare uno Stato che l’oligarchia stava portando al collasso attraverso un’estrazione parassitaria di ricchezza.
Le Idi di Marzo: un crimine di classe mascherato da patriottismo
L’assassinio di Cesare viene così reinterpretato come un atto di tradimento compiuto da un’oligarchia che temeva la perdita definitiva dei propri privilegi materiali.
I congiurati, lungi dall’essere gli eroi disinteressati celebrati da Shakespeare o Gibbon, erano spesso usurai e spogliatori delle province che avevano beneficiato della clemenza di Cesare dopo la sconfitta di Pompeo.
Emblematico è il caso di Bruto, celebrato come “il più nobile dei Romani”, che in realtà prestava denaro al tasso usuraio del 48% e non esitava a utilizzare l’esercito per assediare le città debitrici, arrivando a lasciar morire di fame i loro abitanti pur di riscuotere i propri crediti.
La congiura fu dunque il culmine di un secolo di omicidi politici perpetrati dal Senato contro i riformatori popolari. Parenti evidenzia come gli assassini abbiano agito proprio quando Cesare stava per partire per una lunga campagna militare che lo avrebbe reso irraggiungibile, utilizzando il pretesto della lotta contro la tirannia per restaurare quella “libertà” che per loro significava esclusivamente la libertà di depredare il tesoro pubblico e schiacciare i poveri. Il piano, tuttavia, fu ostacolato da un clamoroso errore di valutazione: i senatori credevano che, eliminato il “tiranno”, la plebe li avrebbe accolti come liberatori, ignorando che il popolo riconosceva in Cesare l’unico difensore dei propri interessi economici.
La reazione popolare e il mito dei “pane e dei giochi”
Uno dei punti più originali dell'analisi di Parenti riguarda la decostruzione del concetto di "plebe parassitaria" interessata solo al pane e ai giochi.
L'autore contesta la visione degli storici classici che descrivevano la folla romana come una massa volubile e ignorante, evidenziando come i proletari fossero in realtà artigiani, muratori, falegnami e piccoli bottegai capaci di una profonda coscienza sociale.
La distribuzione gratuita di grano non era una forma di ozio assistito, ma una necessità vitale in un sistema dove i salari erano mantenuti a livelli di sussistenza e i prezzi degli affitti erano insostenibili.
Parenti osserva che la plebe mostrò una sensibilità superiore a quella dei propri governanti, come quando pianse per il massacro inutile di elefanti nel teatro di Pompeo o quando protestò contro l'esecuzione di massa di quattrocento schiavi innocenti dopo l'uccisione di un padrone crudele.
Dopo la morte di Cesare, fu proprio questo popolo a rifiutare i congiurati, trasformando il funerale in una sollevazione di massa e venerando il defunto come un martire della propria causa. La storiografia elitaria ha cercato di cancellare questa memoria, derubricando la protesta politica a "sommossa della teppaglia", ma per Parenti le azioni della plebe urbana rappresentarono una resistenza legittima contro un colpo di stato aristocratico.
Michael Parenti è stato un saggista, storico e politologo statunitense. Dopo un master alla Brown University e un Ph.D. in scienze politiche dall’università di Yale, ha insegnato nelle università dell’Illinois e del Vermont per poi dedicarsi esclusivamente all’attivismo politico in varie organizzazioni di sinistra USA e alla saggistica.
THE ASSASSINATION OF JULIUS CAESAR
Introduction: Tyrannicide or Treason?
O, what a fall was there, my countrymen! Then I, and you, and all of us fell down, Whilst bloody treason flourish’d over us.
—JULIUS CAESAR ACT III, SCENE 2
On the fifteenth of March, 44 B.C., in a meeting hall adjacent to Pompey’s theater, the Roman Senate awaited the arrival of the Republic’s supreme commander, Julius Caesar. This particular session did not promise to be an eventful one for most of the senators. But others among them were fully alive to what was in the offing. They stood about trying to maintain a calm and casual pose—with daggers concealed beneath their togas.
Finally Caesar entered the chamber. He had an imposing presence, augmented by an air of command that came with being at the height of his power. Moving quickly to the front of the hall, he sat himself in the place of honor. First to approach him was a senator who pretended to enter a personal plea on behalf of a relative. Close behind came a group of others who crowded around the ceremonial chair. At a given signal, they began to slash at their prey with their knives, delivering fatal wounds. By this act, the assailants believed they had saved the Roman Republic. In fact, they had set the stage for its complete undoing.
The question that informs this book is, why did a coterie of Roman senators assassinate their fellow aristocrat and celebrated ruler, Julius Caesar? An inquiry into this incident reveals something important about the nature of political rule, class power, and a people’s struggle for democracy and social justice—issues that are still very much with us. The assassination also marked a turning point in the history of Rome. It set in motion a civil war, and put an end to whatever democracy there had been, ushering in an absolutist rule that would prevail over Western Europe for centuries to come.
The prevailing opinion among historians, ancient and modern alike, is that the senatorial assassins were intent upon restoring republican liberties by doing away with a despotic usurper. This is the justification proffered by the assassins themselves. In this book I present an alternative explanation: The Senate aristocrats killed Caesar because they perceived him to be a popular leader who threatened their privileged interests. By this view, the deed was more an act of treason than tyrannicide, one incident in a line of political murders dating back across the better part of a century, a dramatic manifestation of a long-standing struggle between opulent conservatives and popularly supported reformers. This struggle and these earlier assassinations will be treated in the pages ahead.
This book is not only about the history of the Late Republic but about how that history has been distorted by those writers who regularly downplay the importance of material interests, those whose ideological taboos about class realities dim their perception of the past. This distortion is also manifested in the way many historians, both ancient and modern, have portrayed the common people of Rome as being little better than a noisome rabble and riotous mob.
In word and action, wealthy Romans made no secret of their fear and hatred of the common people and of anyone else who infringed upon their class prerogatives. History is full of examples of politico-economic elites who equate any challenge to their privileged social order as a challenge to all social order, an invitation to chaos and perdition.
The oligarchs of Rome were no exception. Steeped in utter opulence and luxury, they remained forever inhospitable to Rome’s democratic element. They valued the Republic only as long as it served their way of life. They dismissed as “demagogues” and “usurpers” the dedicated leaders who took up the popular cause. The historians of that day, often wealthy slaveholders themselves, usually agreed with this assessment. So too classical historians of the modern era, many of whom adopt a viewpoint not too different from the one held by the Roman aristocracy.
Caesar’s sin, I shall argue, was not that he was subverting the Roman constitution—which was an unwritten one—but that he was loosening the oligarchy’s overbearing grip on it. Worse still, he used state power to effect some limited benefits for small farmers, debtors, and urban proletariat, at the expense of the wealthy few. No matter how limited these reforms proved to be, the oligarchs never forgave him. And so Caesar met the same fate as other Roman reformers before him.
My primary interest is not in Julius Caesar as an individual but in the issues of popular struggle and oligarchic power that were being played out decades before he was born, continuing into his life and leading to his death. Well into my adulthood, most of what I knew about ancient Rome was learned from Hollywood and television. In my head were images of men in togas, striding about marbled palaces, mouthing lapidary phrases in stage-mannered accents, and of course images of chariot races and frenzied arena crowds giving thumbs-down to hapless victims.
In my woeful ignorance I was no different from many other educated Americans who have passed from grade school to the postdoctoral level without ever learning anything sensible about Roman history. Aside from the tableaux furnished by Hollywood and television, all that I knew of Julius Caesar I owed to two playwrights, William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. If one has to be misinformed about a subject, it might as well be from the wonderful pens of Shakespeare and Shaw.1 Fictional representations of history do not usually strive for accuracy, their primary goal being to entertain rather than educate. Still they often are more literal than literary in the way they impact upon our minds. And we had best monitor our tendency to treat the fictional as factual.
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a powerful play that draws heavily from Plutarch, in an imaginative yet surprisingly faithful way. Literary critics do not agree on whether Shakespeare wants us to consider the assassination as execrable or laudable. We are left to wonder whether Caesar is to be admired or denounced, whether Brutus is noble or loathsome, and whether he or Caesar or Antony or anyone is the hero of the play.2 For all its ambiguities, Shakespeare’s treatment is a politically safe rendition. He focuses on the immediate questions of tyranny versus republican freedom. Those are exactly the parameters within which the senatorial assassins confined the debate.
Likewise, Shakespeare shares the Roman elite’s view of the common crowd as a mindless aggregation easily led hither and thither, first adulating Pompey, then bowing to Caesar, later hailing Brutus for saving them from tyranny, only in the next breath to be swayed by Antony. In Julius Caesar, the common people seemingly are capable only of mindless violence and degraded disportment. All this is in keeping with the dominant stereotype of the Roman proletariat that has come down to us.
George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra is charmingly written and highly engaging. Shaw’s Caesar is a benign aging fellow, who reluctantly settles for an avuncular relationship with Cleopatra. Upon their first encounter, when she has yet to discover his identity, she repeatedly calls him “old gentleman.” It is clear from the outset that there can be no romantic interest between them because of Caesar’s age and the young queen’s immaturity. At the end of the play, as Caesar departs for Rome, he voices his doubts that he will ever see Cleopatra again, but he promises to send her the young handsome Mark Antony, much to her delight.
In real life, when she was still in her teens, well before she met Caesar, Cleopatra already had slept with Antony. It happened in 55 B.C. when a Roman expeditionary force was in Egypt to restore Ptolemy to the throne. Antony was serving as commander of the cavalry.3 Some time later, still predating Caesar’s arrival, Cleopatra bestowed her favors upon a second Roman lover, Pompey’s son Cnaeus, who was in Africa raising troops for his father. And Shaw notwithstanding, in late 48 B.C., though Caesar was fifty-three and she but twenty-three or so, she proved ready enough to bed her third Roman. It is said that Cleopatra was a woman of lively turn and enticing talents. She also had a keen sense of the political. That this Roman conqueror had the power to secure the Egyptian throne for her must have added to the attraction she felt for him. It developed into a protracted love affair. Eventually, she bore Caesar a son and moved to Rome in order to be closer to him, thereby demonstrating that some things never change.
Although he was engaged in other sexual liaisons and possessed of a wife, Caesar found time to give Cleopatra a lavish welcome befitting a queen, erecting a gold effigy of her in a consecrated area. He established her in a sumptuous villa across the Tiber, from which she held court, while political leaders, financiers, and men of letters, including the renowned Cicero, danced in attendance.
To his credit, Shaw does insert an iconoclastic sentiment not found in Shakespeare or among regiments of historians who have written about the Late Republic. In a prologue to Caesar and Cleopatra that is almost never performed, the god Ra tells the audience how Rome discovered that “the road to riches and greatness is through robbery of the poor and slaughter of the weak.” In conformity with that dictum, the Romans “robbed their own poor until they became great masters of that art, and knew by what laws it could be made to appear seemly and honest.” And after squeezing their own people dry, they stripped the poor throughout the many other lands they conquered. “And I, Ra, laughed; for the minds of the Romans remained the same size whilst their dominion spread over the earth.” Very likely Shaw was inviting his audience to draw a parallel to the small colonialist minds that held sway over the vast British empire of his own day.
There is another instance of Shaw’s iconoclasm. In Act II of Caesar and Cleopatra, Lucius Septimus refuses Caesar’s invitation to join his ranks and prepares to depart. Caesar’s loyal comrade in arms, Rufus, angrily observes: “That means he is a Republican.” Lucius turns defiantly and asks, “And what are you?” To which Rufus responds, “A Caesarian, like all Caesar’s soldiers.” Left at that, we have the standard view espoused by Shakespeare and most historians: The struggle is between those fighting to preserve the Republic and those who make themselves an instrument of Caesar’s power. But Shaw goes a step further, hinting that Republicanism vs. Caesarism is not really the issue. So he has Caesar interjecting: “Lucius: believe me, Caesar is no Caesarian. Were Rome a true republic, then were Caesar the first of Republicans.”
That response invites the dissident query pursued in this book: how republican was the Late Republic? More than 2,000 years after Caesar, most students of that period have yet to bid farewell to the misapprehensions about the republicanism embraced by Lucius and most others of his social set. They have yet to consider that republicanism might largely be a cloak for oligarchic privilege—as it often is to this day—worn grudgingly by the elites as long as it proved serviceable to their interests. At the same time, as we shall see, ordinary Roman citizens had been able to win limited but important rights under the Republic, and did at times make important democratic gains, including occasional successes around land redistribution, rent control, debt cancellation, and other reforms. As far as the Senate oligarchs were concerned, such agitation and popular victories were the major problem, perceived by them as the first steps down the path of class revolution.
To this day, dubious film representations about ancient Rome continue to be mass-marketed. In 2000, while I was working on this book, Hollywood brought forth Gladiator, a swashbuckling epic about revenge and heroism, offering endless episodes of arena bloodletting. Unencumbered by any trace of artistic merit, Gladiator played before packed houses in the United States and abroad, winning a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award. The story takes place during the reign of the venal Emperor Com-modus, more than two centuries after Julius Caesar’s death. Worth noting is how the Roman Senate is depicted. We are asked to believe that the Senate was populated by public-spirited men devoted to the people’s welfare. But the people themselves are portrayed as little more than a rabble. In one scene, two Senate leaders are seated in the Coliseum. When one of them complains of the unsavory proceedings below, the other opines that the crowd is interested only in bread and circuses, war and violence: “Rome is the mob. . . . The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the Senate. It is the sands of the Coliseum. [The emperor] will bring them death and they will love him for it.” This view of the Roman populace as mindless bloodthirsty riffraff unfortunately remains the anti-people’s history purveyed by both the entertainment media and many classical scholars.
I cannot recall exactly when I moved beyond the stage and screen images of Rome and Caesar and became seriously interested in the Late Republic as a subject of intensive study. It was years ago, by way of my self-directed readings in ancient Greek history and political philosophy. At first, it appeared to me that the Romans could never be as compelling and absorbing as their Mediterranean cousins. But indeed they are, at least from 133 B.C. to about 40 B.C., the years covered in this book, most of which fall in that period designated the Late Republic.4
To assist the many readers who might be unfamiliar with ancient Rome, the first three chapters deal with Rome’s history and sociopolitical life. Chapter Four treats the plutocracy’s bloody repression of popular reformers and their followers from Tiberius Gracchus (133 B.C.) down to Caesar’s early days. Chapter Five offers a critical portrait of the historians’ hero, Cicero, with a narrative of how he mobilized the forces of political repression on behalf of elite interests. The next five chapters deal with Caesar’s life and related political issues, his death and its aftermath. The final chapter caps the whole subject of ancient Rome, taking to task the stereotype of the Roman people as a “rabble” and “mob.”
When the editors of The New Press told me they wanted to include this book in their People’s History Series, I agreed. By my view, any history that deals with the efforts of the populace to defend itself from the abuses of wealth and tyranny is people’s history. Such history has been written over the past century by such notables as W.E.B. Du Bois, Philip Foner, Herbert Aptheker, Albert Mathiez, A.L. Morton, George Rudé, Richard Boyer, Herbert Morais, Jesse Lemisch, Howard Zinn, G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, and others.
But writing “history from the bottom up” is not an easy task when it comes to the Roman Republic, for there exists no trove of ordinary people’s letters, diaries, and memoirs; no back issues of labor publications and newspapers; no court, police, and government documents of the kind that compose the historical record of more recent centuries. Most of Rome’s written histories, libraries, and archives were lost over time or were deliberately destroyed by the fanatical proselytizers of Christianity who conducted a systematic war of eradication against pagan scholarship and culture after they came to power in the fifth century A.D. In any case, as far as we know, the small farmers, proletarians, and slaves of Rome left no written record to speak of.
So one must read against the grain, looking for evidence of the Roman people’s struggle in the self-serving words and repressive deeds of the wealthy oligarchs. A people’s history should be not only an account of popular struggle against oppression but an exposé of the anti-people’s history that has prevailed among generations of mainstream historians. It should be a critical history about a people’s oppressors, those who propagated an elitist ideology and a loathing of the common people that distorts the historical record down to this day.
Here is a story of latifundia and death squads, masters and slaves, patriarchs and subordinated women, self-enriching capitalists and plundered provinces, profiteering slumlords and urban rioters. Here is a struggle between the plutocratic few and the indigent many, the privileged versus the proletariat, featuring corrupt politicians, money-driven elections, and the political assassination of popular leaders. I leave it to the reader to decide whether any of this might resonate with the temper of our own times.
1
Gentlemen’s History: Empire, Class, and Patriarchy
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!
—JULIUS CAESAR ACT I, SCENE 2
The writing of history has long been a privileged calling undertaken within the church, royal court, landed estate, .M . affluent town house, government agency, university, and corporate-funded foundation. The social and ideological context in which historians labor greatly influences the kind of history produced. While this does not tell us everything there is to know about historiography, it is certainly worth some attention.
Historians are fond of saying, as did Benedetto Croce, that history reflects the age in which it is written. The history of seemingly remote events vibrate “to present needs and present situations.” Collingwood made a similar point: “St. Augustine looked at Roman history from the point of view of an early Christian ; Tillemont, from that of a seventeenth-century Frenchman; Gibbon, from that of an eighteenth-century Englishman. . . .”1
Something is left unsaid here, for there is no unanimity in how the people of any epoch view the past, let alone the events of their own day. The differences in perception range not only across the ages and between civilizations but within any one society at any one time. Gibbon was not just “an eighteenth-century Englishman,” but an eighteenth-century English gentleman; in his own words, a “youth of family and fortune,” enjoying “the luxury and freedom of a wealthy house.” As heir to “a considerable estate,” he attended Oxford where he wore the velvet cap and silk gown of a gentleman. While serving as an officer in the militia, he soured in the company of “rustic officers, who were alike deficient in the knowledge of scholars and the manners of gentlemen.”2
To say that Gibbon and his Oxford peers were “gentlemen” is not to imply that they were graciously practiced in the etiquette of fair play toward all persons regardless of social standing, or that they were endowed with compassion for the more vulnerable of their fellow humans, taking pains to save them from hurtful indignities, as real gentlemen might do. If anything, they were likely to be unencumbered by such sentiments, uncomprehending of any social need beyond their own select circle. For them, a “gentleman” was one who sported an uncommonly polished manner and affluent lifestyle, and who presented himself as prosperous, politically conservative, and properly schooled in the art of ethno-class supremacism.
Like most other people, Gibbon tended to perceive reality in accordance with the position he occupied in the social structure. As a gentleman scholar, he produced what elsewhere I have called “gentlemen’s history,” a genre heavily indebted to an upper-class ideological perspective.3 In 1773, we find him beginning work on his magnum opus, A History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, while settled in a comfortable town house tended by half-a-dozen servants. Being immersed in what he called the “decent luxuries,” and saturated with his own upper-class prepossession, Edward Gibbon was able to look kindly upon ancient Rome’s violently acquisitive aristocracy. He might have produced a much different history had he been a self-educated cobbler, sitting in a cold shed, writing into the wee hours after a long day of unrewarding toil. No accident that the impoverished laborer, even if literate, seldom had the agency to produce scholarly tomes. Gibbon himself was aware of the class realities behind the writing of history: “A gentleman possessed of leisure and independence, of books and talents, may be encouraged to write by the distant prospect of honor and reward: but wretched is the author, and wretched will be the work, where daily diligence is stimulated by daily hunger.”4
As one who hobnobbed with nobility, Gibbon abhorred the “wild theories of equal and boundless freedom” of the French Revolution. 5 He was a firm supporter of the British empire. While serving as a member of Parliament he voted against extending liberties to the American colonies. Unsurprisingly he had no difficulty conjuring a glowing pastoral image of the Roman empire: “Domestic peace and union were the natural consequences of the moderate and comprehensive policy embraced by the Romans.... The obedience of the Roman world was uniform, voluntary, and permanent. The vanquished nations, blended into one great people, resigned the hope, nay even the wish, of resuming their independence.... The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom.” 6 Not a word here about an empire built upon sacked towns, shattered armies, slaughtered villagers, raped women, enslaved prisoners, plundered lands, burned crops, and mercilessly overtaxed populations.
The gentlemen historians who lived during antiquity painted much the same idyllic picture, especially of Rome’s earlier epoch. The theme they repeatedly visited was of olden times as golden times, when men were more given to duty than luxury, women were chaste and unsparingly devoted to their family patriarchs, youth were ever respectful of their elders, and the common people were modest in their expectations and served valliantly in Rome’s army.7 Writing during the Late Republic, Sallust offers this fairy tale of Roman times earlier than his own: “In peace and war . . . virtus [valor, manliness, virtue] was held in high esteem . . . and avarice was a thing almost unknown. Justice and righteousness were upheld not so much by law as by natural instinct.... They governed by conferring benefits on their subjects, not by intimidation.” 8
A more realistic picture of Roman imperialism comes from some of its victims. In the first century B.C., King Mithridates, driven from his land in northern Anatolia, wrote, “The Romans have constantly had the same cause, a cause of the greatest antiquity, for making war upon all nations, peoples, and kings, the insatiable desire for empire and wealth.”9 Likewise, the Caledonian chief Calgacus, speaking toward the end of the first century A.D., observed:
[Y]ou find in [the Romans] an arrogance which no reasonable submission can elude. Brigands of the world, they have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate plunder, and now they ransack the sea. The wealth of an enemy excites their cupidity, his poverty their lust of power. . . . Robbery, butchery, rapine, the liars call Empire; they create a desolation and call it peace.... [Our loved ones] are now being torn from us by conscription to slave in other lands. Our wives and sisters, even if they are not raped by enemy soldiers, are seduced by men who are supposed to be our friends and guests. Our goods and money are consumed by taxation; our land is stripped of its harvest to fill their granaries; our hands and limbs are crippled by building roads through forests and swamps under the lash of our oppressors.... We Britons are sold into slavery anew every day; we have to pay the purchase-price ourselves and feed our masters in addition.10
For centuries, written history was considered a patrician literary genre, much like epic and tragedy, concerned with the monumental deeds of great personages, a world in which ordinary men played no role other than nameless spear-carriers, and ordinary women not even that. Antiquity gives us numerous gentlemen chroniclers—Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Cicero, Livy, Plutarch, Suetonius, Appian, Dio Cassius, Valerius Maximus, Velleius Paterculus, Josephus, and Tacitus—just about all of whom had a pronouncedly low opinion of the common people. Dio Cassius, for one, assures us that “many monarchs are the source of blessings to their subjects . . . whereas many who live under a democracy work innumerable evils to themselves.”11
The political biases of ancient historians were not interred with their bones. Our historical perceptions are shaped not only by our present socioeconomic status but by the ideological and class biases of the past historians upon whom we rely. As John Gager notes, it is difficult to alter our habitual ways of thinking about history because “without knowing it, we perceive the past according to paradigms first created many centuries ago.”12 And the creators of those ancient paradigms usually spoke with decidedly upper-class accents.
In sum, Gibbon’s view of history was not only that of an eighteenth-century English gentleman but of a whole line of gentlemen historians from bygone times, similarly situated in the upper strata of their respective societies. What would have made it so difficult for Gibbon to gain a critical perspective of his own ideological limitations—had he ever thought of doing so—was the fact that he kept intellectual company with like-minded scholars of yore, in that centuries-old unanimity of bias that is often mistaken for objectivity.
To be sure, there were some few observers in ancient Rome, such as the satirist Juvenal, who offer a glimpse of the empire as it really was, a system of rapacious expropriation. Addressing the proconsuls, Juvenal says: “When at last you leave to go out to govern your province, limit your anger and greed. Pity our destitute allies, whose poor bones you see sucked dry of their pith and their marrow. ”13
In 1919, noted conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter presented a surprisingly critical picture of Roman imperialism, in words that might sound familiar to present-day critics of U.S. “globalism”:
. . . That policy which pretends to aspire to peace but unerringly generates war, the policy of continual preparation for war, the policy of meddlesome interventionism. There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest—why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome’s duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs. 14
Still, the Roman empire has its twentieth-century apologists. British historian Cyril Robinson tenders the familiar image of an empire achieved stochastically, without deliberate design: “It was perhaps almost as true of Rome as of Great Britain that she acquired her world-dominion in a fit of absence of mind.”15 An imperialism without imperialists, a design of conquest devoid of human agency or forethought, such a notion applies neither to Rome nor to any other empire in history.
Despite their common class perspective, gentlemen historians do not achieve perfect accord on all issues. Gibbon himself was roundly condemned for his comments about early Christianity in the Roman empire. He was attacked as an atheist by clergy and others who believed that their religion had flourished exclusively through divine agency and in a morally flawless manner. 16 Gibbon credits Christianity’s divine origin as being the primary impetus for its triumph, but he gives only a sentence or two to that notion, being more interested as a secular historian in the natural rather than supernatural causes of the church’s triumph. Furthermore, he does not hesitate to point out instances of worldly opportunism and fanatical intolerance among Christian proselytes. Some readers may find his treatment of the rise of Christianity to be not only the most controversial part of his work but also the most interesting. 17
Along with his class hauteur, the gentleman scholar is likely to be a male supremacist. So Gibbon describes Emperor Severus’s second wife Julia Domna as “united to a lively imagination, a firmness of mind, and strength of judgment, seldom bestowed on her sex.”18 Historians do take note of the more notorious female perpetrators in the imperial family, such as Messalina, wife of Emperor Claudius, and Agrippina. They tell us that Agrippina grabbed the throne for her son Nero by poisoning her uncle and then her husband, the reigning Claudius. Upon becoming emperor, Nero showed his gratitude to his mother by killing her. Nero was not what we would call a family man; he also murdered his aunt, his ex-wife, and a half brother who had a claim to the throne.
Except for a few high-placed and notably lethal females, Roman women are virtually invisible in the works of most gentlemen historians. Even when noticed, they are not likely to be seen as of any consequence.19 That there were no female historians to speak of in antiquity, nor for many centuries thereafter, only compounded the deficiency. In the last few decades, thanks mostly to the emergence of feminist scholarship, the research on Roman women has improved, despite the paucity of surviving data. Ordinary Roman women, we know, tended to die younger than their male counterparts because of malnourishment, mistreatment, exhaustion, and childbirth. Almost half of all Roman brides were under the age of fourteen, many as young as twelve, with consummation coming at the time of marriage even if before menarche. Women of all ages almost invariably lived under the rule of some male, be it husband, guardian, or paterfamilias (head of the extended family or clan) .20
Through much of Roman history, females were denied individually given names as well as surnames. Prominent gens names such as Claudius, Julius, and Lucretius gave forth the obligatory feminine derivatives of Claudia, Julia, and Lucretia. Sisters therefore all had the same name and were distinguished from each other by adding “the elder” or “the younger” or “the first,” “the second,” and “the third.” Thus Gaius Octavius’s daughters were Octavia the elder and Octavia the younger. Denying them an individually named identity was one way of treating females as family property, mere fractional derivatives of the paterfamilias.21
Women of common caste performed much of the onerous work of society as laundresses, domestic servants, millers, weavers, spinners, and sometimes even construction workers, all in addition to their quotidian household chores. As far as we know, even when they labored in the same occupations as men, they were not permitted to belong to craft guilds.22 Bereft of opportunities for decent livelihood, some of the more impecunious females were driven to selling their sexual favors. Prostitution was given standing as an employment and taxed as such. Owning a brothel was considered a respectable venture by some investors.23 In general, the great mass of poor women had little hope of exercising an influence on political issues, though numbers of them must have participated in public protests.
The devoted, self-sacrificing wife was a prized character in Roman writing. Examples abound of matrons who faced exile or risked death to stand fast with their husbands.24 But Roman matrons could also be rebellious on occasion. As early as 195 B.C., they successfully pressured the magistrates to repeal the lex Oppia, a law passed during the austerity of the Second Punic War restricting the use of personal ornaments and carriages by women.25 That they would mobilize themselves in this willful manner sorely vexed many a patriarch.
By the Late Republic (approximately 80–40 B.C.) and during the first century of the empire, Roman matrons made a number of important gains relating to marriage, divorce, property rights, and personal independence. Some of them even owned substantial property, and administered commercial operations. During the civil strife following Caesar’s death, the Second Triumvirate posted a list of 1,400 particularly wealthy women whose property was to be assessed. The women organized a protest in the Forum before the magistrates’ tribunal, and demanded to know why they had to share in the punishment of the civil war when they had not collaborated in the crime. “Why should we be taxed when we have no share in magistracies, or honors, or military commands, or in public affairs at all, where your conflicts have brought us to this terrible state?”26 Whatever influence women exercised in business affairs, they never gained full civil rights, nor could they sustain much visibility on the political landscape.27
Upper-class wives had the reputation of being overly generous with their sexual favors. Sallust clucks about the women who “publicly sold their chastity.”28 Horace fumes about the matron who becomes well practiced “in lewd loves, then seeks younger adulterers, while her husband’s at wine.”29 Writing early in the second century A.D., Juvenal seems to anticipate the venomous misogyny that would soon pour from the pens of the Christian church fathers. Roman matrons, he tells us, are wanton hussies, engaged in their illicit pursuits at the expense of the hapless cuckolds who are their husbands. They have long discarded the virtuous devotions of their forebears, along with the “naturally feminine” traits of modesty, chastity, and domestic servitude.30 In like fashion, a historian from our own era registers his disapproval of the growing sway exercised by high-placed improvident women in the Late Republic whose “unwholesome influence” engendered a “growing license” and “did much to debase the moral and social standards of the day.”31
In truth, Roman matrons were doubtless no more promiscuous than their husbands, whose own commonplace dalliances were largely overlooked, given the double standard of that day. Under the patriarchal system, a man was free to kill an allegedly unfaithful wife, while himself patronizing prostitutes or keeping a concubine. The codes against adultery initiated by Emperor Augustus were aimed at wives, with no prohibitions imposed upon husbands. 32 One of the many Roman writers who see only virtue in Rome’s earliest epoch and decadence in their own times is Valerius Maximus. He approvingly cites examples of husbands of yore who divorced their wives or otherwise treated them severely for acting in what we might consider mildly independent ways, such as walking abroad with head uncovered, talking to a common freedwoman, or attending public games without the husband’s knowledge. “While women were thus checked in the old days, their minds stayed away from wrongdoing,” Valerius assures us.33
Powerful men such as Julius Caesar often treated women from well-placed families as disposable strategic assets, to be bartered in arranged marriages designed to fortify one’s fortune or help forge political coalitions—a practice that continued within European aristocratic circles down through the ages. Women were also a source of sensual divertissement for Caesar as for most other Roman men. A few—such as his first wife Cornelia, his longtime mistress Servilia, and, in his last years, Cleopatra—did win Caesar’s love, though none could ever claim exclusive command of his sexual attentions.
Many Roman husbands were hopeless philanderers who fixed upon loveless marriages to advance their careers, pocket ample dowries, or simply enjoy a convenient concupiscence. Still there were instances of deep conjugal links being forged. Valerius gives several examples of husbands who were stricken at the loss of their wives. So does the younger Pliny, who himself expressed genuine love for his wife.34
Along with their gender bias, some gentlemen historians let slip a noticeable ethno-class bigotry. The progenitor of all historians of the Late Republic is Cicero. Hailed by Balsdon as “perhaps the most civilized man who has ever lived,” Cicero has been revered by classics professors and Latin teachers throughout the ages.35 This most civilized man was not above stoking the crassest ethno-class prejudices. Cicero sneered at the Greeks and Jews, both the slaves and freedmen among them, who rallied to the side of democratic leaders, declaring that “men of those nations often throw . . . our assemblies into confusion.” The Greeks are given to “shameless lying,” the Jews to “barbaric superstition.”36
Some latter-day historians have taken their cue from Cicero. Theodore Mommsen describes the Roman Forum as a shouting fest for “everyone in the shape of a man” with Egyptians, Jews, and Greeks, both freedmen and slaves, being the loudest participants in the public assemblies.37 Cyril Robinson notes that many proletarians were “of Greek or Oriental origin . . . [whose] loose and feeble character made them bad citizens.” The “purity of Roman blood began to be contaminated by the admixture of this alien element.” Those of “Oriental blood” were “incapable of assimilating the national habits of decency and restraint,” although “not all Greeks, of course, were vicious or unwholesome characters.” 38
J.F.C. Fuller tells us that Rome’s “Latin stock was increasingly mongrelized as Greeks, Asiatics, Spaniards, Gauls, and other [slaves] were absorbed through manumission and became citizens.” 39 Another esteemed classicist, Jérôme Carcopino, flirts with a racist blood theory of history, writing that interbreeding between Roman aristocrats and their female slaves or freedwomen, followed by frequent emancipation or adoption of the offspring, left “many of the best families of the city infected with an actual hybridization, similar to that which has more recently contaminated other slave-owning peoples.” This mixed breeding “strongly accentuated the national and social decomposition” of Rome.40
In ancient Rome, as in societies before and since, class oppression was supported by class bias. The lowly were considered low because of deficiencies within themselves. Class bias, in turn, was often buttressed by ethnic prejudice. Many of the poor, both slaves and free, were from “barbarian” stock, and this further fueled the tendency to loathe them as wastrels and brigands, troublesome contaminants of respectable society. So ethnic and class bias conveniently dovetailed for those who looked at their world de haut en bas, and this included not only the likes of Cicero but many of the writers who came after him.
2
Slaves, Proletarians, and Masters
Our hearts you see not; they are pitiful; And pity to the general wrong of Rome—
—JULIUS CAESAR ACT III, SCENE 1
Rome’s social pyramid rested upon the backs of slaves (servi) who composed approximately one-third the population of Italy, with probably a smaller proportion within Rome proper.1 Their numbers were maintained by conquests, piratical kidnappings, and procreation by the slaves themselves. Slavery also was the final destination for individuals convicted of capital crimes, for destitute persons unable to repay debts, and for children sold off by destitute families. War captives were worked to death in the mines and quarries and on plantations (latifundia) at such a rate that their ranks were constantly on the wane.2
A step above the servi was the great mass of propertyless proletariat (proletarii), consisting of city-dwelling citizens (plebs urbana ), foreigners, and freedmen (ex-slaves). Rome had a downtown urban center of temples, ceremonial sites, emporia, public forums, and government offices. Downtown was encircled by a dense ring of slums. There being no public transportation, the proletarians had to be housed within walking distance of work sites and markets. The solution was to pile them into thousands of poorly lit inner-city tenements along narrow streets. Such dwellings were sometimes seven or eight floors high, all lacking toilets, running water, and decent ventilation. The rents for these fetid, disease-ridden warrens were usually more than the plebs could afford, forcing them to double and triple up, with entire families residing in one room. Some luckless renters could afford only dank cellars or cramped garrets not high enough to stand in.3
Charcoal braziers and oil lamps were a constant fire hazard. Building codes were not to appear in Rome for centuries to come. Tenants who escaped the typhoid, typhus, and fires that plagued the slums still lived in fear of having the structures collapse upon them, as happened all too frequently. The ingenuity for which Roman architecture is known was not lavished upon the domiciles of the poor. As Juvenal ironically describes it: “Rome is supported on pipe-stems, matchsticks; it’s cheaper thus for the landlord to shore up his ruins, patch up the old cracked walls, and notify all the tenants. They are expected to sleep secure though the beams are about to crash above them.”4 Cicero himself owned tenement properties whose rental income he used to maintain his son as a student in Athens. In a letter to a friend, he sounds every bit the speculative slumlord: “[T]wo of my shops have collapsed and the others are showing cracks, so that even the mice have moved elsewhere, to say nothing of the tenants. Other people call this a disaster, I don’t call it even a nuisance.... [T]here is a building scheme under way . . . which will turn this loss into a source of profit.”5
The narrow rutted streets were crowded with tradesmen, artisans, jobbers, beggars, shoppers, and loiterers. Street vendors hawked salted fish, warm pans of smoking sausages, cups of pudding, and jars of wine. Musicians, acrobats, and jugglers, with their sad little trained animals, performed for the passing crowd. Large dirty pots placed at intervals along the streets served as pissoirs for passersby, a concession to fullers and laundry workers who—soap being unknown to the Romans—used the accumulated urine to treat or wash their cloth.6 (Uric acid is still applied today in such cleansers as borax.) We can presume that the clothes were given a final rinse in fresh water.
For those who could afford it, wine was imbibed during and between meals. Romans of the Late Republic usually drank it more than half diluted with water. Wine was their coffee, tea, and spirits. “And olive oil was their butter, soap, and electricity: they cooked with it, anointed themselves with it at the baths, and burned it in their lamps.”7 The poor person’s sustenance was grain, consumed in the form of bread and porridge.
With rampant poverty came a high crime rate. Rome had no street lighting and no police force to speak of. As night fell, the populace secured itself behind bolted doors. Only the opulent few, who could afford an ensemble of slaves and strongmen to light the way and serve as bodyguards, dared to venture abroad, and even they thought twice about it. Juvenal writes acerbically of the hazards posed by street toughs: “It makes no difference whether you try to say something or retreat without a word, they beat you up all the same.... You know what the poor man’s freedom amounts to? The freedom, after being punched and pounded to pieces, to beg and implore that he be allowed to go home with a few teeth left.”8
Most plebs urbana and their families lived from hand to mouth, toiling long hours for trifling sums. In the countryside, the plebs rustica fared no better than their city cousins. When possible, they would try to ease their straitened circumstances by taking on the more perilous chores offered by latifundia lords who, like American plantation owners of the antebellum South, sometimes preferred to use free laborers for risky tasks. By the owner’s reckoning, the death of a day jobber merely increased the population of the netherworld, whereas the death of a slave represented the loss of a tidy investment.9
A rung above the propertyless proletarii were the small farmers, settled on their own parcels of land in the provinces around the city, with enough property to qualify for military service. And just above them was a small middle class of minor officials, merchants, and industrial employers, who lived in apartments situated away from the stench and noise of the inner city but still within manageable distance of the Forum and the baths.10
Looming over the toiling multitude of Rome in “almost incredible opulence” were “a few thousand multimillionaires.”11 One magistrate estimated that the number of solidly rich families was not more than 2,000.12 This elite stratum, the “officer class,” included the equites or equestrians, a class of knights, so designated because their property qualified them to serve in the cavalry—although by the Late Republic many of them probably had never been on a horse. The equestrians were state contractors, bankers, moneylenders, traders, tax collectors, and landowners.13 They occupied a social rank just below aristocrats and well above commoners, serving as a reservoir for recruits into the aristocratic class, as families of old lineage died out from time to time. Being large property holders who generally had little sympathy for the poor, the knights shared many of the same interests as the nobility, although occasional conflicts did arise between the two elite groups .14
At the very apex of the social pyramid was the nobilitas, an aristocratic oligarchy representing families whose lineage could claim one or more members who had served as consul (the highest office of the Republic). Equestrians and nobles differed more in political lineage than family fortune. Both groups were members of the officer class; both held wealth in land, slaves, trade, and finance. Both lived in seemly mansions, enjoying gourmet meals served on plates of gold and silver, lavish gardens, game preserves, aviaries, stables of the finest horses, fish ponds, private libraries, private baths, and water closets. Their estates were situated on tracts the size of veritable townships, large enough to house swollen retinues of slaves and personal servants. Cicero was an equestrian who owned seven or eight estates and several smaller farms, along with his urban tenements and other business ventures.15
The old nobility too was not above pursuing speculative capitalist ventures. Thus Julius Caesar’s friend and ally Crassus, a landed aristocrat, became one of the wealthiest men of the Late Republic by buying up urban sites upon which tenements had collapsed or been ruined by fire, then rebuilding new tenements whose rents provided ample recompense for his capital outlay.16
Class supremacism permeated republican Roman society right down to its domestic codes. There was a strict prohibition against marriage between a member of the aristocratic class and a citizen who had risen from the class of freedmen. Aristocrats also were forbidden to marry actresses and women of other such dubious professions .17
In Rome’s Late Republic, as in any plutocracy, it was a disgrace to be poor and an honor to be rich. The rich, who lived parasitically off the labor of others, were hailed as men of quality and worth; while the impecunious, who struggled along on the paltry earnings of their own hard labor, were considered vulgar and deficient. Though he wrote later on, during the time of emperors, Juvenal might as well have been speaking of earlier republican society when he noted that a rich man’s word was treated as good as gold because he was possessed of gold, but a poor man’s oath “has no standing in court . . . Men do not easily rise whose poverty hinders their merit.”18
Rome’s oppressive class nature was nowhere more evident than in the widespread practice of slavery. Roman slavery was long treated none too harshly by gentlemen historians. Gibbon, for instance, tells us that a slave did not live without hope, given “the benevolence of the master.” If he showed diligence and fidelity for “a few years” he might very naturally expect to be granted his freedom. 19 More recently, Jérôme Carcopino enthuses about Roman laws that “lightened [the slaves’] chains and favored their emancipation . . . The practical good sense of the Romans, no less than the fundamental humanity instinctive in their peasant hearts, had always kept them from showing cruelty toward the servi. They had always treated their slaves with consideration.... With few exceptions, slavery in Rome was neither eternal nor, while it lasted, intolerable.”20 No slaveholder could have said it better.
“It is not until recent times,” notes K.R. Bradley, “that the realization has begun to set in among scholars that there is something distinctly unpalatable about slavery in antiquity. Indeed in some quarters apologetic influences are still at work.”21 One reputable historian who still celebrates the happy side of slavery is Lionel Casson. He accords a grudging nod to the ill-fated souls who labored under the whip in the fields or died in such numbers in the mines, saying only that they were burdened by “tasks that involved sweat and drudgery.” Then he dwells upon the favorable conditions supposedly enjoyed by slaves who assisted in running luxurious households, or occupied government posts. Some even amassed substantial fortunes as investors. Sometimes “free men with bleak prospects would sell themselves into slavery in order to qualify” for these plum positions.22 A great many manumitted servi, rhapsodizes Casson, “were able to escape from slavery and mount the steps of the social ladder, in some cases to the very top.” One former servus gave his son an excellent education, and the boy grew to be the famous writer Horace. “In but two generations the family had risen from slavery to literary immortality.” 23
The impression one gets is that Roman slavery was a kind of affirmative action program, and Rome was a land of opportunity ouvert aux talents. In fact, such impressive instances of upward mobility were the rare exception. Manumission was usually granted only after many years of servitude. Even then, liberty was fettered with liabilities. Frequently the manumitted servus had to leave behind his spouse or children as slaves. Freedmen could neither serve in the military nor seek public office. They bore the names of their former masters to whom they continued to owe service and make payments.24
Slaves usually had to buy their freedom by meeting the original purchasing price. Obviously, the vast majority could not hope to accumulate such a sum. Some of the luckier ones had their freedom paid for by relatives who were already free and working. Only a select few had the opportunity to pocket tips as doorkeepers or performers, or glean windfall gratuities in specialized occupations such as skilled craftsmen, doctors, and prostitutes.
Manumission was largely motivated by the owner’s desire to escape the onerous expense of having to feed and shelter chattel for their entire lives, especially ones no longer in the full productive vigor of their youth. Many of the manumitted were granted testimonial emancipation in the master’s will, that is, only after his death deprived him of any further opportunity to exploit them would they be set free. As Bradley reckons, “most of the servile population probably never achieved freedom at all . . . [M]anumission was a real but fragile prospect for slaves, and it conceals the years of hardship that preceded its attainment.”25
All slavocracies develop a racist ideology to justify their dehumanized social relationships. In Rome, male slaves of any age were habitually addressed as puer or “boy.” A similar degrading appellation was applied to slaves in ancient Greece and in the slavocracy of the United States, persisting into the postbellum segregationist South of the twentieth century. The slave as a low-grade being or subhuman is a theme found in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. In the minds of Roman slaveholders, the servi—including the foreigners who composed the larger portion of the slave population—were substandard in moral and mental capacity, a notch or two above animals. Cicero assures us that Jews, Syrians, and all other Asian barbarians are “born to slavery.”26 The Roman historian Florus sees the Spartacus slave rebellion not as a monumental struggle for liberty but a disgraceful undertaking perpetrated “by persons of the meanest class” led by “men of the worst character . . . eager to take vengeance on their masters . ” 27 Gibbon describes Rome’s slave population as “a mean and promiscuous multitude.”28 More recently we have Sir Ronald Syme asserting that the Roman slave market was flooded with “captives of alien and often inferior stock.”29 Most present-day classical writers, however, do not embrace the slaveholder’s supremacism, at least not overtly.
By definition the relationship between master and slave is a coercive one. Not surprisingly the master is preoccupied with questions of control, with instilling loyalty and obedience into these recalcitrant underlings, using a combination of lenient and harsh methods. In the first century A.D. the Roman agricultural writer Columella set forth advice on how best to manage servile farm labor. The slaveholder had to avoid excessive severity and gratuitous cruelty not out of humane consideration but because such things were counterproductive. Slaves could be better controlled if provided with decent living conditions, time off from work, and occasional opportunity to voice grievances. 30
The uncertain promise of eventual emancipation sometimes made manumission an effective control mechanism. The slave was encouraged to observe long-term compliance in the hope of eventual freedom. Servile family attachments were another useful restraint. Married slaves with children were less likely to abscond and more ready to cooperate. And their offspring added to the owner’s wealth. But the slave family existed only as long as it served the interests of the master. It was constantly in danger of disruption since the slave was a disposable form of property. Slave owners readily broke up servile families “when economic considerations made sale of their slaves attractive or necessary.”31
Good treatment did not guarantee good slaves. One might recall Frederick Douglass’s observation drawn from his own unhappy bondage in the American South: The slave who has a cruel master wishes for a kind one, and the slave who has a kind master wishes for freedom. Kindly treatment alone could eventually undermine control by nursing heightened expectations. It was necessary then to impose a coercive, fear-inspiring dominion. A Roman slave could be flogged, branded, mutilated, starved, raped, or crucified, without recourse to self-defense. “Against a slave everything is permitted,” wrote Seneca, the Stoic, who inveighed against the cruel treatment of servi while availing himself of their services.32
In accordance with an ancient rule, if a master was murdered by one of his slaves, all the others in his household faced execution. In this way every servus might feel an interest in guarding the master’s safety. A failure to report suspicious doings or secret plots could cost slaves their lives. One could only pray that one’s master expired in an unambiguously natural fashion, for if there was any suspicion of foul play, the investigating authorities would put all the late owner’s slaves to the torture.33 Roman law did not admit the torture of a free man but required it to exact evidence from slaves, both male and female. But servi who betrayed their masters by volunteering damning information against them in court ended up being punished rather than rewarded.34 For while prosecutors and plaintiffs wanted to win cases, they were disinclined to encourage disloyalty among slaves.
Those who think Roman slavery was such a benign institution have not explained why fugitive slaves were a constant problem. Owners did not lightly countenance the loss of valuable property. They regularly used chains, metal collars, and other restraining devices. Slaves who fled were hunted down and returned to irate masters who were keen to inflict a severe retribution.35 Slaveholders consulted oracles and astrologers to divine the whereabouts of runaways; they posted bills offering rewards; they appealed to state authorities and engaged professional slave catchers (fugitivarii).36 Cicero enlisted two successive provincial governors in the search for a slave who had purloined some of his valuable books and fled abroad.37
Every slave society has known its uprisings. Rome was no exception. The three biggest rebellions, occurring in the last two centuries of the Republic, reached the level of open warfare, with many thousands of armed men on both sides, including the famous one waged by Spartacus and his brave hearts in 74–70 B.C. All were mercilessly crushed. There were numerous other slave uprisings but they were small-scale, short-lived, and unsuccessful, apart from the relatively few slaves who managed a permanent escape.38
Some domestic slaves who enjoyed the favored circumstances of a wealthy household doubtless were materially better off than many slum-dwelling plebs, though servile accommodations and food rations on even the richest estates were usually kept at meager levels. Some urban slaves could sneak away and participate in marketplace debates or even join guilds. But most endured long hours of service, daily humiliations, whimsical mistreatment, and the threat of heavy whippings. Ammianus Marcellinus tells of owners in his day who might have slaves flogged 300 times for a minor offense such as being slow to bring hot water.39 The younger Seneca describes some of the indignities endured by household slaves:
When we recline at a banquet, one slave mops up the disgorged food, another crouches beneath the table and gathers up the leftovers of the tipsy guests. Another carves the priceless game birds; with unerring strokes and skilled hand, he cuts choice morsels along the breast or the rump. Luckless fellow, to live only for the purpose of cutting fat capons correctly . . . another, who serves the wine, must dress like a woman and wrestle with his advancing years, he cannot get away from his boyhood; he is dragged back to it; and though he has already acquired a soldier’s figure, he is kept beardless by having his hair smoothed away or plucked out by the roots, and he must remain awake throughout the night, dividing his time between his master’s drunkenness and lust; in the chamber he must be a man, at the feast a boy.40
Sexual exploitation of Rome’s servi by their masters, though pandemic, is ignored by virtually all present-day historians. Among ancient writers it was openly acknowledged that slaves should make their bodies available on demand. Horace parades his preference for household slaves, both male and female: “I like my sex easy and ready at hand.”41 And Petronius has an ex-slave in his Satyricon reminisce about how he sexually serviced both his master and mistress for fourteen years, an arrangement that Roman readers doubtless found familiar and believable.42
The poet Martial—who was the closest thing ancient Rome had to a gossip columnist—alludes repeatedly to sexual intimacies that masters enjoyed with their household servi. He ironically hails a certain Quirinalis for not needing a wife because he fornicates with maid servants and fills his town house and country place with the resultant offspring. “A genuine paterfamilias is Quirinalis.” 43 We hear nothing about how the maid servants felt about all this.
Affluent women sometimes took advantage of their class status to pursue carnal knowledge. So Martial chides one man whose seven sons all advertise the features of their mother’s servile adulterers, among whom are the cook, the baker, and even the husband’s own sodomite underling. The poet refers to a woman of advanced years who uses her entire dowry to redeem her favorite lover from slavery, thereby ensuring regular satisfaction for herself; a master who beds his housekeeper; another who buys back his maid in order to keep her as his concubine; those who seek out slave boys for their pleasure; and a husband who lingers with maidservants while his wife accommodates litter-bearers: “You are quite a pair, Alauda.”44
Martial himself longs for “a plump home-born slave.” When he passes up the chance to buy “a lad” for 100,000 sesterces, a friend of his immediately meets the price. In his unsparingly coarse manner, Martial tells how his “cock grieves” over the lost opportunity.45 Of course, the boy in question had no say in the matter. The owner unilaterally set the boundaries and chose the mode of gratification, using the child as he pleased. Slavers regularly catered to pedophilic tastes, selling young boys and girls for sexual purposes. Depilatories were used to remove the hair on a boy’s body, keeping him as young-looking as possible. Boys were made to ingest various potions thought to delay the onset of puberty. Even worse, slave dealers frequently resorted to castration, despite successive laws forbidding it.46
Such instances of child barter, rape, and sexual mutilation go unmentioned by those latter-day scholars who, like the slaveholders themselves, seem to have a keener sense of slavery’s hidden benefits than of its manifest evils.
The image of a mutually loving master-slave relationship in ancient Rome, as Finley notes, seems “to draw modern commentators irresistibly into sentimentality and bathos.”47 But the relationship was anything but mutual. No matter how mawkishly costumed, Roman slavery cannot be passed off as a love relationship.
When a favorite of his named Sositheus, “a delightful fellow,” died, Cicero observed “I am more upset than perhaps I ought to be over the death of a slave.”48 Here Cicero is monitoring his feelings, aware that the slaveholder must maintain proper class boundaries by not growing too attached to a mere servus. The love a master feels for his slave is patronizing and paternalistic. While the love a slave feels for his master is at least partially exacted by the steeply asymmetrical power relationship, generated as much by uneasy necessity as by genuine affection. No wonder it existed more firmly in the master’s imagination than in the slave’s heart. We will never know how Cicero’s Sositheus, who lived and died in servitude, may have felt about their relationship had he been given an opportunity for freedom and decent employment.
During the American Civil War, many masters and mistresses in the Confederacy were astonished to find that their slaves—supposedly so well treated and so devoted and faithful—would manifest the most outrageous ingratitude at the first opportunity, insolently disregarding commands that could no longer be enforced, or fleeing to freedom, even enlisting in the ranks of the Union army to fight for the emancipation of their brethren. The journalist Whitelaw Reid, traveling through the South immediately after the war, noted the refrain repeated tirelessly by erstwhile slaveholders, “We have been the best friends the nigger ever had. Yet this is the way they treat us.”49 We can safely assume that this kind of hidden “ingratitude” existed among many Roman household slaves.
The “faithful slave” was a favorite theme among ancient writers, most of whom were themselves slaveholders. Both Valerius and Appian provide a number of stories of slaves who showed extraordinary devotion to their masters.50 No doubt, touching friendships could blossom between master and slave. Vulnerable captives, torn from hearth and home, will sometimes seek survival and security by attaching themselves emotionally to those who hold life-and-death power over them. But we should not make too much of it. The Roman slaveholders, like the American slaveholders of the antebellum South, lived in persistent fear that their “faithfully devoted” slaves were quite capable of rising up and massacring their overlords. In the younger Pliny’s words, slaveholders were permanently exposed to “dangers, outrages and insult . . . No master can feel safe because he is kind and considerate: for it is their brutality, not their reasoning capacity, which leads slaves to murder masters.”51 Hence the Roman proverb, “A hundred slaves, a hundred enemies.”
The Panglossian view of benign bondage ignores the inhumanity that inheres in forced servitude. Slaves had to truckle to their masters and all other superiors. They were marginalized creatures often denied the most elementary social bonds. They suffered a nearly total lack of control over their labor, their persons, and in most regards their very personalities. Slaves themselves—not just their labor power—were commodities.52 Presumably not thinking of his delightful Sositheus, Cicero made this perfectly clear when he remarked that it was preferable to lighten a ship in emergency by throwing an old slave overboard rather than a good horse. And the elder Cato advises his readers to sell old or sick slaves along with old or sick draught animals “and everything else that is superfluous.”53 So every slaveholder was locked into an intrinsically injurious construct that is the inescapable essence of slavery: The degrading exploitation of one human being so that another may pursue whatever comforts and advantages wealth might confer. Ultimately, the same can be said of all exploitative class relations perpetrated by those who accumulate wealth for themselves by reducing others to poverty.
