Ancient History from Below (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies) [1 ed.] 9780367424411, 9781032078809, 9781003005148, 036742441X

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Foreword: what is this history to be?
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
1 Ancient history from below: an introduction
Part 1 Who is below? Subaltern conditions, languages and communities
2 Subaltern community formation in antiquity: some methodological reflections
3 Southern Gaul from below: the limits and possibilities of epigraphic documentation
Part 2 Experiences of poverty, dependency and work
4 Poverty, debt and dependent labour in the ancient Greek world: thinking through some issues in doing ancient history from below
5 Destitute, homeless and (almost) invisible: urban poverty and the rental market in the Roman world
6 Roman agriculture from above and below: words and things
Part 3 Gender, ethnicity and subalternity
7 Hellenicity from below: subalternity and ethnicity in classical Greece and beyond
8 Subaltern masculinities: Pompeian graffiti and excluded memories in the early Principate
Part 4 Politics from below: subaltern agency and collective action
9 Metics, slaves and citizens in classical Athens: rethinking the polis from below
10 What is below? The case of the Athenian riot of 508/7 BC
11 Slave agency in Livy’s history of Rome: between rebellion and counterconspiracy
12 The crowd in late antiquity: problems and possibilities of an inquiry
Epilogue: agency, past, present and future
Index

Citation preview

Ancient History from Below

If ancient history is particularly susceptible to a top-down approach, due to the nature of our evidence and its traditional exploitation by modern scholars, another ancient history—‘from below’—is actually possible. This volume examines the possibilities and challenges involved in writing it. Despite undeniable advances in recent decades, ‘our slowness to reconstruct plausible visions of almost any aspect of society beyond the top-most strata of wealth, power or status’ (as Nicholas Purcell has put it) remains a persistent feature of the field. Therefore, this book concerns a historical field and social groups that are still today neglected by modern scholarship. However, writing ancient history ‘from below’ means much more than taking into account the anonymous masses, the subaltern classes and the non-elites. Our task is also, in the felicitous expression coined by Walter Benjamin, ‘to brush history against the grain,’ to rescue the viewpoint of the subordinated, the traditions of the oppressed. In other words, we should understand the bulk of ancient populations in light of their own experience and their own reactions to that experience. But, how do we do such a history? What sources can we use? What methods and approaches can we employ? What concepts are required to this endeavour? The contributions mainly engage with questions of theory and methodology, but they also constitute inspiring case studies in their own right, ranging from classical Greece to the late antique world. This book is aimed not only at readers working on classical Greece, Republican and imperial Rome and late antiquity but at anyone interested in ‘bottom-up’ history and social and population history in general. Although the book is primarily intended for scholars, it will also appeal to graduate and undergraduate students of history, archaeology and classical studies. Cyril Courrier is Associate Professor of Roman History at Aix-Marseille University— CNRS, France, and junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He is the author of La plèbe de Rome et sa culture (fin du IIe s. av. J.-C.–fin du Ier s. ap. J.-C.) (2014) and co-editor (with Sandrine Agusta-Boularot) of the ninth volume of Inscriptions latines de Narbonnaise dedicated to the city of Narbonne (2021). Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira is Professor of Ancient History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. He is the author of Potestas Populi: Participation Populaire et action collective dans les villes de l’Afrique romaine tardive (2012) and Sociedade e Cultura na África Romana (2020).

Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies

Recent titles include: Xenophon’s Socratic Works David M. Johnson Dionysus and Politics Constructing Authority in the Graeco-Roman World Edited by Filip Doroszewski and Dariusz Karłowicz Monsters in Greek Literature Aberrant Bodies in Ancient Greek Cosmogony, Ethnography, and Biology Fiona Mitchell Antonio Gramsci and the Ancient World Edited by Emilio Zucchetti and Anna Maria Cimino Holders of Extraordinary imperium under Augustus and Tiberius A Study into the Beginnings of the Principate Paweł Sawiński Divination and Knowledge in Greco-Roman Antiquity Crystal Addey Travel, Geography, and Empire in Latin Poetry Edited by Micah Young Myers and Erika Zimmermann Damer Ancient History from Below Subaltern Experiences and Actions in Context Edited by Cyril Courrier and Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira

For more information on this series, visit: www.routledge.com/RoutledgeMonographs-in-Classical-Studies/book-series/RMCS

Ancient History from Below Subaltern Experiences and Actions in Context

Edited by Cyril Courrier and Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Cyril Courrier and Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Cyril Courrier and Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-42441-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-07880-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00514-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003005148 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of figures List of contributors Foreword: what is this history to be?

vii viii x

B R E N T D . S H AW

Acknowledgements

xxvi

C Y R I L C O U R R I E R AND JUL I O CE S AR MAGAL HÃES D E O LIV EIR A

Abbreviations 1 Ancient history from below: an introduction

xxviii 1

J U L I O C E S A R MAGAL HÃE S DE OL I VE I RA AND CY RIL CO U R R IER

PART 1

Who is below? Subaltern conditions, languages and communities

33

2 Subaltern community formation in antiquity: some methodological reflections

35

K O S TA S V L A S S OP OUL OS

3 Southern Gaul from below: the limits and possibilities of epigraphic documentation

55

C Y R I L C O U R R I E R AND NI COL AS T RAN

PART 2

Experiences of poverty, dependency and work 4 Poverty, debt and dependent labour in the ancient Greek world: thinking through some issues in doing ancient history from below C L A I R E TAY L O R

79

81

vi

Contents

5 Destitute, homeless and (almost) invisible: urban poverty and the rental market in the Roman world

104

C R I S T I N A R O S I L L O- L ÓP E Z

6 Roman agriculture from above and below: words and things

122

KIM BOWES

PART 3

Gender, ethnicity and subalternity 7 Hellenicity from below: subalternity and ethnicity in classical Greece and beyond

155

157

G A B R I E L Z U CHT RI E GE L

8 Subaltern masculinities: Pompeian graffiti and excluded memories in the early Principate

175

R E N ATA S E N NA GARRAF F ONI

PART 4

Politics from below: subaltern agency and collective action 9 Metics, slaves and citizens in classical Athens: rethinking the polis from below

193

195

F Á B I O A U G US TO MORAL E S

10 What is below? The case of the Athenian riot of 508/7 BC

216

A L E X G O T T ES MAN

11 Slave agency in Livy’s history of Rome: between rebellion and counterconspiracy

237

F Á B I O D U A RT E JOLY

12 The crowd in late antiquity: problems and possibilities of an inquiry

254

J U L I O C E S AR MAGAL HÃE S DE OL I VE I RA

Epilogue: agency, past, present and future

278

P E D R O PA U L O A. F UNARI

Index

285

Figures

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 7.1 7.2 7.3

Narbonne: inscription in honour of Sex. Fadius Secundus Musa Lyon: base of a statue offered to M. Inthatius Vitalis Narbonne: homage of the Decumani Narbonenses to Iulia Domna Arles: funerary stele of Chia and her patroness Arles: funerary stele of M. Iulius Felix Plan, Settefinestre (Ansedonia), Phase 2 (after Carandini 1985, figure 139) Plan, first century BC/AD (?) field drain, Colle Massari (Cinigiano) Cereal, fodder/legumes and local pastoral pollen indicators (LPPI) pollen percentages, late Republican sites Plan, Pievina (Cinigiano), first century AD phase Local/regional amphora, Case Nuove (Cinigiano), Phase 1.2 (Augustan/Tiberian) Reconstruction, Case Nuove pressing site (first century BC/AD) Paestum: the urban necropolis Burials at Ponte di Ferro during the excavation Reconstruction drawing of a loom weight from the Ponte di Ferro necropolis worn on a necklet

58 59 62 66 67 128 132 133 137 138 141 164 165 165

Contributors

Kim Bowes is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Her current research addresses the economic histories of Roman working people, including Roman peasants. Together with a team of colleagues she has recently published The Roman Peasant Project 2009–2014: Excavating the Roman Rural Poor (2021). Cyril Courrier is Associate Professor of Roman History at Aix-Marseille University—CNRS, France, and junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He is the author of La plèbe de Rome et sa culture (fin du IIe s. av. J.-C.–fin du Ier s. ap. J.-C.) (2014) and co-editor (with Sandrine Agusta-Boularot) of the ninth volume of Inscriptions latines de Narbonnaise dedicated to the city of Narbonne (2021). Pedro Paulo A. Funari is Professor of Historical Archaeology at the University of Campinas, Brazil. He is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Global Historical Archaeology (2020) and Historical Archaeology, Back from the Edge (1999), and the author of ‘Graphic Caricature and the Ethos of Ordinary People at Pompeii’ EJA 1 (1993), among others. Renata Senna Garraffoni is Professor of Ancient History at Paraná Federal University, Brazil. Her current research interests include Latin graffiti from Pompeii and classical reception. She is co-editor (with Manel Garcia) of Mujeres, género y estudios clásicos: un diálogo entre España y Brasil (2020). Alex Gottesman is Associate Professor of Greek and Roman Classics at Temple University, USA. He studies Greek politics and Greek political thought. He is the author of Politics and the Street in Democratic Athens (2014), as well as of articles on Greek literature and history. Fábio Duarte Joly is Professor of Ancient History at the Federal University of Ouro Preto, Brazil, and has published Tácito e a Metáfora da Escravidão: Um Estudo de Cultura Política Romana (2004) and A Escravidão na Roma Antiga: Política, Economia e Cultura (2013). Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira is Professor of Ancient History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. He is the author of Potestas Populi: Participation

Contributors

ix

Populaire et action collective dans les villes de l’Afrique romaine tardive (2012) and Sociedade e Cultura na África Romana (2020). Fábio Augusto Morales is Adjunct Professor of Ancient History at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil. His research interests lie in the urban and global history of classical and Hellenistic Aegean, focusing on Athens. He is the author of A democracia ateniense pelo avesso (2014). Cristina Rosillo-López is Associate Professor at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Spain. Her most relevant publications are La corruption à la fin de la République romaine (IIe–Ier av. J.-C.): aspects politiques et financiers (2010) and Public Opinion and Politics in the Late Roman Republic (2017). Brent D. Shaw is the Andrew Fleming West Professor in Classics Emeritus at Princeton University, USA, and the author of Spartacus and the Slave Wars (2nd ed., 2018), Worlds Together, Worlds Apart (5th ed., 2019, with others) and, most relevant to this volume, Bringing in the Sheaves: Economy and Metaphor in the Roman World (2013). Claire Taylor is John W. & Jeanne M. Rowe Chair of Ancient Greek History and Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA. She is the author of Poverty, Wealth and Well-Being: Experiencing Penia in Democratic Athens (2017) and co-editor (with Kostas Vlassopoulos) of Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World (2015) and (with Jennifer A. Baird) Ancient Graffiti in Context (2011). Nicolas Tran is Professor of Roman History at the University of Poitiers, France. He is the author of Les membres des associations romaines (2006) and Dominus tabernae. Le statut de travail des artisans et des commerçants de l’Occident romain (2013). Kostas Vlassopoulos is Associate Professor of Ancient History at the University of Crete, Greece. He is the author of Unthinking the Greek Polis: Ancient Greek History beyond Eurocentrism (2007); Politics: Antiquity and Its Legacy (2010); Greeks and Barbarians (2013); and Historicising Ancient Slavery (2021). Gabriel Zuchtriegel is Director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, Italy. His publications include Colonization and Subalternity in Classical Greece. Experience of the Nonelite Population (2018), as well as a number of articles on gender, ethnicity and subalternity in ancient Greece and Rome.

Foreword What is this history to be?

The idea of writing a history of lowly persons, history from below or, as has often been proclaimed, giving a voice to the voiceless, was a long-term project of post–Second World War historiography. The desire had its roots in the preWar resistance to the then-dominant paradigm of history that had emerged in nineteenth-century Western Europe, the idea of history as an exact discipline on a Thucydidean model. History was to become a demonstrable science of the past focused on the most powerful actors and events, and based on the hard data of documented evidence found in archives. From von Ranke and Baxter Adams onwards, the result was a history written as a precise narrative of high politics, important men, diplomatic affairs, armed conflicts and other matters of state directly related to these. As with Thucydides, the programme was one of deliberate exclusivity and exclusion. Of course, there were always eccentric autodidacts who thought differently, like the late nineteenth-century activist and reformer Cyrenus Osborne Ward. With the creative use of non-canonical literary sources, marginal Christian writings, odd material artefacts and epigraphical texts, his multivolume The Ancient Lowly: A History of the Ancient Working People demonstrated the potential of an alternative history and imagining what it might look like.1 His impact on the writing of mainstream history was virtually nil. The first alternatives that permanently reshaped the writing of history came from youths like Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch in France, who had served in the first great war—a catastrophe that destroyed faith in traditional values and ideas, including ways of doing history.2 They were not alone. New perspectives also emerged in Anglo-American labour history, in various species of continental Marxist historiography, in the pathbreaking forays of the proto-Annalistes, and others, all of which contributed strands of an alternative historiography that began to flourish in the 1960s and the 1970s of the last century. Because of the common origin of these diverse new histories in a conscious rejection of a dominant old-fashioned history, some of the first attempts were simple negations or inversions of existing paradigms. If there was to be a history of nonelites like manual labourers, it often turned out to be a mirror image of institutional political ‘big man’ history. So the history of trade unions, like Henry Pelling’s A History of British Trade Unionism, became an acceptable stand-in for a history of working people.3 This was to be the serious labour history, the Thucydidean version, founded on accuracy, facts, checkability and the deep proofs provided by

Foreword

xi

rafts of written documents. It was meant to replace the childish Herodotean efforts of a Cyrenus Ward. This was the alternative to orthodox political history that the working class deserved: its real history, so to speak. The perverse result of this approach was a history that was still focused on elites, albeit new ones, but in many ways as narrowly political and as claustrophobic as the contemporary conservative histories of the state and men who counted. What was needed was a history of working people that had its own aims, historical norms, peculiar sources and narrative forms that caught all of its breadth and energy. In my lifetime, it was E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class that ventured boldly to paint a picture of what this quite different type of historical writing might look like.4 Like the young Annalistes, he was also part of a movement—in his case, a new generation of young British Marxist historians who invented a genuine ‘history of the below.’5 The authors of the contributions to this book rightly quote Thompson’s words as constituting a primary statement of aims of the history of the voiceless. To ask questions about the ideals, beliefs, values and practices of working persons as valid in their own right were, as Cyril Courrier and Nicolas Tran percipiently note, classic ‘interrogations thompsoniennes.’ His epic achievement was just one part of several streams of post-War historiography that were developed by a range of new socialist historians. More directly important for the study of antiquity, the Italo-Marxists centred on the Istituto Gramsci held out for a more highly theorised deployment of Marxism than their English-speaking peers.6 If Thompson could lacerate high theory with the sharpened barbs of his satire, the bearers of the Italian Marxist tradition, armed with their Gramscian heritage, could insist on the importance of the theoretical aspect of approaches to the social history of the subaltern.7 From their perspective, even the best thick description and the best emic appreciation of those people in their own time, even if shorn of ‘the enormous condescension of posterity,’ would never be sufficient. Despite its specific linkage with Greek and Roman history and, even more, with the material record of archaeology, much of the new ‘Gramscian’ historiography seemed less attuned to a history of subaltern persons than it was to grander schemes and globalising developments in which the lowly and servile played their appropriate historical roles. As far as actually getting down to writing the history of ordinary persons was concerned, the Marxian trends were overshadowed by the huge presence of the Annalistes. For the purposes of the history of the lowly, the important influence was not as much the domineering figure of Fernand Braudel as the next generation of Annales historians. They turned their focus from the vast expanses of the super-long and very large to the tiniest elements, individual human actors, to produce history at the village and street level, microhistory as it came to be called. More generally, however, these prompts and many others, including anthropological or sociological models to which historians were looking, were just ‘in the air’ at the time.8 At times, indeed, the different voices that were suggesting potentially cooperative paths to a new history seemed like a dialogue of the deaf. Many of the tentative forays seeking a new way were still local and unconnected to explorations being made elsewhere.9 When the 20-year-old Carlo Ginzburg went to Pisa in 1959 and set to work on witches and their trials in order to ‘rescue the

xii Foreword voices and attitudes of the oppressed,’ he was not especially moved by the pre-War Annalistes or by the Anglo-Marxists but by an Italian trinity: Antonio Gramsci, Ernesto de Martino and Carlo Levi.10 They were all young men of the pre-War years. The latter two survived the war and flourished in the decades afterward when the young Ginzburg came to the Scuola Normale. The resentments of the old and the pressures felt by younger generations everywhere to develop a new vision of history were compelling historians, like Le Roy Ladurie in France, to look at the vast areas of undone history of the great majority of people below the important men and their doings that were the common fare of existing historical narratives. At first, it was thought that it might be possible to unlock the world of the subaltern, in Le Roy Ladurie’s case that of the peasants of the Languedoc, by applying the then new computing technology at scale to amass and analyse data relevant to everyday life.11 This approach, however, is manifestly so undoable for ancient historians that no further discussion of it as a possibility is merited. Parametric modelling has become one of our acceptable stand-ins. The much bigger problem with numbers, where they are collectible at scale, is not that they are not in some sense true. The measurements of so many peculiar edges of lithics by a prehistorian in many thousands of types or of precise kinds of pottery sherds by his historical counterpart counted at equal magnitudes are indeed facts. The difficulty is that they are specifically irrelevant as such to humans. In the transition of detailed mathematical computations of risk from things and natural forces to decisions made by humans, the Bernoulli’s realised that a common mental aspect decisively skewed their meaning in terms of human behaviour. To try to measure the precise statistics of climatic change, as Le Roy Ladurie was among the first historians to do, was a laudable enterprise, but the question then became—as he realised: what did the very long-term cosmic climate changes mean to a host of individual human actors? The great demographic sorting of numbers (and for amounts of cereals produced and hectarage put under cultivation) for Provence might well document a great cyclical ‘exhalation’ and ‘inhalation’ of environment and economy, but it was not total history and much less history from below. It was surely the same as more widely identified patterns of ‘intensification’ and ‘abatement’ typical of pre-modern Mediterranean history.12 Recognising the impasse, wonderful tales from the sub-Pyrenean village of Montaillou soon pointed to different directions that might enable a history of the subaltern. And if the life of individuals like the shepherd Pierre Maury could star in a history of the early fourteenth-century Ariège, then why could there not be histories of other forgotten people, even complete unknowns of the past?13 Investigations like Alain Corbin’s history of an anonymous nineteenth-century maker of clogs showed, again, that this too was possible.14 This might have been a road taken by us: possible, but only in certain circumstances. The ‘certain circumstances’ meant that such microhistories from below were simply not doable for historians of much earlier times. The looming difficulty, duly noted and heavily lamented by every contributor to this volume, is the quite different world of evidence in which the historian of Mediterranean antiquity must live. For them, the path to a different history ‘from below’ forged

Foreword

xiii

by modern historians often proves to be a frustrating dead end. In any event, the temptation had a hidden poison in it. The more that the historian focused on the rescue of the micro, the individual and the forgotten of ‘below,’ the more the larger forces, especially the globalising ones in which they lived, were lost from sight. This, too, was one of the legacies of the Thompsonian moment. So what is to be done? Ever since Herodotus and Thucydides, Western historiography has oscillated back and forth between a broad, generous, catholic retelling of all peoples, ranks and stories, and a cramped, protestant, Presbyterian-cold ‘scientifically exacting’ record of persons and events that count, and nothing else. In appearance, the latter type of history is as superior as the men who wrote it. Given the terms that were established for doing history properly, it automatically confirmed its own excellence. Attempts were made at reconciliation, but, like all compromises, they were unsatisfying. To the reader’s benefit, this poison chalice, the deadly challenge of how we are to get beyond this strong duality, has been handed to Kostas Vlassopoulos. It takes an inquirer who has ably dealt with the quintessential repression, dishonour and exploitation, that of slavery in the Greek and Roman worlds, a fundamental interpretative problem facing the historian of antiquity, to try to find some ways out.15 What is this new history to be like when it was constantly configured by humans who were dominated in this fashion, and not by sort-of-romantic peasant venturers, village millers and shoemakers? For us, this question cannot be avoided. Slaves and the institution of slavery remain the great weight that shaped the social worlds below the high elites. Even if some slaves were in positions of power and authority, the greatest majority were not. And even if slaves were not present in considerable numbers in every region of the Empire, their position in systems of colonial expansion and imperial domination meant that the effects of their use were evident everywhere, from the pragmatics of agency and management to the hypotheticals of law and imperial ideology. The distinct possibility of employing the ‘breathing tools’ of slaves in elevated positions of status and authority raises Weber’s concept of ‘life chances’ as having a serious relevance to this story. As Cyril Courrier and Nicolas Tran show in their study of southern Gaul, certain milieux, like the urban port environments, were peculiarly favourable to the rise of ex-slaves or freedmen into positions that would elsewhere have been foreclosed to them. Where the most mobile and ‘advanced’ faces of the economy were found is where slaves and freedmen had a special function and prominence. For the many millions of freedpersons who were part of Roman imperial society, dozens of millions over its whole existence, this is not just a theoretical problem but a real-life fact of some consequence. It raises hard questions about the stratification, sometimes fine distinctions of difference in all social relations, but especially of those found in the lower orders. Broad-brush categories of ‘the lowly’ turn out to be typologically questionable and lead to unpersuasive historical writing. As Claire Taylor rightly asks about the poor, a query that applies to the full range of non-elite groups: who, exactly, were these people anyways? And how are we to find them? After all, that world was not a modern one where the poor live in their favelas, bidonvilles and barrios and the middle classes in their own neat set-aside, gated, redlined suburbs: slaves, the middling, the poor, the well

xiv

Foreword

off and the privileged lived and were housed cheek by jowl. With the poor, and all the others, it is not a simple question of understanding how vertiginously and unequally income and wealth were distributed (our society is not all that different) to show that a great majority of the population was exposed to serious deprivation or the threat of it.16 But her question applies much more widely. Who, indeed, were these people in their location and in their experience? As any analysis of the distribution of wealth and income shows, not all of ‘the lowly’ were poor, desperate or marginal. A good number of them, the so-called menu peuple or popolo minuto, might well have been ‘small’ people in wealth and power, but their numbers were considerable; and they were distributed along a wide spectrum of types, occupations, resources, skills, expectations, specific cultural conventions and mental horizons. As Courrier and Tran ask, ‘Who counted as subaltern in that world, and why?’ Even if we manage somehow to cope with the theoretical problem of identity, we are still left with the pragmatic difficulties of how to do the history. The huge difference with most modern social histories is, again, the deficit in the data. Every contributor to this volume rightly emphasises the pathetic state of the evidence. But one challenge that faces the writer of these histories is the almost absolute absence of narratives of the lives of ordinary persons written by themselves. There are no first-hand musings of a Ralph Josselin that enabled a talented modern social historian to retell his family life, and more.17 There is no diary of a Martha Ballard with which the life of a midwife in nineteenth-century New England could be brilliantly reconstructed.18 Nor for the most part do we have records of direct testimony like the inquisitorial records that enabled the villagers of Montaillou or the now-famous miller Menocchio from the Friuli to be heard.19 For modern historians, a finer understanding of ‘the low’ logically meant going biographical. Some of the motives involved in this move can be sensed in Ginzburg’s own recollections:20 The rejection of ethnocentrism had brought me not to serial history but to its opposite: the minute analysis of a circumscribed documentation, tied to a person who was otherwise unknown. In the introduction, I took issue with an essay by Furet in the Annales in which he asserted that the history of the subaltern classes in pre-industrial societies can only be studied from a statistical point of view. In the same reminiscence, he tends to accept François Furet’s observation that it is only at this small scale that the modern historian can comprehend matters like individual beliefs, values and actions, and the greater social networks of which each person was part. It might be possible, with some difficulty, to reconstruct the world of an individual who worked in harvesting cereal crops in one regional part of the Roman Empire.21 What the same story shows, however, is his systematic involvement in many other aspects of the social orders of the time. Isolating the subject would seriously risk marginalising his history. Anyone writing a history of the subalterns of antiquity has so very little, amounting to virtually nothing, of these kinds of necessary witnesses. The canonical writings that we do have, like those of the historian Livy, are so heavily skewed to their own ideological interests that unpacking their narratives for our purposes is difficult. Simply reading them ‘against the grain’ is not sufficient. In his study of

Foreword xv slave agency, Fábio Duarte Joly is able, with considerable exertion and nuance, to extort something of use, often telling us more about Livy than his intended subjects. Constantly faced with the mass of stories by elite authors, our challenge is how to write this other history, but in a different way. And even if we succeed in this endeavour, as with Ginzburg’s writings subsequent to the Night Battles, how does one work re-establish connections from below? The life stories of individuals, their biographies, might well reflect some of the big forces making them, but there is simply no way that the larger whole can be extrapolated out of their lives. Pursuing similitudes here and there, as Ginzburg has done, tends to a dead-end of historical writing as a kind of Wunderkammer. We must try to explicate the ways in which the micro and the macro can be made part of a unified history. The hurdles seem almost insuperable. The historian can produce a detailed recoupage of the history of a Brazilian bandit like Virgulino Ferreira da Silva, better known as Lampião, and so rescue the voice of the voiceless, only to find out that he was a small bit player in the grand power networkings of the oligarchs who dominated affairs in the Nordeste.22 In defiance of a suggested unimportance of all such smallness, however, we have manifest instances, like that of the Christians who moved from being a very tiny thing to being just about as macro as possible. The nature of the variable and ever-mobile connective links is another challenge faced by all the writers of the essays in this volume. Perhaps we will be fortunate and human history will be biological in nature and it will be possible to link big organisms with the genomic codes of microbiology.23 But perhaps, we shall have to face the real possibility that for us there will be no equivalent of the unified field theory sought by physicists: there will be no way that the very big and the very small can be made into a descriptive and analytical whole. Multitudinous micro-forces might create things that are very big that simply function differently—on a different plane that has its own rules. The artificially created problem of an aporia of acceptable types of evidence was one that already confronted an orthodox historiography based on detailed written sources. It created problems both for them and for us. What was to be done with whole periods of history and entire peoples for which written documentation simply did not exist? Did history for them not exist such that they are ‘pre-historical’ or ‘peoples without history,’ as Eric Wolf aggressively phrased it?24 The same problem bedevils both the people and their history which are not vastly distant in time or in some non-Euro world ‘way out there,’ in which whole groups of people embedded well inside the larger societies but whose ruling orders are governed by writing and written records.25 This is a daunting challenge that confronts the historian of the subaltern social orders of antiquity. We are forced to search for echoes of a pervasive oral culture as it is reflected in material objects and written records. This does not mean that even very ordinary persons were not influenced by basic types of literacy. The numbers of graffiti known from a Pompeii or an Ephesus attest to a desire for writing on almost any surface that presented itself— and these are, in some ways, direct voices from the past. The graffiti inscribed on plastered walls or ceramic ostraca, however, are often disjointed and present severe interpretative challenges.26 To dismiss them as just so many ephemera, however, is misleading. Graffiti often endure for decades or more and are read and heard

xvi

Foreword

by generations of observers. As is often noted, the situation of reporting on the oral improves somewhat with Christian sources, but only by a little. Even in this case, the vast bulk of the writing was still being done by the highly literate and the highly educated. Again, how important was writing as such? I cannot desist from quoting the words of Georges Lefebvre in his study of the Grande Peur of 1789. The problem, he says, in understanding this history is that it was fuelled by a big myth, but to understand why the one big lie worked the historian has to face another hard fact. The vast majority of the French people depended entirely on oral tradition for the dissemination of news. What would most of them have done with a newspaper in any case? They could not read, and between five million and six million of them could not even speak French.27 How often can these same observations be echoed for the world of antiquity? We cannot even expect that any substantial part of the vast majority of persons in the lower orders of that world (however construed) would have written or read anything of length. But they surely consumed considerable amounts of written knowledge through oral interfaces. But even for this ‘received knowledge’we will almost always be dependent on descriptions by the literate. So any method for recouping their history will have to take the warping effect of the lenses in which such elite knowledge is pictured as ‘lower.’ Furthermore, even if most communications among persons in the lower orders were oral, the extent to which the values that we take to be popular were in fact provided by elite literate writers must not be underestimated.28 As more than one contributor to this volume rightly remarks, echoing Simona Cerutti, the use of the spatial metaphor of ‘above’ and ‘below’ echoes too strongly the Manichaean polarities found in elite writers of antiquity who wished to distinguish themselves, the less than one percenters, from ‘all the rest’ in the starkest terms possible. Making our way past the strongly dialogic nature of what is represented as the duality of the high and the low must be one of the aims of the modern historian. Far from being the peripheral thing that a history of marginals might suggest, this history is that of a vast submerged continent dimly discernible through the historian’s sonar. The theory for dealing with such a subject will somehow have to engage those people in all of history. Thinking of approaching the problem within the anodyne framework of ‘outsiders,’ ‘outcasts’ or ‘marginals’ opens up the floodgates of possible subjects, but in terms of a productive analysis it does not get us very far.29 All too often, the trope of marginality, by isolating the subjects, risks marginalising their history by placing them in isolated ghettos of otherness, like exotic animals in a human zoo.30 Abandoning oppositions and exoticism for a strongly dynamic dialogic attack on the evidence is not just another desideratum. It is a necessary first step. As Fábio Augusto Morales argues, the political community of ‘the Athenians’ and their democracy is simply not comprehensible without the inclusion of the slaves, freedmen and metics, and the seeing of the whole community from their perspective. Far from being the history of some ‘small people’ or ‘the low,’ this becomes a history of by far the greatest number of all the human

Foreword xvii peoples of that world. Since ordinary persons of every low status provided by far the greatest bulk of the human power needed to produce the vast range of fixed constructions and consumable goods, there exists an extensive and varied material record directly relevant to their activities in creating, building, clearing, distilling, patching, painting, plastering, loading, fixing, farming and forging. Once again, despite the creative use of comparative situations and evidence, the descriptions in technical writings, legal sources and narrative histories, there is still a considerable void that has to be filled. Real gaps in interpretation have to be traversed before the silent can be made to speak. But Kim Bowes shows that with the right questions and attention to the appropriate material evidence, much can be recovered that pulls us away from the too neat polarities in the ideologies of the elite that we are so often ready to accept. Part of our aim must be to integrate the history of these people not only with the history of social orders as a whole but also with the traditional history of political power at ‘the top.’ Peter Brown, the pre-eminent historian of Mediterranean late antiquity, has demonstrated ways in which this task of integration can be achieved. But investigations of wealth and poverty, even if in the hands of a creative historical genius, have also demonstrated how very challenging, almost insuperable a task this is.31 There can be no doubt that the labelling persons in the lower ranks and orders of society by those who controlled the main levers of communication did in fact establish norms within which the subordinate and subaltern were boxed. So we need something like James C. Scott’s concepts of hidden transcripts and subversive strategies to understand the dialogue of idea and action between the two.32 Even so, arraying and analysing texts that talk, seemingly without end, about the poor or about poverty are a far cry from an historical understanding of the actualities of systemic deprivation, even as felt or perceived. What were ‘those people’ doing? Claire Taylor tackles this difficult problem, and, laudably, she does not flinch from looking the beast directly in the eye. To decipher their categories— the ones through which members of the lower orders were perceived—means to understand the dual veiling and masking functions of ideology.33 The ‘poor’ are usually constructed as a huge undifferentiated mass which, as both Taylor and Cristina Rosillo-López delineate, is part of yet another stark polarity generated by ‘the above.’ It is most unlikely to be true on the ground where significant differences appear. And different strategies of survival were always in play. To get back to James Scott’s variable tactics of the oppressed, this meant that poor beggars could not only humbly beg, playing the role expected of them in a public script, but they could also demand and even threaten—drawing on different public scripts of human responsibility, common justice and divine sanction. Or, no longer as individuals but in larger numbers and assembled in crowds, they might, in the terms of Thompson’s moral economy, violently demand what they felt was owed to them. The study of collective violence engaged in by non-authorised groups of ordinary persons, such as the kind that occurred in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, has been a fertile ground for modern historians. Ever since Georges Rudé studied crowd actions in London and Paris, the focalised social values and nature of the participants concentrated in crowds, riots and demos have been profitably

xviii Foreword unpacked. They surely merit close attention by historians of antiquity with greater focus on the values motivating the persons and their modes and rituals of behaviour, rather than dismissing them as ‘hooligans’ (Cameron) or ‘the mob’ (Brunt) and in similar terms that echo the negative labelling of them by the very elites that a history from below is attempting to avoid. The tactic is necessary, since the elite writers of our literary works either would not or could not see the people below them in other than warped and purposefully distorted terms.34 The attitude is analogous to one where people deliberately do not see persons ‘unseen’ by them or would prefer them to go away somewhere and disappear.35 We cannot buy into the neat polarities proffered by the elites themselves so that phenomena like these are understood to be a general undifferentiated mass of the ignorant and the poor. When rioters or violent crowds turn out to be composed not by the elite-imagined caricature of rootless, propertyless, listless, beggarly trouble-makers but by quite other types of persons—skilled, propertied, educated, motivated by precise aims and not sheer anarchy—then the historian begins to unlock the range of social life below the 1 per cent or the more generous 10 per cent at the top. This was one of the surprise findings of Rudé’s research, richly confirmed by subsequent inquiries. But the old bipolar images, because of their real function in the present, have a powerful staying force. Analysis of the makeup of the Trumpist crowd that invaded the Capitol buildings of the United States in January 2021 provoked many expressions of surprise and amazement (especially in the so-called ‘liberal’ media outlets) that army soldiers and veterans, police and firemen, small businessmen, well-employed skilled workers, the college educated, and even doctors and lawyers were among its members.36 Rudé would not have been surprised, certainly not shocked. Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira is surely right to avoid the masks of the ideology and to follow the lead of the evidence about specific persons: their normal social connections, their common values—their ‘customs in common’ as E. P. Thompson phrased it—as well as what is imputed to them. The whole of this history is a history of dialogues—the actions, aims and tactics of the one side embedded along with the power and images of the others who want to control them and wish that they could disappear from notice and memory. Kim Bowes’s contribution is a particularly damning condemnation of how much the present historiography of the Roman economy, willingly or not, has often colluded with one side in this dialogue. The okhlos or vulgus, and by whatever other terms of disrepute they have been known, were not infrequently said to be in need of monitoring. Even more, as Alex Gottesman points out, regardless of their differences of origin, views, institutions and actions, they were often just bunched together as an undifferentiated mass—a mass that was frequently seen as amorphous and threatening. Control of popular threats or ‘the mob’ has been a rich source of information since police were constantly being called upon to manage the ‘dangerous classes,’ especially in the larger urban centres. This meant coming face to face with a Dickensian range of characters that filled Henry Mayhew’s journalistic reportage on the down-and-outs of nineteenth-century London. Alas, there is almost nothing like this for our cities, and the satirists, appealed to by every student of daily life from Friedländer to

Foreword xix Carcopino, and onwards, do not adequately begin to fill this vast space.37 This path leads back to the Wunderkammer. How fascinating and entertaining it is to gaze at how these specimens of the past in their exotic world managed to drink, dine, defecate or dream! Of course, if one possesses the bare-bones of a narrative, like that of the sixteenth-century peasant and adventurer Martin Guerre, the possibilities of a history are there, but they still require the historian to do a considerable amount of imaginative reconstruction. In which case, there are at least two fundamental objections that might be considered as a riff on Paul Veyne’s denunciation of the validity of comparative history. Why engage in the reconstruction in the first place if comparison cannot be the gaps in the original? And how reliable, in any event, is a probable case fictively confected out of other evidence?38 The one point on which all of the contributors to this volume are emphatic is that we do not possess evidence of this kind. The surviving texts and materials that would enable us to retell the life of one ordinary person of the time must approach zero. The absence immediately provokes serious problems of method. In terms of our dispossessed, our poor and our people who are below the top social ranks, we must feel like our own particular Christ has stopped at Eboli. One of the few things of which we can be reasonably certain, as Claire Taylor insists, is that the instruments of credit and debt were the hard enforcers of the subaltern. If pervasive in Athens, Rome was no different. In the earliest written laws that we have from Rome, after the regulations governing court procedure the first laws move immediately to harsh measures of debt enforcement as the first and most important issue to be dealt with by the society.39 Here, too, the instruments of force and coercion were vitally connected with slavery. This and not entertaining scenes repainted from ‘everyday life’ is our problem. If there have been missing persons in these matters, then there have often missing items of agenda. So it is a happy thing to see that the team composing this volume has approached gender and sexuality as part of the constellation of forces that have produced systemic inferiority and deprivation. This is an issue that often seemed to drop off the desk of the new social history of previous generations. Second-generation feminist historians had emphatically drawn attention to this lost history and had begun configuring the problem of gender as a gateway to the history of a vast number of humans.40 But their effect on the writing of ancient history seemed to have been somewhat delayed. Perhaps the difficulties of shaping this history for ‘those below’ were not just the heavily skewed writings of elites but a huge lack of first-hand testimony. Nevertheless, a historian who was instrumental in exciting interest in the history of orders of society other than the high elites, Moses Finley, noted that sex and sexual exploitation were primal elements in the subordination of slavery, one of the fundamental ways in which slaves have always been ‘answerable’ with their bodies. Note that: one of the most fundamental aspects. And yet he then promptly said not another word about this fundamental aspect in all of his other writings.41 This was not an innocent forgetfulness or a studied disinterest. Despite the challenges of the evidence, this must have been a kind of deliberate avoidance that is only in the process of being rectified by the current generation of historians of Greek and Roman antiquity. Even the new

xx

Foreword

historiography of the lower orders with its emphasis on class and status, work regimen, social symbolism, economic exploitation and popular politics tended to leave unspoken this huge gravitational field of human history almost as if it did not exist. As the valiant efforts of Renata Senna Garraffoni indicate, even armed with the roadmap provided by Foucault (itself open to serious objections), this remains one of the most challenging tasks that face the current generation of historians of antiquity. On the one hand, so much is hidden from our view. On the other hand, the sheer ubiquity with which sexuality has universally inflected human relations makes its specific effects in each instance difficult to understand. As she rightly shows, the high and the low were jammed more closely cheek by jowl than would be assumed from the vantage point of the zoned living of today’s towns and cities. Forum and fornix were exceptionally close. Gender differences always permeated and configured social relations of both upper and lower, with serious consequences for women, especially those in the ranks of the subaltern. The other obvious meta-mechanism that has artificially structured the extremes of deprivation and subordination were concepts and practices of race/ethnicity. This historical problem, like slavery, with which it is vitally connected, is a rather daunting one to unravel. The labelling of whole human groups and populations in a way that has conditioned systemic repression, exploitation and deprivation of opportunities and resources has been receiving long overdue attention in recent decades. Like sexuality, these malignant ideologies were everywhere and never just limited to the slaving periphery of a conquering colonial power. In his inspection of democratic Athens, Gabriel Zuchtriegel demonstrates how, no less than in distant colonial settings, the branding of groups of peoples as marginals, ‘barbarians’ and other types of outsiders was central to the structural oppression and exploitation of those nearby, those living among the insiders in the polis. In the conventional duet of race and ethnicity, surely far too much has been made of the supposed fundamental differences between the two. In reality, the race and ethnicity strongly overlap and have often been made to function—with the nice adjustments, often simple substitutions in language—in the same fashion and to the same ends. Ethnic identity, a staple of recent scholarship when done in an anodyne Barthean mode, was never a kinder version of race. In one of the most frequently quoted studies of his time of the problem of race, and all too typical of it, a leading scholar could suggest that all was just fine since the Romans, only afflicted by mere ethnic prejudices, were prepared to admit people who could be acculturated into their world as Roman citizens.42 As if such a thing ever obviated racism. Try telling the more than 45 million African Americans that their sharing of American culture (much of which they themselves have created) and their possession of US citizenship has effaced the hard edges of racist ideology and action. Like all the historical actors of the past, we live in Veyne’s messy, contradictory, manic, unique sublunary world—an exasperating, vexatious world where interpretation must be highly individual and very general at the same time. Happily, every contribution in this collection engages with the difficulties that are generated by these complex networks of human creativity. Perhaps best of all— although setting a severe test for the writer—this collection of essays begins

Foreword

xxi

without blinking by facing head on the core problems of definitions, paths of development, methodological and evidentiary difficulties—all harsh tasks for the researcher. The challenges are met by Kostas Vlassopoulos, who, like any good guide, bravely and competently maps possible roads into this future. After all, how we are to get to our many destinations? As historians, we know that our great mission of doing history on the large-stage strategic history, global history if you will, is baggy, ill-defined, amorphous and so on, but we still sense basically what it is. But what is ‘history from below’ supposed to be within this other larger mission? The essays here suggest that different paths might be taken. But which ones and by which means? A better title for my foreword might be ‘How is this history to be?’ There is probably no better way to end this foreword than to say that we are just at the beginning. Brent D. Shaw

Notes 1 Ward 1888–1900. 2 As evoked by Eksteins 1989. 3 Pelling 1963 (basically, a product of the 1950s); and, in a similar vein, his histories of the Labour Party. 4 Thompson 1963. 5 There are numerous treatments, but Kaye 1984 should suffice. 6 For some of this background albeit, in my perspective from a somewhat selective viewpoint, see Giardina 2007, 15–31. 7 So, almost in the same year: Thompson 1978 and Carandini 1979. Admittedly, Thompson’s target was not Italo-Marxist ideas but rather the nearly incomprehensible high theorising of the Althusserians in Paris. 8 These always had their own problems. Sociology was always far too myopic and anachronistic in its focus, if not, as Magalhães de Oliveira points out, actually complicit with legitimising current configurations of power (e.g. the sociology of deviants). Anthropology was just a faux history that was created by the abandonment of a whole range of history by the creation of the Thucydidean/Rankean idea of history as a science, as a result of which the oral history of ‘primitives’ was left to others to do as a kind of ‘nothistory.’ This was always a quite false idea and so ‘anthropology’ as something different from history has died a not-so-slow death. 9 Cerutti 2015, a study referred to by several of the contributors, outlines the long-delayed response to Thompson’s work in France, for example. 10 University of Pennsylvania seminar, led by Francesca Trivellato: 2 March 2021: https:// youtu.be/cgHcSCXknnM. 11 Le Roy Ladurie 1966 (Engl. transl. 1974—a much-reduced selection of the original, alas). 12 A central theme, for example, of Horden and Purcell 2000. 13 Le Roy Ladurie 1979. 14 Corbin 1998 (Engl. transl. 2001). 15 Vlassopoulos 2021, where he advances a similar programme of new pathways of analysis for slavery as he does here for ‘history from below.’ 16 Scheidel 2020, referring to a range of his earlier work on the same problem; of course, the long shadow of Piketty hovers over all of this. 17 McFarlane 1970. 18 Ulrich 1990.

xxii

Foreword

19 Ginzburg 1976 (Engl. transl. 1980). There are some modest possible exceptions in the records of Q&A sessions between Roman magistrates and Christian defendants, and in the stenographic records of debates in church concilia. Even so, these are rather feeble sources for the sentiments, ideas and lives of ‘the lowly’ as expressed by themselves. 20 Ginzburg 1993, 22. 21 The attempt was made: Shaw 2013, with some of these results. 22 Chandler 1978; someone who merits all of two to three pages in Lewin 1987. She did recognise the problem: Lewin 1979b. In the history of the Northeast, we can see a lot of the relevant evidence in detail; the number of analogous cases in the history of antiquity where we cannot must be almost beyond count. 23 It must be said that the problem was faced by the Annalistes, especially Braudel, who attempted to link the great forces of the so-called longue durée (volume 1) with the histoire événementielle (vol. 2) with no great success. The borrowing of the conjuncturale from the economists produced nothing of note. 24 Wolf 1982. 25 See, e.g., Seabrook and Siddiqui 2011. 26 Not that these cannot be truly significant. I remember seeing on the inside of the door of a stall in the men’s restroom in the UL at Cambridge an inscribed arrow pointed to the handle on the door, accompanied with the explanatory inscription ‘The Hand of Maradona.’ The notation was simultaneously a shout against a perceived injustice and an assertion of British identity. I understood this immediately and laughed. But to reconstruct my laugh, someone 2,000 years hence would have to understand the cultural relevance of the physical circumstances (the men’s restroom), specific point of reference (the game of football, the World Cup of 1986, the fact that a player called Diego Maradona actually referred to the said act as ‘The Hand of God’), the assumed audience—some of the most highly educated and privileged persons on the globe—who, despite this, would share in the sentiments of what was then deemed to be a popular game of working-class origins and focus. The task would be rather daunting. Since this happened in the men’s restroom, it seems to confirm some of the methods of Garraffoni’s reading of graffiti. 27 Lefebvre 1932 (Engl. transl. 1973, 73–74). 28 An aspect that was drawn to my attention many years ago in a hard fashion by Lewin 1979a. 29 As I can tell from personal experience: Shaw 2000. 30 So, despite the best of intentions, I am sure: Neri 1998. 31 With repeated attacks on the problem: Brown 2001, 2012 and 2016. 32 Scott 1990 and, more recently, 2013. 33 Merquior 1997 (transl. of the English original 1979); for an attempt to unpack the problem in this vein, see Shaw 2020. 34 As demonstrated, famously, by Auerbach 1946 (Engl. transl. 1953). 35 Confirmed by the persons themselves: Ellison 1952; a theme in Hacker’s writings: 1992, 12. 36 Lambert Strether, ‘The Class Composition of the Capitol Rioters,’ Monthly Review Online (January 21, 2021) reposted from Naked Capitalism (January 18, 2021); doctors: P. Stone, The Guardian, January 22, 2021. 37 The policing units of the time undoubtedly had such records: see, e.g., Tertullian, de Fuga, 13.3 (CCL 2, 1154–5) on Carthage is good testimony; and there is also evidence in the papyri from Egypt. It is just that we do not have sufficient survivals from the policing archives. 38 Davis 1983, followed by the debates on the use of imagination in the American Historical Review: Finlay 1988, and the author’s reply: Davis 1988 (where Davis’s defence of her methods seems convincing to me—it’s what historians do). 39 The so-called Twelve Tables of c. 450 BCE, nos. 3 following: FIRA 12, no. 2, table 3, 32–34.

Foreword

xxiii

40 There were many precursors, but in my case the breakthrough historical analysis was provided by Scott 1986. 41 Finley 1980, 161–4. 42 Sherwin-White 1967; his revised study of the Roman citizenship, it must be confessed, is no better in this respect.

Bibliography Auerbach, E. 1946. Mimesis: dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur. Bern: Franke (Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by W. R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953, reprint edition, 2013). Brown, P. 2001. Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Brown, P. 2012. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brown, P. 2016. Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Carandini, A. 1979. Anatomia della scimmia: la formazione economica della società prima del capitale (con un commento alle Forme che precedono la produzione capitalistica dai Grundrisse di Marx). Turin: Einaudi. Cerutti, S. 2015. ‘Who is below? E. P. Thompson, historien des sociétés modernes: une relecture.’ Annales HSS 70 (4): 931–55. doi:10.1353/ahs.2015.0167. Chandler, B. J. 1978. The Bandit King, Lampião of Brazil. College Station, TX: A&M University. Corbin, A. 1998. Le monde retrouvé de Louis-François Pinagot, sur les traces d’un inconnu, 1798–1876. Paris: Flammarion (The Life of an Unknown: The Rediscovered World of a Clog Maker in Nineteenth-Century France. Translated by A. Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). Davis, N. Z. 1983. The Return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Davis, N. Z. 1988. ‘On the Lame.’ AHR 93 (3): 572–603. doi:10.2307/1868103. Eksteins, M. 1989. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin (reprint: 2000). Ellison, R. 1952. Invisible Man. New York: Random House. Finlay, R. 1988. ‘The Refashioning of Martin Guerre.’ AHR 93 (3): 553–71. doi:10.2307/1868102. Finley, M. I. 1980. Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. London: Chatto & Windus (expanded edition, Princeton, NJ: Marcus Weiner, 1998). Giardina, A. 2007. ‘Marxism and Historiography: Perspectives on Roman History.’ In Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century, edited by C. Wickham, 15–31. Oxford: British Academy/Oxford University Press. doi:10.5871/bacad/9780197264034.001.0001. Ginzburg, C. 1976. Il formaggio e i vermi: Il cosmo di un mugnaio del ’500. Turin: Einaudi (The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Translated by J. & A. Tadeschi. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Ginzburg, C. 1993. ‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It.’ Critical Inquiry 20 (1): 10–35. doi:10.1086/448699. Hacker, A. 1992. ‘The New Civil War.’ NYRB 39 (8) (23 April), 12.

xxiv

Foreword

Horden, P. and N. Purcell. 2000. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford: Blackwell. Kaye, H. J. 1984. The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lefebvre, G. 1932. La Grande Peur de 1789. Paris: Armand Colin (The Great Fear of 1789. Translated by J. White. London: NLB, 1973). Le Roy Ladurie, E. 1966. Les Paysans de Languedoc. Paris, S.E.V.P.E.N. (The Peasants of Languedoc. Translated by J. Day. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974). Le Roy Ladurie, E. 1975. Montaillou, village Occitan de 1294 à 1324. Paris: Gallimard (Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error. Translated by B. Bray. New York: Vintage, 1979). Lewin, L. 1979a. ‘Oral Tradition and Elite Myth: The Legend of Antônio Silvino in Brazilian Popular Culture.’ Journal of Latin American Lore 5: 157–204. Lewin, L. 1979b. ‘The Oligarchical Limitations of Social Banditry in Brazil: The Case of the “Good” Thief Antonio Silvino.’ P&P 82 (February): 116–46. Lewin, L. 1987. Politics and Parentela in Paraíba: A Case Study of Family-Based Oligarchy in Brazil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McFarlane, A. 1970. The Family Life of Ralph Josselin: A Seventeenth-Century Clergyman: An Essay in Historical Anthropology. New York and London: Norton. Merquior, J. G. 1997. O véu e a mascara: ensaios sobre cultura e ideologia. São Paulo: T. A. Queiroz (The Veil and the Mask: Essays on Culture and Ideology. Translated of the English original by L. L. de Oliveira. London: RKP, 1979). Neri, V. 1998. I marginali nell’Occidente tardoantico: poveri, ‘infames’ e criminali nella nascente società Cristiana. Bari: Edipuglia. Pelling, H. 1963. A History of British Trade Unionism. London: MacMillan. Scheidel, W. 2020. ‘Roman Wealth and Wealth Inequality in Comparative Perspective.’ JRA 33: 341–52. doi:10.1017/S104775942000104X. Scott, J. C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scott, J. C. 2013. Decoding Subaltern Politics: Ideology, Disguises, and Resistance in Agrarian Politics. New York: Routledge. Scott, J. W. 1986. ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.’ AHR 91 (5): 1053– 75 (= Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988 (revised edition, 1999), 28–50). doi:10.2307/1864376. Seabrook, J. and I. A. Siddiqui. 2011. People Without History: India’s Muslim Ghettos. London and New York: Pluto Press. Shaw, B. D. 2000. ‘Rebels and Outsiders.’ In The Cambridge Ancient History. Vol. 11: The High Empire, A.D. 70–192, edited by A. K. Bowman, P. D. A. Garnsey and D. Rathbone, 361–403. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ CHOL9780521263351.012. Shaw, B. D. 2013. Bringing in the Sheaves: Economy and Metaphor in the Roman World. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Shaw, B. D. 2020. ‘Poverty and Charity in Roman Imperial Society.’ Religion in the Roman Empire 6: 229–67. Sherwin-White, A. N. 1967. Racial Prejudice in Ancient Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, E. P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books. Thompson, E. P. 1978. The Poverty of Theory & Other Essays. London: Merlin.

Foreword

xxv

Ulrich, L. T. 1990. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812. New York: Knopf-Random House. Vlassopoulos, K. 2021. Historicising Ancient Slavery. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ward, C. O. 1888–1900. The Ancient Lowly: A History of the Ancient Working People, from the Earliest Known Period to the Adoption of Christianity by Constantine, 2 vols. Chicago: C. H. Kerr & Co. Wolf, E. R. 1982. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press (reprint: 2010).

Acknowledgements

Most of the chapters gathered in this volume have their origin as papers delivered at the international conference ‘Ancient History from Below: Possibilities and Challenges,’ held at the University of São Paulo in March 2018. However, this book goes far beyond the mere publication of proceedings. Firstly, four chapters have been added, so the range of topics covered is much more comprehensive. Secondly, not only the original contributions have been rewritten to take into account the discussions that took place during the conference but also all chapters have been subject to the same orientations in a spirit of collegiality and conviviality that gives the volume a resolutely coherent feature. Yet some themes do not appear here. For example, the reader may be surprised not to find any contribution of religious history, especially since two papers at the conference were devoted to the study of religion from below. Unfortunately, the writing of the book, which really began in 2019, was seriously impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, which compelled some scholars to give up the project. Without much hope of a rapid improvement in the health situation in 2020 and 2021, we did not wish to delay the publication any further. The genesis of this book goes back to 2012 and the symposium ‘Locating Popular Culture in the Ancient World’ organised by Lucy Grig at the University of Edinburgh. On this occasion, several of the participants of the present book met, and the result was the international project Subaltern Groups and Popular Practices in Antiquity. Structured in 2015 and led by Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira, it is intended to encourage and sustain a theoretical and methodological reflection on the experience of subaltern groups in antiquity and their practices, forms of expression and modes of action. It also aims to explore the specific problems involved in investigating these issues in the study of ancient societies. This project brings together teachers, researchers and students of history and related fields such as archaeology, literature and social sciences. It is mainly developed around a blog regularly updated with new posts and video podcasts on current research in history from below: https://en.subalternosblog.com. We would like to address our warmest thanks to the Department of History of the University of São Paulo, which had hosted the 2018 symposium, as well as to the Graduate Program in Social History of the University of São Paulo (PPGHS) and to the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), which had financed the

Acknowledgements xxvii event. We would especially like to thank the students, Giovan do Nascimento, Jéssica Brustolim, Luiz Giacomo, Márcio Monteneri, Nara Oliveira, Pedro Benedetti and Rafael Monpean, who played an essential role in the success of the conference. Since then, many of them have been the backbone of the blog. Our most sincere thanks also go to Victoria Leitch and Katia Schörle, who ensured the linguistic correction of the chapters, as well as to the Institut Universitaire de France and the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme (Aix-Marseille University—CNRS) that helped us with the publication. We are also grateful to Lucy Grig, Brent D. Shaw and Claire Taylor, who helped with the preparation of the volume in various ways. Amy Davys-Pointer at Routledge has been a generous and enthusiastic supporter of our project, and we warmly thank her. Finally, we are grateful to Ben Brown, David Kawalko-Roselli, Elena Isayev and two anonymous referees of Routledge for their helpful and constructive comments.

Abbreviations

The abbreviations of ancient authors and their works and the collections of inscriptions follow those in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edition, or, when not found, in the Liddell-Scott-Jones’ Greek-English Lexicon, 9th edition. Journal titles are abbreviated as in L’Année philologique. Abbreviations of ancient text editions, reference works and collections of inscriptions not given in the Oxford Classical Dictionary or Liddell-Scott-Jones’ Lexicon are as follows: BCTH CAG De malig. Her ICalvet ILGN ILN SGD

Bulletin archéologique du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques. Paris: Impr. Nationale, 1883–1973. Carte archéologique de la Gaule. Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres: Maison des Sciences de l’homme, 1988– Plutarch, De malignitate Herodoti, edited by P. A. Hansen. Amsterdam: Hakkertium, 1979. La collection d’inscriptions gallo-grecques et latines du Musée Calvet, edited by J. Gascou and J. Guyon. Paris and Avignon: De Boccard and Fondation Calvet, 2005. Inscriptions latines de Gaule Narbonnaise, edited by E. Espérandieu. Paris: E. Leroux, 1929. Inscriptions latines de Narbonnaise. Paris: CNRS, 1985– Jordan, D. R. 2004, ‘Survey of Greek Defixiones not Included in the Special Corpora.’, GRBS 26: 1–81.

1

Ancient history from below An introduction Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira and Cyril Courrier

Questions of a reading worker Who built seven-gated Thebes? In the books, there are the names of kings. Did the kings haul the boulders? And Babylon, several times destroyed, Who rebuilt it so many times? In which houses Of golden shining Lima did the builders dwell? The night the Great Wall of China was finished, where did The masons go? Great Rome Is full of triumphal arches. Who built them? Over whom Did the Caesars triumph? Did much-praised Byzantium Have only palaces for its inhabitants? Even in legendary Atlantis, The night when the sea swallowed it up, Those who were drowning shouted for their slaves. Young Alexander conquered India. He alone? Caesar beat the Gauls. Did he not at least have a cook with him? Philip of Spain wept when his fleet Was sunk. Did no one else weep? Frederick the Second won the Seven Years’ War. Who Won besides him? Each page a victory. Who cooked the victory feast? Every ten years a great man. Who paid the expenses? So many reports, So many questions. (Bertolt Brecht, translated by Olivier Baisez)1

Why write ancient history ‘from below’ today? All of us who have tried to write ‘history from below’ have started with the same basic questions as those formulated by Bertolt Brecht in 1935. The shift of DOI: 10.4324/9781003005148-1

2

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira and Cyril Courrier

attention from rulers to ordinary people that Brecht advocated in this poem gained ground during the twentieth century as a consequence of the growing impact of social movements, the wider democratisation of our societies and the gradual opening of universities themselves to men and women coming from well below the upper and upper-middle classes.2 Today, it is clear that history is no longer restricted to the report of ‘the great deeds of kings.’3 Yet it is still significant to note that most of Brecht’s ‘Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters’ concerned in fact ancient history: Thebes, Babylon, imperial Rome, the legendary Atlantis, the conquests of Alexander and Caesar. Ancient history is indeed particularly susceptible to a top-down approach, to the tendency of seeing history through the eyes of the elite. This reflects not only the nature of our sources but also the conscious or unconscious identification of modern scholars with the elites of the ancient world, an identification that has influenced the choices not only of historians but also of archaeologists and epigraphists.4 Yet there is also another reason why ancient history features so prominently in Brecht’s poem. This reason is that the view of history as an account of great and celebrated people, events and achievements (or, in Walter Benjamin’s words, as a Triumphzug, a triumphal procession of the conquerors) is an ancient invention and one that remains as a model for modern conceptions of history.5 Brecht’s poem can, in this sense, lead us to question not only the thematic preferences of historians but also the very nature of the writing of history. The contributors to this book come from different countries, different professional affiliations and even divergent scholarly traditions, but we are all united by our common conviction that another ancient history is possible. Writing ancient history ‘from below’ means, however, much more than taking into account those who, to repeat Brecht’s formula, ‘built seven-gated Thebes’: the anonymous masses, the subaltern classes, the non-elites. Our task is also, in the felicitous expression coined by Benjamin, ‘die Geschichte gegen den Strich zu bürsten’ (‘to brush history against the grain’). This means breaking with the view of history as a ‘triumphal procession’ to rescue the subordinated and the oppressed (Benjamin’s Unterdrückten) from the eyes of judgement of the winners.6 In other words, we should understand the bulk of ancient populations ‘in light of their own experience and their own reactions to that experience.’7 There is a political commitment in our engagement with the past, and we believe that, in this specific juncture, at the beginning of the 2020s, ‘history from below’ has become more urgent than ever. After all, we live in a world where inequalities of power and wealth continually intensify. Global financial agents and institutions dictate governmental policies, ignoring the citizens’ will. The neoliberal policies of austerity and the increasing flexibility of labour relations have undermined trade unions and increased the precarity of labourers. The coronavirus pandemic has only exposed and further aggravated a previous tendency of penalising the poor for the crises. In several countries, authorities and security forces treat immigrants, ethnic minorities or the poor as potential enemies. The rise of far-right rhetoric threatens to suppress the voices of women, LGBTQ+ people, indigenous communities and other minorities, while traditional political

Ancient history from below

3

parties and politicians (even on the left), having long abandoned their social bases, prefer to blame citizens for their wrong political choices, rather than to understand their aspirations and viewpoints.8 In this context, when we promote a critical reflection about how subaltern people in the ancient world lived their lives and coped with their situations, we are also opposing the contemporary tendency to ignore, disrespect or suppress the ‘voices from below.’ In refusing to accept as natural ‘the most final, and brutal, of life’s inequalities,’9 the inequality between who is remembered and who is forgotten, and in trying to understand the Greek debtor, the urban homeless, the Roman peasant or the domestic slave10 in terms of the lives they led, we are saying to our contemporaries that the sufferings and hopes of every human being should not be forgotten, at least for us who aspire a different future. Ultimately, we are affirming that a really democratic, more egalitarian society cannot be constructed unless all people are heard and better understood. Moreover, at a time when the more conventional, homogeneous image of the Greek and Roman worlds is once again embraced by the far right as the foundation of male, white supremacy, it is worth remembering that it is only by writing an entirely new, more pluralist story about antiquity that ancient history can really become liberating.11 This kind of history is (as it must be) uncomfortable, because we do not in this volume treat the ancient world as a refuge from our social hardships, as a haven of social peace.12 Nor will the reader find here the aseptic approaches inspired by the New Institutional Economics that became dominant in much of the recent historiography on the ancient world and that, as Kostas Vlassopoulos rightly observed, tend to replace discussions of slavery, class and exploitation by ‘purely’ economic accounts of production, exchange and growth.13 While avoiding the alternative traps of miserabilism or populism,14 this book will take a different path. The reader will still find here industrious smallholders or prosperous artisans and traders who benefited from the burgeoning commerce of thriving port towns. But we also insist on bringing to the fore stories of subjugated and exploited agricultural labourers stigmatised as barbarians, working poor families expelled from their homes because they were unable to pay their rents and even a whole urban populace reduced to hunger by the policies and self-interest of their rulers.15 Even so, this history can also be inspiring, because in studying the strategies, agencies and solidarities of subaltern groups, we can also show their margins of freedom, their capacities of resistance and the potential for social change that persist in spite of the many forms of domination and oppression. But before discussing the main challenges involved in our endeavour, let us see how the field of ‘history from below’ was constituted in the first place and how it has developed in recent decades.

‘History from below’ in context The phrase ‘history from below’ was used for the first time in English in 1966 as the title of an article published by Edward P. Thompson in the Times Literary Supplement.16 In French, however, the expression dates back at least to a 1932

4

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira and Cyril Courrier

essay by Lucien Febvre, who aimed to write a ‘histoire des masses et non des vedettes, histoire vue d’en bas et non d’en haut.’17 In fact, as Eric Hobsbawm observed, it was the French tradition of historiography as a whole, steeped in the history not of the French ruling class but the French people, which established most of the themes and even the methods of grassroots history. Marc Bloch as well as Georges Lefebvre.18 Already in 1924, with the publication of Les Rois Thaumaturges, an investigation of the belief that the kings of France and England could work miracles, Bloch showed how a study of the beliefs and mentality of ordinary people and their changes over time could illuminate the history of major political decisions and events.19 Lefebvre went a step further, establishing the main precedent of this historiographical perspective which would later be known as ‘history from below.’ In a series of works, the most famous of which is La Grande Peur de 1789 (1932), Lefebvre drew attention to the need of taking into account the wider context of popular life, including the everyday habits and associations, memories and traditions, as the only way to understand the underlying motives or rationales of popular actions.20 The two first generations of the French Annales School, however, were much more concerned with long-term developments, macro-history and serial trends, rather than with human historical agency. It was only in the late 1950s and 1960s that the British Marxist historians steered ‘history from below’ in a more critical and in-depth direction. We are referring here to the remarkable generation of historians that came together initially in the Communist Party Historians’ Group and whose foremost members were Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Eric Hobsbawm, Victor Kiernan, George Rudé, John Saville, Dorothy Thompson and E. P. Thompson.21 Owing to their intellectual and political formation in the popular struggle against fascism and moving away from the deterministic, Stalinist readings of Marx, especially after the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary in 1956, these historians focused their attentions on the capacities of action and the choices of men and women in making their own history. Consequently, they committed their energies to recover the experiences and agencies of the labouring classes and their struggles, practices and beliefs, going well beyond the organised movements or the critical moments of rebellion or revolution.22 In a famous passage of his preface to The Making of the English Working Class (1963), E. P. Thompson defined this new way of doing history in terms that remain to this day the best introduction to the aims of any ‘history from below’: I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ handloom weavers, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded followers of Joanna Southcott from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been

Ancient history from below

5

foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and if they were casualties in history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.23 As this passage makes clear, ‘history from below’ is above all a history rooted in the experience of the subordinated, the oppressed and the dispossessed. It is a history that treats the common people not simply as effects of the social structures or as ‘one of the problems the government has to handle’24 but as social actors who make their own history in the circumstances they encountered. ‘History from below’ is certainly a ‘rescue’ operation, in the sense that we are looking for people who were forgotten, ignored or misrepresented by a conventional history. Its main objective, however, is to rescue them from the judgements of the ‘winners’ and, consequently, of posterity. History tends to be understood as an evolutionary chain or as a series of achievements. The consequence, as Thompson observed, is that ‘[t]he blind alleys, the lost causes, and the losers themselves are forgotten.’25 Rescuing them from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ does not mean their actions are attributed a retrospective political significance that they did not always have.26 It means that their actions, motivations and rationales, however unfamiliar they might seem to us, must be understood on their own terms and not in light of subsequent evolution or on the terms that the winners have chosen to represent them. In his 1966 article, Thompson reviewed the emerging trends in this new type of history. Although his concern at that time was mainly with labour history, all of his predictions about what would become central topics of research in the following decades proved to be correct: histories of crime and popular disorder, of popular culture and popular religion, and so on.27 The intellectual and political context of the time was indeed favourable to the exploration of new themes, and not only among historians. In 1957, the literary critic and sociologist Richard Hoggart published his pioneering book, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life, while he founded, along with Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, the Cultural Studies movement.28 Defining culture as ‘a whole way of life,’ rather than as the best or the most influential artistic or literary works of a civilisation, these scholars enabled the investigation of previously ignored arenas, such as the everyday-life practices, marginal or marginalised groups and popular culture. By their political commitment with movements against inequality in the 1960s and their insistence on the potential of working-class cultures to resist dominant cultures, the British Cultural Studies movement contributed to the same perspective that the British Marxist historians advocated.29 Indeed, E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall were close at the time and co-signed a famous text of the new left, the May Day Manifesto 1968.30 In the 1970s and 1980s, ‘history from below’ continued to flourish, but historians adopting a more bottom-up approach turned to a wider range of historical concerns than those defined by traditional Marxism. It was in those years, for instance, that Thompson began his investigation of the ‘moral economy’

6

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira and Cyril Courrier

of the crowd, of rough music, the sale of wives and other popular customs in eighteenth-century England, while Natalie Zemon Davis applied the insights of cultural anthropology in her studies of religious riots, of the organised rituals of French adolescent males or of the women’s experience of the Reformation in sixteenth-century France.31 At the same time, in Italy and Germany, ‘history from below’ assumed radical new forms.32 German Alltagsgeschichte (‘the history of everyday life’) developed in reaction to the then prevailing hegemony of Strukturgeschichte, with its emphasis on ‘big structures’ and ‘large processes,’ encouraging instead the qualitative analysis of the mental and material world of German workers in clearly defined microhistoric environments.33 Italian ‘microhistory’ similarly reduced the scale of the historical investigation, adopting the intensive analysis of seemingly mundane sources and the ‘microscopic observation’ of a single individual, a small community or an apparently obscure event as devices to get at larger issues.34 Thus, in The Cheese and the Worms (1976), Carlo Ginzburg used the detailed interrogations of the inquisition to investigate the mental universe of a sixteenth-century miller and ultimately to explore the complex relations between elite and popular cultures.35 In France, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, in his Montaillou (1975), which remains a model work of historical anthropology, took advantage of the same kind of source to reconstruct the social life of a medieval village.36 Outside Europe, the attempt to rethink history from the perspective of the subaltern was pursued in the 1980s by the Indian Subaltern Studies group. Building on the concept of ‘subaltern classes’ formulated by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the Subaltern Studies Group, led by Ranajit Guha, extended the concept of ‘subalternity’ to take into account the various categories of subordination in a colonial context. Their aim was to deconstruct the colonial perspectives on Indian history, so often written from the perspective of the state, and retrieve the viewpoint of subalterns as autonomous agents.37 In his classic Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in India (1983), Guha showed how the codes through which the colonial officials interpreted peasant rebellion could be inverted to reveal the constituent elements of peasant protest. Instead of the conventional images of a peasantry manipulated by the elite, he proposed a new picture of the colonial state as constantly confronted and limited by the force of an autonomous peasant insurgency.38 One characteristic of the work of the Indian Subalternists after the mid1980s, and one that by 1993 inspired the formation of a parallel Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, was, in the words of Florencia Mallon, ‘the irresolvable tension . . . between a more narrowly postmodern literary interest in documents as “constructed texts” and the historian’s disciplinary interest in reading documents as “windows,” however foggy and imperfect, on people’s lives.’39 Although it can be argued that the tension was ultimately resolved among Indian Subalternists in favour of the focus on colonial discourse, to the detriment of the recovering of the experiences of the subordinated and the oppressed,40 this particular combination of postcolonial criticism and ‘history from below’ that Mallon and the Latin American Subalternists advocated remains important for some contributors to this book.41

Ancient history from below

7

In Brazil, in the 1980s, the project of writing ‘history from below’ became mainly associated with the study of slavery and the Brazilian labour movement, but these two fields are only one example of a wider transformation.42 Stimulated not only by the hopes raised by the (re)democratisation of Brazilian society after 21 years of military dictatorship (1964–1985) and the rise of social movements on the national political scene but also by the dissolution of Marxist expectations with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, several historians turned to the study of the experiences, agencies and culture of subordinated or dominated actors as part of a larger political commitment with the construction of a democratic society. In this context, the works of E. P. Thompson, on the one hand, and Michel Foucault, on the other, became some of the main references for Brazilian historians in search of new historiographic practices, leading them, respectively, to rescue the struggle, practices and ways of thinking of the dominated and to discover new research topics such as gender and sexuality.43 It was also in those years, and in dialogue with these wider transformations, that Brazilian ancient historians turned to the study of popular culture and the subaltern and marginalised groups in antiquity.44 By the late 1990s, these various forms of ‘people’s history’ developed in the previous decades were eclipsed by the new interest in textual, rather than social, analyses inspired by the cultural and linguistic turns. In recent years, however, ‘history from below’ witnessed a renewed interest. Although incorporating the preoccupation with the role of language and discourse, historians throughout the world have returned vigorously to the study of the ‘voices from below,’45 the writing practices and experiences of the poorest inhabitants,46 the modes of popular protest, resistance and rebellion,47 and the political activism of workers and disfranchised groups.48 Two questions, in particular, have become the object of intense debate. The first one is, ‘Who are the actors studied in a history from below?’49 The second one is, ‘What is the best scale of analysis for this endeavour?’ The microscopic one, as brilliantly illustrated by a recent book by Jacques-Olivier Boudon based on the secret diary of a nineteenth-century carpenter written on the hidden side of the floorboard of a castle in southern France?50 Or a more global analysis, such as the study of the eighteenth-century Atlantic connections of slaves, sailors and commoners by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker?51 The wide range of themes and possibilities of research currently discussed can be glimpsed through the contributions to an online forum on ‘The Future of History from Below’ inaugurated in 2013 and continuously nourished by new interventions from medievalists, early modernists and historians of the twentieth century.52 Some of these contributions have paved the way for new fields of research, such as ‘landscape history from below’ or ‘global history from below.’53 Others emphasise the importance of comparative and interdisciplinary approaches, as well as the intensive use of electronic resources for the collection and study of various kinds of evidence.54 In fact, as Andrew Port suggested in 2015, just as the political turmoil of the 1960s partly explains the sudden popularity of ‘history from below’ in that decade, recent political developments—from the ‘Arab Spring’ in North Africa and the Middle East to the ‘Occupy Movement’ worldwide—might well spark a sustained interest in this

8

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira and Cyril Courrier

approach to history.55 Five years later, this tendency seems to be confirmed, and this book itself is part of that persistent interest.

Ancient history from below? Ancient historians, as a rule, did not participate in the developments of the 1960s–1980s that consolidated ‘history from below’ into a new way of doing history.56 This absence is all the more remarkable when we know that those decades represented an important milestone in ancient historical studies, with the opening up of new research perspectives and the noticeable presence of Marxism as an innovative trend in ancient studies.57 Why did this not happen? One reason is certainly that, as Jim Sharpe has put it, ‘the further back historians seeking to reconstruct the experience of the lower orders go, the more restricted the range of sources at their disposal becomes.’58 But two other factors should also be considered in explaining this situation. The first is the breaking of links between ancient history and other branches of the historical discipline in the post-war period. The second is the influence among ancient historians of normative, sociological models of a Weberian or Durkheimian matrix, which led to an emphasis on the functioning of societies, rather than on their transformations.59 As Vlassopoulos has observed, until the Second World War ‘ancient historians not only partook of the general frames of interpretation and the intellectual exercises of their discipline, but quite often they were at the forefront of new developments.’60 Yet the destruction of the German tradition of ancient history under Nazism and the predominance in the post-war period of Anglo-Saxon historians, traditionally confined in departments of classics, instead of history, reinforced the segregation of ancient history from developments in the larger historical discipline.61 The influence of political history and the authoritativeness of practitioners of (elite) prosopography delayed until the 1970s a more sustained engagement of ancient historians with social-historical issues that were already thriving in other fields.62 When, however, historians such as Moses Finley and the Cambridge School or Jean-Pierre Vernant and the Paris School finally introduced anthropological and sociological approaches to the study of the Greek and Roman worlds, their adoption of holistic models of the functioning of societies oriented the debates towards the exploration of social order and social classification, rather than of social conflicts and the experiences and viewpoints of the various actors in society. Finley, for instance, subsumed the study of Greek and Roman economies and societies to the Weberian model of the consumer city and presupposed that aristocratic values (such as the contempt for work) were accepted as a rule by all social groups.63 Vernant’s emphasis on the primacy of politics in ancient Greece also led to a conception of the polis as an exclusive club of adult male citizens, thus disregarding groups without institutionalised political participation, such as women, foreigners and slaves, as active agents in the life of the city.64 It is not surprising, therefore, that these scholars have never conceived the project of an ancient history ‘from below,’ but it is significant that even the Italian Marxist historians, who formed a

Ancient history from below 9 coherent and innovative group around the Gramsci Institute in Rome in the 1970s, did not develop anything similar to the emphasis of the British Marxist historians on the struggles, practices and ways of thinking of the dominated. On the contrary, their disagreements with Finley’s school led them to focus almost exclusively on the character of Roman economy and the role of slavery in it.65 There were, of course, exceptions to this generalisation. In the 1960s, Peter Brunt and Zvi Yavetz proposed interpretations of the activities of the Roman plebs at the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Principate that in some points resembled the approaches developed by the British Marxist historians.66 During the following decade, Claude Nicolet in turn shifted focus by proposing an innovative analysis of the daily lived experience of Roman citizenship, including its ‘alternative’ forms, in the republican Rome.67 Their interpretations were undoubtedly inspired by the social ferment of the time, when student revolts and social unrest agitated Europe, the United States and beyond, and in Yavetz’s case, by his personal experience in Ethiopia of Emperor Haile Selassie, which allowed him to think about the relations between the plebs and the princeps in imperial Rome.68 Even so, the preoccupations of Brunt and, perhaps to a lesser degree, of Yavetz with the logic of popular action did not derive from explicit theoretical reflection (although they occasionally quoted Hobsbawm and Rudé) but from the almost positivistic critique of the unfounded opinions of their predecessors. They simply started with a big question—the transition from Republic to Empire—and sought to determine the actual role of the Roman populace in this transformation.69 For his part, Nicolet adopted a more institutional point of view which subsequently contributed to the debate on the democratic or oligarchic nature of the Roman Republic, rather than being an evaluation of the political culture of the plebs in Roman political life.70 This is not to say that scholars during the twentieth century accorded no attention to subaltern people in antiquity, nor should we ignore the enormous advances in ancient social history since the 1960s. But taking into account the enslaved, women, the lower classes or ethnic minorities is not the same as trying to understand them in terms of their own aspirations, experiences and perspectives. The study of slavery is a case in point. As a moral problem or as the object of antiquarian research, the institution of slavery in Greece and Rome had for long sparked debates, but slaves and freed people did not occupy many pages in historiographical works before the twentieth century. Marxist historians were the first to redirect attention towards the living conditions of the enslaved. The subject, however, did not become the object of serious debate until the 1950s, when the political concerns of the post-war period led to a marked polarisation between historians in the Soviet bloc countries, who emphasised the tensions and struggles between masters and slaves, and Western scholars, who tended to downplay the unpleasant consequences of slavery in their treatments of Greek and Roman civilisations.71 From the 1960s to the 1980s, debates focused mainly on the nature of slave production or of slave society and whether slaves in Greece and Rome formed a single social class. In this context, slaves were conceived either as a legal category or as a status group (M. I. Finley; P. Vidal-Naquet), or as objects of exploitation and

10

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira and Cyril Courrier

domination (G. E. M. de Ste. Croix), but not as historical agents.72 Scholars also tended to downplay large-scale slave resistance or any form of group action by slaves, stressing rather their internal divisions or their use as passive tools in civil strife.73 Although the possibilities of the slave agency had already been suggested in some pioneering approaches, such as those of Yvon Thébert,74 it was only in the past two or three decades that ancient historians began to explore more systematically the possibility of investigating slave resistance (and even slave rebellion) in the ‘silences’ of ancient texts75 and, following the path opened by historians of slavery in the New World and Africa, started to study how ancient slaves and ex-slaves ‘struggled to reduce the effects of marginality and exclusion and how, other than by means of usually futile rebellion, they sought to break away from oppressive forms of dependence.’76 The same can be said of studies on the urban and rural poor. Ancient historians have not neglected the topic, but a greater amount of research has focused on the Roman rather than on the Greek world, and most especially on late antiquity.77 The book that Évelyne Patlagean published in Paris in 1977 (Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance, 4e—7e siècles) was one of the first to have proposed a systematic study of the ancient poor (including their demography, the history of families, their diets and sanitary conditions, their social relations).78 Two related issues, however, have dominated the discussions since the 1970s: the first is the impact of changes in the classical city and the rise of Christianity on the forms of social classification; the second is the changing attitudes towards the poor.79 Ancient historians have therefore focused on the discourses and representations about the poor, on the different forms of public generosity in Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions or on questions related to the quantification of standards of living, but rarely on the experiences, conceptions and agencies of the poor— except in contexts of open social conflict. Classical archaeologists have also rarely focused their work on the reconstitution of the lives of the poor themselves. As Kim Bowes observed in a review of the archaeological work on the rural poor in Roman Italy, even the field surveys that have revolutionised our understanding of the Roman countryside have been aimed: either to elucidate the process of ‘Romanization’—how the coming of Roman domination impacted ‘indigenous’ (Etruscan, Samnite) land use, and/or to describe the economic changes wrought by the formation of empire—the development of slave agriculture and the development of commercial wineexport industries.80 As Claire Taylor has observed, it was only in the two past decades or so that a number of scholars have recognised the need to focus on the whole way of life of the poor ‘to see how they negotiated their own roles in society, ways of belonging to the community, and how they defined their own world.’81 Just as in the case of slave revolts, peasant rebellions and urban riots have also long attracted a great amount of research by ancient historians. Yet even here, the prevalence in the twentieth century of normative models, which presupposed the

Ancient history from below

11

continuity of social relations and the submission of individuals and groups to social rules, often led ancient historians to treat social conflicts and revolts as anomalies amid the larger history of Greece and Rome. They also tended to consider the various forms of subaltern insurgency as irrational movements without a trace of real political objectives, except when these movements served as tools for the elite.82 Even Marxists did not completely break with what E. P. Thompson called ‘a spasmodic view’ of popular history, according to which senseless episodes of disorder are simply juxtaposed and attributed to compulsive external stimuli.83 In fact, by focusing on the ‘ancient liberation movements of the oppressed’ and interpreting them as direct responses to acute exploitation or to changes in the prevailing mode of production, the Marxist historians continued to treat the various forms of subaltern insurgency in straightforwardly reactive terms.84 The examples could be multiplied, but the general trend is clear. Despite undeniable advances in the study of Greek and Roman society, the prevalence of normative models and the tendency of ancient historians and archaeologists only to touch on questions related to subaltern groups as part of the study of macroeconomic trends or inserted into teleological narratives have precluded the advance of studies on subaltern groups in antiquity on their own terms. Since the 1990s, however, this scenario has begun to change. Reflection about the place of the study of antiquity in a world where the classical tradition is no longer dominant has led classicists, classical archaeologists and ancient historians to become more aware of the theoretical side of their work.85 The increasing criticism of normative models by social movements first, then by academics, also led to a new understanding of the ancient world as more heterogeneous, conflictive and diverse than the normative concepts of Hellenisation, Romanisation, the consumer city or even the polis presupposed.86 The development of the field in peripheral countries marked by experiences of exclusion, violence and social inequality, as is the case of Latin America, has been no less important for the redirection of ancient studies in this sense. As a consequence of these changes, over the last 20 years or so, we have witnessed a renewed interest in the study of ‘ordinary people’ in antiquity. Numerous new books have been published on the ‘daily life’ of people in the ancient world, on marginalised and excluded groups, on women, slaves and peasants, on craftsmen and traders, and on the lower classes as a whole.87 Popular culture in the Greek and Roman worlds also became the object of several books, and the publication in 2017 of the volume edited by Lucy Grig, Popular Culture in the Ancient World, marked a significant advance in providing a more theoretical basis for the study of this challenging topic.88 A number of traditional themes in ancient history have also been reappraised from a more bottom-up perspective. The Athenian polis, for instance, is no longer seen as an exclusive club of adult male citizens. Foreigners, women and slaves also came to be studied not as separated groups but as part of a complex interaction with citizens and with one another.89 The history of Greek colonisation has also begun to be written from the perspective of the less visible groups involved in these ventures, such as women, slaves and peasant farmers.90 In the case of republican and imperial Rome, the study of plebeian culture, of the social relationships

12

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira and Cyril Courrier

constructed through work and of the informal politics of the plebs has allowed scholars to move beyond the ‘democracy’ debate launched by Fergus Millar, while forcefully stressing the subaltern role in politics.91 As for late antiquity, the study of how peasants and urban plebeians constructed communities and identities, made use of civic and ecclesiastical institutions, and actively reinterpreted Christian or civic ideas about charity, legal rights and moral values has also begun to renovate our understanding of wider conflicts and transformations of the age.92

Key concepts and lines of inquiry Below What we need to do now is to reflect anew on the definitions, categories and methods we should employ in writing ancient history ‘from below.’ We have to engage with recent debates on the nature of this research project and start by asking ourselves: who exactly is this ‘below’ whose history we are trying to write? The question, already formulated by Mark Hailwood in 2013, became the subject of discussions after the publication two years later of an article by Simona Cerutti in the Annales revaluating the contributions of Thompson on the occasion of the first French translation of his Customs in Common.93 Noting that the ‘popular culture’ that Thompson studied in that book included practices and places that were not in fact exclusive to popular groups, Cerutti argued that the assimilation of ‘below’ to ‘popular’ and the consequent attribution of cultures and ideologies to individuals or groups well identified on the social scale would no longer be sustainable. In her view, the main lesson to be retained from Thompson would be that ‘history from below’ is a sort of rescue operation, but a rescue of ‘that which might have been,’ of the forgotten systems of signification and not of specific social groups. One may argue that Cerutti ignores a central aspect of the Thompsonian approach that is to understand how what is shared by different groups is differently lived and appropriated by the dominated. As Federico Tarragoni has observed, Thompson’s move is not just about ‘rescuing’ social practices destined to be forgotten; it is also, and above all, about producing a critical intelligence of politics by focusing on the experience that the dominated have of relations of domination in a given society.94 Nonetheless, Cerutti’s article undoubtedly has the merit of provoking a debate that also concerns us as scholars studying the ancient world. Thus, in describing who is below in an ancient history from below, should we take into account concrete social conditions defined by the different levels of segmentation (class, status, gender, ethnicity) and the different forms of subjection and exclusion in ancient societies? Or should we define this ‘below,’ as Cerutti has proposed, less in terms of a given ‘condition’ than of a momentary stage of the relations of power, the individuals and groups ‘from below’ being those who, having lost ‘the battle of legitimacy,’ were ‘forgotten’?95 In any event, scholars studying the ancient world should take seriously the warning that Hoggart already made in 1957 about the risks in which books on popular

Ancient history from below

13

culture incur ‘by not making sufficiently clear who is meant by “the people,” by inadequately relating their examinations of particular aspects of “the people’s” life to the wider life they live.’96 ‘History from below’ only makes sense when this ‘below’ is related to something ‘above.’ Such a history therefore cannot be seen as the history of a group defined by default as the ‘invisible’ Romans, the ‘non-elite’ or the ‘99 per cent’ of the population, as many recent publications continue to do. It is here that the concept of ‘subalternity’ can be helpful as a way to keep in mind that the individuals and groups we investigate, however diverse and heterogeneous they might have been, cannot be seen in isolation but only in a context of domination, oppression or exploitation crossed by conflicts. Subalternity The concept of ‘subaltern’ as a social category was first formulated by Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks as a way to expand Marxist analysis beyond the terrain of strict socio-economic relations.97 The word ‘subaltern,’ from the late Latin subalternus (someone who is placed sub alter, ‘under someone’), is present in modern Italian from the second half of the fifteenth century with the generic meaning of ‘subordinate’ or ‘auxiliary’ (its use in the military vocabulary only became widespread in the nineteenth century). In his first notes in prison, Gramsci still used the term in this common sense, but in his Notebook 3 of 1930 he began by using the expression ‘subaltern classes’ to refer to all social groups dialectically opposed to the dominant classes. This included the most marginal social groups as well as the fundamental classes which are not yet hegemonic, from the Sardinian peasantry to the Turin workers. Most of Gramsci’s comments on the subject of subalternity, however, appear under the rubric ‘History of the Subaltern Classes,’ which means that he applied the category even to very distant historical times. Thus, in Note 18 of Notebook 3, he speaks specifically of the plebs and the slaves in ancient Rome as subaltern classes (or, as he later redefined, as subaltern social groups).98 Some of these notes were copied and reworked in Notebook 25 of 1934, significantly entitled ‘On the Margins of History (The History of the Subaltern Social Groups).’99 As this title suggests, the focus now was more specifically on the disaggregated sections of the population, politically and culturally marginalised, and most especially the Italian peasantry. The later fortune of the concept owes much to the Indian historians who further expanded the category of ‘subaltern’ by taking into account all forms of subjection in a colonial context. In the preface to the first volume of the Subaltern Studies series, published in 1982, Guha defined their use of the word ‘as a name for the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way.’100 Later, however, the interventions of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and the greater influence of the postcolonial theory more broadly, turned the definitions of ‘subaltern’ among the Indian Subalternists in another direction. Spivak defined ‘the subaltern’ in essentially discursive terms as someone who cannot speak for himself or herself and who is misrepresented in colonial and scholarly discourses.101 According to

14

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira and Cyril Courrier

this definition, in direct opposition to Gramsci, the oppressed who manage to organise and speak for themselves, such as the industrial proletariat, could not even be considered subalterns.102 The reformulation of the idea of subalternity as an ‘effect of discursive systems’ that Spivak and other postcolonial scholars have promoted raised the important question of the marginalisation of ‘subaltern voices’ in the very writing of history, which we have taken into account here.103 We are also aware of the significant differences that exist among the oppressed between those who could speak for themselves and those who could not.104 Yet even so, the concept of ‘subaltern’ as used in this volume follows the Gramscian definition of subalternity as an effect of the social relations of domination, rather than as the inability of individual subjects to ‘speak for themselves.’ We have certainly adopted a wider understanding of the forms of subordination in the ancient world than Gramsci himself admitted, including questions of class, status and political power, as well as of ethnicity and gender. Our objective, however, is not simply to expose the multiplicity of subaltern identities in antiquity but rather to explore how various forms of subordination were defined, imposed, resisted and contested within the structures of the ancient city, of the Greek colonies and of the Roman Empire. Agency This brings us to one of the most fundamental, even philosophical, problems involved in the writing of ‘history from below’: the relationship between structure and agency, between determinism and free will. As Marx memorably wrote at the beginning of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances already existing, given, and transmitted from the past.’105 Practitioners of ‘history from below’ tend to emphasise from this Marxian sentence the capability of men and women to ‘make their own history,’ their ability to actively shape and reshape their conditions of existence. Thompson, for instance, defined agency as the capacity of men and women, ‘by a voluntary act of social will, [to] surmount . . . the limitations imposed by “circumstances” or “historical necessity.”’106 Against the mechanistic, Stalinist version of Marxism, Thompson highlighted the importance of conscious human agency as part of the ‘dialectic interaction between social consciousness (both active and passive) and social being’: ‘men, who act, experience, think and act again.’107 The concept thereby became central for all his work and especially for the title and the project of his most famous book, The Making of the English Working Class, which he conceived as ‘an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning.’108 Critics, however, have argued that such a balance between agency and conditioning is not actually maintained by practitioners of history from below and that the advocation of the primacy of human agency often leads to a confluence of various senses of the term, from the ways of coping with adverse situations to actions that have a more transformative impact on society.109 Antony Giddens also

Ancient history from below

15

observed that the relation between agency and constraint has nothing to do with the possibility of doing things otherwise, for structural conditions provide possibilities for the mobilisation of human capabilities as well as limit them.110 Other critics refer more specifically to the emphasis on the agency of subaltern peoples. Commenting on the social history of American slavery, Walter Johnson noted that historians attempting to rescue enslaved people as agents often start with an abstract, liberal notion of selfhood, with its emphasis on independence and choice, and then proceed by looking for signs of the self-determination of slaves as an index of their ‘humanity.’ By focusing on the fact that slaves were agents, rather than on the specific social and cultural contexts of their actions, these historians therefore have tended to alienate the slaves they study from Marx’s ‘circumstances,’ that is, from the conditions produced by an ‘enslaved humanity.’ Johnson also warns of the risk of confusing agency and resistance, noting that it is also possible to identify other forms of human agency, such as collaboration and betrayal.111 Now, there is no doubt that the greatest challenge involved in all forms of ‘people’s history’ is of navigating between ‘the Scylla of blind historical forces that determine individual behaviors, and the Charybdis of a romanticized selfdetermination by radically free actors.’112 But in pursuing the study of subaltern agency in this volume, we are not ignoring the limitations imposed on the choices and actions of subalterns in the ancient world, nor are we attributing to them a transformative power that they did not necessarily have. We are rather trying to investigate the meaning and motivation behind their activities, the everyday processes by which they actively formed social and political solidarities, the means by which they tried to negotiate the terms of their own subordination and the ways their agency was made possible in concrete situations. Experience The last concept we need to introduce is ‘experience,’ a central category for a project that aims at writing a history rooted in the experiences of subalterns. Etymologically, ‘experience’ comes from the Latin experientia, from experior, ‘trying’ or ‘testing,’ a verb related to peritus, ‘experienced,’ ‘skilled,’ and associated with the Greek πεῖρα, ‘test,’ ‘experiment.’113 There is, thus, a clear connection between experiment, in the sense of putting to test, and experience, the consciousness of the result of such a test. In the English tradition, since at least the late eighteenth century, the term experience assumed two main senses: one as a product, the other as a process.114 These can be summarised, in Raymond Williams’s words, as ‘(i) knowledge gathered from past events, whether by conscious observation or by consideration and reflection; and (ii) a particular kind of consciousness, which can in some contexts be distinguished from “reason” or “knowledge.”’115 Williams called the first sense ‘experience past’ (the lessons from the past) and the second ‘experience present’ (a ‘full and active “awareness,”’ including both feeling and thought). According to Williams, developments in the twentieth century led to a reduction of ‘experience present’ to an effect of material conditions, thus excluding

16

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira and Cyril Courrier

the processes of consideration, reflection and analysis that continued to be associated with ‘experience past.’116 The question, however, remained controversial. Thompson, for instance, refused to separate the ideas of external influence and subjective feeling. In his polemic with Althusser, Thompson defined experience as the lived realities of social life that mediate between social structure and social consciousness. Although considering that experience is, in the last instance, generated in ‘material life,’ Thompson nonetheless maintained that the ways people ‘handle’ this experience ‘defies prediction and escapes from any narrow definition of determination.’ For people do not only experience their own experience as ideas, within thought and its procedures; they also experience their own experience as feeling, and they handle their feelings within their culture, as norms, familial and kinship obligations and reciprocities, as values or (through more elaborate forms) within art or religious beliefs.117 Developments in German language and philosophy were also influential. For Victor Turner, for instance, the inspiration for an anthropology of experience derived from the German term Erlebnis (literally ‘what has been lived through’) and its conceptualisation by the German thinker Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911).118 Dilthey distinguished between ‘experience’ as the passive endurance and acceptance of events and ‘an experience,’ a definite sequence of external events and internal responses to them.119 Each Erlebnis or distinctive experience, Dilthey argued, has five moments: a perceptual core, the evocation of images of past experiences, the revival of past feelings, the generation of meaning by ‘feelingly’ thinking about the connection between past and present events, and the expression of the lived experience in terms intelligible to others.120 Building on this scheme, Turner defined experience as ‘both “living through” and “thinking back”’ and also as ‘“willing or wishing forward,” i.e., establishing goals and models for future experience.’ He then defined its expressions (in ideas, acts, works of art or cultural performances) as ‘the crystallized secretions of once living human experience.’121 Postmodern criticism raised doubts about the possibility that either historians or anthropologists were able to pass from expressions of experience to experience in itself and challenged the anchoring of social identities in concrete experiences that authors like Thompson, or many feminist historians, had established. For Joan Scott, for instance, there is no reason to suppose that the lived experience of workers or women necessarily led to resistance to oppression, that is, to the working-class movements or to feminism. Consequently, it would be much more important ‘to understand the operations of the complex and changing discursive processes by which identities are ascribed, resisted, or embraced.’122 There is no doubt about the importance of this attention to the symbolic forms of differentiation, which can indeed enrich our analysis. But, as Michael Pickering pointed out, ‘we need not reduce experience and the subject to an effect of the play of words and language alone.’123

Ancient history from below 17 ‘As a living gesture,’ Boaventura de Souza Santos writes, ‘experience convenes as a whole everything that science divides, be it body and soul, reason and feeling, ideas and emotions.’124 An analysis of the social experience of subaltern groups should therefore hold together what holds together in practice. In studying the male experiences of the cityscape in Pompeii (Renata Senna Garraffoni), the living conditions of peasants in Roman Italy or the Greek colonies (Kim Bowes, Gabriel Zuchtriegel), the experiences of poverty in the Greek and Roman worlds (Claire Taylor, Cristina Rosillo-López) or the formative experiences in the life of the urban populace (Cyril Courrier and Nicolas Tran, Fábio Augusto Morales, Alex Gottesman, Fábio Duarte Joly, Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira), the contributors to this book allow for the role of both discourses and material circumstances in shaping and delimiting the lives of subaltern groups and individuals, even though their emphases vary. Another preoccupation of contributors is on how to recover the properly lived aspects of subaltern experiences. As Dan-El Padilla Peralta has argued in a recent article on the experiential and psychological aspects of ‘slave religion’ in Rome at the era of the Punic Wars, ‘there are tools available for the effective recovery,’ for example, ‘of the religious experiences of the enslaved, provided we work with these tools carefully and honestly.’125 This book will similarly explore such tools, from the adoption of comparative perspectives to the attention to the ‘patterns, gaps, and silences of the literary record,’126 not to mention the practices revealed by the archaeological remains. In the last instance, by paying attention to the processes of ‘living through,’ ‘thinking back’ and ‘willing and wishing forward,’ we hope to give to subalterns, in the words of Lila Abu-Lughod, credit for resisting in a variety of ways the power of those who control so much of their lives, without either misattributing to them forms of consciousness or politics that are not part of their experience . . . or devaluing their practices as pre-political, primitive, or even misguided.127

The shape of this volume This volume aims at reassessing the possibilities and challenges involved in writing an ancient history from below. What sources can we use? What methods and approaches can we employ? What kind of history do we want to write? So, all chapters deal with at least three main problems: (i) determining who was ‘below’ in Greek and Roman societies; (ii) locating the sources necessary to write their history; and (iii) analysing the experiences of subordination and, beyond that, the capacity of subaltern groups to adapt and resist the forms of domination under which they lived. The main objective of the book is, therefore, methodological and exploratory, without any pretension to exhaustivity. Consequently, the chronological and geographical range covered, from archaic Sicily to late antique Syria, passing through classical Greece, late republican Italy or imperial Gaul, serves mainly as a framework for exploring the possibilities and challenges defined earlier. This is why the book is divided into thematic parts, and not chronologically

18

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira and Cyril Courrier

or geographically. The goal is to locate and describe the situations of subalternity in context and then to provide the groundwork for comparison. The first part provides a theoretical framework for the definition and conceptualisation of subaltern groups in antiquity: who are we talking about, and how do we find them? The chapters do this both in a general way (Kostas Vlassopoulos) and in a more specific but richly documented context (southern Gaul: Cyril Courrier and Nicolas Tran). The authors of these two chapters (2 and 3) emphasise that in Greece as in Rome, factors of hierarchy were multiple and not limited to dichotomies of slaves/free, citizens/non-citizens, urban/rural, rich/poor, men/ women. Most importantly, they argue that these hierarchies were neither fixed, nor watertight, nor parallel, giving social inferiority a character as relative and fluid as it was complex. A particular concern of the chapters of this part is with the nature and format of our sources and the languages and discourses that subaltern groups in the ancient world employed to conceive of themselves and achieve their aims. In Chapter 2, Kostas Vlassopoulos discusses the wide range of problems and possibilities involved in this study and outlines an agenda for future work. In Chapter 3, Cyril Courrier and Nicolas Tran illustrate more specifically the problem of the visibility of subaltern groups in our sources using the example of epigraphic documentation. While being sources produced by subaltern people themselves, the inscriptions follow norms and conventions that highlight exceptions and, in so doing, obscure our understanding of social relations: is the invisibility of certain groups in the sources the consequence of social inferiority or its cause? Like Courrier and Tran, the contributors to this book tend to favour the first hypothesis, without excluding the second.128 The second part examines economic forms of subalternity and the experiences of poverty, work and debt bondage. Discussing poverty, debt and dependent labour in the ancient Greek world in Chapter 4, Claire Taylor starts with the difficult problem of sources and language, for the ancient poor were not necessarily deprived of everything. As the ‘geste le plus simple d’autolégitimation,’129 categorisation as poor was, at least in part, the result of a social construction that reveals the ethnocentrism of those who despised and excluded them. Moreover, as Taylor shows, the Greek categories of rich and poor, developed for the most part in the Athenian context, are not necessarily valid elsewhere. In fact, one must question the reasons for stigmatisation in order to avoid assimilating to poverty practices or situations that did not fall under it. Taylor develops the example of debt bondage to show that the prism of dependent labour is perhaps a more suitable focal point for thinking about subalternity in all its components (economic, legal, social) and the mechanisms of its compensation in ancient societies. In Chapter 6, Kim Bowes focuses on another example, that of agricultural practices in Roman Italy. Against elitist historiographical constructions, themselves dependent on the discourses of villa owners transmitted by agricultural treaties, archaeology proves that the subaltern peasant should no longer be exclusively conceived of as a destitute person struggling for survival. The same techniques of soil and water maintenance, intensive manipulation of the land, maximisation of yield and management of risk were practised by large and smallholders alike. In sum, Taylor and Bowes show two

Ancient history from below 19 ways of doing ‘history from below’ and treating subaltern groups on their own terms: mobilising concepts adapted to the analysis of subaltern strategies and/or bringing together other types of sources usually ignored (by ethnocentric imitation of literary evidence or because of a deficiency of tools to interpret the evidence). As part of a recent field of research,130 Cristina Rosillo-López proposes, in Chapter 5, a third way: learning to examine stereotypes to better deconstruct them by drawing on the very genre of the texts in which the poor appear. She takes the example of imperial Rome’s homeless and unsheltered, arguing that we should not equate them with beggars. From the point of view of a Juvenal or a Martial, all were poor. Yet the experiences of the homeless and beggars were not the same, and neither were their strategies for survival. She therefore shows how to locate and analyse them in these inverted worlds of the satires. The third part focuses on gender and ethnicity as other forms of subalternity in the ancient world. In Chapter 7, Gabriel Zuchtriegel shows that, long before the ideal representation of the Greek polis as depicted in Plato’s or Aristotle’s treatises, the archaeology of the Greek colonies of Sicily reveals that, already in the sixth century BC, women and foreigners had no visibility and lived on the margins of the city. Here, the factors producing social inferiority and visibility in the written record match perfectly between them: social status, culture, space and ethnic identity define subalternity at the same time as they separate it from a male and urban world of the Greek citizen and its official representation. This is less obvious in Pompeii, as Renata Senna Garraffoni demonstrates in Chapter 8. Exploring the different types of masculinity constructed in the early Principate through the study of wall inscriptions found in the lupanar region, she shows a real social and ethnic diversity in a district located a stone’s throw from the forum. For Renata Senna Garraffoni, studying the sexual graffiti is a way to give visibility to aspects of life of people of humble origin who have been marginalised in modern scholarly discourse by the typical and flawed assumptions regarding heteronormativity. In this case, subalternity is akin to a counter-discourse based on the claim of alternative and outrageous sexual practices, even though the exact meaning of them, without having all the cultural references, is very difficult to grasp.131 The last part deals with politics and the capacities for action of subaltern groups in various contexts. Naturally, these varied greatly from one place and time to another. In classical Athens, for example, the ‘below’ has to be defined in terms of democracy, where power was exercised by the demos itself. This leads Fábio Augusto Morales to focus on metics and slaves, that is, those excluded from the civic system. In Chapter 9, he shows that, contrary to previous assumptions, they played an essential and dynamic role in the configuration of the Athenian regime. Agreeing with arguments also developed by Courrier, Tran, Bowes and Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira (see subsequent chapters), Morales demonstrates that history from below is not necessarily a history of marginalised people,132 that groups without institutionalised political participation could also be active agents in the life of the city and that the structures of domination could nonetheless offer the means for the subordinated to pursue their own ends. In Chapter 10, Alex Gottesman shows that the particular conditions of democratic Athens also had significant

20

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira and Cyril Courrier

consequences on the writing of history. As he demonstrates, the supposed absence of riots in the life of this city is much more an effect of Greek literary sources reluctant to describe Athenian political life in terms of stasis. Thus, the revolt of 508/7 BC was perhaps not that of ‘the’ people against tyranny for the conquest of their rights but a civil war which opposed two rival factions, where the losers were assimilated to traitors and condemned to death and oblivion. In republican Rome, the verticality of social relations was much more marked, but as Lucy Grig recently pointed out, the possibilities of social mobility were also arguably greater and the legal barriers perhaps a little less insurmountable.133 In this context, the dialectic between the structures of domination and the agency of subalterns was necessarily different. In Chapter 11, Fábio Duarte Joly deals specifically with the problem of slave agency as described in Livy’s History of Rome, investigating the strategies that domestic slaves were able to employ in order to obtain their manumissio by playing between the obligations they owed to their masters and to the res publica. Like Gottesman, Joly also deals with the difficult methodological problem of using ancient historiography for writing history from below. In the last chapter (12) we turn to late antiquity and to the methodological problems involved in the study of ancient crowds and collective action. Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira, in this regard, looks at how the motivations of subaltern groups might be reconstructed. In the major cities of the Roman Empire, urban crowds were neither immature nor entirely controlled by religious or political leaders. Their demands were based on shared and inherited values that belonged only to them and defined them as a group. Rediscovering this culture, giving back a place to these values and not only seeing antiquity through the eyes of those who wrote ‘great’ history, his chapter rejoins some of the objectives assigned to this book and reminds us that I padroni non hanno sempre ragione.134

Notes 1 ‘Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters,’ taken from: Bertolt Brecht, Werke. Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Band 12: Gedichte 2. © Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag 1988. Brecht’s poem was written during his exile in Denmark in 1935 and first published in Moscow in 1936. We warmly thank Olivier Baisez (Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis, Mondes allemands EA 1577) for the quoted translation made especially for this volume and Suhrkamp Verlag for the permission to publish this translation of Brecht’s poem based on the standard German edition (Brecht 1967). 2 See Hobsbawm 1997. 3 Ginzburg 1992, xiii. 4 Toner 1995, 22; Grig 2017b, 1. 5 Benjamin 1980, 696 (Thesis VII). As Tufano (2020) has observed, ancient historiography also offers other possibilities of conceiving the past that did not fail to influence Benjamin’s philosophy of history. 6 Benjamin 1980, 697 (Thesis VII). 7 Sharpe 2001, 27. 8 Robert 2003. 9 Hitchcock 2013. 10 Respectively Chap. 4 (C. Taylor), 5 (C. Rosillo-López), 6 (K. Bowes) and 11 (F. Joly).

Ancient history from below

21

11 An important point recently raised by D. Padilla-Peralta: see Poser 2021. 12 On the prevalence of this view in the twentieth-century historiography, see Funari 2001. 13 Vlassopoulos 2018, 212–3. 14 Grignon and Passeron 1989. 15 Respectively Chap. 6 (K. Bowes), 2 (C. Courrier and N. Tran), 7 (G. Zuchtriegel), 5 (C. Rosillo-López) and 12 (J. C. Magalhães de Oliveira). 16 Thompson 1966. 17 Febvre 1932, 576. 18 Hobsbawm 1997, 203. 19 Bloch 1924. 20 Lefebvre 1932. 21 Among their best-known book titles, we can cite Hilton’s Bond Men Made Free (1973), Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down (1971), Rudé’s The Crowd in History (1964), Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels (1966), and E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). 22 Kaye 2000; Fortes, Negro and Fontes 2012. 23 Thompson 1963, 12–3. 24 Thompson 1966. 25 Thompson 1963, 12. 26 Hobsbawm 1997, 204. 27 Thompson 1966. 28 Hoggart 1957; Williams 1958; Hall 2011. 29 Kagan 2016. 30 Williams 1968. See Jarrige 2015. 31 Thompson 1971, 1972, 1993; Davis 1971, 1973, 1975. 32 Port 2015. 33 Crew 1989; Lüdtke 1995. 34 Ginzburg 1993; Levi 2001; Port 2015, 108. 35 Ginzburg 1992. 36 Le Roy Ladurie 1978. 37 Guha 1997; Chakrabarty 2000; Chaturvedi 2000. 38 Guha 1983. 39 Mallon 1994, 1506. On the Latin American Subaltern Studies, see Rodríguez 2001. 40 Sarkar 2000. 41 See the contributions of Vlassopoulos, Taylor and Zuchtriegel in this volume. 42 Batalha 2003; Chalhoub and Silva 2009. 43 Ramos 2015. 44 Funari 1986–7, 1989, 1993; Guarinello 2004, 2006. The chapters by Garraffoni, Morales, Joly and Magalhães de Oliveira in this volume can give the reader an idea of some of the current directions of research on ancient history in Brazil derived from these initial preoccupations. 45 Hopkin 2012; Lett 2016. 46 Hitchcock 2004; Lyons 2010. 47 Cronin 2007; Rediker 2012. 48 Scott 2018. 49 Hailwood 2013; Cerutti 2015. 50 Boudon 2017. 51 Linebaugh and Rediker 2000. 52 Hailwood and Waddell 2013. 53 Farell 2013; Whyte 2013. 54 Hitchcock 2013; Jackson 2013. 55 Port 2015, 112. See also Ryzova 2020. 56 Ijalba Pérez 2011.

22

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira and Cyril Courrier

57 On the development of the interest in social-historical issues concerning the ancient world, see Peachin 2011. On the importance of Marxism in ancient studies from the 1960s to the 1980s, see Giardina 2007. 58 Sharpe 2001, 27. 59 Funari 2001. 60 Vlassopoulos 2007, 61. 61 Morris 1999, xxv; Vlassopoulos 2007, 61–63; Grig 2017b, 14. 62 Peachin 2011, 7. 63 Finley 1973. As Brent D. Shaw has recently observed, this Weberian argument that social rank and attendant values tended to prevail over economic interest, which became the orthodoxy in ancient studies in the 1980s and the 1990s, tended to obscure the behaviour not only of subalterns but also of members the ancient elites, such as the Roman equites. See Shaw 2020. 64 Vernant 1976. Cf. Joly 2010a. 65 On the themes addressed by the Seminario di Antichistica of the Gramsci Institute during the 1970s and the 1980s, see Giardina 2007, 23–27. 66 Brunt 1966; Yavetz 1969. 67 Nicolet 1976. On this book and its legacy, see Courrier and Guilhembet 2019, esp. 247–8. 68 Malkin 1994, xi; Peachin 2011, 9. 69 Ijalba Pérez 2011, 247. 70 Montlahuc 2019. 71 On the debates on ancient slavery until the 1960s, see Finley 1980, ch. 1. 72 Finley 1959, 1980; Vidal-Naquet 1986; Ste. Croix 1981. See Vlassopoulos, this volume. 73 McKeown 2011, 154, discussing Vernant 1976, Vidal-Naquet 1986 and Klees 1998, 418–21. 74 Thébert 1993 [1989]. 75 Johnstone 1998; Forsdyke 2012. 76 Galvão-Sobrinho 2012, 132. On the range of activities now investigated as ‘slave resistance,’ see McKeown 2011 and Bradley 2011. 77 Taylor 2017, 11–2. Poverty in late antiquity: Patlagean 1977; Brown 2002. 78 On the repercussions of Patlagean’s work, see Freu 2012. 79 Osborne 2006, 2–4. 80 Bowes 2011, 3. 81 Taylor 2017, 11. 82 On peasant movements as irrational millenarianism or as tools for the elite, see MacMullen 1966, ch. 6; Van Dam 1985, 24–56; discussed and criticised by Dossey 2010, 172–3. On the historiography on urban riots, see the chapters by Gottesman and Magalhães de Oliveira in this volume. 83 Thompson 1971, 76. 84 On Marxist approaches on slave and peasant revolts, see Thompson, E. A. 1952; Seyfarth 1960; Doi 1988. 85 Toner 2002; Settis 2004. 86 Funari and Garraffoni 2018. See also Vlassopoulos 2007. 87 ‘Ordinary people:’ Knapp 2011; for a severe criticism of this expression: Tran and Vandevoorde 2018, 229–309; Courrier and Tran 2018. Daily life: Funari 2003; Sessa 2018. Marginalised and excluded groups: Neri 1998; Garraffoni 2002, 2005. Women: Feitosa 2005; Karanika 2014; García Sánchez and Garraffoni 2020. Slaves (and exslaves): Joly 2010b; Bradley and Cartledge 2011; Harper 2011; Bell and Ramsby 2012; Hunt 2018. Peasants: Dossey 2010; Grey 2011. Craftsmen and traders: Tran 2013; Bond 2016; Wilson and Flohr 2016. Work and workers: Verboven and Laes 2017. 88 Funari 1989, 2003; Horsfall 2003; Morgan 2007; Toner 2009; Forsdyke 2012; Richlin 2017; Grig 2017a; Nogueira 2018.

Ancient history from below 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132

23

Katz 1999; Morales 2014; Taylor and Vlassopoulos 2015; Vlassopoulos 2016. Zuchtriegel 2018. Courrier 2014; Rosillo-López 2017. Dossey 2010; Shaw 2011; Magalhães de Oliveira 2012. Hailwood 2013; Cerutti 2015. The reader can also consult the podcast of the debate promoted in June 2016 by the Annales about Cerutti’s article (‘Les Annales en débat: L’histoire par le bas’): https://annales.hypotheses.org/158. Tarragoni 2017. Cerutti 2015, 952. Hoggart 1957, 11. On what follows, see Liguori 2015. Gramsci 1977, v. 1, 302–3. For the Roman plebs and the slaves as ‘subaltern social groups,’ see Note 4 of Notebook 25 (Gramsci 1977, v. 3, 2284–7). Gramsci 1977, v. 3, 2277–94. Guha 1988, 35. Spivak 1988. Liguori 2015, 120. Prakash 1994. See Garraffoni, this volume. See Courrier and Tran, this volume. Marx 1979 [1852], 103. Thompson 1958, 89. Thompson 1957, 113. Thompson 1963, 9. Anderson 1980. Giddens 1987. Johnson 2003. Gregory 1999, 105, quoted by Port 2015, 111. Ernout and Meillet 2001, 498–9 (s.v. peritus, -a, -um). Pickering 1997, 92. Williams 2015, 83. Williams 2015, 85–86. Thompson 1978, 171. Bruner 1986; Turner 1986. Turner 1986, 35. Turner 1982, 13–4. Turner 1982, 17–8. Scott 1991, 792. Pickering 1997, 243. Santos 2018, 79. Padilla Peralta 2017, 318. Padilla Peralta 2017, 319. Abu-Lughod 1990, 47. See, e.g., Gottesman’s chapter. Grignon and Passeron 1989, 30. For a first attempt in ancient history, see Ménard and Courrier 2012 and 2013. For a suggestive comparison, see Shaw’s foreword, in this volume, n. 26. See Shaw’s foreword to this volume. On the relationships between history from below and marginality, see Hailwood 2013: ‘If we are struggling to find suitable indigenous terms, there are some less loaded analytical categories than class that we might think about imposing from outside. “Ordinary people” is one I have already used above. My concern with this label, and likewise that of ‘common people,’ is that it tends to assume a certain homogeneity amongst our subjects, but it also suggests we are looking for the majority experience in the search for history from below. For many, though, ‘history from below’ is about recovering the voices or experiences of the marginal, the nonconformist, the

24

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira and Cyril Courrier

persecuted—those not in the majority. It seems to me the pursuit of the marginal and the pursuit of the ordinary are two very different agendas, and although both may constitute ‘history from below’ the subjects of such agendas are unlikely to fit within one label.’ 133 Grig 2017b, 19. 134 Reversing the agricultural day labourer’s adage repeated by an old emigrant woman from the Mezzogiorno in Louis Nucera’s autobiography, Avenue des Diables Bleus, Paris, Grasset, 1979, cited by Grignon and Passeron 1989, 88–94.

Bibliography Abu-Lughod, L. 1990. ‘The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women.’ American Ethnologist 17 (1): 41–55. doi:10.1525/ae.1990. 17.1.02a00030. Anderson, P. 1980. ‘Agency.’ In Arguments within English Marxism, 16–58. London: Verso. Batalha, C. H. M. 2003. ‘A historiografia da classe operária no Brasil: trajetórias e tendências.’ In Historiografia brasileira em perspectiva, edited by M. C. de Freitas, 145–58. São Paulo: Contexto. Bell, S. and T. Ramsby, eds. 2012. Free at Last! The Impact of Freed Slaves on the Roman Empire. London: Bristol Classical Press. Benjamin, W. 1980. ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte.’ In Gesammelte Schrifte, Band I.2, edited by R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser with the participation of T. W. Adorno, 691–704. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bloch, M. 1924. Les Rois thaumaturges, étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale, particulièrement en France et en Angleterre. Strasbourg and Paris: Istra. Bond, S. 2016. Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. doi:10.3998/mpub.8224993. Boudon, J.-O. 2017. Le plancher de Joachim: l’histoire retrouvée d’un village français. Paris: Belin. Bowes, K. 2011. ‘Rural Poverty in the Roman Empire.’Accessed February 22, 2021. www. semanticscholar.org/paper/Rural-Poverty-in-the-Roman-Empire-Bowes/ b96ef799f928e408b03cd6f76159ff9a551ee8ae. Bradley, K. 2011. ‘Resisting Slavery at Rome.’ In Bradley and Cartledge 2011, 362–84. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521840668.019. Bradley, K. and P. Cartledge, eds. 2011. The Cambridge World History of Slavery. Vol. 1: The Ancient Mediterranean World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ CHOL9780521840668. Brecht, B. 1967. ‘Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters.’ In Gesammelte Werke in 20 Bänden, edited by E. Hauptmann in association with Suhrkamp Verlag. Vol. 9, 656–7. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Brown, P. 2002. Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire. Hanover and London: University Press of New England. Bruner, E. M. 1986. ‘Experience and Its Expressions.’ In Turner and Bruner 1986, 3–32. Brunt, P. 1966. ‘The Roman Mob.’ P&P 35 (December): 3–27. doi:10.1093/past/35.1.3. Burke, P., ed. 2001. New Perspectives on Historical Writing. 2nd edition. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Cerutti, S. 2015. ‘Who Is Below? E. P. Thompson, historien des sociétés modernes: une relecture.’ Annales HSS 70 (4): 931–55. doi:10.1353/ahs.2015.0167.

Ancient history from below

25

Chakrabarty, D. 2000. ‘Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography.’ Nepantia: Views from South 1 (1): 9–32. Chalhoub, S. and F. T. Silva. 2009. ‘Sujeitos no imaginário acadêmico: escravos e trabalhadores na historiografia brasileira desde os anos 1980.’ Cadernos AEL (Brazil) 14 (26): 3–47. Chaturvedi, V., ed. 2000. Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial. London: Verso. Courrier, C. 2014. La plèbe de Rome et sa culture (fin du IIe s. av. J.-C.–fin du Ier s. ap. J.-C.). Rome: École française de Rome. Courrier, C. and J.-P. Guilhembet. 2019. ‘Le métier de citoyen dans la ville: vie civique et topographie urbaine.’ CCG 30: 247–72. Courrier, C. and N. Tran. 2018. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un Arlésien ordinaire?’ CCG 29: 251–72. Crew, D. F. 1989. ‘Alltagsgeschichte: A New Social History “From Below”?’ Central European History 22 (3–4): 394–407. doi:10.1017/S0008938900020550. Cronin, S., ed. 2007. Subalterns and Social Protests: History from Below in the Middle East and North Africa. London and New York: Routledge. Davis, N. Z. 1971. ‘The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in SixteenthCentury France.’ P&P 50 (February): 41–75. doi:10.1093/past/50.1.41. Davis, N. Z. 1973. ‘The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France.’ P&P 59 (May): 51–91. doi:10.1093/past/59.1.51. Davis, N. Z. 1975. Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Doi, M. 1988. ‘Methods for Viewing World History from the Perspective of the Ruled.’ In Forms of Control and Subordination in Antiquity, edited by T. Yuge and M. Doi, 3–8. Tokyo and Leiden: The Society for Studies on Resistance Movements in Antiquity and Brill. Dossey, L. 2010. Peasant and Empire in Christian North Africa. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Ernout, A. and A. Meillet. 2001. Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine: histoire des mots. 4th edition. Paris: Klincksieck. Farell, W. 2013. ‘Global History from Below.’ In Hailwood and Waddell 2013. https:// manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/history-from-below/. Febvre, L. 1932. ‘Albert Mathiez: un tempérament, une éducation.’ Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 4 (18): 573–6. doi:10.3406/ahess.1932.1357. Feitosa, L. M. G. C. 2005. Amor e sexualidade: o masculino e o feminino em grafites de Pompeia. São Paulo: Annablume. Finley, M. I. 1959. ‘Was Greek Civilization Based on Slave Labour?’ Historia 8: 145–64. Finley, M. I. 1973. The Ancient Economy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Finley, M. I. 1980. Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. London: Chatto & Windus. Forsdyke, S. 2012. Slaves Tell Tales and Other Episodes in the Politics of Popular Culture in Ancient Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.1515/9781400842155. Fortes, A., A. L. Negro and P. Fontes. 2012. ‘Peculiaridades de E. P. Thompson.’ In E. P. Thompson. As peculiaridades dos ingleses e outros artigos, edited by A. L. Negro and S. Silva, 21–57. Campinas, SP: Editora da Unicamp. Freu, C. 2012. ‘Les pauvres en société à l’époque protobyzantine: regards historiographiques sur l’œuvre d’Évelyne Patlagean.’ In Les Réseaux familiaux, Antiquité tardive et Moyen Âge in memoriam A. Laiou et É. Patlagean, edited by B. Caseau, 373–92. Paris: Collège de France–CNRS. Funari, P. P. A. 1986–7. ‘Cultura(s) dominante(s) e cultura(s) subalterna(s) em Pompeia: da vertical da cidade ao horizonte do possível.’ Revista Brasileira de História 7 13: 33–48. Funari, P. P. A. 1989. Cultura popular na Antiguidade Clássica. São Paulo: Contexto.

26

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira and Cyril Courrier

Funari, P. P. A. 1993. ‘Graphic Caricature and the Ethos of Ordinary People at Pompeii.’ JEurArch 1 (2): 133–50. doi:10.1179/096576693800719374. Funari, P. P. A. 2001. ‘Uma antiguidade sem conflitos?’ Boletim do CPA 6 (11): 13–24. Funari, P. P. A. 2003. A vida quotidiana na Roma antiga. São Paulo: Annablume. Funari, P. P. A. and R. S. Garraffoni. 2018. ‘Discussing Acculturation as an Interpretative Model: Romanisation as a Case-Study.’ Heródoto 3 (2): 256–65. doi:10.31669/herodoto. v3n2.21. Galvão-Sobrinho, C. R. 2012. ‘Feasting the Dead Together: Household Burials and the Social Strategies of Slaves and Freed Persons in the Early Principate.’ In Bell and Ramsby 2012, 130–76. García Sánchez, M. and R. S. Garraffoni, eds. 2020. Mujeres, género y estudios clássicos: Un diálogo entre España y Brasil—Mulheres, gênero e estudos clássicos: Um diálogo entre Espanha e Brasil. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona; Curitiba, PR: Editora UFPR. Garraffoni, R. 2002. Bandidos e salteadores na Roma antiga. São Paulo: Annablume. Garraffoni, R. 2005. Gladiadores na Roma antiga: dos combates às paixões cotidianas. São Paulo: Annablume. Giardina, A. 2007. ‘Marxism and Historiography: Perspectives on Roman History.’ In Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century, edited by C. Wickham, 15–31. Oxford: British Academy/Oxford University Press. doi:10.5871/bacad/9780197264034. 001.0001. Giddens, A. 1987. ‘Out of the Orrery: E. P. Thompson on Consciousness and History.’ In Social Theory and Modern Sociology, 203–24. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ginzburg, C. 1992 [1976]. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Translated by J. and A. Tedeschi. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Ginzburg, C. 1993. ‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things that I Know about It.’ Critical Inquiry 20 (1): 10–35. doi:10.1086/448699. Gramsci, A. 1977. Quaderni del Carcere, 4 vols. Critical edition of the Istituto Gramsci, edited by V. Gerratana. Turin: Einaudi. Gregory, B. S. 1999. ‘Is Small Beautiful? Microhistory and the History of Everyday Life.’ History and Theory 38 (1): 100–10. doi:10.1111/0018-2656.791999079. Grey, C. 2011. Constructing Communities in the Late Roman Countryside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511994739. Grig, L., ed. 2017a. Popular Culture in the Ancient World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781139871402. Grig, L. 2017b. ‘Introduction: Approaching Popular Culture in the Ancient World.’ In Grig 2017a, 1–36. doi:10.1017/9781139871402.001. Grignon, C. and J.-C. Passeron 1989. Le savant et le populaire. Misérabilisme et populisme en sociologie et en littérature. Paris: Seuil. Guarinello, N. L. 2004. ‘Prefácio.’ In Joly, F. D. Tácito e a metáfora da escravidão, 11–23. São Paulo: Edusp. Guarinello, N. L. 2006. ‘Escravos sem senhores: escravidão, trabalho e poder no mundo romano.’ Revista Brasileira de História 26 (52): 227–46. doi:10.1590/S0102– 01882006000200010. Guha, R. 1983. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Guha, R. 1988. ‘Preface.’ In Selected Subaltern Studies, edited by R. Guha and G. C. Spivak, 35–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ancient history from below

27

Guha, R., ed. 1997. A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hailwood, M. 2013. ‘Who Is Below?’ In Hailwood and Waddell 2013. Accessed January 31, 2021. https://manyheadedmonster.com/2013/07/19/who-is-below/. Hailwood, M. and B. Waddell, eds. 2013. ‘The Future of History from Below: An Online Symposium.’ The Many Headed Monster (blog), June 19. Accessed January 31, 2021. https://manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/history-from-below/. Hall, S. 2011. Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History, edited by J. D. Slack and L. Grossberg. Raleigh, Durham: Duke University Press. Harper, K. 2011. Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511973451. Hitchcock, D. 2013. ‘Why History from Below Matters More than Ever.’ In Hailwood and Waddell 2013. https://manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/history-from-below/. Hitchcock, T. 2004. ‘A New History from Below.’ History Workshop Journal 57: 294–8. doi:10.1093/hwj/57.1.294. Hobsbawm, E. J. 1997. ‘On History from Below.’ In On History, 201–16. New York: the New Press. Hoggart, R. 1957. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments. London: Chatto & Windus. Hopkin, D. 2012. Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horsfall, N. 2003. The Culture of the Roman Plebs. London: Duckworth. Hunt, P. 2018. Ancient Greek and Roman Slavery. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Ijalba Pérez, P. 2011. ‘¿Una “historia desde abajo” de la Antigüedad es posible? El análisis de la historiografía sobre la Roma Antigua.’ SHHA 29: 237–49. Jackson, M. 2013. ‘Relocating History from Below: Places, Spaces, Databases.’ In Hailwood and Waddell 2013. https://manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/history-frombelow/. Jarrige, F. 2015. ‘E. P. Thompson, une vie de combat.’ La vie des idées. www.laviedesidees. fr/E-P-Thompson-une-vie-de-combat.html. Johnson, W. 2003. ‘On Agency.’ Journal of Social History 37 (1): 113–24. doi:10.1353/ jsh.2003.0143. Johnstone, S. 1998. ‘Cracking the Code of Silence: Athenian Legal Oratory and the Histories of Slaves and Women.’ In Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture: Differential Equations, edited by S. R. Joshel and S. Murnaghan, 221–36. London and New York: Routledge. Joly, F. D. 2010a. ‘Jean-Pierre Vernant.’ In Historiadores de nosso tempo, edited by M. A. Lopes and S. J. Munhoz, 173–92. São Paulo: Alameda. Joly, F. D. 2010b. Libertate opus est: Escravidão, manumissão e cidadania à época de Nero (54–68 d.C.). Curitiba, PR: Editora Progressiva. Kagan, D. 2016. ‘Cultural Studies.’ In The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy. Vol. 1: A-D, edited by K. Jensen and R. T. Craig, 428–42. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781118766804.wbiect225. Karanika, A. 2014. Voices at Work: Women, Performance, and Labor in Ancient Greece. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. doi:10.1353/book.29442. Katz, M. 1999. ‘Women and Democracy in Ancient Greece.’ In Contextualising Classics: Ideology, Performance, Dialogue. Essays in Honour of John J. Peradotto, edited by T. M. Faulkner, N. Feldson and D. Konstan, 41–68. Lantham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

28

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira and Cyril Courrier

Kaye, H. J. 2000. ‘Fanning the Spark of Hope in the Past: The British Marxist Historians.’ Rethinking History 4 (3): 281–94. doi:10.1080/136425200456976. Klees, H. 1998. Sklavenleben im klassischen Griechenland. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Knapp, R. 2011. Invisible Romans: Prostitutes, Outlaws, Slaves, Gladiators, Ordinary Men and Women, the Romans That History Forgot. London: Profile Books. Lefebvre, G. 1932. La Grande Peur de 1789. Paris: Armand Colin. Le Roy Ladurie, E. 1978 [1975]. Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village. Translated by B. Bray. London: Scolar Press. Lett, D. 2016. ‘Les voix du peuple à la fin du Moyen Âge.’ Médiévales 71: 159–76. doi:10.4000/medievales.7931. Levi, G. 2001. ‘On Microhistory.’ In Burke 2001, 97–119. Liguori, G. 2015. ‘Conceptions of Subalternity in Gramsci.’ In Antonio Gramsci. Critical Explorations in Contemporary Political Thought, edited by M. McNally, 118–33. London: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9781127223183_7. Linebaugh, P. and M. Rediker. 2000. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Lüdtke, A. 1995 [1989]. ‘Introduction: What Is History of Everyday Life and Who Are Its Practitioners?’ In The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life. Translated by W. Templer, 3–40. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv7r41bx.4. Lyons, M. 2010. ‘A New History from Below? The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe.’ History Australia 7 (3): 59.1–59.9. doi:10.2104/ha100059. MacMullen, R. 1966. Enemies of the Roman Order: Treason, Unrest, and Alienation in the Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. doi:10.4159/harvard.9780674864962. Magalhães de Oliveira, J. C. 2012. Potestas Populi: participation populaire et action collective dans les villes de l’Afrique romaine tardive (vers 300–430 apr. J.-C.). Turnhout: Brepols. Malkin, I. 1994. ‘Zvi Yavetz: A Biographical Outline.’ In Leaders and Masses in the Roman World: Studies in Honor of Zvi Yavetz, edited by I. Malkin and Z. W. Rubinsohn, ix–xiii. Leiden: Brill. doi:10.1163/9789004329447_001. Mallon, F. E. 1994. ‘The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History.’ AHR 99: 1491–515. doi:10.1086/ahr/99.5.1491. Marx, K. 1979 [1852]. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In Karl Marx/Frederick Engels, Collected Works. Vol. 11: Marx and Engels, 1851–1853. Translated by C. Dutt, R. Livingstone and C. Upward, 99–197. New York: International Publishers. McKeown, N. 2011. ‘Resistance among Chattel Slaves in the Classical Greek World.’ In Bradley and Cartledge 2011, 153–75. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521840668.010. Ménard, H. and C. Courrier, eds. 2012. Miroir des autres, reflet de soi. Stéréotypes, politique et société dans le monde romain, Paris: M. Houdiard Éd. Ménard, H. and C. Courrier, eds. 2013. Miroir des autres, reflet de soi (2): stéréotypes, politique et société dans le monde occidental (de l’Antiquité romaine à l’époque contemporaine), Paris: M. Houdiard Éd. Montlahuc, P. 2019. ‘Claude Nicolet et les “langages parallèles” du citoyen. (Ré)introduire le politique à Rome.’ CCG 30: 227–46. Morales, F. A. 2014. A Democracia ateniense pelo avesso. São Paulo: Edusp. Morgan, T. 2007. Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511597398.

Ancient history from below

29

Morris, I. 1999. ‘Foreword.’ In M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy. Updated edition with a foreword by I. Morris, ix–xxxvi. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Neri, V. 1998. I marginali nell’Occidente tardoantico: Poveri, ‘infames’ e criminali nella nascente società cristiana. Bari: Edipuglia. Nicolet, C. 1976. Le métier de citoyen dans la Rome républicaine. Paris: Gallimard (The World of the Citizen in Republican Rome. Translated by P. S. Falla. Berkeley and Los Angeles: 1980). Nogueira, P. 2018. Narrativa e cultura popular no cristianismo primitivo. São Paulo: Paulus. Osborne, R. 2006. ‘Introduction: Roman Poverty in Context.’ In Poverty in the Roman World, edited by M. Atkins and R. Osborne, 1–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511482700.002. Padilla Peralta, D. 2017. ‘Slave Religiosity in Roman Middle Republic.’ ClAnt 36 (2): 317–69. doi:10.1525/ca.2017.36.2.317. Patlagean, É. 1977. Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance, 4e–7e siècles. Paris: Mouton. Peachin, M. 2011. ‘Introduction.’ In The Oxford Handbook of Social Relations in the Roman World, edited by M. Peachin, 3–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780195188004.013.0001. Pickering, M. 1997. History, Experience and Cultural Studies. London: MacMillan Press. Port, A. I. 2015. ‘History from Below, the History of Everyday Life, and Microhistory.’ In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, edited by J. D. Wright. 2nd edition. Vol. 11, 108–13. Amsterdam: Elsevier. doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.62156-6. Poser, R. 2021. ‘He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?’ The New York Times, February 2. Accessed February 28, 2021. www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/ magazine/classics-greece-rome-whiteness.html. Prakash, G. 1994. ‘Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism.’ AHR 99 (5): 1475–90. Ramos, I. G. 2015. Genealogia de uma operação historiográfica: Edward Palmer Thompson, Michel Foucault e os historiadores brasileiros da década de 1980. São Paulo: Cultura Acadêmica. Rediker, M. 2012. The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom. London: Penguin. Richlin, A. 2017. Slave Theatre in the Roman Republic: Plautus and Popular Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316585467. Robert, A.-C. 2003. ‘Government without the People.’ Le Monde Diplomatique, November. Accessed February 28, 2021 https://mondediplo.com/2003/11/07democracy. Rodríguez, I., ed. 2001. The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Rosillo-López, C. 2017. Public Opinion and Politics in the Late Roman Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316535158. Ryzova, L. 2020. ‘The Battle of Muhammad Mahmoud Street in Cairo: The Politics and Poetics of Urban Violence in Revolutionary Time.’ P&P 247 (May): 273–317. doi:10.1093/pastj/gtz029. Santos, B. S. 2018. The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham and London: Duke University Press. doi:10.1215/9781478002000. Sarkar, S. 2000. ‘The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies.’ In Chaturvedi 2000, 300–23. Scott, J. S. 2018. The Common Wind: The Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution. London: Verso.

30

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira and Cyril Courrier

Scott, J. W. 1991. ‘The Evidence of Experience.’ Critical Inquiry 17 (4): 773–97. Sessa, K. 2018. Daily Life in Late Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9780511819360. Settis, S. 2004. Futuro del ‘classico.’ Torino: Einaudi. Seyfarth, W. 1960. ‘Neue sowjetische Beiträge zu einigen Problemen der alten Geschichte: Das Problem der Bagauden.’ Lebendiges Altertum: Populäre Schriftenreihe für Altertumswissenschaft 3: 7–13. Sharpe, J. 2001. ‘History from Below.’ In Burke 2001, 25–42. Shaw, B. D. 2011. Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511762079. Shaw, B. D. 2020. ‘Social Status and Economic Behavior: A Hidden History of the Equites?’ AncSoc 50: 153–202. doi:10.2143/AS.50.0.3289082. Spivak, G. C. 1988. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, 270–313. London: MacMillan Education LTD. Ste. Croix, G. E. M. de. 1981. The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, from the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquest. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tarragoni, F. 2017. ‘La méthode d’Edward P. Thompson.’ Politix 30 (118): 183–205. doi:10.3917/pox.118.0183. Taylor, C. 2017. Poverty, Wealth, and Well-Being: Experiencing Penia in Democratic Athens. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198786931.001.0001. Taylor, C. and K. Vlassopoulos, eds. 2015. Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198726494.001. 0001. Thébert, Y. 1993 [1989]. ‘The Slave.’ In The Romans, edited by A. Giardina, translated by L. G. Cochrane, 138–74. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thompson, E. A. 1952. ‘Peasant Revolts in Late Roman Gaul and Spain.’ P&P 2 (1): 11–23. doi:10.1093/past/2.1.11. Thompson, E. P. 1957. ‘Socialist Humanism: An Epistle to the Philistines.’ The New Reasoner 1: 105–43. Thompson, E. P. 1958. ‘Agency and Choice.’ The New Reasoner 5: 89–106. Thompson, E. P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books. Thompson, E. P. 1966. ‘History from Below.’ Times Literary Supplement, April 7: 279–80. Thompson, E. P. 1971. ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.’ P&P 50 (February): 76–136. doi:10.1093/past/50.1.76. (= Thompson 1993, 185–258). Thompson, E. P. 1972. ‘“Rough music”: Le Charivari anglais.’ Annales ESC 27 (2): 285–312. doi:10.3406/ahess.1972.422501. Thompson, E. P. 1978. The Poverty of Theory & Other Essays. London: Merlin. Thompson, E. P. 1993. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. New York: The New Press. Toner, J. P. 1995. Leisure and Ancient Rome. Cambridge: Polity Press. Toner, J. P. 2002. Rethinking Roman History. Cambridge: The Orleander Press. Toner, J. P. 2009. Popular Culture in Ancient Rome. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Tran, N. 2013. Dominus Tabernae: Le statut de travail des artisans et des commerçants de l’Occident romain. Rome: École française de Rome. Tran, N. and L. Vandevoorde, eds. 2018. Romains ordinaires? La fragmentation socioéconomique de la plèbe romaine. CCG 29: 229–309.

Ancient history from below

31

Tufano, S. 2020. ‘Walter Benjamin and Greek Historiography.’ In Reconciling Ancient and Modern Philosophies of History, edited by Aaron Turner, 263–89. Berlin: De Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110627305–011. Turner, V. W. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications. Turner, V. W. 1986. ‘Dewey, Dilthey, and Drama: An Essay in the Anthropology of Experience.’ In Turner and Bruner 1986, 33–44. Turner, V. W. and E. M. Bruner, eds. 1986. The Anthropology of Experience. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Van Dam, R. 1985. Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul. Berkeley: University of California Press. doi:10.1525/9780520341968. Verboven, K. and C. Laes, eds. 2017. Work, Labour, and Professions in the Roman World. Leiden and Boston: Brill. doi:10.1163/9789004331686. Vernant, J.-P. 1976. ‘Remarks on the Class Struggle in Ancient Greece.’ Critique of Anthropology 2 (7): 67–82. doi:10.1177%2F0308275X7600200705. Vidal-Naquet, P. 1986 [1983]. ‘Were Greek Slaves a Class?’ In The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World. Translated by A. Szegedy-Maszak, 159–67. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Vlassopoulos, K. 2007. Unthinking the Greek Polis: Ancient Greek History beyond Eurocentrism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511482946. Vlassopoulos, K. 2016. ‘Que savons-nous vraiment de la société athénienne?’ Annales HSS 71 (3): 659–81. doi:10.1353/ahs.2016.0118. Vlassopoulos, K. 2018. ‘Marxism and Ancient History.’ In How to Do Things with History: New Approaches to Ancient Greece, edited by D. Allen, P. Christensen and P. Millet, 209–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whyte, N. 2013. ‘Landscape History from Below.’ In Hailwood and Waddell 2013. https:// manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/history-from-below/ Williams, R. 1958. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. New York: Columbia University Press. Williams, R., ed. 1968. May Day Manifesto: 1968. Harmindsworth: Penguin. Williams, R. 2015. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, A. and M. Flohr, eds. 2016. Urban Craftsmen and Traders in the Roman World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198748489.001.0001. Yavetz, Z. 1969. Plebs and Princeps. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Zuchtriegel, G. 2018. Colonization and Subalternity in Classical Greece: Experience of the Nonelite Population. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ 9781108292849.

Part 1

Who is below? Subaltern conditions, languages and communities

2

Subaltern community formation in antiquity Some methodological reflections Kostas Vlassopoulos

Introduction How can we write the history of subaltern communities in antiquity? The aim of this chapter is to raise some major methodological issues about the study of subaltern groups in antiquity and to offer a framework that could be utilised in future work. The main thrust of my argument is that we must not take for granted the existence of distinct and distinctive subaltern communities in antiquity. If we want to do history from below properly and accord subaltern agency its rightful place, we need to explore carefully a range of difficult issues. These issues include the nature and format of our sources, the metanarratives within which we interpret and utilise them, the various factors and processes that created subaltern communities, and the languages and discourses that they employed to conceive of themselves and the world and achieve their aims.

Methodological issues I will start by pointing out a number of major problems involved in the study of ancient subaltern communities. The first nexus of problems relates to the nature and form of our sources. It is of course well known that the overwhelming majority of ancient literary sources were written by members of the ancient elites; they reflect elite interests, preoccupations and points of view. Very few sources were created by subaltern communities and their members, and this creates obvious problems in terms of studying them. Less obvious are the implications of two other related issues. Ancient narrative accounts, and by this I am thinking primarily of ancient historiography, are written exclusively by members of the elite: apart from this authorial bias, the focus of narrative accounts on politics, warfare and diplomacy means that subaltern communities are overwhelmingly absent from them.1 This of course must be qualified. Greek narrative histories are largely oblivious to subaltern communities. One of the main reasons for this is that Greek narrative histories do not focus on the history of a single community but on the history of the international political interaction between Greek communities, as well as Greek communities and various other communities, actors and states (the Persian Empire, the Macedonian kings, Rome, Carthage). As a result, there is a strong DOI: 10.4324/9781003005148-3

36

Kostas Vlassopoulos

tendency to focus on diplomacy and warfare, and the elites that run them, and there is limited interest in the internal affairs of Greek communities, which would allow more scope for dealing with subaltern communities.2 One could probably argue that subaltern people appear in Greek narrative histories only in the exceptional circumstances of civil war that might affect international politics. Roman narrative histories are quite different in this respect. Because Roman narrative histories are effectively the histories of a single community, its internal affairs are evident in the record to an extent that is unparalleled in Greek narrative sources. For certain periods of Roman history, like the archaic struggle of the orders or the Gracchan crisis, subaltern communities make a notable entrance into ancient narrative history.3 This does not of course mean that the narrative accounts where subaltern people have a vivid presence are unproblematic. The elite authorship of these accounts, the anachronistic nature of our accounts for early Roman history and the disjuncture between the aims and the limits of the understanding of Greek sources like Plutarch and Appian who write about events in Roman history that occurred hundreds of years earlier are well-known issues that I merely mention without going into detail.4 But the difference between Greek and Roman narrative sources as regards subaltern people should be obvious and should become an object of reflection. At the same time, the overwhelming majority of ancient sources created by subaltern people and relating to them have a non-narrative form. Dedications, epitaphs, lists, curses or the various inscriptions relating to subaltern associations have a profoundly non-narrative form. It is natural that ancient historians have used these pieces of evidence in order to study subaltern people and their communities synchronically, but there is a clear disjuncture between the synchronic approach favoured by the nature of subaltern sources and the diachronic approach favoured by narrative sources that tend to elide subaltern people and their role in history. The result is quite telling: subaltern people make their presence by and large in synchronic and usually structural accounts of ancient societies (the slaves in classical Athens, or the plebs in republican Rome), while they are largely absent from narrative histories concerning long-term change.5 A typical example to illustrate this issue is a late fifth-century epitaph from Athens (IG 1³.1361): Mannes Orymaios was the best of the Phrygians in broad-spaced Athens. This is his beautiful memorial. ‘And, by Zeus, I have not seen a better wood-cutter than myself.’ He died in the war. This is the epitaph of a Phrygian woodcutter, who was probably a metic at the time of his death and was likely a former slave. He is proud both of his national origins and of his skill in his art. The text mentioning that he died ‘in the war’ most likely refers to his death in the Peloponnesian War, fighting in the Athenian army against the Spartans. The few works devoted to synchronic analyses of subaltern groups, like the Athenian metics, devote some space to Mannes,6 but I have yet to encounter any history of the Peloponnesian War which makes any reference to this subaltern experience and its historical consequences. If we want to pursue new

Subaltern community formation in antiquity 37 ways of studying history from below, we need to grapple seriously with this major problem created by the nature of our sources.7 The next problem is distinctive, but it also makes clear the difference between synchronic and diachronic approaches. The easiest opening to this kind of problem concerns slavery. Ancient historians interested in history from below have long found it particularly hard to fit slavery within the study of subaltern groups in antiquity. On the one hand, there are scholars who focus primarily on slavery and on the conflictual relationship between masters and slaves. Given the few cases of slave revolts in antiquity, and their overall concentration within a short period between the 130s and the 70s BCE, the study of masters and slaves takes a distinctive non-diachronic form by focusing on synchronic accounts of relationships between masters and slaves.8 On the other hand, there are scholars who focus on the conflictual relationship between the ruling elites and the free lower classes: while such accounts can be synchronic, they are often diachronic and narrative.9 Another distinctive feature of the accounts that focus on the free lower classes is their particular attention to politics and political struggles for the distribution of power: a feature almost completely absent from accounts focusing on masters and slaves.10 Ancient historians have yet to find a way of integrating slaves within the wider subaltern groups and communities. The old debates of the 1960s and 1970s about the significance of status, order and class as analytical categories for understanding ancient social history might have gradually dissipated, but they have not left us with any clear or productive solution.11 This brings us to the next major problem of delineating subaltern communities. For the concept of the subaltern, we need to understand its opposite in order to acquire its identity. For certain periods and societies, the opposite of subaltern is relatively easy to define. In early modern Europe there existed a distinctive state apparatus and court with a monarch at its head, an ecclesiastical establishment and various forms of hereditary aristocracies with their distinctive privileges and lifestyles.12 These were the three main elements of elite society, and it was relatively straightforward to define subaltern people and communities in contradistinction with them.13 But if defining elites in early modern Europe is fairly easy, it would be a huge mistake to assume that a similar straightforward distinction between elite and subaltern would apply to antiquity as well. Admittedly, for certain periods and societies of antiquity the definitional problems are not particularly more complex than those of early modern Europe. If we turn to the early Roman Empire, it is relatively straightforward to identify the imperial, senatorial, equestrian and civic elites that ruled the Empire and its communities.14 The existence of groups like the imperial slaves or the wealthy freedmen might complicate things somewhat in terms of defining the Roman elites of the early Empire, but this would not pose a particularly acute problem.15 Accordingly, defining the subaltern in contradistinction with such elite groups and cultures appears relatively straightforward—at least initially.16 The really major conceptual problem rather concerns most periods and societies of Greek history. It used to be rather easy to presume the existence of Greek aristocracies that gradually lost their dominance in the archaic period and were

38

Kostas Vlassopoulos

radically transformed in the course of the classical and Hellenistic periods.17 But in the last few decades, the very existence of Greek aristocracies has come under strong attack. Recent works have shown the extreme rarity of hereditary aristocracies in Greek history and have plausibly argued that ancient historians must strongly resist importing assumptions from early modern European history into the study of ancient Greek societies.18 This of course does not mean that ancient Greek societies did not have their own elites. But it means that we cannot take for granted how these elites were constituted, and we cannot assume that there existed distinctive elite communities and lifestyles. Recent approaches tend to suggest the existence of a continuum of practices and activities, which were more accessible and significant to those with more wealth, leisure and power, but in which anybody could potentially participate, even if in asymmetrical ways.19 If correct, this continuum model is significantly different from the model of a radical gap between elite and subaltern worlds employed in many other societies and periods. If there was no distinctive elite culture, lifestyle or values, then we must think very carefully about what constitutes subaltern individuals and communities in such circumstances.20

History from below and subaltern communities We can now move to a wider range of questions and problems. What exactly are we trying to achieve when we do history from below and we study subaltern communities? In a famous poem, quoted in full in the introduction to this volume, Bertolt Brecht presented the reactions of a worker reading history books.21 Brecht was attacking history from above: a form of history that focused almost exclusively on ruling elites and rendered invisible the vast majority of the population. This form of history had a very long pedigree and was still dominant up to the historiographical revolution of the 1960s and the emergence of social history as a major field of study.22 In its early stages, the study of history from below took the form envisaged by Brecht’s worker: that of supplementing the existing accounts of traditional history from above with references to subaltern people, primarily as objects of exploitation and domination. This was initially a necessary corrective to earlier accounts; but once historians started to realise that subaltern people were not merely objects of exploitation but also active agents of history, they started to face a major problem. As we mentioned earlier, ancient narrative sources rarely attribute to subaltern people any role in the making of history. And this means that it is exceedingly difficult to find ways of incorporating subaltern people as active agents of ancient history.23 Ste. Croix’s magnum opus is a characteristic example of this problem.24 It might be titled The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, but its real title should have been The Ruling Classes of Antiquity and How They Oppressed the Lower Classes. The agency of subaltern people and its historical consequences are hardly visible: subaltern people are merely the passive objects of exploitation, and it is rather the consequences of the varying degrees of exploitation and domination that shape the parameters within which ancient elites made history. History is still

Subaltern community formation in antiquity 39 made by the elites, but on the basis of the blood, sweat and tears of the subaltern classes. Historians working on other periods have been exploring these problems for some time now.25 Perhaps the most illuminating example in relation to ancient history concerns the case of the history of American slavery and slave agency. For a long time, slaves were just a footnote in narratives of North American history. When new approaches started to emerge in the 1950s, slaves finally became one of the main concerns of historians, but primarily as objects of domination and exploitation. Slavery was studied from above as a relationship solely defined by the masters and imposed on the slaves unilaterally. But starting with Genovese’s masterpiece,26 which focused on slave agency and conceived slavery as an asymmetrical negotiation of power, historians of New World slavery have started to reframe their narratives in order to present slaves as historical agents who had an active, if asymmetrical, role in the making of their own history and the history of slave-owning societies. Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone was an exemplary application of this new conception of history from below to the study of slavery.27 There are still major issues of debate and contention: to name just one, ‘To what extent was the abolition of slavery the result of slave agency, rather than the action of abolitionists and governments?’28 But historians of modern slavery have taken a crucial first step into writing new kinds of history from below. What is the alternative for those ancient historians who are not content to reduce history from below to the story of the exploitation and domination of the subaltern groups? Given that ancient sources rarely if ever allow us to look at subaltern people as active agents in history, ancient historians have been particularly vulnerable to adopting wholesale and without much critical thinking wider metanarratives that would allow them to conceptualise subaltern agency. The most influential example is the metanarrative of the French Revolution; this was initially created by French liberal historians in the first half of the nineteenth century, and was subsequently taken over by leftist intellectuals and scholars, while ultimately becoming effectively the main model for interpreting large-scale historical change in any historical period.29 According to this metanarrative, the social and economic crisis of the Old Regime created new socio-economic classes, based on trade and industry, which demanded their fair share in political power, destroyed the privileges of the aristocracy and ultimately brought down the monarchy. This metanarrative has certain fixed elements: a socio-economic crisis as the factor that explains how change was possible, social classes organised as collective actors that fight for their interests and a direct link between socio-economic structure and political power. This metanarrative was often employed straightforwardly in ancient history: the crisis of the archaic poleis, tyranny and the hoplite revolution, the sixth-century crisis in Attica and the reforms of Solon, or the struggle of the orders in Rome have often been interpreted in this way.30 But modified versions of this metanarrative have been employed in all sorts of other ancient contexts; the Gracchan crisis was often seen as the failed attempt of subaltern groups to stem the tide of accumulation in the hands of the rich, while Rostovtzeff famously described the major changes in late antiquity as the result of the coming into power of a subaltern army.31

40

Kostas Vlassopoulos

The obvious problem with such attempts is that they are not particularly successful and have been largely refuted.32 I do not have the space here to examine in detail why the various attempts to explore subaltern agency in antiquity through the metanarrative of the French Revolution have failed to convince. I am rather more interested in stressing the fact that over the last few decades it is the validity of the metanarrative for explaining the French Revolution itself that has come under severe attack. The revisionist challenge, from the work of Cobban and Furet in the 1960s till the present, has blown into pieces most of the assumptions on which this model was based. In particular, it has completely undermined the very existence of the bourgeoisie as a distinct social class in eighteenth-century France and as a collective actor that attempted and succeeded in gaining power.33 It has to be said that the revisionist challenge has largely failed to offer a convincing alternative interpretation of the revolution, which does not reduce a momentous event and a complex process into a series of historical accidents.34 But the important conclusion for our purposes is that the explosion of the traditional metanarrative of the French Revolution must force ancient historians to search for new models and metanarratives concerning subaltern agency. This search will be complicated by a final general issue. Once upon a time, historians disagreed about which particular concept to employ in order to conceptualise subaltern groups in antiquity. Those of a Marxist persuasion tended to favour the concept of class, which posited the existence of socio-economic groups based on their relationship to the means of production. Other historians disagreed with the Marxist theory of class or merely thought that it was inapplicable to antiquity; these scholars tended to favour the alternative concepts of status groups or sociolegal orders.35 Whether they preferred class, status or order as their organising principles, all historians accepted a particular form of materialist sociology in which social, economic and political conditions constituted various groups that reflected those conditions and acted upon them. These assumptions came under strong challenge from the 1980s onwards with the emergence of the linguistic and the cultural turns.36 If our only access to the material world comes through language and discourse, through which human beings conceive of and act upon it, then this undermines a naïve distinction between base and superstructure. The study of gender, race, culture and politics has effectively challenged the traditional Marxist definition of class as a relationship to the means of production by disputing any direct and automatic relationship between economic relationships and the constitution of people into a class and emphasising the role of politics, culture and discourse in the processes of class formation.37 And while traditional scholarship took the existence of classes as collective actors for granted, more recent work has problematised this by showing a coexisting multiplicity of groups and identities, partly overlapping and partly moving in very different directions.38 In conclusion, doing history from below and studying subaltern groups in antiquity face some quite difficult questions and problems. Some of them are the result of the nature of our sources; others relate to the problems of how to conceptualise subaltern groups in the various societies and periods of antiquity without importing anachronistic and misleading assumptions or excluding from our purview those

Subaltern community formation in antiquity 41 groups that do not fit our assumptions and models; but equally significant are those that result from wider historical debates, in particular about how to conceptualise the historical agency of subaltern individuals and communities. In the remaining part of this chapter, I want to offer some constructive suggestions towards creating the conceptual and methodological framework that we need in order to explore history from below and subaltern communities and agency in antiquity.39 I want to explore three broad factors that played a crucial role in the processes of subaltern community formation.

The formation of subaltern communities The first factor is the nexus of material activities and practices in which subaltern individuals engaged in the course of their lives. This obviously includes work in its most diverse manifestations: not only the production of wealth, which usually stands at the centre of attention, but also the huge amount of labour necessary for the daily reproduction of life in the technological conditions of pre-industrial societies.40 Labour was crucial in the life of subaltern people,41 but it was not necessarily what defined them as individuals or groups or distinguished them from the elite. It is true that most ancient societies perceived a major dividing line between those rich enough to be able to live without the need to work and the rest who had to work for a living. But within the latter group were included people of extremely diverse conditions, whom we cannot automatically classify as subaltern.42 Let us imagine a Roman senatorial landowner, an artisan owning a workshop where he worked alongside his ten slaves and an unskilled manual labourer who lived from hand to mouth: we can envisage various lines of cleavage between these three individuals, which in certain ways and contexts would place the first two in the same group of respectable property owners while in other contexts would create a distinction between the ruling elite, represented by the first, and the subalterns excluded from power, represented by the latter two individuals.43 In fact, there have been some stimulating recent attempts to delineate the Roman middling sort and distinguish them from the wider subaltern population.44 Furthermore, we need to take seriously the peculiarities of a world where most labourers had direct control of the labour process, irrespective of who owned the means of production. In such a world, major forms of exploitation and arenas of conflict that created dividing lines between elite and subaltern took place outside the labour process and included factors such as debt, taxation and dishonourable mistreatment, as Claire Taylor’s chapter in this volume clearly shows.45 The groups in conflict constituted by such bones of contention had boundaries that could differ significantly from those created on the basis of labour or wealth and could be based on identities that owed little to the activity of labour. This is not to say that the different issues could not feed off and mutually reinforce each other; it only means that we cannot establish a priori what constitutes a subaltern group in antiquity. Only work on specific groups in specific periods and contexts will allow us to move beyond misleading generalisations.

42

Kostas Vlassopoulos

The second factor concerns the concept of community. Traditional approaches to subaltern people tended to take for granted that subaltern groups would form automatically on the basis of their shared material interests, and where the expected subaltern groups did not materialise, or did not seem to act as groups, scholars either resigned to the study of a passive ‘class in itself,’ which was merely the object of domination and exploitation, or concluded that there was no point in studying subaltern groups altogether. In the last few decades, historians have turned a lot of their attention to the issue of community formation. A revealing illustration is the concept of the slave community. While ancient historians spent the 1960s and the 1970s debating whether ancient slaves constituted a class, modern historians discovered the concept of the slave community as a means of exploring both slave agency and the world that slaves created beyond and below slavery.46 The slave community was not the direct result of the slave condition: it consisted of the diverse outcomes created by slaves out of the materials furnished by legal condition, labour, race, ethnicity, kinship, family, residence, religion and commensality. Significantly, the slave community could have contradictory implications at the same time. The slave family was an important factor of stability for slaveholding societies. It ensured the natural reproduction of the slave force; slaves with families were less likely to flee; and the threat of family separation was a potent weapon in the masters’ hands. But at the same time, family and kinship were major tools for creating slave communities of emotion, support and solidarity. The slave family was both a tool in the hands of masters and a means through which slaves could organise their resistance. Any attempt to study subaltern agency must start from the processes of subaltern community formation.47 In this respect, we must avoid making a number of mistaken assumptions. The first is to assume the a priori existence of exclusively subaltern communities. We must start from the much wider framework of ‘the networks of sociability.’ Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira has offered us an exemplary model of the networks created around the various associations, the taverns and the baths, the streets, markets and ports, the spectacles and the churches.48 As should be readily obvious, while some of these networks and communities might be exclusively subaltern, many of them would have a more diverse membership.49 Many of these communities cannot be seen as expressions of subaltern identity: they are rather complex communities whose raison d’être might be anything than the representation of subaltern interests but whose substantial subaltern membership affected them in such ways that they came to play a crucial role in the exercise of subaltern agency. The case of late antique North Africa offers a particularly instructive example, as a result both of the richness of the available sources, literary, epigraphic and archaeological, and of the fascinating scholarship that has profitably explored this material. We have moved a long way from the time when ancient historians wondered whether ancient heresies like the Donatists were national or social movements in disguise;50 nobody nowadays would accept this particular way of approaching subaltern agency. Recent studies have explored the emergence of Christian communities in North Africa with substantial subaltern membership,

Subaltern community formation in antiquity 43 their new forms of leadership and communication, the various interpretations that could be placed on the diverse contents of Christian ritual and communication, and the context of the four-way conflict between the two rival churches, imperial authorities and local communities and potentates.51 While these Christian communities cannot be described as subaltern, they provided a crucial medium through which subaltern individuals constructed communities and identities, related to their superiors and understood themselves and their world. To put it in more general terms, we must not assume the a priori existence of exclusively subaltern communities and identities. In certain contexts and for certain purposes such groups did emerge, and this has obviously deeply significant historical consequences. But by and large, we should expect subaltern people and identities to be part of wider communities and identities, which would often have deeply contradictory characteristics. We should be on the lookout for the peculiar subaltern inflection of such wider communities and identities and the ways in which subaltern people made use of institutions and processes in which they did not have an independent voice of their own. Recent work on the Roman civil wars has tried to show the historical significance of the subaltern role in conflicts that were in theory an affair among the members of the elite.52

Languages of the social The third factor concerns the role of language and discourse in constituting subaltern identities, communities and agencies. We should start by taking the implications of the linguistic turn seriously. The study of the social history of late antiquity was long dominated by an image of deep social crisis, including the impoverishment of the free lower classes.53 It is only relatively recently that late antique historians have started to challenge this picture through a serious engagement with the generic and discursive features of late antique sources. It has been observed that whereas classical sources tend to focus on the status distinctions free/slave or citizen/outsider, Christian sources are based on a fundamentally novel focus on the poor. Christian sources construct a particular image of poverty and the poor which focuses on certain aspects that are congenial for the purposes of Christianity; by making poverty into a dominant subject of discursive debates, Christian sources bring to light the conditions in the life of the lower classes that classical sources were largely indifferent to.54 It is not primarily an increase in impoverishment that makes poverty so visible in late antiquity; it is the emergence of genres and discourses that make poverty one of their main subjects. The same applies to the vast collections of laws in the Theodosian and Justinianic codes. It would again be misleading to interpret them as evidence of a deep social crisis: if the sale of free children into slavery or marriages between free and slave are so prominent in late antique laws, the reason is not the radical impoverishment of the free or the undermining of the status distinctions between slave and free in late antiquity. Whereas classical law focused on certain areas and left a large area of social interaction outside purview and subject to ambiguity and gentlemen’s agreements, late antique laws reflect the decision of the state to

44

Kostas Vlassopoulos

intervene in these areas and attempt to clarify and define the fuzzy edges of social interaction that classical law left opaque.55 Earlier literalist readings drew a picture of the radical difference between early Empire and late antiquity on the basis of a fundamental assumption: that the difference between classical and late antique sources and the issues they focused on was a direct reflection of differences in social reality. Recent and more complex interpretations have accepted that there is no automatic correlation between texts and discourses, on the one hand, and social reality, on the other. The social imaginaire does not include the totality of relations and aspects within a particular society: it rather privileges and focuses on certain issues, while others remain outside purview. Some conclusions follow from this observation. Precisely because texts and discourses are not direct reflections of realities, but selective focuses, it follows that they have to be understood as choices of past actors that need to be explained historically, rather than being taken for granted. Let us take the case of the Athenian social imaginaire, which exemplifies a major peculiarity which has largely escaped the attention of ancient historians. The Athenian imaginaire was based on three major distinctions.56 The first one was that between free and slave; the second focused on the distinction between male citizens and various excluded others (slaves, metics, women); finally, within the citizen community the Athenians distinguished between the plousioi, those wealthy enough to live without the need to work, and the penētes, who had to work in order to make a living, irrespective of whether they were relatively well-off or destitute. What is peculiar about these three distinctions is that they all express polar opposites rather than relationships: one can easily gauge the difference if the Athenian pairs were substituted with the pairs masters/slaves, rulers/subjects and landlords/peasants or capitalists/workers. Some societies imagine their social reality on the basis of polarities, while others view it as interdependent relationships. The Athenian social imaginaire was a deliberate choice about what to focus on, and this choice cannot be derived from a priori reasoning but needs to be explained as the result of historical processes.57 Instead of assuming a direct correspondence between social reality and the world as represented in our textual sources, we should recognise the constitutive role of language as a means through which the real world is conceived, represented and acted upon.58 In other words, out of the inherently messy, complex and contradictory world of social reality, human beings employ a range of social languages in order to conceptualise, represent and negotiate their various relationships.59 These diverse languages cannot manage to encompass the totality of social relationships, even if on occasion they are stretched in order to achieve that aim.60 Rather, they tend to focus on certain relationships and certain phenomena by sidelining others; they can also deal with the same issues and relationships but present them from a variety of viewpoints and with different emphases. As a result, most communities tend to utilise a variety of social languages, which are employed for different purposes and often tend to predominate in different genres. These diverse languages can complement each other, coexist without interaction or directly conflict with each other.61

Subaltern community formation in antiquity 45 I want to present a number of social languages with particular relevance to the study of ancient history. Four of these languages can be used as holistic representations of the social world; the others tend to be employed not as holistic descriptions but in order to focus on particular aspects of the social world. The language of hierarchy focuses on the gradations created by birth, privilege and status; it tends to present society as a spectrum of statuses from the highest to the lowest. Normally, status groups are related to privileges and obligations: a significant aspect of this language is whether it attempts to integrate all social groups within the hierarchical order. Greek and Roman processions and the social architecture of the theatre are characteristic examples in which hierarchical models were visually implemented for all to see.62 The language of wealth focuses on the distribution of wealth as a means of distinguishing between various groups in society and defining their role and place;63 it is a language that tends to favour tripartite models of the social world (the rich, the middling sort, the poor). On the contrary, the language of oppression presents a dichotomous division of the social world as a struggle between opposed groups as a result of oppression and exploitation: the rich versus the poor, the powerful versus the weak or the mass versus the elite.64 Finally, the language of function/work divides the social world on the basis of the functions performed by different social groups; the caste system of South Asia and the medieval tripartite system of warriors, priests and cultivators are well-known examples of this language.65 While functional models are not as significant in antiquity, they can certainly be found widely, from the social imaginaries of Greek philosophers to the significant role in civic life of early and late Roman professional associations.66 Four other languages focus not so much on the divisions within the community but on the nature of the community itself. The language of exclusion focuses on the division between the full members of the community and the excluded outcasts: freemen and slaves, patricians and plebeians, citizens and outsiders.67 On the contrary, the language of solidarity focuses on the bonds that link together the insiders: it emphasises the reasons and ways in which those who share a community need to support each other. A related, but distinct, language is that of reciprocity, which focuses on a range of relationships, both symmetrical and asymmetrical: friendship, patronage, exchange, service and honour. This language can stress on either equality and mutuality in those relationships, or authority and obedience. While the language of solidarity tends to refer to the community as a whole, the language of reciprocity tends to focus on binary relationships within the community.68 Finally, the language of family not only focuses on relationships within the patriarchal household but also uses the household as a model for conceptualising various aspects relating to property, kinship and authority.69 The study of these various languages in the context of ancient history is still in its infancy, but comparative examples from other periods and societies have a lot to contribute. David Cannadine has explored, in a very fruitful way, how, over the last three centuries, spectrum models based on hierarchy, tripartite models based on wealth and dichotomous models based on oppression have coexisted in the modern British world.70 As he has effectively shown, each model is sufficiently sharp to successfully describe many aspects of the social world and yet is incapable

46

Kostas Vlassopoulos

of accounting on its own for the full diversity and complexity of social reality. Instead, different individuals or groups, or the same individuals and groups in different contexts, tend to use these models for different purposes. In the opposite direction, Paul Freedman has explored the deep contradictions in medieval attitudes towards peasants by the coexistence of the language of function and the language of exclusion.71 My final task is to explore the language in which subaltern communities might express their grievances. This has highly significant implications. On the one hand, the language in which a community formulates its grievances might be directly related to how it conceptualises itself and its opponents. On the other hand, the language of grievance might provide important evidence of how a community attempted to solve its problems, and this could prove significant in terms of how we conceptualise subaltern agency. A first language is that of injustice: grievances cast in the language of injustice can already be found in Hesiod’s Ways and Means,72 where he inveighs against the unjust decisions of the gift-eating and people-devouring basileis. Appeals to justice could be based on general principles accepted by the community at large; they could be more specifically to the body of written laws of the polity; or they could be based on principles of justice that appealed to particular subaltern groups.73 A second language is that of domination. Greek and Roman societies developed a peculiar and highly significant conception of freedom. Freedom was no longer conceptualised as the state of not being a slave, an idea common to many other societies. Instead, it became linked to the ideas of independence and autonomy; it was conceptualised as an unalterable status that could not be shed even voluntarily; and it was seen as a totalising status, with a tendency to cover the full range of a person’s life, like the protection from violence and physical punishment. Freedom provided an entitlement of individuals and communities that could be used in order to defy domination; and domination provided a model through which a range of actions could be castigated as inimical to freedom and opposed.74 A third language is that of inequality. One well-known aspect of this language is the distinction between arithmetic equality with equal shares for all and the geometric form that posits a proportional equality in relation to the merits and contributions of each individual or group.75 But I think that a significant aspect of the language of equality is that it relates to issues that have little to do with the labour process and exploitation. In many ancient societies the majority of subaltern people worked for themselves as independent petty producers. These subaltern people were not directly exploited by the elite, but the unequal distribution of wealth and property had a deep impact on their lives, and the language of equality provided a potent means of expressing their grievances.76 The two last languages are particularly prominent in our own world; establishing their relevance for antiquity requires a lot of further work. The language of distress and need is a common element in modern humanitarian appeals. It is also a prominent theme in the ancient Near East and the Jewish Bible, and would become a major aspect of the Christian social language.77 But this language is largely absent from the normative texts of Greek and Roman political and moral theory. The speech of

Subaltern community formation in antiquity 47 Tiberius Gracchus, in which he presents the distress of the poor inhabitants of Italy as an argument in favour of his agrarian law, appears to be a relative rarity in ancient elite texts (Plutarch, Life of Tiberius Gracchus, 9):78 it would be interesting if a detailed survey could show that the language of distress was much more prominently used by subaltern individuals and groups than in elite discourses.79 I turn finally to the language of exploitation. There is no doubt that it is a language that is ubiquitous in our own world and constitutes one of the most powerful ways of conceptualising grievance. And yet, as Dimitris Kyrtatas has forcefully argued, the language of exploitation is generally absent from the ancient world.80 My general impression from the sources is that exploitation is largely present in framing political forms of extraction and in particular taxation.81 If this is actually true, it would have important implications for the history of subaltern communities. On the one hand, the limited range of long-term uses of wage labour in antiquity might be relevant here. Equally significant could be the nature of our sources, which focus largely on relationships between masters and slaves, and allow us rarely to see the exploitative relationships over free people, like sharecroppers and tenants. But it might be the case, as Kyrtatas argues, that the language of domination was the predominant prism through which the ancient subalterns formulated grievances that we would have expressed through the economic language of exploitation.

Conclusions The study of subaltern communities should become one of the major preoccupations of ancient history. Volumes like this one can play a major role not only in stimulating further research but also in debating major conceptual and methodological issues. We should not restrict ourselves to studying subaltern people synchronically as mere objects of oppression or as one topic among many others. One of the major desiderata of our work should be to place subaltern agency at the forefront and repopulate our diachronic accounts with subaltern people and their role in making the history of antiquity. But if we are to achieve that aim, we need to think carefully through the various challenges we are facing. The old image of collective actors representing clear and distinctive subaltern interests cannot ultimately survive the linguistic and cultural turn. But the solution is not despair but the attempt to map and explore the complex processes through which the various subaltern groups lived their lives, formed their communities, conceptualised their various and contradictory aims and identities, and tried to achieve and realise them; in order to achieve that, we will need to construct new kind of metanarratives. It is obviously a heavy task, but we are undoubtedly making serious progress in that direction.

Notes 1 For a fascinating account of ancient historiography as a source of social history and a reflection on ancient societies, see Mazzarino 1983. 2 Fornara 1983, 50–61. 3 Raaflaub 2008; Toynbee 1965; Brunt 1971. 4 Badian 1972; Gargola 2008. See also Joly, in this volume.

48

Kostas Vlassopoulos

5 Slaves in Athens: Klees 1998; Morales, in this volume. Plebs in Rome: Horsfall 2003; Toner 2009; Courrier 2014; Kröss 2017 and Knopf 2018. 6 E.g. Bäbler 1998, 159–63. 7 Vlassopoulos 2017. 8 Bradley 1984. 9 Brunt 1971; MacMullen 1974; Ste. Croix 1981; Fuks 1984. 10 Wood 1988. 11 Nafissi 2004; Zurbach 2013. 12 Bush 1983; Clark 1995. 13 Burke 2009. 14 For the general problem of what is subaltern and what is elite, cf. Cerutti 2015; the issue is also discussed in the Introduction to this volume. 15 Duncan-Jones 2016. 16 Toner 1995, 2009; cf. Grig 2017b; Courrier 2017a and Courrier and Tran, this volume. 17 Donlan 1999. 18 Duplouy 2006; Fisher and Van Wees 2015. 19 Davidson 1997; Van Wees and Fisher 2015. 20 Canevaro 2017. For the concept of popular culture in ancient Greece, see Forsdyke 2012 and my review in www.sehepunkte.de/2012/11/21991.html. 21 Brecht 1998, 252–3. 22 Iggers 1984. 23 Hunt 1998 offers an attempt to think through the implications of slaves as active agents in ancient warfare; for the role of subaltern people in Roman politics, see Yavetz 1969; Nicolet 1980. 24 Ste. Croix 1981. 25 Bender 2002. 26 Genovese 1974. 27 Berlin 1998. 28 Drescher and Emmer 2010. 29 Comninel 1987; Vlassopoulos 2018. 30 Kyrtatas 2002a, 133–47. 31 Hopkins 1978, 1–98; Rostovtzeff 1926. 32 E.g. Van Wees 2013; Van Wees and Fisher 2015. See also Gottesman, this volume, for a reappraisal of the Athenian democratic revolution. 33 Maza 2005. 34 Comninel 1987; Hobsbawm 1990. 35 For these debates, see Nafissi 2005; Zurbach 2013; Ismard 2014. 36 Wood 1995; Dworkin 2007; Eley and Nield 2007. 37 Stedman Jones 1983; Wahrman 1995. 38 Reddy 1987; Van der Linden 2008. 39 For a particularly stimulating contribution along similar lines, see Magalhães de Oliveira 2020. 40 Lis and Soly 2012. 41 See e.g. Magalhães de Oliveira 2012, 43–84. 42 Courrier 2017a. 43 Similar issues are raised by Courrier and Tran’s chapter in this volume. 44 Veyne 2005, 139–94 (and the ancient notion of plebs media, discussed and largely redefined in Courrier 2014, 299–421); Scheidel and Friesen 2009; Mayer 2012. 45 Fisher 2000; Van Wees 2008. 46 Blassingame 1972; Genovese 1974; Kolchin 1983; Berlin 1998, Penningroth 2003; Tran 2006. 47 Grey 2011; Taylor and Vlassopoulos 2015. 48 Magalhães de Oliveira 2012, 125–55; see also Courrier 2017b; Magalhães de Oliveira 2017.

Subaltern community formation in antiquity 49 49 Philip Harland has explored this issue in relation to associations in Roman Asia Minor (Harland 2003). While he is right in his main point that associations cannot be seen as oppositional communities, the nature of the epigraphic evidence that he has consulted is unlikely to reveal much about oppositional activities or ideas. 50 Jones 1959. 51 Dossey 2010; Shaw 2011; Magalhães de Oliveira 2012. 52 Osgood 2006; Alston 2015. 53 Patlagean 1977. 54 Brown 2002; Freu 2007. 55 Harper 2011, 351–66. 56 Cartledge 2002. 57 Vlassopoulos 2016. 58 Cf. Ando 2015. 59 The foundational work for this argument is Stedman Jones 1983. 60 The inability of the language of hierarchy to encompass the complex realities of early modern Europe comes out nicely in Bush 1992. 61 Ossowski 1963. 62 Maurizio 1998; Rawson 1987. 63 Taylor 2017. 64 Ober 1989. 65 Duby 1982; Arnoux 2012. 66 Vidal-Naquet 1986, 224–45; Van Nijf 1997; Tran 2006; Verboven and Laes 2016. 67 Cartledge 2002. 68 Schwartz 2010. 69 Schloen 2001; cf. Herzog 2013. 70 Cannadine 1999. 71 Freedman 1999. 72 Hes. Op. 202–92. 73 Havelock 1978. 74 Raaflaub 2004; Arena 2012. 75 Harvey 1965. 76 Garnsey 2007. 77 Brown 2002; MacMullen 2015. 78 For the meaning of this speech, see Balbo 2013. 79 Fleischacker 2005. 80 Kyrtatas 2002b. 81 But see the case of the coloni of the saltus Burunitanus in Roman Africa (CIL VIII 10570); for this case, see Kehoe 1988.

Bibliography Alston, R. 2015. Rome’s Revolution: Death of the Republic and Birth of the Empire. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Ando, C. 2015. Roman Social Imaginaries: Language and Thought in the Context of Empire. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press. Arena, V. 2012. Libertas and the Practice of Politics in the Late Roman Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139235754. Arnoux, M. 2012. Le temps des laboureurs. Travail, ordre social et croissance en Europe (XIe-XIVe siècle). Paris: Albin Michel. Bäbler, B. 1998. Fleißige Thrakerinnen und wehrhafte Skythen: Nichtgriechen im klassischen Athen und ihre archäologische Hinterlassenschaft. Stuttgart: Teubner.

50

Kostas Vlassopoulos

Badian, E. 1972. ‘Tiberius Gracchus and the Beginning of the Roman Revolution.’ In Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, Band 1: Politische Geschichte, I.1, edited by H. Temporini, 668–731. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110818352–023. Balbo, M. 2013. Riformare la Res publica: retroterra sociale e significato politico del tribunato di Tiberio Gracco. Bari: Edipuglia. Bender, T., ed. 2002. Rethinking American History in a Global Age. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. doi:10.1525/9780520936034. Berlin, I. 1998. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Blassingame, J. W. 1972. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press. Bradley, K. R. 1984. Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire: A Study in Social Control. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brecht, B. 1998. Poems, 1913–1956. Translated by J. Willett. London and New York: Routledge. Brown, P. 2002. Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire. Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England. Brunt, P. A. 1971. Social Conflicts in the Roman Republic. London: Chatto & Windus. Burke, P. 2009. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. 3rd edition. London and New York: Routledge. doi.10.4324/9781315246420. Bush, M. L. 1983. The European Nobility. Vol. 1: Noble Privilege. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bush, M. L., ed. 1992. Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification. London and New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315845081. Canevaro, M. 2017. ‘The Popular Culture of the Athenian Institutions: “Authorized” Popular Culture and “Unauthorised” Elite Culture in Classical Athens.’ In Grig 2017a, 39–65. doi:10.1017/9781139871402.002. Cannadine, D. 1999. The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain. New York: Columbia University Press. Cartledge, P. 2002. The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cerutti, S. 2015. ‘Who is below? E. P. Thompson, historien des sociétés modernes: une relecture.’ Annales (HSS), 70, 931–56. Clark, S. 1995. State and Status: The Rise of the State and Aristocratic Power in Western Europe. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Comninel, G. C. 1987. Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge. London: Verso. Courrier, C. 2014. La plèbe de Rome et sa culture (fin du IIe siècle av. J.-C.-fin du Ier siècle ap. J.-C.). Rome: École française de Rome. Courrier, C. 2017a. ‘Plebeian Culture in the City of Rome, from the Late Republic to the Early Empire.’ In Grig 2017a, 107–28. doi:10.1017/9781139871402.005. Courrier, C. 2017b. ‘The Roman plebs and rumour: social interactions and political communication in the Early Principate.’ In Rosillo-López 2017, 137–64. Davidson, J. 1997. Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. London: Harper Collins. Donlan, W. 1999. The Aristocratic Ideal and Selected Papers. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy Carducci Publishers. Dossey, L. 2010. Peasant and Empire in Christian North Africa. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press.

Subaltern community formation in antiquity 51 Drescher, S. and P. C. Emmer, eds. 2010. Who Abolished Slavery? Slave Revolts and Abolitionism: A Debate with João Pedro Marques. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Duby, G. 1982. The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined. Translated by A. Goldhammer with a foreword by T. N. Bisson. Revised edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Duncan-Jones, R. 2016. Power and Privilege in Roman Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316575475. Duplouy, A. 2006. Le prestige des élites: recherches sur les modes de reconnaissance sociale en Grèce entre les Xe et Ve siècles avant J.-C. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Dworkin, D. 2007. Class Struggles. London: Routledge. Eley, G. and K. Nield. 2007. The Future of Class in History: What Is Left of the Social? Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Fisher, N. 2000. ‘Hybris, Revenge and Stasis in the Greek City-States.’ In War and Violence in Ancient Greece, edited by H. Van Wees, 83–123. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. doi:10.2307/j.ctvvnbwv.8. Fisher, N. and H. Van Wees, eds. 2015. ‘Aristocracy’ in Antiquity: Redefining Greek and Roman Elites. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. doi:10.2307/j.ctvvn9xw. Fleischacker, S. 2005. A Short History of Distributive Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fornara, C. W. 1983. The Nature of History in Ancient Greece and Rome. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Forsdyke, S. 2012. Slaves Tell Tales and Other Episodes in the Politics of Popular Culture in Ancient Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.1515/ 9781400842155. Freedman, P. 1999. Images of the Medieval Peasant. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Freu, C. 2007. Les figures du pauvre dans les sources italiennes de l’Antiquité tardive. Paris: De Boccard. Fuks, A. 1984. Social Conflict in Ancient Greece. Jerusalem and Leiden: The Magnes Press and Brill. Gargola, D. J. 2008. ‘The Gracchan Reform and Appian’s Representation of an Agrarian Crisis.’ In People, Land and Politics: Demographic Developments and the Transformation of Roman Italy, 300 BC-AD 14, edited by L. de Ligt and S. J. Northwood, 487–518. Mnemosyne, Supplements 303. Leiden: Brill. Garnsey, P. 2007. Thinking about Property: From Antiquity to the Age of Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511482786. Genovese, E. 1974. Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Press. Grey, C. 2011. Constructing Communities in the Late Roman Countryside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511994739. Grig, L., ed. 2017a. Popular Culture in the Ancient World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781139871402. Grig, L. 2017b. ‘Introduction: Approaching Popular Culture in the Ancient World.’ In Grig 2017a, 1–36. doi:10.1017/9781139871402.001. Harland, P. A. 2003. Associations, Synagogues, and Congregations: Claiming a Place in Ancient Mediterranean Society. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Harper, K. 2011. Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511973451. Harvey, F. D. 1965. ‘Two Kinds of Equality.’ C&M 26: 101–46.

52

Kostas Vlassopoulos

Havelock, E. 1978. The Greek Concept of Justice: From Its Shadow in Homer to Its Substance in Plato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Herzog, D. 2013. Household Politics: Conflict in Early Modern England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hobsbawm, E. J. 1990. Echoes of the Marsellaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. doi:10.36019/9781978802414. Hopkins, K. 1978. Conquerors and Slaves. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horsfall, N. 2003. The Culture of the Roman Plebs. London: Duckworth. Hunt, P. 1998. Slaves, Warfare and Ideology in the Greek Historians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iggers, G. 1984. New Directions in European Historiography. London: Methuen. Ismard, P. 2014. ‘Classes, ordres, statuts: la réception française de la sociologie finleyenne et le cas Pierre Vidal-Naquet.’ Anabases 19: 39–53. doi:10.4000/anabases.4539. Jones, A. H. M. 1959. ‘Were Ancient Heresies National or Social Movements in Disguise?’ JThS 10 (2): 280–98. doi:10.1093/jts/X.2.280. Kehoe, D. P. 1988. The Economics of Agriculture on Roman Imperial Estates in North Africa. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Klees, H. 1998. Sklavenleben im klassischen Griechenland. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Knopf, F. 2018. Die Partizipationsmotive der plebs urbana im spätrepublikanischen Rom. Münster: LIT Verlag. Kolchin, P. 1983. ‘Re-Evaluating the Antebellum Slave Community: A Comparative Perspective.’ Journal of American History 70 (3): 579–601. doi:10.2307/1903484. Kröss, K. 2017. Die politische Rolle der stadtrömischen Plebs in der Kaiserzeit. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Kyrtatas, D. I. 2002a. Κατακτώντας την αρχαιότητα: ιστοριογραφικές διαδρομές. Athens: Polis. Kyrtatas, D. J. 2002b. ‘Domination and Exploitation.’ In Money, Labour and Land: Approaches to the Economics of Ancient Greece, edited by P. Cartledge, E. E. Cohen and L. Foxhall, 140–55. London and New York: Routledge. Lis, C. and H. Soly. 2012. Worthy Efforts: Attitudes to Work and Workers in Pre-Industrial Europe. Leiden and Boston: Brill. MacMullen, R. 1974. Roman Social Relations, 50 BC to AD 284. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. MacMullen, R. 2015. ‘Social Ethic Models: Roman, Greek, “Oriental”.’ Historia 64: 487–510. Magalhães de Oliveira, J. C. 2012. Potestas Populi: participation populaire et action collective dans les villes de l’Afrique romaine tardive (vers 300–430 apr. J.-C.). Turnhout: Brepols. Magalhães de Oliveira, J. C. 2017. ‘The Emperor Is Dead! Rumours, Protests, and Political Opportunities in Late Antiquity.’ In Rosillo-López 2017, 165–78. Magalhães de Oliveira, J. C. 2020. ‘Late Antiquity: The Age of Crowds?’ P&P 249 (November): 3–52. doi:10.1093/pastj/gtz063. Maurizio, L. 1998. ‘The Panathenaic Procession: Athens’ Participatory Democracy on Display.’ In Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth-Century Athens, edited by D. Boedeker and K. A. Raaflaub, 297–317. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mayer, E. 2012. The Ancient Middle Classes: Urban Life and Aesthetics in the Roman Empire 100 BCE–250 CE. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.

Subaltern community formation in antiquity 53 Maza, S. 2005. The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Mazzarino, S. 1983. Il pensiero storico classico, I–III. Bari: Laterza. Nafissi, M. 2004. ‘Class, Embeddedness and the Modernity of Ancient Athens.’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 46: 378–410. doi:10.1017/S0010417504000180. Nafissi, M. 2005. Ancient Athens and Modern Ideology. Value, Theory and Evidence in Historical Sciences: Max Weber, Karl Polanyi and Moses Finley. London: Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Nicolet, C. 1980 [1976]. The World of the Citizen in Republican Rome. Translated by P. S. Falla. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Ober, J. 1989. Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Osgood, J. 2006. Caesar’s Legacy: Civil War and the Emergence of the Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ossowski, S. 1963. Class Structure in the Social Consciousness. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe. Patlagean, E. 1977. Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance, 4e-7e siècles. Paris: Mouton. Penningroth, D. C. 2003. The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Raaflaub, K. A. 2004. The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Raaflaub, K. A., ed. 2008. Social Struggles in Archaic Rome: New Perspectives on the Conflict of the Orders. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9780470752753. Rawson, E. 1987. ‘Discrimina Ordinum: The Lex Julia Theatralis.’ PBSR 55: 83–114. doi:10.1017/S0068246200008965. Reddy, W. M. 1987. Money and Liberty in Modern Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511572555. Rosillo-López, C., ed. 2017. Political Communication in the Roman World. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Rostovtzeff, M. I. 1926. The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Scheidel, W. and S. J. Friesen. 2009. ‘The Size of the Economy and the Distribution of Income in the Roman Empire.’ JRS 99: 61–91. doi:10.3815/007543509789745223. Schloen, J. D. 2001. The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. doi:10.1163/9789004369849. Schwartz, S. 2010. Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Shaw, B. D. 2011. Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511762079. Ste. Croix, G. E. M. de. 1981. The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. London: Duckworth. Stedman Jones, G. 1983. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511622151. Taylor, C. 2017. Poverty, Wealth, and Well-Being: Experiencing Penia in Democratic Athens. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198786931.001. 0001.

54

Kostas Vlassopoulos

Taylor, C. and K. Vlassopoulos, eds. 2015. Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198726494.001. 0001. Toner, J. 1995. Leisure and Ancient Rome. Cambridge: Polity Press. Toner, J. 2009. Popular Culture in Ancient Rome. Cambridge: Polity Press. Toynbee, A. J. 1965. Hannibal’s Legacy: The Hannibalic War’s Effects on Roman Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tran, N. 2006. Les membres des associations romaines: le rang social des collegiati en Italie et en Gaules, sous le Haut-Empire. Rome: École française de Rome. Van der Linden, M. 2008. Workers of the World: Essays towards a Global Labor History. Leiden and Boston: Brill. doi:10.1163/ej.9789004166837.i-472. Van Nijf, O. 1997. The Civic World of Professional Associations in the Roman East. Leiden: Brill. Van Wees, H. 2008. ‘“Stasis, Destroyer of Men”: Mass, Elite, Political Violence and Security in Archaic Greece.’ In Sécurité collective et ordre public dans les sociétés anciennes, edited by C. Brélaz and P. Ducrey, 1–39. Geneva: Fondation Hardt. Van Wees, H. 2013. ‘Farmers and Hoplites: Models of Historical Development.’ In Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece, edited by D. Kagan and G. F. Viggiano, 222– 55. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. doi:10.1515/9781400846306. Van Wees, H. and N. Fisher. 2015. ‘The Trouble with “Aristocracy”.’ In Fisher and Van Wees 2015, 1–57. doi:10.2307/j.ctvvn9xw.4. Verboven, K. and C. Laes, eds. 2016. Work, Labour, and Professions in the Roman World. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Veyne, P. 2005. L’Empire gréco-romain. Paris: Seuil. Vidal-Naquet, P. 1986. The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World. Translated by A. Szegedy-Maszak. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Vlassopoulos, K. 2016. ‘Que savons-nous vraiment de la société athénienne?’ Annales (HSS) 71 (3): 659–81. doi:10.1353/ahs.2016.0118. Vlassopoulos, K. 2017. ‘Οι σύγχρονες θεωρίες της ιστοριογραφίας και η μελέτη της αρχαίας ιστορίας.’ In Μεθοδολογικά ζητήματα στις κλασικές σπουδές, edited by M. Tamiolaki, 225–42. Herakleion: Πανεπιστημιακές Εκδόσεις Κρήτης. Vlassopoulos, K. 2018. ‘Marxism and Ancient History.’ In How to Do Things with History: New Approaches to Ancient Greece, edited by D. Allen, P. Christensen and P. Millet, 209–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wahrman, D. 1995. Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ CBO9780511622175. Wood, E. M. 1988. Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy. London: Verso. Wood, E. M. 1995. Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511558344. Yavetz, Z. 1969. Plebs and Princeps. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zurbach, J. 2013. ‘La formation des cités grecques. Statuts, classes et systèmes fonciers.’ Annales (HSS) 68 (4): 957–98. doi:10.1017/S0395264900015079.

3

Southern Gaul from below The limits and possibilities of epigraphic documentation Cyril Courrier and Nicolas Tran

Who is below? A problem of sources and outlook Can we make a history of ‘subaltern’ viewpoints in antiquity? Can we rediscover the values and norms that underpinned the actions of the ‘Romans from below,’ understand them in light of their ‘social heritage’1—that is, their beliefs, their knowledge, their practices? What do we mean by ‘Romans from below’? Below in relation to what or to whom? Very ‘Thompsonian’ in their essence, such questions, already raised in the general introduction, remind us of our difficulties in writing history at the level of individuals, that of everyday men and women. These difficulties mirror not only the state of the sources, but also their exploitation. Indeed, it is well known that the available literary documentation throws a strong light on the elites, the senatorial and equestrian ranks, and indeed often emanates from them; it is only too rarely and indirectly interested in the plebeian strata. In addition, the ancient authors’ approach was above all a moral one: they only mentioned the role of the masses when their behaviour was part of a more general political crisis capable of attracting the attention of their readers, themselves being from aristocratic circles.2 ‘The’ crowd—sometimes referred to as plebs, other times populus, but very often simply multitudo, turba, vulgus—was ‘described’ only to better mock the infamy of its condition (imperita, perdita, infima, indocta, misera, etc.) and the inconstancy of its position (incondita, tumultuosa, ventosa, etc.).3 Worse, this conception was shared by many modern historians who, until relatively recently, unreservedly accepted these ancient authors’ judgement calls and ‘their caricature crowd psychology.’4 Zvi Yavetz was the first to show the limits of these schematic descriptions, and, since his seminal work of 1969,5 in line with the advances made by Eric Hobsbawm, Edward P. Thompson, George Rudé and others,6 scholars have largely reconsidered how to analyse the Urbs.7 Studies on urban crowds and their internal stratifications flourished, from Claude Nicolet’s ordines (1984) to Maria Letizia Caldelli’s pauperes (2012, 2018), with Emanuel Mayer’s ‘middle class’ (2012) and Paul Veyne’s plebs media (2000), and recently, the publication of the proceedings of a conference held in Rome in 2016 specifically devoted to the socio-economic fragmentation of plebeian circles.8 These works have arisen, from very different perspectives, from the same desire in the 1980s to think about the organisation of very heterogeneous groups,9 whose definition and outlines have since continued to be developed. Indeed, in the DOI: 10.4324/9781003005148-4

56

Cyril Courrier and Nicolas Tran

societies of the Roman world, factors of hierarchy were multiple and not necessarily parallel.10 These could be linked to status (servile or free by birth), civic rank (enjoyment of citizenship, belonging to a privileged order), gender, ethnicity or even socio-economic structures that arose in terms of resources and in relation to work (day labourer, long-term contract, master craftsman, entrepreneur, etc.), and even cultural practices. For this reason, and as Lucy Grig cautiously recalled in the introduction to a collective work at the very origin of this book, ‘we need to avoid viewing Roman society in terms of a tiny “elite” atop a huge, non-differentiated “non-elite.”’11 The question ‘who is below’ therefore seems timely in terms of this historical debate: indeed, introduced by Thompson, the concept of ‘history from below’ has recently experienced a resurgence of interest consisting not only, to refer to Mark Hailwood, in considering how to write a history from below12 but also in trying to define what this below might be: its composition, of course, but also and above all its internal functioning.13 Without always claiming allegiance to the tradition and methods of this stream of studies, specialists in antiquity have recently addressed the question. To do this, they moved the analysis to the field of identities, trying to rediscover the awareness that the Romans could have of the different hierarchies that structured their social environment, close ones (family relations, jobs and sociability) or more distant ones (relationship to the elite, involvement in political life), thus positioning themselves at the level of individuals and especially how they viewed their own situation and that of their peers or their superiors.14 The same concern has guided our research on southern Gaul,15 in particular on individuals, at first glance, one could qualify as ‘subaltern,’ since they belonged to the great majority of the population and were foreign to the elites of the cities and the empire.16 The interest of this geographical area is that it provides epigraphic documentation of undeniable richness compared to other regions of the Roman West. Southern Gaul—in reality the province of Gallia Narbonensis to which we can add the neighbouring city of Lyon—has some of the most abundant epigraphic corpora of the Roman Empire. Narbonne, Nîmes, Arles, Lyon and also smaller cities (Aix-en-Provence, Glanum, Valence, Vienne, etc.) have produced thousands of inscriptions pertinent to this subject. From a qualitative point of view, the ‘subaltern’ social groups occupy a prominent place. Indeed, the epigraphy of the major sea or river ports, as well as those located at the mouth of rivers, sheds more light on the world of urban professions, crafts and commerce than anywhere else.17 For example, a marginal group from the servile population of this milieu, made up of slaves and freedmen who worked alongside freeborn, is fairly well known.18 These major marketplaces aside, the richness of the epigraphy of southern Gaul also concerns the interior and societies born from the coexistence of indigenous and exogenous individuals. In this region, disturbed by the establishment of Roman colonists, who themselves came from various geographical and social backgrounds, these ‘subaltern’ people are also the simple incolae, Gallic inhabitants treated as second-rate inhabitants, in or in the vicinity of Roman colonies.19 As a result, southern Gaul is an excellent observatory of the multiplicity, and therefore of the complexity, of the hierarchies that structured the societies of the Empire between the end of the first century BC and the middle of the third century

Southern Gaul from below 57 AD.20 However, in this multifaceted territory, figuring out who is below quickly becomes a challenge. Conversely, while such an investigation is undoubtedly difficult, it seems at least possible, if not fruitful. Indeed, despite the biases induced by the nature of the available documentation (1) and the difficulties in locating the subaltern Romans (2), the case of southern Gaul makes it possible to go beyond vague statements and thus highlight a real social complexity (3).

A distorted vision: the extreme visibility of exceptions An initial problem is linked to the very nature of our documentation.21 Indeed, the epigraphy of southern Gaul appears to be clearly dominated by remarkable individuals who occupied the apex of plebeian circles. In other words, looking for ‘subaltern’ Romans, you will paradoxically hardly find anything but the elite, or the elites of the subaltern people. The freedmen of municipal elites (or simply gravitating around them), whose hopes for social advancement were based on family ascension, are the most conspicuous.22 In the second half of the second century AD, we know in Nîmes of Q. Avilius Q. f. Sennius Cominianus, whom the Senate bestowed with the public honour of a statue for his father, Q. Avilius Hyacinthus, himself of servile origin.23 By his acts of euergetism (financing spectacles, fitting the theatre with vela and especially through providing loans to the city magistrates), Hyacinthus appears to be a rich financier, at the doors of the notability. The name of his son, no doubt adopted from among the freedmen’s offsprings of two great Nîmes families, betrays his project. Nevertheless, his hopes founded on the adoption of young Sennius Cominianus were squashed by the latter’s untimely early death. The inscriptions from southern Gaul mostly leave a prominent place to high-calibre businessmen at the upper echelon of port communities (Arles, Narbonne, Lyon), where economic dynamism favoured the phenomena of social ascension.24 The Arlesian freedman and sevir Augustalis G. Paquius Pardalas was an emblematic figure of this milieu, even though his funeral altar, in marble, does not explicitly define him as a negotiator.25 Nevertheless, his personal status and his relations with various trades tend to designate him as such. The shipwrights, the utricularii (transport professionals)26 and the centonarii (textile professionals)27 chose him as their patron, just as in the port of Lattes, on the territory of the city of Nîmes, the fabri and the utricularii had relied on the sevir Augustalis T. Eppillius Astrapton for the financing of a dedication to the god Mars and to the genius of a community whose identity is debated.28 These titles and practices emphasise the importance of vertical relations in the hierarchy of the plebs of southern Gaul. Relationships of this type structured the intermediate social circles at the scale not only of the city but also of the civitas. Thus, the shipowner from Arles, M. Frontonius Euporus, was patron not only of the sailors of the Durance based in the administrative centre of the region29 but also of the utriculari of Ernaginum,30 a nearby village. The influence of this curator of the navicularii of Arles went beyond the framework of the colony, since the city of Aix-en-Provence awarded him the title of sevir Augustalis. This was also the case with the navicularius Q. Capitonius Probatus,31 who had the honour of being sevir in Lyon and Puteoli. He had been led from Rome, where he originated, by the circumstances of his

58

Cyril Courrier and Nicolas Tran

existence and his business, to Lyon, and to Puteoli, and, in all probability, through Arles.32 In Narbonne, too, long-distance traders constituted, at least in the second century AD (see subsequent discussion), the elite of the subaltern circles, in the image of P. Olitius Apollonius, navicularius and then negotiator, honoured in the middle of the second century by the seviri Augustales of which he himself was a member.33 It was also the trade in Baetican oil that made the fortune of Sex. Fadius Secundus Musa (Figure 3.1).34 The dedication made to him by the fabri subaediani in gratitude for a gift shows the success of a lifetime: magistrate of the colony, priest or, more likely, curator of a temple of imperial worship and grandfather of a young boy who may have been admitted into the senatorial order.35

Figure 3.1 Narbonne: inscription in honour of Sex. Fadius Secundus Musa Source: Musée Narbo Via (© photo: Centre Camille Jullian).

Southern Gaul from below

59

Without giving into the temptation of producing a catalogue, let us add that in Lyon the upper echelon of the plebeian hierarchy was merged with the realm of the nautae of the Rhône River and even more of the Saône River, socially close to local wine merchants.36 Among the first, originating from Lyon and its region, and particularly active in the surroundings of the city, emerges the figure of M. Primius Secundus, who was nauta (then prefect of the corporation), sevir Augustalis (then curator of the seviri Augustales) and member of the college of the fabri tignuarii, within which he exercised all the responsibilities before being chosen as patron.37 The same three associations can be found on the epitaph of his son, M. Primius Secundianus,38 who was also a merchant of fish-sauces (muria)—that is, the owner of commercial cargoes which he also transported: ‘This accumulation of titles shows that these were persons of high status, well established in the city, even if they did not have access to the office of a decurion, and only to that of a sevir Augustalis.’39 Of an even higher social rank were the nautae of the Saône River: M. Inthatius Vitalis, who was also a wine merchant, patron of the two collegia, as well as those of the utriculari and fabri of Lyon, was one of them (Figure 3.2).40 He obtained privileges which brought him closer to the elites of the city and those of equestrian dignity. The ordo of Alba thus enabled him to attend civic festivals among the decurions, literally to sit among them,41 a clear sign of the

Figure 3.2 Lyon: base of a statue offered to M. Inthatius Vitalis Source: Lugdunum, musée & théâtres romains (© photo: J.-M. Degueule, C. Thioc/Lugdunum).

60

Cyril Courrier and Nicolas Tran

scope of his business and the ties forged with the city of the Helvians, renowned for its vineyards.42 In Lyon, he was also patron of the equites (an unsolved riddle)43 and of the seviri, among whom was Toutius Incitatus, nauta, centonarius and negotiator frumentarius.44 Mostly natives outside the city of Lyon, the sailors of the Saône had come to settle in Lyon, attracted by the prosperity of the city. This was the case of the Trevir C. Apronius Raptor, nauta and wine merchant, who had the honour of the order of the decuriones in his city of origin,45 or of C. Novellius Ianuarius, of the city of the Vangions, in Upper Germany, sailor, curator and ultimately patron of the corporation.46 It was finally that of Aebutius Agatho, sevir in Arles and Apt, to whom the city of Glanum had entrusted the responsibility of its finances.47 A form of notability had evidently resulted from his commercial career as a source of enrichment. Can we therefore really count these members of the negotiating elites among the ‘subaltern’ Romans? The question might seem odd, because the documents that promote these professionals precisely aim to present them as exceptional individuals and, in particular, as superior to members of client communities. Should we therefore exclude the negotiatores, the navicularii or the nautae from a history from below? Why not, but by multiplying exclusions of this type, our study would soon be deprived of purpose, or almost deprived of purpose. In addition, this approach would be questionable, simply since it would not pay sufficient attention to the nature of the inscriptions preserved and to the individual accomplishments and career or life paths. As many shipowners and businessmen, Pardalas, Euporus and probably Apollonius were slaves, who rose upwards from their initial social status in the years following their emancipation. As for Vitalis, Raptor or Ianuarius, they mention that they had been ordinary members of the associations that they eventually ended up leading and even protecting. The question therefore is not only to judge whether they were subaltern or not, at their death, but also to try to determine when they would have ceased to be ‘subaltern.’ To use Michel Christol’s motto, epigraphic documentation occurs when the individual trajectory is completed or perfected, retaining only its most rewarding stages.48 As such, inscriptions are rhetorical constructions built on standards and conventions that need to be decoded.49 More generally speaking, it is undeniable that the epigraphy provides a distorted image of the population of ancient cities. It is a smooth, selective representation in which only the fairly well-off, or even privileged individuals, appear. However, insofar as Roman society was structured by the existence of a multiplicity of fine hierarchies, it is not enough to shift one’s gaze ‘vertically’ from one environment to another, to consider a lower or upper layer and to claim to access the (more) subordinate strata. The hierarchies were also parallel, without being watertight, hence the recurring impression of accessing only the top fraction of each milieu. The case of slaves is exemplary since, beyond a common inferiority of legal status, on the socio-economic level, the documentation highlights the better off. In Arles, the ministri Laribus from Trinquetaille offer a glimpse of Augustan-period slaves with a large nest egg, thanks to the benevolence of their masters. In fact, a few slaves were designated each year as servants of the Compitalia, the annual celebration of the Lares. The ministri sometimes formed a small group rich enough to finance a commemorative monument, in the form of an altar or a marble slab, which they installed

Southern Gaul from below 61 in their sanctuary.50 In Narbonne, the provincial capital and undoubtedly the seat of the offices of the equestrian procurator who managed the goods of the emperor, the imperial slaves, and on a lesser scale the colonial slaves, had also acquired affluence and prestige which contrasted with the general invisibility of the servile world in the city and the rest of the province. This was the case of first-century AD collegium salutare familiae tabellariorum Caesaris nostri, an association of imperial messengers.51 Likewise Faustus, coloniae servus, who had a vicaria: his epitaph, also dated to the first century AD, takes the form of a beautiful marble slab.52 In short, epigraphy ensures the greatest visibility to individuals who wished to put a title or a particular function forwards. The ministri Laribus are one of these groups, as are the seviri Augustales, in a somewhat later period and in a higher social sphere. Because there was nothing systematic about them, trade names also appear as distinctive attributes. Beyond epigraphic display, professional knowledge distinguished a minority of individuals from the mass of unskilled workers. This applied to the servile population, as it did among freemen. The Arles slaves Peregrinus53 and Dionysius54 were able to boast of their respective skills as treasurer (dispensator) and doctor. In Narbonne, the tomb of the argentarius Q. Fuficius was given to him by at least two of his slaves or former slaves, left in the anonymity of their legal condition and devoid of professional know-how,55 at least from the point of view of the epigraphic display.

Where is the ‘mass’ of subaltern peoples? So where are the poor? Where are the unskilled workers? They were essential to the smooth running of port economies, as evidenced in particular by the thousands of amphorae sherds discovered in the Rhône.56 A group of workers, anonymous to us now, ensured the loading and unloading of goods, their storage, their repackaging and their onward shipment, from the transhipment points these ports constituted. At Cabrières d’Aigues, about 30 km north of Aix-en-Provence, there is a relief which may appear to be a rare and modest exception to this invisibility.57 However, dated to the second century AD and depicting a hauling scene (on the nearby Durance?) of a boat loaded with barrels and amphorae, it undoubtedly adorned the mausoleum of a wealthy transporter and/or landowner, whose comfort of travel and trips between the estate and the city can be seen in the upper part of the relief, in the shape of the horse and carriage. In Arles, the famous landform of the longshoremen lends itself to a similar analysis,58 just like that of Colonzelle, east of Saint-Paul-TroisChâteaux, the capital of the Tricastini, where we can see the top of a loaded cargo on a boat equipped with a hauling mast with an attached cable.59 In Narbonne, saccarii and other ferrymen are likewise only attested through iconography and their depiction in the usual attire of slaves.60 The individuals who orchestrated these scenes of ‘subaltern’ work were surely not warehousemen. Besides, did the latter consider themselves to be professionals? We may suspect that many of them did not exercise one trade alone during the 12 months of the year. Indeed, in an economy strongly influenced by seasonality, working in the fields or in the city was undoubtedly necessary to meet one’s needs. The slaves were then moved by their masters,

62

Cyril Courrier and Nicolas Tran

and the freemen had to find work elsewhere. From this perspective, the lack of a unique activity (or one worthy of mention)61 was clearly not conducive to the positive identification of a profession that would have facilitated the visibility of this type of subordinate worker in our sources.62 To be subaltern was therefore—to use a typically ‘Spivakian’ vocabulary— to blend in, to be invisible, at least individually.63 The epigraphic references to Romans from below are furtive, because they are collective, and therefore carry little information. Thus, behind the Decumani Narbonenses (Figure 3.3), the Sextani Arelatenses or the Septimani Baeterrenses (according to the order of precedence transmitted by Pliny’s formula provinciae),64 loom the simple descendants of settlers, former soldiers of the legiones decima, sexta and septima, who honoured

Figure 3.3 Narbonne: homage of the Decumani Narbonenses to Iulia Domna Source: Musée Narbo Via (© photo: Centre Camille Jullian).

Southern Gaul from below

63

their successive patrons.65 Certainly, these names, participating in the collective memory of the Roman colonies, designated the entire civic body of these cities. Admittedly, the Italian population living in Narbonne, Arles or Béziers must have formed a heterogeneous group from when they settled onwards.66 However, the establishment of the colonies of veterans in southern Gaul constituted an essential moment in the history of the province and a lasting reference in memory of these communities, always attached to the reminder of their origin. Recognising themselves in these appellations reflects the pride of descending from veterans, rewarded for their bravery at the end of glorious campaigns.67 This feeling belonged to citizens who could doubtlessly be qualified as subaltern and ensured, in the long run, the cohesion of that component, among others, within the population of these colonies. Conversely, this facet of the identity of the Romans from below is, by definition, imperceptible in cities where indigenous structures had endured, such as Nîmes or Vienne. But in one case as in the other, the subaltern is also and especially confused with the Gallic incola, dominated, in all the aspects of his existence (wealth, civic integration, legal status), not only by the colonists but also by the descendants of native aristocrats who counted among the foreign clientelae of the imperatores at the end of the Republic. As a result, the invisibility of territories is a fairly general constant that only a few inscriptions allow us to glimpse. The dedication celebrating the construction of cellae to the god Larraso by magistri pagi, found in 1849 in Moux, on the edge of the city of Narbonne, on the side leading towards Carcassonne, suggests that the ancient indigenous communities, structured into pagi by the Roman authority, had not yet disappeared.68 However, they appear here only through their magistrates, of whom three of the four members (P. Usulenus Phileros, T. Alfidius Stabilio, M. Usulenus Charito) were the freedmen of wealthy elites who had settled their villae on the borders of the territory. The fourth (T. Valerius Senecio), on the other hand (the first on the list), was a native whose onomastics betray a provincial origin. He embodies ‘a world that will be described as village-based or local, heir to the indigenous world of the protohistoric period, with its cults and its own notables.’69 Looking at the professional colleges of the second and the beginning of the third century AD, a similar line of demarcation runs between the activities carried out by individuals sufficiently well-off to regularly break out of anonymity, gain access to the sevirate or even come into contact with the State70 and the others, known only or mainly by collective testimonies.71 Thus, in Arles, the naviculari appear both individually and collectively, unlike the lenunculari and centonarii. The first were boatmen who notably ensured links between the river port and its maritime outer ports. They have only been known since 2007 through an altar collectively dedicated to the genius of their corpus and by a statue of Neptune donated by one of their benefactors: P. Petronius Asclepiades.72 Likewise, centonarii are only known through a patron: G. Paquius Pardalas. Their economic sector had to be dynamic, however, given the intensity of pastoral activities in the Crau plain.73 More generally, however, ordinary members of the trades often remain in the shadows. Even if there are exceptions, among the body of the fabri tignuarii in particular,74 epigraphy tends to give more visibility to the heads of associations or their patrons than

64

Cyril Courrier and Nicolas Tran

their plebs (see the previous discussion). In the second century, such communities were an essential part of Arles’s social fabric,75 and no doubt they were even more numerous than the inscriptions known to date indicate. However, again, not all were on the same social level. A completely unequal epigraphic visibility suggests that the fabri navales, the fabri tignuarii and the utricularii, whose magistri never access the status of sevir, were probably of a higher social rank than the lapidarii Almanticenses, the centonarii or lenuncularii.76 No doubt the same was true of the visibility of their urban spaces and the lustre of their meeting places. Likewise, in the rest of the province, especially on its borders, epigraphical evidence very often only reveals the workers through their associations, themselves known through a single inscription: these individuals would be totally unknown to us had they not formed such communities (see also the subsequent discussion). Thus, in Ugernum (Beaucaire)77 and Tresques,78 two agglomerations located in the eastern part of the vast territory of Nîmes, the centonarii appear on two epitaphs which in fact mention a more noteworthy character (a magistrate and what appears to be a benefactress or the wife of an important member of the association, if not a patron).79 But even a larger city like Alba reveals little more. Admittedly, the regulation establishing a double foundation there by the centonarii, utricularii, dendrophori and fabri for the distribution of sportula80 constitutes an exceptional document which offers valuable insights not only on the hierarchy of associations within the civitas (where the dendrophori occupied a special place, since they contributed and received more than the other corporations) but also on the solidarity of these different collegiati, which had formed two common funds. For the rest of the city, however, only the cupari Vocronenses81 and the centonarii appear, with similar situations to Beaucaire and Tresques (epitaphs).82 Very often, it is also religious offerings that preserve the place of the association honoured by the benefactor through a divinity—like the ex-voto offered by L. Sanctius Marcus, civis Helvetius, to Silvanus in honour of the ratiarii superiores.83 In Vaison, Christol drew attention to a broken column possibly containing another tribute to the god Silvanus, for the benefit of the town’s utriculari.84 These groups were apparently having some difficulty in realising all their aspirations.85 However, we can imagine that they played a fundamental role in secondary towns and rural areas. But the notion of a ‘subaltern’ Roman becomes even more complex when we change scale and move away from the Rhône and the influence of Arles. Indeed, the Arles worker very frequently appears as a corporatus. This is much less evident in the capital, for example, no doubt for documentary reasons: the epigraphy of Narbonne is earlier and probably prior to the greater development of associations in Gaul, during the second and third centuries. However, even focusing on this period, a similar proliferation is not evident in the same proportions in Narbonne and Arles.86 Our perception of what a ‘subaltern’Roman could be is inevitably altered. The hierarchies into which these individuals fit do not present the same arrangement. They were thus able to condemn to oblivion the particularly humble workers who only achieved epigraphic visibility within the framework of associations, like the professionals of river transport, unknown in the context of Narbonne.87 At the same time, one also wonders

Southern Gaul from below 65 if a smaller development of the associations may not have levelled the social fabric by limiting the emergence and visibility of more noteworthy individuals. Looked at this way, the ‘subaltern’ Roman is perhaps less difficult to spot in the capital of the province, at least in the first century, than in the great port of Arles, because all the working people provided inscriptions similar in style that we can thus bring together and examine in series: a proclaimed technical knowledge, an assumed reputation, a well-marked individuality.88 However, as said before, the analysis must, as far as possible, not only reconstruct trajectories but also bear in mind that, from one case to another, the nuances, often difficult to distinguish, constitute signs of quite varied material realities (and other realities as well).89 The case of the Vettieni of Narbonne is particularly interesting in this regard. C. Vettienus T. f. Pol(lia) had exercised the profession of mensularius (money changer) in Narbonne in the last two decades of the first century BC.90 The reference to the Pollia tribe makes him a shopkeeper whose family origins go back to the early population of Narbonne, whether he is the descendant of a settler from 118 BC or an Italian immigrant attracted by the prosperity of the region. His socio-economic profile, typical of the epigraphy of the capital, is characterised by a certain level of wealth (he owned slaves) and by the display of undeniable professional pride. Equally interesting is the attention paid to his ‘descendants’: his freedman, Metrodorus, himself had a freedman, Eros, whose enrichment can be assessed by the yardstick of his own epitaph, a moulded marble slab, which he also erected for his patron.91 He was able to marry a freeborn woman (Iulla). This rise is suggestive: the freed ‘heir’had entered the world of the freeborn at the same time as he changed his economic situation. In this specific case, parallel hierarchies presented a concordant arrangement. This was far from always being the case.

Limits to possibilities Due to the lack of sources and the multiplicity of hierarchies that have finely stratified plebeian circles, the ancient historian finds himself in a delicate situation considering this ‘below’: he touches on a complexity that is difficult to organise in a simple way. But, are we perhaps mistaken when wondering about the Romans whose inscriptions evoke the titles awarded by the city or professional associations, or the status of specialised workers? Aren’t the subaltern Romans precisely the ‘group without a rank’ deprived of any distinctive quality put forward by epigraphy, like these very numerous epitaphs, simple in their form (stelae with rounded top) as in their text, and which often only convey the names of the deceased, without any further details on the profession, the family, membership in a community or social rank? An affirmative answer to these questions would, once again, hardly be encouraging, since it would lead to the observation that the subaltern Romans are, in essence, doomed to escape all precise knowledge. In this regard, the approach proposed by the ‘linguistic turn,’ which makes language a constitutive element of the social configuration, is an attractive one. Indeed, the communication paradigm tends to dissolve the stratifications into discursive strategies. In this way, reasoning in terms of cultures and group ideologies only comes at best from an etic perspective, from an intellectual construction,

66

Cyril Courrier and Nicolas Tran

foreign to the eyes of contemporaries. In an article recently devoted to a rereading of the work of Thompson, Simona Cerutti usefully attempted to adapt the concept of history from below to the framework provided by the linguistic turn. Following a very Foucauldian approach, according to which language is essentially an instrument of social domination, she thus proposed to extend it to individuals who, precisely, have lost what she presents as a ‘battle,’ that of language, and thus found themselves, for various reasons, in a position of momentary weakness, whatever their rank.92 In doing so, they lost the struggle for legitimacy, turning the ‘subaltern’ into the ‘forgotten’ of history, the memory of which would need to be saved. By adapting the paths set out by Cerutti to our study, would not the subaltern Roman be the one to lose the battle of epigraphic display? Is this type of analysis of heuristic interest? The answer is more nuanced than it seems. Indeed, even the category—not least to say the non-category—of ‘without rank’ shows signs of heterogeneity and hierarchy. Among the funerary monuments of Arles, a small series of funeral stelae with portraits, made in the first half of the first century, particularly stand out.93 One was acquired by freedwoman Chia for herself and her patroness, who was a slave in the first half of her life (Figure 3.4).94 M. Iulius Felix,

Figure 3.4 Arles: funerary stele of Chia and her patroness Source: Musée départemental Arles antique (© photo: J.-L. Maby, L. Roux).

Southern Gaul from below

67

Figure 3.5 Arles: funerary stele of M. Iulius Felix Source: Musée départemental Arles antique (© photo: J.-L. Maby, L. Roux).

freedman of Marcus, bought another stela during his lifetime to mark the burial he shared with his relatives (Figure 3.5).95 These intricately carved stelae must have been valuable objects, so it seems impossible to classify their sponsors among the poorest population. Above all, nothing proves that their lack of title and simplicity of funeral form result from a low position, even momentary, compared to that of a licensed association member or a specialised worker, wishing to be presented as such. Admittedly, the quality of a funeral monument constitutes a very crude social marker, because nothing says that the pronounced taste or the relative indifference towards this type of object was proportional to the wealth of the person involved. But the same goes for the appetite for civic titles and their display, as well as the desire to have one’s profession featured on one’s gravestone. From this angle, isn’t the etic gaze precisely the one that gives social actors the will to wage a ‘battle’ whose basis and existence are sometimes difficult to define?

68

Cyril Courrier and Nicolas Tran

Additionally, if we follow the argument that makes language a constitutive element of social cohesion, reasoning in terms of hierarchies does not necessarily come from an external perspective. Noting that the lines between elites and common people, between popular culture and legitimate culture, are not fixed, Cerutti affirmed that the only possible definition of ‘below’ must free itself from these hierarchies produced by the sources. The shift in gaze is interesting and potentially the bearer of fruitful historiographical discussions.96 However, it cannot lead to a monopoly of the history from below, because ‘in reality, these are social groups in a relationship of domination and subordination to each other.’97 The visibility or invisibility of social actors in southern Gaul is linked not only to a battle for legitimacy but to the fact that they fit into hierarchies allowing them to do so, even in their ability to write history. In this sense, it would be useful, following an approach that leads back to the agency of Thompson, to take into account concrete social conditions and to reason in terms of feelings of belonging to entities—for which we need to rediscover the outlines and the relative arrangement, in spite of the lack of information in the sources. It is one thing to consider without due caution the declared membership of a social group; it is quite another to reduce the existence of that group to a discursive strategy constructed by language. On the contrary, the experience of Gaul’s ‘subaltern’ groups appears to be very largely determined by the influence of the vertical relationships that we have mentioned so far. It even constitutes the richness of an approach that integrates this verticality into the analysis, turning this limit into a possibility. In this chapter, we will only take two examples: the integration of this verticality and the reaction to it. An epigraphic curiosity from the city of Arles has not failed to surprise the modern historian: the total (or almost total) absence of negotiatores and mercatores.98 How do we account for such a situation, which contrasts sharply with that of Lyon, Narbonne or even Ostia, where negotiatores constitute the most frequently attested profession?99 The chance of discoveries, among nearly 900 known tituli, could not alone explain this oddity. A recently advanced hypothesis is that they would have voluntarily chosen not to mention their trade commitments.100 Why? Because they had a more valuable dimension to their social identity to promote: that of sevir Augustalis. Indeed, a previous prosopographic study, based on onomastic criteria, is thought to have discovered a split between two groups of the Arlesian working world. The Latin cognomina are well represented in the first, which brings together individuals working in professions other than shipping and trade. On the other hand, two known naviculari out of three have Greek cognomina, as do three quarters of the seviri Augustales. It is all the more likely that such professionals ‘hide’ behind the documented seviri Augustales and, in particular, behind those who combined wealth and geographic mobility. The proportion of freeborn would therefore have been higher in jobs such as construction, naval carpentry or river transport, for example, which could guarantee a certain level of wealth. On the other hand, the proportion of freedmen would have been higher in the most lucrative trades, maritime trade and commerce on a large scale. These activities demanded capital that only wealthy patrons could

Southern Gaul from below 69 provide. On the socio-professional level, the elite of the servile population therefore seem to occupy a higher place than that of the well-off freeborn, as if the hierarchy of the working world had reversed the legal divide between men born free and slaves. However, this type of trade was so lucrative that it allowed its actors to escape their condition and the aristocratic contempt of their trades and the status of those who practised it. In other words, behind these seviri Augustales from Arles who did not mention the origin of their fortunes is hidden the vertical social relations that pushed them to internalise aristocratic norms in an attitude of mimicry towards civic elites.101 But, is it that what was valid for the elite of plebeian circles was also valid for all the plebs? We cannot take this for granted. The professional pride shown by tradespeople suggests, for example, a mindset that could vary from one layer of the social hierarchy to another.102 In addition, the influence of vertical relations did not apply only between economic elites and ordinary workers. It percolated through the entire social fabric, sometimes even causing a surprising inversion of the expected hierarchies. A good example is undoubtedly provided by a famous lost inscription, that of the pagani pagi Lucreti, whose text, known by a copy of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, does not present serious problems.103 These pagani lived on the fringes of Arles’s territory, opposite the capital of the colony. Their village, established around the priory of Saint-Jean-de-Garguier de Géménos, in the Huveaune Valley, revealed several epitaphs of first-century peregrini and of new Roman citizens that were created at some point later on.104 However, the inscription in question here, engraved under or shortly after the principate of Antoninus Pius, reveals that these border inhabitants struggled to gain recognition for free access to the baths of the capital that their status as Arlesians guaranteed them.105 The inhabitants of Arles and the colonial authorities must have found it difficult to recognise Gallic people from the distant countryside as compatriots. Yet the legal promotion of their community was four decades old. The tensions and the negotiations mentioned show how difficult it was for the pagani to obtain treatment on an equal footing, and not as second-class Arlesians. However, the profile of the individual who helped them in their journey is also remarkable. These descendants of peregrini, and therefore freemen, gave themselves a former slave as their protector, in the person of the sevir Augustalis Q. Cornelius Zosimus. Was he a negotiator, retired to the countryside after making his fortune? Nothing is known of him, and Zosimus might have been the procurator of a wealthy landowner. In any case, this character was surely chosen for his high status, which enabled him to attain the rank of sevir and which also gave him the respect of the pagani. They made him an ‘extraordinary’ individual within the pagus. This single example therefore illustrates how distinct hierarchies could both intersect and give a relative character to each of them. None were valid in all areas. It also illustrates the influence of vertical relationships between preexisting groups on the daily life of subaltern Romans. Finally, it throws a furtive light on the strategies of these subaltern Romans, to compensate for certain aspects of their inferiority, by bringing into play, and the hierarchies and their places within these hierarchies.

70

Cyril Courrier and Nicolas Tran

Conclusions Far from being an undifferentiated mass, the plebeian circles of southern Gaul appear to be a finely layered world with multiple tensions. However, the very nature of the epigraphic documentation favours the visibility of individuals who present themselves as exceptional to the detriment of the most subaltern Romans, not to mention the marginalised, the persecuted, by nature totally foreign to a system as conformist as the epigraphic habit.106 In doing so, it complicates our view of what a subaltern Roman might be, at the same time as it obscures thinking about this complexity. We believe that the most fruitful approach consists of accepting this hierarchical complexity in the analysis of plebeian experiences. That said, it is true that at the present time there is a lack of conceptualisation of social relations that takes into account the point of view/social identity of the actors and succeeds in reconstructing the interpenetrations of hierarchies as the Romans saw them while classifying what came under discursive strategies and what proceeded from feelings of belonging.107 However, this is the price for overcoming the all too simplistic dichotomy between ‘elite’ and ‘people’ which, no more in the Roman world than today, does not help to understand the subtlety of hierarchies and internal social relations in subaltern circles.

Notes * We extend our warmest thanks to Katia Schörle for translating this article into English. This translation benefited from the support of the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme (Aix-Marseille University—CNRS). 1 Inglebert 2005, 5. 2 A finding that we owe to Virlouvet 1985, 6. On the literary sources relating to plebeian circles and their limits, see Kröss 2017, 71–171, although the ‘inclusive’ definition of the urban plebs as the entire population of the capital—free citizens, freedmen, but also slaves and foreigners—is eminently questionable (sources show otherwise: see Courrier 2017, 107), as well as the thesis which proceeds from this ‘non-definition,’ that of an amorphous mass, controlled by the aristocracy. In the same vein, see the excellent remarks by Flaig 2019, 77, footnote 5. On the plebs at the end of the Republic, see also Knopf 2018, 23–53. 3 Courrier 2014, 1–3 and 427–8; Kröss 2017, 24–29 and 113–8. 4 Veyne 2005, 153. See also the introduction and Magalhães de Oliveira’s chapter in this volume. 5 Yavetz 1969. See also Brunt’s article: Brunt 1966. 6 See Magalhães de Oliveira and Courrier, this volume. 7 To cite three of the most symbolic works: Le Gall 1971; Veyne 1976; Flaig 2019 (first published in 1992). 8 Nicolet 1984 (esp. Cohen’s (1984) article on apparitores; on this group, see David 2019), as well as Nicolet 1985; Veyne 2005 (on the meaning of plebs media in antiquity, Courrier 2014, 299–421); Caldelli and Ricci 2012 and Caldelli 2018; Mayer 2012; Tran and Vandevoorde 2018, 229–309. From a more cultural perspective, Clarke 2003; Toner 2009 or Knapp 2011, but without any reflection on internal hierarchies, beyond the observation of a common, but necessarily relative, inferiority to the elites. 9 In a landmark debate that pitted the supporters of a ‘Rome, society of orders’ against those of a ‘Rome, society of classes.’ See Courrier and Tran 2018, 251–5 (with previous bibliographical references).

Southern Gaul from below

71

10 Nicolet 1985. On this question, see also the suggestive introductory note by Veyne 2005, 117, footnote 1. 11 Grig 2017b, 17–8, 32 and 36. 12 On this aspect, see Vlassoupoulos, this volume. 13 Hailwood 2013; Cerutti 2015. See also Taylor, this volume. 14 Inter alia: Joshel 1992 and Cristofori 2016 on the social identity of workers; Mouritsen 2011 on that of the freedmen; Magalhães de Oliveira 2012; Flohr 2013 and Tran 2013a on the imaginaire of artisans and traders and the world of the taberna; on the plebs of Rome and its culture, Courrier 2014; Vandevoorde 2014, on the world of the seviri Augustales; on that of the collegiati, Van Nijf 1997; Tran 2006 and Van Haeperen 2018. 15 This chapter is an extension of a recently published study devoted to the colony of Arles (Courrier and Tran 2018). As a result, it did not seem useful to us to provide a full historiographical assessment that can be found there (see also Magalhães de Oliveira and Courrier, this volume), and we chose instead to concentrate on the methodological biases and on the heuristic possibilities of the epigraphic documentation from southern Gaul. Inevitably, some evidence overlaps, for which the reader must forgive us. 16 On the definition of ‘below,’ see Vlassopoulos, this volume. 17 To name a few recent studies: on Narbonne, Bonsangue 2016; Christol 2020 as well as the forthcoming Inscriptions latines de Narbonnaise, edited by Sandrine AgustaBoularot and Cyril Courrier (herewith cited as ILN Narbonne); on Arles and its outer ports, Christol 2010a and Tran 2016; on Nîmes, Vandevoorde 2014; Lyon, Bérard 2012. 18 Tran 2013b. 19 In Arles: Christol 2008; in Valence: Tran 2015a. 20 For obvious reasons, the picture cannot be complete. On gender issues, e.g., see Garraffoni’s chapter, this volume. 21 On epigraphy as a discourse analysed from the perspective of port communities, see Arnaud and Keay 2020a, with previous bibliography. 22 Christol 2010b, 501–17. 23 AE 1982.681: Ordo sanctissim(us) | Q(uinto) Avilio Q(uinti) f(ilio) Sennio | Palatina (tribu) Comini|ano in honorem pa|tris eius Q(uinti) Avili Hyacin|thi quod is, praeter libera|litates spectaculorum quae | sponte ededit vel postulata | non negavit, velis novis sum|ptu suo in theatro positis cum | suis armamentis, saepe pecunia | mutua quae a magistratibus | petebatur data actum publicum | iuverit. Cf. Christol 2010b, 483–99. 24 Christol 2010b, 508. 25 CIL 12.700: D(is) M(anibus) | G(ai) Paqui Optati | lib(erti) Pardalae IIIIII(viri), | Aug(ustalis) col(onia) Iul(ia) Pat(erna) Ar(elate), | patron(i) eiusdem | corpor(is) item patron(i) | fabror(um) naval(ium), utric(u)lar(iorum) | et centonar(iorum), C(aius) Paquius | Epigonus cum liberis suis, | patrono optime merito. See Tran 2016, 263–4. 26 See M.-T. Raepsaet-Charlier’s recent comment in ILN Narbonne 176 on CIL 12.*283, a bronze tessera discovered in Narbonne in 1766 before being transferred to the Séguier collection in Nîmes and that she interprets as c(ollegium) u(triculariorum) N(arbonensium). Declared as false by Otto Hirschfeld, it has subsequently been reconfirmed by numerous researchers on the basis of comparisons with other tesserae. 27 Liu 2009. 28 AE 2003.1142: Deo Marti Aug(usto) | et Gen(io) col(oniae). IIIIIIvir | Aug(ustalis) T(itus) Eppil(ius) Astrapton | fabr(is) et utric(ularis) Lattar(ensibus) | [ob] mer(ita) eor(um). This restitution is that of Christol 2010b, 391–404; Christol and Tran 2014, 24–25 (with the elements of the debate). 29 Christol 2008, 183. 30 CIL 12.982: [D(is)] M(anibus), || M(arci) Frontoni Eupori, | IIIIIIvir(i) Aug(ustalis) col(onia) Iulia | Aug(usta) Aquis Sextis, navicular(ii) | mar(itimi) Arel(atensis), curat(oris) eiusd(em) corp(oris), | patrono nautar(um) Druen|ticorum et utric(u)larior(um) | corp(oratorum) Ernaginens(i)um, | Iulia Nice, uxor, | coniugi carissimo.

72

Cyril Courrier and Nicolas Tran

31 CIL 13.1942: D(is) M(anibus) | Q(uinti) Capitoni Probati | senioris domo Rom(a) | IIIIIIvir(i) Aug(ustalis) Lugudun(i) | et Puteolis | navic(u)lario marino. | Nereus et Palaemon | liberti patrono | quod sibi vivus insti|tuit posteribusq(ue) suis | et sub ascia dedicav(erunt). 32 Tran 2016, 259. 33 CIL 12.4406 = ILN Narbonne 124: Dec(reto) (se)vir(orum) | Augustal(ium). | P(ublio) Olitio | Apol(l)onio, | (se)vir(o) Aug(ustali) et | navic(ulario) c(olonia) I(ulia) P(aterna) C(laudia) N(arbone) M(artio) | ob merita (et) liberali|tates eius; qui | honore decreti | usus inpendium | remisit et | statuam de suo | posuit. 34 Christol 2020, 256–7. 35 CIL 12.4393 = ILN Narbonne 69. 36 On river transport corporations in Lyon, see Bérard 2012. On the organisation of trade in Lyon, see Christol 2010b, 527–8 and 605–13. 37 CIL 13.1967. 38 CIL 13.1966: D(is) M(anibus) || et memoriae aeternae M(arci) Primi Secundiani IIIIIIvir(i) Aug(ustalis) | c(olonia) C(opia) C(laudia) Aug(usta) Lug(uduni) curator(is) eiusd(em) cor|por(is) nautae Rhodanic(i) Arare na|vigant(is) corporat(i) inter fabros | tign(arios) Lug(uduni) consist(entes) negot(iatoris) muriar(ii). | M(arcus) Primius Augustus fil(ius) et heres patri | karissim(o) ponend(um) cur(avit) et sub asc(ia) ded(icavit). 39 ‘Cette accumulation de titres montre qu’il s’agit de notables bien implantés dans la ville, même s’ils n’accèdent pas au décurionat, mais seulement au sévirat augustal.’ Bérard 2012, 136–7. 40 CIL 13.1954: M(arco) Inthatio M(arci) fi[l(io)] | Vitali negotiat(ori) vinar(io) | Lugud(uni) in kanabis con|sist(enti) curatura eiusdem | corpor(is) bis funct(o) item q(uin)|q(uennali) nautae Arare navig(anti) | patrono eiusd(em) corporis | patron(o) eq(uitum) R(omanorum) IIIIIIvir(orum) utri|c(u)lar(iorum) fabror(um) Lugud(uni) con|sist(entium) cui ordo splendidis|simus civitat(is) Albensium | consessum dedit. | Negotiatores vinari(i) [Lug(uduni)] in kanab(is) consist(entes) pat[rono], ob cuius statuae ded[ica]|tione sportul(as) | (denarios) X[---] dedit. 41 Christol 2010b, 606–7 and 616. 42 Plin. NH 14.4.25. Lauxerois 1983, 94–97. 43 Christol 2010b, 528 and footnote 47. 44 CIL 13.1972: D(is) M(anibus) || et quieti aeternae | Touti Incitati IIIIIIvir(i) | Aug(ustalis) Lug(uduni) et naut(ae) Arar(ici) item | centonario Lug(uduni) consis|tent(i) honorato negotia|tori frumentario. | Toutius Marcellus lib(ertus) | [p]atrono piissimo et sibi vi|[vus p]osuit et sub ascia dedicav(it) | [opt]o felix et hilaris vivas qui | [leg]eris et Manibus meis be|ne optaveris. 45 CIL 13.1911: C. Apronio | Aproni | Blandi fil(io) | Raptori, | Trevero, | dec(urioni) eiusd(em) civitatis, | n(autae) Ararico, patrono | eiusdem corporis, | negotiatores vinari(i) | Lugud(uni) con[sist]entes | bene de se m[ere]nti | patro[n]o. | Cuius statua[e d]dica|tione sportulas | ded(it) negot(iatoribus) sing(ulis) corp(oratis) denarios) V; and 11179: [Dis Ma]nibus | [C. Aproni R]aptoris, Tre|[veri, dec(urionis) eiusd(em) ci]vitat(is), negot|[iatoris ? vinari(i)] in canab(is), nautae | [Ararici, patro]ni utrorumq(ue) cor|[porum, ---] Aproniae Belli|[cae ? ponen]d(um) curaverunt et [sub ascia] dedicaverunt. 46 CIL 13.2020: C. Novellio Ianuario, | civi Vangioni, nautae | Ararico, curatori et | patrono eiusd[em c]orp(oris), | Novelli Faus[tus et ? Sote]ri|cus de se [merenti ?] | patrono in[dulgen]tis|simo. C[uius statu]a[e] | dedica[tione ded]it | sportulas u[niversis n]a[u]|tis praesent[ibus] (denarios) III. | L(ocus) d(atus) d(ecreto) n(autarum) Araric[or]um, | dedicata pr(idie) [---] Sept(embres) | Sabino II et [Anullin]o | co(n)s(ulibus). 47 CIL 12.1005: [D. M. et ?] || [me]mori(a)e aeterna[e] | [A]ebuti Agathon[is], | [se]viro Aug(ustali) corp(orato) [col(oniae) Iul(iae) | Pat]er(nae) Arel(atensium), curat(ori) e[ius|de]m corp(oris) bis, item IIII[II|vi]ro col(oniae) Iul(iae) Apt[ae], nau|[ta]e

Southern Gaul from below

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70

71 72

73 74 75 76 77

73

Ararico, curator[i] | peculi(i) r(ei) p(ublicae) Glanico(rum), qui | vixit annos LXX, | Aebutia Eutychia patro|no erga se pientissimo. Christol 2010b, 528. Arnaud and Keay 2020a, 37–40. Tran 2014. CIL 12.4449 = ILN Narbonne 106: [ collegium sa]|[l]utar[e f]amilia[e] | [t]abellarior[um] [C]ae[s]aris n(ostri) qua[e] | [su]n[t] Narbone, in | domu. | [I]n f(ronte) p(edes) CCCXXV, | [i]n a(gro) p(edes) C[.]CV. See Tran 2015b. CIL 12.4451 = ILN Narbonne 108: Fausti col(oniae) | Narbon|e(n)sium servi | vicaria, | hic est sepu(l)t(a). | Poethus con|tubernalis. See Moisand 2019. CIL 12.856: Peregrino, | Antistiae Piae | dispensatori, | Antistia Piae liberta | Cypare, contubernali | pientissimo. CIL 12.725: D(is) M(anibus) | Dionysi, | medici, | Iul(ius) Hermes, | alumno. CIL 12.4457 = ILN Narbonne 184: Q(uintus) Fuficius Q(uinti) T(iti) l(ibertus) [---] | argent[arius --- ?] | Eleuter, Philotis [--- ?] | de suo [fecerunt ?]. The same situation has been observed in other western ports such as Seville, Ostia or Aquileia (Rougier 2020, esp. 13–49). Espérandieu 1925, no. 6699. Espérandieu 1907, no. 164. Espérandieu 1925, no. 6779, and Blanc 1976. Espérandieu 1907, no. 685 and Lassalle and Jézégou 2018. Arnaud and Keay 2020a, 45: ‘This probably means that those occupations mentioned in inscriptions were associated with a certain level of social legibility.’ Rougier 2015 and 2020, 138. Spivak 1988; Courrier and Tran 2018, 261–4; Arnaud and Keay 2020a, 39. See also Taylor, this volume. Plin. NH 3.37. Christol 2010b, 129–45. Narbonne: CIL 12.4344–9, 5366 (ILN Narbonne 40–46); Arles: CIL 12.701 and in Rome, CIL 6.1006, 41045; Béziers: CIL 12.4227. For Arles, see Christol 2008, 132, 191–201. For Narbonne, Gayraud 1981, 149–59 and 181–6. Christol 2008, 126 and 2015. CIL 12.5370 = ILN Narbonne 279: T(itus) Valerius C(ai) f(ilius) Senecio, | P(ublius) Usulenus Veientonis l(ibertus) | Phileros, | T(itus) Alfidius T(iti) l(ibertus) Stabilio, | M(arcus) Usulenus M(arci) l(ibertus) Charito, | magistri pagi ex reditu fani | Larrasoni cellas faciund(as) | curaverunt idemque probaverunt. ‘Un monde que l’on qualifiera de villageois ou de local, héritier du monde indigène de la période protohistorique, avec ses cultes et ses propres notables.’ Christol 2010b, 469. On this point, the documentation comes from Narbonne, in the second century (Gayraud 1981, 534–6 and the comments of Maria Luisa Bonsangue in ILN Narbonne 121 = CIL 12.4398 and 124 = 4406), but also refers to Arles and to the famous inscription of Beirut CIL 3.14165–8. Rougier 2020, 139–44. AE 2009.823: ------ | [Genio cor|po]ris len|[u]nclari | sacrum; AE 2009.822: Numinibus Auggg(ustorum) nnn(ostrorum), | honori corporis renunclariorum, P(ublius) Pe|tronius Asclepiades donum dedit. See also Christol 2010a, 409–12; Christol and Tran 2014, 17–20 and Tran 2020, 85–86, 98. Badan, Brun and Congès 1995; Marty, Courrier and Fontaine 2019, 64–67. CIL 12.714, 722, 726, 728, 736, 738. Christol 2008, 182–7. Christol 2010a, 409 and 2010b, 525–6; Tran 2016. CIL 12.2824: D(is) M(anibus) | Mocciae C(ai) f(iliae) | Silvinae | centonari | Ucernenses | ob merita.

74

Cyril Courrier and Nicolas Tran

78 CIL 12.2754 = AE 1999.1032 = ICalvet 92: D(is) M(anibus). T(ito) Craxxio | Severino, | collegium | centonar|io{rio}rum | m(agistro) s(uo) colle|g(a)eq(ue) p(osuit) ex | fun[eraticio]. 79 Christol 2010b, 505 and 522. 80 ILN Alba 7. 81 CIL 12.2669 = ILN Alba 61: D(is) M(anibus) | Max{x}imi, | cupari Vocro|nenses. 82 AE 1976.412 = ILN Alba 23: [D(is)] M(anibus) | C(ai) Petroni (Cai) f(ilii) | Vol(tinia) Iunio[ris], | decur(ionis) Albe[nsium], | iuveni inno[centi] | patron(o) IIIIII[vir(orum)] | et centonari[orum] | Petroni Barba[rus ?] | et Nice paren[tes]. Evidence from Vaison is usually associated with this: CIL 12.1384, which mentions a group of opifices lapidari and their action ob sepulturam of a deceased member of the college. 83 CIL 12.2597 = ILN Vienne 838: Deo Silva|no, pro salu|[t]e ratiarior(um) | superior(um), a|micor(um) suor(um), | pos(u)it L(ucius) Sanct(ius) | Marcus, civis Hel(vetius), | v(otum) s(olvit) l(ibens) m(erito); | d[e] suo d(edit). 84 ILGN 209: Sil[vano] | base[m] | utric(u)laris | Vas(iensium) Voc(ontiorum) | donum d(at). See Christol 2010b, 543. 85 Christol 2010b, 515. See also CIL 13.2002. 86 Christol 2010b, 533–4. 87 Unless the nauclarii, known by various inscriptions (CIL 12.4493 = ILN Narbonne 234; CIL 12.4495 = ILN Narbonne 235; CIL 12.4701 = ILN Narbonne 236), had this function. 88 Bonsangue 2016. 89 Christol 2010b, 533. 90 CIL 12.4491 = ILN Narbonne 229: [C(aius) V]ettienus T(iti) f(ilius) P[ol(lia)], mensularius, heic sepultus est. 91 Christol 1997, 271–80. See also CIL 12.5226 and 6016. 92 Cerutti 2015. 93 Gaggadis-Robin and Heijmans 2015. 94 CIL 12.891: [---]raniae Sex{s}t(i) l(ibertae) | [Ph]ilemationi C(h)ia l(iberta) | [si]bi et patronae | viva fecit. 95 BCTH 1908.213 = CAG 13–5.264: [---]us M(arci) l(ibertus) Felix uiuos | [fecit s]ibi et Coeliae | [---] Maxumae et | [---]ae M(arci) f(iliae) Pollae || [---] Potitus M(arcus) Iulius M(arci) f(ilius) | ------ ? 96 As Gottesman, this volume. 97 ‘Dans la réalité, ce qui existe, ce sont des groupes sociaux qui sont dans des rapports de domination et de subordination les uns par rapport aux autres.’ Cuche 2010, 78. 98 The recent discovery of a dedication, in Fos-sur-Mer, on the territory of the Arles colony, by a nauclerus cor[---] to an association of negotiantes subaediani, is all the more remarkable (Courrier 2015). 99 Rougier 2020, 134. 100 Tran 2016, 263–7; Courrier and Tran 2018, 264–5. 101 Christol 2010b, 506. 102 Courrier 2014, 277–86. 103 CIL 12.594: [P]agani pagi Lucreti qui sunt fini|bus Arelatensium loco Gargario, Q(uinto) Cor(nelio) | Marcelli lib(erto) Zosimo, IIIIIIvir(o) Aug(ustali) col(onia) Iul(ia) | Paterna Arelate, ob honorem eius. Qui notum (sic) fecit | iniuriam nostram omnium saec[ulor]um sacra|tissimo principi T(ito) Aelio Antonino [Aug(usto) Pio. Te]r Romae | misit, per multos annos ad praesides pr[ovinci]ae perse|cutus est iniuriam nostram suis in[pensis e]t ob hoc | donavit nobis inpendia quae fecit, ut omnium saecu|lorum sacratissimi principis Imp(eratoris) Caes(aris) Antonini Aug(usti) Pii | beneficia durarent permanerentque quibus frueremur | [oleo] et balineo gratuito quod ablatum erat paganis | quod usi fuerant amplius annis XXXX. The version is that by Christol 2004, 97 and 95, and differs from Gascou 2000a. 104 Gascou 2000b.

Southern Gaul from below

75

105 For another interpretation (a local conflict, limited to the pagus Lucretius), see the bibliography in Courrier and Tran 2018, 266–7, footnote 125. 106 Hailwood 2013. See Magalhães de Oliveira and Courrier, this volume. 107 See Vlassopoulos in this volume, based on David Cannadine’s work.

Bibliography Agusta-Boularot, S. and E. Rosso, eds. 2014. Signa et tituli 2. Corpora et Scholae: Lieux, pratiques et commémoration de la vie associative en Gaule méridionale et dans les régions voisines. Nîmes: École antique de Nîmes. Arnaud, P. and S. Keay. 2020a. ‘Inscriptions and Port Societies: Evidence, “Analyse du Discours,” Silences and Portscapes.’ In Arnaud and Keay 2020b, 36–62. doi:10.1017/ 9781108665278.002. Arnaud, P. and S. Keay, eds. 2020b. Roman Port Societies. The Evidence of Inscriptions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108665278. Badan, O., J.-P. Brun and G. Congès. 1995. ‘Les bergeries romaines de la Crau d’Arles: les origines de la transhumance en Provence.’ Gallia 52 (1): 263–310. Bérard, F. 2012. ‘Les corporations de transport fluvial à Lyon à l’époque romaine.’ In Collegia. Le phénomène associatif dans l’Occident romain, edited by M. Dondin-Payre and N. Tran, 134–54. Bordeaux: Ausonius. Blanc, A. 1976. ‘La scène de halage de Colonzelle (Drôme).’ RAN 9: 247–50. Bonsangue, M. L. 2016. ‘Les hommes et l’activité portuaire dans l’emporion de Narbonne (IIe s. av. J.-C.-IIe s. ap. J.-C.).’ In Les ports dans l’espace méditerranéen antique. Narbonne et les systèmes portuaires fluvio-lagunaires, edited by C. Sanchez and M.-P. Jézégou, 23–41. RAN Suppl. 44. Montpellier: Revue Archéologique de Narbonnaise. Brunt, P. 1966. ‘The Roman Mob.’ P&P 35 (December): 3–27. doi:10.1093/past/35.1.3. Caldelli, M. L. 2018. ‘Gli “ostiensi ordinari” ad Ostia tra tarda Repubblica e primo Impero: continuando una ricerca.’ CCG 29: 273–94. Caldelli, M. L. and C. Ricci. 2012. ‘Memoria ed epigrafia. Il pauper a Roma nel I secolo d.C., un progetto in corso.’ Pyrenae 43 (1): 7–45. Cerutti, S. 2015. ‘Who is below? E. P. Thompson, historien des sociétés modernes: une relecture.’ Annales (HSS) 70 (4): 931–56. doi:10.1353/ahs.2015.0167. Christol, M. 1997. ‘Notes d’épigraphie.’ CCG 8: 271–84. Christol, M. 2004. ‘Notes d’épigraphie 7–8.’ CCG 15: 85–119. Christol, M. 2008. ‘Colonie de vétérans et communautés indigènes.’ In Arles: histoire, territoires et cultures, edited by J.-M. Roquette, 125–34. Paris: Actes Sud. Christol, M. 2010a. ‘Formes de la vie économique et formes de la vie sociale à Arles au IIe et au IIIe siècle: sources et travaux récents.’ In Le tribù romane. Atti della XVIe Rencontre sur l’épigraphie, edited by M. Silvestrini, 405–16. Bari: Edipuglia. Christol, M. 2010b. Une histoire provinciale. La Gaule narbonnaise de la fin du IIe siècle. av. J.-C. au IIIe siècle ap. J.-C. Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne. doi:10.4000/books. psorbonne.10542. Christol, M. 2015. ‘Pacensis: les noms de la cité de Fréjus et l’histoire coloniale sous Auguste.’ MEFRA 127 (2): 535–53. doi:10.4000/mefra.2839. Christol, M. 2020. ‘Ports, Trade and Supply Routes in Western Europe. The Case of Narbonne.’ In Arnaud and Keay 2020b, 241–65. doi:10.1017/9781108665278.011. Christol, M. and N. Tran. 2014. ‘Tituli et signa collegiorum en Gaule méridionale et ailleurs. Réflexions sur le décor des sièges de collèges à partir du cas arlésien.’ In AgustaBoularot and Rosso 2014, 15–31.

76

Cyril Courrier and Nicolas Tran

Clarke, J. R. 2003. Art in the Life of Ordinary Romans: Visual Representation and NonElite Viewers in Italy, 100 B.C.-A.D. 315. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cohen, B. 1984. ‘Some neglected ordines: the apparitorial status-groups.’ In Nicolet 1984, 23–60. Courrier, C. 2014. La plèbe de Rome et sa culture (fin du IIe siècle av. J.-C.-fin du Ier siècle ap. J.-C.). Rome: École française de Rome. Courrier, C. 2015. ‘Une inscription inédite de Fos-sur-Mer: la (vraisemblable) dédicace d’un nauclerus à la divinité tutélaire et au Génie de negotiantes subaediani.’ RAN, 48: 9–30. Courrier, C. 2017. ‘Plebeian Culture in the City of Rome, from the Late Republic to the Early Empire.’ In Grig 2017a, 107–28. doi:10.1017/9781139871402.005. Courrier, C. and N. Tran. 2018. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un Arlésien ordinaire?’ CCG 29: 251–72. Cristofori, A. 2016. ‘Lavoro e identità sociale.’ In Storia del lavoro in Italia. Vol. 1: L’età romana, edited by A. Marcone, 149–74. Rome: Castelvecchi. Cuche, D. 2010. La notion de culture dans les sciences sociales. Paris: La Découverte. David, J.-M. 2019. Au service de l’honneur: les appariteurs de magistrats romains. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Espérandieu, E. 1907. Recueil général des bas-reliefs, statues et bustes de la Gaule romaine. Vol. 1: Alpes Maritimes, Alpes Cottiennes, Corse, Narbonnaise. Paris: Impr. nationale. Espérandieu, E. 1925. Recueil général des bas-reliefs, statues et bustes de la Gaule romaine. Vol. 9: Gaule germanique. Paris: Impr. nationale. Flaig, E. 2019 [1992]. Den Kaiser herausfordern: die Usurpation im Römischen Reich. Revised edition. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag. Flohr, M. 2013. The World of the Fullo. Work, Economy, and Society in Roman Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199659357.001.0001. Gaggadis-Robin, V. and M. Heijmans, 2015. ‘Espaces et monuments funéraires en Arles: autour des stèles à portraits.’ In Signa et tituli. Monuments et espaces de représentations en Gaule méridionale, edited by S. Agusta-Boularot and E. Rosso, 123–43. Aix-enProvence-Arles: Centre Camille Jullian-Errance. doi:10.4000/books.pccj.2288. Gascou, J. 2000a. ‘L’inscription de Saint-Jean-de-Garguier en l’honneur du sévir augustal Q. Cornelius Zosimus.’ MEFRA 112 (1): 279–95. Gascou, J. 2000b. ‘Le gentilice Vrittius. Remarques sur l’onomastique du pagus Lucretius (territoire oriental d’Arles).’ ZPE 130: 223–31. Gayraud, M. 1981. Narbonne antique: des origines à la fin du IIIe siècle. RAN Suppl. 8. Montpellier: Revue Archéologique de Narbonnaise. Grig, L., ed. 2017a. Popular Culture in the Ancient World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781139871402. Grig, L. 2017b. ‘Introduction: Approaching Popular Culture in the Ancient World.’ In Grig 2017a, 1–36. doi:10.1017/9781139871402.001. Hailwood, M. 2013. ‘Who is Below?’ In The Future of History from Below: An Online Symposium, edited by M. Hailwood and B. Waddell. Accessed January 31, 2021. https:// manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/2013/07/19/who-is-below/. Inglebert, H., ed. 2005. Histoire de la civilisation romaine. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Joshel, S. R. 1992. Work, Identity and Legal Status at Rome. A Study of the Occupational Inscriptions. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Knapp, R. 2011. Invisible Romans: Prostitutes, Outlaws, Slaves, Gladiators, Ordinary Men and Women, the Romans that History Forgot. London: Profile Books. Knopf, F. 2018. Die Partizipationsmotive der plebs urbana im spätrepublikanischen Rom. Berlin: Lit Verlag.

Southern Gaul from below

77

Kröss, K. 2017. Die politische Rolle der stadtrömischen Plebs in der Kaiserzeit. Leiden and Boston: Brill. doi:10.1163/9789004339743. Lassalle, A. and M.-P. Jézégou. 2018. ‘Les représentations de la navigation et du commerce dans les collections lapidaires de Narbonne.’ Archaeonautica 20: 151–61. doi:10.4000/ archaeonautica.548. Lauxerois, R. 1983. Le Bas Vivarais à l’époque romaine: recherches sur la Cité d’Alba. RAN Suppl. 9. Montpellier: Revue Archéologique de Narbonnaise. Le Gall, J. 1971. ‘Rome: ville de fainéants?’ REL 49: 266–77. Liu, J. 2009. Collegia Centonariorum: The Guilds of Textile Dealers in the Roman West. Leiden and Boston: Brill. doi:10.1163/ej.9789004177741.i-428. Magalhães de Oliveira, J. C. 2012. Potestas Populi: participation populaire et action collective dans les villes de l’Afrique romaine tardive (vers 300–430 apr. J.-C.). Turnhout: Brepols. Marty, F., C. Courrier and S. Fontaine. 2019. ‘Le gisement de stèles funéraires et autels antiques de l’anse Saint-Gervais (Fos-sur-Mer): étude documentaire, archéologique et épigraphique.’ RAN 52: 55–83. Mayer, E. 2012. The Ancient Middle Classes: Urban Life and Aesthetics in the Roman Empire, 100 BCE-250 CE, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Moisand, M. 2019. ‘Esclaves et affranchis à Mostyn Hall: le parcours de quatre inscriptions funéraires depuis Narbonne et Rome.’ RAN 52: 187–203. Mouritsen, H. 2011. The Freedman in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511975639. Nicolet, C., ed. 1984. Des ordres à Rome. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Nicolet, C. 1985. ‘Plèbe et tribus: les statues de Lucius Antonius et le testament d’Auguste.’ MEFRA 97 (2): 799–839. Rougier, H. 2015. ‘La saisonnalité des activités portuaires dans l’Occident romain sous le Haut-Empire.’ Pallas 99: 209–26. doi:10.4000/pallas.3101. Rougier, H. 2020. ‘Port Occupations and Social Hierarchies. A Comparative Study through Inscriptions from Hispalis, Arelate, Lugdunum, Narbo Martius, Ostia-Portus and Aquileia.’ In Arnaud and Keay 2020b, 132–51. doi:10.1017/9781108665278.006. Spivak, G. 1988. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, 270–313. London: MacMillan Education LTD. Toner, J. 2009. Popular Culture in Ancient Rome. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity. Tran, N. 2006. Les membres des associations romaines. Le rang social des collegiati en Italie et en Gaules sous le Haut-Empire. Rome: École française de Rome. doi:10.4000/ books.efr.2048. Tran, N. 2013a. Dominus tabernae. Le statut de travail des artisans et des commerçants de l’Occident romain (Ier siècle av. J.-C.-IIIe siècle ap. J.-C.). Rome: École française de Rome. Tran, N. 2013b. ‘Les statuts de travail des esclaves et des affranchis dans les grands ports du monde romain (Ier siècle av. J.-C.-IIe siècle apr. J.-C.).’ Annales (HSS) 68 (4): 999– 1025. doi:10.1017/S0395264900015080. Tran, N. 2014. ‘Esclaves et ministres des Lares dans la société de l’Arles antique.’ Gallia 71 (2): 103–20. Tran, N. 2015a. ‘Coloni et incolae de Gaule méridionale: une mise en perspective du cas valentinois.’ MEFRA 127 (2): 487–501. doi:10.4000/mefra.2918. Tran, N. 2015b. ‘Les tabellarii Caesaris nostri de Narbonne et les collèges d’esclaves impériaux dans le monde romain (CIL, XII, 4449).’ CCG 26: 109–25.

78

Cyril Courrier and Nicolas Tran

Tran, N. 2016. ‘The Social Organization of Commerce and Crafts in Ancient Arles: Heterogeneity, Hierarchy, and Patronage.’ In Urban Craftsmen and Traders in the Roman World, edited by A. Wilson and M. Flohr, 254–77. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198748489.003.0012. Tran, N. 2020. ‘Boatmen and Their Corpora in the Great Ports of the Roman West (Second to Third Centuries AD).’ In Arnaud and Keay 2020b, 85–106. doi:10.1017/ 9781108665278.004. Tran, N. and L. Vandevoorde, eds. 2018. Romains ordinaires? La fragmentation socioéconomique de la plèbe romaine. CCG 29: 229–309. Vandevoorde, L. 2014. ‘Making the Difference: Social Positioning of Augustales of Nîmes and Narbonne.’ In Agusta-Boularot and Rosso 2014, 33–46. Van Haeperen, F. 2018. ‘Les dédicaces des collegiati: une marque de distinction?’ CCG 29: 295–310. Van Nijf, O. 1997. The Civic World of Professional Associations in the Roman East. Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben. Veyne, P. 1976. Le pain et le cirque: sociologie historique d’un pluralisme politique. Paris: Seuil. Veyne, P. 2005. ‘Existait-il une classe moyenne en ces temps lointains?’ In L’Empire grécoromain, edited by P. Veyne, 117–61. Paris: Seuil. Virlouvet, C. 1985. Famines et émeutes à Rome: des origines de la République à la mort de Néron. Rome: École française de Rome. Yavetz, Z. 1969. Plebs and Princeps. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Part 2

Experiences of poverty, dependency and work

4

Poverty, debt and dependent labour in the ancient Greek world Thinking through some issues in doing ancient history from below Claire Taylor

Introduction As other chapters in this volume have discussed, doing ancient history from below has a number of challenges. One of these is how to think about poverty within the context of subaltern identities, lifestyles and practices, and this chapter will offer a few thoughts on this topic. Subaltern studies in general have raised questions about the types of evidence available and how these should be read, the modes of knowledge generation and retrieval, and the power dynamics and relationships between elites and non-elite groups, and all of these are pertinent here.1 This chapter focuses on three aspects of poverty—precarity, dependency and vulnerability—as features of ancient life that structure social relationships. In particular, it explores the role that these aspects play in relations of dependency in the ancient Greek world and, in doing so, uses debt and, especially, debt bondage as a lens through which to think through various theoretical and methodological issues of concern to the overall presentation of this volume. In practice, my argument sketches some ground concerning the intersections between poverty, debt and slavery, the relationships between social structures and historical agency, and raises some questions about the gendered implications of debt bondage in the ancient world.

Who are ‘the poor’? There are two methodological questions that form the starting point of almost all attempts to do ancient history from below: who are we attempting to find, and how do we find them? In the context of ancient poverty studies these questions take shape in the following ways. First of all, the source tradition is weighted towards those who were not poor, leaving a direct challenge for historians to access the lives of these groups. Secondly, although we all think we know what poverty is, there is actually no agreed-upon definition and there are some significant differences between ancient and modern conceptions. Thirdly, the multiplicity of diverse and dynamic social groups within Greek communities and across the Greek world suggests that there was no single experience of being poor. The focus of this chapter DOI: 10.4324/9781003005148-6

82 Claire Taylor on precarity, vulnerability and dependency, therefore, attempts to isolate certain strands of these experiences through which we might assess poverty, but other aspects—for example, hunger or social marginalisation—might also be chosen. The question of evidence survival is also fundamental to assessments of debt bondage, not least because scholars suspect that it was fairly prevalent, if not widespread in the ancient Greek world, yet it rarely shows up in the extant source material.2 This, in and of itself, raises a number of questions, the most pertinent of which is: how should we not only read the evidence that survives but explain that which does not? The problem is that from the point of view of the historian, trained to base interpretation on evidence, the lack of visibility of certain social groups within the source tradition is a ‘gap’ against which knowledge of a past society is defined. Metaphorically, these ‘gaps’ are frequently seen as gaping holes of silence juxtaposed against the audible chatter of extant evidence.3 However, framing the source tradition in this way can also be problematic. Firstly, it places too much weight on the views of the non-poor on the behaviours, attitudes and social positions of those they may view as different to themselves. This implicitly overvalues the production of knowledge from some social groups and downplays that from others. Secondly, conceptualising our evidence in terms of presence or absence ignores the complexities of social and economic differentiation that underlie the attestations (or lack thereof) of those variously classified as poor in our source material, paying insufficient attention to the discourses and practices that construct ideas about poverty (and through which the poor are not absent) and ignoring the processes through which certain types of evidence are preserved and others are not.4 Thirdly, it implicitly assumes that poverty is defined by basic needs alone, that the poor are simply those people who fill the ‘spaces’ left when all other forms of culture are accounted for, divorced from social processes and lacking any form of agency. This, as I have argued elsewhere, is overly narrow in focus and, as we will see here, does not particularly aid our understanding when discussing debt, debt bondage and dependency.5 The difference between ancient and modern conceptualisations of poverty is also important here. This means that we cannot take poverty for granted as a category of analysis without seriously unpicking what is meant. Although we all think we know what is meant by the alluring simplicity of the term ‘poverty,’ what it means in practice is, in fact, ‘neither obvious nor universal.’6 This is because poverty is, at least in part, a socially constructed experience that takes shape from the society in which it is found. This also means that being poor is not simply an economic condition in which wealth or income is lacking but rather that it takes meaning from social categories, discourses, interlocking networks of relations and social structures (which are dynamic). As others have demonstrated, classical Athenian ideas about poverty (perhaps the only time and place in the ancient Greek world where we are able even to begin to unpick these) were rooted in ideologies of labour and leisure, which themselves reveal tensions between notions of political and economic (in)equality that are of particular relevance within this democratic society.7 Penia—the word

Poverty, debt and dependent labour (Greek world) 83 most commonly translated as ‘poverty’—is hardly a neutral term; it signals the need to work for a living in contrast with being wealthy. This, in turn, suggests an ideological polarity between the plousioi and penētes, even though this appears to be at odds with social reality. Indeed, such a definition of poverty envisions (at least in our minds) a dichotomous social structure with a small wealthy elite (the rich) and a subsisting, or barely subsisting, mass of people (the poor) with no one in between. This does not adequately describe Athenian society in the classical period.8 Moreover, it takes little account of others for whom a different terminology typically applies but which is no less ideological—for example, ptōchoi/ptōcheia.9 Other terms, which in context clearly point to people who were categorised as poor in some sense (alētai, thētes, etc.), are no less slippery.10 These are not neutral descriptive terms but ones that construct a series of discourses about what it meant to be poor in a particular time and place. Like in Greek, in English the terms ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ often form a rhetorical pair; however, most modern definitions of poverty actually conceptualise wealth and poverty as two ends of a sliding scale of differing material resources or as interconnected social relations, rather than as contrasting conditions.11 These views of poverty, therefore, are distinct from ancient conceptualisations, which included people who might be seen today to be relatively well off (one might be considered ‘not-wealthy’ but have plenty to live on and be far from destitute, for example).12 This has ramifications for how we try to identify ‘the poor’ within the source material. It is tempting, for example, to exclude categories of evidence, for example material evidence of everyday life, on the grounds that if an item cost anything to produce, obtain or use, it does not provide evidence for the poor. Looking for archaeological evidence of the very poorest is equally difficult because of the problem of identification that our sources raise.13 On the other hand, we can certainly identify aspects of the material culture of the penētes—workshops, housing, rituals, marketplaces and so forth—that is, the lives of people who are categorised as poor in ancient terms. But this then, in itself, raises questions about the process of categorisation of people as poor. The issue can be illustrated with regard to perhaps the best-known example of the problem of debt in Greek history: the reforms of Solon. As is well known, Solon’s seisachtheia cancelled debts made on the security of the person, thus abolishing debt slavery in Athens, and attempted to return to Attica those who had been sold into slavery abroad.14 As such, it is typically seen by scholars as a political response to economic inequality and social unrest where portions of the demos were either in or reduced to poverty brought on by the actions of the elite.15 In this, they follow authors such as Ath. Pol., Androtion and Plutarch who also explained the reforms as being related to poverty, albeit using the language of their day.16 However, the groups that these later authors categorised as poor are not the same as those that Solon does. The only groups that Solon explicitly notes as being poor (in the albeit fragmentary poems) are those who are no longer in Attica: those who were ‘sold and bound [and sent abroad] in shameful fetters’ (F 4 lines 23–25). It is these people, and these alone, who are described as penichros.17 Others fled Attica ‘through dire necessity,’ although it is unclear whether this is a result of

84

Claire Taylor

economic factors or for other reasons (F 36).18 For the most part, however, Solon is concerned with the kakoi, whom he contrasts with the agathoi (negatively) in a role reversal from the normal order of things.19 He describes them as having become wealthy (ploutousi), and the agathoi as penontai.20 The least forced translation of this term is, indeed, ‘poor’ (‘many kakoi are rich, and many agathoi are poor’), but more accurately the agathoi have not become poor as such—they are elites who have been reduced in status; it is Plutarch who glosses them as penētes, because it forms part of his (wrong) interpretation that Solon thought of himself as a penēs.21 More precisely, the agathoi were ‘those who by their own merit deserve to be wealthy but are not,’ and the kakoi were ‘relatively wealthy non-aristocrats.’22 Changed in circumstance as they seemingly are, neither the agathoi nor the kakoi were exactly poor. In contrast, it is the hektēmoroi and pelatai, not the kakoi, who the Ath. Pol. describes as ‘poor,’ explaining the terminology of the past, now fallen out of use, for readers of his day (‘the penētes were enslaved (edouleuon) to the plousioi, and their children and wives; they were called (ekalounto) pelatai and hektēmoroi’).23 In this, he reveals different assumptions about poverty to both Solon and Plutarch, rooted in fourth-century language. That is, later authors had different criteria for categorising the people they found in Solon’s poetry as ‘poor,’ none of whom are explicitly called ‘poor’ by Solon (at least in the fragments that survive) and, with perhaps the exception of the hektēmoroi and pelatai, would not be called ‘poor’ by modern scholars. Questions of definition and categorisation are not just semantic; they point to a central difficulty in how to approach subaltern groups for whom little evidence survives: who are we looking for when we look for the poor, and how do we read the multiple intertwining discourses that construct poverty in different ways in different times? At the very least, the differences between ancient and modern understandings of poverty raise questions about the relative weight historians might give to questions of subsistence, social exclusion or capability deprivation in approaching the study of poverty and cause us to reflect on our own assumptions about what that means.24 Valid though all these approaches are, they will reveal different aspects of poverty. Indeed, they shape how the source material is interrogated in the first place and pose the question to historians: what do we envisage when we think of ancient poverty?

Poverty and debt These questions can be explored further through the frame of debt. This was not because debt was the preserve of the ‘poor’ but because debt was a major feature of (as far as we can tell) all parts of the ancient Mediterranean world.25 Credit relations were multiple, pervasive and cut across society in a variety of ways. Political programmes rose and fell on the back of debt; legal systems attempted to control it (or at least the responses to it); armies marched as a result of it; the success of numerous farms—and the ability of populations to eat—rested on it.26 Lending and borrowing (with or without interest) were a fact of life for large numbers of people regardless of wealth or social status.27 Because of the ubiquity

Poverty, debt and dependent labour (Greek world)

85

of credit relations, we can use this as a way of thinking about issues of structure and agency. As Millett demonstrated, there was a wide variety of credit available in a city like Athens, and this was governed by social relations.28 Indeed, the pervasiveness of credit here highlights that loans were provided not just in a top-down fashion from wealthy to poor but loaning and borrowing were located within diverse networks of relations, neighbours and other groups. We can see that in Athens large numbers of wealthy men had money on loan, but credit was also available to, and from, less well-off Athenians and involved larger networks than friends and family. These were ‘frail networks’ for sure, consisting most likely of other similarly non-wealthy people who both acted as creditors and contracted debts in multiple ways.29 That is, although our source material only really presents credit and debt relations among wealthier groups in any coherent way, we should be wary about assuming that debt caused more problems for the poor than the rich.30 Did the rich and the poor have different motivations for borrowing? Many discussions surrounding such practices suggest scholars believe they did. Millett assumes, for example, that the poor contracted debts to avoid starvation, whereas the rich did so in order to pay dowries, lease the estates of orphans, take on commercial loans or pay liturgies.31 This implicitly assumes, however, that poverty is defined solely by basic needs and that the poor behave differently to the non-poor. The evidence, however, shows that both the rich and the poor were concerned with providing funerals and dowries for their relatives, and both were concerned with maintaining their standards of living, which suggests that behavioural patterns of the rich and poor were broadly similar. Debt, particularly that arising from unforeseen circumstances, affected all social groups.32 Indeed, this fear—that wealth was unstable and misfortune just lay around the corner—is prevalent in a wide variety of Greek literary texts that derive from elite authors and speak to wide audiences. However, to assume that the non-rich are not concerned with prestige is questionable; this is an illusion of the source material. Whilst it is certainly true that the non-wealthy did not pay liturgies or need to raise money for Olympic chariots (Millett’s examples of prestige goods), there were other forms of social recognition that were equally as important for non-elite groups, such as pride in work, choral singing and dedication at sanctuaries. Even ptōchoi are considered aidioi (worthy of respect) in the Homeric poems.33 The problem is that if we follow too closely the discourses of the elite, we miss the discourses of other groups and perpetuate the categories of the former at the expense of the latter. Kapēloi, for example, are often viewed in a negative light by our sources in ways which highlight relations of power within Athenian society but through which we can also raise questions about agency. They were viewed as deceptive, opportunistic and greedy, over-charging, short-changing and fleecing customers in taverns and inns as well as in the agora.34 In Aristophanes’ Wealth, Penia is mistaken for a kapēlis, highlighting the low social status—and gender—that was frequently associated with this group of people.35 However, it is also clear that kapēloi were centrally active within the kinds of social networks that both acquired and provided credit. Not only did they contract

86

Claire Taylor

debts themselves (Theophr. Char. 6.9), they also lent to their customers (Lys. F 1, Hermippos F 78).36 In some sense, this is perhaps no surprise given that they must have been in regular contact with large numbers of people, especially if many Athenians in the fifth and fourth centuries were fairly regularly purchasing (at least some) food from markets or taverns.37 The widespread presence of kapēloi in curse tablets highlights their visibility and centrality within social networks.38 Indeed, extending small-scale credit to customers is an extremely common practice throughout history; in other contexts it can be seen to cement social ties, reproduce social hierarchies and provide a means through which those with limited resources could manage their basic needs.39 The fact that many kapēloi were women, metics and/or freed slaves implies that these groups played a crucial role in credit relations for non-elite residents of Athens, a pattern that interestingly mirrors that which we see in the banks that catered to the wealthy.40 Some kapēloi were male citizens to be sure; we might even suggest that those who lent to Aeschines the Sokratic were, given that Lysias (F 1) says they bring actions (dikazontai) against him. It is not necessary, however, to assume this: metics had access to justice via the polemarch and are known to be active in dikai suits.41 The text is unsurprisingly silent on the matter. Borrowing from others, therefore, was a strategy that was available to many and was widespread. We should not assume it was a feature of poverty any more than it was a characteristic of wealth. Through such practices kapēloi—or kapēlides— may have been able to negotiate their own positions as important members of social networks within broader structures that denigrated or sought to isolate them. In some circumstances, they were at the mercy of unscrupulous borrowers, as implied by Theophrastos, but they were also central nodes in networks that could use lending and borrowing to ameliorate hardship, cement social ties and perhaps resist the alienation that the literary sources reflect. Those who were very poor might have found these networks harder to access, but as Millett points out, even the poorest had their labour to offer.42 This, however, raises some difficult questions about the practice of debt bondage within ancient societies.

Poverty and debt bondage Debt bondage is a term that is used to describe various relationships of social and economic dependency—the differences between which we can only sketch out roughly in the ancient world.43 Perhaps more common than the surviving source material suggests are indenture-like relationships, in which a debtor provides labour for a creditor, usually to service a loan.44 In such cases, the loan is ‘real’ (e.g. the debtor receives seed to plant to enable next year’s crop to grow) and labour is exchanged for collateral (e.g. agricultural labour on the creditor’s farm or service within their household) for a limited period of time until the loan is repaid. Alternately, a person may act as collateral for a loan or as a guarantee that the loan will be repaid, becoming a kind of hostage to ensure repayment (pawnship). In addition, sometimes a person is placed in the household of another as a result of a legal judgement. These arrangements are well attested in Near Eastern sources.45 In

Poverty, debt and dependent labour (Greek world)

87

the ancient Greek world, the latter is also documented in Crete and it seems likely that Plangon’s service in the household of Myrrhine in Menander’s play Heros (discussed further below) is an example of the former.46 Either way, the debtor or, frequently, a member of his household—often female and/or enslaved—is transferred to the household of the creditor, sometimes for an agreed length of time, although sometimes (often?) in practice in perpetuity, to work to repay the debt. Antichretic loans involving people were forms of pawnship in that the labour of the debtor was transacted in lieu of interest owed, often over long periods of time.47 Again, the person whose labour is transferred is likely to have been a member of the household of the debtor (i.e. women, children, or slaves).48 Near Eastern sources also make it clear that threats of distraint towards the household of the debtor could act as inducements to pay, emphasising that debts were the concern of the whole household, not the individual; in fact, in the case of pawns acting as hostages in contexts of distraint, parallels from the ancient Near East only involve women or animals.49 Alternately, as Finley observed, the ‘debt’ may also be fictitious in that it is transacted not primarily to provide collateral for the debtor, but for the main purposes of providing additional labour for the ‘creditor’ (that is, this is a disguised form of indenture in which ‘debt bondage’ exists without any clear debt).50 Like pawnship, this creates relations of dependency between households as labour is transferred from one to another. The transferal of labour between households may be particularly necessary at certain times in the agricultural year, e.g. when crops need to be sown, but it also might be sought after on a more long-term basis. Indeed, Foxhall has shown that larger landowners needed to acquire the labour of others (that is, those outside their own households) in order to generate wealth, which implies ripe conditions for such transactions.51 In Hesiod’s Works and Days, this is not just men to work on the farm, but includes women whose skills are needed to process wool.52 Working for others was the characteristic that defined thēteia, but there was clearly a fine line between selling one’s labour for, e.g., an agricultural season or year, doing so as a result of a debt bondage-type arrangement, and slavery. Indeed, this slippage allows Harris to translate thēteia (controversially) as ‘debt bondage’ and for Blok and Krul to dispute this.53 In practice there may have been as many shades of dependency as households needing labour. As a strategy to gain access to resources for those who had little, working for others in such arrangements presumably provided food and shelter for defined periods of time, thus alleviating households of a mouth to feed.54 But these arrangements were no doubt precarious and had the potential to be seriously disruptive. Jacquemin, for example, shows how thetes are portrayed as those without ties or otherwise unattached (i.e. without a household to support on their own) which implies that the ideal worker-for-hire be male, unmarried and relatively young.55 Obviously we have no idea what proportion of thetes fit this profile, nor how many hired themselves out as a result of debt or the threat of debt, fictitious or otherwise, but it is clear that in doing so they both created and reinforced relations of dependency between richer and poorer households. Parallels from elsewhere, and the household basis of economic transactions in general, suggests that being

88 Claire Taylor placed in any form of debt bondage was, in fact, a particular threat to women, children and slaves.56 However, debt bondage could also be used as a strategy to negotiate these relations of dependency, as is clear from the Cretan katakeimenoi who appear in the Gortyn Code. Katakeimenoi could be either freemen whose labour was pledged to another household, or slaves who, as a result of legal disputes, would be obliged to work for a different household for a defined period of time before returning to their previous household. Free katakeimenoi remained free, whereas enslaved katakeimenoi were enslaved both before and after the agreed-upon period.57 As Kristensen points out, one likely motivation for free katakeimenoi to agree to take a position working in another’s household was precisely to keep their property together in order to preserve it for inheritance purposes.58 It is likely that this group used their labour, or that of members of their household, as a strategy to maintain, and pass on, already existing property. Similar motivations might be deduced in Mesopotamian and Hebrew texts where daughters were placed in pawnship with clauses that they marry the creditor or a member of his household.59 It is worth pausing here to ask a question. Given that debt bondage is frequently associated with poverty,60 in what sense were the katakeimenoi poor? Should they be viewed in terms of the Athenian penētes, socially integrated, but working for others? As recent research has shown, the penētes in Athens were well-integrated into Athenian society (unsurprising given the political dominance of the demos),61 but can we say this was the case elsewhere? Oligarchic cities, like Gortyn, had property qualifications that excluded at least some of the penētes from political participation, which suggests, at the very least, that experiences of penia were different across the Greek world. Or were the katakeimenoi more akin to ptōchoi, those who ‘had nothing,’ social outcasts, defined by their inability to supply their basic needs? We might be tempted to answer these questions by dividing the group according to status and viewing free katakeimenoi as more like Athenian penētes, whereas slave katakeimenoi are more like ptōchoi, but this raises further problems. Whilst slaves might sometimes be seen as socially isolated, slave katakeimenoi in Gortyn had fairly robust legal protections; their labour was simply transferred from one household to another. Ptōchoi are normally characterised as itinerant, people on the verge of destitution who survived often through begging.62 Slave katakeimenoi were pawned to a household for a defined period of time and it was in the interest of the temporary master to ensure that their basic needs were met. Moreover, as highlighted by Kristensen, it is not at all clear that free katakeimenoi were ‘poor’ at all. Further research is undoubtedly needed, but these difficulties suggest that categories that are developed predominantly within the Athenian context might not necessarily be a good guide for somewhere like Crete (or Sparta, or elsewhere). This is because poverty is, at least in part, a social relation, therefore it takes meaning from the society in which it appears, and underlines again the importance for historians to be sensitive to the contexts in which people were—or are—categorised as poor and consider the reasons for this categorisation. It also suggests that we should be wary about associating all forms of debt bondage with poverty.

Poverty, debt and dependent labour (Greek world) 89 Debt bondage and slavery On the other hand, there are clearly features of debt bondage that overlap with slavery. Regardless of the motivation that precipitates such actions, these are forms of labour arrangements which function through asymmetrical relations of power and below we will turn our attention more closely to the connections between forms of debt bondage and the slave trade. But before we do so, it is necessary to consider debt slavery and its similarities to and differences from debt bondage. Typically, scholars have distinguished the various forms of debt bondage and debt slavery in legal terms.63 The former is considered to be time-limited whereas the latter is permanent unless the slave-owner decides to manumit. Debt-bondsmen (or -bondswomen) remain legally ‘free,’ usually stay within their own community to service the debt, and if the debt is paid off can return to their own household. The Cretan katakeimenoi fall into this category, regardless of whether they were free or slave to begin with. Debt slaves, on the other hand, are people who are permanently enslaved as a result of a debt, considered no longer free and perhaps sold outside their community.64 This legal distinction, however, disguises other significant aspects of dependency, of which slavery is but one manifestation. Vlassopoulos demonstrates that rather than being simply a question of property, relationships of domination are central to understanding ancient slavery.65 The term douleia, he argues, expresses not the ownership of one human by another but ‘the pragmatic result of the fact that there exists inequality of power and wealth among individuals and communities. . . . It defined a situation in which an individual or community was under the power of another individual or community.’66 These relations of power were just as present between pawn and ‘creditor,’ whether they were regarded as legally free or legally a slave; in fact, both existed in Gortyn, where slaves acting as debtbondsmen remained slaves and free remained free. This explains why there could be considerable slippage between debt bondage and slavery: the debt-bondsman or debt-bondswoman could become (effectively or in reality) a slave over time as masters continued to control their labour and exert their power over them and their families. Indeed, the fact that debts were passed on within families demonstrates the long-term nature of such relations.67 This seems to have been part of the problem in pre-Solonian Athens where the long-term impact of indebtedness on families is clear: Solon claims he brought home those who were sold abroad so long ago that they were ‘no longer speaking the Attic tongue’ (F 36).68 Legal distinctions between debt bondage and slavery as a result of debt are undoubtedly important, but we should question whether these distinctions were particularly significant or even perceptible from the point of view of those most affected. Arguably they were not. Menander’s Heros provides food for thought here. In this play, Plangon is working off a debt, first of her father, then of her brother, through service in the household of Laches. Her father Tibeios, a former slave himself, borrowed two minai from Laches (presumably his former master) but died before paying off the loan. Her brother Gorgias then borrowed another mina for Tibeios’ funeral and works also for Laches, like his father, as a shepherd.69

90

Claire Taylor

Interpretations of debt bondage in this fragmentary play have typically been shaped by legalistic questions. This is because the terms of the debate have been focused on the abolition in law (or otherwise) of debt bondage in Athens and the maintenance of this ban by democratic institutions. Harris, for example, argues that the play demonstrates the continuation of debt bondage (as opposed to debt slavery) in Athens post-Solon. He objects to Ste. Croix and Millet ‘explain[ing] away’ this passage; the former by stating the play was produced after the fall of the democracy (and therefore that Solon’s law abolishing debt slavery was repealed) and the latter by arguing that the family concerned were non-citizens (and therefore not covered by the law anyway).70 Legal questions notwithstanding, focusing on the dependency relationships within the play reveals some important similarities between debt bondage and slavery. It is clear that Plangon has been pawned. She is placed in the household as either collateral for the debts of her male relatives or as a guarantee it will be repaid, she is not sold abroad and the arrangement appears to be understood as temporary. How temporary this type of arrangement typically was, if it reflected a common practice in real life, is a matter of conjecture. In the play it comes to an end, not when the debt is repaid, but when Plangon and Gorgias are discovered to be the birth children of Laches and Myrrhine, and therefore citizens themselves. As Lape has shown, this conforms to various plot patterns of New Comedy, notably those that stage concerns surrounding citizenship.71 A real life Plangon, however, would have unlikely been in such a situation as depicted here, released from the debt on discovery of her ‘true’ citizenship. Indeed, regardless of her citizenship status, her actions were severely constrained by those of her male relatives with the consequence that she is required to work in the household of another for an unknown—but clearly not inconsiderable—length of time. Furthermore, her work—she is ‘in service’ (diakonei) and works wool with her mistress—is remarkably similar to the duties of a domestic slave and she is clearly portrayed throughout the first part of the play in a servile fashion.72 Daos, another slave in the household who has fallen in love with her, is granted permission by Laches to marry her because they are both governed by the same relationship of domination. She is described in the hypothesis as ‘a slave like him’ (homodoulon).73 That this betrothal falls apart when her ‘true’ identity is discovered and she is married to Pheidias, a citizen, reinforces the importance of these relations of power. That is, in terms of lived experience, the day-to-day existence of a woman like Plangon was hardly that much different from that of a household slave. Her brother might have paid off the debt eventually, but the time required to do so is likely to have been long (here it is generational). From this perspective, Finley was absolutely correct to say that ‘“sale” into bondage [i.e. debt slavery] and debtbondage cannot be distinguished very sharply.’74 Indeed debt bondage and debt slavery are not phenomena we can study in isolation from slavery and the slave trade in general. This, of course, has not escaped the attention of a number of historians. Finley’s evolutionary explanation, however— that chattel slaves replaced debt bondsmen and other forms of dependent labour in the archaic period—has been superseded by arguments that recognise that various

Poverty, debt and dependent labour (Greek world)

91

forms of dependent labour developed in tandem with slavery and observe that, in practice, they frequently appear together.75 Comparative evidence from precolonial west Africa, where pawnship was common, shows a similar pattern. Here, pawnship existed hand-in-hand with the growth of the transatlantic slave trade and the development of overseas markets.76 Together, this suggests that various forms of debt bondage (and other types of dependent labour) and slavery are forms of dependency that are themselves manifestations of precarious economic conditions—not just in the societies where debt bondage occurs—and reveal the vulnerability of individuals and communities to the violence and domination of others. That is they are both features and causes of social and economic inequality. Debt bondage and the slave trade In this section I wish to investigate further the relationship between some forms of debt bondage and the slave trade with particular focus on Thrace, the Black Sea regions, and Attica. The reason for doing so is to draw attention to the ways in which these phenomena cut across individual polities and regions, developing in tandem and feeding off one another. Slavery, debt slavery and debt bondage are forms of dependency that are closely related: all three are manifestations of inequality and reveal aspects of poverty that transcend status categories and regions. Here we see in particular that legal distinctions between debt bondage and debt slavery are less helpful than focusing on the conditions of precarity, dependency and vulnerability that characterise poverty and inequality in the first place. The slave trade between Athens and the Black Sea regions must have been highly organised, profitable and systemic, despite the fact that little evidence survives that allows us to sketch in detail how this worked.77 Slaves were procured through warfare, raiding and piracy, but the large numbers of slaves and their consistent use over long periods of time suggests that these could not have been the only mechanisms of supply.78 The presence of slaves in Thracian and Scythian society suggests that there was local and regional demand for this form of labour as well as from the Aegean world more broadly (Athens as well as other places).79 Slave markets are attested in a number of cities in the region, which may have been geared predominantly towards Mediterranean export (though perhaps not solely).80 What other factors might have sustained the supply of slaves in this region? It is widely recognised that local conditions in Thrace and surrounding areas played a role here. The fact that there were many competing ‘tribes’ in the region, to whom the accumulation of wealth was important and warfare between was frequent, suggests highly stratified societies in which the exploitation of populations by local elites was a significant factor.81 This certainly took the form of local elites capturing enemies in war,82 but Testart and Brunaux suggest that pawning is also a possible factor here, and there is some evidence to suggest that this linked into the Aegean-wide slave trade.83 Although no source speaks directly about any form of debt bondage in this region, Herodotus does provide some relevant evidence about Thracian society, albeit filtered through a Greek lens. He states that the Thracians sold their children

92

Claire Taylor

for export and had polygamous marriages arranged through the payment of a bride price.84 Testart and Brunaux argue that this is not just a literary trope that otherises the Thracians, but that these practices were accurately reported (at least in their general form) by Herodotus.85 They suggest that these marriage practices created the conditions for debt as the accumulation of wealth was a major factor in the ability of men to be able to marry and debts could be incurred in order for them to do so. Ethnographic comparisons from pre-colonial west Africa suggest also that bride wealth, polygamy and pawning went hand-in-hand as additional wives and their children were placed in the households of creditors as collateral for loans.86 If this is the case for Thrace, pawning may have been significant and would have predominantly affected women and children. Echoes of this practice can perhaps be seen in Greek observations of the prevalence of Thracian women working in the fields; this would be the likely destination of many pawns sent as an additional labour source to wealthier households.87 Women and children who were pawned were also vulnerable to becoming debt slaves, to being sold outright, or to being captured. The mechanisms by which this happens are, however, poorly understood. Near Eastern sources frequently outline the time limits of service, but also explicitly state that a pledged wife could be sold into slavery if a debt was not repaid.88 Women and children were particularly at risk from being captured in war and raids across the ancient world.89 Given the prevalence (and social significance) of warfare in Thrace, it is possible that pawns were fairly easily transferred outside of the ‘creditor’s’ household through capture or sale without the objection of their own kin.90 Pawns could also have been transferred as part of trade dealings, akin to the ‘commercial hostage taking’ of the west African slave trade.91 There is no direct evidence for this stage of the process admittedly, although slaves are certainly embedded within networks of exchange in Thrace.92 It has been noted in other historical societies that women and children were especially vulnerable here too not least because they were sought after by slave traders who may have considered them to be more docile and easier to control than adult men.93 Not all Thracian slaves were female of course, but it is noteworthy in this context that large numbers of Thracian slaves in Athens were. On the Attic stelai, it is often noted that Thracians form the largest group, but rarely noticed that almost half of these Thracians were women.94 Indeed, of the female slaves listed on these inscriptions, only two are not from Thrace.95 Other evidence confirms the impression that women made up a relatively large contingent of Thracian slaves: Thratta is the most common name for female slave characters in Aristophanic comedy suggesting that this formed some kind of stereotype.96 Moreover, Thracian women are well represented in the epigraphic evidence: they form the largest group of people commemorated in Bäbler’s catalogue of foreigners in Athens.97 Thracian women, it seems, were well enough known that they were stereotyped as being industrious and considered a good source of wet-nurses or nannies.98 Female and child slaves are also explicitly mentioned in a number of the Pontic lead letters.99 Elsewhere, Thracian women are manumitted at twice the rate of Thracian men in the Delphi inscriptions.

Poverty, debt and dependent labour (Greek world) 93 The Greek belief that the Thracians ‘[sold] their children for export’ therefore may allude to more than a response to short-term economic problems such as harvest failure,100 but instead to deeper social inequalities that located Thracian practices within divergent forms of credit relations and labour extraction which, at present, we can only guess at. Local and regional demand for slaves was certainly present, but the (additional? much greater?) demand from Greek cities like Athens was a key driver of the slave supply within Thrace and beyond. That is to say that although debt slavery was abolished in Athens in the sixth century, this does not mean that it did not affect Athens as Athenians bought slaves who may well have been enslaved because of debt or were captured pawns.101 In fact, Athenian demand for slaves elided various distinctions in dependent labour-regimes elsewhere, contributed to the conditions that encouraged debt slavery, intensified the inequalities of other regions and supported what was, in all likelihood, a highly gendered system of interlocking dependencies.102 Although the process is difficult to parse, similar patterns might be seen in other contexts where we know that forms of debt bondage were prevalent such as Phrygia, Israel or Mesopotamia. More research needs to be done.

Poverty, debt and dependent labour: some conclusions Thinking about poverty, debt and dependent labour from below therefore raises a number of important questions that interlink in various ways. It shows how debt, various forms of debt bondage, and slavery intertwine across time and space, creating systems of dependency and structuring social and economic relations, but does not necessarily assume that those involved were always poor. It is not always the case that all forms of debt bondage occurred as a result of abject poverty; we have seen in Crete (with parallels from other historical societies) that pawning was a mechanism through which assets could be preserved or liquidity maintained. Rather it highlights the need to interrogate how poverty is constructed through these interlocking practices and the real-world consequences of this. Moreover, it suggests that debt bondage as a catch-all term to describe all forms of dependent labour outlined here may be conceptually too broad. In addition, the perspective from below highlights the constraints placed on people in precarious situations and, in particular, the vulnerability of women and children to different forms of dependency relations that (from our perspective) shade into one another. On the other hand, it also allows us to view these groups as historical agents shaping transregional economies and social relations across the Aegean. It may be the case, for example, that pawnship in Thrace was sustained not just by local inequalities, but by the slave trade in general and Aegean-wide demand for Thracian slaves. Of course, such conclusions shine a light once more onto questions of evidence, how we can interrogate the kinds of source material we can use and to question how it has come into being, but also to reflect on the process of doing ancient history from below. As ancient historians, can we position ourselves as interlocutors with people in the past rather than solely interpreters of it from a distance? Perhaps

94

Claire Taylor

by centring the kapēlis, the debtor, the pawn or the enslaved person within our inquiries, being sensitive to the discourses that categorise people in certain ways and foregrounding (and critiquing) the historical agency of marginalised groups we can begin to do so. We can also acknowledge that although there is much we have lost, that all is not lost, and that the attempt is, in and of itself, worthwhile: The contradictory attempt to ‘know’ the past, to become acquainted with the human beings who made it, leads us through archival sources that refuse to yield clear pictures. But because the archives provide unique clues about power relations, and about the human, moral, and philosophical quandaries faced by the people who produced them and by the people whose shadows inhabit them, we cannot afford to do without them. In my experience, it is the process itself that keeps us honest: getting one’s hands dirty in the archival dust, one’s shoes encrusted in the mud of field work; confronting the surprises, ambivalences, and unfair choices of daily life, both our own and those of our ‘subjects.’ However poignantly our search is conditioned by the understanding that we will never know for sure, occasionally, just for a moment, someone comes out of the shadows and walks next to us. When, in a flash of interactive dialogue, something is revealed; when, for a brief span, the curtain parts, and I am allowed a partial view of protagonists’ motivations and internal conflicts—for me, those are the moments that make the quest worthwhile.103

Notes 1 See, e.g., Guha 1997; Spivak and Morris 2010 for a selection of some of the debates. 2 Ste. Croix 1981, 137, 162; Millett 1991, 78; Harris 2002, 429–30; Vlassopoulos 2016, 425–6. This is also true in other historical contexts: Austin and Lovejoy 1994, 120. 3 Morley 2006, 31–32. 4 Vlassopoulos 2016; Courrier and Tran, this volume. 5 Taylor 2017. 6 Green and Hulme 2005, 869. In the context of the ancient world, see the chapters in Taylor (forthcoming). 7 Markle 1985, 268–71; Rosivach 1991; Lenfant 2013; Galbois and Rougier-Blanc 2014a, 39–44. 8 Ober 2010; Kron 2011; Cecchet 2015. 9 Kloft 1988; Roubineau 2013; Coin-Longeray 2014, 177–201; Cecchet 2015. 10 Jacquemin 2013; Coin-Longeray 2014, 183. Agyrtai (‘beggar priests’) might be considered in this category too: on which, see Eidinow 2017. 11 Lister 2004. 12 See also Lenfant 2013; Roubineau 2010, 2013. 13 See Rougier-Blanc 2014. For similar problems within iconographical studies, see Villanueva-Puig 2013; Jacquet-Rimassa 2014. 14 Solon F4; Ath. Pol. 2.2, 6.1; Plut. Sol. 13.4–5. That these are not necessarily connected see Noussia Fantuzzi 2010, 34–37. 15 There is considerable debate as to the precise nature of the reforms, e.g. on who the hektēmoroi were (Rihll 1991; Van Wees 1999), precisely what removing the horoi did (Harris 1997; Ober 2006), whether Solon abolished debt bondage or just enslavement for debt (Finley 1981a; Harris 2002), and on the causes and consequences of the

Poverty, debt and dependent labour (Greek world) 95

16

17 18 19

20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37

reforms (see overviews by Forsdyke 2006; Noussia Fantuzzi 2010; Zurbach 2013). On the Near Eastern context of various aspects of the reforms, see Blok and Krul 2017. Ath. Pol. 2.2: the penētes—identified as pelatai and hektēmoroi (see subsequent discussion)—and their families were enslaved to the plousioi in pre-Solonian times; Androtion FGH 324 F 34: the penētes welcomed cancellation of debts and reduction of interest rates (see Rhodes 1993: 168 on some of the anachronisms here); Plut. Sol. 13.2: the disparity (anōmalias) between the penētes and the plousioi led to instability in the polis. Penichros is predominantly found in lyric poetry and falls out of regular use after the archaic period (see Coin-Longeray 2014, 146–8; Werlings 2014, 73). See Noussia Fantuzzi 2010, 38–39, 469; Lewis 2007. Solon mostly uses the terms kakoi and dēmos (i.e. not explicitly the poor) who are contrasted with the agathoi. See, e.g., Solon F 4, F 5, F 15, F 37, F 36 (kakoi contrasted with esthloi and agathoi) for similar contrasts. That he is not especially concerned with economic reform is argued by Noussia Fantuzzi 2010, 40–41. Solon F 15: πολλοὶ γὰρ πλουτεῦσι κακοί, ἀγαθοὶ δὲ πένονται. This role reversal is a topos of archaic lyric poetry: see, e.g., Thgn. 315–8. Plut. Sol. 3.2: ‘he [Solon] classified himself among the penētes rather than the plousioi.’ Solon did not place himself on the side of the penētes (the term is not securely attested before the fifth century); he is concerned, rather, with ethical behaviour. See Noussia Fantuzzi 2010, 446–8. Noussia Fantuzzi 2010: 279, 448; Rosivach 1992, 156. Ath. Pol. 2.2. See Rhodes 1993, 90–97. Note that neither term is attested in the surviving fragments of Solon’s poetry and Noussia Fantuzzi (2010, 31) thinks it is unlikely that pelates was used by Solon. Compare Gallant 1991; Roubineau 2013; Taylor 2017. On debt in general, see Graeber 2011. Ancient Near East: Westbrook and Jasnow 2001; Hudson and Van de Mieroop 2002. Greece: Finley 1981b; Millett 1991. Rome: Shaw 1975; Bernard 2016 with literature cited there; Rosillo-López, this volume. Asheri 1969; Hudson 2002. Historians inevitably differ on its interpretation: compare, e.g., Finley 1985; Millett 1991 with Cohen 1992; Harris 2013 for Athens. Millett 1991. E.g. eranoi loans: Millett 1991, 153–9; Thomsen 2014; but also interest bearing loans obtainable through (e.g.) obolostatēs (Theophr. Char. 6.9). On ‘frail networks,’ see Lemercier and Zalc 2012. On the public debts of the wealthy and/or prominent, see Hunter 2000. Millett 1991, 75–84. As indeed Millett 1991, 59–64 acknowledges. Hom. Od. 14.56–8. See Cairns 2011, 30. Kapēleia is a generic word that covers a range of retail from small-scale peddlers, shopkeepers and tavern- or inn-keepers: see Finkelstein 1935. For their bad reputation, see, e.g., Dem. 25.46, Antiphanes F 157, 159. See also Pl. Leg. 915d—7d (with Leese 2017, 50–53) for a lengthy discussion of some of the assumptions about kapēloi. In general Kurke 1989; Leese 2017. Kapēlides are very well attested in Athens: IG 22.1553.16–18, 1566.12–14, 1557.51–4; Def. tab. Wünsch 68, 87; SGD 11, Ar. Thesm. 347–50. There are also a number of female specialist sellers attested: IG 13.546, IG 22.1554.40–3, 1570.73, 12073, 11254. Millett 1991, 179–88. This is the resounding implication of recent research which emphasises the abundance of references to kapēloi of various descriptions within literary evidence (Harris and Lewis 2016) and increasingly frequent identification of agora sites throughout Attica (IG 22.1174 (Halai Aixonides), 1180 (Sounion), 1202 (Aixone), 2500 (Thria), Kakavogianni 2009a (Myrrhinous), Kakavogianni 2009b (Paiania), Kaza-Papageorgiou et al. 2009, 209

96

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

Claire Taylor (Besa)). On the gap between discourses about kapēloi and their social reality, see also Vlassopoulos 2016, 432–3. Def. tab. Wünsch 68, 70, 75, 87, SGD 11, 43. See Eidinow 2007, 196. See Lemercier and Zalc 2012 on the dangers of viewing this as ‘informal’ lending. As is clear, this form of credit was widespread. Cohen 1992. On women collecting loans: Harris 1992. Ath. Pol. 58.2–3. See Todd 1993, 194–9. Millett 1991, 74–75, 77–78. Falola and Lovejoy 1994a: 1–2; Testart 2002; Stanziani and Campbell 2013, 2–3. See, e.g., Millett 1991, 78. Guarantors/hostages: Steinkeller 2001, 50–51; Westbrook 2001, 73, 85. Legal judgements: Radner 2001, 281–2. Crete: Kristensen 2004, 77–78. Falola and Lovejoy 1994a, 3; Lovejoy 2014, 66. In general see Taubenschlag 1955, 286–91. Paramonē clauses also dictate the terms of labour for freed slaves. Garfinkle 2004, 5; Justel and Justel 2015. Westbrook 2001, 84–86. Finley 1981a, 153–6; Murray 1993, 190; Zurbach 2013, 628–31. Foxhall 2003. Hes. Op. 603–4. Harris 2002, 419; Blok and Krul 2017, 618. Schaps 2004, 150–3. Jacquemin 2013, 10. Falola and Lovejoy 1994a; Westbrook 2001, 84–89; Justel and Justel 2015. Kristensen 2004; Lewis 2018, 73–74. Kristensen 2004, 77–78. Garroway 2014, 140, argues that this might be seen as a form of social mobility. Ste. Croix 1981, 163; Millett 1991, 77–78; Testart 2002, 178 but see also Lovejoy 2014 for the contrary position. Lenfant 2013; Roubineau 2013. Kloft 1988, though see also Cecchet 2015. Ste. Croix 1981, 136–7; Harris 2002. Testart 2002, 175–8. Lovejoy 2014, following Testart, stresses the role of kinship in distinguishing the two. Vlassopoulos 2011. Vlassopoulos 2011, 120. Falola and Lovejoy 1994a, 5–6; Testart 2002. The marriage of female pawns to members of the household of their father’s creditor in Near Eastern sources also demonstrates this: see the numerous examples in Garroway 2014, 113–40. See Noussia Fantuzzi 2010, 471–2. Men. Her. 27–36. Harris 2002, 420–1, with n. 22; Ste. Croix 1981, 163; Millett 1991, 78. Lape 2004. Men. Her. 38–39. Men. Her. hypothesis line 6. Finley 1981a, 151. Finley 1981a; Van Wees 2003; Zurbach 2013. In Rome: Kleijwegt 2013. Falola and Lovejoy 1994a; Austin and Lovejoy 1994. Finley 1981c; Taylor 2001; Gavriljuk 2003; Avram 2007. Finley 1981c; Taylor 2001. See Archibald 2013 for the regional character of exchange in the northern Aegean with comments on slavery at pp. 118–23 and Lewis 2018, 279–82, for regional (and chronological) patterns within the Aegean slave trade.

Poverty, debt and dependent labour (Greek world)

97

80 IGBulg. III-1 1114 (Philippopolis, late fourth/early third century BC) makes reference to a panēgyris for Apollo which might be a venue for a periodic local or regional market (see Tzochev 2015, 418–9); elsewhere these are attested as venues of buying and selling slaves: Siewert and Taeuber 2013, no. 13 (Aktion), Paus. 10.32.15–16 (Tithorea), Polyb. 5.8.5 (Thermon). SEG 48.1024 attests to the selling of a slave from Borysthenes (Olbia) to Phanagoria (see Vinogradov 1998, 160–3, no. 3) and possibly further afield (Avram 2007: 240). Inter-regional slave markets are attested at Byzantium: Polyb. 4.38.4, 50.2, Tanais: Str. 11.2.3, Abdera: SEG 47.1026 (see Archibald 2013, 121–2), Colchis: Braund and Tsetskhladze 1989, Olbia: SEG 48.988, 54.694 (see Gavriljuk 2003, 80–1; Avram 2007, 240–1). Possibly Pistiros: Avram 2007, 241; Archibald 2013, 122–3, Istria: Hind 1994. Avram (2007, 242) argues that many Thracian slaves were shipped to the Mediterranean via slave markets of the west Pontic cities. 81 Finley 1981c, 175; Braund and Tsetskhladze 1989, 118; Lewis 2018, 283–6. 82 Xen. An. 7.4.2. 83 Testart and Brunaux 2004. 84 Hdt 5.6.1. 85 This is accepted by Archibald 2013, 118; 2015, 386, 388; Braund and Tsetskhladze 1989, 117–8. Polygamy is also noted by Str. 7.3.3. 86 Falola and Lovejoy 1994a, 11–2. These loans might be accrued for the purpose of marriage given that this was a major expense, but need not be. The point is that wives and children in polygamous marriages are often vulnerable to such arrangements. 87 Pl. Leg. 7.805de. 88 See Westbrook 2001, 73–4. 89 Gaca 2010. See Xen. An. 6.3.2–4 for an example in Thrace. 90 Note in this context Antiphon 5.20 which describes Thracians travelling on board a ship sailing from Mytilene to Ainos who had arranged a ransom for some ‘andrapodized’ Thracians and Aelian F 71, which mentions a trader, Dionysios, who bought a female slave from Colchis ‘whom the Machyles, a local tribe, had carried off.’ 91 In the Bight of Benin and Biafra children especially were placed with traders as collateral, following local pawning practices and through which parents intended to redeem, but the traders viewed such transactions differently, i.e. as sales, since pawning was not prevalent within the Islamic societies of the traders: see Lovejoy 2014, 71. Might similar cultural differences lie behind Hdt 5.6.1? 92 Pollux 7.14, SEG 26.845, 42.710, 54.694. 93 Morton and Lovejoy 1994; Ojo 2013. 94 IG 13.421–30. This is a much greater female–male ratio than we find in almost any other source. 95 IG 13.422.79–80: Polyxsene of Macedonia; IG 13.421.49: Lyde. Possibly Melitten[os] should read Melitten[e]: IG 13.421.48. There is never more than one woman from any other ‘ethnic’ group, though this may be disguised by naming practices of masters, on which see Tsetskhladze 2008; Vlassopoulos 2015. Unsurprisingly there are far fewer women recorded in the Laurion region or on naval lists, other important sources of slave names. 96 Ar. Ach. 273, Pax 1138, Thesm. 279–94, Vesp. 828. See also Ar. Lys. 184 for a Skythaina. 97 Bäbler 1998. 98 Bäbler 2005. 99 SEG 26.845, 48.988, 47.1175. Other letters may have included female slaves, but the collective noun is masculine. Further afield, Xenophon’s peltast, once a slave in Athens and presumably sold as a child, recognized the language of the Makrones on the southern shores of the Black Sea, three days’ march from Colchis: Xen. An. 4.8.4–7.

98

Claire Taylor

100 101 102 103

Braund and Tsetskhladze 1989, 117; Tzochev 2015, 421. See also Ar. Plut. 147–8: Karion appears to have entered slavery via this route. On slave demand as a destabilising force, see Lewis 2018, 285–6. Mallon 1994, 1507.

Bibliography Archibald, Z. H. 2013. Ancient Economies of the Northern Aegean: Fifth to First Centuries BC. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199682119.001. 0001. Archibald, Z. H. 2015. ‘Social life of Thrace.’ In Valeva, Nankov and Graninger 2015, 385–98. doi:10.1002/9781118878248.ch25. Asheri, D. 1969. ‘Leggi greche sul problema dei debiti.’ SCO 18: 5–122. Austin, G. and P. E. Lovejoy. 1994. ‘Human Pawning in Asante, 1800–1950: Markets and Coercion, Gender and Cocoa.’ In Falola and Lovejoy 1994b, 119–60. Avram, A. 2007. ‘Some Thoughts about the Black Sea and the Slave Trade before the Roman Domination (6th-1st Centuries BC).’ In The Black Sea in Antiquity: Regional and Interregional Economic Exchanges, edited by V. Gabrielsen and J. Lund, 239–51. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Bäbler, B. 1998. Fleissige Thrakerinnen und wehrhafte Skythen. Nichtgriechen im klassischen Athen und ihre Archäologische Hinterlassenschaft. Stuttgart: Teubner. Bäbler, B. 2005. ‘Fremde Frauen im Athen. Thrakische Ammen und athenische Kinder.’ In Xenophobie-Philoxenie. Vom Umgang mit Fremden in der Antike, edited by U. Riemer and P. Riemer, 65–88. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Bernard, S. 2016. ‘Debt, Land, and Labor in the Early Republican Economy.’ Phoenix 70 (3/4): 317–38. Blok, J. and J. Krul. 2017. ‘Debt and Its Aftermath: The Near Eastern Background to Solon’s Seisachtheia.’ Hesperia 86 (4): 607–43. Blok, J. and A. P. M. H. Lardinois, eds. 2006. Solon of Athens: New Historical and Philological Approaches. Mnemosyne, Supplements 272. Leiden: Brill. doi:10.1163/ 9789047408895. Braund, D. and G. R. Tsetskhladze. 1989. ‘The Export of Slaves from Colchis.’ CQ 39: 114–25. doi:10.1017/S0009838800040519. Cairns, D. 2011. ‘Honour and Shame: Modern Controversies and Ancient Values.’ Critical Quarterly 53 (1): 23–41. doi:10.1111/j.1467–8705.2011.01974.x. Campbell, G. and A. Stanziani, eds. 2013. Debt and Slavery in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds. London: Pickering & Chatto. doi:10.4324/9781315654799. Cecchet, L. 2015. Poverty in Athenian Public Discourse. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Cohen, E. E. 1992. Athenian Economy and Society. A Banking Perspective. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Coin-Longeray, S. 2014. Poésie de la richesse et de la pauvreté: étude du vocabulaire de la richesse et de la pauvreté dans la poésie grecque antique, d’Homère à Aristophane. PhD diss., Université de Saint-Étienne. Eidinow, E. 2007. Oracles, Curses and Risk among the Ancient Greeks. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199277780.001.0001. Eidinow, E. 2017. ‘In Search of the “Beggar-Priest”.’ In Beyond Priesthood: Religious Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the Roman Empire, edited by R. L. Gordon, G. Petridou and J. Rüpke, 255–75. Berlin: De Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110448184–011.

Poverty, debt and dependent labour (Greek world) 99 Falola, T. and P. E. Lovejoy. 1994a. ‘Pawnship in Historical Perspective.’ In Falola and Lovejoy 1994b, 1–26. Falola, T. and P. E. Lovejoy, eds. 1994b. Pawnship in Africa: Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective. Boulder: Westview Press. Finkelstein, M. I. 1935. ‘Ἔμπορος, Ναύκληρος, and Κάπηλος: A Prolegomena to the Study of Athenian Trade.’ CPh 30 (4): 320–36. doi:10.1086/361870. Finley, M. I. 1981a. ‘Debt-Bondage and the Problem of Slavery.’ In Finley 1981d: 150–66. Finley, M. I. 1981b. ‘Land, Debt and the Man of Property in Classical Athens.’ In Finley 1981d: 62–76. Finley, M. I. 1981c. ‘The Black Sea and Danubian Regions and the Slave Trade in Antiquity.’ In Finley 1981d: 167–75. Finley, M. I. 1981d. Economy and Society in Ancient Greece, edited by B. D. Saller and R. P. Shaw. London: Chatto & Windus. Finley, M. I. 1985 [1952]. Studies in Land and Credit in Ancient Athens, 500–200 BC. Revised edition. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Forsdyke, S. 2006. ‘Land, Labour, and Economy in Solonian Athens: Breaking the Impasse between Archeology and History.’ In Blok and Lardinois 2006, 334–50. doi:10.1163/9789047408895_016. Foxhall, L. 2003. ‘Cultures, Landscapes, and Identities in the Mediterranean World.’ MHR 18 (2): 75–92. doi:10.1080/0951896032000230499. Gaca, K. L. 2010. ‘The Andrapodizing of War Captives in Greek Historical Memory.’ TAPhA 140 (1): 117–61. doi:10.1353/apa.0.0051. Galbois, E. and S. Rougier-Blanc. 2014a. ‘Les mots de la pauvreté. Définitions et concepts: Introduction de la 1re partie.’ In Galbois and Rougier-Blanc 2014b, 37–44. Galbois, E. and S. Rougier-Blanc, eds. 2014b. La pauvreté en Grèce ancienne: Formes, représentations, enjeux. Bordeaux: Ausonius. Gallant, T. W. 1991. Risk and Survival in Ancient Greece. Reconstructing the Rural Domestic Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garfinkle, S. J. 2004. ‘Shepherds, Merchants, and Credit: Some Observations on Lending Practices in Ur III Mesopotamia.’JESHO 47 (1): 1–30. doi:10.1163/156852004323069385. Garroway, K. H. 2014. Children in the Ancient Near Eastern Household. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. doi:10.5325/j.ctv18r6r3k. Gavriljuk, N. 2003. ‘The Graeco-Scythian Slave-Trade in the 6th and 5th Centuries BC.’ In The Cauldron of Ariantas: Studies Presented to A. N. Ščeglov on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday, edited by J. M. Højte, V. F. Stolba and P. Guldager Bilde. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 75–85. Graeber, D. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House. Green, M. and D. Hulme. 2005. ‘From Correlates and Characteristics to Causes: Thinking about Poverty from a Chronic Poverty Perspective.’ World Development 33: 867–79. doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2004.09.013. Guha, R., ed. 1997. A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harris, E. M. 1992. ‘Women and Lending in Athenian Society: A “Horos” Re-Examined.’ Phoenix 46(4): 309–21. doi:10.2307/1088620. Harris, E. M. 1997. ‘A New Solution to the Riddle of the Seisachtheia.’ In The Development of the Polis in Archaic Greece, edited by L. G. Mitchell and P. J. Rhodes. London and New York: Routledge, 103–12. Harris, E. M. 2002. ‘Did Solon Abolish Debt-Bondage?’ CQ 52: 415–30. doi:10.1093/ cq/52.2.415.

100

Claire Taylor

Harris, E. M. 2013. ‘Finley’s “Studies in Land and Credit” Sixty Years Later.’ Dike 16: 123–46. doi:10.13130/1128–8221/4292. Harris, E. M. and D. M. Lewis. 2016. ‘Introduction: Markets in Classical and Hellenistic Greece.’ In The Ancient Greek Economy: Markets, Households and City-States, edited by E. M. Harris, D. M. Lewis and M. Woolmer, 1–37. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hind, J. 1994. ‘The Trade in Getic Slaves and the Silver Coins of Istria.’ Thracia Pontica 5: 153–8. Hudson, M. 2002. ‘Reconstructing the Origins of Interest-Bearing Debt and the Logic of Clean Slates.’ In Hudson and Van de Mieroop 2002, 7–58. Hudson, M. and M. Van de Mieroop, eds. 2002. Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East. Bethesda, MD: CDL Press. Hunter, V. 2000. ‘Policing Public Debtors in Classical Athens.’ Phoenix 54 (1–2): 21–38. doi:10.2307/1089088. Jacquemin, A. 2013. ‘D’une condition sociale à un statut politique, les ambiguïtés du thète.’ Ktèma 38: 7–13. Jacquet-Rimassa, P. 2014. ‘“Cherchez le pauvre!” Quelques réflexions sur la pauvreté dans l’imagerie attique (VIe-Ve a.C.).’ In Galbois and Rougier-Blanc 2014b, 179–88. Justel, J. J. and D. Justel. 2015. ‘An Unpublished Nuzi-Type Antichretic Loan Contract in the British Museum. With Some Comments on Children in the Kingdom of Arraphe.’ Iraq 77: 129–42. doi:10.1017/irq.2015.12. Kakavogianni, O. 2009a. ‘Τοπογραφία του αρχαίου δήμου Μυρρινόυτος.’ In Από τα Μεσόγεια στον Αργοσαρωνικό: Β’ Εφορεία Προïστορικών και Κλασικών Αρχαιοτήτων. Το έργο μιας δεκαετίας, 1994–2003, edited by V. Vasilopoulou and S. Katsarou-Tzeveleki, 47–78. Markopoulou: Demos Markopoulou Mesogaias. Kakavogianni, O. 2009b. ‘Αρχαίες οδοί στα νότια και δυτικά Μεσόγεια και τη Λαυρεωτική.’ In Korres 2009, 182–97. Kaza-Papageorgiou, K., O. Kakavogianni, E. Andrikou and A. Ntova. 2009. ‘Η αστική οδός (οδός Αθηνών—Σουνίου).’ In Korres 2009, 198–211. Kleijwegt, M. 2013. ‘Debt Bondage and Chattel Slavery in Early Rome.’ In Campbell and Stanziani 2013, 29–37. Kloft, H. 1988. ‘Gedanken zum Ptochos.’ In Soziale Randgruppen und Aussenseiter im Altertum: Referate vom Symposion “Soziale Randgruppen und Antike Sozialpolitik” in Graz (21. bis 23. September 1987), edited by I. Weiler and H. Grassl, 81–106. Graz: Leykam. Korres, M., ed. 2009. Αττικής οδοί: αρχαίοι δρόμοι της Αττικής. Athens: Ekdotikos Oikos Melissa. Kristensen, K. R. 2004. ‘Gortynian Debt Bondage. Some New Considerations on IC IV 41 IV-VII, 47 and 72 I.56-I.2, X. 25–32.’ ZPE 149: 73–79. Kron, G. 2011. ‘The Distribution of Wealth in Athens in Comparative Perspective.’ ZPE 179: 129–38. Kurke, L. 1989. ‘Καπηλεία and Deceit: Theognis 59–60.’ AJPh 110 (4): 535–44. doi:10.2307/295278. Lape, S. 2004. Reproducing Athens: Menander’s Comedy, Democratic Culture, and the Hellenistic City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Leese, M. 2017. ‘Kapêloi and Economic Rationality in Fourth-Century BCE Athens.’ ICS 42 (1): 41–59. doi:10.5406/ILLICLASSTUD.42.1.0041. Lemercier, C. and C. Zalc. 2012. ‘For a New Approach to Credit Relations in Modern History.’ Annales (HSS) 67 (4): 661–91. doi:10.1017/S2398568200000418.

Poverty, debt and dependent labour (Greek world) 101 Lenfant, D. 2013. ‘Intégrés ou dénoncés: la place faite aux pauvres dans les discours grecs sur la démocratie.’ Ktèma 38: 37–51. Lewis, D. M. 2018. Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c. 800– 146 BC. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198769941.001.0001. Lewis, J. 2007. ‘Slavery and Lawlessness in Solonian Athens.’ Dike 7: 19–40. Lister, R. 2004. Poverty. London: Polity Press. Lovejoy, P. E. 2014. ‘Pawnship, Debt, and “Freedom” in Atlantic Africa during the Era of the Slave Trade: A Reassessment.’ The Journal of African History 55 (1): 55–78. doi:10.1017/S0021853714000073. Mallon, F. E. 1994. ‘The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History.” AHR 99: 1491–515. doi:10.1086/ahr/99.5.1491. Markle, M. M. 1985. ‘Jury Pay and Assembly Pay at Athens.’ In Crux: Essays Presented to G.E.M. de Ste Croix on his 75th Birthday, edited by P. Cartledge and F. D. Harvey, 265–97. London and Exeter: Imprint Academic. Millett, P. 1991. Lending and Borrowing in Ancient Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511518577. Morley, N. 2006. ‘The Poor in the City of Rome.’ In Poverty in the Roman World, edited by M. Atkins and R. Osborne, 21–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511482700.003. Morton, F. and P. E. Lovejoy. 1994. ‘Pawning and Slavery on the Kenya Coast: The Miji Kenya Case.’ In Falola and Lovejoy 1994b, 27–42. Murray, O. 1993. Early Greece. London: Fontana. Noussia Fantuzzi, M. 2010. Solon the Athenian: The Poetic Fragments. Mnemosyne, Supplements 326. Leiden: Brill. doi:10.1163/ej.9789004174788.i-580. Ober, J. 2006. ‘Solon and the Horoi: Facts on the Ground in Archaic Athens.’ In Blok and Lardinois 2006, 441–56. doi:10.1163/9789047408895_020. Ober, J. 2010. ‘Wealthy Hellas.’ TAPhA 140 (2): 241–86. doi:10.1353/apa.2010.0014. Ojo, O. 2013. ‘The Business of “Trust” and the Enslavement of Yoruba Women and Children for Debt.’ In Campbell and Stanziani 2013, 77–92. Radner, K. 2001. ‘The Neo-Assyrian Period.’ In Westbrook and Jasnow 2001, 264–88. Rhodes, P. J. 1993. A Commentary on the Aristotelian ‘Athenaion Politeia’. Revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198149422.book.1. Rihll, T. E. 1991. ‘Hektemoroi: Partners in Crime?’ JHS 111: 101–27. doi:10.2307/631890. Rosivach, V. J. 1991. ‘Some Athenian Presuppositions about “The Poor”.’ G&R 38 (2): 189–98. doi:10.1017/S0017383500023561. Rosivach, V. J. 1992. ‘Redistribution of Land in Solon, Fragment 34 West.’ JHS 112: 153–7. doi:10.2307/632161. Roubineau, J.-M. 2010. ‘Sources littéraires et histoire sociale: être riche, être pauvre selon Xénophon.’ In La cité et ses élites. Pratiques et représentation des formes de domination et de contrôle social dans les cités grecques, edited by L. Capdetrey and Y. Lafond, 211–24. Bordeaux: De Boccard. Roubineau, J.-M. 2013. ‘Mendicité, déchéance et indignité sociale dans les cités grecques.’ Ktèma 38: 15–36. Rougier-Blanc, S. 2014. ‘Architecture et/ou espaces de la pauvreté? Habitats modestes, cabanes et “squats” en Grèce ancienne.’ In Galbois and Rougier-Blanc 2014b, 105–35. Schaps, D. M. 2004. The Invention of Coinage and the Monetization of Ancient Greece. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. doi:10.3998/mpub.17760. Shaw, B. D. 1975. ‘Debt in Sallust.’ Latomus 34: 187–96.

102

Claire Taylor

Siewert, P. and H. Taeuber. 2013. Neue Inschriften von Olympia. Vienna: Holzhausen. doi:10.15661/tyche/specials.07.olympia. Spivak, G. C. and R. C. Morris, eds. 2010. Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea. New York: Columbia University Press. Stanziani, A. and G. Campbell. 2013. ‘Introduction: Debt and Slavery in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds.’ In Campbell and Stanziani 2013, 1–27. Ste. Croix, G. E. M. de. 1981. The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World from the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests. London: Duckworth. Steinkeller, P. 2001. ‘The Ur III Period.’ In Westbrook and Jasnow 2001, 47–62. Taubenschlag, R. 1955. The Law of Greco-Roman Egypt in the Light of the Papyri, 332 B.C.-640 A.D. 2nd edition. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. Taylor, C. 2017. Poverty, Wealth, and Well-Being: Experiencing Penia in Democratic Athens. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198786931.001.0001. Taylor, C. ed. forthcoming. A Cultural History of Poverty in Antiquity. London: Bloomsbury. Taylor, T. 2001. ‘Believing the Ancients: Quantitative and Qualitative Dimensions of Slavery and the Slave Trade in Later Prehistoric Eurasia.’ World Archaeology 33 (1): 27–43. doi:10.1080/00438240120047618. Testart, A. 2002. ‘The Extent and Significance of Debt Slavery.’ Revue française de sociologie 43: 173–204. doi:10.2307/3322762. Testart, A. and J.-L. Brunaux. 2004. ‘Esclavage et prix de la fiancée: La société thrace au risque de l’ethnographie comparée.’ Annales (HSS) 59 (3): 615–40. doi:10.1017/ S0395264900017741. Thomsen, C. A. 2014. ‘The Eranistai of Classical Athens.’ GRBS 55 (1): 154–75. Todd, S. C. 1993. The Shape of Athenian Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsetskhladze, G. R. 2008. ‘Pontic Slaves in Athens: Orthodoxy and Reality.’ In Antike Lebenswelten: Konstanz, Wandel, Wirkungsmacht. Festschrift für Ingomar Weiler zum 70. Geburtstag, edited by P. Mauritsch, 309–19. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Tzochev, C. 2015. ‘Trade.’ In Valeva, Nankov and Graninger 2015, 412–25. doi:10.1002/ 9781118878248.ch27. Valeva, J., E. Nankov and D. Graninger, eds. 2015. A Companion to Ancient Thrace. Oxford: Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781118878248. Van Wees, H. 1999. ‘The Mafia of Early Greece. Violent Exploitation in the Seventh and Sixth Centuries BC.’ In Organized Crime in Antiquity, edited by K. Hopwood, 1–51. London: Duckworth. doi:10.2307/j.ctvvn934.4. Van Wees, H. 2003. ‘Conquerors and Serfs: Wars of Conquest and Forced Labour in Archaic Greece.’ In Helots and their Masters in Laconia and Messenia: Histories, Ideologies, Structures, edited by N. Luraghi and S. E. Alcock, 33–80. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Villanueva-Puig, M.-C. 2013. ‘La pauvreté dans la culture visuelle des Grecs anciens.’ Ktèma 38: 89–115. Vinogradov, Y. 1998. ‘The Greek Colonisation of the Black Sea Region in the Light of Private Lead Letters.’ In The Greek Colonisation of the Black Sea Area, edited by G. R. Tsetskhladze, 153–78. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Vlassopoulos, K. 2011. ‘Greek Slavery: From Domination to Property and Back Again.’ JHS 131: 115–30. doi:10.1017/S0075426911000085. Vlassopoulos, K. 2015. ‘Plotting Strategies, Networks and Communities in Classical Athens: The Evidence of Names.’ In Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World, edited by C. Taylor and K. Vlassopoulos, 101–27. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198726494.003.0005.

Poverty, debt and dependent labour (Greek world) 103 Vlassopoulos, K. 2016. ‘What Do We Really Know about Athenian Society?’ Annales (HSS) 71 (3): 419–39. doi:10.1017/S239856821800002X. Werlings, M.-J. 2014. ‘Qui étaient vraiment les pauvres dans les cités grecques archaïques?’ In Galbois and Rougier-Blanc 2014b, 67–84. Westbrook, R. 2001. ‘The Old Babylonian Period.’ In Westbrook and Jasnow 2001, 63–92. Westbrook, R. and R. Jasnow, eds. 2001. Security for Debt in Ancient Near Eastern Law. Leiden: Brill. Zurbach, J. 2013. ‘La formation des cités grecques.’ Annales (HSS) 68 (4): 957–98. doi:10.1017/S0395264900015079.

5

Destitute, homeless and (almost) invisible Urban poverty and the rental market in the Roman world Cristina Rosillo-López

Introduction Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, article 25)1 In general terms, definitions of poverty that have been applied to the Roman world have focused on food and living standards in general, while few have focused on housing specifically. However, the United Nations’ definition of poverty includes both food and shelter, addressing housing poverty as an impactful category to be considered a basic need.2 Housing is a human necessity; as such, it also reflects the inequalities of human existence. It is so in our times, and it was so in ancient Rome. While some people owned several houses and enjoyed private rooms, elsewhere, whole families squeezed into just a few square meters. Storey has argued that ‘the true poverty of ancient Rome is defined by life in the tiniest, most cramped upper-floor apartments in apartment houses.’3 The following pages attempt to demonstrate that the true poverty of ancient Rome is defined by people who lived unsheltered, and who fell into homelessness. If we want to develop a real economic history from below, we have to look at those who were totally outside the housing market; the unsheltered people, the urban poor, who lived in slums, or were homeless in the city of Rome. If housing is a human necessity, what happened to those for whom housing was actually a luxury? Can we reconstruct their experience in Rome? What were their challenges, and where did they end up? Finally, can we integrate them into a study of the housing market in Rome? This study will first survey contemporary terms such as slums, homelessness and poverty, before analysing what living conditions were like in Rome at the bottom of the economic scale, and the experience of homeless people in the city. DOI: 10.4324/9781003005148-7

Destitute, homeless and (almost) invisible 105

Slums, homelessness and poverty The existence of slums in Rome, the circumstances of slum-dwellers and the daily lives of the homeless are, as expected, difficult to grasp through the available sources. Due to the nature of their shelter (or lack of it), archaeological sources encounter many difficulties when trying to trace these people. Furthermore, the modest nature of a dwelling was not always linked to the modest or poor economic or social status of its dwellers.4 Literary sources talk occasionally about poverty and sometimes even destitution, but they do so with a literary objective in mind.5 Beggars, for instance, are ostensibly absent from most Roman texts, but that absence should not make us think they can be erased from history.6 Poverty is a multifaceted and complex phenomenon, of difficult definition even today; in antiquity, the concept of poverty was wrapped in multiple categories, social hierarchies and ethical discourses.7 Slums can be defined as closely packed housing units in poor condition, without access to adequate infrastructure such as water supply, and inhabited by impoverished people. There is a great variety in the composition, size and quality of slums, from shanty houses to more durable dwellings. Today, slum-dwellers make up a third of the world’s urban population, around 863 million people (2012).8 Common causes for the existence of contemporary slums are made up of a complex mixture of political, demographic, social and economic circumstances: rapid rural-to-urban migration, poor planning, economic crises, poverty, inequality, natural disasters and social conflict. Rapid rural-to-urban migration often means that migrants have a hard time finding housing in cities, since the number of available housing units is not great enough to satisfy such a sudden influx of population, and urban infrastructure can be stretched beyond its limits. Slums typically originate in the least desirable parts of a city, where less population pressure exists. For this reason, the outskirts of cities are often one of the main locations. They typically emerge in places with difficult access: on the sides of mountains or in flood plains. Regardless of their location, their inhabitants usually have no legal right to live there and so may experience continuous insecurity regarding their shelter. Furthermore, such insecurity typically precludes them from upgrading their facilities, as they face the constant fear of their shelters being torn down, leaving them even more at the mercy of natural disasters.9 Finally, slum-dwellers are more prone to high rates of disease due to their lack of adequate infrastructure (clean water, availability of sewers), malnutrition and overcrowding. Homelessness is defined as the state of being without permanent housing. The definition varies widely from country to country; in some, people living in shanty town structures, tent cities or the like, and even squatters, can count as homeless.10 The number of homeless people throughout the world is difficult to quantify, not only because of the various different definitions of homelessness but also because of the elusive nature of many of their sleeping arrangements.11 Homelessness is considered not as a static state but rather as a process. Scholars have pointed out that homelessness is not just the state of not having a shelter but also the absence of a ‘home,’ that is, an ‘experience place’ that serves as a base for cultivating human

106

Cristina Rosillo-López

relationships and establishing an identity; such a lack creates psychological, health and socio-economic deficiencies.12

Is it possible to study homelessness in ancient Rome from below? Rome was the ancient megalopolis in which a population of up to one million people had to find living quarters.13 The model of the ‘urban graveyard effect’ posits that, in pre-modern cities, deaths exceeded births due to the dreadful sanitary conditions, and the resulting lack of natural population growth was compensated for by migration.14 Being poor in Rome brought with it a vulnerability to food shortages and natural hazards, and almost certain exclusion from the reciprocal patron-client relationship, cutting poor people off from any support network, since they had nothing to offer. In the mentality of the Roman elite, in contrast with the idealised rural poor, urban poverty was linked with rebellion and crime.15 It is a complex debate that is far from settled.16 Lo Cascio has argued that early modern cities, upon which the model is mainly based, had variable populations, and that the unsanitary conditions in the city of Rome were not as extreme as previous studies had proposed;17 therefore the ‘urban graveyard effect’ does not accurately describe Rome’s population increase. Courrier suggests that the plebs frumentaria was not hit as hard by poverty as recent migrants, who could not easily access to the distributions and sales of grain at low prices.18 For the study of the ancient world, as is the case in more recent definitions of poverty, it is more useful to leave aside an absolute definition of poverty, based on a specific property line below which someone could be considered poor or on a fixed set of criteria, and adopt a sliding scale of poverty, which is fluid and according to context.19 Poverty is thus not an objective economic condition, but an experience set in a given social and cultural context. Contemporary definitions of poverty establish a difference between structural and conjunctural poverty. The first category refers to those who are born and die poor, while the second refers to those who fall into poverty through misfortune. Free urban dwellers in Rome were more likely to have been overrepresented among the structural poor, since they relied on their own capacity to find a job (in contrast with slaves), and were cut off from patronage relationships: the chronically ill and disabled, disabled veterans and the unsupported elderly formed part of such a group.20 The conjunctural poor were those struck down by temporary situations such as famine, war and debt: often, for instance, the labouring urban poor, migrants and foreigners.21 Morley has pointed out that this distinction is not always clear, especially in the case of widows and orphans.22 Another question refers to the difference between poverty and destitution, the latter being an extreme form of poverty.23 Ancient Greek, for instance, established a difference between poor (penestai) and destitute (ptochoí).24 Egens and pauper in Latin approximate those expressions but, in the end, are subjective terms.25 In Latin, inopia, inops, egestas and egentes were the poorest of the poor; other concepts, such as mediocres, imply a lower social, rather than economic, status.26

Destitute, homeless and (almost) invisible 107 On the basis of Augustine, Carrié has analysed the obvious elements of poverty in ancient Rome, such as the lack of food, domicile or any income or property.27 In any case, Scheidel has argued plausibly that Roman society was not defined by the dichotomy of rich versus poor, with no middle gradations; nuances were widespread, and there was a big difference between a poor and a destitute person.28 Publius Iuventius Celsus, a jurist who was active at the beginning of the second century CE, discussed a case in which someone planted or built upon land of other persons and then he was evicted. If he was a poor person (pauper), he may need to sell his house or the tombs of his ancestors; he may be poor, but he had still a roof under which to live.29 This example leads to my third point: there is a conceptual problem with much of the modern historiography about Roman poverty, which has lumped together mass of peoples whose experiences were different under the same category. In the case of the present study, beggars and homeless people have been considered to be roughly the same.30 In all likelihood, the reality was much more nuanced; such sweeping statements conflate thousands of people and situations into one big amorphous crowd. Not all beggars lived in the streets, and not all those who lived in the streets or in slums were beggars.31 For the sake of this study, I will set aside all references exclusively to beggars and their behaviour, with the exception of their living arrangements (and I will specifically note that they refer to beggars). This methodology will allow us to overcome the previously mentioned dichotomy of rich and poor by constructing a more defined sub-division among those at the lower end of the scale. It provides more adequate and nuanced categories for the study of the urban poor and, especially the context of their relationship to their access to, and exclusion from, the rental market. Could we recover the voice and agency of homeless people from the sources and analyse them through the lens of history from below? How could we go beyond stereotypes and clichés regarding the urban homeless? Historians of the eighteenth century, such as A. Farge and T. Hitchcock, have attempted to recover the voices and experiences of poor people. Farge centred upon the experience of the street in Paris, pointing out the richness and complexity of the sociability, relationships and even the violence that occurred in it, through the perspective of the people themselves, not of the administrators, thinkers or philanthropes.32 Hitchcock has carried out a similar study in London, refusing to consider them just as pegs of a machinery that led to the modern administration and modern State. At the same time, he had denounced the fixation of historians with the ‘middling sort’ and the history of consumption, leaving poor people aside or, at best, just considering them through statistical studies that dehumanise them. For him, a real history of poverty from below has to take into account the economic role of activities related to charity and beggary, and focus on their agency and survival strategies to balance out the limitations of public or private assistance.33 A similar exercise for the ancient Roman world collides with the limitation of sources; Farge and Hitchcock have used as their main source accounts of trials, legal statements, newspaper accounts and police reports, which are not available for previous centuries. Furthermore, only Hitchcock has briefly breached the subject of homeless people.34

108 Cristina Rosillo-López This methodological problem is symptomatic of the study of homelessness: it is a research issue difficult to grasp, even nowadays, because of its very nature. The picture gets more complicated for the ancient Roman world: if elite sources did rarely paid attention to the lives of people in poverty, the homeless were absolutely out of their interests. As we shall see, homeless people figure only in certain kinds of sources; first of all, as part of the background, when historians such as Tacitus or Appian mention the consequences of natural disasters or of political decisions that dispossessed people from their lands. Secondly, as characters in poetry, the subjects of the mockery and scorn of the poet, such as Martial or Juvenal. Finally, as legal figures whose actions should be controlled and punished if they interfered with private property, as in the works of the jurists Gaius and Ulpian or in the Theodosian Code. We should not forget that history from below should be studied in the context of relationships of power and domination. How far could we grasp the social and economic life of homeless people in Rome through those sources? First of all, we should keep in mind the presence of topoi and literary constructions, since those sources had their own literary objectives. If we take Juvenal or Martial, for instance, at their face’s value, the city of Rome was full of poor people who lived in buildings that were about to crumble at any moment; Courrier has put forward that some scholars have read those sources without paying close attention and that the reality is much more nuanced.35 Secondly, even if occasionally it would not be possible to reach that socio-economic reality, we could still at least consider them a reflection of the mentalities of the upper classes regarding homeless people.36 These methodological reflections having being raised, the following pages will attempt to recover the experiences and agency of homeless people in the Roman world.

The difficulties of living in Rome Renting lodgings in Rome was more expensive than in other cities in Italy or probably any other Roman province.37 After the civil war, Caesar enacted a measure that established a maximum price for rents of 2,000 sesterces for the city of Rome and 500 sesterces for the rest of Italy—four times more in the capital.38 A freedman in the second century BC paid 2,000 sesterces a year for a cenaculum, the lowest rent recorded for such type of home.39 However, it should be noted that literary sources mention the prices of rents of well-off people, such as senators, knights or moneyed freedmen, and mostly with a moralising objective.40 We should not have the impression that 2,000 sesterces represented a minimum price for the rental market in Rome in general, but for the upper tier of the market. Furthermore, we do not know what kind of cenaculum is being discussed. In the Satyricon, one as per night was paid for an unpleasant room.41 Some papyri from Roman Egypt mention rental prices: if we look at the bottom end of the scale, the lowest price for a house with a courtyard was 20 drachmai p.a. (for half a house) and 26 drachmai p.a. (for a whole house) in the second century AD, and 8 drachmai p.a. for half a house with a courtyard at the end of the first century AD.42 For rooms, the lowest price attested in AD 173 for the two-year lease of a dining room

Destitute, homeless and (almost) invisible 109 and storeroom was 20 drachmai.43 We are probably not dealing here with the lowest level of property. Sixty drachmai, for instance, allowed for the purchase of half a house with a courtyard in Soknopaiou Nesos; the difference is not that big, even allowing for the differences in location and their unknown size and state.44 In Rome, there was no housing planning in the sense of providing people with adequate housing. The jurist Gaius stated that some considered food the only essential requirement for living; the late republican jurist Ofilius, a contemporary of Cicero, added clothing and some bedding or bedclothes.45 Lodging of any kind was not considered a basic necessity.46 In ancient Greece, Coin-Longeray has suggested that the mild climate could be the reason for this; however, in parts of Greece, and in Rome, cold weather (and sometimes very cold weather) is an annual occurrence. It probably had more to do with a view of the world in which food was considerably more necessary than housing. In any case, governments only began to worry about the basic necessity of housing from the twentieth century onwards, and the extent to which the State should provide an answer to that need is still a subject for debate. Taking that context into account, mild weather does not seem a very convincing explanation. The Senate (later the emperor) and the magistrates, who were in charge of the city, did focus on infrastructure (aqueducts, roads) and on food supply (annona);47 regarding housing, throughout the Republic and Principate a number of laws were passed that restricted, for instance, the number of floors that could be built, or the material that could be used in their construction.48 Other imperial laws tried to prevent property speculation. For instance, two decrees of the Senate (senatus consultum Hosidianum Vagellianum, AD 47, and senatus consultum Volusianum Cornelianum, AD 56: FIRA I, nº 45) legislated against speculation in urban residential property (negotiandi causa), forbidding the purchase of private dwellings in order to demolish and rebuild them. Both documents seem to have applied to Rome, and probably also to Italy.49 They also addressed how speculation could become a problem, describing it as ‘this most cruel form of profiteering’ (cruentissimo genere negotiationis). The emperor Claudius, who was behind the first decree, was concerned with buildings left purposely to run to ruin, so that they could be destroyed and rebuild later. The second decree was actually an interpretation of the first, since it compelled citizens who had bought some land and abandoned buildings actively to demonstrate that no-one lived on the premises, and the Senate warned against this kind of speculation. This type of legislation was repeated during the reign of emperor Vespasian, at an undetermined later date, and in a rewriting of the law by emperor Severus Alexander in AD 222 (Codex Iustinianum 8.10.2). Such laws were not exclusively for the city of Rome or even Italy but represented a constant and conscious policy of the Roman government at least in the first centuries BC/AD: the law of Tarentum (Lex Tarentina 32–38), the code of Urso (lex Ursonensis 75) and the municipal code of Malaca (lex Flavia Malacitana 62) incorporated similar clauses. Despite those cases, housing policy did not constitute a question that they felt fell within the purview of the Roman government. There were just two exceptions: during the civil war between Caesareans and Pompeians, a praetor and a tribune

110

Cristina Rosillo-López

of the plebs proposed measures through which the State would intervene in the rental market. The political and military context was instrumental in the failure of such proposals, but popular support was huge. A year later, in 46 BC, as previously stated, Caesar established the maximum rates for residential rents in Rome (2,000 sesterces) and Italy (500 sesterces).50 A few years later, in a more volatile and unstable context, Octavian re-enacted Caesar’s economic policy on the rental market for a year.51 These measures have been understood as remissions of rents but in fact they were revolutionary rent control measures, unheard of in other periods of Roman history.52 If we focus on the bottom end of the economic scale, how could people with very low incomes access the rental market? Who was excluded from it, and under what circumstances? Frier divided the rental market into several categories: firstly, the stable and long-term leases of apartments, composed of a long corridor with private rooms (cenaculum), paid at the conclusion of the period; secondly, people who lived in the mezzanines or backrooms of the shops in which they worked; and finally, the lower end of the market (short-term contracts), which was composed of long rows of partitioned cubicles, akin to hotels or lodging houses (deversoria, synoikia, even tabernae). The latter catered not only to travellers or occasional guests but probably also to tenants.53 Humble people lived in quarters sometimes described as cella, a term with special connotations of poverty.54 Seneca the Younger criticised those millionaires who kept one very small and humble room to simulate the lodgings of the poor (cella pauperis); Martial described a certain Olus who had such a room built for his enjoyment, again with moralising connotations.55 In my opinion, Frier’s dichotomy is artificial; the reality was more nuanced.56 Martial (cf. infra) described someone who went from a long-term contract directly to living in the streets as homeless, without touching on their passing through other segments of the market. Working poor also existed in Rome—that is, people who, due to lack of working hours and/or low wages, strove with difficulty to make ends meet.57 Martial described two advocates, Atestinus and Civis, who emigrated to Rome determined to make a living there through pleading in the forum. However, ‘neither made enough to pay for his lodging’ (sed neutri pensio tota fuit).58 Juvenal mentioned the high rent that had to be paid in Rome as one of the reasons for the lack of social mobility.59 In the case of Atestinus and Civis, a common reason for the condition of the working poor can be identified: the cost of housing can consume the majority of income, making it very difficult to carry on a normal life. Moreover, housing costs can even induce poverty. In any case, we should also question Martial’s depiction of Atestinus and Civis: are they purely a joke? Martial and Juvenal had different attitudes and opinions about the urban poor, with Martial disdaining them and veering towards the rich, while Juvenal claimed that they deserved it.60 In Martial 11.32, not to have nothing is not to be poor.61 Atestinus and Civis were not in all likelihood real individuals but paradigms; in any case, the situation Martial was describing should be plausible enough to be recognised as a reader as believable.62

Destitute, homeless and (almost) invisible 111 In the shaky circumstances of the working poor in Rome, a small misstep could derail a whole life. People were evicted from their homes when they could not pay the rent. Martial devoted a poem to Vacerra, who had suffered such a situation: I saw your movables, Vacerra, your disgrace of July’s Kalends, yes, I saw them. They were not impounded in lieu of two years’ rent, so your wife with her seven red curls and your white-headed mother, and your burly sister were carrying them. I thought the Furies had come out from the darkness of Dis. These three went in front and you followed, parched with cold and hunger, paler than old box-wood, the Irus of your times. One would have thought that Aricia’s slope was moving house. Along went a three-footed truckle bed and a two-footed table, and a broken chamberpot was pissing from a chip in the side together with a lamp and a cornel-wood bowl. . . . Why do you look for a house and make mock of superintendents when you could lodge for nothing, Vacerra? This procession of movables is fit for the bridge.63 Unable to pay two years’ rent, Vacerra had been expelled from his house, together with his wife, mother and sister; note the predominance of women in this situation and the absence of slaves, an indication of their poverty.64 Cold and hungry, they had to carry their belongings, mockingly enumerated by the poet: a bed, a table, a lamp, a cup, some pots and few other humble possessions; so miserable were they that they were not even seized in payment.65 In the poem, Vacerra is looking for another house, but, according to Martial, he needed both to face up to the fact that he had no means to pay and to move to a place suitable to his condition in life: living in the streets, under a bridge. Vacerra and the women of his family were leaving the bottom of the housing market to become unsheltered and homeless people in Rome. Watson has convincingly suggested that Vacerra and his family could represent the prototype of the migrants from the North, probably Celts; among other arguments for this, the sister is described as gigantic (ingens), and the wife as having her red hair arranged in seven locks.66 If so, this poem would be one of the rare testimonies to the plight of migrants in Rome who could not afford any lodgings, despite being a family of four, and who ended up joining the ranks of the destitute. Martial depicts the situation of Vacerra and his family with scorn.67 To what point does Martial provide us with information on the plight of eviction and not a set of topoi and prejudices regarding poor people? Watson has described a possible approach to the study of the figure of Vacerra: If, in what follows, I occasionally talk of Vacerra as though he were a real individual, this is not to be taken as meaning that he should be regarded as such. Rather, I am reflecting the procedure of Martial himself, who creates fictitious or type-figures (in the present case, the unsuccessful migrant), and invests these with a wealth of circumstantial detail in order to sustain the illusion that he is treating living personages.68

112

Cristina Rosillo-López

Even though Vacerra the person did not exist, for the sake of this study Martial is describing a reality, a behaviour and a series of circumstances that were present in the city of Rome during his time; the depiction of Martial had to be at least coherent with the situations that could be found in Rome.

Where and how did homeless people live? How and where did people who fell into destitution in Rome, excluded even from the lowest end of the rental market, find shelter? First of all, some methodological points. Previous studies have conflated beggars with homeless people, but, as it has been previously argued, those two terms do not always cover the same ground. Furthermore, some studies of homelessness in Rome have included people like prostitutes in brothels, pilgrims in lodging-houses or soldiers in their tents.69 The present study does not concern itself with people who lived in temporary accommodation but had no economic constraints when finding lodgings, but specifically with those who had no kind of roof over their heads, and no social environment to call a home because of their lack of income and means. This is a reflection of a similar problem today, because different countries have very different definitions of homelessness. Such a lack of a common working definition makes it more difficult to grasp the problem; the historical research into this question is thus even more urgent. The evidence for homelessness in Rome is anecdotal but, when brought together, paints a consistent portrayal of the situation.70 Despite enjoying some warmer months, winters in the city of Rome could be very cold, and the lack of lodgings could be painfully felt. Covered parts of public buildings were one of the places where destitute people found shelter, such as in arcades and under the columns of temples. In an epigram, Martial curses a slanderous poet, wishing on him a cruel destiny of destitution, to be a wandering beggar, deprived of shelter, who fights for food with the dogs: ‘May the shutting of the arcade prolong his miserable chill’ (clususque fornix triste frigus extendat).71 The miserable poet lives in a closed arch, probably that of a temple. Despite it being closed, he is at the mercy of nature, which the poet emphasises cruelly by wishing him a long and wet December (Illi December longus et madens bruma). Ammianus Marcellinus described the situation of those who spent their nights lurking under the awnings of the theatres of the city (sub velabris umbraculorum theatralium latent).72 Homeless people also lived in the open air, under bridges. Martial considered such a dwelling suitable for someone who had been evicted from his house together with his family.73 Seneca also mentioned the Sublicius bridge as a place where beggars lived.74 Robinson proposed that squatters lived under the aqueducts, but there is no ancient source on this point.75 As happens today in 24-hour restaurants and cafés, Juvenal mentioned all-night popinae (pervigiles popinae), where Roman homeless may have also found shelter and warmth.76 Evidence about baths open at night is difficult to determine; the entrance fee may have been a problem for some people, but taverns and eating places presented the same problem.77 In any case, the Greek Sophist Alciphron mentioned poor people finding warmth in the

Destitute, homeless and (almost) invisible 113 baths, and around the bath ovens.78 Tombs, some of them richly elaborate buildings, were also popular places: Ulpian considered living in a grave a dolo malo act to be punished.79 Slaves were also found among the grave-dwellers.80 Poor, and especially destitute, people were at the mercy of sudden disasters. Floods were a recurrent occurrence in Rome.81 Tacitus described the flood of AD 15, when the Tiber destroyed inns, houses and insulae, bringing hunger and scarcity. In fact, insulae were prime candidates for being destroyed in floods, since they were usually built of inferior materials and were sometimes of considerable height.82 For some people of humble extraction, such an event could put an end to their ability to pay for a roof over their heads, even if it was humble.83 Apart from natural disasters, Ault links the homeless population with wars and displacement.84 During the triumviral expropriations in Italy carried out in the late 40s BC to distribute land among the veterans, a sizable number of common people, deprived of their means for making a living, and not having received any compensation, moved to Rome: They came to Rome in crowds, young and old, women and children, to the forum and temples, uttering lamentations, saying that they had done no wrong for which they, Italians, should be driven from their fields and their hearthstones, like people conquered in war.85 The sources do not specify their number but, taking into account that the cities where expropriations were carried out were located a maximum of 2–3 days away from Rome, and also that, even though the triumvirs had established a minimum size of the plot to be expropriated, smaller plots of lands were seized, it is reasonable to think that a sizable number of dispossessed families without jobs (at least when they arrived) joined the ranks of the lower stratum of the population.86

Conclusions We have seen that a true economic history of the rental market from below needs to address not only those who lived in minuscule dwellings or miserable quarters; it should also include those who were priced out completely, and expelled from the rental market, becoming homeless and unsheltered. Housing in Rome was not considered a basic necessity, as it has been in recent decades. Even though ancient evidence for the homeless is scarce, especially when we try to differentiate them from beggars, the former are not absolutely invisible in the sources, as they were not invisible in the city of Rome. Even though we hear about homelessness through elite sources, we discover tantalising evidence about that experience. Most of the sources either do not specify gender or refer mainly to male homeless; however, women, especially widows, and children were part of the structural poor of Rome and thus they constituted very possibly a sizable number of homeless people. As we have seen, Vacerra was not evicted alone from his rented apartment; he was accompanied by his wife, his mother and a sister. The female experience of homelessness alluded in this case to unmarried and elderly women.

114

Cristina Rosillo-López

Were the homeless marginalised? Was there a lived experience of exclusion and shame? The malicious comments by Martial and Juvenal would point in that direction and would lead us to consider homeless people not only as marginal but also as the dregs of society. However, it is also necessary to look at them from their own point of view and ponder whether they developed a sense of self-identity and agency. For eighteenth-century London, Hitchcock mentioned the Black Guard youth, that is, boys and girls who slept in the glass houses in the Minories and earned their life by pickpocketing, pilfering and stealing, risking, if caught, death penalty or transportation to the colonies as indentured servants.87 The experience of finding shelter in the streets in Rome would gather some people together and create community ties. The clivus Aricinus, the slope in the via Appia near the city of Aricia (around 30 km from Rome), was mentioned as one of the places where homeless people lived.88 Juvenal described that they mobbed the carriages of the rich to force them to give alms; Parkin suggested that the travellers gave alms out of fear of violence or shame.89 Such group points out to a strategy of survival of homeless people and a possible sense of community. At the same time, the existence of the clivus Aricinus and other habitational strategies indicate the agency of homeless people, finding shelter outside the private rental market. As we have seen, tombs and bridges were well-known places where homeless people lived. Temporary structures were erected against, or on top of, more solid constructions, such as private or public buildings. City officials could tear them down if they considered them a fire hazard or if they caused insidiae.90 More in-depth research into terms such as tuguria, ergasteria or parapetasia and their contexts will bring nuance to this anecdotal evidence and provide answers to such questions.91 The present contribution offers an approximation of the situation in a subject that has been insufficiently investigated, and about which many questions remain open. Did the number of low-income households exceed the available affordable housing units in Rome? Where were the slums in Rome?92 Were there slums in other cities, such as Ostia, Herculanum or Pompeii? Was there any State reaction to their existence? Were they tolerated, harassed, or dismantled? In a contemporary world in which one third of all urban inhabitants live in slums, and homelessness is not even counted in some countries, tracing the historical roots of those experiences in an ancient megalopolis constitutes a necessary and valuable exercise.

Notes * This research has been financed by the project ‘El sector inmobiliario en el mundo romano: un análisis económico; s. II a.C.-s. II d.C.’ (HAR2016–76882-P), Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Spain. 1 Italics are mine. In 1976, Habitat I took place, the first United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, to discuss the challenges of rapid urbanisation. The establishment of UNCHS (Habitat), the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements, was one of the results of the conference. Ensuring adequate shelter for all human beings has since been endorsed as a universal goal. Habitat II took place in 1996 and Habitat III in 2016.

Destitute, homeless and (almost) invisible 115 2 UNESCO web page: https://en.unesco.org/themes/fostering-rights-inclusion/migration. Accessed January 15, 2021. ‘Absolute poverty measures poverty in relation to the amount of money necessary to meet basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter.’ 3 Storey 2013, 155. 4 Rougier-Blanc 2014, 105–6 for Greece; similar considerations in Driaux 2020 for ancient Egypt. 5 Marsilio 2008, Marina Castillo 2015 and Larsen 2015 on poverty in Martial. 6 Balsdon 1969, 268; Neri 1998, 33–83; Parkin 2006 on Roman attitudes towards giving to beggars. 7 Courrier forthcoming for an analysis of how the Romans conceived poverty through different categories. 8 ‘State of the World’s Cities Report 2012/2013: Prosperity of Cities’ (https:// sustainabledevelopment.un.org/index.php?page=view&type=400&nr=745&menu= 1515; Accessed January 15, 2021). 9 E.g. Aldrete 2007 on urban floods in the city of Rome, especially 215 with a table on the number of houses in flood-prone areas of the city. 10 ETHOS (European Typology of Homelessness) was created to provide a common working language about the topic throughout Europe. 11 Depending on the country, situation and location, these sleeping arrangements include homeless shelters, 24-hour Internet cafés or McDonalds, abandoned buildings, inexpensive motels, outdoors in general, vehicles, public places (railway or bus stations, airports, libraries, on public transport), tunnels, bridges, squatting, etc. On the difficulties of quantifying the number of homeless people, see Busch-Geertsema, Culhane and Fitzpatrick 2016. 12 Springer 2000; Morley 2005; Tipple and Speak 2005. 13 Debate on the population size of Rome, cf. Lo Cascio 1994 and 2000. 14 Scheidel 2007. Holleran 2011 and Tacoma 2016 for recent studies on migration. 15 Whittaker 1989; Morley 2006, 33–35. 16 Courrier 2014, 116–25, for a criticism of the model. 17 Lo Cascio 2006. Hin 2013 has also questioned the comparison with early modern cities. 18 Courrier 2014, 116–28. 19 E.g. Taylor 2017 for ancient Athens. See also Taylor, this volume. 20 See Thompson 2003 on slaves’ living arrangements. 21 Grey and Parkin 2003, 287–8. Harris 2011 argues that there was a high degree of structural poverty and destitution. 22 Morley 2006, 28–29. 23 Harris 2011 discusses several definitions of poverty in Rome; see also Bolkestein 1939, 328–32 on destitution in Rome. 24 Ault 2005. See Ar. Plut. 551–4 for the difference between Penia (poverty) and Ptochia. 25 Harris 2011, 31. 26 Grodzynski 1987; Courrier forthcoming for further reflections on this vocabulary. 27 Carrié 2003, 73–75, based on August. Ep. Divjak 20*; he has tried to provide a number for a poverty threshold in Rome, using the Theodosian Code, Diocletian’s prices edict and Egyptian papyri (Carrié 2003, 88–102). 28 Scheidel 2006. See Graham 2006, 48–62 on the Roman urban poor. 29 Dig. 6.1.38 (Celsus 3 Dig.). 30 E.g. Grey and Parkin 2003; Ault 2005, 146. Neri 1998, 37–42 on the lexicon regarding beggars in pagan literature. 31 Juv. 14.34 claimed that a poor man’s food was so sparse that a beggar would refuse it. Rougier-Blanc 2014: 108–11 on the vocabulary for homeless in ancient Greek (aoikos, anoikos); cf. also Coin-Longeray (vocabulary in ancient Greek poetry); Grodzynski 1987 on the Theodosian Code. 32 Farge 1979. In the field of classical studies, see also Ménard and Courrier 2012 and 2013.

116 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40

41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63

Cristina Rosillo-López

Hitchcock 2004. See also Vaillant 2013. Hitchcock 2004, 40–48 (Black Guard youth; cf. infra). Courrier 2014, 28–44 (with historiographical and methodological remarks). On this regard, we could establish a parallelism with Petersen’s remark regarding Trimalchio, Petersen 2007, 86: ‘When historians talk about Trimalchio as if he were a historical individual rather than a literary construct, they risk perpetuating ancient elite, pejorative attitudes about ex-slaves, rather than getting closer to revealing the multifaceted and diverse intentions of historical ex-slaves.’ Frier 1977, 34; Harris 2011, 29 on how the city of Rome was not typical of the Roman empire as a whole. Suet. Iul. 38. On this measure, cf. Courrier 2014, 65–66; Rosillo-López forthcoming. Plut. Sull. 1.6. Cicero (QRosc. 28) is our only source for a salary (3 sesterces a day for a non-specialised worker), but the reference dates of half a century later, so it should be taken into account with caution (cf. Courrier 2014, 49–50). On the sources for the price of rents, cf. Dubouloz 2011, 187–97 (legal sources); Courrier 2014, 63–68, is pessimistic about the usefulness of the prices of rent mentioned in the sources, since they do not provide details about location and number of rooms and cannot be integrated into a purchase power index. Petron. Sat. 8.4. 20 drachmai: P. Lips. 16 (AD 138), in Tebtynis (a four-year lease). 26 drachmai: P. Tebt. 2.372 (AD 141), in Tebtynis (for a six-year lease). 8 drachmai: P. Soterichos 26 (AD 82–96), near Theadelphia (for a three-year lease). See Harper 2016 for the latest study on prices in Roman Egypt. P. Oxy. 8.1128, in Sepho, Oxyrhynchites nome. P. Ryl. 2.162, in AD 159 (also one the lowest prices attested in Egypt). Whittaker 1989, 305–6; Gaius (2 ad leg. Duodec. Tab.), Dig. 50.16.234.2. Coin-Longeray 2014, 48. Cod. Theod. 17.27.1: the State even provided clothing to avoid people selling their children (cf. Humfress 2006). See Robinson 1994, 28–40 for a useful survey. Procchi 2001. Suet. Iul. 38.2. Dio Cass. 48.9.5. Frier 1977, 36 (remission). See Rosillo-López forthcoming for a study of these measures as rent control. Frier 1977 and 1980. Hermansen 1978 and Dubouloz 2011 on the different meanings of the concept insula. Bergh 2003 on the leases of poor people. E.g. Mart. 3.30.3, 7.20.21. Sen. Ep. 2.18; Mart. 3.48. See criticism of Frier’s hypothesis that the law on tenancy was created for upper class tenants exclusively in Crook 1983. Andress and Lohmann 2008 on modern definitions of working poor. Mart. 3.38.5–6. Juv. 3.166–7: magno hospitium miserabile, magno / servorum ventres, et frugi cenula magno. Larsen 2015, 220–37, with references to previous scholarship. Mart. 11.32: Non est paupertas, Nestor, habere nihil; cf. Kay 1985, 142–3. Moreno Soldevila, Marina Castillo and Fernández Valverde 2019: s.v. Atestinus and Civis suggest that Atestinus could have been a real or fictional character, although they reject that Atestinus and Civis should be a veiled allusion to C. Vettulenus Civica Cerialis and M. Arrecinus Clemens. Mart. 12.32: O Iuliarum dedecus Kalendarum, / Vidi, Vacerra, sarcinas tuas, vidi; / Quas non retentas pensione pro bima / Portabat uxor rufa crinibus septem / Et cum sorore cana mater ingenti. / Furias putavi nocte Ditis emersas. / Has tu priores frigore

Destitute, homeless and (almost) invisible 117

64

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85 86

et fame siccus / Et non recenti pallidus magis buxo / Irus tuorum temporum sequebaris. / Migrare clivom crederes Aricinum. / Ibat tripes grabatus et bipes mensa, / Et cum lucerna corneoque cratere / Matella curto rupta latere meiebat; / Foco virenti suberat amphorae cervix; / Fuisse gerres aut inutiles maenas / Odor inpudicus urcei fatebatur, / Qualis marinae vix sit aura piscinae. / Nec quadra deerat casei Tolosatis, / Quadrima nigri nec corona pulei / Calvaeque restes alioque cepisque, / Nec plena turpi matris olla resina, / Summemmianae qua pilantur uxores / Quid quaeris aedes vilicesque derides, / Habitare gratis, o Vacerra, cum possis? / Haec sarcinarum pompa convenit ponti. Translation Shackleton Bailey 1993. Watson 2004; Marsilio 2008 on the analogies between this poem and Catullus 23. On Vacerra, see also Moreno Soldevila, Marina Castillo and Fernández Valverde 2019, s.v. Vacerra. On the urban rental market, cf. Frier 1977 and 1980. Vacerra was evicted on the 1st of July, when new leases began. The only other portrait of eviction, in this case in the countryside, is Hor. Carm. 2.18.26, during the triumviral land confiscations of the 40s. See Desmond 2016 for an impressive sociological account of eviction and poverty in the contemporary USA. On the mockery with which destitution was usually regarded in the ancient world: Watson 2004, 312–6. Watson 2004, 319–23. See also Marina Castillo 2015, 584–5 on Vacerra in Martial’s work. Neri 1998, 34–36, who also comments on the marginality of beggars on Roman literature. Watson 2004, 231, n. 1. Scobie 1986, 403; Ault 2005 for Greece, criticised in Rougier-Blanc 2014, 104–5. See for ancient Greece Ault 2005; Rougier-Blanc 2014. Mart. 10.5.2–9. Amm. Marc. 14.6.25. Mart. 12.32. Sen. Vit. Beat. 25.1; cf. Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae, s.v. Pons Sublicius. Robinson 1980, 72. Juv. 8.158. See supra for Juvenal’s view of the poor. Grey and Parkin 2003, 287; Le Guennec 2019, 87–94 (popina). Scobie 1986, 403 points out that question, but adds that SHA, Alex. Sev. 24.6 explicitly mentions thermae open at night. Parkin 2006, 75–76 on the relationship between beggars and shopkeepers, that could be extrapolated here (although note that it refers to beggars, not to homeless people). Alciphron 3.40.3. Rougier-Blanc 2014, 123–5 on finding shelter in the baths in ancient Greece. Ulp. (25 ad edict. praet.) Dig. 47.12.3pr: Si quis in sepulchro dolo malo habitaverit aedificiumve aliud, quamque sepulchri causa factum sit, habuerit: in eum, si quis eo nomine agere volet, ducentorum aureorum iudicium dabo. In Lucian’s Philosophers for Sale 9, Diogenes advised to leave the house and settle in a sepulchre, a ruin or a tub. Ulp. (25 ad edict. praet.) Dig. 47.12.3.11. See Aldrete 2007, 15 (list of known ancient floods). Tac. Hist. 1.76. See Aldrete 2007, 15 and 91–128 on the immediate effects of floods; Larsen 2015, 149–50. Crumbling insulae are a recurrent motif in Juvenal: e.g. Juv. 3.193–6; see also Cic. Att. 14.9; 14.11 (the collapse of one of Cicero’s properties). Aldrete 2007, 105–13 on the collapse of houses and structures because of floods (20 out of 33 accounts of floods in ancient Rome refer to damaged or destroyed structures). Ault 2005, 145–7. App. B Civ. 5.12: ἀλλa συνιόντες ἀνὰ μέρος ἐς τὴν Ῥώμην οἵ τε νέοι καὶ γέροντες ἢ αἱ γυναῖκες ἅμα τοῖς παιδίοις, ἐς τὴν ἀγορὰν ἢ τὰ ἱερά, ἐθρήνουν, οὐδὲν μὲν ἀδικῆσαι λέγοντες, Ἰταλιῶται δὲ ὄντες ἀνίστασθαι γῆς τε καὶ ἑστίας οἷα δορίληπτοι. Dio Cass. 48.8.5 (minimum size of the lots: between 35 iugera (Cremona) and 50 (other colonies). See Keppie 1983. Veterans sometimes seized neighbouring lands: App. B Civ.

118

87

88 89 90 91

92

Cristina Rosillo-López

5.13–14; Dio Cass. 48.6.8–9. Properties belonging to senators were exempt from the land distributions (Dio Cass. 48.8.5). Hitchcock 2004, 40–8. The Black Guard was treated by Daniel Defoe in his 1722 novel History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Colonel Jack, the story of the bastard child of a gentleman who is left to the mercies of the street and joins a group of homeless boys. Hitchcock 2004, 40 remarks that ‘the Black Guard was an object of both high-level social policy and literary invention.’ The existence of such bands would sound familiar to any reader of Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Mart. 2.19.3, 12.32; cf. also Juv. 4.116–7; Friedländer 1886, 249, n. 3 (considered it a beggar’s colony, as do Grey and Parkin 2003, 288 and Parkin 2006, 74–5); Marina Castillo 2015, 98. Juv. 4.116–7; Parkin 2006, 74–5. Dio Chrys. Or. 40.8–9; Cod. Theod. 15.1.39. E.g. Vitr. De arch. 2.1.4–5 for types of tuguriae and huts in the Roman world (note that he did not mention them for the city of Rome, but in Phrygia and other provinces, and that they are not always associated with poverty and destitution). See Ault 2005, 146 on archaeological instances of squatting in ancient Greece; Courrier 2014, 32–3 on tuguria. Prell 1997, 126–7 considers that there were no slums in the city of Rome.

Bibliography Aldrete, G. S. 2007. Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Andress, H.-J. and H. Lohmann, eds. 2008. The Working Poor in Europe: Employment, Poverty and Globalization. Northampton: Edward Elgar. Atkins, M. and R. Osborne, eds. 2006. Poverty in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511482700. Ault, B. A. 2005. ‘Housing the Poor and Homeless in Ancient Greece.’ In Ancient Greek Houses and Households: Chronological, Regional, and Social Diversity, edited by B. A. Ault and L. C. Nevett, 140–59. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Balsdon, J. P. V. D. 1969. Life and Leisure in Ancient Rome. London: Phoenix Press. Bolkestein, H. 1939. Wohltätigkeit und Armenpflege im vorchristlichen Altertum: ein Beitrag zum Problem ‘Moral und Gesellschaft.’ Utrecht: Oosthoek. Busch-Geertsema, V., D. Culhane and S. Fitzpatrick. 2016. ‘Developing a Global Framework for Conceptualising and Measuring Homelessness.’ Habitat International 55: 124–32. doi:10.1016/j.habitatint.2016.03.004. Carrié, J.-M. 2003. ‘Nihil habens praeter quod ipso die vestiebatur: comment définir le seuil de pauvreté à Rome?’ In Consuetudinis amor: fragments d’histoire romaine (IIe-VIe siècles) offerts à Jean-Pierre Callu, edited by J.-P. Callu, F. Chausson and E. Wolff, 71–102. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider. Coin-Longeray, S. 2014. ‘Pénès et Ptôchos: le pauvre et le mendiant. Deux figures de la pauvreté dans la poésie grecque ancienne.’ In Galbois and Rougier-Blanc 2014, 45–65. Courrier, C. 2014. La plèbe de Rome et sa culture (fin du IIe siècle av. J.-C.-fin du Ier siècle ap. J.-C.). Rome: École française de Rome. Courrier, C. forthcoming. ‘Defining Poverty (Rome).’ In A Cultural History of Poverty in Antiquity, edited by C. Taylor. London: Bloomsbury. Crook, J. A. 1983. ‘Review: Frier, B. W. Landlords and Tenants in Imperial Rome.’ JRS 73: 213–4. doi:10.2307/300093. Desmond, M. 2016. Evicted. Poverty and Profit in the American City. New York: Crown Publishers.

Destitute, homeless and (almost) invisible 119 Driaux, D. 2020. ‘Toward a Study of the Poor and Poverty in Ancient Egypt: Preliminary Thoughts.’ CArchJ 30: 1–19. doi:10.1017/S0959774319000258. Dubouloz, J. 2011. La propriété immobilière à Rome et en Italie (Ier-Ve siècles): organisation et transmission des praedia urbana. Rome: École française de Rome. Farge, A. 1979. Vivre dans la rue à Paris au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard. Friedländer, L. 1886. M. Valerii Martialis Epigrammaton Libri (erster Band). Leipzig: S. Hirzel. Frier, B. W. 1977. ‘The Rental Market in Early Imperial Rome.’ JRS 67: 27–37. doi:10.2307/299916. Frier, B. W. 1980. Landlords and Tenants in Imperial Rome. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Galbois, E. and S. Rougier-Blanc, eds. 2014. La pauvreté en Grèce ancienne: Formes, représentations, enjeux. Bordeaux: Ausonius. Graham, E.-J. 2006. The Burial of the Urban Poor in Italy in the Late Roman Republic and Early Empire. Oxford: Archaeopress. Grey, C. and A. Parkin. 2003. ‘Controlling the Urban Mob: The colonatus perpetuus of CTh 14.18.1.’ Phoenix 57 (3–4): 284–99. Grodzynski, D. 1987. ‘Pauvres et indigents, vils et plébéiens. (Une étude terminologique sur le vocabulaire des petites gens dans le Code Théodosien).’ SDHI 53: 140–218. Harper, K. 2016. ‘People, Plagues, and Prices in the Roman World: The Evidence from Egypt.’The Journal of Economic History 76 (3): 803–39. doi:10.1017/S0022050716000826. Harris, W. V. 2011. ‘Poverty and Destitution in the Empire.’ In Rome’s Imperial Economy. Twelve Essays, edited by W. V. Harris, 27–56. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hermansen, G. 1978. ‘The Population of Imperial Rome: The Regionaries.’ Historia 27: 129–68. Hin, S. 2013. The Demography of Roman Italy. Population Dynamics in an Ancient Conquest Society 201 BCE-14 CE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ CBO9780511782305. Hitchcock, T. 2004. Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Holleran C. 2011. ‘Migration and the Urban Economy of Rome.’ In Demography and the Graeco-Roman World, edited by C. Holleran and A. Pudsey, 155–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Humfress, C. 2006. ‘Poverty and Roman Law.’ In Atkins and Osborne 2006, 183–203. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511482700.012. Kay, N. M. 1985. Martial Book XI, a Commentary. London: Duckworth. Keppie, L. 1983. Colonisation and Veteran Settlement in Italy, 47–14 B.C. London: British School at Rome. Larsen, M. R. 2015. The Representation of Poverty in the Roman Empire. PhD diss., University of California. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3sp0w5c4. Le Guennec, M.-A. 2019. Aubergistes et clients. L’accueil mercantile dans l’Occident romain (IIIe siècle av. J.-C.-IVe siècle apr. J.-C.). Rome: École française de Rome. Lo Cascio, E. 1994. ‘The Size of the Roman Population: Beloch and the Meaning of the Augustan Census Figures.’ JRS 84: 23–40. doi:10.2307/300868. Lo Cascio, E. 2000. ‘La popolazione.’ In Roma imperiale: una metropoli antica, edited by E. Lo Cascio, 17–69. Roma: Carocci. Lo Cascio, E. 2006. ‘Did the Population of Imperial Rome Reproduce Itself?’ In Urbanism in the Preindustrial World. Cross-Cultural Approaches, edited by G. R. Storey, 52–68. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.

120

Cristina Rosillo-López

Marina Castillo, A. 2015. Infimae personae en los Epigramas de Marcial: cuestiones literarias y prosopográficas. PhD diss., Universidad Pablo de Olavide. https://rio.upo.es/ xmlui/handle/10433/2357. Marsilio, M. 2008. ‘Mendicancy and Competition in Catullus 23 and Martial 12,32.’ Latomus 67 (4): 918–30. Ménard, H. and C. Courrier, eds. 2012. Miroir des autres, reflet de soi. Stéréotypes, politique et société dans le monde romain, Paris: M. Houdiard Éd. Ménard, H. and C. Courrier, eds. 2013. Miroir des autres, reflet de soi (2): stéréotypes, politique et société dans le monde occidental (de l’Antiquité romaine à l’époque contemporaine), Paris: M. Houdiard Éd. Moreno Soldevila, R., A. Marina Castillo’ and J. Fernández Valverde. 2019. A Prosopography to Martial’s Epigrams. Berlin: De Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110624755. Morley, N. 2005. ‘The Salubriousness of the Roman City.’ In Health in Antiquity, edited by H. King, 192–204. London and New York: Routledge. Morley, N. 2006. ‘The Poor in the City of Rome.’ In Atkins and Osborne 2006, 21–39. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511482700.003. Neri, V. 1998. I marginali nell’Occidente tardoantico: poveri, ‘infames’ e criminali nella nascente società cristiana. Bari: Edipuglia. Parkin, A. R. 2006. ‘You Do Him No Service: An Exploration of Pagan Almsgiving.’ In Atkins and Osborne 2006, 60–82. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511482700.005. Petersen, L. H. 2007. The Freedman in Roman Art and Art History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prell, M. 1997. Sozialökonomische Untersuchungen zur Armut im antiken Rom. Von den Gracchen bis Kaiser Diokletian. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Procchi, F. 2001. ‘“Si quis negotiandi causa emisset quod aedificium . . .” Prime considerazioni su intenti negoziali e “speculazione edilizia” nel Principato.’ Labeo 47: 413–38. Robinson, O. 1980. ‘The Water Supply of Rome.’ SDHI 46: 44–86. Robinson, O. 1994. Ancient Rome. City Planning and Administration. London and New York: Routledge. Rosillo-López, C. forthcoming. ‘Rent Control Measures in the 40s BCE: Housing Costs, State Intervention and Inequality in the Roman World.’ Rougier-Blanc, S. 2014. ‘Architecture et/ou espaces de la pauvreté ? Habitats modestes, cabanes et “squats” en Grèce ancienne.’ In Galbois and Rougier-Blanc 2014, 105–35. Scheidel, W. 2006. ‘Stratification, Deprivation and Quality of Life.’ In Atkins and Osborne 2006, 40–59. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511482700.004. Scheidel, W. 2007. ‘Demography.’ In Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, edited by W. Scheidel, I. Morris and R. P. Saller, 38–86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521780537.004. Scobie, A. 1986. ‘Slums, Sanitation and Mortality in the Roman World.’ Klio 68: 399–433. doi:10.1524/klio.1986.68.68.399. Shackleton Bailey, D. R. 1993. Martial. Epigrams. Volume III. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Springer, S. 2000. ‘Homelessness: A Proposal for a Global Definition and Classification.’ Habitat International 24: 475–84. doi:10.1016/S0197-3975(00)00010-2. Storey, G. R. 2013. ‘Housing and Domestic Architecture.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rome, edited by P. Erdkamp, 151–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CCO9781139025973.012. Tacoma, L. E. 2016. Moving Romans: Migration to Rome in the Principate. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198768050.001.0001.

Destitute, homeless and (almost) invisible 121 Taylor, C. 2017. Poverty, Wealth, and Well-being: Experiencing Penia in Democratic Athens. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198786931.001.0001. Thompson, F. H. 2003. The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Slavery. London: Duckworth. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472540928. Tipple, A. and S. Speak. 2005. ‘Definitions of Homelessness in Developing Countries.’ Habitat International 29: 337–52. doi:10.1016/j.habitatint.2003.11.002. Vaillant, M. 2013. ‘La foule des pauvres à Londres au XVIIIe siècle: une nouvelle histoire par en bas.’ Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine 60 (3): 137–50. Van der Bergh, R. 2003. ‘The Plight of the Poor Urban Tenant.’ RIDA 50: 443–78. Watson, L. 2004. ‘Martial 12.32: An Indigent Immigrant?’ Mnemosyne 57 (3): 311–24. doi:10.1163/1568525041318010. Whittaker, C. R. 1989. ‘Il povero.’ In L’uomo romano, edited by A. Giardina, 301–33. Roma: Laterza.

6

Roman agriculture from above and below Words and things Kim Bowes

Introduction When we speak of agriculture in the Roman world, particularly in Italy, we often speak of two agricultures: an agriculture of elite villas or large estates, centred on surplus production for the market, and a so-called peasant or smallholder agriculture of the majority.1 It’s a binary seemingly supported by both our textual corpora and the archaeological evidence. From Cato’s labour requirements for a 100 iugera vineyard to Columella’s repeated advice on management and transportation, the technical manuals on Roman agriculture penned by elites describe agricultural production which was large in scale and destined, at least in part, for the market.2 Excavations of the great villas of central Italy have confirmed the scale of production, particularly the wine destined for overseas markets.3 Smallholders’ smaller scale and autarkic ambitions are suggested by the small plot sizes handed out to veterans, the small surface scatters found in archaeological field surveys and the seeming absence of large production and storage facilities.4 The two agricultures binary is, however, rooted in an evidence binary. We are well informed about elites, both through the extensive writings by elites themselves and with excavated examples of their villas, including, in many cases, their agricultural quarters. We are far less informed about smallholders. No writings exist describing their activities, while the archaeology has quite literally remained at the surface, with field survey data providing information on the size and chronology of such sites while remaining mute on aspects of lived experience, including agriculture.5 Until recently in Italy only a handful of peasant sites had been excavated, and detailed knowledge about arable and animal agricultural strategies, surplus production and interactions with markets was largely absent. Despite its lopsided evidentiary basis, the two-agricultures model has been made to do substantial historical work. It underpins a major model of Roman history that pits smallholders in a losing battle against villa-based agrobusiness.6 It underlies an associated labour binary in which villas are presumed to be worked by slaves and/or tenants and farms by family effort.7 And it lurks in the tendency to further divide Roman agriculture into ‘intensive’—capital- and labour-intensive grape and olive production—and ‘extensive’—cereal and pastoral crops requiring allegedly less labour or capital. The former is thought to characterise villas and the DOI: 10.4324/9781003005148-8

Roman agriculture from above and below

123

latter smallholders, while the evolution of Roman agrarian economies in Italy are thought to be marked by a shift from the former to the latter.8 This chapter suggests that this model needs revising. It argues that smallholders and villas employed a broadly shared set of agricultural practices and intentions, which differed most significantly both in the scale at which those practices were carried out and in their deployment to shape identity and status. I make these arguments on the basis of an allied set of arguments about words and things, in particular, between the agronomic literature and the archaeological data including new archaeological work on smallholders. We have misunderstood or at least misrepresented the nature of Roman agriculture not only because we’ve mostly done it from the top-down but also because we haven’t been as attentive as we might to the particular character of our two forms of evidence. Words describe not only agricultural techniques but also labour and tenurial relationships; things, that is to say archaeology, are mute on ownership and labour but eloquent on practice. The two-agricultures binary stems in part from a tendency to map differences in labour and land tenure onto different kinds of agricultural practice. When we disentangle words from things, we find that history from below and from above meet in a place of shared praxis and diverge not only in terms of labour and scale but just as importantly in the temporal and ideological planes on which those practices took place.

Sowing The two-agricultures model has a long and impressive pedigree, originating, seemingly with the Romans themselves: small farmers’ complaints at having been pushed off their lands by elite land-grabs leading to the failed Gracchan land reforms and their laments about increasing debt are but two threads in an important strand of Roman history defined by agrobusiness versus the small farmer.9 These Roman threads were woven into a broader tapestry by a nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury scholarship, itself spurred on by the land debates and reforms of its own age. Mommsen, Weber and Rostovtzeff all penned decline-and-fall narratives of the Roman small farmer, but with important shifts in emphasis and vocabulary from their ancient interlocutors.10 What had been a Roman story about land ownership became an industrial history of agricultural practice, in which the Roman sources’ pitting of small plots versus larger plots became a contest between different technologies of working the land and different agricultural practices. For Weber and particularly for Rostovtzeff, the large elite-owned estate practised a different kind of agriculture, one borrowed from allegedly eastern traditions of large-scale monocultures.11 This pernicious ‘capitalist’ agrobusiness produced monoculture economies of scale with which the traditional polyculture small farm simply could not compete. Villas monopolised oil and wine production while peasants, either freeholders or tenants, were pushed into growing unprofitable grain.12 Thus, what for late republican and early imperial Roman historians had been a story about the ownership of land became, in the hands of a modern historiography shaken by the rise of industrialised agriculture, a change in the nature of agricultural practice itself.

124

Kim Bowes

The Romans’ own writings on agriculture—the so-called agronomic literature— were thus read as manifestations of this two-agricultures model. Until relatively recently, these texts were written as straightforward, if not always terribly wellinformed, accounts of agricultural practice, taken at face value as how-too manuals reflecting the preoccupations and management practices of elite estate owners, who, while they might bemoan the sad decline of agriculture in their day, were engaged in precisely the kind of monoculture-driven, surplus-for-export practices outlined earlier.13 Cato’s slave rations seemed to describe just the kind of slave-run, surplus-driven agrobusiness that, already in the 160s BC, was putting smallholders out of business, while Columella’s productivity calculations for a vineyard were actually used as an interpretive guide in the first large-scale, scientific excavations of an Italian villa—Settefinestre.14 The assumption of two agricultures continues to shape recent trajectories in the study of the Roman economy. For Moses Finley, the agronomists were proofpositive of an elite gentleman-farmer, whose agricultural manuals were little more than performance art in a world in which agriculture spelled status, not profit.15 The broad underbelly of unproductive subsistence agriculture, practised by peasant and villa owner alike, lay at the basis of an agrarian world whose thin crust of surplus and exports were little more than the crest on a wave. Finley thus eschewed the two-agricultures model even as he accepted the broad narrative of smallholder decline at the hands of villa-owning elites. The recent rejection of Finley’s substantivism in favour of both modern approaches and an emphasis on the productivity of Roman agriculture have led to new readings of the agronomic literature, finding proofs of both production and profit maximisation in everything from Cato’s recommendations on fodder to Columella’s soils recommendations.16 Efforts have been made to use Geographic Information Software to hunt for matches to the latter’s land requirements for viticulture, while a careful reading of the various authors’ interest in fodder crops has suggested an application of crop rotation strategies designed to maximise yields and mitigate soil depletion.17 Calculation of productivity from oil and wine vats and presses has produced similarly optimistic assessments of wine and oil production capacity.18 In short, the new work on Roman agriculture has tacitly assumed that its efficiencies and maximising ethos is centred on, if not confined to, villa agriculture. Smallholders rarely form part of the calculus or the conversation. At the same time that economic historians have returned to the agronomists as data sources for maximisation-oriented practices, literary scholars have made an equal effort to incorporate the agronomic texts into the corpora of Latin literature, dissecting them as literary productions in their own right.19 The deployment of specialised know-how as part of the toolkit of literary status and the construction of a trope of ‘old-time agriculture’ as either a yardstick to measure the evils of the present age or an alchemical set of praxes with which even ‘new men’ might construct an ancient bloodline are central to the other ‘functions’ of these texts— not as how-too manuals, but as agents of elite identity.20 Agriculture practice was so central to Roman thought that the qualities of the vir bonus might be found in an articulation of the bonus agricola, the arc of imperial conquest and rule might

Roman agriculture from above and below

125

be elaborated in the successive stages of arable agriculture, while the very order of what appears to be an encyclopaedic march through agrarian topics is itself a reflection on man’s relationship with nature and with himself.21 As these studies have made us ever more aware of the nuance and complexity of agronomic texts as literary constructions, however, ever wider seems the gap between an elite meta-literary practice of agriculture and the actual work on the ground. Taking the agronomists seriously as literary figures would seem to require either taking them less seriously as farmers or concluding that the texts themselves are largely mute on aspects of real praxis. What’s notable about most of this new work is its emphasis on elites: either as rationalist, profit-mongers or as astute manipulators of language and metaphor, or as some combination of both, we now have a detailed, if diverse, set of lenses on villas and large-scale agriculture. What has proven less appealing is an interrogation of the other half of the two-agricultures model—the peasants. Smallholders are of little interest to a recent Roman economic history preoccupied with surplus production and the state, and archaeologists have obligingly followed the same leads, continuing to privilege villas over farms as an object of excavation interest.22 The result is a tacit but widening gap between what has become either an elite rationalist economy or an elite literary apparatus, and a peasant world which was neither rational nor literary. This deepening evidentiary binary has tacitly reinforced the sense of two different worlds making the land produce in two different ways. This chapter offers a bridge across both the two agricultures and the words and things divide. My argument centres largely on the agrarian landscape of central Italy, both the mis-en-scène for the agronomists and the villa excavations which have shaped scholarly perceptions of elite agriculture, as well as the location of the Roman Peasant Project’s recent work on Roman peasants.23 I argue that when we take both groups—and their evidentiary corpora—seriously on its own terms, what emerges are common practices employed by all kinds of farmers, regardless of the scales at which they worked. In short, there was only one kind of agriculture—a Roman agriculture—characterised by a hyper-detailed management of soil and water, a simultaneous management of risk and maximisation of yield through a deployment of polycultures. While this argument is not wholly new, it is now possible to make it in the rather pointed way I shall develop here, thanks to this new work on both words and things. That new work also allows the real differences between villa and smallholder agriculture to shine through—differences not of practice, but of scale and discourse. Not only did villa owners and small farmers operate at different scales, but just as importantly, they shaped their work around different temporal scales and a different articulation of status.

Digging up words and things Filling the gap between elite and smallholder agriculture requires a robust set of methodologies for making sense of both words and things. It’s a fascinating irony that the fields of philology and archaeology, whose history in classical scholarship

126

Kim Bowes

has been so conjoined, suffers from a chronic communication problem.24 As the two disciplines have decoupled from their shared nineteenth-century origins, each adopting a more precise, discipline-specific and ultimately more rigorous toolkit, it has become harder to use them simultaneously to ask shared questions, while continuing to permit each to speak with its own particular voice. While we’ve developed ever more exacting tools for interrogating words and things, we’ve been remiss in developing parallel tools for interrogating them together.25 A clear sense of our two evidentiary corpora—their potentials and limitations—and some parameters for tackling them together, is thus a necessary prolegomenon to examining Roman agriculture. As the problem is central to doing history from below—a task which, as the editors of this volume note, requires more robust definitions and methods—it’s worth the detour. The agronomic texts provide a useful place from which to examine words and things, given that, for a long time, they were assumed to offered a straightforward application of the former on the latter. The Greek and Latin treatises on building, medicine, farming and other ‘practical’ matters were long regarded as providing reliable windows into actual praxis. In the agronomic texts, for instance, plough techniques, animal husbandry, arboriculture, water management and a myriad of other subjects were elaborated in detail seemingly similar to the technical manuals penned in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Technical literature’s attention to minute detail and its encyclopaedic structure, authoritative voice and the oftstated desire voiced in its prefaces to serve as ‘useful’ references lent them the air of factual repositories. Ancient historians and archaeologists, eager for these glimpses into lived experience and most recently, desirous of evaluating ancient economic capacities, have thus mined them extensively as repositories of fact and practice. As many of these practices were the province of non-elites from farmers to builders to craftsmen, the so-called technical writers would seem to provide a rare window into non-elite experience—their labour practices, craft and technical know-how. As we noted earlier, only more recently has the literary quality of these works been emphasised. Studies on their generic qualities, voice and structure have drawn attention to their rhetorical intent.26 Just like epistolography or historiography, these works were structured to convey authorial auctoritas and self-fashioning via the very qualities—encyclopaedic enumeration, second-person narration, logical progression—we have used as evidence of their ‘factuality.’ Thus, we have come to recognise the insoluble ties that bind, say, Vitruvius’ treatise on architecture to Livy. The result has been, as Matheus Trevizam has recently heralded, the integration of so-called technical literature into classical literature writ large.27 It is revealing of the centrality of agriculture to a Roman worldview that farming, and the minutiae of farming practices, could be used to think across the broadest aspects of Roman experience. As the prefaces to Cato and Columella’s manuals make clear, enumerating the qualities of a good farmer was nothing less than enumerating the qualities of the good man and the ideal soldier.28 While farming as moral exemplum was one of the unifying features of all agronomic metaphor, each author modified those relationships through a complex and distinct interplay of intertext,

Roman agriculture from above and below 127 organisation and linguistic nuance to make more pointed, individual narratives. Cato’s careful construction of smallholder agriculture as part of the apparatus of ancient civic virtue—a trope now so familiar we have to look carefully to find Cato inventing it—provided a means for him, a novus homo, to lay claim to an ancient skill in lieu of an ancient bloodline.29 For Varro, narrowly having avoided the proscription of 43 BC, the organisation of the farm, from its religious apparatus to its beehives, provided a canvas on which to paint the arc of Roman political history, from its storied past to its more troubled present.30 Columella’s more massive work, one that expands the subject to include animal husbandry and land surveying, and the genre to include poetry, provides nothing less than a meditation, via the themes of productivity and preservation, on man’s civilising relationship with nature.31 Throughout the latter work appears the spectre of Virgil, the acknowledged master of fact and the focus of literary ambition, with the Georgics as the central intertext that defined both an agrarian golden age and the summa, which required constant homage even as it demanded to be supplemented.32 Unearthing the literary qualities of these works will be the work of a generation, only barely begun as their literary complexity becomes more apparent. Yet some of the most recent exploration on the shared generic qualities and authorial intent of the three principal agronomic texts may have revealed a bridge between the worlds of words and things. For the three principal agronomic texts are inescapably ‘both/ and’: they are clearly both expositions of detailed agricultural know-how, trimmed and pruned by literary aims and generic constraints. Indeed, the genre of Roman agronomy is a genre defined by know-how with the enumeration of technical details itself central to literary self-fashioning, the techne defining intertextual play.33 To whom this complex interweaving of literary play and exhaustive detail was addressed has long puzzled scholars, and the most recent work has convincingly shown how, at least in Cato and Columella, the combined address in both the second-person (mostly) singular and the imperative describes two sets of audiences—an elite peer group of gentlemen farmer-literati and the bailiffs actually charged with running the estate.34 It has been further ingeniously argued that the extension of the master’s hand and intent to the slave bailiff is entirely in keeping with Roman understandings of master–slave relationships, so that the seeming disjunction in audience is no disjunction at all. To write for a bailiff is merely to write to extension of oneself and most importantly, a self which is actually ‘doing’ the manual work of farming as did one’s mythic ancestors, now through the extended self of the slave.35 In this way, agronomic texts, or at least Cato and Columella, have a real and central function as ‘manuals’ that actually define their literary generic qualities. While this doesn’t mean that the farming practices enumerated by these texts were necessarily the only or even the most common practices, it does pull them back into an intermediate space where praxis and language might meet. While the work on agronomic literature has undergone a salutatory moment of self-reflection, the scholarship on the material side has been slower to shift perspective, despite the fact that it has suffered from many of the same blind spots—assumptions of ‘fact’ and an unwillingness to recognise its own rhetorically, culturally constructed qualities. The majority of work has focused on the

128

Kim Bowes

monumental portions of Roman villas, Vitruvius’ villa urbana, with less work being devoted to their work quarters, the so-called villa rustica.36 The most comprehensive and comprehensively published excavation of a whole villa in Italy remains Settefinestre, excavated in the 1970s as both a proof-positive for Marxist narratives about the rise of a slave mode of production and an effort to find in its remains a largely empirical reading of the agronomic texts, particularly the roughly contemporary Columella’s De re rustica (Figure 6.1).37 Recent critiques of the Settefinestre excavations have exposed the problem with such a simplistic

Figure 6.1 Plan, Settefinestre (Ansedonia), Phase 2 (after Carandini 1985, figure 139)

Roman agriculture from above and below 129 relationship between words and things as they meet around Roman agriculture.38 Harder to shake off is the modern historiographic baggage, described earlier, which tacitly or explicitly locates the more productive, efficient agriculture derived from the agronomists in cash-crop producing villa estates.39 Similarly, the polyculture and locally oriented agricultural elements of villas like Settefinestre—its olive presses, granary and animal stalls, as well as its predominantly local ceramics— have never been given as much attention as its wine-for-export component, despite these being on a similarly large scale. Some recent archaeological work has laid down new paths which both take the material culture in toto more seriously and may provide a bridge between the world of words and things. The barns, presses and productive facilities of these villas, it has been argued, form part of the same rhetorical apparatus which defined the bonus agricola as one who saved and planned, even as they exhibited the same contemporary anxieties about excess.40 Farm buildings, and by extension farm productivity, were part of elites’ self-fashioning every bit as much as luxurious villae urbanae, and elites used a complex set of allusions to time and scale which while distinct from overlap felicitously with agronomic poetics to do similar work. Yet even this new work on villa storage buildings assumes that surplus and its rhetorical elaboration is proper to elites and villas, while smallholders, by definition without surplus, are cast in a ‘have-nots’ role.41 The smallholder side of the archaeological picture has suffered from some of its own biases. While very few excavations have been carried out on peasant farmsteads—our own project having been designed to fill that lacuna—remote sensing, including systematic, non-invasive surface collection, aerial photography and geophysics has produced abundant datasets on rural non-elites. It has been presumed that the smallest surface scatters from these surface surveys represented peasant homes, and a rich literature has developed in tracking the fate of these scatters over time.42 The late nineteenth-century historical preoccupations with the fate of the peasant farmer described here translated into post-war efforts to map the vanishing countrysides around Rome. The large-scale South Etruria Project spurred hundreds of smaller, more methodologically sophisticated projects which have been used to argue for either the demise or the survival of Roman smallholders during the late Republic and early Empire. Lurking behind all these surveys, however, is the continued assumption that Roman peasants lived in small farms and that those farms were represented by the smallest surface scatters. 43 This image of the solitary ‘farm’ and its denizens have thus biased the interpretation of the survey data around modern conception of landscape and labour. Furthermore, the very framework in which smallholders have been placed tends to view them in a binary with elite villas—as objects (or not) of elite land-grabs, as durable autochthonous locals versus elite Roman newcomers—binaries which tacitly or explicitly have helped reinforce the two-agricultures model.44 Some work, particularly on the field survey data, has acknowledged that small and large scatters seem to have symbiotic chronologies, but this observation hasn’t dented the certainty that even this symbiosis was formed by two essentially distinct spheres of agricultural praxis.45

130

Kim Bowes

In ploughing through these layers of historiographic soil—of both elite and smallholder agriculture and the parallel stories of agronomic literature and archaeology— we might derive a few best practices of our own for doing work with words and things. The first is a purely negative one, namely, that it is necessary to turn over the surface of things to get at more durable relationships. Mining our evidence for empirical facts, be they yields reported by Columella, the tank capacity of pressing vats, or the comparative chronologies of large and small surface scatters, are not terribly useful ways of seeing the shared world of smallholders and elite agriculture, or bridging the worlds of words and things. Deeper digging is required, as is an effort which takes all our sources seriously on their own terms, and in the totality of their, often contradictory, evidence. Furthermore, we shouldn’t necessarily assume that our different kinds of evidence should be placed together: difference and slippage will be as important as sameness, and it is in the interstices where our data simply don’t line up that important observations about the fundamental character of modes of agriculture practice—physical and literary—may be found.

Binding: managing resources Central to all farmer’s work is the proper management of the two environmental substrates—soil and water. Having read the agronomists as centred on profit and/or status-producing viticulture, most earlier accounts of Roman agriculture assumed their subjects weren’t terribly interested in the seeming mundanities of soil or hydrological management. These earlier accounts found no evidence, either in the agronomists or in the archaeology, that villa estates practised soil maintenance strategies like crop rotation, instead assuming that they practised biannual or dry fallowing, either because of a desire to maintain soil water reserves, or as the most basic tool in soil nutrient maintenance.46 The capability of Roman ploughs to cut through heavy clay soils at their winter wettest was also in doubt, pushing ploughing into the dryer season where the precious water might inevitably be lost. More recent work on the agronomists, plus a bit of new data from the field, has found the opposite.47 Columella begins his sprawling work, and indeed his whole agricultural-golden age and the project itself, around soil: ‘Again and again I hear leading men of our state condemning the unfruitfulness of the soil.’48 Rather, Columella argues, soils are only a reflection of human management and it is modern management that is to blame. And the reader is off, set on a course to improved agriculture—and a better Roman society—via soil science. It took the first female soil scientist in America—Lois Olson—to recognise Columella’s remarkably astute and detailed commentary on soils—their colour, humidity, texture, topographic setting—for what it was, namely a manager’s guide to the maximisation of the Mediterranean’s diverse soil profiles, and just as importantly, soil maintenance.49 Managing, which means maximising as well as maintaining, soils lies at the heart of Columella’s project. Manuring and above all, the proper selection of crops to suit specific soils, all get full treatment in his treatise, as well as the seasonal rhythms by which soil was to be cared for.

Roman agriculture from above and below 131 Central to Columella’s soil-and-civilisation restoration project is the management of water. While he discusses irrigation somewhat, he’s more concerned with a micromanagerial (diligens) approach to in situ water supplies. The location of cisterns, their sources and maintenance, and particularly the management of ground water, sodden soils and surface water is an abiding preoccupation.50 He offers detailed descriptions on how to construct field drains to drain saturated fields including materials, labour organisation and maintenance plans.51 For Columella, these instances of water management appear not so much as a generalised manifestation of the Roman control of nature, but a specific riff on his theme of attentive curation of extant resources as characteristic of the good manager, that is, the bonus agricola. Only through the correct and balanced management of nature’s gifts, particularly water, are land and farmer brought into productive harmony. The archaeology of water management still remains in its infancy in Roman Italy. A few large-scale geophysics projects have traced possible Roman field boundaries and drainage systems around Grosseto.52 The traces of villa agricultural drainage projects (to be distinguished from the large-scale efforts of the state to remove wetlands) have been found in various parts of central Italy—from big stone or amphora-built drains near Terracina seemingly built by the villa owners of the region, to smaller versions near Praeneste.53 A GIS-based study of Roman land management in the Tiber Valley also suggested, albeit based on both modern soils data and Columella, that Roman farmers avoided the heavy clays of the lowlands as being too difficult to plough, building their farms and villas adjacent to the lighter soils of the rolling uplands.54 The Roman Peasant Project found smallholders engaged in whole series of water and soil management projects, all at a small scale and aimed at controlling the erosive effects of surface and ground water runoff and seepage. The sites excavated by the project included a series of field drains, excavated some 50 cm into the clayey soils and lined with cobbles taken from the fields which formed both a structure and a filter to remove eroding soils.55 In one instance, the drain in question appears to have been built to drain a small upwelling of subsurface water in land, judging from the pollen data, that was used for grain and/or pasture (Figure 6.2).56 Another drain located not far from a possible farm house/work hut seems to have been one of several that drained a parcel of land rich with heavy clay soils, but pockmarked by upwellings of ground water.57 Again, cereals or pasture, probably not grapes or olives, were grown near the structure, the drain serving to make viable land that would otherwise have been frequently inundated by surface and subsurface run-off. Both these drains would have had their principal function during the rainy winters, rendering otherwise inundated, sodden and heavy soils viable for ploughing the all-important winter grain or fodder crop. That Roman smallholders would have bothered to excavate a 13-metre drain just to remove a pooling spot for ground water in land that didn’t even boast so-called high-value crops is perhaps surprising to us, but Columella would have approved. It is precisely this management of the destructive properties of pooling surface water upon which he and Cato dwell: such pools of stagnant water, rife with parasites, represented a threat to livestock grazing on these fields, and the production of consistent, productive arable soils required just these kind of interventions.58 In

132

Kim Bowes

Figure 6.2 Plan, first century BC/AD (?) field drain, Colle Massari (Cinigiano) Source: © Roman Peasant Project (Elisa Rizzo, Marco Sfacteria).

short, the smallholders we studied were every bit as attentive, or diligens as Columella would have said, at the management of field water as we find in the agronomic texts and are starting to see in the archaeology of villa estates. Drainage for erosion prevention and ground-water management was basic to all agriculture in Mediterranean climates characterised by massive variation in precipitation, and all farmers—smallholders and great estates owners alike—seem to have taken it very much to heart. One of the principal tools in the villa owner’s soil maintenance toolkit was crop rotation. A careful re-read of the agronomic literature has recently brought forth what others had long suspected, namely, a careful strategy and just as importantly, a vocabulary for rotation: restibilis described land used in arable cultivation, principally of cereals, while novalis or veteretum described land either sown with fodder crops or maintained as cultivated pasture.59 This vocabulary presupposes a tripartite rotation of grain, nitrogen-fixing leguminous fodder crops followed by a period of cultivated pasture—a system sometimes termed convertible or ley agriculture. In Columella, this vocabulary is heavily focused on a specific managerial decision—whether and how to open new, previously forested land for cultivation and how to mitigate the ensuing perils of soil depletion should one do so.60 Likewise, his extensive discussion of fodder crops is predicated on the assumption that such crops are central both to large-scale animal husbandry practices (discussed at length in Books 6–9) and to soil maintenance.61

Roman agriculture from above and below 133 Agronomic rotation practices have been assumed, at least tacitly, to be elite know-how, utilised not only for soil maintenance but also yield and profit maximisation. The first archaeological data in support of ley agriculture as a commonplace, however, came from peasant farms in our project.62 The excavation of eight sites with late republican/early imperial phases ranging from farms to stables to seasonal work sites to a ceramics production site permitted the extraction of pollen from among our stratified remains. This pollen can be dated to the same degree of precision as the archaeological contexts from which it is drawn, in this case usually to an accuracy of around 30–70 years, and the species of plants grown in a 1–3 km radius assessed. The chronological granularity of pollen data is insufficient to parse year-to-year patterns, nor can it be used to reconstruct the agrarian landscape, as different plants produce differing amounts pollen of different weights and dispersion.63 However, a clustered dataset like ours drawn from the same locale and period and with the same methods can be relatively compared. In all sites where notable (i.e. greater than 3 per cent) quantities of cereal pollen were found, a slightly smaller equivalent of leguminous fodder plants and approximately twice that percentage of grazed pasture pollen were also found (Figure 6.3). This strongly points to the regularised alternation of cereals and fodder crops, followed by a longer period of maintained, grazed pasture. Whether these alternations were within the same field or the product of multiple adjacent field managed in succession cannot be determined from the evidence we have. What the pollen data makes clear, however, is that smallholders are managing arable land very much along the same lines as Columella instructs his would-be villa owners and bailiffs, both adopting a relatively sophisticated, intensive, and sustainable practice of land management.

Cereal (% pollen) 24%

LPPI (w/out Cichorieae) (% pollen) 60%

Legumes/Fodder (% pollen) 16%

Figure 6.3 Cereal, fodder/legumes and local pastoral pollen indicators (LPPI) pollen percentages, late Republican sites Source: © Roman Peasant Project (Anna Maria Mercuri/Eleonora Rattighieri).

134 Kim Bowes Rotation practices imply a silent third party in the effort to manage soils: animals. Animals are central to lay agriculture as manure sources, grazing on the stubble of harvested cereal fields, as consumers of nitrogen-fixing fodder crops grown in the second rotation, and as the principal occupants of the fields during the long stint as managed pasture. Cato and Varro, not as keen on animals as they are on arable agriculture, seemed to imply that Roman agriculture writ large raised animals simply as an aside, even as labour. The all-important viticulture seemed largely driven by seasonal human-labour and for a diet presumed to be centred on grain, animals could only represent an adjunct labour source used for ploughing, but only occasionally for eating. New work on both the agronomists and the animal themselves, via their bones, has radically revised this picture. Columella, it is true, is the only one of his agronomic peers to devote a whole chapter to animal husbandry, a novelty in which we might read as both part of his deliberate expansion of the definition of agriculture into heretofore excluded realms and reflecting the enormous importance that animals—particularly oxen—had assumed by his day.64 For as new zooarchaeological work has shown, the expansion and intensification of Italian agriculture by the first century BC/AD was in large part due to animals.65 Not only did the previously described rotation schemes depend on it, but the ploughing of new lands, including those hard-to-plough lowlands, required new sources of animal labour. The deliberate breeding of ever larger oxen—taller, heavier, or both—was both cause and effect of agricultural expansion, and cattle breed size increased significantly starting in the republican period but principally in the early years of the Empire when Columella was writing.66 The expansion of cities at the same time, and the increasing demand for pork by non-farming urbanites may have also driven the increase in pig size, as well as regional pig breed specificity.67 Meat, it is becoming clear, formed a significant part of the urban-dwellers diet: far from being the grain-dominated fare formerly assumed, meat, particularly pork but also beef, were consumed consistently, if not daily, by elites and non-elites alike while the pastio villatica encouraged by Varro of ducks, chickens, and rabbits seem to have been more elite fare. The same earlier pessimism about animals in Roman agriculture was assumed to apply doubly to peasants, thought to be so poor that they had to use family members as plough animals and were subject to a largely vegetarian diet.68 Again, recent work, including our own project, finds animals doing the same jobs, and subject to the same husbandry practices, on small farms as on large ones.69 As discussed earlier, if smallholders were engaged in the same rotation strategies used by villas, animals would have played the same critical roles as manure sources, grazers, and along with the crops themselves, factored as a major part of the caloric output of the land. The faunal collections from smaller sites across central Italy show the same trends in breed size increases as on villa sites: the size variety may be somewhat greater on individual sites, a product either of those collections being smaller or because consistently large breeds may have been less required, but overall, the sizes of all the major domesticates are broadly similar to those in villas.70 Smallholders seem to have shared a dietary preferences for pork, although beef and mutton/goat are also important dietary meat sources. The key to these modest species differences is labour: the smallholders’

Roman agriculture from above and below

135

animals seem first and foremost to represent labour and/or secondary products, and only secondarily meat. Most animals (with the exception of pigs) were consumed at the end of the labour-use life as traction, milk or wool, and then they were eaten somewhat more indiscriminately than on the pork-dominated villas. The other principal difference is quantities: in many of the smallholder sites we excavated, faunal samples were tiny. This was in part to our having excavated largely short-term use sites (on which more below), but also seemingly again the scale of exploitation and consumption was simply smaller than on villas. In short, the overall role of animals as partners in arable agriculture is broadly shared between smallholders and great estates: the differences, in scale and end-life use, are linked to a more profound difference in the scale of specialisation, which we will take up in a moment. At the heart of the most current version of the two-agricultures model is the concept of risk. Smallholders avoid it, while agro-capitalists assume it, at least in part, in pursuit of profit.71 The more likely reality was that both groups avoided and courted risk in ways frequently ignored by this binary. The most fundamental tool of risk avoidance was the adoption of polycultures by all farmers in Roman Italy.72 Monocultures did not exist, a rather obvious fact which has become somewhat obscured by the two-agricultures model’s distorting effects. Equally obvious, although rarely remarked on, is the fact that Roman agronomic literature as a genre is predicated on polycultures: the encyclopaedic elaboration of different crops and their complementary needs—soils, water and labour—define their poetics and narrative structure.73 It is the multiple, not singular, crops and their ability to both maximise the multiple properties of the land and exploit those properties to mitigate the failure of any one crop—which anchors the agronomic text. One of the reasons that the poetic garden in Columella’s Book 10 can act as a synecdoche for the whole of Columella’s estate at the end of his immense book is their shared polyculture—the estate and the garden are both defined by the multiple, complementary things they produce.74 Polyculture risk avoidance is obvious, too, in the remains of great villas like Settefinestre (see Figure 6.1):75 the scale of pork production (assuming that great stall is for pigs) alone is massive, the granary some 1400 m2, but both grain and pork get scant play in a narrative based on the presumed centrality of viticulture. The allegedly different end-use of these products—the former two directed towards the villa itself as autarkic unit, with the wine being sold for profit on the market— has been used to explain away villa polycultures as the ‘natural’ component of a ‘natural-monetary’ economic binary.76 The agronomic texts don’t dice up their produce like this: they frequently discuss the marketability of all kinds of things, from animals to grain to timber, and describe a world in which any surplus might be sold, given the right conditions, just as growing a bit of everything simultaneously maximised the land’s yield while mitigating risk. Theirs is a ‘both/and’ principal. How central was this ‘both/and’ principal is revealed in one piece of the recent archaeology—cereal and legume cultivation. While cereals are assumed to constitute the majority of the Roman diet, cereal cultivation is dealt with more summarily than viticulture in the agronomic texts, proof positive for many scholars that cereals were an onerous requirement, undeserving of particular comment. In actual fact, cereal and legume agriculture is, in the absence of other qualifiers, what is assumed

136 Kim Bowes as the arable agriculture in the agronomic texts, and the enumeration of different kind of cereals, alongside different legumes, forms part of all the treatises, not least because their varieties and subvarieties provide fertile ground for authorial command of know-how.77 As is becoming clear, however, those different varieties were more than part of the display of know-how, but were central to grain production strategies. Most everywhere in Italy we have archaeobotanical data for cereals, we find multiple different kinds of wheat, plus a host of other cereals, being grown and consumed simultaneously.78 Large villas like a newly excavated one in Gerace, Sicily, seem to be growing not only the triticum aestivum for fine bread but together with the heartier durum (triticum durum) and emmer (triticum diococcum) wheats, as well as barley.79 Barley, farro, emmer and some millet were also consumed together in the wealthier houses of Pompeii.80 This plurality of cereals points not only away from the hierarchies someone like Pliny the Elder places on these plants, with triticum aestivum at the top, but also towards a widespread use of cereal polyculture for risk reduction.81 Each of these cereals, as someone like Varro or Columella is keen to tell you, have their own set of environmental conditions.82 Grow them all and the farmer has covered the bases from drought to inundation, cold to heat; not to mention exploiting all available land parcels which, as Horden and Purcell have taught us, are themselves subject to different climatic conditions in any given year.83 Needless to say, cereal polyculture also seems to have been practised by smallholders. Everywhere that our project found cereals we found multiple types—bread wheat, durum wheat, emmer and barley—the same kind of cereal polyculture found in villas. The absence of millet is interesting: millet has been presumed to be a poverty food and recent isotope studies in a Roman cemetery tentatively suggested that its consumption might be linked with class.84 The ubiquity of millet in archaeobotanical assemblages from Pompeii, even in wealthy houses, suggests that that binary, too, is unhelpful, and that like most other foods, the decision to grow and eat millet is governed by the particularities of climate and choice.85 Closely related to the binary of risk and profit are the concomitant binary of surplus and autarky. Peasants are assumed to be largely autarkic, producing just enough for their needs and for bad-year storage and seed; they eschew markets because markets are risky and thus any surplus production which winds up being sold is ad hoc, not by design or long-term strategy.86 Elite estate owners are, in a Marxist paradigm, embedded in a bimodal economy in which things like cereals are part of a ‘natural’ economy dedicated to supplying the estate and viticulture is part of a monetary economy dedicated to the market.87 According to more recent New Institutionalist thinking, elites funnel their capital into profit-making agriculture.88 Either way, intentional surplus production, mostly for the market, defines their agricultural strategies. Both sides of the binary owe their origins to the Romans themselves, who painstakingly constructed it to do important poetic and political work. As has recently been argued, Cato’s invention of the ancient Cincinnatus-figure, whose subsistenceoriented small plot (four iugera) defined his moral and political virtus, was a highly calculated move, constructing a scale of agrarian virtues in place of family lineage in which new men like himself might have a place.89 The man who works his own farm efficiently and consumes its products claims pride of place in Cato’s hierarchy—even if that work is done by slaves as an extension of his master’s hoe-arm.

Roman agriculture from above and below 137 The opposite end of the scale, particularly for Columella, is occupied by the absentee agro-businessman, producing surplus for profit and critically, not supervising his estate with the diligentia that defines the true bonus agricola.90 The smallholder’s virtue-kit is further equipped by the Virgilian corpus, his oneness with a natural harmony ground in by the Moretum, while the Georgics defined his unending routine of labour as both banishing the siren-calls of luxury and dodging the equal perils of living outside of nature’s intended temporal rhythms.91 So successful were these poetic caricatures, both in their own time and at various moments in their reception, that it has proven almost impossible to escape their shadow. Assumptions about peasant autarky find their way into almost every consideration of Roman smallholders, while surplus remains the yardstick that various types of villas are measured. Indeed, it is perhaps no wonder that one has to leave Italy altogether to escape the shade of Cincinnatus, where new archaeological evidence from Gaul and the Rhineland have banished it. In the Low Countries, Roman villages of smallholders produced consistently robust surpluses of both grain and animals for sale on urban markets. In both villas and farms of the Ile-deFrance, decisions were made to concentrate on specific cereals for urban export, with some villas opting to concentrate on the closed-hull coarser wheats, while some small farms grew the finer, more risky, open-hulled varieties. Back in Italy, progress has been slower, but similar trends are emerging. The modest scale granary from our own excavations at the farm of Pievina describe surplus grain production well in excess of what a family would need for a year even with reserved seed (Figure 6.4).92 The small, flat-bottomed amphorae we found at most of our

Figure 6.4 Plan, Pievina (Cinigiano), first century AD phase Source: © Roman Peasant Project (Elisa Rizzo, Marco Sfacteria).

138

Kim Bowes

0

5

10 cm

Figure 6.5 Local/regional amphora, Case Nuove (Cinigiano), Phase 1.2 (Augustan/Tiberian) Source: © Roman Peasant Project (Emanuele Vaccaro).

sites describe a heretofore unknown local trade in surplus wine, destined for one’s near and far neighbours, not overseas export (Figure 6.5).93 These amphorae were made in local ceramic kilns for short-distance land transport to peasants customers who, presumably, may have grown their own grapes but opted to supplement their home vintage with that of their neighbours. Another small farm near Volterra seems to have been producing dormice—presumably for sale in the nearby city.94 On the other side of the surplus/autarky divide, villas clearly produced and used large quantities of their own produce, although the destination of crops which never left the estate is harder to track than amphora-born goods that did. The recent discovery through isotope analysis of imported grain at one such villa, the

Roman agriculture from above and below 139 so-called villa of Horace at Vacone, may suggest that even such an autarkic staple might be imported from elsewhere, purchased, like peasants bought wine, not necessarily because of want but for preference, or to allow the estate to concentrate on other activities.95 Some observations on the application of water power in Gallic villas have suggested it was often employed to grind wheat for in-house consumption.96 Much wider application of both isotopic analysis on botanical and faunal materials, and thin sections to track the origins and consumption-points of ceramics is necessary to really see these trends in detail. The initial data, and the comparanda from north of the Alps, describes a world in which it was the scale, not the presence, of market-oriented surplus which really distinguished smallholders from their villa-owning neighbours.97 All farmers aimed to sell some of their surplus on the market: at what scale and by what means lay the differences.

Threshing The flat-bottomed amphorae described earlier were dwarfed by the great Dressel 1B which held the produce of a villa like Settefinestre, just as its granary loomed over the small affair at the peasant farm at Pievina. These material differences in scale epitomise the broader scaler distinctions which everywhere distinguish smallholder agriculture from villa agriculture: from hectares under the plough to the size of agricultural labour force to the overall scale of surplus production, size differences are the most obvious ways in which villa and smallholder agriculture differed. As we’ve cautioned earlier, that difference in scale takes place upon a shared basis of practices, which are, in most instances simply scaled-up in the case of large estates: larger scale of cereal polycultures, larger wine surpluses, larger herd sizes. A certain kind of subtle specialisation can be found as a product of larger scales; we’ve already noted the way in which work animals and eating animals might be distinctly managed on larger estates versus smaller ones where labour trumped dietary meat. But these tend to be differences of emphasis, not radical distinctions in practice. As has been long recognised, this difference in emphasis rather than kind is similarly true of labour practices. As we’ve noted earlier, the assumption that Italian villas were worked with a predominantly slave system, with tenancy used for specific land types or geographies, lies at the heart of the two-agricultures model and lurks behind a presumed concomitant difference in agricultural practices.98 As has been clear for some time, however, the equation of Italian villas with majority slave labour forces has been exaggerated; most Italian villas were worked with a complex, largely impossible to reconstruct mélange of slaves, free wage labour, and tenants.99 For Columella, it is quite clear that labour determinations are a product of a complex calculus—the personalities of locals, the time the owner plans to spend on the estate; even the nature of the soil.100 From his indications that wandering shepherds were often slaves, and Cato’s contracts for wage labourers at harvest time, it’s plain that specific crops did not necessarily dictate specific and singular types of labour.101 Furthermore, these categories of tenant, wage labour and smallholder were fluid.102 Smallholders might let out portions of their land to

140

Kim Bowes

tenants, or act as tenants in addition to owning their own plots, while large landowners might also rent land as tenants.103 Slave owning was not limited to large villas, as evidenced by the canonical smallholder, Simulus of the Moretum, who owns a female slave. Smallholder family members might work for wages during harvest time and other moments of labour dearth.104 In short, the differences between villa and smallholder labour were again a matter of emphasis, with larger slave populations on villas, but slavery, tenancy and wage labour used everywhere. Where there are non-scalar, structural differences to be found between peasant and villa agriculture, they are to be sought both in more subtle material distinctions on the ground and in the slippage between words and things. Indeed, the most obvious difference between the peasant doing agriculture and the aristocratic writing about doing agriculture are the words between. In writing agriculture—in ordering its practices and know-how, in planting it in ancient literary soil—the elite agronomists ploughed words into the praxes of planting and tilling and harvesting and storing that they shared with their smallholder neighbours. In doing so, they transformed those praxes in ways that, while they still permit a glimpse of that shared world, made it do extra, different kind of work. The most obvious work is status. In laying out a dizzying display of knowhow of everything from soil selection to land surveying, and using it to create or uphold a mythic past in which that very know-how defined aristocratic virtue, the elite agronomists shifted the infinite tasks and knowledge involved in growing from part of a survival apparatus to a status apparatus. Know-how ordered and debated, used to construct and critique history or to make oneself a place in that history—these were uses of agriculture which words, and the agronomic genre, permitted. Agronomy was geekiness exhibited, a genre of minutiae in which information on distinguishing the fattiness of soil by soaking it overnight or a dispute over the best material for beehives, constituted literary form as well as practical instruction.105 Smallholders, who produced the know-how but who seemingly had no such literature, were denied its status-producing qualities. If there were oral versions of such competitive displays of knowledge, which there very well may have been, their form restricted their circulation to the here of the local and now of their telling. Putting knowledge on a stage is also characteristic of the monumental physical villa. In lining of the perimeter of his/her villa with buildings that monumentalised the outcomes of know-how—granaries, cisterns, animal stalls—the villa owner like the agronomist trumpeted agricultural successes to neighbours and passersby.106 So, too, the great oil and wine presses, which in the late republican/early imperial villas of Italy lay adjacent to and on-par with the luxurious living quarters, or in the provinces often flanked the villa entrance, these made status out of the art and scale of agro-processing (see Figure 6.1). So prominent and impressive are these monuments to elite production capacities that we can be forgiven if we have assumed that peasants had no equivalent, and, has often been argued, had little surplus to store.107 That they did have granaries and cisterns and presses and often significant surplus is only evident from a careful archaeology which seeks out the whole of the peasant task-scape, where such

Roman agriculture from above and below 141 structures are often placed at some distance from their central dwelling spaces.108 As noted earlier, our project located a small granary, as well as a cistern at the late republican site of Pievina (see Figure 6.4), while the large-scale excavations in northern Gaul and Germania have found whole villages defined by their multiple granaries.109 But these are not status projects: they have none of the overt monumentality, masonry architecture or placement which suggests buildings trying to do anything other than store water, animals and cereals. Indeed, in many peasant farms, the principal vessel of storage may not have been a building, but ceramic dolia, whose broken fragments we found in numbers only near sites which longer-term occupation.110 Presses, similarly, may have been open air—either freestanding as in the hill-top press we located at Case Nuove (Figure 6.6), or outside the house as was the case at the peasant farm at Podere Cosciano near Volterra.111 Often built to press both grapes and olives and constructed of a minimum of opus signinum liquid-resistant mortar, these presses, like the granaries and cisterns, were modest affairs, often without roof or walls, used only during the harvest months. The apparatus of crop processing was not only not claimed through monumentalisation but may have been shared between multiple peasant families, as the positioning and archaeobotanical record of Case Nuove suggests. The rhetorical possibilities of these activities are passed over and they simply do the one job of pressing, its costs divided among many.

Figure 6.6 Reconstruction, Case Nuove pressing site (first century BC/AD) Source: © Roman Peasant Project (Studio InkLink).

142

Kim Bowes

The fact that rural dwellers don’t seize on the doing of agriculture as an opportunity to proclaim status is somewhat at odds with the activities of their non-elite brethren in cities. Shop-owners, butchers, bakers and tanners in cities like Ostia and Pompeii both insistently used buildings, images and inscriptions to proclaim their identity, cement their success at their chosen field and stake their claim over their rivals.112 The shrine and paintings from the shop of Vetutius Placidus in Pompeii which advertise their owner’s commercial success, inscribed signs like a humorous example from an innkeeper in Asernia, the funerary inscriptions of freed-people who proclaim their occupational identity in lieu of a familial one—the Roman city was littered with the detritus of makers using their making as an instrument of status creation.113 Why non-elites in the Italian countryside did not do so suggests both important differences in the benefits of status creation in the countryside and/or different non-material vehicles like reputation and storytelling, by which that status was maintained. Another deep-seated difference between the world of the villa owner and that of the smallholder was the nature and rhythms of time. These differences are not, perhaps, the ones we expect. The agronomist or elite villa owner with their urban political careers seem the epitome of lives lived in Braudel’s événement, while the peasant living out their lives according to the rhythms of soil and rain would seem to embody the longue durée.114 That a more complex, even opposite reality characterised aristo-time and peasant time is suggested by both the agronomists themselves and the new archaeology. The agronomic text is shackled to the past: the construction of agricultural virtus is tied to a mythic smallholder past, itself constructed around political figures like Cincinnatus whose événement lives saving the Republic from invasion and crisis are mere punctuation points of a career allegedly lived on and with the rhythms of the land. The agronomist, each in their own way, seeks to mask the present with its many agrarian innovations, from the expanding villa to the huge investment in animal agriculture, with prefaces setting those innovations in the context of renewal and return.115 Whether it be Columella’s counter to soil exhaustion or Varro’s troubled arc of Roman history narrated through the farm, the agronomic genre is defined as much around a past golden age as it is about know-how in the present, and the latter must always bow to the former. The physical villa, too, was built to create and recall a family’s longue durée ties to the land. Villas were meant to embody family memory in rural place.116 Their monumental, masonry architecture emphasised their durability and longevity. The shrine at a villa like that of the Volusii tied that villa to family history, with dozens of public honorific inscriptions to generations of notables placed in a prominent room in the public space of the villa. So, too, did free-standing villa mausolea, set at the approaches or boundaries of villas, marking the intersection of agriculture and habitation with the memory of family members past.117 When accompanied by great storage spaces, these other parts of the villa’s monumental apparatus bound agricultural production to ancestral identity, just as Cato sought to do for his upstart gens.

Roman agriculture from above and below 143 A more attentive reading of the texts as well as the archaeology can help us see these statements for the reality they conceal, a reality in which few families retained their estates for more than a generation or two, in which, as the agronomists themselves admit in the interstices, buying and selling of estates was constant and desirable.118 Villa excavations with detailed stratigraphic sequences often find the impression of longevity broken by periodic abandonment, large-scale rebuilding, restoration or other indications of hiatus and rupture.119 The letters of elites from Cicero to Pliny are filled with plans for buying and selling rural estates, of transplanting one’s rural family identity from one place to another. The notion of villa permanence managed to do important rhetorical work while remaining a convenient fiction. The notion of the autochthonous, unchanging peasant likewise has a long and diverse history, one elite Romans themselves contributed to in their effort to tie their own modern agriculture to a mythic past. The figure of Simulus or Virgil’s Georgics’ farmers are framed as eternal figures, grown from the soil, their days a round of the same tasks on an unchanging land.120 The actual peasant worlds we found in our project were almost entirely the opposite. The average site occupation length was 44 years, the number encapsulating a whole series of indicators for a mobility and change among rural non-elites.121 Most pronounced were the non-permanent nature of the majority of the spaces we excavated. One, at most two of the various-sized sites were what one might term ‘houses’—spaces which displayed material indicators for cooking, storage, sewing or weaving, or other of the multiple-elements of days lived out in the same space. Instead, most of the sites we encountered were specialised in function and seemingly used for varying lengths of time—from occasional to seasonal.122 Two work huts whose botanical profile suggested the periodic stabling of animals as well as short stays with no facilities for cooking; the afore-mentioned outdoor pressing site complete with rudimentary press, treading surface, well and cistern used presumably during the September and November harvest months; planned facilities for the production of various phases of Italic sigillata ceramics—these comprised the bulk of the sites, large and small, revealed by the project’s excavations. In contrast, the one likely farm at Pievina included structures for long-term storage (a granary and cistern), an outdoor hearth and multiple and abundant faunal and ceramic collections—something missing in the shorter-use sites. We termed the very different use periods and functions as ‘distributed habitation,’ a mode of living in which different ‘domestic’ activities—pasturing, pressing, artisanal activities—were separated in space and time.123 The fact that most of these activities pertained to production is characteristic of smallholder’s particular ‘domestic,’ centred on making and growing. Their separation in space we interpreted as a doubling-down on the micro-regional possibilities presented by an environmentally diverse landscape characterised by plots of different soil, hydrology, and topography. Thus, these smallholders tended to build small work huts used for short-term animal shelter areas in lowland, clayey areas more readily left as pasture, the pressing site on a hilltop unsuitable for agriculture but visible from the fields around, while longer-term sites tended to sit in better drained, somewhat

144

Kim Bowes

lighter soils.124 The diversity in these sittings, however, belied any simple environmental determinism and pointed to choices made beyond the ability of archaeology to recover. Habitation, then, consisted of movement between these different areas and specialised sites as need and time required. Mobility and transience, occasioned by a desire to make more efficient and productive the use of diverse plots of land, characterised the smallholder experience in this area. The architecture of these sites was itself a product of this distributed, mobile mode of dwelling. Made largely of rammed or mounded earthen walls atop stone socles, the buildings were a combination of micro-locally available earth and collected stones.125 A stone-poor area, the region prompted recycling of these structures and reuse of the stones whose multiple geological origins described a palimpsest of use and reuse, occasioned by the constant movement around the locale. Tile roofs were required to preserve the earthen walls, but once the site was no longer deemed useful, the roofs were recycled and reused in other projects. The remnants of such a recycling project were found at the site of Poggio dell’Amore, where one wall and fragmentary remains of a recycled roof were all that remained of a small pasture hut.126 It is important to note that the earthen material of these structures did not itself produce impermanence: just as the monumental stone villas might be sporadically occupied, the earthen walls of these smallholder sites could in theory be preserved for centuries by careful maintenance of their bases and roofs. The fact that they generally were not was a product of their impermanent function, used for days or seasons, and then as generational shifts prompted new uses of the land, they were abandoned and recycled, their walls returned to the earth. Finally, as we’ve noted earlier, even the peasant use of the land was characterised by constant change. Crop rotational schemes likewise imply a shifting use of the land as different plots were rotated with different crops. Distributed habitation strategies were also developed in dialectical relationship with agricultural practice; longer term sites tended to have higher quantities of olive and grape pollen as those more fixed crops seem to have been situated near more fixed dwellings.127 Finally the notion of an unchanging earth on which the soil-tied smallholder toiled is confounded by the construction of field drains and containment of groundwater, signs of an insistent effort to bend land and water to human needs.

Conclusions Eric Hobsbawm once cautioned that the grassroots historian would find only what he or she was looking for, not what was already waiting to be found. The search for working people in most periods, he warned, was conditioned by the historian’s questioning of a recalcitrant source base and thus was even less a positivistic enterprise than most history writing: ‘There is generally no material until our questions have revealed it.’128 In the case of Roman agriculture, this is both particularly true in ways that are actually revealing of our subject and also not true. As I’ve tried to describe here, the shared practices of smallholders and elite villa owners were simultaneously advertised and obfuscated by the latter, the genre of agronomy

Roman agriculture from above and below 145 serving to clothe shared know-how in a garb of self-presentation and poetics in which, for a while, it became hard to take the know-how seriously. The literary work of the last few years has revealed a genre defined by ‘both/and,’ a peep-show that reveals actual practices of ploughing and planting, harvesting and storing, delivered as instructions to villa managers, only to periodically reclothe those practices as Roman history and literary self-crafting. Those moves, I’ve argued, are themselves an integral part of history from below, in which practice is shared but put to very different uses by smallholders and elites. Both are engaged in the detailed business of persuading the land to produce to its maximum capacity and leveraging that production for self-sufficiency and profit. But only elites put that work to further work, using their agricultural praxes both to craft a distant past to which they shackled their identity and as part and parcel of their efforts to bolster and maintain their moral and family status in the now. It is indeed, as Hobsbawm notes, only when we pose questions about smallholder agriculture that we can see that Janus-faced structure. But it is also the obfuscating act itself on the part of elites and the absent equivalent on the part of smallholders, which tells us something interesting about the latter. It’s puzzling as to why Roman smallholders don’t seem to have seized hold of their production as an opportunity to make claims about themselves, if not in writing then in their buildings, and why there is no peasant equivalent to the art and architecture of working urbanites. The answer to that question might reveal two quite different grassroots histories between city and country. Hobsbawm, too, didn’t reckon on archaeology: new archaeological work on villas and peasants alike allows us another way of doing history from below. That way, as I’ve tried to suggest here, does not lie in just bypassing the elite written source corpora as irrelevant or wrong. Rather, archaeology gives us the opportunity to compare and contrast two different kinds of information about the past and, in their overlaps, to identify the many points where all farmers, large and small, are engaged in the same thing—crop rotation, polycultures, investment in animals, self-sufficiency combined with surplus export, even at small scales. Only the new attention to archaeobotanical and faunal remains, ceramic fabric and thinsection studies, laid against the agronomic texts, allows us a glimpse of that world. Similarly, only a detailed attention to stratigraphy and stratigraphic dating, which ironically is required of smallholder archaeology and is still optional in large villa excavations, laid against the atavistic agronomy literature, allows us to get at the potentially different temporal scales at which these two groups lived—or at which elites claimed to have lived. In short, while archaeology holds out the most promise for a rural history from below, it is a careful questioning of all our data and a desire to see it on its own terms, that might produce what Hobsbawm urged us toward—a grassroots history which doesn’t just discover the past but explains it.

Notes 1 On the use of ‘peasant’ as a shorthand for non-elite countryman and for a dissection of the term’s ancient through modern baggage, see Grey 2011, 26–33. This essay will use the term ‘smallholder’ and ‘peasant’ interchangeably to refer to non-elite countrymen whose economic strategies were centered on, but not limited to, agriculture.

146 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Kim Bowes Cato, Agr. 11; Columella, Rust. 1.1.18, 1.2.1, 1.2.3, 1.3.3, 1.7–1.9. E.g. Carandini 1985b; Marzano 2007. Cambi 2002; Capogrossi Colognesi 1986; Rathbone 2008; Launaro 2011. For critical observations about smallholder archaeology, see Rathbone 2008. For a review of the debate, see Bowes 2021b. Carandini 1983; Giardina and Schiavone 1981. Carandini 1985a; Carandini 1989; Vera 1992; Morley 1996; Patterson 2006, 66–88; cf. Bowes et al. 2017. For a careful reading of the Gracchan evidence, see Gargola 2008 and Balbo 2013; on debt, see Rosenstein 2004, 51–55. For a summary, see Momigliano 1982; Bowes 2021b. Weber 1891; Rostovtzeff 1926. Weber 1891; modified but substantially retained by Neeve 1984, 90–93. White 1970; Duncan-Jones 1982, 33–59; Spur 1986; Marcone 1997, the later more attentive to their literary qualities and emphasis on polycultures. Cato, Agr. 11; Columella, Rust. 3.3; Carandini 1985b. Finley 1999 (updated edition), 108–17. Kron 2004 and 2012; De Sena 2005; Goodchild 2013. Goodchild 2013; Trapero Fernández 2016. Marzano 2013 and 2015 (on Gaul and Spain). See generally Diederich 2005; Trevizam 2013. On know-how, Thibodeau 2018; on the trope of old-time agriculture, Reay 2005; on agricultural measurements of the decline of history, Nelsestuen 2015; on the construction of first century BC elite identity via literature, Habinek 1998. Spanier 2010; Nelsestuen 2015; Henderson 2004, 7–11. Bowes 2021c. Bowes 2021c. On the relationship between philology and archaeology in classical studies, see Dyson 1981; Hall 2014, ch. 1. A notable exception is Hall 2014. Gibson 1997; Habinek 1998, 46–50; Hine 2011; Henderson 2002. Trevizam 2013. Cato, Agr. praef.; Columella, Rust. praef. Reay 2005. Nelsestuen 2015. Henderson 2002; Henderson 2004. Thibodeau 2011. Thibodeau 2018. Hine 2011; see also Reay 2005. Reay 2005. See the critique in Marzano 2007. Carandini 1985a. Marzano 2007. Marzano 2013. Van Oyen 2015 and 2019. Van Oyen 2019, 42–43. See the review of this literature in Witcher 2006a and 2006b; Launaro 2011. See the cautions in Witcher 2006a. E.g. the debates between Terrenato 1998 and Carandini et al. 2002. Marzano 2007, 137; Launaro 2011. White 1970; Finley 1999, 106–11. Starting with the careful work of Spurr 1986. See now Kron 2005. Columella, Rust. praef 1. Olson 1943.

Roman agriculture from above and below 147 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

Columella, Rust. 1.5, 2.4. Columella, Rust. 2.2. Campana 2017. Quilici and Quilici Gigli 2009. Goodchild 2007, 184–5. Bowes 2021c, ch. 4, 8 and 9. Bowes 2021c, 207–20. Bowes 2021c, 221–48. Cato, Agr. 155; Columella, Rust. 2.2. Spurr 1986, 38, 57–58. Kron 2000. See also suggestion in Spurr 1986, 27. Columella, Rust. 2.1–2. On fodder crops, Columella Rust. 2.10–3. Bowes et al. 2017; Mercuri and Bowes in Arnoldus et al. 2021. Cf. Groot and Kooistra 2009, who use similar data to make more definite ‘reconstructions.’ Fögen 2016. Kron 2002 and 2004. MacKinnon 2010. MacKinnon 2001 and 2015. Jongman 1988, 80–82. MacKinnon in Arnoldus et al. 2021. MacKinnon in Arnoldus et al. 2021; MacKinnon in Bowes, MacKinnon, Mercuri, Rattighieri and Rinaldi 2021. See Garnsey 1988, 44–47. Long ago noted by Spurr 1986, 5–6. For a rare notice of the genre’s emphasis on polycultures, Duncan-Jones 1982, 37; Henderson 2004, 10 (on Columella). See Henderson 2002. As noted by Carandini 1983. Carandini 1983. Columella, Rust. Book 2, ostensibly on soils, is principally dedicated to soil selection, ploughing and seeding for cereals and legumes. Cato, Agr. 34–37; Varro, Agr. 42–53. E.g. Motta, Camin and Terrenato 1993; Caramiello et al. 2000; Kron 2004; Ciaraldi 2007; Mercuri et al. 2009; Rowan 2016, Bosi et al. 2019, among many. Wilson and Ramsay 2017. Ciaraldi 2007; Rowan 2016. Pliny’s hierarchy of cereals: Plin. HN 10.18.20. Varro, Agr. 9; Columella, Rust. 2.9. Horden and Purcell 2000, 77–79. On association of millet with poverty and small farmers, Spurr 1983, 14; for the isotope evidence, Killgrove and Tykot 2013. Murphy 2016. Garnsey 1988, 44–48; Gallant 1991. Carandini 1983. Kay 2014; Stringer 2020; Marzano 2015. Reay 2005. Columella, Rust. Praef. Thibodeau 2011. Ghisleni, Vaccaro and Bowes 2011; Bowes 2021c, 104. Pecci et al. 2015; Bowes and Vaccaro in Bowes, Vaccaro, Collins-Elliot and Gray 2021. Camin 2014. On the imported grain from Vacone, see Rowan 2019. Marzano 2015, 218–9. See, for instance, the contributions in Deru and González Villaescusa 2014; Groot et al. 2009.

148 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128

Kim Bowes For an elaboration of this earlier model, see Giardina and Schiavone 1981. Rosafio 1993; Capogrossi Colognesi 1986. Columella, Rust. 1.7. Columella, Rust. 1.9; Cato, Agr. 144–5, respectively. Foxhall 1990. Neeve 1984, who argues that status and vocabulary might distinguish elite from nonelite tenants in this period. Marcone 2009. Columella, Rust. 2.2.20 (on soils); 9.6–7 (on beehives). Van Oyen 2019. Van Oyen 2019, 42–43. On task-scape, see Ingold 1993, and below. Pievina: Ghisleni, Vaccaro and Bowes 2011; Bowes 2021c, 63–105; Groot et al. 2009; Ferdière 2015. Bowes in Bowes, MacKinnon, Mercuri, Rattighieri and Rinaldi 2021. Vaccaro et al. 2013; Bowes 2021c, 107–62; Camin and McCall 2002–3. See the surveys in Joshel 1992; Petersen 2006; Mayer 2012; Flohr 2013, ch. 6. See also Courrier and Tran, this volume, for the case of southern Gaul. Aesernia inscription: CIL 9.2689; Fagan 2017. Braudel 1958. On the craft of literature as therapy for anxiety about the present, see Habinek 1998. On the prefaces specifically see Reay 2005; Spanier 2010, 210–62. On the masking of the present in the Georgics, see Thibodeau 2011. Bodel 1997. Bowes 2006. Bodel 1997, 12; Hillner 2003. E.g. Greenslade 2019; in general, Foxhall 2000. On the Virgilian construction of an unchanged farming, see Thibodeau 2011. Bowes 2021a. Bowes, Collins-Elliot and Grey 2021. Bowes, Collins-Elliot and Grey 2021. Arnoldus et al. 2021. Bowes 2021a. Bowes 2021c, 185–206. Arnoldus et al. 2021. Hobsbawm 1988, 271.

Bibliography Arnoldus, A., K. Bowes, M. MacKinnon, A. M. Mercuri, E. Rattighieri and R. Rinaldi. 2021. ‘Agriculture and Land Use.’ In Bowes 2021c, 471–516. Balbo, M. 2013. Riformare la Res Publica: retroterra sociale e significato politico del tribunato di Tiberio Graccho. Bari: Edipuglia. Bodel, J. 1997. ‘Monumental Villas and Villa Monuments.’ JRA 10: 5–35. Bosi, G., D. Labate, R. Rinaldi, M. C. Montecchi, M. Mazzanti, P. Torri, F. Riso and A. M. Mercuri 2019. ‘A Survey of the Late Roman Period (3rd-6th Century AD): Pollen, NPPs and Seeds/Fruits for Reconstructing Environmental and Cultural Changes after the Floods in Northern Italy.’ Quaternary International 499: 2–23. doi:10.1016/j. quaint.2018.02.002. Bowes, K. 2006. ‘Building Sacred Landscapes: Villas and Cult.’ In Villas tardoantiguas en el Mediterráneo occidental, edited by A. Chavarría, J. Arce and G. P. Brogiolo, 73–95. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.

Roman agriculture from above and below 149 Bowes, K. 2021a. ‘Architecture and Recycling.’ In Bowes 2021c, 567–86. Bowes, K. 2021b. ‘Introduction: Inventing Roman Peasants.’ In Bowes 2021c, 1–18. Bowes, K., ed. 2021c. The Roman Peasant Project 2009–2014: Excavating the Roman Rural Poor. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bowes, K., S. Collins-Elliot and C. Grey. 2021. ‘Where Did Roman Peasants Live?’ In Bowes 2021c, 435–70. Bowes, K., M. MacKinnon, A. M. Mercuri, E. Rattighieri and R. Rinaldi. 2021. ‘Diet, Dining and Subsistence.’ In Bowes 2021c, 517–42. Bowes, K., A. M. Mercuri, E. Rattigheri, R. Rinaldi, A. Arnoldus-Huyzendveld, M. Ghisleni, C. Grey, M. MacKinnon and E. Vaccaro. 2017. ‘Peasant Agricultural Strategies in Southern Tuscany: Convertible Agriculture and the Importance of Pasture.’ In The Economic Integration of Rural Italy. Rural Communities in a Globalising World, edited by T. de Haas and G. W. Tol, 165–94. Leiden: Brill. Bowes, K., E. Vaccaro, S. Collins-Elliot and C. Grey. 2021. ‘Non-Agricultural Production, Markets, and Trade.’ In Bowes 2021c, 543–66. Bowman, A. and A. Wilson, eds. 2013. The Roman Agricultural Economy. Organization, Investment and Production. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/ 9780199665723.001.0001. Braudel, F. 1958. ‘Histoire et sciences sociales: la longue durée.’ Annales ESC 13(4): 725–53. doi:10.3406/ahess.1958.2781. Cambi, F. 2002. ‘La casa del colono e il paesaggio (III-I secolo a.C.).’ In Paesaggi d’Etruria. Valle dell’Albegna, Valle d’Oro, Valle del Chiarone, Valle del Tafone. Progetto di ricerca italo-britannico seguito allo scavo di Settefinestre, edited by A. Carandini, F. Cambi, M. G. Celuzza and E. Fentress, 37–144. Rome: Edizione di storia e letteratura. Camin, L. 2014. ‘Pomarance (PI). Il dolium per l’allevamento dei ghiri di Podere San Mario: Alcune considerazioni sulla diffusione del tipo in Toscana.’ Notiziario della soprintendenza per i beni archeologici della Toscana 10: 338–40. Camin, L. and W. McCall. 2002–3. ‘Settlement Patterns and Rural Habitation in the Middle Cecina Valley between the Hellenic to Roman Age: The Case of Podere Cosciano.’ EtrStud 9: 19–27. doi:10.1515/etst.2002.9.1.19. Campana, S. 2017. ‘Emptyscapes: Filling an “Empty” Mediterranean Landscape at Rusellae, Italy.’ Antiquity 91: 1223–40. doi:10.15184/aqy.2017.139. Capogrossi Colognesi, L. 1986. ‘Grandi proprietari, contadini e coloni nell’Italia romana (I–III d.C.).’ In Società romana e impero tardoantico. Vol. 1, edited by A. Giardina, 325–65. Rome and Bari: Laterza. Caramiello, R., M. Siniscalco, A. Zeme, L. Forlani, C. A. Accorsi, D. Arobba, M. Bandini Mazzanti and E. Zanini. 2000. ‘Analisi paleobotaniche e sedimentologiche: storia forestale, clima, ed agricoltura a Trino dall’età romana al medioevo.’ In San Michele di Trino. Dal villagio romano al castello medievale, edited by M. M. Negro Ponzi Mancini, 577–99. Florence: All’Insegna del Giglio. Carandini, A. 1983. ‘Columella’s Vineyard and the Rationality of the Roman Economy.’ Opus 2: 177–204. Carandini, A. 1985a. ‘Da villa perfecta.’ In Carandini 1985b, 107–37. Carandini, A., ed. 1985b. Settefinestre, Una villa schiavistica nell’Etruria romana. Modena: Panini. Carandini, A. 1989. ‘Italian Wine and African Oil: Commerce in a World Empire.’ In The Birth of Europe: Archaeology and Social Development in the First Millennium AD, edited by K. Randsborg, 16–31. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider.

150

Kim Bowes

Carandini, A., F. Cambi, M. G. Celuzza and E. Fentress, eds. 2002. Paesaggi d’Etruria. Valle dell’Albegna, Valle d’Oro, Valle del Chiarone, Valle del Tafone. Progetto di ricerca italobritannico seguito allo scavo di Settefinestre. Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura. Carlsen, J. and E. Lo Cascio, eds. 2009. Agricoltura e scambi nell’Italia tardo-repubblicana, 115–28. Bari: Edipuglia. Ciaraldi, M. 2007. People and Plants in Ancient Pompeii. London: Accordia Research Institute, University of London. de Ligt, L. and S. Northwood, eds. 2008. People, Land and Politics. Demographic Developments and the Transformation of Roman Italy, 300 BC–AD 14. Mnemosyne, Supplements 303. Leiden: Brill. Deru, X. and R. González Villaescusa, eds. 2014. Consommer dans les campagnes de la Gaule romaine. Revue du Nord, Hors-série, Collection Art et Archéologie 21. de Sena, E. 2005. ‘An Assessment of Wine and Oil Production in Rome’s Hinterland: Ceramic, Literary, Art Historical and Modern Evidence.’ In Roman Villas around the Urbs: Interaction with Landscape and Environment. Proceedings of a Conference Held at the Swedish Institute in Rome, September 17–18 2004, edited by B. S. Frizell and A. Klynne, 135–49. Rome: Swedish Institute. Diederich, S. 2005. ‘Das römische Agrarhandbuch als Medium der Selbstdarstellung.’ In Antike Fachtexte. Ancient Technical Texts, edited by T. Fögen. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 271–88. doi:10.1515/9783110912104.271. Duncan-Jones, R. 1982. The Economy of the Roman Empire. Quantitative Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dyson, S. 1981. ‘A Classical Archaeologist’s Response to the “New Archaeology”.’ BASO 242: 7–13. doi:10.2307/1356543. Fagan, G. 2017. ‘The Traveler’s Bill (CIL IX 2689 = ILS 7478 = AE 1983.329)?’ ZPE 204: 246–50. Ferdière, A. 2015. ‘Essai de typologie des greniers ruraux de Gaule du nord.’ RACF 54, document 4. Accessed January 13, 2021. http://journals.openedition.org/racf/2294. Finley, M. 1999. The Ancient Economy. Updated edition, with a Foreword by Ian Morris. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Flohr, M. 2013. The World of the Fullo: Work, Economy, and Society in Roman Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199659357.001.0001. Fögen, T. 2016. ‘All Creatures Great and Small: On the Roles and Functions of Animals in Columella’s De Re Rustica.’ Hermes 114: 321–51. Foxhall, L. 1990. ‘The Dependant Tenant: Land, Leasing and Labour in Italy and Greece.’ JRS 80: 97–114. doi:10.2307/300282. Foxhall, L. 2000. ‘The Running Sands of Time: Archaeology and the Short Term.’ World Archaeology 31: 484–98. doi:10.1080/00438240009696934. Gallant, T. 1991. Risk and Survival in Ancient Greece. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gargola, D. 2008. ‘The Gracchan Reform and Appian’s Representation of an Agrarian Crisis.’ In de Ligt and Northwood 2008, 487–518. Garnsey, P. 1988. Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World. Responses to Risk and Crisis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511583827. Ghisleni, M., E. Vaccaro and K. Bowes. 2011. ‘Excavating the Roman Peasant: Excavations at Pievina.’ PBSR 79: 95–145. doi:10.1017/S0068246211000067. Giardina, A. and A. Schiavone, eds. 1981. Società romana e produzione schiavistica, 3 vol. Roma and Bari: Laterza. Gibson, R. 1997. ‘Didactic Poetry as “Popular” Form: A Study of Imperatival Expressions in Latin Didactic Verse and Prose.’ In Form and Content in Didactic Poetry. Fifth

Roman agriculture from above and below 151 Nottingham classical literature symposium, held at the University of Nottingham on May 22nd, 1996, edited by C. Atherton, 67–98. Bari: Levante. Goodchild, H. 2007. Modelling Roman Agricultural Production in the Middle Tiber Valley, Central Italy. PhD diss., University of Birmingham. Goodchild, H. 2013. ‘GIS Models of Roman Agricultural Production.’ In Bowman and Wilson 2013, 55–83. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199665723.003.0003. Greenslade, S. 2019. ‘Early Imperial Period: 1st and 2nd Century AD. The Archaeology and Growth of a Suburban Settlement.’ In Butrint 6. Excavations on the Vrina Plain. Vol. 1: The Lost Roman and Byzantine Suburb, edited by S. Greenslade, 26–66. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Grey, C. 2011. Constructing Communities in the Late Roman Countryside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511994739. Groot, M., S. Heeren, L. Kooistra and W. Vos. 2009. ‘Surplus Production for the Market? The Agrarian Economy in the Non-Villa Landscapes of Germania Inferior.’ JRA 22: 231–53. doi:10.1017/S1047759400020687. Groot, M. and L. Kooistra. 2009. ‘Land Use and the Agrarian Economy in the Roman Dutch River Area.’ Internet Archaeology 27. Accessed January 13, 2021. https://intarch. ac.uk/journal/issue27/5/1.html. Habinek, T. 1998. The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Empire, and Identity in Ancient Rome. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.1515/9781400822515. Hall, J. 2014. Artifact and Artifice. Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Henderson, J. 2002. ‘Columella’s Living Hedge: The Roman Gardening Book.’ JRS 92: 110–33. doi:10.2307/3184862. Henderson, J. 2004. The Roman Book of Gardening. London and New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203356999. Hillner, J. 2003. ‘Domus, Family and Inheritance: The Senatorial Family House in Late Antique Rome.’ JRS 93: 129–45. doi:10.2307/3184642. Hine, H. M. 2011. ‘“Discite . . . Agricolae”: Modes of Instruction in Latin Prose Agricultural Writing from Cato to Pliny the Elder.’ CQ 61: 624–54. doi:10.1017/ S0009838811000103. Hobsbawm, E. 1988. ‘On History from Below.’ In History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology, edited by F. Kranz, 13–28. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horden, P. and N. Purcell. 2000. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford: Blackwell. Ingold, T. 1993. ‘The Temporality of the Landscape.’ World Archaeology 25 (2): 152–74. doi:10.1080/00438243.1993.9980235. Jongman, W. 1988. The Economy and Society of Pompeii. Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben. Joshel, S. 1992. Work, Identity and Legal Status at Rome. A Study of the Occupational Inscriptions. Norman, OK and London: Oklahoma University Press. Kay, P. 2014. Rome’s Economic Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ acprof:oso/9780199681549.001.0001. Killgrove, K. and R. Tykot. 2013. ‘Food for Rome: A Stable Isotope Investigation of Diet in the Imperial Period (1st–3rd Centuries AD).’ Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 32: 28–38. doi:10.1016/j.jaa.2012.08.002. Kron, G. 2000. ‘Roman Ley Farming.’ JRA 13: 277–87. doi:10.1017/S1047759400018924. Kron, G. 2002. ‘Archaeozoological Evidence for the Productivity of Roman Livestock Farming.’ MBAH 21: 53–73.

152

Kim Bowes

Kron, G. 2004. ‘A Deposit of Carbonized Hay at Oplontis and Roman Forage Quality.’ Mouseion 4 (3): 275–330. doi:10.1353/mou.2004.0014. Kron, G. 2005. ‘Sustainable Roman Intensive Mixed Farming Methods: Water Conservation and Erosion Control.’ In Concepts, pratiques et enjeux environnementaux dans l’empire romain, edited by R. Bedon and E. Hermon, 285–308. Limoges: PULIM. Kron, G. 2012. ‘Food Production.’ In The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, edited by W. Scheidel, 156–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ CCO9781139030199.011. Launaro, A. 2011. Peasants and Slaves: The Rural Population of Roman Italy (200 BC to AD 100). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacKinnon, M. 2001. ‘High on the Hog: Linking Zooarchaeological, Literary, and Artistic Data for Pig Breeds in Roman Italy.’ AJA 105: 649–73. doi:10.2307/507411. MacKinnon, M. 2010. ‘Cattle “Breed” Variation and Improvement in Roman Italy: Connecting the Zooarchaeological and Ancient Textual Evidence.’ World Archaeology 42: 55–73. doi:10.1080/00438240903429730. MacKinnon, M. 2015. ‘Changes in Animal Husbandry as a Consequence of Developing Social and Economic Patterns from the Roman Mediterranean Context.’ In Ownership and Exploitation of Land and Natural Resources in the Roman World, edited by P. Erdkamp, K. Verboven and A. Zuiderhoek, 249–73. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198728924.003.0014. Marcone, A. 1997. Storia dell’agricoltura romana. Dal mondo arcaico all’età imperiale. Rome: Nuova Italia Scientifica. Marcone, A. 2009. ‘Il lavoro giornaliero nell’agricoltura a Roma in età repubblicana.’ In Carlsen and Lo Cascio 2009, 115–28. Marzano, A. 2007. Roman Villas in Central Italy. A Social and Economic History. Leiden: Brill. doi:10.1163/ej.9789004160378.i-826. Marzano, A. 2013. ‘Agricultural Production in the Hinterland of Rome: Wine and Olive Oil.’ In Bowman and Wilson 2013, 85–106. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/ 9780199665723.003.0004. Marzano, A. 2015. ‘Villas as Instigators and Indicators of Economic Growth.’ In Structure and Performance in the Roman Economy: Models, Methods and Case Studies, edited by K. Verboven and P. Erdkamp, 197–215. Brussels: Latomus. Mayer, E. 2012. The Ancient Middle Classes: Urban Life and Aesthetics in the Roman Empire, 100 BCE-250 CE, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Mercuri, A. M. et al. 2009. ‘From the “Treasure of Domagnano” to the Archaeobotany of a Roman and Gothic Settlement in the Republic of San Marino.’ In Plants and Culture: Seeds of the Cultural History of Europe, edited by J.-P. Morel and A. M. Mercuri, 69–91. Bari: Edipuglia. Momigliano, A. 1982. ‘From Mommsen to Max Weber.’ History and Theory 21: 16–32. Morley, N. 1996. Metropolis and Hinterland: The City of Rome and the Italian Economy, 200 B.C.–A.D. 200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511518584. Motta, L., L. Camin and N. Terrenato. 1993. ‘Un sito rurale nel territorio di Volterra.’ Bollettino di Archeologia 23–24: 109–16. Murphy, C. 2016. ‘Finding Millet in the Roman World.’ Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 8: 65–78. doi:10.1007/s12520-015-0237-4. Neeve, P. W. de. 1984. Colonus: Private Farm-Tenancy in Roman Italy During the Republic and the Early Principate. Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben. Nelsestuen, G. 2015. Varro the Agronomist: Political Philosophy, Satire, and Agriculture in the Late Republic. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University.

Roman agriculture from above and below 153 Olson, L. 1943. ‘Columella and the Beginning of Soil Science.’ Agricultural Science 17: 65–72. Patterson, J. 2006. Landscapes and Cities: Rural Settlement and Civic Transformation in Early Imperial Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof: oso/9780198140887.001.0001. Pecci, A., E. Vaccaro, M. Á. Cau and K. Bowes. 2015. ‘Wine Consumption in a Rural Settlement in Southern Tuscany During Roman and Late Roman Times.’ In Le forme della crisi: Cultura materiale nell’Italia centrale tra Romani e Longobardi, edited by E. Cirelli, F. Diosono and H. Patterson, 229–35. Bologna: Ante Quem. Petersen, L. H. 2006. The Freedman in Roman Art and Art History. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Quilici, L. and S. Quilici Gigli. 2009. ‘Segni archeologici nella ricostruzione delle coltivazioni agrarie.’ In Carlsen and Lo Cascio 2009, 221–41. Rathbone, D. 2008. ‘Poor Peasants and Silent Sherds.’ In de Ligt and Northwood 2008, 305–32. Reay, B. 2005. ‘Agriculture, Writing, and Cato’s Aristocratic Self-Fashioning.’ ClAnt 24: 331–61. doi:10.1525/ca.2005.24.2.331. Rosafio, P. 1993. ‘Slaves and Coloni in the Villa System.’ In Landuse in the Roman Empire, edited by J. Carlsen, 145–58. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider. Rosenstein, N. 2004. Rome at War: Farms, Families, and Death in the Middle Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Rostovtzeff, M. 1926. The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rowan, E. 2016. ‘Bioarchaeological Preservation and Non-Elite Diet in the Bay of Naples: An Analysis of the Food Remains from the Cardo V Sewer at the Roman Site of Herculaneum.’ Environmental Archaeology 22: 318–36. doi:10.1080/14614103.2016.1235077. Rowan, E. 2019. ‘Eating in the Roman Countryside: A Reconsideration of Roman Literary Sources in Light of the Archaeobotanical Evidence from Rural Sites in Italy.’ Abstract. 18th Conference of the International Workgroup for Palaeoethnobotany—IWPG. Lecce, 3rd–8th June 2019. Program and Abstracts, 111. Lecce: Università del Salento. Accessed January 13, 2021. http://siba-ese.unisalento.it/index.php/iwgp/article/view/20556/ 17419. Spanier, E. 2010. The Good Farmer in Ancient Rome: War, Agriculture and the Elite from the Republic to Early Empire. PhD diss., University of Washington. Spurr, M. S. 1983. ‘The Cultivation of Millet in Roman Italy.’ PBSR 51: 1–15. doi:10.1017/ S0068246200008552. Spurr, M. S. 1986. Arable Cultivation in Roman Italy, 200 BC–AD 100. JRS Monographs 3. Stringer, M. 2020. ‘Impensae, Operae, and the Pastio Villatica: The Evaluation of New Venture Investments in the Roman Agricultural Treatises.’ In Capital, Investment, and Innovation in the Roman World, edited by P. Erdkamp, K. Verboven and A. Zuiderhoek, 253–73. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198841845.003.0008. Terrenato, N. 1998. ‘Tam Firmum Municipium: The Romanization of Volaterrae and its Cultural Implications.’ JRS 88: 94–114. doi:10.2307/300806. Thibodeau, P. 2011. Playing the Farmer. Representations of Rural Life in Vergil’s Georgics. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. doi:10.1525/ california/9780520268326.001.0001. Thibodeau, P. 2018. ‘Ancient Agronomy as a Literature of Best Practices.’ In Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World, edited by P. T. Keyser and J. Scarborough. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199734146.013.28.

154

Kim Bowes

Trapero Fernández, P. 2016. ‘Roman Viticulture Analysis Based on Latin Agronomists and the Application of a Geographic Information System in the Lower Guadalquivir.’ Virtual Archaeology Review 7: 53–60. http://dx.doi.org/var.2016.4481. Trevizam, M. 2013. Prosa Técnica. Catão, Varrão, Vitrúvio e Columela. Campinas: Editora da Unicamp. Vaccaro, E., M. Ghisleni, A. Arnoldus-Huyzendveld, C. Grey, K. Bowes, M. MacKinnon, A. M. Mercuri, A. Pecci, M. Á. C. Ontiveros, E. Rattigheri and R. Rinaldi. 2013. ‘Excavating the Roman Peasant II: Excavations at Case Nuove, Cinigiano (GR).’ PBSR 81: 129–79. doi:10.1017/S006824621300007X. Van Oyen, A. 2015. ‘The Moral Architecture of Villa Storage in Italy in the 1st c. B.C.’ JRA 28: 97–123. doi:10.1017/S1047759415002421. Van Oyen, A. 2019. The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage: Agriculture, Trade, and Family. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108850216. Vera, D. 1992. ‘Il sistema agrario tardoantico: un modello.’ In La storia dell’alto medioevo italiano (VI-X secolo) alla luce dell’archeologia, edited by R. Francovich and G. Noyé, 136–8. Siena: All’insegna del giglio. Weber, M. 1891. Die römische Agrargeschichte in ihrer Bedeutung für das Staats-Und Privatrecht. Stuttgart: F. Enke. White, K. D. 1970. Roman Farming. London: Thames and Hudson. Wilson, R. J. A. and J. Ramsay. 2017. ‘UBC Excavations of the Roman Villa at Gerace, Sicily: Results of the 2015 Season.’ Mouseion 14: 253–316. doi:10.3138/mous.14.2–3. Witcher, R. 2006a. ‘Agrarian Spaces in Roman Italy: Society, Economy and Mediterranean Agriculture.’ Arqueología espacial (Paisajes agrarios) 26: 341–59. Witcher, R. 2006b. ‘Broken Pots and Meaningless Dots?: Surveying the Landscapes of Roman Italy.’ PBSR 74: 39–72. doi:10.1017/S0068246200003226.

Part 3

Gender, ethnicity and subalternity

7

Hellenicity from below Subalternity and ethnicity in classical Greece and beyond Gabriel Zuchtriegel

Introduction If we look at ancient history ‘from above’—that is, from the viewpoint of urban elites in the Greek and Roman world—ethnicity as a category for defining individual and group identities appears neglectable. From the literary and archaeological evidence on intermarriage in the context of Greek colonial-indigenous encounters to Roman senators and emperors coming from the provinces, the elites of the ancient world showed an astonishing openness when it came to integrating with ethnically diverse groups. Apart from isolated cases (e.g. access to Athenian citizenship in the fifth century BC), ethnic ‘purity’ seems not to have been a major concern for ancient Greek and Roman elites. It is therefore understandable that scholars such as Robin Osborne have concluded that ethnicity was not a crucial category for ancient societies.1 However, things change if we look at history ‘from below’—that is, if we focus on non-elite and non-urban, subaltern experience and agency. Arguably, ethnic diversity was crucial for defining non-elite identities and shaping subaltern experience in the ancient world. This was not the case from the beginning, though. In fact, a second point I would like to emphasise is that ethnicity was not a stable category during antiquity but a dynamic one. The intrinsic link between ethnicity and subalternity, as described here, developed in a specific period and region, namely in Greece and the Greek colonies between the sixth and fourth centuries BC. Therefore, I will focus on this particular historical context in my contribution. Further, I will touch on how the classical Greek notion of ethnically codified subalternity might have influenced later, especially Roman, ideologies and social practices. On a global level, depicting ethnically diverse groups as inferior is a common phenomenon that cannot be linked to any specific region or period. However, the kind of ethnically codified subalternity we will be looking at in this chapter goes beyond depicting the Other as inferior. Subalternity, according to the definition provided by Antonio Gramsci, is a social category and therefore presupposes some form of integration or incorporation: it applies to those who are part of a society but within it are occupying a marginal position (‘gruppi sociali ai margini della storia’).2 The subaltern is the Other Self, the outsider who is included inside the DOI: 10.4324/9781003005148-10

158 Gabriel Zuchtriegel hegemonic ‘bloc,’ as Gramsci calls it. The ‘voicelessness’ of the subaltern stems from their being part of a society without having access to the hegemonic codes structuring it. In Gayatri Spivak’s words, ‘their speech acts cannot be concluded because the elite lacks the necessary infrastructure.’3 As an archaeologist whose professional socialisation took place in the 2000s in German and Italian universities, I grew up in an academic environment in which the ‘pots equal peoples’ model was considered as completely outdated—rightly so.4 As a consequence, our professors would often warn us better not to engage with ethnicity, as if this were a kind of academic no-go-area. The possibilities of tracing ethnic identities in the archaeological record are indeed limited. In the case of subaltern groups, who left no written sources and whose experience is not included in official historical accounts, this is even more difficult.5 Yet, I only realised later, while working on colonisation and subalternity in classical Greece, that screening out the dimension of ethnic identity means ignoring one of the key elements by which subalternity was defined in the ancient world.6 Arguably, ethnicity as a cultural construct that pretends being founded on a shared biological lineage is one of the most effective means of naturalising subalternity—that is, of presenting social inferiority as a natural condition.7

Ethnicity, subalternity and colonisation: literary sources In this context, Aristotle’s concept of ‘natural slavery’ (douleia kata physin, Politics, Book 1) has received much attention.8 However, in this chapter, I would like to take another passage from the Politics as a starting point. In Book 7, while addressing the organisation of the ideal polis, Aristotle gives a hint to where the subaltern labour force working the land owned by the citizens should come from: τοὺς δὲ γεωργήσοντας μάλιστα μέν, εἰ δεῖ κατ᾽ εὐχήν, δούλους εἶναι, μήτε ὁμοφύλων πάντων μήτε θυμοειδῶν (οὕτω γὰρ ἂν πρός τε τὴν ἐργασίαν εἶεν χρήσιμοι καὶ πρὸς τὸ μηδὲν νεωτερίζειν ἀσφαλεῖς), δεύτερον δὲ βαρβάρους περιοίκους παραπλησίους τοῖς εἰρημένοις τὴν φύσιν. Those who are to cultivate the soil should best of all, if the ideal system is to be stated, be slaves, not drawn from people all of one tribe nor of a spirited character (for thus they would be both serviceable for their work and safe to abstain from insurrection), but as a second best they should be neighbouring barbarians (barbaroi perioikoi) of a similar nature.9 That in the ideal state subaltern labourers should be ethnically diverse from the citizens (slaves from different tribes or ‘neighbouring barbarians,’ whatever that means) is an idea that is also present in the Laws of Aristotle’s teacher Plato. In Book 8, Plato states that ‘no resident citizen shall be numbered among those who engage in technical crafts, nor any servant of a resident’ (ἐπιχώριος μηδεὶς ἔστω τῶν περὶ τὰ δημιουργικὰ τεχνήματα διαπονούντων, μηδὲ οἰκέτης ἀνδρὸς ἐπιχωρίου).10

Hellenicity from below 159 Neither Aristotle nor Plato provides any further context for these statements. It is unclear where the ‘foreign labourers’ in Plato’s ideal polis should come from. Likewise, Aristotle does not specify what tribes the slaves who work the land should come from nor what relation the barbaroi perioikoi were to have with the polis. Are they also slaves or ethnically diverse groups living on the margins of, or even outside, the polis territory? Yet, by using the term barbaroi perioikoi, Aristotle has left a trace of the ideology that sustained his viewpoint—as well as the blind spots surrounding it. It appears that it makes little sense talking of ‘neighbouring barbarians’ with regard to places in mainland Greece such as Athens, Corinth, Sparta or Thebes, as these were surrounded by other Greek communities. It is therefore likely that Aristotle had a colonial setting in mind. As I have tried to show, the whole discussion on the ‘best state/polis’ in Plato’s Laws and Aristotle’s Politics is fully understandable only if we contextualise it in a society where the foundation of new colonies in non-Greek territories was a common phenomenon.11 Arguably, the Greek colonial experience of the sixth to fourth centuries BC provided the backdrop for the political and economic theories of classical writers such as Aristotle and Plato—including the way they conceptualised subalternity as ethnically codified. Aristotle’s mention of the barbaroi perioikoi is emblematic in this regard. It appears rather enigmatic in a purely philosophical, abstract context (who are they, where do they come from, what is their place in the polis?); though, it is less enigmatic if we analyse it on the backdrop of colonial subaltern groups such as the Kyllyrioi in Syracuse. In 1891, during the heyday of British colonialism, Oxford professor Edward A. Freeman summarised what we know of the Kyllyrioi, thanks to Herodotus’ Histories (Book 7, 155) and a series of later sources (in particular, late antique lexica): These last [i.e., the Sikels, the indigenous population of eastern Sicily] had their place in the economy of the Syracusan commonwealth, but without being its members even in the lowest sense. Under the name of Kyllyrioi, a name of uncertain origin, they dwelled in a position much like that of villainage on the lands of the Syracusan landowners. They are likened to the Helots of Laconia and to the Penests of Thessaly. But the Helots were Greeks as much as their masters; the Penests were more truly so; a scrupulous genealogist might have called in question the right of the Thesprotian invaders to the Hellenic name. This relation of villainage was a common one in the Greek colonies. The natives of the soil tilled the lands which had once belonged to their own people.12 Apart from its specific content (the Kyllyrioi as one possible example of barbaroi perioikoi), I quote this text here for two further reasons: firstly, it shows how the nexus of subalternity/ethnicity was approached in the wider context of modern European colonialism in nineteenth-century scholarship. On the same pages, Freeman distinguishes people of ‘pure Greek blood’ from Barbarians of various kinds. Secondly, the text stands out against the backdrop of post-war archaeology and

160

Gabriel Zuchtriegel

historiography that have attempted to avoid the pitfalls of colonialism. After the Second World War, an increasing number of scholars started questioning Eurocentric and racially biased visions of the ancient world. While this can be considered a major shift towards a better understanding of ancient Mediterranean migration and hybridisation, it also entailed a certain scepticism, or even unwillingness, to accept that in some cases otherness and subalternity were defined along ethnical division lines. To some extent, this resulted from a misinterpretation of postcolonial theories and frameworks, such as Middle Ground, Third Space, hybridisation and so forth, giving rise to exaggeratedly irenic representations of ancient Greek colonial interaction with local groups.13 Against this backdrop, Benjamin Isaac and Kostas Vlassopoulos were among the first to point out the outspokenly ethnic, or even racist, definitions in ancient Greek discourses about the Other.14 Thus, after more than a century, groups such as the Kyllyrioi have re-emerged at the centre of classical studies—though now from a critical/postcolonial viewpoint. If we follow the trace left by Aristotle’s mention of the barbaroi perioikoi, it turns out that while ethnical mixture and diversity had a positive connotation on the level of elite interaction, this was not necessarily the case on the level of lower and subaltern classes. Freeman sustained that the kind of subaltern status typical of the Kyllyrioi was ‘a common one in the Greek colonies.’ Again, after more than a century, this continues to be a crucial point. When writing this, Freeman probably had other—scanty—references to subaltern groups of non-Greek origin in mind, such as the Pedieis at Priene, a local Carian population living in the countryside and working the fields of the citizens (Pedieis literally means ‘inhabitants of the plain’).15 In Herakleia Pontike on the southern coast of the Black Sea in modern Turkey, the local population of the Mariandynoi seem to have lived under comparable conditions.16 In this case, however, the name ‘gift-bearers’ (dorophoroi), which the people of Herakleia gave them, tended to obscure their ethnic identity rather than emphasising it, as Athenaeus suggests: λέγει δὲ καὶ Καλλίστρατος ὁ Ἀριστοφάνειος, ὅτι τοὺς Μαριανδυνοὺς ὠνόμαζον μὲν δωροφόρους ἀφαιροῦντες τὸ πικρὸν τῆς τῶν οἰκετῶν προσηγορίας, καθάπερ Σπαρτιᾶται μὲν ἐποίησαν ἐπὶ τῶν εἱλώτων, Θετταλοὶ δ᾿ ἐπὶ τῶν πενεστῶν, Κρῆτες δ᾿ ἐπὶ τῶν κλαρωτῶν. καλοῦσι δὲ οἱ Κρῆτες τοὺς μὲν κατὰ πόλιν οἰκέτας χρυσωνήτους, ἀμφαμιώτας δὲ τοὺς κατ᾿ ἀγρὸν ἐγχωρίους μὲν ὄντας, δουλωθέντας δὲ κατὰ πόλεμον· διὰ τὸ κληρωθῆναι δὲ κλαρώτας. ὁ Ἔφορος δ᾿ ἐν τρίτῃ Ἱστοριῶν, κλαρώτας, φησί, Κρῆτες καλοῦσι τοὺς δούλους ἀπὸ τοῦ γενομένου περὶ αὐτῶν κλήρου. τούτοις δ᾿ εἰσὶ νενομισμέναι τινὲς ἑορταὶ ἐν Κυδωνίᾳ, ἐν αἷς οὐκ εἰσίασιν εἰς τὴν πόλιν ἐλεύθεροι, ἀλλ᾿ οἱ δοῦλοι πάντων κρατοῦσι καὶ κύριοι μαστιγοῦν εἰσι τοὺς ἐλευθέρους. Aristophanes’ student Callistratus [FGrH 348 F 4] claims that people called the Mariandynoi ‘gift-bearers’ as a way of removing the sting of the term ‘slaves,’ as the Spartiates did in the case of the Helots, the Thessalians in the case of the Penestai, and the Cretans in the case of the klarōtai. The Cretans

Hellenicity from below 161 refer to urban slaves Aschrusōnētoi, and to those in the countryside who are native-born, but have been enslaved in war Asamphamiōtai; they call them klarōtai because they are distributed by lot (klēros). Ephorus says in Book III of the History [FGrH 70 F 29]: Cretans refer to their slaves as klarōtai because of the lot cast for them. Certain festivals in Cydonia are considered theirs; free people do not enter the city during them, and the slaves control everything and have the authority to whip free individuals.17 The situation of the Cretan Asamphamiōtai resembles that of the Kyllyrioi and the Pedieis: in all these cases, local non-Greek populations were integrated as subaltern groups in a colonial economy, living in the countryside and serving as agricultural workforce. While this situation characterised their being subjugated and exploited, it also allowed them to maintain some form of ethnic identity diverse from that of their Greek masters. As the cases of the Cretan Asamphamiōtai and of the Spartan Helots suggest, such ethnic distinctions could also be applied to communities living in the Greek mainland or even to Greek tribes that were seen as ethnically diverse from others.18 Irad Malkin has shown how this could lead to forms of subjugation and colonisation in the Greek homeland that in many respects resembled those known from the colonies.19 Thus, while the Messenian Helots were not considered as barbaroi, their ethnic identity was fundamental to the Spartan project of subjugating and exploiting them. The sources further refer to local populations who lived in some kind of dependent or subaltern status in Hellenistic settlements in Asia Minor, the Levantine, Egypt and the Near East—for example, the local Phrygian population living near Zeleia. An inscription from Zeleia dating to the end of the fourth century BC ‘explicitly distinguishes between the Greek population of the town and the rural population of Phrygians in the chōra of Zeleia.’20 While this does not necessarily mean that the Phrygians were serfs, what is striking is that: even in the Hellespontine region, where the two peoples had lived in close proximity for more than three centuries by this point, there was still such a clear ethnic, spatial and juridical separation between the urban Greeks and the rural Phrygians.21 The commonness of the subjugation and/or exploitation of ethnically diverse groups in colonial settings also seems to emerge from a passage in Xenophon’s Anabasis, in which he describes an area that to his eyes is ideally suited for establishing a colony (my emphasis): ὁ δὲ Κάλπης λιμὴν ἐν μέσῳ μὲν κεῖται ἑκατέρωθεν πλεόντων ἐξ Ἡρακλείας καὶ Βυζαντίου, ἔστι δ᾽ ἐν τῇ θαλάττῃ προκείμενον χωρίον, τὸ μὲν εἰς τὴν θάλατταν καθῆκον αὐτοῦ πέτρα ἀπορρώξ, ὕψος ὅπῃ ἐλάχιστον οὐ μεῖον εἴκοσιν ὀργυιῶν, ὁ δὲ αὐχὴν ὁ εἰς τὴν γῆν ἀνήκων τοῦ χωρίου μάλιστα τεττάρων πλέθρων τὸ εὖρος: τὸ δ᾽ ἐντὸς τοῦ αὐχένος χωρίον ἱκανὸν μυρίοις ἀνθρώποις οἰκῆσαι. λιμὴν δ᾽ ὑπ᾽ αὐτῇ τῇ πέτρᾳ τὸ πρὸς ἑσπέραν αἰγιαλὸν

162

Gabriel Zuchtriegel ἔχων. κρήνη δὲ ἡδέος ὕδατος καὶ ἄφθονος ῥέουσα ἐπ᾽ αὐτῇ τῇ θαλάττῃ ὑπὸ τῇ ἐπικρατείᾳ τοῦ χωρίου. ξύλα δὲ πολλὰ μὲν καὶ ἄλλα, πάνυ δὲ πολλὰ καὶ καλὰ ναυπηγήσιμα ἐπ᾽ αὐτῇ τῇ θαλάττῃ. τὸ δὲ ὄρος εἰς μεσόγειαν μὲν ἀνήκει ὅσον ἐπὶ εἴκοσι σταδίους, καὶ τοῦτο γεῶδες καὶ ἄλιθον: τὸ δὲ παρὰ θάλατταν πλέον ἢ ἐπὶ εἴκοσι σταδίους δασὺ πολλοῖς καὶ παντοδαποῖς καὶ μεγάλοις ξύλοις. ἡ δὲ ἄλλη χώρα καλὴ καὶ πολλή, καὶ κῶμαι ἐν αὐτῇ εἰσι πολλαὶ καὶ οἰκούμεναι: φέρει γὰρ ἡ γῆ καὶ κριθὰς καὶ πυροὺς καὶ ὄσπρια πάντα καὶ μελίνας καὶ σήσαμα καὶ σῦκα ἀρκοῦντα καὶ ἀμπέλους πολλὰς καὶ ἡδυοίνους καὶ τἆλλα πάντα πλὴν ἐλαῶν. As for Calpe Harbour, it lies midway of the voyage between Heracleia and Byzantium and is a bit of land jutting out into the sea, the part of it which extends seaward being a precipitous mass of rock, not less than twenty fathoms high at its lowest point, and the isthmus which connects this head with the mainland being about four plethra in width; and the space to the seaward of the isthmus is large enough for ten thousand people to dwell in. At the very foot of the rock there is a harbour whose beach faces toward the west, and an abundantly flowing spring of fresh water close to the shore of the sea and commanded by the headland. There is also a great deal of timber of various sorts, but an especially large amount of fine ship-timber, on the very shore of the sea. The ridge extends back into the interior for about twenty stadia, and this stretch is deep-soiled and free from stones, while the land bordering the coast is thickly covered for a distance of more than twenty stadia with an abundance of heavy timber of all sorts. The rest of the region is fair and extensive, and contains many inhabited villages; for the land produces barley, wheat, beans of all kinds, millet and sesame, a sufficient quantity of figs, an abundance of grapes which yield a good sweet wine, and in fact everything except olives.22

The way in which Xenophon introduces the presence of villages in the area which he thought to be a favourable territory for a new city foundation is revealing for various reasons. Firstly, the passage casts doubt on the idea that the ideal territory the Greeks imagined for a new foundation was an eremos chora, an empty land.23 Rather, the presence of an indigenous population is presented here as an advantage for a colonial settlement. Secondly, this favourable condition—from the Greek colonial viewpoint—stems from the local population living in villages (komai) and not in a fortified settlement centre. The underlying idea is that of subjugating the indigenous population, who do not have the military organisation of a walled polis and exploit the extant agricultural land and manpower for the new foundation. The indigenous villages were important for yet another reason: the army guided homeward by Xenophon after the Battle of Cunaxa (410 BC) consisted, if not exclusively, almost entirely of men. In order to establish a new settlement, they would have to found families and therefore needed women. Archaeological and literary sources suggest that intermarriage was frequent in colonial settlements;24 a further reason why Xenophon considered the presence of local villages as an advantage, thus, could be seen in the presence of women.

Hellenicity from below 163 Archaeological research in southern Italy and Sicily has long shown that Greek colonies were regularly established in areas that were already inhabited (and cultivated) by local populations.25 Likewise, almost all Ionian cities in Asia Minor seem to have been established on the sites of extant Carian settlements, the only exceptions (according to Pausanias) being Klazomenai and Phokaia.26 It is likely that intermarriage between Greeks and Carians was a frequent phenomenon in this context, too. In the case of Miletos, the violence towards non-Greek groups that accompanied such foundations is recorded in a tale Herodotus narrates in Book 1 of the Histories: οἱ δὲ αὐτῶν ἀπὸ τοῦ πρυτανηίου τοῦ Ἀθηναίων ὁρμηθέντες καὶ νομίζοντες γενναιότατοι εἶναι Ἰώνων, οὗτοι δὲ οὐ γυναῖκας ἠγάγοντο ἐς τὴν ἀποικίην ἀλλὰ Καείρας ἔσχον, τῶν ἐφόνευσαν τοὺς γονέας. διὰ τοῦτὸν δὲ τὸν φόνον αἱ γυναῖκες αὗται νόμον θέμεναι σφίσι αὐτῇσι ὅρκους ἐπήλασαν καὶ παρέδοσαν τῇσι θυγατράσι, μή κοτε ὁμοσιτῆσαι τοῖσι ἀνδράσι μηδὲ οὐνόματι βῶσαι τὸν ἑωυτῆς ἄνδρα, τοῦδε εἵνεκα ὅτι ἐφόνευσαν σφέων τοὺς πατέρας καὶ ἄνδρας καὶ παῖδας καὶ ἔπειτα ταῦτα ποιήσαντες αὐτῇσι συνοίκεον. And as for those who came from the very town-hall of Athens and think they are the best born of the Ionians, these did not bring wives with them to their settlements, but married Carian women whose parents they had put to death. For this slaughter, these women made a custom and bound themselves by oath (and enjoined it on their daughters) that no one would sit at table with her husband or call him by his name, because the men had married them after slaying their fathers and husbands and sons. This happened at Miletus.27 What is interesting to note is the fact that the memory of the ethnic identity of the female members of the Milesian community seems to have endured, although we cannot tell to what degree Herodotus’ claim that the wives refused to sit at the table with their husbands or call them by their names corresponded to the facts of his own time.28 Yet the idea as such of subaltern ethnic (and gendered) identities surviving in this manner is noteworthy. It testifies to the ethnicity being crucial to social status and identity.

Tracing the subaltern in the archaeological record While tracing subaltern populations in the literary sources is not easy because of the systematic underrepresentation of such groups in the texts, the archaeological evidence is even more lacunary and difficult to interpret. There are hardly any direct traces of subaltern groups in the archaeological record, let alone the ethnic identities that might have been associated with their social status. One possible exception is a necropolis north of the ancient Greek colony of Poseidonia in southern Italy. At a distance of 850 metres from the urban centre, at Ponte di Ferro near the beach, from 1983 to 1988, 191 tombs dating from the late sixth to early fifth century BC were excavated (Figure 7.1).29 Analysis of the burials as well as of the grave

164

Gabriel Zuchtriegel

Figure 7.1 Paestum: the urban necropolis Source: (© Parco Archeologico di Paestum e Velia, Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo).

goods suggests that we are dealing with subaltern community members, although one should be cautious with the term ‘slaves.’ All tombs excavated so far at Ponte di Ferro are inhumations; cremation burials seem to be lacking. The tombs are dug into the sand, which is highly unusual (Figure 7.2). Moreover, the density of tombs in this necropolis is significantly higher than that in other necropolis of the same area and period. In several cases, two or more burials overlay one another. The study of the burial site is still ongoing, which is why only preliminary results can be presented here. As has been observed, the majority of tombs lacked grave goods and other features; the skeletons were found buried ‘in the naked sand.’ Especially in male adolescent and male adult burials grave goods were missing, while it was female burials that occasionally contained small vases and other items—though rarely more than one or two. The grave goods often consist of waster pottery. The same holds true for the small number of ‘Cappuccina’ tombs—that is, tombs that were covered with a small ridged roof made of two rows of roof tiles, as known from other cemeteries of the period. However, at Ponte di Ferro, the vast majority of roof tiles used as tomb covers were wasters. In one case, the find-spot of a loom weight suggested that it was worn on a necklet, which is also highly unusual and points to a low social and economic status of the buried person (Figure 7.3). The only burials that generally were carried out with some effort are infant burials of individuals aged between zero and six years. They are usually buried in large pots

Hellenicity from below 165

Figure 7.2 Burials at Ponte di Ferro during the excavation Source: (© ParcoArcheologico di Paestum e Velia, Ministero dei Beni e delleAttività Culturali e del Turismo).

Figure 7.3 Reconstruction drawing of a loom weight from the Ponte di Ferro necropolis worn on a necklet Source: (Drawing by Rosario Marino, © Parco Archeologico di Paestum e Velia, Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo).

166

Gabriel Zuchtriegel

(so-called enchytrismos), which were often poorly fired and/or defective. Infant burials contained up to six objects, which further distinguishes them from the adult, especially male, burials. The necropolis of Ponte di Ferro evidently belonged to a group of low social and economic status that could be labelled ‘subaltern.’As Emanuele Greco has pointed out, the tombs date to a period in which Poseidonia was rapidly growing.30 New infrastructure and temple-building projects created an ever-increasing demand for workforce, and it is likely that the people buried at Ponte di Ferro were among those involved in carrying out the ambitious projects of the polis. However, the community of Ponte di Ferro seems to have maintained some kind of cultural and social identity, considering that they were entitled to formal burial, though in a marginal area of the necropolis. Rather than totally disenfranchised ‘slaves,’ it is likely that they were a culturally and socially defined group within the population of Poseidonia. The fact that they were buried some distance from the urban centre on the shore, which had no agricultural value and was a kind of ‘no-one’s land,’ suggests that while they might have resided in the countryside, they had no extensive land property, nor did they belong to a family or household owning land in the countryside. It is therefore likely that they had a status that was somehow akin to that of the Kyllyrioi in Syracuse and to the barbaroi perioikoi mentioned by Aristotle. This impression is further corroborated by an observation by Paola Contursi, who is currently studying the necropolis. A series of features of the burial rites and grave goods from Ponte di Ferro have parallels in the area north of Poseidonia around the Etruscan-Campanian settlement centre of Pontecagnano.31 While this does not mean that the individuals buried at Ponte di Ferro came from that site, it sustains the notion that they adhered to forms of ritual and social representation that were different from that of the citizens of Poseidonia.32 To sum up, it looks as if the necropolis of Ponte di Ferro belonged to a subaltern or low-status group within the polis who were characterised as ethnically/culturally different and marginal with regard to the urban elite. Hopefully, the ongoing analysis of the necropolis will shed more light on the cultural identity and experience of the people from Ponte di Ferro. Yet, it remains difficult to interpret a cemetery for which no close parallels are known so far. On a broader level, the ethnical determination of social class and subalternity emerges indirectly from the archaeological record of classical colonies and their hinterland. Classical colonial settlements formed the backdrop on which Plato and Aristotle developed their notion of subalternity as something linked to rurality and to ethnical diversity. Aristotle’s barbaroi perioikoi are characterised on two levels: ethnicity (they are barbaroi, i.e., non-Greeks) and rurality (their living places— oikoi—are situated ‘around’—peri—the urban centre). They are opposed to the Greek citizens who live in the urban centre where they can fully participate in the political, social, military and athletic activities that constitute Hellenicity. In Plato and Aristotle’s ideal geography of the polis, the difference between urban centre and countryside contains the double boundary of Greek-Barbarian and citizensubaltern. ‘Barbarian,’ however, is not a fixed category. As Lin Foxhall has observed, Greekness was an unstable and blurry category in rural areas on the

Hellenicity from below

167

margins of Greek colonial territories, where Greekness faded as the very possibilities of participating on a regular basis in urban-based social and religious practices that constituted Greekness (symposia, hetairiai, assemblies, military training, athletic training, social interaction on the agora) was practically impossible.33 The structural opposition of urban/Greek versus rural/Barbarian also applied to communities in homeland Greece, at least to some degree. Notably, from the early sixth century onwards, chattel slavery was spreading in the Greek world.34 Many of the slaves deported to Greece came from the Black Sea Region and Thrace. While in earlier periods slaves and dependent workers were often local Greeks who had lost their livelihood, e.g. because of debt slavery or as war prisoners, from the sixth century onwards the typical slave would be an ethnically diverse individual. In the Attic comedy, it is typically Scythes and Thracians who figure as douloi, ‘slaves.’ However, local community members could also experience forms of ethnically codified downgrading if they failed to meet the standards of Greek citizenship/urbanity and Greekness. As Jonathan Hall has observed, in classical Greece ‘transhumant subsistence strategies’—that is, economic activities that were not in line with the urban-based elite culture, as well as ‘the right of women to dispose of alienable property and to act as heads of families’ could mark out certain areas in homeland Greece as ‘more primitive and thus more “barbarian.”’35 These were also more exposed to the forms of internal colonisation mentioned earlier in this chapter. As I have argued before, the social geography of classical settlements suggests that the binary structure urban/Greek/citizen versus rural/barbarian perioikoi/ subaltern was firmly implemented in Greek political practice as early as the fifth century BC.36 A century before Plato and Aristotle defined citizenship as a privilege of urban, Greek-born, male land-owners ‘who must not engage in any artisanal activity,’37 colonial settlements appear to have been organised according to the same ideological principles. The settlers received land lots, ideally of equal size, and were expected to live off their land property. Trade and artisanry were viewed as socially suspect and dishonourable for a citizen already by Herodotus. What is more, the settlers of classical colonies lived not in farmsteads and villages in the countryside, but in the walled centre. Apart from the frequent military conflicts with local populations and other Greek communities, the reason was that only by living in the urban centre one could fully participate in the social and political way of life that characterised the Greek polis. In order to do so, the less fortunate settlers who were allotted land some distance from the urban centre, put up with walking distances of up to four or five hours to reach their parcels. While in many colonies, after several decades a rural population of low to middle class status appears in the archaeological record, what is particularly striking about most new foundations of the classical period is the invisibility of non-citizen, subaltern groups—both on the level of archaeology and in the social geography of the settlements. There had to be labourers who worked the fields, processed the produce, weaved cloths, produced pottery, built houses and so forth for the land-owning settlers. Apart from slaves, this were likely the children and wives of the settlers. Female community members in colonial settlements often had a

168

Gabriel Zuchtriegel

non-Greek, indigenous background, although this was usually not emphasised in the material culture, which appears predominantly of Greek tradition. Yet, literary sources, inscriptions and grave goods suggest that a considerable number of the women participating in many new foundations came from non-Greek areas. Further, indigenous groups such as the Kyllyrioi in Syracuse or the community members buried at Ponte di Ferro near Paestum contributed to agricultural and handicraft production, thus making it possible for the male citizens to avoid such ‘dishonourable’ occupations. The concentration of the settler community in the walled centre suggests that the majority of settlers tried to comply with that ideology, at least in the early phases of a settlement.

Conclusions To sum up, it looks as if the idea according to which being a Greek citizen meant being an urban-based landowner, as advocated in Plato’s Laws and Aristotle’s Politics, was somehow prefigured in classical settlements. These settlements were organised according to the same principles that guided classical theorists who were thinking about the ideal state; consequently, the settlements suffered the same shortcomings characterising some of the major theoretical texts: by organising the entire polis—both concretely in colonial settlements and ideally on the level of politics and political theory—around the male, urban-based citizen, other groups such as women, foreigners/non-citizens, and subaltern labourers are ignored. In the official representation of the polis, these groups have little or no visibility. On the level of space, the distinction between the visible and the invisible is reflected in a fundamental difference between rural and urban spaces as parts of the social geography of the polis. Non-citizens living on the margins of a colonial polis such as the Kyllyrioi or the community of Ponte Ferro near Poseidonia literally remained out of sight. Together with other population groups, they formed an obscure background for the development of Greek male citizenship and subject realisation. Aristotle’s mention of the barbaroi perioikoi is symbolic in this regard. It is little more than an allusion to something beyond the focus of the male citizen and therefore, inside the text, remains as unexplained and enigmatic as the real lives of these groups remained outside the imagination of Greek elite members. The binary structure that emerges behind that distinction can be summarised in a table: Politai

Barbaroi perioikoi

Legal status Economic status

citizens own the land, at least ideally

Culture

elite, urban

non-citizens have no legal title to land ownership within the polis subaltern, mostly rural, living literally and metaphorically on the ‘margins’ of the polis

Hellenicity from below 169 Politai

Barbaroi perioikoi

Gender

follow Greek-elite malefemale role models

Ethnic identity

Greek; hybridisation (e.g., intermarriage) with nonGreeks is seen as a symbolic capital that ultimately enhances the subject (e.g., in the foundation story of Massilia)

unwilling and/or unable to implement Greek-elite role models (e.g., women have to work outside the house rather than staying inside) Other, even if of Greek origin, seen as ‘less Greek’ and somehow more ‘Barbarian’ by virtue of their lifestyle

While representing the (ethnically) Other as somehow inferior is so widespread a phenomenon that it offers little historical insight, the combination of a series of features, as just described, creates a specific structure consisting in a typically Greek discourse linking social status, culture, space and ethnicity. From a broader historical perspective, the importance of this discourse consists in the fact that it became a blueprint for codifying subalternity ethnically also in other cultures. This is surprising, given that it presupposes a substantial change in the contents of the structure: ‘Greek’ as opposed to non-Greek/Barbarian/uncivilised is replaced by another ethnic identity, e.g. Roman, although from a Greek point of view the Romans were themselves Barbarians. However, in this process, the underlying structure remains unaltered. Arguably, it can be traced from the Lucanians in southern Italy to Roman and even early Christian modes of representing the Other as both subaltern and ethnically diverse.38 If this holds true, we have to acknowledge that the legacy of classical Greece includes a specific way of collocating subalternity on a spatial and ethnical level and obscuring it in the political and philosophical discourse. While Aristotle remained linked to the model of the city-state, the fourthcentury BC writer Isocrates went a step further: in his speech Panegyrikos (380 BC), he envisages making ‘all Barbarians the perioikoi of Greece’ (131), thus ‘bringing enormous wealth from Asia to Europe’ (187). What is more, Isocrates’ text insists on an ontological (‘racial,’ in modern terminology) difference between Greeks and Barbarians. While the Barbarians theoretically could become Greeks through culture/education (cf. Pan. 50), their entire way of life is such that they have a ‘totally ruined nature’ (Pan. 151: μάλιστα τὰς φύσεις διαφθαρεῖεν). There is an underlying ambiguity in Isocrates’ work. In terms of rhetoric, Greek culture is presented as a universal heritage appealing to all men. However, in terms of political practice, the Barbarians are de facto excluded from fully partaking in ‘Greekness’ on the grounds that their way of life is so diverse that their very nature (physis) inhibits them from aspiring to the highest level of Greek culture and virtue.39 The Roman image of the Barbarian, as it evolved from the early imperial period onwards, reiterated this Greek notion of subalternity as something linked to ethnic diversity and rurality. This is suggested by literary texts.40 However, a certain

170

Gabriel Zuchtriegel

continuity in the representation of the ‘Barbarian’ also emerges from the iconographic evidence, in particular official monuments such as triumph arcs and funerary and honorary monuments for emperors such as Trajan, Hadrian, and Marc Aurelius.41 One might even ask whether the notion of the ‘pagan’ in one of the foundational texts of Christianity, namely Augustin’s City of God (the full title being De civitate Dei contra paganos), somehow carried on the classical notion of the Other as a perioikos barbaros, given that paganus originally meant ‘rural dweller.’42 Doubtless, the question of how the link between subalternity and ethnicity developed and eventually became part of Roman and early medieval ideologies is highly complex and merits further inquiry. What seems to be clear so far is that there is a tradition of entangling ethnicity and subalternity that can be traced back at least to fifth-to-fourth-century-BC Greece. The classical period of Greek art, literature and philosophy produced a certain image of the subaltern Barbarian that was incorporated in the classical tradition and re-emerged in various forms and at various times, arguably until today. In Colonization and Subalternity in Classical Greece,43 I have argued that the way citizenship is conceptualised in the modern nation state as essentially separated from the globalised economy (and the forms of subaltern labour and modern forms of slavery that sustain that economy)44 can be considered as a legacy of classical political theory, which was on its part influenced by the colonial practice and experience of the time. While such views remain controversial, the debate of the last two decades has shown that the rejection of ethnicity and racism as allegedly purely modern categories with no value for the study of antiquity deserves being revised. Screening out ethnicity as a political and social reality on the grounds that it is a modern concept risks depriving us of one of the fundamental categories for understanding the construction of subalternity in the ancient world.

Notes * I would like to express my gratitude to Irad Malkin for helping me with the historical part of this contribution. Paola Contursi shared her insight into the necropolis of Ponte di Ferro (Paestum) with me, for which I am also very grateful. I wrote this chapter during the pandemic with very limited access to libraries, which is why I would like to thank the colleagues who sent me PDFs of their works and apologise to those on whose work I might have missed out due to the general situation. 1 Osborne 2012. 2 Gramsci 1977. 3 Spivak 1988. For the application of subaltern studies and postcolonial criticism in the fields of classical archaeology and history, see the seminal paper by Pappa (2013). 4 At that time, the work of Brather (2002, 2004) had stimulated a vivid debate, as summarised in a response by Curta (2013). 5 Diaz Andreu et al. 2005; Esposito and Pollini 2013; Joshel and Petersen 2014; Cuozzo and Pellegrino 2016. 6 Zuchtriegel 2018. Following Cerchiai (2012), ethnicity in this context could be defined as a ‘relational process’ rather than as a stable identity. 7 Cf. Hall, E. 1989; Malkin 2001, 2011; Harrison 2002; Hall, J. 2002, 2016; McInerney 2014; Vlassopoulos 2013. J. Hall in particular has emphasised the construction of (superior) Hellenicity in opposition to (inferior) barbarism as a binary structure emerging not before the sixth century BC.

Hellenicity from below 171 8 Arist. Pol. 1.1254. See the discussion in Alston, Hall and Proffitt 2011; Deslauriers and Destrée 2013. 9 Arist. Pol. 1330a, transl. H. Rackham, 1944, slightly altered. 10 Pl. Leg. 8.846d. 11 Zuchtriegel 2018, 216–35. 12 Freeman 1891, 13–4. 13 Pappa 2013; Zuchtriegel 2016. 14 Isaac 2004; Vlassopoulos 2013. An early, widely neglected forerunner can be seen in Puzzo 1964. See also McCoskey 2012. 15 Ohto 1972. 16 Cf. Heinemann 2010, 201–8. 17 Ath. 263e, transl. I. Malkin. 18 An overview in Gschnitzer 1958. See also the recent study by J. Zurbach (2017). 19 Malkin 1994. 20 Syll.3 279; Thonemann 2013, 16. 21 Ibid. 22 Xen. An. 6.4.3–6, transl. C. L. Brownson, 1922. 23 On the motif of the eremos chora (‘empty land’), see Moggi 1983. On the complexity of foundation processes, and the tendency in the ancient literary tradition to simplify them ex post, see Braund 2019. 24 Shepherd 2011, 2012, 2013; Saltini Semerari 2016; Zuchtriegel 2018, 69–71. 25 See the papers of the annual Convegno di Studi sulla Magna Grecia, in particular vol. 50 (Alle origini della Magna Grecia, 2010) e 54 (Ibridazione e integrazione in Magna Grecia, 2014); see further: Giangiulio 2010; Osanna 2012; Denti 2013; Burgers and Crielaard 2016. 26 Paus. 7.2.5. Crielaard 2009, 57. 27 Hdt. 1.146, transl. A. D. Godley, 1920. 28 See also Thuc. 1.8.1, who suggests that also the Aegean islands were once Carian and had been colonised. 29 Avagliano 1985; Contursi 2016 and 2018. 30 Greco 1987, 486–7. 31 Contursi forthcoming. 32 On the indigenous settlement in the area of Poseidonia, see Cipriani 2019. 33 Foxhall, Michelaki and Lazrus 2007, 26. 34 Andreau and Descat 2009, 35–40. 35 Hall 2002, 195. 36 Zuchtriegel 2018. 37 Pl. Leg. 8.846d. 38 Zuchtriegel 2020. 39 In this, Isocrates turns out to be a strikingly modern. In his texts we find the same ambiguity that characterises modern European hegemonic discourse. On the one hand, Western culture claims to offer a set of universal values for all mankind (from Christianity to human rights and democracy) while, on the other, thousands of minor differences make it practically impossible for non-white, non-Western people to get full access to that culture. 40 Isaac 2017. 41 Cf. Raeck 1981; Krierer 1998; Zuchtriegel 2020. 42 The etymology of the term and its introduction in Christian terminology is controversial. As has been argued, by the time the term was first used with the modern sense of ‘pagan,’ the paganus was the ‘civilian’ as opposed to the Christian ‘miles Dei.’ At any rate, the word paganus could be associated with rurality and subalternity way into the Middle Ages. Cf. Mathisen 2006. 43 Zuchtriegel 2018. 44 The ‘international division of labour’ in Spivak’s (1988, 287) words.

172

Gabriel Zuchtriegel

Bibliography Alston, R., E. Hall and L. Proffitt, eds. 2011. Reading Ancient Slavery. London: Bristol Classical Press. Andreau, J. and R. Descat. 2009 [2006]. Gli schiavi nel mondo greco e romano. Bologna: Il Mulino. Avagliano, G. 1985. ‘Paestum. Necropoli di Ponte di Ferro.’ RSS 2 (1): 261–8. Brather, S. 2002. ‘Ethnic Identities as Constructions of Archaeology: The Case of the Alamanni.’ In On Barbarian Identity. Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages, edited by A. Gillett, 149–76. Turnhout: Brepols. doi:10.1484/M.SEM-EB.3.4487. Brather, S. 2004. Ethnische Interpretationen in der frühgeschichtlichen Archäologie. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110922240. Braund, D. 2019. ‘Colonial Location: Olbia on the Hypanis.’ In Greek Colonization in Local Contexts: Case Studies in Colonial Interactions, edited by J. Lucas, C. A. Murray and S. Owen, 215–30. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Burgers, G.-J. and J. P. Crielaard. 2016. ‘The Migrant’s Identity: “Greeks” and “Natives” at L’Amastuola, Southern Italy.’ In Donnellan, Nizzo and Burgers, 225–37. Cerchiai, L. 2012. ‘L’identità etnica come processo di relazione: alcune riflessioni a proposito del mondo italico.’ In Le origini degli Etruschi. Storia, Archeologia, Antropologia, edited by V. Bellelli, 345–57. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider. Cipriani, M. 2019. ‘Settlement Dynamics South of the Sele River before Poseidonia.’ In Poseidonia Water-City. Archaeology and Climate Change (Catalog of the Exhibition, Paestum), edited by G. Zuchtriegel, P. Carter and M. E. Oddo, 75–81. Paestum: Pandemos. Contursi, P. 2016. ‘Ponte di Ferro: una necropoli di schiavi?’ Forma Vrbis 21 (11): 28–31. Contursi, P. 2018. ‘Sepolture di infanti nelle necropoli arcaiche e classiche di PoseidoniaPaestum. Appunti su una questione “minore”.’ In Percorsi. Scritti di archeologia di e per Angela Pontrandolfo. Vol. 2, edited by S. De Caro, F. Longo, M. Scafuro and A. Serritella, 27–44. Paestum: Pandemos. Contursi, P. forthcoming. Poseidonia. In 59° Convegno di Studi sulla Magna Grecia, Taranto 2019. Crielaard, J. P. 2009. ‘The Ionians in the Archaic Period. Shifting Identities in a Changing World.’ In Ethnic Constructs in Antiquity: The Role of Power and Tradition, edited by A. M. J. Derks and N. G. A. M. Roymans, 37–84. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Cuozzo, M. and C. Pellegrino. 2016. ‘Culture meticce, identità etnica, dinamiche di conservatorismo e resistenza: questioni teoriche e casi di studio della Campania.’ In Donnellan, Nizzo and Burgers 2016, 117–36. Curta, F. 2013. ‘The Elephant in the Room: A Reply to Sebastian Brather.’ Ephemeris Napocensis 23: 165–75. Denti, M. 2013. ‘The Contribution of Research on Incoronata to the Problem of the Relations Between Greeks and non-Greeks During Proto-Colonial Times.’ Ancient East & West 12: 71–116. doi:10.2143/AWE.12.0.2994444. Deslauriers, M. and P. Destrée, eds. 2013. The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Politics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Diaz Andreu, M., S. Lucy, S. Babić and D. N. Edwards, eds. 2005. The Archaeology of Identity. Approaches to Gender, Age, Status, Ethnicity and Religion. London and New York: Routledge. Donnellan, L., V. Nizzo and G.-J. Burgers, eds. 2016. Conceptualising Early Colonization. Rome: Belgisch Historisch Instituut te Rome.

Hellenicity from below 173 Esposito, A. and A. Pollini. 2013. ‘La visibilité des classes subalternes dans les sources archéologiques. Considérations sur quelques cas d’étude en Grande Grèce.’ Ktema 38: 117–34. Foxhall, L., K. Michelaki and P. Lazrus 2007. ‘The Changing Landscapes of Bova Marina, Calabria.’ In Uplands of Ancient Sicily and Calabria: The Archaeology of Landscape Revisited, edited by M. Fitzjohn, 19–34. London: Accordia. Freeman, E. A. 1891. The History of Sicily From the Earliest Times, Vol. 2: From the Beginning of the Greek Settlement to the Beginning of Athenian Intervention. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Giangiulio, M. 2010. ‘Deconstructing Ethnicities: Multiple Identities in Archaic and Classical Sicily.’ BABesch 85: 13–23. doi:10.2143/BAB.85.0.2059887. Gramsci, A. 1977. ‘Quaderno no. 25. Ai margini della storia.’ In Quaderni del carcere, vol. 3. Quaderni 12–29, 2277–94. Critical edition of the Istituto Gramsci, edited by V. Gerratana. Turin: Enaudi. Greco, E. 1987. ‘La città e il territorio. Problemi di storia topografica.’ In PoseidoniaPaestum. Atti del XXVII Convegno Internazionale di Studi sulla Magna Grecia, TarantoPaestum, 9–15 ottobre 1987, 471–99. Taranto: Istituto per la Storia e per l’Archeologia della Magna Grecia. Gschnitzer, F. 1958. Abhängige Orte im griechischen Altertum. Munich: Beck. Hall, E. 1989. Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-definition through Tragedy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, J. 2002. Hellenicity. Between Ethnicity and Culture. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Hall, J. 2016. ‘Quanto c’è di “greco” nella “colonizzazione greca”?’ In Donnellan, Nizzo and Burgers 2016, 51–59. Harrison, T. 2002. Greeks and Barbarians. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Heinemann, U. 2010. Stadtgeschichte im Hellenismus. Die lokalhistoriographischen Vorgänger und Vorlagen Memnons von Herakleia. München: Utz. Isaac, B. 2004. The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Isaac, B. 2017. ‘The Barbarian in Greek and Latin Literature.’ In Empire and Ideology in the Graeco-Roman World: Selected Papers, 197–220. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316476963.011. Joshel, S. and L. H. Petersen. 2014. The Material Life of Roman Slaves. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139030922. Krierer, K. R. 1998. ‘Barbarian Enemies from Beyond the Frontiers. Representations of War, Defeat, Submission, Captivity, Death.’Novensia 10: 211–30. doi:10.11588/diglit.41276.22. Malkin, I. 1994. Myth and Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malkin, I. 2001. Ancient Perceptions of Greek ethnicity. Washington, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Malkin, I. 2011. A Small Greek World. Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199734818.001.0001. Mathisen, R. 2006. ‘Peregrini, Barbari, and Cives Romani: Concepts of Citizenship and the Legal Identity of Barbarians in the Later Roman Empire.’ AHR 111 (4): 1011–40. doi:10.1086/ahr.111.4.1011. McCoskey, D. E. 2012. Race: Antiquity and Its Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.5040/9780755697878. McInerney, J., ed. 2014. A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean. Hoboken: Wiley. doi:10.1002/9781118834312.

174

Gabriel Zuchtriegel

Moggi, M. 1983. ‘L’elemento indigeno nella tradizione letteraria sulle ktiseis.’ In Modes de contacts et processus de transformation dans les sociétés anciennes. Actes du Colloque de Cortone (24–30 mai 1981), 979–1002. Rome: École française de Rome. Ohto, C. 1972. ‘The Pedieis in the Inscriptions of Priene.’ JCS 20: 79–87. doi:10.20578/ jclst.20.0_79. Osanna, M. 2012. ‘Prima di Eraclea: l’insediamento di età arcaica tra il Sinni e l’Agri.’ In Amphi Sirios Rhoas. Nuove ricerche su Eraclea e la Siritide, edited by M. Osanna and G. Zuchtriegel, 17–43. Venosa: Osanna. Osborne, R. 2012. ‘Landscape, Ethnicity, and the Greek Polis.’ In Landscape, Ethnicity and Identity in the Archaic Mediterranean Area, edited by G. Cifani and S. Stoddart, 24–31. Oxford: Oxbow Books. doi:10.2307/j.ctvh1dkcp.6. Pappa, E. 2013. ‘Postcolonial Baggage at the End of the Road: How to Put the Genie Back into Its Bottle and Where to Go from There.’ In Archaeology and Cultural Mixture, edited by W. Paul Van Pelt. Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28 (1): 19–42. Puzzo, D. A. 1964. ‘Racism and the Western Tradition.’ JHI 25 (4): 579–86. doi:10.2307/2708188. Raeck, W. 1981. Zum Barbarenbild in der Kunst Athens im 6. und 5. Jh. v. Chr. Bonn: Habelt. Saltini Semerari, G. 2016. ‘Greek-Indigenous Intermarriage: A Gendered Perspective.’ In Donnellan, Nizzo and Burgers 2016, 77–87. Shepherd, G. 2011. ‘Hybridity and Hierarchy: Cultural Identity and Social Mobility in Archaic Sicily.’ In Communicating Identity in Italic Iron Age Communities, edited by M. Gleba and H. W. Horsnæs, 113–29. Oxford and Oakville: Oxbow Books. Shepherd, G. 2012. ‘Women in Magna Graecia.’ In A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, edited by S. L. James and S. Dillon, 215–28. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781444355024.ch16. Shepherd, G. 2013. ‘Ancient Identities: Age, Gender, and Ethnicity in Ancient Greek Burials.’ In The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial, edited by S. Tarlow and L. Nilsson Stutz, 543–57. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199569069.013.0030. Spivak, G. 1988. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, 270–313. London: MacMillan Education LTD. Thonemann, P. 2013. Roman Phrygia. Culture and Society. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139381574. Vlassopoulos, K. 2013. Greeks and Barbarians. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Zuchtriegel, G. 2016. ‘Colonisation and Hybridity in Herakleia and Its Hinterland (Southern Italy), 5th-3rd Centuries BC.’ MEFRA 128(1): 169–86. doi:10.4000/mefra.3326. Zuchtriegel, G. 2018. Colonization and Subalternity in Classical Greece. Experience of the Nonelite Population. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108292849. Zuchtriegel, G. 2020. ‘Isocrates and the Paideia of the Lucanians. Culture and Race in the Fourth Century BC.’ MEFRA 132: 383–401. Zurbach, J. 2017. Les hommes, la terre et la dette en Grèce, c. 1400-c. 500 av. J.-C. Bordeaux: Ausonius.

8

Subaltern masculinities Pompeian graffiti and excluded memories in the early Principate Renata Senna Garraffoni

Introduction The social movements of the 1960s and the 1970s—feminism, gay liberation, the Black and civil rights movements—undoubtedly had a deep impact on academia. In this process of epistemological transformation of the field of classical studies, Michel Foucault became a key figure. With the publication of his volumes of The History of Sexuality, Foucault reshaped our understanding of ancient philosophy and its relationship to today—as did Dover upon relating canonical texts and Greek vases to discuss homosexuality in the Hellenic context, and Catherine Johns and Amy Richlin in their published work on phallic images produced in diverse types of material culture.1 Notwithstanding such significant efforts, themes of economic, political and social history continued to prevail within the historiography of the Greco-Roman world. Culture, and even postcolonial concerns, did not gain purchase within the field until recent decades. As the introduction to the present anthology makes clear, classical studies, segregated within their own departments, took extra time before beginning to examine the possibilities of action that were there for men and women of different social strata in Greco-Roman antiquity. Despite the theoretical and methodological progress offered by Vernant and Finley’s work—as the editors of this volume point out—historians of the Greco-Roman period largely tended to reproduce more normative explanations of the past, leaving little room for the study of erotic desires or modes of resistance and marginalised lives. This is so much the case that Clarke, upon publishing a book on Roman erotic images, began his work with a direct question: ‘why a book on sex in ancient Rome?’2 It is important to give salience to this phenomenon, considering that almost two decades after the publication of The History of Sexuality and the growth of discussions in the field of gender studies, it was still necessary not only to provide a justification of the pertinence of such themes within research on the classical world but also to clear ground for an issue that often permeated 1990s studies and which, in spite of obstacles, brought them to the forefront: the excess of generalisations and anachronism that prevailed within the modern gaze on social practices in the ancient world. Over the last two decades, gender studies, with an emphasis on masculinities, have not only grown but also veritably reconfigured DOI: 10.4324/9781003005148-11

176

Renata Senna Garraffoni

the field of Graeco-Roman societies, bringing to light the experiences of subjects beyond the military elites.3 The contribution that material culture makes to this process is highly relevant; after all, exploring the silences and gaps in the studies of marginalised masculinities provides us with alternative routes for thought on power relations during the Roman Empire. This means placing men within a context of relations of power and domination, taking subaltern and marginalised masculinities into account, and rethinking sources and methods of analysis. These challenges, according to Hall, enable us to construct a new hermeneutic gaze for interpreting the legacy of material fragments that the ancient world has left behind for modern societies.4 The central goal of this chapter is to explore the different types of masculinities that could be found at the beginning of the Roman Principate. For these purposes, my starting point is postcolonial theory. This perspective enables me to demonstrate the importance of rethinking the power relations, then I move on from there to show how a gender studies perspective that informs archaeological debate is fundamental for our understanding of marginalised masculinities within the Roman Empire. For such purposes, I seek alternative analytical methods for the study of sexual practices between men, as well as between men and women, focusing on the daily life of common people and exploring the diversity of human passions. Thus, what I present here is a very specific case study, a reading of the walls of Pompeii in the lupanar region, including its graffiti and its tituli picti. From a ‘written space’ perspective, I seek to capture how the diversity of encounters can allow us to think about masculinities and the complexity of social relations in the Roman past.5

Masculinity, power and marginality There are many ways to understand the relationships between masculinity, power and marginality. In order to define the theoretical perspective that undergirds the chapter, I take up issues that I have discussed elsewhere.6 I refer here particularly to considerations on power, colonialism and elite men informed by the work of Richard Hingley.7 Hingley states that over the last two centuries, scholars have largely understood the consequences of Roman imperialism as beneficial, given the material improvement it allegedly afforded indigenous societies. Through interpretations primarily based on the written sources left by elites, some scholars argued that becoming a Roman citizen could be considered a sign of progress. The so-called nativist approach—that took place in the 1970s due to decolonisation and social changes—had a key role to challenge this way of perceiving the Roman Empire as it pointed to the importance of material culture in the study of local communities. This scholarship not only focused on elite interests but also balanced the latter with an awareness of the existence of negotiation and cultural interaction in different regions of the empire.8 This approach emphasised that native people were not only ‘assimilated’ into the Roman order but also participated in the creation of new ones. This debate is interesting because it inspired Richard Hingley’s critical approach to the Roman past. Hingley deconstructed an aspect of the notion of citizenship

Subaltern masculinities

177

that had previously been taken for granted among many scholars of the Roman Empire: the idea of Romanisation, or becoming Roman, as it had been elaborated from an elite male point of view.9 He argued that, notwithstanding the diversity of approaches developed throughout the twentieth century, classical studies maintained a focus on elite male writings and material culture. Hingley stated that although some scholars may have examined different identities and contributed to a more pluralistic understanding of the relationship between Roman and native peoples, the fundamentally elite, male-centred approach had not been challenged. He suggested that the predominant modern idea of the Roman Empire as a political and cultural unit is based on a Roman colonial image which, derived from literary sources, tended to obscure differences. Hingley did not develop a gender-sensitive approach to understanding the effect of the Roman Empire on native peoples. Yet his scholarship encourages us to seek alternative models with which to construct a more balanced interpretation of the Roman Empire and its peoples. Inspired by his attitude of questioning narratives on the empire that focused exclusively on the texts of elite males, I found in a specific field of archaeology—epigraphy—sources for the study of masculinities in different contexts. From a conceptual point of view, theories of masculinity have an important role in challenging monolithic and essentialist views of ‘the male.’ Such theories provide tools to re-examine masculinity and to consider it as multidimensional and socially constructed. Gilchrist emphasises that gender archaeology offers a more comparative perspective, grounded in a critical approach to culture across societies, over time and through individual lives. It helps us to rethink naturalised approaches to masculinity, reminding us that categories are neither absolute nor static; rather, they are constituted according to varied, changing and historically specific societal patterns.10 The methodology she suggests, based upon case studies, provides insight into varying gender and social arrangements. Considering that material culture has a unique role to play in telling the history of people rendered invisible or misrepresented in written sources,11 my intent here, then, is to focus on the walls of Pompeii and how they enable us to rethink our perceptions of Roman masculinity. I shall argue that Pompeii’s wall graffiti and tituli picti can promote what Lucy Grig signals in her research on popular culture: moving beyond topdown categories and constructing a more authentic portrait of the Roman context of the early Principate.12

Why should scholars read the walls of Pompeii? What has been written or etched on ancient walls is one of the oldest registers of humanity that we have, a component of the forms of communication and visual representation that people have used since the distant times of our first available records of rock art.13 Old as this may be, the symbolic and cultural meanings of the act of writing or drawing on walls and the content they deal with change over time and place: we need only to consider how today, writing on walls may result in criminal prosecution, whereas in other times in history this would have been

178

Renata Senna Garraffoni

unthinkable. This cultural diversity of ways of seeing and signifying the world, as well as their ephemeral nature, are factors that led me to more detailed study of the graffiti on the Pompeiian walls. In other words, as incomplete texts, phrases that may or may not have been in dialogue with one another, I was enchanted by their de-stabilising potential. Thus, classicists, frequently accustomed to discussing principles of philosophy or of Western thought through the texts of Roman orators, historians, philosophers and rhetoricians may be surprised by the concise critique of a local politician or reflections on life, death and love provided by graffiti. It is precisely their fragmentation, quantity and diversity that constitute the major challenge for people who desire to study them. Graffiti, as well as tituli picti, have been recorded through the CIL (Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum) since the nineteenth century. However, as they do not necessarily follow the patterns of conventional or scholarly writing, they have rarely become objects of study, tending to be relegated to a secondary level as a ‘less relevant’ category of ancient inscription.14 Nonetheless, there are several important exceptions to this pattern that date back to the early twentieth century. Certain scholars, observing the specificities of wall inscriptions, and graffiti in particular, drew attention to aspects that some 80 years later were to become important parameters for those who delved more deeply into their study. I refer here to the linguistic characteristics of graffiti and the way in which they brought out aspects of people’s daily lives. Abbott, for instance, stressed that graffiti are important for the study of the language of the common people. The crux of his argument is that although we know very little about the commoners, they made up the large majority of populations under Roman rule. In a similar vein, Tanzer, who believes that Pompeiian graffiti are fundamental for a wider perspective on Roman daily life and its passions, resorts to Rostovtzeff to defend her position. To assert the value of and disseminate her work on graffiti, Tanzer is uninterested in the criticisms of grammatical mistakes that other scholars have directed towards them; instead, she focuses on the diversity of those who used the walls for their writing, and the themes they addressed.15 Even at a first glance, the common elements in the analyses of these two authors stand out: they seek evidence that can aid their study of popular culture and foment ways to approach Roman history from a non-elitist perspective. For these purposes, they resort to Marxist studies. Diversity, daily life and people of humble background emerge as themes and characters in their studies. The language and forms of expression of the commoners were recognised and validated through a tradition that Funari renewed and widened at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s.16 In Funari’s earliest papers, written decades after Abbott and Tanzer’s pioneering contributions, new themes came to the forefront: the social history of culture, the circulation of ideas and the possibility of thinking about a popular ethos on the basis of these graffiti, that is, the constitution of a particular form of expression, with its own views and forms of feeling. This is something he returns to some years later, pointing out that although the graffiti do not provide theoretical ponderings on existence—coming as they do from the practical context in which common folk think about the world and its situation—they give us a window into

Subaltern masculinities 179 commoners’ takes on life.17 Following this logic of subaltern or marginal positions, other researchers go on to examine the potential of graffiti. Williams points out that these inscriptions provide important documentation for the study of Roman homoeroticism, and Feitosa expands our understanding of them through her discussion of love and sexuality.18 The quick overview that I have provided here encourages us to think about some of the issues that are relevant for studies of Pompeiian wall graffiti. Yet there is still little study on this theme. More prevalent are notes or records. Baird and Taylor mention Funari’s key role in defining graffiti as an object for the study of daily life within the realm of popular culture. They note that his focus on caricature, for example, seeks alternatives to official versions of history and constructs a theoretical and methodological approach which allows us greater proximity to common folk. The aforementioned authors also highlight the way in which Funari’s approach connects certain graffiti to specific social groups.19 Baird and Taylor’s book encompasses various researches and refines graffiti studies, defining them as a form of handwriting which may or may not include drawing and which should be understood as a type of social discourse. Since inscriptions take on different forms, they may be seen as a system of communication in which texts and drawings come together to produce a particular kind of textuality, and for that very reason, require consistent analysis within archaeological context. Furthermore, it is worth noting that Baird and Taylor’s statements differ from those of scholars from the early twentieth century in several respects. Like Abbott and Tanzer, they argue that graffiti should be considered as important evidence for access to non-elite culture (slaves, poor persons who were not slaves, those who were not considered citizens, women, children, people from urban and rural areas), thereby joining Funari, Grig and others in the notion that material and visual culture are fundamental for a more varied study of Roman society. However, they also bring greater scope to this field of study through their discussion of language, and of the graffiti found in other locales that can be attributed to the wealthy strata of society. In short, graffiti today are considered of relevance to linguists, historians and archaeologists, a rich source of material to bring us closer to antiquity, and attention must be paid to the different contexts in which the graffiti appear, as well as to their meanings.

Reading the walls of Pompeii Laurence and Sears alert us to the fact that public spaces containing wall inscriptions have been scantly studied, calling for their more detailed analysis.20 In the case of antiquity, as societies in which oral forms of memory prevail, this is especially important.21 Thus, inscriptions can be seen not only as ways of recording the past but as means for defining individual and group rights, identities and perceptions of the world. In the case of the Roman Empire, the aforementioned authors assert that writing is constitutive of public space and marks city life. Inscriptions can be lasting, such as the official writing on public buildings or tombstones, or ephemeral, such as electoral propaganda and graffiti. The fact is that Romans wrote

180

Renata Senna Garraffoni

a lot, making it possible to perceive the relationship between the places and social groups involved, with emphasis placed on the deeds of members of the elites yet also recording the way in which children and slaves saw the world. Thus, written spaces have a lot to tell us, widening or even subverting earlier studies of the Roman past. In his classic study, MacMullen defined this Roman impulse to record information on hard surfaces as the ‘epigraphic habit.’22 There is of course immense variety in the forms and types of inscriptions to be found in urban contexts at the end of the Republic and throughout the entire Roman imperial period, and although this type of writing also appears in many other moments or societies of antiquity, the amount of data provided in this particular period represents a very special corpus. Pompeii’s wall inscriptions, for instance, the object of this chapter, have been disseminated through publications since the nineteenth century. The graffiti alone constitute a corpus of more than 11,000 inscriptions.23 In addition to this, there is a wide variety of painted inscriptions, or tituli picti, ranging from electoral propaganda (2,500, according to Viitanen and Nissinen),24 to announcements of gladiatorial combat.25 These inscriptions tell many different stories, including those of individual men, many of whom do not belong to elite strata, and of women.26 Graffiti in particular, which represent the writing of common people who sought to express their opinions, were voluntarily inscribed. They were varied in content and embroiled in a process of production and reception that could be modified.27 Pompeii is especially relevant insofar as its walls, buried underground as a result of the historic eruption of Mount Vesuvius, have survived the passage of time in a relatively preserved state. Nonetheless, the habit of writing on walls and monuments was so common throughout the different regions conquered by the Romans that it is featured in the works of Plutarch and Pliny the Younger, just to mention two examples. Hillard notes its presence in Plutarch.28 He claims that it is possible to perceive how, in Tiberius Gracchus’ vita, Plutarch lists the inscriptions on walls and monuments that can be attributed to people who are politically disadvantaged. It is undoubtedly for this reason that writing on the walls becomes a way of demonstrating dissatisfactions. Graffiti, in his reading via Plutarch, are a channel for the expression of public opinion. Just as Plutarch comments on political disputes, Pliny the Younger, in his Letter 8.8 to Romanus, expresses his concerns on how one is to read graffiti while ‘maintaining one’s composure.’ In this letter, Pliny asks his friend if he is familiar with the source of the Clitumno river, a place that lies at the foot of a small mountain, a spot surrounded by trees. Pliny ends his descriptions of the beauty of this villa and its surroundings by asserting that the constructions that can be found there may be quite entertaining: there Romanus will encounter inscriptions, made by many different hands along columns and walls, to celebrate the source itself, or the gods. He ends with the phrase, plura laudabis, non nulla ridebus; quamquam tu vero, quae tua humanitas, nulla ridebis, ‘many will praise what they find there, while others will laugh; but not you, who in your politeness, will make fun of nothing.’29

Subaltern masculinities 181 These two examples, from celebrated authors who belonged to the Roman elite, express several important issues that I would like to highlight here. Plutarch comments on an urban context while Pliny refers to the rural, but both suggest that, rather than censorship, an intense relationship with writing prevailed, whether as a vehicle for expressing dissatisfaction or sense of humour. Pliny comments on Romanus’s politeness dissuades inappropriate behaviour while reading the inscriptions, suggesting that there was greater concern for the reaction to reading them than to the contents of the writing. Both authors correlate places with types of writing. This is a very pertinent question, as in antiquity such a relationship was very clear to people, although in modern epigraphy many scholars have paid more attention to the content of inscriptions than to the context in which they were written. This is exactly the type of tension I would like to give salience to: Hillard’s work on Plutarch can be found in a book in which researchers address the challenge of understanding writing in its context, as well as in terms of its contents. Such a proposal, as mentioned earlier deals with the study of written spaces.30 Thus, since these ancient peoples both read and commented on inscriptions, a fundamental challenge that researchers who study these inscriptions have faced over the last decade involves taking the place where writing is inscribed into account, also bringing the issue of how people circulated through such places to light. Such concerns have ushered in deep changes in the dynamics of projects designed to collect data, also affecting the type of results that have been obtained and generating a much more plural perspective on the circulation of persons through urban spaces or through the Roman villae. Considering that graffiti and tituli picti are ephemeral, and not all have been recorded by researchers, yet those that have are scattered throughout the CIL, situating them within their original spaces has become a monumental task, and one that is only possible to carry out through research networks. Thus, the organisation of debates and projects are important initiatives in bringing together this rich and plentiful material, well-known, albeit scantly studied. If, on the one hand, workshops have been helpful in defining the state of the art, promoting debate and taking steps forward, collective projects have re-signified the theme and in doing so, attracted young scholars to the topic. I am thinking precisely of the Inscribed Texts in their Spatial Contexts in Roman Italy (University of Helsinki 2011–2013), Scripta Pompeiana31 and the Ancient Graffiti Project.32 Another example that comes to mind is the graffiti catalogue organised by Hunink which helps to cover important lacunae, presenting inscriptions and drawings together.33 I highlight these initiatives, which can most certainly be considered the fruit of recent perceptions and theoretical debate: although studying graffiti in a material context was recognised, earlier forms of compilation did not correspond to new demands. Thus, as I have already stated, although all graffiti were compiled through the CIL, those volumes—as Baird and Taylor remind us—do not provide us with a precise topographical distribution of where these inscriptions are to be found. This makes their spatial perception difficult.34 Furthermore, the CIL usually register only inscriptions and not the drawings that accompany them, which are simply mentioned. Drawings appear more frequently when they are a part of

182 Renata Senna Garraffoni a text. Where this is not the case, figures appear on plates, scattered throughout a number of different publications. Langner tries to improve this by publishing a very complete catalogue of drawings, and Hunink attempts to move beyond the text/image dichotomy.35 While Langner and Hunink made an important contribution in terms of disseminating the material, an archive such as the Ancient Graffiti Project or the results of a project such as Inscribed Texts in their Spatial Contexts in Roman Italy or Scripta Pompeiana become pivotal, enabling scholars from different parts of the world to engage in research and to debate their methods. This also represents an attempt at the spatial reconstitution of the places where inscriptions are located. In this regard, the recent initiatives I have mentioned are indicative of the new paths being taken within the field, in which the reconstruction of spatial contexts has become a central component. But what is the specific contribution of drawing attention to spatial dimensions? In my view, providing knowledge, whenever possible, of the place where inscriptions were engraved expands our potential to apprehend dimensions of daily life in antiquity. In other words, as Viitanen, Nissinen and Kohronen argue, a more holistic approach to space enables us to combine different elements—graffiti, tituli picti, topography, type of building (house, bar, temple . . .) of the place where particular inscriptions are found—creating connections that shed light on the social groups that were involved there, as well as the more general dynamics of the urban space of the city.36 This means it becomes possible to acquire knowledge of pedestrians and their interaction with their surroundings. On the basis of Michel de Certeau’s writings, Keegan examines the ways in which inhabitants of a city come to relate to urban space on the basis of their own experiences as pedestrians.37 In his approach, it is the act of walking that connects people to the sparse writing on the walls of the city. To read the writing on the walls and answer with one’s own comments becomes a form of creating language and marking memory; to inscribe graffiti becomes an act linked to lived experiences, the desire to leave the marks of one’s own existence and life choices on the places one has passed through. This allows graffiti writing to be seen as a cultural practice that creates discourse and brings together many actors for whom the condition of participation in this ongoing conversation is some minimal knowledge of writing. Keegan’s approach advances in the directions of bringing orality, writing and memory together, exploring aspects of daily life in Pompeii, as well as the stories of those who lived or passed through there. To adopt the position of the pedestrian—the person who goes about on foot—seems particularly interesting to me, since it expands upon an issue that Keegan left out of his work, yet one which is highly fruitful: it allows us to position ourselves as scholars and producers of discourse. It also becomes clear that the corpus a scholar selects is borne of his or her own eagerness to walk through the remains of the ancient city of Pompeii. This leads to new studies and approaches, bringing renewed meaning to circulation and experiences with language, a topic to which I will now turn.

Subaltern masculinities 183

Case study: masculinity and excluded memories The case study that I present here seeks to relate the diverse elements that I have discussed earlier, in an attempt to provide tools for more pluralist readings of male experiences in the city of Pompeii. This has led to very precise selection of locale: the lupanar area (Reg. 7.12.18–20). The choice is justified by a very concrete question: it is here, and in the immediate surroundings, that we find three distinct types of inscriptions—graffiti and two types of tituli picti—gladiatorial announcements and electoral propaganda. Graffiti, appearing in a prostitution district, are largely sexual in content, whereas the tituli picti make reference to members of the elites, whether those who financed the fights or those who sought election to public posts. This in turn signifies that we have before us, examples of both hegemonic and subaltern masculinities. Each one of these types of inscriptions has its own characteristics. Franklin provides us with an extensive and differentiated typology of graffiti—incisions made with a stylus, small cuts that can only be read up close—and tituli picti, painted with brushes by professionals and meant to be discernible from afar, comprising both announcements for gladiator fighting (edicta munerum) and electoral propaganda (programmata). Franklin’s study allows us to differentiate between the two types of inscriptions, and we take such differentiations as our point of departure, although the author is more inclined towards cataloguing typologies and pondering the ability of common people to write. He mentions only that these three different types of inscriptions are found in different parts of the city, and thus goes on to assert that some are less relevant that others—such as an alphabet graffiti—while others represent information exchange, such as announcements, propaganda, and graffiti of sexual connotation.38 Since research on wall inscriptions had, for a long time, neglected to take into account the physical location of the writing, studies on these inscriptions were infrequent and ran along a parallel track. To cite a few examples, I highlight Savunen on electoral propaganda, whose work comments on women who supported particular candidates, Sabbatini Tumolesi’s survey and study of gladiatorial announcements, as well as Williams’ and Feitosa’s aforementioned work on graffiti that were sexual in connotation.39 On another occasion, I wrote a brief essay on the fact that these inscriptions were studied separately, yet could be found close to one another in the lupanar district.40 My objective had been to avoid superimposing canonical Roman texts on the city of Pompeii, and for that reason I brought out the corner of the lupanar and its inscriptions as a way to defend the importance of situating the inscriptions in the context of the city, thereby avoiding perspectives such as those presented by Wallace-Hadrill. Based upon Seneca’s idea that cities had a moral geography that attributed different types of value to particular buildings and monuments, Wallace-Hadrill argued that a scale that ranged from virtue to vice could be applied to Pompeii.41 That scholar then proceeded to divide Pompeii into spaces of vice or virtue, associating brothels and bars to dark back streets populated by an underclass of actors, prostitutes and all people of ‘abject condition.’ In his urban model, the public life of decurions and magistrates, public

184

Renata Senna Garraffoni

honours and ceremony were held in the best part of the city, the forum. Activities seen as least appropriate for the forum, such as sex, drinking and eating, were spatially located along dark and narrow streets of ill repute. Although the lupanar mentioned here is located on a narrow street that is close to the bars, what is missing from Wallace-Hadrill’s account is the fact that it is situated only some blocks from the forum. This suggests that in practice, the moral division must have been much less strict. Although my earlier discussion of the matter was meant as an initial exploration, I argued, based on Barbara Voss’ work, that it was crucial to discuss sexuality as an interconnected dimension of social and cultural systems.42 In this regard, relating the lupanar to the inscriptions and proximity to the forum became a way to foster a more dynamic approach to Roman social relations. I recently discovered two papers that encouraged me to return to this theme from a slightly different perspective. I refer here to the aforementioned writings of Viitanen, Nissinen and Korhonen and Viitanen and Nissinen. In the former text, which takes off from studies of inscriptions from the perspective of written spaces, the authors discuss the importance of the dynamics of people on the streets. Since many houses were very small, a part of the population had a very intense street life, frequenting cauponae or tabernae, in addition to water fountains and shrines. They dethrone Wallace-Haddrill’s argument with their own critical argument that even if the Romans exerted some type of moral control over the population, prostitutes also frequented busy places that were not far from the forum. The authors adopt a wider view of urban space and combine a number of different elements in their analyses—in this case, the distribution of electoral propaganda in homes and bars and the graffiti that make reference to prostitution—drawing the conclusion that residential and commercial areas in Pompeii were interconnected. In their understanding, the social and political practices of the rich could attract members of subaltern groups, yet shops and bars benefitted from the intensity of people’s circulation. In a more recent work, Viitanen and Nissinen stress the importance of comparing different types of inscriptions on the same site, since they believe that this dynamic is revealing of how people made their way through the city. Places with a greater number of inscriptions would have been the busiest, giving origin to that which the authors denominate as loci celeberrimi, that is, strategic places for the distribution of information.43 It is my understanding that these two papers take us beyond Wallace-Hadrill, particularly insofar as they defend the analysis of different types of inscriptions at the same location. This affords us more knowledge of the neighbourhood and its dynamics. Their focus, however, is on the distribution of wall inscriptions and the topography of the places where they are found, that is, more on electoral propaganda and less on the graffiti. Although the latter are not completely neglected, I would argue that aligning the issue of space to the field of gender studies, additional contributions are gained. For such purposes, I go back to the lupanar corner, keeping the three types of inscriptions I have mentioned in mind, and with the intention of contrasting the different types of masculinities they may be indicative of.

Subaltern masculinities 185 I return here to Franklin, one of the first scholars to study this particular spot. He notes that at the corner of the ‘Via degli Augustali’ and the ‘Vico del Lupanare,’ there are 9 electoral posters and 4 gladiatorial announcements. In fact, the ‘Vico del Lupanare’ turns south from the ‘Via degli Augustali’ at an obtuse angle where there is a bar. Only two doorways from its entrance is the famous lupanar. As Franklin noticed, this place was near the Via Stabiana, one of the main roads and one which, despite initial impressions, was well-located and attractive to passersby. He also argues that the triangular plot was in itself an important space—not only as an open space with a wall that could be written on but also because the corner and the square served as the social centre of the neighbourhood.44 More recently, Viitanen and Nissinen also stressed that a lot of the electoral propaganda to be found there is written on the outer walls of bars, in close proximity to the doors of the establishment, and could thus be read by both people who were passing by in carts and those who walked inside. It is worth noting that, since propaganda was erased from time to time, what remains dates back, according to the authors, to AD 50–79. The data from this propaganda is much used by prosopographical studies, since they primarily refer to candidates for public posts in the city, and for aedilis and duumvir in particular.45 The format is repeated: candidates’ names, the post they are running for and the names of their supporters, whether a specific person or a group. Gladiatorial propaganda, such as those studied by Sabbatini Tumolesi, provide another type of information. They give us general information on spectacles, such as the dates they are scheduled to take place, who their sponsors were, the reason behind the combat, the number of pairs of gladiators who would be fighting, venationes or other types of activities.46 Thus, this data provides information on Roman citizens, while gladiators or hunters are always introduced collectively, that is, namelessly. This in turn shows that such data are useful for approaches to the political and economic history of elite males, but are of little help for our understanding of non-elite men. However, while the outer walls of the corner boast 13 tituli picti that allow us insight into the public life of leading citizens, their political pretensions and donation of public spectacles to the city, inside the lupanar there are 140 graffiti which all focus on sexual intercourse. There is a huge diversity of graffiti on sexual encounters, thereby introducing us to a particular type of relation between text and image. Some are simple little drawings of men’s phalluses without a single written word, while others are composed only of inscriptions and no drawings. This heterogeneity implies a type of information that is rarely explored by scholars on Roman sexuality, as Feitosa reminds us. Many of these graffiti include the writers’ names (male or female) and as Franklin noted, they denote different social and ethnical origins.47 There are many examples with the verb futuere, which, in polished English means ‘to have sexual intercourse with’ and in colloquial terms means ‘to fuck.’ In the lupanar there are 30 graffiti that include this verb. Feitosa has stated that there is much discussion and controversy about the meaning such graffiti might have had in Roman society. For Varone, these frequent citations are part of the erotic pulse and express an uncontrollable need to write about the sexual encounter

186

Renata Senna Garraffoni

and to share with others the pleasure that was taken in it. Thus, to write about the encounters would be the continuation of pleasure itself. Adams considers that the most frequent meaning of these graffiti had to do with the demonstration or enhancement of an author’s virility. Yet more recent readings, such as Prina’s, point out that graffiti of sexual content are diverse. There are many that reinforce notions of virility, yet others, which refer to homoerotic encounters, are also spread throughout the city. Prina argues that graffiti studies have tended to privilege those inscriptions that depict or make reference to sex between men and women, while those that are homoerotic in content gain less attention.48 Besides the term futuere, the expression cunnum lingere—that is, the act of cunnilingus, also appears. There is just one inscription of this sort in the lupanar, although there are many others spread throughout different places in Pompeii. Could such citations be offensive allusions towards particular individuals, as Adams states?49 Some inscriptions may indeed suggest that the scribbler sought to make a moral attack on the person mentioned.50 But this is not a general rule. Garraffoni and Laurence have noted that sexual insults in graffiti are a rare phenomenon, when compared to descriptions of ships, gladiators, birds or any other category. The characterisation of others as cocksuckers or cinaedi was a more common phenomenon in linguistic graffiti, rather than those containing graphic caricature.51 There were, of course, those who practised prostitution, as demonstrated by the indication of the prices in some entries in the lupanar. We find, for example, seven graffiti in which the verb fello is present, such as Ismenus felattor.52 Was Ismenus a male prostitute whose served male or female searches for satisfaction? Who might purchase his services? These questions have no easy answer, but they do incite us to question established interpretations of Roman sexuality. After all, these inscriptions of practices and prices make reference to pleasures that were accessible to men and women. The 140 lupanar graffiti seem to indicate having been written by people of humble origin—many of them signed in ways that express different ethnic origins—and refer to intimate encounters in a sexual discourse meant to be read by anonymous people who frequented the lupanar. Their words give visibility to aspects of life that have been little commented in academia, mired as it is in the taboos of modernity. Yet many graffiti are open to more than one interpretive possibility, and could therefore help to question models based on typical and flawed assumptions regarding heteronormativity. In their ambiguities, practices between people of the same sex may or may not be gleaned, yet the possibility of understanding sexual experience in terms of diversity is there. To conclude, the corner where the lupanar is located is an interesting part of the city and it provides us with intriguing sources of information. It was a public place where people could get together and relax in nearby bars. Passers-by encountered a written space adorned with a variety of inscriptions: electoral posters, gladiatorial announcements and sexual graffiti. While electoral posters and the gladiatorial announcements suggest the occurrence of public encounters, the sexual graffiti suggests the occurrence of intimate ones. It is also a written space that brings under-represented sexualities into archaeological discourse. As the inscriptions were found

Subaltern masculinities

187

in a populated area of the city, they attest to intense social and personal interaction. They allow us to study people’s intercourse within urban spaces, as well as their expression of political support and public display. There is evidence of professional inscriptions (i.e. the painted ones) as well as common people’s graffiti. These are walls that provide food for thought on politics and pleasures and show us something about the different types of passions for life (gladiatorial combats, hunters or sex) that existed in that time and place. Furthermore, these walls invite us to rethink Wallace-Hadrill’s approach: although the lupanar is located on a narrow street, the inscriptions on its inner and outer walls inside and surrounding neighbourhood seem to demonstrate the interaction of many people. This corner and its inscriptions allow us to rethink spatial analyses based on moralistic textual approaches and ask us to look to material evidence to construct less normative models for understanding the relationship between intimate and public encounters. They also challenge us to avoid binary interpretation and recognise the complexity of urban space.

Conclusions There is a long tradition of studies that defines the writings of the male elite as the major source of our understanding of Roman culture and society, whether expressed in literature or epigraphy. From this limited perspective, these memories of rulers and their worldviews are taken as shaping Roman identity as a whole. The corner studied in this chapter challenges this perspective. There are significant elements present—two types of inscriptions, tituli picti and graffiti, with the former further divided into two types, electoral propaganda and gladiatorial announcements. While those of the first type speak of local politicians or citizens who demonstrate their generosity and memory by organising spectacles for the general public to attend, the latter give voice to men and women of different ethnic origins who made their living working in bars and taverns as well as providing sexual services. Although the propaganda is placed outside of establishments, as Viitanen and Nissinen tell us,53 we are able to assume that there were negotiations between owners of small businesses, candidates and supporters in order to have inscriptions done there by professionals. Thus, to leave marks for posterity through gladiatorial announcements or electoral notices engaged people of different social conditions. The second case, that of graffiti of sexual content, allows us to think about intimate encounters from the perspective of diversity. The locale, typography and the number of inscriptions in a demarcated space suggest this was the site where people of different social conditions and origins circulated, functioning much more as a site of encounter and negotiation than a distant corner of the city. In drawing my chapter to conclusion, I return to a well-known graffiti that appears in different parts of Pompeii and reads as follows: ADMIROR O PARIENS TE NON CECIDISSE RVINIS QVI TOT SCRIPTORVM TAEDIA SVSTINEAS54 ‘I admire you, oh wall that has not fallen, you who must bear the boredom of writers.’

188

Renata Senna Garraffoni

This graffiti, in its concise irony, seems to fluently express some of the themes I have dealt with above. In the first place, it becomes evident that the person who wrote it understood the wall as a locus for many different types of writing. In the second place, it seems to indicate that whoever wrote it knew well the milieu and those whom it brought together, thus understanding that his or her phrase would be read by other pedestrians. In the third place, in an irony of fate that escapes that writer from so long ago, the phrase has lived on, on walls that have withstood earthquakes, the successive eruptions of Mt Vesuvius and the passing of time itself. It is this persisting material legacy that enables us to return to the streets of Pompeii to read its walls again. In doing so, we gain insights not only on members of the elite but on people of humble origins, their language, experiences and worldview, inviting us to ponder what type of history of Rome we ourselves want to write.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Foucault 1978, 1985, 1986; Dover 1978; Johns 1982; Richlin 1983. Clarke 2003, 11. Garraffoni and Sanfelice 2014. Hall 2012. Sears, Keegan and Laurence 2013. Garraffoni 2012, 214–9. Hingley 1996, 2000, 2001, 2005. See Delgado and Ferrer 2012. Hingley 2005. Gilchrist 1999. See Voss and Schmidt 2000. Grig 2017, 2. Baird and Taylor 2012. More recently scholars have also been considering how Della Corte proposed CIL 4 made it difficult to read. See Courrier and Dedieu 2012. Abbott 1912; Tanzer 1939. Funari 1986–7, 1989, 1993. Funari 2003, 113. Williams 1999; Feitosa 2005. Baird and Taylor 2012, 12. Laurence and Sears 2013, 1. See Corbier 2006 and 2017. MacMullen 1982. Feitosa 2005, 61. Viitanen and Nissinen 2017. Sabbatini Tumolesi 1980. Benefiel 2012. Taylor 2012. Hillard 2013. Plin. Ep. 8.7, my translation. Hillard 2013; Laurence and Sears 2013. Courrier and Dedieu 2012. http://ancientgraffiti.org/Graffiti/ Hunink 2014, expanded edition, first published in 2011. Baird and Taylor 2012, 5–6. Langner 2001; Hunink 2014.

Subaltern masculinities 189 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

Viitanen, Nissinen and Kohronen 2013. Keegan 2012. Franklin 1991. Savunen 1995; Sabbatini Tumolesi 1980. For a more recent work, see Prina 2018. Garraffoni 2010. Wallace-Hadrill 1996. Voss and Schmidt 2000, 7. Viitanen, Nissinen and Korhonen 2013; Viitanen and Nissinen 2017. Franklin 1985. Viitanen and Nissinen 2017. Sabbatini Tumolesi 1980. Feitosa 2005; Franklin 1985. Feitosa 2005; Varone 2000, 79; Adams 1996, 161; Prina 2018, 45. Adams 1996, 114. CIL 4.2081, 4304, 1331, 3925. Garraffoni and Laurence 2013. CIL 4.2169. Viitanen and Nissinen 2017. CIL 4.1904, 1906, 2461, 2487.

Bibliography Abbott, F. F. 1912. The Common People of Ancient Rome: Studies of Roman Life and Literature. London: George Routledge & Sons. doi:10.4324/9780203705636. Adams, J. N. 1996. Il vocabolario del sesso a Roma. Analisi del linguaggio sessuale nella latinità. Roma: Argo. Baird, J. A. and C. Taylor, eds. 2012. Ancient Graffiti in Context. London and New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203840870. Benefiel, R. 2012. ‘Dialogues of Graffiti in the House of the Four Styles at Pompeii (Casa dei Quattro Stili, I. 8. 17, 11).’ In Baird and Taylor 2012, 20–48. Clarke, J. R. 2003. Roman Sex 100 BC-AD 250. New York: Harry N. Abrams publishers. Corbier, M. 2006. Donner à lire, donner à voir. Mémoire et communication dans la Rome ancienne. Paris: CNRS Éditions. Corbier, M. 2017. ‘Autour des graffitis dans le monde romain: normes, codes, transgressions.’ In La norme sous la République et le Haut-Empire romains. Élaboration, diffusion et contournements, edited by P. Le Doze and T. Itgenshorst, 501–15. Bordeaux: Ausonius. Courrier, C. and J.-P. Dedieu. 2012. ‘Écrire à Pompéi: propositions pour une modernisation du CIL IV.’ SEBarc 10: 371–88. Delgado, A. and M. Ferrer. 2012. ‘Life and Death in Ancient Colonies: Domesticity, Material Culture and Sexual Politics in the Western Phoenician World, Eighth to Sixth Centuries.’ In Voss and Casella 2012, 195–213. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511920011.015. Dover, K. 1978. Greek Homosexuality. New York: Harvard University Press. dx.doi. org/10.5040/9781474257183. Feitosa, L. M. G. C. 2005. Amor e sexualidade: o masculino e o feminino em grafites de Pompeia. São Paulo: Annablume/FAPESP. Foucault, M. 1978 [1976]. A History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Translated by R. Hurley. New York: Radom House. Foucault, M. 1985 [1984]. A History of Sexuality. Vol. 2. Translated by R. Hurley. New York: Radom House.

190

Renata Senna Garraffoni

Foucault, M. 1986 [1984]. A History of Sexuality. Vol. 3. Translated by R. Hurley. New York: Radom House. Franklin Jr., J. L. 1985. ‘Games and a Lupanar: Prosopography of a Neighborhood in Ancient Pompeii.’ CJ 81: 319–28. Franklin Jr., J. L. 1991. ‘Literacy and the Parietal Inscriptions of Pompeii.’ In Literacy in the Roman World, edited by M. Beard, 77–98. JRA Suppl. 3. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology. Funari, P. P. A. 1986–7. ‘Cultura(s) dominante(s) e cultura(s) subalterna(s) em Pompeia: da vertical da cidade ao horizonte do possível.’ Revista Brasileira de História 7 (13): 33–48. Funari, P. P. A. 1989. Cultura Popular na Antiguidade Clássica. São Paulo: Contexto. Funari, P. P. A. 1993. ‘Graphic Caricature and the Ethos of Ordinary People at Pompeii.’ JEurArch 1 (2): 133–50. doi:10.1179/096576693800719374. Funari, P. P. A. 2003. ‘O pensamento popular nas inscrições parietais pompeianas.’ Boletim do CPA, Campinas, SP, 16: 101–18. Garraffoni, R. S. 2010. ‘Via del Lupanar em Pompeia: contribuições da arqueologia para repensar política e sexualidade no mundo romano.’ In: História e historiografia da Educação nos Clássicos: estudos sobre Antiguidade e Medievo, edited by T. Oliveira, 57–71. Dourados: UEMS. Garraffoni, R. S. 2012. ‘Reading Gladiators’ Epitaphs and Rethinking Violence and Masculinity in the Roman Empire.’ In Voss and Casella 2012, 214–31. doi:10.1017/ CBO9780511920011.016. Garraffoni, R. S. and R. Laurence. 2013. ‘Writing in Public Space from Child to Adult: The Meaning of Graffiti.’ In Sears, Keegan and Laurence 2013, 123–34. doi:10.5040/ 9781472555908.ch-007. Garraffoni, R. S. and P. P. Sanfelice. 2014. ‘Homoerotismo nas paredes de Pompeia.’ In Homoerotismo na Antiguidade Clássica, edited by A. M. Esteves, K. T. Azevedo and F. Frohwein, 219–48. Rio de Janeiro: Editora da UFRJ. Gilchrist, R. 1999. Gender and Archaeology: Contesting the Past. London and New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203007976. Grig, L. 2017. ‘Introduction: Approaching Popular Culture in the Ancient World.’ In Popular Culture in the Ancient World, edited by L. Grig, 1–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781139871402.001. Hall, M. 2012. ‘Sexuality and Materiality: The Challenge of Method.’ In Voss and Casella, 2012, 323–40. Hillard, T. 2013. ‘Graffiti’s Engagement: The Political Graffiti of the Late Republic.’ In Sears, Keegan and Laurence 2013, 105–22. doi:10.5040/9781472555908.ch-006. Hingley, R. 1996. ‘The “Legacy” of Rome: The Rise, Decline and Fall of the Theory of Romanization.’ In Roman Imperialism: Post-colonial Perspectives, edited by J. Webster and N. Cooper, 36–48. Leicester: University of Leicester. Hingley, R. 2000. Roman Officers and English Gentlemen: The Imperial Origins of Roman Archaeology. London and New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203136508. Hingley, R., ed. 2001. Images of Rome: Perceptions of Ancient Rome in Europe and the United States in the Modern Age. JRA Suppl. 44. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology. Hingley, R. 2005. Globalizing Roman Culture: Unity, Diversity and Empire. London and New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203023341. Hunink, V. 2014. Oh Happy Place!—Pompeii in 1000 Graffiti. Revised edition. Pantoni: Apeiron Editori.

Subaltern masculinities 191 Johns, C. 1982. Sex or Symbol, Erotic Images of Greece and Rome. London: British Museum Publications. Keegan, P. 2012. ‘Blogging Pompeii: Graffiti as Speech-Act and Cultural Discourse.’ In Baird and Taylor 2012, 165–90. Langner, M. 2001. Antike Graffitizeichnungen: Motive, Gestaltung und Bedeutung. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag. Laurence, R. and G. Sears. 2013. ‘Written Space.’ In Sears, Keegan and Laurence 2013, 1–12. doi:10.5040/9781472555908.ch-001. MacMullen, R. 1982. ‘The Epigraphic Habit in the Roman Empire.’ AJPh 103: 233–46. Prina, F. 2018. “Quisquis amat valeat”: Homo- and Bisexuality in Pompeii’s Graffiti. MLitt. Classics diss., University of St. Andrews. Accessed January 17, 2021. www.academia. edu/38096665/_Quisquis_amat_valeat_Homo_and_Bisexuality_in_Pompeiis_Graffiti_ pdf. Richlin, A. 1983. The Garden of Priapus. Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sabbatini Tumolesi, P. L. 1980. Gladiatorum paria. Annunci di spettacoli gladiatorii a Pompei. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Savunen, L. 1995. ‘Woman and Election in Pompeii.’ In Women in Antiquity: New Assessments, edited by R. Hawley and B. Levick, 194–206. London and New York: Routledge. Sears, G., P. Keegan and R. Laurence, eds. 2013. Written Space in the Latin West, 200 BC to AD 300. London: Bloomsbury. doi:10.5040/9781472555908. Tanzer, H. H. 1939. The Common People of Pompeii: A Study of the Graffiti. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Taylor, C. 2012. ‘Graffiti and the Epigraphic Habit: Creating Communities and Writing Alternate Histories in Classical Attica.’ In Baird and Taylor 2012, 90–109. Varone, A. 2000. L’erotismo a Pompei. Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider. Viitanen, E. M. and L. Nissinen. 2017. ‘Campaigning for Votes in Ancient Pompeii: Contextualizing Electoral Programmata.’ In Writing Matters: Presenting and Perceiving Monumental Inscriptions in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, edited by I. Berti, K. Bolle, F. Opdenhoff and F. Stroth, 117–44. Berlin: De Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110534597–006. Viitanen, E. M., L. Nissinen and K. Korhonen. 2013. ‘Street Activity, Dwellings and Wall Inscriptions in Ancient Pompeii: A Holistic Study of Neighbourhood Relations.’ In TRAC 2012—Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference, Frankfurt, 29 March-1 April 2012, edited by A. Bokern et al., 61–80. Oxford and Oakville, CT: Oxbow Books. doi:10.16995/ TRAC2012_61_80. Voss, B. L. and E. C. Casella, eds. 2012. The Archaeology of Colonialism: Intimate Encounters and Sexual Effects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ CBO9780511920011. Voss, B. L. and R. A. Schmidt, eds. 2000. Archaeologies of Sexuality. London and New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203991879. Wallace-Hadrill, A. 1996. ‘Public Honour and Private Shame: The Urban Texture of Pompeii.’ In Urban Society in Roman Italy, edited by T. J. Cornell and K. Lomas, 39–62. London: UCL Press. Williams, C. A. 1999. Roman Homosexuality. Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Part 4

Politics from below Subaltern agency and collective action

9

Metics, slaves and citizens in classical Athens Rethinking the polis from below Fábio Augusto Morales

Introduction The myth of classical Athens as the cradle of freedom and reason is well known. It is based on a supposed historical continuity between ancient Greece and the modern, capitalist Western societies, self-proclaimed as the prime heirs of (their) antiquity, whose mission, consequently, is to spread freedom and reason to the rest of the world. Recent scholarship has demonstrated the absurdity of this proposition, which reifies the modern European construction of antiquity as its own (and exclusive) past, obscures the many other ways the Greek cultural features were transmitted to non-Western societies, and isolates the ancient Greek-speaking societies from their complex historical contexts. 1 One could expect that studies on Athenian slavery would have unsettled this myth; however, as N. Lenski recently observed, the success of Finley’s widespread list of ‘genuine slave societies’ (classical Athens, ancient Rome, ante-bellum US South, the Caribbean islands and pre-abolition Brazil) have had the opposite effect: Not only does it link cultural practices shared between Western societies across the longue durée, it also sets the West apart as uniquely capable of systematizing the use of slavery into a social and economic driver that propelled ‘our’ culture to the forefront of history—albeit at tremendous cost to human life. . . . The implication seems to be that Greece and Rome were the only premodern societies capable of the rationalism, efficiency, and complexity necessary to orchestrate coordinated cruelty at this level. The same sense of superiority—imbued with all due remorse—can also be found in the work of modern Western historians.2 This rather ambiguous status of classical Athens—the cradle of freedom as well as ‘rational’ mass slavery—led to the reification of two discordant approaches to Athenian society. According to the ‘polis approach,’ Athens was a polis, and a polis was a community of citizens. Athenian citizens exercised their civic rights in opposition to the mass of (totally or partially) excluded women, metics and slaves; political issues such as participation, civic ideology and institutional DOI: 10.4324/9781003005148-13

196

Fábio Augusto Morales

arrangement are expectedly central.3 In turn, according to the ‘slave-society approach,’ Athens was a society composed by a community of rational masters that controlled and explored a mass of chattel slaves; accordingly, economic issues such as slave labour productivity, elite and sub-elite dependence on slave labour and slave demography have been the main topics of studies on Athenian slavery/slave system.4 In this chapter, I argue that a history of Athenian society from below, rather than a history of those below, should combine these two approaches, and that for two main reasons. Firstly, though each society separated its social activities in distinctive spheres through rituals and representations, social reproduction presupposes their imbrication: Athenian citizens in the Assembly do not become translucid political beings without economic needs, equally Athenian slave-owners do not abandon the polis, its institutions and safeguards, while extracting surplus from slaves’ labour. Secondly, and consequently, treating separately political or economic boundaries between citizens and non-citizens prevents a comprehension of the social reproduction as a totality, leaving aside the dialectic relationship of structure and agency. The aim of this chapter is to offer a way to approach the social reproduction of classical Athens from below—that is, from the viewpoint of the relations between dominant and dominated according to the multifarious ways in which they interact. Who is below, certainly, could not be defined outside the power relations of concrete agents in specific circumstances: combinations of gender, ethnic, class and cultural boundaries produced and were produced by different relations in which individuals simultaneously shared and disputed power.5 Therefore, and to avoid an anachronistic neoliberal image of a society with no boundaries, 6 a history of classical Athens from below must consider the complexity of its social relations as well as the structures produced by them. Among these structures, the polis itself is certainly prominent. Here, rather than define the polis as city, state or community,7 I will take it as the arena where power relations between inhabitants are performed, discussed and provisionally regulated. The history of the polis and the history of citizens and non-citizens relations are inseparable: rather than change the focus from citizens to non-citizens or even to ‘unthink’ the polis, we should rethink the polis by considering the disputes over its meaning and boundaries. The main hypothesis is that, besides the citizen/non-citizen and master/slave relations, a complex citizen/inhabitant dialectic was central to the polis reproduction itself and, in specific contexts, was engaged in the disputes over its boundaries. To explore this hypothesis, I address the question of the polis’ definitions and its internal boundaries, and then I discuss two specific contexts, both based on speeches written by the metic logographer Lysias: the participation of metics in the restoration of 403 BC and a judicial accusation of a metic master by his slaves, dated probably to the early fourth century BC. In the conclusion, I address the issue of the non-citizens’ support of democratic restoration by discussing the conditions democracy created for slave and metic agency.

Metics, slaves and citizens in Athens 197

The polis and its others What was a polis? In a chapter on ‘Civic ideology and citizenship’ published in 2009, P. J. Rhodes wrote: Greek city-states (poleis, sing. polis) and states of other kinds were communities of citizens (politai, sing. polites). Except when a ‘tyrant’ had usurped power and ruled (as some but not all tyrants did) not through the regular institutions but autocratically, these citizens were entitled and expected to play a part in the running of the state. At the beginning of book 3 of his Politics Aristotle asks, ‘What is the polis?’ and he proceeds to say that ‘the polis is a body of citizens, so we must investigate who ought to be called a citizen and what a citizen is.’8 The definition of polis as a ‘community of citizens,’ with the obvious implied exclusions of non-citizens, has a long history in modern scholarship. The main criterion which identified the citizen community varied from religion,9 land-owning10 and civic institutions11 to self-awareness12 and prestige competition.13 Noncitizens were excluded from the polis and its historiographical representations by not sharing ancestors, not owing land and not being to hold civic offices to exercise public speech or to compete for public honours. Models which focused on the economic sphere, such as the modernist approaches to the polis,14 though more inclusive, often relegated non-citizens to the economic sphere, leaving politics to the exclusive citizen community. The equation polis/citizens also deeply informed studies devoted to the excluded groups, often built upon normative approaches.15 The list of exclusions and obligations has been an unavoidable topos: Athenian metics had to pay a special annual tax of 12 drachmas for men and six for women (the metoikion), men had to perform military service in segregate detachments and both needed a citizen procurator to judicial procedures (the prostates); they could not participate directly in civic institutions such as the courts, the Assembly, the Council or the magistratures, and if charged by supposedly passing as citizens, they could be put to death or reduced to slavery; they could not marry citizens, could not own land (unless with special concession, enktesis) and crimes committed by metics against citizens were punished much harder than offenses of citizens against metics.16 Slaves, in turn, were legally a property, subject to his/her master’s will: they could be bought, sold, beaten, tortured, sexually abused and eventually killed by their master, with minor, if any, judicial consequences; they were obliged to work on whatever the master wishes, from the Laurion mines to domestic service, from agriculture to banking, and if they worked autonomously, they had to pay a sum to the master (the apophora), and if the master had a debt which he could not pay, the slave could be seized by the creditor.17 Less normative studies on the last decades have shown the limits of the exclusion-centred histories of non-citizens. Influenced by the complex social and political movements of the late twentieth century,18 these studies have taken the

198

Fábio Augusto Morales

ubiquity of non-citizens in Athenian society as support for the research on the many ways they have contributed to community life or, more emphatically, played their agencies under, against and/or through the state exclusion structures.19 Studies on Athenian metics, for example, have emphasised their participation in the religious, cultural and military spheres: metic interventions on public sphere (esp. Aristotle and Lysias) or metic participation in polis religious rituals and Athenian army, as well as economic activities with strong ties to the political and military reproduction of the community, became common topics in recent scholarship.20 Studies on Athenian slavery, in turn, have explored the social breaches created by the multifarious economic integration of Athenian slaves: slaves were able to develop successful careers in banking, slave traffic and slave management, gain or buy manumission through many ways (reward from the master or the community, personal savings from slave-loan activities, social support from networks such as eranoi, efforts of family members, etc.), marry or sexually manipulate masters, run away when circumstances allowed, be recruited along with citizens in war times with potential derived honours, try to change masters, sabotage skill-needed activities, lie, steal and give false-testimony on masters, etc.21 Greek manumission studies, in turn, have shown the complexity of the burdens and breaches in the sociability of freedmen and freedwomen, from the continuity of obligations towards the former master to a more independent exercise of the acquired freedom.22 Metic and slave status were deeply intertwined by statuschange through manumission or, on the opposite direction, enslaving as judicial penalty, as well as by metic slave-owning, and by joint participation of metics and slaves in manumission eranoi.23 Finally, the very existence of judicial procedures against false allegations of citizenship, as well as the widespread use of the ‘servile invective,’ a rhetorical topos by which the opponent is accused of be a slave or have a slave origin, points to the importance of ‘fake citizenship’ strategies in Athenian society.24 The gaps of citizen-centred histories of classical Athens, highlighted by studies focused on the agency of non-citizens, have led some scholars even to prefer to leave aside the polis as the main conceptual tool to deal with Athenian society. Alternatives spans from Cohen’s proposal to define Athens as an ethnos, rather than a polis, considering its ‘anomalous’ size and internal complexity in contrast to ‘normal’ poleis,25 to Vlassopoulos’ proposal of taking the sets of communities and networks as unities of analysis for the Greek history, rather than (exclusively) the polis. 26 As recently put by Taylor and Vlassopoulos, communities are fluid, malleable, and subjective: nobody belongs to a single community and no single community incorporates all of the same people all of the time. Communities and networks form (and disband) in a variety of settings for different reasons and have different temporalities; they are not fixed entities. Although some are created through the institutions of the polis (for example, citizen communities and their subdivisions), others are not and often are formed with very little reference to them.27

Metics, slaves and citizens in Athens 199 The study of communities and networks that crossed Greek History’s fabric have shown the complexity of the relations obliterated in polis-centered histories. This decentring, nonetheless, maintains the traditional identification of the polis to the community of citizens. But, was it? After all, what was a polis?

Citizens and inhabitants Rather than try to define the polis, it seems more fruitful to pursue the ‘polis question’ as it appeared in ancient sources. Here, let’s go back to Aristotle, the metic and philosopher,28 who framed the question as follows: When we are dealing with constitutions, and seeking to discover the essence and the attributes of each form, our first investigation may well be directed to the city itself; and we may begin by asking, ‘What is the city?’ (τί ποτέ ἐστιν ἡ πόλις). This is at present a disputed question—while some say, ‘It was the city that did such and such an act,’ others say, ‘It was not the city, but the oligarchy or the tyrant.’ All the activity of the statesman and the lawgiver is obviously concerned with the city, and a constitution is a way of organizing the inhabitants of a city (πολιτεία τῶν τὴν πόλιν οἰκούντων ἐστὶ τάξις τις). A city belongs to the order of ‘compounds,’ just like any other thing which forms a single ‘whole,’ while being composed, none the less, of a number of different parts. This being the case, it clearly follows that we must inquire first about the citizen. In other words, a city is a multitude of citizens (ἡ γὰρ πόλις πολιτῶν τι πλῆθός ἐστιν) and so we must consider who should properly be called a citizen and what a citizen really is.29 Before offering his own solution—‘the polis is a multitude of citizens’—Aristotle lists six others. The first of them is the very condition of the reasoning: the polis is a disputed question. As such, the polis could be interpreted as a politically disputed concept in the Athenian public sphere, which is not limited to the civic institutions; Aristotle’s Politics was itself a piece in that dispute. The second, third and fourth solutions varied upon the problem of agency: the polis as the proper agent, in a whole-part metonymy; the polis as the platform for rulers’ agency over the world; the polis as the object or reference of administrative and legislative actions. The fifth solution, rather tangentially, defines the politeia as a form of ordering the inhabitants, oikountes, citizens or not, and accordingly the polis was an inhabited space ordered by any politeia. The sixth treats the polis as a philosophical object, which must be analysed according the usual method of disentangling its composing parts, specifying its internal relations and discerning its core. This leads Aristotle to give the seventh and last solution, the polis as the multitude of citizens. Each solution mentioned by Aristotle could be developed with more detail,30 but here I will stress the first and the fifth ones. The ‘polis as a question’ solution is an evidence of what C. Pébarthe, drawing from Castoriadis, called the ‘interrogation illimitée,’ the ‘unlimited questioning’ permitted by democratic political practice;31 although Pébarthe limited this feature to citizens, the very

200

Fábio Augusto Morales

existence of the Aristotelian Politics demonstrates that a metic could participate in it. The fact that Aristotle raised the core question of political activity should alert the modern reader that the polis was in fact an open concept. Therefore, rather than choosing (and reifying) one definition over others, we must explore how the different solutions—or different polis concepts—were constructed both in theory and in social practice, and by which ways the disputes between essentially precarious concepts were performed. Aristotle is not a colleague, it must be repeatedly stressed.32 The fifth solution, the polis as a community of inhabitants ordered by a politeia, points towards a less juridical and more spatial concept of polis, where citizens and non-citizens shared the community’s social reproduction as residents. By social reproduction, it should be noted, I don’t mean the traditional reduction of non-citizens’ agency to economy and demography. The spatial concept of polis mentioned by Aristotle relates politeia to dwelling, regardless of the political and social (real or imagined) limitations some inhabitants’ segments suffered. By shifting the emphasis from juridical status to spatial experience of dwelling, Aristotle’s fifth solution puts this category, the inhabitant, at the core of the polis concept. However, a polis defined by its inhabitants appeared incongruent to him. In fact, loyal to the civic concept of polis, Aristotle addressed a supposed contradiction of a concept of citizenship defined by the place of residence, which would erase the distinction between citizens and non-citizens. Aristotle preferred the definition of citizen as one who ‘shares in the administration of justice and the holding of office’ (Aristotle, 1275a). As metics and slaves could not do this, participation in courts and civic offices were a most definitive criteria than residence. A citizen was a citizen because he does what a non-citizen couldn’t do; what defined the citizen, rather than his agency through civic institution, was the very exclusion they can exercise over non-citizens. The polis, besides being a set of institutions and their legitimate holders, was the act of exclusion itself. In that sense, the citizens’ polis, built upon the dialectics between citizens (those who had power enough to exclude non-citizens) and inhabitants (anyone who dwells in the polis), was in crisis whenever the practices of inhabitants’ polis clash with the citizens’ polis, a structural contradiction.33 The history of the polis, then, was dotted by ‘moments of danger’—a concept I borrow from Benjamin’s VI thesis on the concept of history34—brought forth by the movement of the social reproduction itself, because the ‘polis of the citizens’ depended on the ‘polis of the inhabitants’ to exist, both materially and symbolically.35 Along the fifth century BC, Athens became a new powerful, silver rich centre in the world of empires,36 attracting a mass of freeborn immigrants as well as importing numerous slaves.37 The unsettling concerns posed to citizens by the influx of newcomers, especially the immigrant women,38 were deeply discussed in the public sphere (especially on dramatic festivals) and supported laws such as the famous Periklean restriction of Athenian citizenship to sons of Athenian fathers and mothers.39 However, the law didn’t resolve ambiguities raised in everyday life: the anomalously large population of Attica was a visual reminder of the fragility of the citizen-polis ideology.40

Metics, slaves and citizens in Athens 201 Athens was anything but a homogeneous polis; its heterogeneity, instead, created breaches in Athenian citizens’ exclusivity. Metics, slaves and citizens working, worshiping and eventually fighting side by side multiplied the threats of the inhabitants’ polis against the civic exclusivist ideology. The resultant porosity was at the basis of the well-known complaint of Old Oligarch in relation to the allegedly licentiousness of non-citizens under Athenian democracy: ‘But again the slaves and the metics at Athens enjoy extreme license, and it is not possible to strike them there, nor will a slave step aside for you.’ Well, I shall tell you the reason why this is their local practice. If it were legal for the slave or the metic or the freedman to be beaten by a free-born citizen, he would often strike an Athenian by mistake, thinking that he was a slave. For the demos there are no better dressed than the slaves and the metics, nor are they any better in their appearance. If anyone is also surprised at the fact that they allow the slaves to live luxuriously there and, some of them, in a grand style, it will become clear that they do this too with good reason. For where there is a naval power, economic reasons make it necessary for us to be slaves to our slaves in order that we may take their earnings, and to manumit them. ‘But in Lacedaemon my slave fears you.’Yes, but if your slave fears me, there will be a risk that he will also offer me his money so as not to be in physical danger. And in a state where there are rich slaves it is no longer to my benefit as a master there that my slave should fear you. This then is the reason why we have established equality of free speech as between slaves and free men; and also as between metics and citizens, since the city needs metics because of the great number of their skills and the requirements of the fleet. So that is why we have, naturally, established equality of free speech for the metics too (διὰ τοῦτο οὖν καὶ τοῖς μετοίκοις εἰκότως τὴν ἰσηγορίαν ἐποιήσαμεν).41 This passage, as usual, was used to support very conflicting interpretations. Vlassopoulos, for instance, relates the alleged difficulty to differentiate citizens and noncitizens by appearance to the shape of Athenian socioeconomical citizenship and economic structure: on the one hand, ‘Athenian lower classes . . . possessed significant political rights’; on the other, there was a ‘lack of distinction between free and slave in most professions.’42 Paiaro and Requena, contrarily, argue that this supposedly ‘undifferentiation’ was one of the many rhetorical exaggerations of the text, paralleling the Old Oligarch’s reference to non-citizens isegoria to Plato’s Republic passages referring non-citizens’ isonomia with citizens; as such, they should not be taken at its face-value.43 Here, rather than address the problem of the Old Oligarch’s reliability, I would like to stress the reasons the author gave to what he (supposedly) believes happened in Athens. The author’s main complaint is that metics, freedmen and slaves (a differentiation to which I will return) enjoyed rights similar to those that should be exclusive to citizens: physical protection, access to wealth and free-speech. Although the first reason for the non-citizens’ right to physical protection is a practical one—they dressed similarly and one could beat a citizen by mistake—the main reasoning

202

Fábio Augusto Morales

is sociopolitical: the thalassocratic Athenian democracy conceded rights to noncitizens because it was profitable. But for whom? Marr and Rhodes, in their commentary to the text,44 argue that the main profit was made by the lower-class citizen slave-owners: the part destined to the masters from the earnings (apophorai) slaves received in their autonomous activities, such was woodwork for and rowing in the Athenian fleet (paid by the polis), as well as the fee charged for manumission, created a considerable income for poor masters. Since richer slaves could pay greater apophorai and manumission charges, Athenian citizens didn’t prevent slaves from enriching themselves. However, the Old Oligarch states that in order to avoid violence from freeman in general, rich slaves could pay those other than their master. To solve this problem, Athenian freeman didn’t instill fear of violence in slaves, and that is why they are so licentious and even have isegoria. The fearful, poor and quiet Spartan helots, here, offered a perfect contrast. What about the metics? Since they do not have to pay apophorai to any master, Marr and Rhodes argue that metics were profitable to the polis in function of their specialised skills.45 Thus, rich slaves gave profit to their masters, whereas skilled metics gave profit (indirectly) to the polis. The spectrum of non-citizens’ social relations considered by the Old Oligarch, according to Marr and Rhodes’ reconstruction, went from those with an individual master (who enabled slave enrichment) to those with the community of masters (who didn’t instil fear on slaves) and later to the polis in general (who attracted metics). However, the fact that the Old Oligarch complains about not being able to strike both slaves and metics is revealing of the proximity, in his mind, between metics and slaves. On a recent work on Athenian demography and economy, Akrigg argues that, rather than the ‘economic immigrant,’ the figures of Athenian metic population is better understood by considering manumission as the main source.46 Considering this and appropriating Old Oligarch’s individual-community spectrum, we can consider the metoikion as the conversion, to the polis, of the former apophora paid by slaves to their individual master. We will return to this later; here, it must be noted that the imperial and democratic rationality of the concession of ‘licentious’ conditions to slave and metics (freeborn and freedmen) created unbearable pains for rich oligarchs, already obliged to treat respectfully their fellow lower-class citizens. From this shouldn’t emerge an all-inclusive picture of Athenian democracy: the summary execution of non-citizens caught participating in civic institutions is a reminder that ultimate violence was the corollary of civic ideology’s fragility.47 To access the complexity of the citizen/inhabitant dialectic, I will discuss with more detail two specific contexts: the restoration of democracy in 403 and a charge of slaves against their metic master.

The asty and the Piraeus The regime of the Thirty in Athens, which ruled the polis between 404 and 403 BC, persecuted hundreds of democracy’s supporters, with especial cruelty towards metics. The regime was overthrown by a restoration army assembled in Megara

Metics, slaves and citizens in Athens 203 under the command of Thrasyboulos. The army counted with the substantial financial and military support of exiled Athenian metics such as Lysias, who managed to flee Athens after the execution of his brother Polemarchus. The restoration begun with the take over of the fortress at Phyle, in north Attica, and proceeded with the conquest of the Piraeus, from where the army, increasingly composed of citizens and non-citizens, marched to the asty. After the final victory, the restoration army allowed the Thirty and all the citizens who preferred oligarchy to settle on Eleusis, converted in an independent polis (a measure revoked in 401/0). To those who remained in the asty and desired to stay in Athens, and consequently to live under democracy, an amnesty agreement set the imperative of me mnesikakein, ‘do not recall the bad things.’48 To reward the metics who supported the restoration, Thrasyboulos himself proposed a collective enfranchising, a measure soon put down as illegal. However, a decree dated to 401/0 conceded honours to non-citizens, distinguishing three groups: those who fought with Thrasyboulos since Phyle, those who fought since Mounikhia in the Piraeus, and those who remained in the Piraeus during the siege of the asty. The nature of the privileges is debated, but probably involved concessions of citizenship to the first group and of isoteleia to the second and third.49 As we could expect, the ‘bad things’ of the Thirty’s regime were not forgotten, especially by those who were personally—or had family members who were— harmed by the regime, as was the case of Lysias. Many speeches attributed to him refer directly to the persecutions of that time, and often the Athenian concept of citizenship itself was at stake.50 The fundamental questions were: where did the defendant stayed during oligarchy, and what was his attitude towards it? In the well-known speech Against Erathosthenes (Lys.12)—according to tradition delivered by Lysias himself during the short period when Thrasyboulos decree was valid—Lysias describes vividly many aspects of the Thirty’s regime, especially the involvement of Erathosthenes, one of the Thirty, in the execution of his brother Polemarchus. The two exordia that end the speech stressed a spatial opposition of ‘those who stayed in the asty’ and ‘those from Piraeus,’ which respectively meant, then, supporters and opponents of the Thirty’s regime: In the first place, all you of the town party (ἐξ ἄστεώς) should consider that you were so oppressed by the rule of these men that you were compelled to wage against your brothers, your sons and your fellow-citizens a strange warfare in which your defeat has given you equal rights with the victors, whereas your victory would have made you the slaves of these men. They have enlarged their private establishments by means of their public conduct, while you find your’s reduced by your warfare against each other: for they did not permit you to share their advantages, though they compelled you to share their ill-fame. . . . And all you of the Peiraeus party (ἐκ Πειραιῶς), remember first the matter of the arms,—how after fighting many battles on foreign soil you were deprived of your arms, not by the enemy, but by these men, in a time of peace; and next, that you were formally banished from the city which your fathers bequeathed to you, and when you were in exile they demanded

204

Fábio Augusto Morales your persons from the various cities. In return you should feel the same anger as when you were exiles.51

The contradiction implicated in the defeat/liberty and victory/slavery equations makes clear the costs of the decision to remain in the asty or to fight for oligarchy. Only the condemnation of Erathosthenes could resettle both the allegiance of those who stayed in the asty to democracy and the reconstruction of the social fabric— despite the remaining bad reputation. Meanwhile, to those from the Piraeus, the speaker urges a mnemonical return to the condition of exiles in order to revive the anger which will fuel vengeance; they must, above all, never forget, in order to never forgive. Delivered in the wake of democratic restoration, the speech Against Erathosthenes stresses the boundary defined by the place where someone stayed during the oligarchy. In the following years, a more nuanced boundary emerged, defined by the adherence to democracy, which eventually overcame the spatial one. This is made clear in the speeches against Evandros and Philon. Submitted to a dokimasia, the judicial scrutiny of qualification for public office, both were accused of past undemocratic behaviour. Against Evandros counts the fact that he has held office during the oligarchy: the speaker anticipates the argument that the me mnesikakein agreement should protect the accused, but counter-argues that ‘the people do not take the same view of all those who remained in the city, but regard those who commit offences like his with the feelings that I say they ought, while towards the rest they feel the opposite.’52 Against Philon, conversely, counts the fact that he has left Athens during the oligarchy not to support democracy, but to pursue his private businesses as a metic in the neighbouring polis of Oropus: the speaker reflects on the meaning of citizenship, observing that ‘those who, though citizens by birth (φύσει μὲν πολῖταί εἰσι), adopt the view that any country in which they have their business is their fatherland, are evidently men who would even abandon the public interest of their city to seek their private gain.’53 Citizenship, rather than defined by descent, depended here on behaviour. Nevertheless, the spatial marker remains: as the defendant of the speech Against the accusation of subverting democracy, a man who stayed at the city but claims to have not supported oligarchy, describes his behaviour as similar to what ‘the best citizen in the Peiraeus would have done, if he had remained in the city.’54 The Piraeus was not alone as spatial reference to the post-restoration democratic memory; Lysias and other orators also use ‘those from Phyle,’ referring to the first step of the restoration war. As argued by Loraux, there was a subtle difference in the choice of Phyle or Piraeus: while ‘those from Phyle’ referred to a more homogeneously citizen army, ‘those from Piraeus’ stressed the presence of non-citizens among the troops.55 The strong presence of metics and slaves among the residents in Piraeus, where Lysias’ family dwelled, stresses the point.56 The double exordium at the end of Against Erathosthenes attests the speaker’s disagreement with the amnesty terms; the urge for remembering is the opposite of me mnesikakein. Remembering, in that case, meant to update the spatially based polis’ stasis, which could be healed only by the institutional reckoning with those who subverted

Metics, slaves and citizens in Athens 205 democracy—a claim particularly telling to contemporary post-dictatorial societies, I must add. The Piraeus, thus, became a symbol of democracy, an idea echoed in Aristotle’s description of the port demos as particularly adherent to democracy.57 In post-403 BC Athens, the scrutiny over the past was at the core of citizenship itself, approaching oligarchical or individualist citizens to non-citizens, from whom active political support for democracy was not expected. Inversely, metics who have supported democracy, such as Lysias himself, could be portrayed as behaving better towards democracy than citizens. As Lysias states in the speech Against Erathosthenes: This [persecution] was not the treatment that we deserved at the city’s hands, when we [metics] had produced all our dramas for the festivals, and contributed to many special levies; when we showed ourselves men of orderly life, and performed every duty laid upon us; when we had made not a single enemy, but had ransomed many Athenians from the foe. Such was their reward to us for behaving as resident aliens far otherwise than they did as citizens (οὐχ ὁμοίως μετοικοῦντας ὥσπερ αὐτοὶ ἐπολιτεύοντο)!58 The ‘metics better than citizens’ argument presented here is linked to the financial contributions and lawful and quiet sociability which one could expect of rich citizens. Athenian metics, indeed, could surpass the allegiance of citizens towards democracy also by supporting the restoration movement, as stated by the speaker of the speech Against Philon, who justifies a necessary punishment to unfaithful citizens such as him by remembering the honours the polis gave to ‘our resident aliens for having supported the democracy beyond the requirements of their duty.’59 Through the concession of honours, the polis asserted a citizenship concept; honouring metics who went ‘beyond the requirements of their duty’ logically demanded dishonouring citizens who didn’t meet the minimum required from their title. Lysias’ speeches eloquently reveal the conversion of courts in democracy’s places of memory, where the civic wounds could be, and often were, reopened. The polemics on the concession of honours to metics in the years just after restoration show the open nature of the citizenship question: what does it mean to be a citizen? The participation of slaves in the restoration movement60 stretched the question to its limit: slaves could be better than citizens? The revocation of Thrasyboulos’ decree and the much less wide concession of honours to non-citizens in 401/0 indicate the partial victory of the civic ideology; nevertheless, the central role of metics in Plato’s Republic, for example, reveals the depth of the trauma.61 In what follows, I will discuss another way slaves could push the polis to its limits: the charge slaves made against their metic master, preserved in Lysias’ speech For Kallias.

Masters and slaves The speech For Kallias is the shortest of the corpus, with only 292 words—Lysias’ speeches normally have between 1,220 and 2,500 words. The speech’s fragmentary state is due to the loss of two sheets of the twelfth century manuscript: the

206

Fábio Augusto Morales

lost part would have contained about 1,000 words, but from that number should be discounted those related to the next speech, maybe about 250 words.62 The title, For Kallias, defense speech on a charge of hierosulia, was attributed by the manuscript’s author (or his antecessors), even though, as argued by Todd, he would hardly have made reference to a hierosulia (‘theft of sacred things’), and not to the broader asebeia (‘impiety’), if the lost pages did not have more precise information.63 The dating, if its inclusion in the Corpus Lysiacum indicates Lysias’ authorship, should be placed between the late fifth and early fourth century. As the remaining material shows, the case is about a denunciation made by slaves against their master, a metic named Kallias. The central issue addressed by scholars was: what was the crime? Hypotheses range from the lack of payment for the use of sacred lands or deviation of resources from public treasure, to mystery cults profanation or irregularities in the lease of sacred properties.64 The religious nature of the suit, however, is more consensual: slave complaints were admitted only in extreme cases, such as offences against the gods.65 The reference at the fragment’s end to the possible manumission of the accusers reinforces the exceptional nature of the case. The speech reveals that the case is heard at a normal court, not the Areopagus, that could be explained by the juridical status of accusers and accused. The speaker didn’t present himself as Kallias’ prostates, but stresses his social connections with him: friendship and business. After that, the speaker points to the positive connection of Kallias with the polis through the metic status and the ‘much good’ he has done to the community, although the content of that ‘good’ was not specified. Kallias, then, was a ‘good’ metic in both his social and institutional relations, as is evidenced by the fact that he was never judicially charged before. The accusers, in turn, are featured as the opposite: untrustworthy slaves and sycophants, whom, by accusing a good metic, reverse the judicial order by making the life of lawful individuals more dangerous than that of criminals. Until now, the normative social roles were safe: the good metic, accused by his quisling slaves, was supported by his citizen friends. The next argument, however, points in another direction: I am not surprised [with the accusation]: they know that if they are shown to be lying, they will suffer nothing worse than their existing situation, whereas if they deceive you successfully, they will be released from their present troubles. . . . It seems to me appropriate to view the trial not as the private concern of these men, but as the common concern of all those who are in the polis. For these are not the only people who have slaves, but so does everybody else (οὐ γὰρ τούτοις μόνοις εἰσὶ θεράποντες, ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις ἅπασιν): they will concentrate on the plight of these men, and will no longer consider how they might become free by having performed services for their masters, but by having made false denunciations about them.66 By referring to the profit the accusers will enjoy, the speaker sought to delegitimise the charge: potentially self-harming statements should be more trustful than interested ones, and no profit would be greater than manumission for the slaves.67

Metics, slaves and citizens in Athens 207 Consequently, the case surpassed the limits of the private sphere: what was at stake were the manumission practices which regulated the individual’s change of status. The eventual victory of the accusers would put at risk the manumission system based on the slave’s good services, which was conducted individually by each master. This type of judicial manumission debased master–slave relations in favour of the public court–slave relation: slaves would use the polis to surpass, legitimately, their master’s authority.68 This is an example of the intervention of the free/slave dialectics in the master/slave dialectics, in Vlassopoulos’ terms,69 but was driven by slaves’ agency. The speaker, then, makes the problem more concrete: everybody had slaves, and consequently everybody would be at risk if Kallias’ slaves succeed. Scholars have debated the extent of that statement, but, as Lewis has recently sustained, slavery was widely disseminated in both the Athenian elite and sub-elite and through a wide range of economic activities, a situation created mainly by the low prices of slaves derived from the city’s proximity and access to the main sources of slave in Thracia and Phrygia.70 What was at stake were not only the manumission system but the slave system as a whole as well. The judicial breach created by the possibility of slave institutional denunciation, therefore, demanded the rhetorical suspension of the frontiers between citizens and metics: Kallias was as much a slave-owner as any citizen at the court, thereafter the case threatened the polis as a ‘community of slave-owners.’ This rhetorical metonymy—Kallias represented all masters—corresponded, thus, to a boundary displacement: the civic exclusivism should be suspended in favour of the reproduction of master/slave opposition. Sadly, there is no evidence for the case’s outcome, but surely the speaker’s fear was not materialised: Athenian slavery was not abolished through mass denunciations; the master/slave dialectics remained safe.

Conclusions When approached from the non-citizens’ agency point of view, the relations between democracy and slavery become more complex. The narrative based on the exclusions list, which relegates to metics and slaves only economic roles, cannot encompass the multiple ways in which non-citizens were involved in the reproduction of the polis itself. In the last decades, ancient historians have shifted the emphasis of citizenship studies from institutions to kinship and religion, and of slavery studies from normative models to social experiences. These two paths must be articulated to construct a more comprehensive understanding of the polis. The questioning of the fundamentals of citizenship after the Thirty’s regime in Athens offered a rich case to explore this venue. A history of Athenian society from below, thus, by focusing simultaneously on the non-citizens’ agencies and the consequences they have to the exclusivist civic ideology in danger, offers new perspectives on the social and political structure itself. A telling example is the question of the support non-citizens gave to the restoration of 403. In his pioneering study on Athenian metoikia, Clerc answered that question by stressing the metics’ democratic allegiance to a society where they

208 Fábio Augusto Morales shared rights very close to those of the citizens.71 K. Dover, in his study on the Corpus Lysiacum, chose the ‘personal relations’ as the main variable to explain Lysias support to the restoration.72 Whitehead, in turn, strongly rejected Clerc’s inclusive paradigm; nonetheless, he characterises the Thirty’s regime and its persecution over the metics as the opposite of ‘open society and all its corollaries, such as freedom of movement,’73 and, though he didn’t address the question directly, one could suppose that metics were supporters of that ‘open society.’ GonzálezRomán represented Athenian metics as a class sufficiently aware of itself to oppose an oppressing oligarchy—but not enough to oppose an oppressive democracy.74 Bazlez stressed the metics’ contractual indifference towards politics, leaving the question of their support to democracy aside.75 The best answer to that question, I believe, resides in the particular shape the relations between democracy and slavery took in late fifth century Athens, according to three main features. Firstly, Athenian democracy was a popular democracy, with clear (although variable) hegemony of lower-class citizens.76 The public financing system of liturgies, eisphorai and other contributions, created an arena where rich people, citizens or not, could compete and display their allegiance to the community, configuring a reciprocal relationship between the rich and the polis: the polis received resources for the financing of its religious, political, military and redistributive activities, the rich gained the ‘benefaction argument’ to be used before popular courts when (just or unjustly) charged. Secondly, the status stratification in classical Athenian democracy, which distinguished more clearly citizens, metics and slaves, had a subtler distinction: as D. Kamen has pointed out, the existence of a specific terminology for freedman (apeleutheron), the additional tax (triobolon) freedman should pay along with the metoikion, and the arguable presence of the former master as prostates and as eventual heir in case the freedman died childless, all point to a distinction between freeborn immigrants metics and freedman metics.77 Thirdly, Athenian metoikia and slave systems embedded practices through which non-citizens could negotiate their condition and their participation in civic life. Slave strategies to obtain manumission, from the ‘good services reward’ system to judicial denunciation, could lead to outcomes ranging from the maintained obligation towards the former master to the execution of a master by the polis. Metic strategies to participate in civic life, in turn, from officialised foreign cults to donations in the polis’ public financing system, could generate responses that ranged from clear xenophobia to the creation of strong social ties with citizens. These three features, combined in the citizen/inhabitant dialectics, favoured the stability of the democratic regime. For wealthy freeborn or freedman metics, popular democracy allowed them to distinguish themselves from slave associations by displaying, alongside citizens, their allegiance through liturgies and other financial contributions. By that, wealthy metics could both reinforce their social links with upper-class citizens and acquire moral capital to eventually use in popular courts. Oligarchy, in turn, by reducing metics to quasi-slaves (as in the Old Oligarch’s utopia) or even banning them, limited public munificence competition to wealthy

Metics, slaves and citizens in Athens 209 citizens, as well as allowing confiscation of metic property insofar as metics were kind of citizen-polis’ slaves. For poor freeborn and freedman metics and slaves, on one hand, popular democracy maintained the importance of naval power, which multiplied economic opportunities for social and economic mobility through autonomous activities, and on the other, the relative accessibility to manumission through personal relations or economic resources presented ways to make everyday life less unbearable. The economic pressure over poor citizens created by competition in the labour market with poor metics and slaves, in turn, was softened, collectively, by the polis-mediated practices of redistribution made possible by the public financing system and empire, and, individually, by the exploitation of slaves (through direct appropriation of labour, apophora or manumission charge) and freedman (in case of maintained dependence under paramone). For the slave-owners as a whole, the manumission openness surely helped to soften social tensions potentially catalysed by urban contexts, such as the Piraeus, where huge contingents of slaves were concentrated. In that sense, the gradual and subtle differences in Athenian metoikia and slavery could be interpreted in terms of social control. As Akrigg correctly observed, the fact that the metoikion was levied on the persons ‘have made [metics] vulnerable to identification with slaves.’78 The metoikion, I believe, constituted a kind of apophora to the polis, part of a spectrum between slavery and freedom defined by different forms of appropriation of surplus (produced by the person or others): servile total appropriation by the master, partial appropriation by the master (apophora), servile-like partial appropriation by the polis (metoikion plus triobolon or metoikion only), and civic partial appropriation by the polis (isoteleia accompanied by liturgies). Of course, this doesn’t mean that democracy was an open society where citizens and non-citizens could live in harmony; the boundaries of class, gender and status were not suspended, and in the same way that democracy created breaches and softened pressures on poor citizens and wealthy or poor non-citizens, it nonetheless reinforced multiple forms of violence, as R. Kennedy pointed in his discussion on metic women.79 My argument is that, in comparison to oligarchy, democracy was a better regime for non-citizens, although in different ways according to the boundaries related, but not subsumed, to the civic status. Conversely, democracy was unbearable to wealthy, pro-oligarchy citizens: they could not beat poor metics and slaves, had to compete with wealthy metics in public munificence instances, if they marry wealthy foreigners their children would lose citizenship, and eventually would find themselves in a court composed of poor citizens. The sufferings of Athenian rich oligarchs were well represented in the slave inversion argument in Plato’s Republic. Socrates opposes two situations: a master who doesn’t fear his slaves because the entire polis would defend him, and a solitary master, away from the polis, with five or more slaves. In that case, asks Socrates: would he not forthwith find it necessary to fawn upon some of the slaves and make them many promises and emancipate them, though nothing would be

210

Fábio Augusto Morales further from his wish? And so he would turn out to be the flatterer of his own servants.80

To oligarchs, Athens was dangerously near the rich solitary master situation: manumission is the main strategy to pacify slaves when there is no state to protect the masters—a state that according to Plato and the Old Oligarch gave citizen-like rights to metics and slaves. This exaggerated response makes sense considering the stable relationship between democracy and manumission, the basis of Athenian social stability. Thus, oligarchs reflected on the nature of citizenship and the polis itself in the same vein non-citizens did—and facing their agency—in crucial moments such as the restoration of 403 or through breaches such as slave legal denunciation of masters (citizens or metics). After all, democratic Athens was crossed by the contradictions and porosities of a society that included through exclusion: the polis was not a substance, a thing, but the product and vector of the relationship between agents. Athens was a slave and metic polis as well as a citizen polis.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Vlassopoulos 2007; Fillafer 2017; Morales and da Silva 2020. Lenski 2018, 24–25. See, e.g., Rhodes 2004. See, e.g., Rihl 2011; Lewis 2018. Thompson 1963, 9–10, Cerutti 2015. Cohen 2000. Hansen 1998. Rhodes 2009. Fustel de Coulanges 1864. Marx 1993, 471–9. Glotz 1928; Hansen 1984. Vernant 1962; Meier 1980. Weber 1966; Finley 1973. Rostovtzeff 1926, 262–347; Cohen 2000. E.g., on the Athenian metics, see Clerc 1893; Whitehead 1977; González-Román 1979; Baslez 1984. Whitehead 1977; for updated bibliography and debate, see Kamen 2013, 43–61. Finley 1980; for updated debate, see Lewis 2015. See Introduction, this volume. See, e.g., Joly, this volume. Mansouri 2011; Morales 2014; Kennedy 2014; Wijma 2014. Rihl 2011; McKeown 2011; Ismard 2014 and 2017; Lewis 2018, 167–96; Hunt 2018; Vlassopoulos 2016 and 2018. Zelnick-Abramovitz 2005; Kamen 2012 and 2014; Sosin 2015; Vlassopoulos 2018. Vlassopoulos 2018; Akrigg 2019. Kamen 2009; Vlassopoulos 2009; Ismard 2019. Cohen 2000. Vlassopoulos 2007. Taylor and Vlassopoulos 2015, 9. See also Vlassopoulos 2007 and Vlassopoulos, this volume. Whitehead 1977. Arist. Pol. 1274b–1275a; Ernest Baker’s translation, adapted.

Metics, slaves and citizens in Athens 211 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

See, especially, Vlassopoulos 2009, 85–96. Pébarthe 2012. Blok 2017, 37–41. Morales 2009. Benjamin 1980, 695. Loraux 1981; Ober 1996, 161–88; Kasimis 2018. Vlassopoulos 2007, 147–55 and 2013. On the proportion of freeborn immigrants and slaves, see Akrigg 2019, 89–138. Kennedy 2014. Manville 1994; Lape 2010; Kennedy 2014; Blok 2017; Jacome Neto 2020. Andrade 2011; Kasimis 2018. Xen. [Ath. pol.] 10–12, Marr and Rhodes’s translation. Vlassopoulos 2009, 359. Paiaro and Requena 2015. Marr and Rhodes 2008, 73–80. Marr and Rhodes 2008, 80. Akrigg 2019, 89–138. Kasimis 2018, 89–96. Carawan 2012. IG 22.10. Cf. Kamen 2013, 111–2; Kears 2014, 164–6. Vagios 2018. Lys. 12.92–3, 95–96, Lamb’s translation. Lys. 26.16–7, Lamb’s translation. Lys. 31.5–7, Lamb’s translation. Lys. 25.2, Lamb’s translation. Loraux 2005, 256. Von Reden 1995; Kasimis 2018, 51–83. Arist. Pol. 1303b. Lys. 12.20, Lamb’s translation. Lys. 31.29. Arist. [Ath. Pol.] 40.1–2. Kasimis 2018. Todd 2007, 385–6. Todd 2007, 387. Todd 2007, 387. Todd 1993, 307–10; Osborne 2000; Gagarin 2001; Parker 2005. Lys. 5.3–5, Todd’s translation. Compare with Lysias’ speech Defense concerning the Sekos, when the defendant stresses the implausibility of having committing a sacrilege before his slaves, by arguing that would put in their hands ‘both to get revenge on me and to gain their own freedom by denouncing me’ (Lys. 7.16). Kamen 2014, 282–5. Vlassopoulos 2018, 8–9. Lewis 2018 and Taylor, this volume. Clerc 1893, 230–1. Dover 1968, 47–56. Whitehead 1977, 155. González-Román 1979. Baslez 1984, 147–8. Wood 1995, 161–237; Ober 1996, 18–31. Kamen 2013, 88–89. Akrigg 2019, 134. Kennedy 2014. Pl. Resp. 578d-579a, Shorey’s translation.

212

Fábio Augusto Morales

Bibliography Akrigg, B. 2019. Population and Economy in Classical Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781139225250. Andrade, M. M. 2011. ‘Funerary Spaces: Private Dedications and the Public Exposure of Women in Athens (6th-4th centuries BC).’ Revista Brasileira de História 31 (61): 185–208. doi:10.1590/S0102–01882011000100010. Baslez, M.-F. 1984. L’étranger dans la Grèce antique. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Benjamin, W. 1980. ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte.’ In Gesammelte Schrifte, Band I.2, edited by R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser with the participation of T. W. Adorno, 691–704. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Blok, J. 2017. Citizenship in Classical Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781139017916. Bradley, K. and P. Cartledge, eds. 2011. The Cambridge World History of Slavery. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521840668. Carawan, E. 2012. ‘The Meaning of Mê Mnêsikakein.’ CQ 62 (2): 567–82. doi:10.1017/ S0009838812000171. Cerutti, S. 2015. ‘Who is below? E. P. Thompson, historien des sociétés modernes: une relecture.’ Annales (HSS) 70 (4): 931–56. doi:10.1353/ahs.2015.0167. Clerc, M. 1893. Les métèques athéniens: étude sur la condition légale, la situation morale et le rôle social et économique des étrangers domiciliés à Athènes. Paris: Thorin. Cohen, E. 2000. The Athenian Nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dover, K. J. 1968. Lysias and the Corpus Lysiacum. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fillafer, F. 2017. ‘A World Connecting? From the Unity of History to Global History.’ History & Theory 56 (1): 3–37. doi:10.1111/hith.12000. Finley, M. I. 1973. The Ancient Economy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Finley, M. I. 1980. Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. London: Chatto & Windus. Fustel De Coulanges, N. 1864. La cité antique: le droit, les institutions de la Grèce et de Rome. Paris: Durand. Gagarin, M. 2001. ‘Review of Virginia Hunter, Jonathan Edmondson (ed.), Law and Social Status in Classical Athens.’ BMCRev 2001.10.03. https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2001/ 2001.10.03/. Glotz, G. 1928. La cité grecque. Paris: La Renaissance du Livre. González-Román, C. 1979. ‘Los metecos atenienses: un punto de vista sobre las clases sociales en la Antigua Atenas.’ In Clases y lucha de clases en la Grécia Antigua, edited by C. Mossé, P. Vidal-Naquet, J. Fernández Ubiña, C. González Román and M. I. Finley, 129–59. Madrid: Akal. Hansen, M. H. 1984. Die athenische Volksversammlung im Zeitalter des Demosthenes. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag. Hansen, M. H. 1998. Polis and City-State: An Ancient Concept and its Modern Equivalent: Symposium January 9, 1998. Copenhagen: Munksgaard. Hunt, P. 2018. ‘Ancient Greece as a “Slave Society”.’ In Lenski and Cameron 2018, 61–85. doi:10.1017/9781316534908.003. Ismard, P. 2014. ‘Le simple corps de la cité. Les esclaves publics et la question de l’État grec.’ Annales (HSS) 69 (3): 723–51. doi:10.1353/ahs.2014.0126. Ismard, P. 2017. ‘Écrire l’histoire de l’esclavage. Entre approche globale et perspective comparatiste.’ Annales (HSS) 72 (1): 8–43. doi:10.1017/S0395264917000026.

Metics, slaves and citizens in Athens 213 Ismard, P. 2019. ‘Dénombrer et identifier les esclaves dans l’Athènes classique.’ In L’identification des personnes dans les mondes grecs, edited by R. Guicharrousse, P. Ismard, M. Vallet and A.-E. Veïsse, 51–75. Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne. https:// books.openedition.org/psorbonne/54833. Jacome Neto, F. 2020. ‘The Fear of Social Interaction: A Historiographical Essay on Ethnocentrism and Racism in Ancient Greece.’ Revista Brasileira de História 40 (84): 1–20. doi:10.1590/1806–93472020v40n84–02. Kamen, D. 2009. ‘Servile Invective in Classical Athens.’ SCI 28: 43–56. Kamen, D. 2012. ‘Manumission, Social Rebirth, and Healing Gods in Ancient Greece.’ In Slaves and Religions in Graeco-Roman Antiquity and Modern Brazil, edited by S. Hodkinson and D. Geary, 174–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kamen, D. 2013. Status in Classical Athens. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.1515/9781400846535. Kamen, D. 2014. ‘Sale for the Purpose of Freedom: Slave-Prostitutes and Manumission in Ancient Greece.’ CJ 109 (3): 281–307. doi:10.5184/classicalj.109.3.0281. Kasimis, D. 2018. The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781107280571. Kears, M. 2014. Metics and Identity in Democratic Athens. PhD diss., University of Birminghan. https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/5046/1/Kears14PhD.pdf. Kennedy, R. 2014. Immigrant Women in Athens: Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in the Classical City. New York and London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315817774. Lape, S. 2010. Race and Citizen Identity in the Classical Athenian Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511676024. Lenski, N. 2018. ‘Framing the Question: What Is a Slave Society?’ In Lenski and Cameron 2018, 15–57. doi:10.1017/9781316534908.002. Lenski, N. and C. Cameron, eds. 2018. What is a Slave Society? The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316534908. Lewis, M. D. 2015. ‘Slavery and Manumission.’ In Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Law, edited by E. Harris and M. Canevaro, 1–34. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199599257.013.21. Lewis, M. D. 2018. Greek Slave Systems in their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c. 800– 146 BC, Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198769941.001.0001. Loraux, N. 1981. L’invention d’Athènes: histoire de l’oraison funèbre dans la ‘cité classique.’ Paris, The Hague and New York: Mouton/EHESS. doi:10.1515/9783110814088. Loraux, N. 2005. La cité divisée: l’oubli dans la mémoire d’Athènes. Paris: Payot & Rivages. Mansouri, S. 2011. Athènes vue par ses métèques (Ve–IVe siècles av. J.-C.). Paris: Tallandier. Manville, P. 1994. ‘Towards a New Paradigm of Athenian Citizenship.’ In Athenian Identity and Civic Ideology, edited by A. Boegehold and A. Scafuro, 21–33. Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Marr, J. L. and P. J. Rhodes. 2008. ‘Commentary.’ In The ‘Old Oligarch.’ The Constitution of the Athenians Attributed to Xenophon, edited and translated by J. L. Marr and P. J. Rhodes, 59–168. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Marx, K. 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin. McKeown, N. 2011. ‘Resistance among Chattel Slaves in the Classical Greek World.’ In Bradley and Cartledge 2011, 153–75. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521840668.010. Meier, C. 1980. Die Entstehung des Politischen bei den Griechen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

214

Fábio Augusto Morales

Morales, F. A. 2009. ‘Cidadãos e habitantes: por uma dialética da polis.’ In Estudos sobre a cidade antiga, edited by M. Florenzano and E. Hirata, 185–203. São Paulo: EDUSP. Morales, F. A. 2014. A democracia ateniense pelo avesso: os metecos e a política nos discursos de Lísias. São Paulo: EDUSP. Morales, F. A. and U. G. da Silva. 2020. ‘História Antiga e História Global: afluentes e confluências.’ Revista Brasileira de História 40 (83): 125–50. doi:10.1590/1806– 93472020v40n83–06. Ober, J. 1996. The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv14164gc. Osborne, R. 2000. ‘Religion, Imperial Politics, and the Offering of Freedom to Slaves.’ In Law and Social Status in Classical Athens, edited by V. Hunter and J. Edmonson, 75–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paiaro, D. and M. Requena. 2015. ‘“Muchas veces pegarías a un ateniense creyendo que era un esclavo” . . . (PS-X, 1, 10): espacios democráticos y relaciones de dependencia en la Atenas Clásica.’ In Los espacios de la esclavitud y la dependencia desde la antigüedad, edited by A. Beltrán, I. Sastre and M. Valdés, 153–70. Besançon: Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté. Parker, R. 2005. ‘Law and Religion.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Law, edited by M. Gagarin and D. Cohen, 61–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521818400.004. Pébarthe, C. 2012. ‘Faire l’histoire de la démocratie athénienne avec Cornelius Castoriadis.’ REA 114 (1): 139–57. Rhodes, P. J., ed. 2004. Athenian Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rhodes, P. J. 2009. ‘Civic Ideology and Citizenship.’ In A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought, edited by R. K. Balot, 57–69. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781444310344.ch4. Rihll, T. E. 2011. ‘Classical Athens.’ In Bradley and Cartledge 2011, 48–73. doi:10.1017/ CHOL9780521840668.005. Rostovtzeff, M. 1926. A History of the Ancient World. Vol. 1: The Orient and Greece. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sosin, J. D. 2015. ‘Manumission with Paramone: Conditional Freedom?’ TAPhA 145 (2): 325–81. Taylor, C. and K. Vlassopoulos, 2015. ‘Introduction: An Agenda for the Study of Greek History.’ In Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World, edited by C. Taylor and K. Vlassopoulos, 1–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof: oso/9780198726494.003.0001. Thompson, E. P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Pantheon. Todd, S. 1993. The Shape of Athenian Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Todd, S. 2007. A Commentary on Lysias: Speeches 1–11. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vagios, V. 2018. ‘The Citizenship Debates, Lysias, and the Metics in Athens after the Restoration of Democracy.’ Interface 6: 23–64. doi:10.6667/interface.7.2018.74. Vernant, J.-P. 1962. Les origines de la pensée grecque. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Vlassopoulos, K. 2007. Unthinking the Greek Polis: Ancient Greek History beyond Eurocentrism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511482946. Vlassopoulos, K. 2009. ‘Slavery, Freedom and Citizenship in Classical Athens: Beyond a Legalistic Approach.’ European Review of History 16 (3): 347–63. doi:10.1080/ 13507480902916852.

Metics, slaves and citizens in Athens 215 Vlassopoulos, K. 2013. Greeks and Barbarians. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139049368. Vlassopoulos, K. 2016. ‘Does Slavery Have a History? The Consequences of a Global Approach.’ Journal of Global Slavery 1: 5–27. doi:10.1163/2405836X-00101002. Vlassopoulos, K. 2018. ‘The End of Enslavement, “Greek style”.’ In The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries, edited by S. Hodkinson, M. Kleijwegt and K. Vlassopoulos, 1–23. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199575251.013.39. Von Reden, S. 1995. ‘The Piraeus—A World Apart.’ G&R 42 (1): 24–37. https://doi. org/10.1017/S0017383500025201. Weber, M. 1966. The City. Translated by D. Martindale and G. Neuwirth. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Whitehead, D. 1977. The Ideology of the Athenian Metic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wijma, S. 2014. Embracing the Immigrant: The Participation of Metics in Athenian Polis Religion (5th-4th Century BC). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Wood, E. M. 1995. Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511558344. Zelnick-Abramovitz, R. 2005. Not Wholly Free: The Concept of Manumission and the Status of Manumitted Slaves in the Ancient Greek World. Mnemosyne, Supplements 266. Leiden: Brill. doi:10.1163/9789047408178.

10 What is below? The case of the Athenian riot of 508/7 BC Alex Gottesman

Riots in Athens? Practitioners of history from below have long been interested in crowds. Riots, protests and uprisings: such are the subjects that occupied pioneering historians like George Rudé and Edward P. Thompson.1 For these scholars, pre-modern riots were not simply knee-jerk responses to external or economic stimuli. Instead, they were the expressions of a ‘popular ideology’ (Rudé) or a ‘plebeian culture’ (Thompson) with its own values, often opposed to the elite ones, that was a forerunner of the nineteenth-century working-class movement. The historian looking for analogous events in ancient Greece will find the pickings quite slim, especially for classical Athens, where, judging from the sources, it seems riots were practically unheard of.2 It has been accordingly argued that Athens lacked the kind of ‘popular culture’ that E. P. Thompson saw as the necessary background to the politics of riot.3 Simply put, Athenian culture was popular culture, so we should not be surprised if Athens lacked the crowd actions that result when ordinary people feel they lack power or a say in government policy. Why would Athenians raise a riot, if they could raise their voices in the Assembly whenever they wanted or bring their disputes to a resolution through the courts? There is undoubtedly some truth to this. And yet outbreaks of what we would call ‘riots’ did occur in Athens. There are three reasons why we have not seen them as such. The first reason has to do with how our sources conceived of and talked about collective, public action. Greek did have a word that comes close to the English ‘mob,’ ochlos, and a writer like Thucydides deploys it liberally, but it is normally to characterise the irrational behaviour of an assembly, not a crowd in the street. This is because, as Hunter notes, ‘crowd, assembly and collective as a whole, or city, are identical in Thucydides’ mind.’4 As I argued in my Politics and the Street, extra-institutional political action was far from uncommon, especially before the fourth century. Our sources shared Thucydides’ tendency to conflate the crowd with the assembly; to ascribe to the demos a singular identity whether it was to be found in the assembly, the court or the street. From this perspective, there was a sense that extra-institutional politics were illegitimate and dangerous, because they could corrupt the orderly chain of communication between speakers and audiences.5 DOI: 10.4324/9781003005148-14

What is below? 217 Our sources’ concept of collective action is one problem for history from below. A related problem is our own concept of collective agency. Simona Cerutti has recently called attention to this problem.6 She argues that the spatial metaphor of ‘above/below’ that Thompson embraced tends to foster an unduly bipolar view of society: above is the elite whose perspective produced (and is reproduced in) our sources, and below is the mass, the common people or plebs whose lives and minds we strain to glimpse. This view assumes that these identities are constant and well-defined. In fact, this has been one of the most trenchant criticisms of Thompson’s view of late eighteenth-century riots and society more generally.7 In Athens (as I argued in Politics and the Street), many of the same actors who were active in the institutions also engaged in extra-institutional action, for instance the kinds of actions I called ‘publicity stunts.’ People took to the street not necessarily because they were excluded from the central institutions but because it allowed them to communicate with a broader public in pursuit of their aims. It makes little sense to imagine Athenian riots as the province of an excluded or marginal class. Instead, it makes better sense to think of it as a marginal way of acting that was deeply problematic. The final reason why we have not noticed riots in ancient Athens is related to the first two reasons but should be kept distinct. When Athenians rioted, they were not rioting against the crown or a government in parliament; they were rioting against themselves. Riot thus overlapped uncomfortably with the phenomenon they called stasis. Riot’s conflation with stasis means that there is a bias in our sources against remembering it. After the riot passed, the process of coming to terms with it would necessitate the creation of a cathartic and reassuring narrative that prioritised the reintegration of the city by portraying the riot either as the act of a few or as taking place between the demos and a foreign enemy. The simplest way I can put it is that Athenians did not like to talk or think about occasions when it would seem to them that the demos was turning against itself. The Civil War of 403 and its legal prohibition against ‘remembering wrongs’ is the best-known example of this, but it is not the only one.8 Euphemism and omission surround collective acts of violence in our sources. Only by reading between the lines of our sources will we be able to see past, or rather below, them. If I am right that events that would have looked a lot like riots to us did occur in Athens, and the main reason we do not know about them is because of how Athenians talked about them after the fact, then it should be possible to go through the historical record and to identify possible riots. Riotous violence was probably more frequent in the archaic period—at least there are more signs of it in the sources. But the classical period was no stranger to it. Incidents involving what we would call ‘riot’ might include the stoning of Lycidas and his wife, possibly the murder of Ephialtes, the murders of Androcles and Phrynichus, as well as whenever someone threatened to or in fact did ‘hand over’ someone to the Eleven for execution without a trial.9 More work needs to be done to tease out the lineaments of crowd actions and the way they intersected with the legal system.10 Here, instead, I will offer a proof of concept by focusing on the one occasion

218 Alex Gottesman when historians generally agree there was in fact a riot in Athens, in 508/7 BC. The debate around this incident has turned on the issues of its leadership and how it related to subsequent democratic reforms. These are big questions that go to the heart of the Athenian democratic revolution, and I will only touch upon them here. My main focus is on how the sources remembered the event and how they thought about its significance. I will suggest that, whatever it actually was, we can see our sources coming to terms with it over time by slowly altering its contours so that it resembled not a riot at all, but the demos rising up against an occupying force.

The major sources Historians have long suspected that a politics of memory was at work around the end of the tyranny and the Athenian democratic revolution.11 Although the reforms of Cleisthenes were clearly important in the history of Athenian democracy, it was only Herodotus who suggested that Cleisthenes ‘set up the tribes and the democracy for the Athenians’ (6.131.1). Isocrates knew him as ‘the one who kicked out the tyrants and restored the demos’ (7.16; cp. 15.306). Pausanias saw his grave monument in the Cerameicus, but he only names him as a tribal reformer (Paus. 1.29.6). In antiquity Athenians tended to credit their democracy to the mythical Theseus, the quasi-mythical Solon or the mythologized tyrant-slayers, rather than Cleisthenes.12 Only the 1891 publication of the Athenaion Politeia alerted scholars to the singular importance of Cleisthenes’ reforms for the history of democracy, although there continues to be much debate about it.13 In an oft-cited paper Ober criticised the scholarly consensus for making the opposite mistake and focusing too much on Cleisthenes, a tendency he rightly attributed ‘to the uncritical . . . acceptance of a view of history that supposes that all advances in human affairs come through the consciously willed actions of individual members of an elite.’14 Ober suggests that Cleisthenes’ reforms grew out of a brief, popular riot that ‘made democracy possible by changing the terms of discussion, by enlarging the bounds of the thinkable, and by altering the way citizens treated one another.’15 Before, the Athenians had been in thrall to powerful aristocratic families. But after 508 Athenians were filled with a political energy that set the city on a new path. A leaderless riot was the catalyst. As he notes, ‘Democracy comes into existence with the capacity of a demos to act as a collective historical agent.’16 Ober shares a tendency to imagine the Athenian democratic revolution as a relatively bloodless and smooth process. As Anderson sums up: ‘The Acropolis siege aside, the process lacked the popular activism, the violence, and the terror one usually associates with radical progressive change.’17 Rather, a close reading of our narrative sources, along with a recently unearthed inscription, suggests that the sources have significantly downplayed and even effaced the signs of civil violence. I will suggest that starting at the time of the events or very soon after Athenians sought to remember the riot as anything but what it was: the culmination

What is below? 219 of an especially intense and bloody period of civil violence. This memory faded over time as the riot became defined as a battle between a united demos and its (mostly foreign) enemies. Our two major sources about the riot are Herodotus (5.66, 69–78) and the Athenaion Politeia (20–2). It has been long recognised that the Aristotelian author (hereafter A.) follows Herodotus closely, probably because Herodotus was the best source he could find about archaic Athens.18 A. breaks off when Cleisthenes returns to Athens, after the siege of the Acropolis. He then discusses the constitutional details of his reforms, for which he drew on a different source.19 Herodotus goes on to discuss Cleomenes’ return to Attica and the subsequent hostilities with Boeotia and Euboea. The divergence between the two texts at this point has caused much chronological dispute, with some scholars arguing that Herodotus dates the reforms immediately before Isagoras’ appeal to Cleomenes, whereas A. dates them some years after his expulsion from the Acropolis.20 Here I am not interested in the events’ chronology but rather in how our two sources imagine they occurred. Their differences are not minor. Herodotus tells a story about how Athens became powerful. A. tells a story about how Athens became democratic. A.’s story fits a pattern of conflict between the forces of aristocracy and those of democracy. In good Aristotelian fashion he has organised his treatise around the concept of metabolē, change or transformation (28, 41).21 Cleisthenes’ is the ‘Fifth Transformation’ that Athens underwent on its way to the radical form it had at the time of the text’s composition (41.2).22 He goes through each stage of the democracy as it featured a ‘champion of the demos’ and an opposing ‘champion of the nobles’ (28.2). His view is, as Rhodes notes, ‘naïvely over-simple in its assumption of a permanent opposition between γνώριμοι and πλῆθος, with each party acquiring a new leader at the same time.’23 Naïve it surely is, but A.’s polar view of Athenian history has shaped his reading of Herodotus.24 Demos-protectors pursue policies that gratify the demos and increase its power. These diminish the nobles, and vice versa. For example, Ephialtes’ reform of the Areopagus was in keeping with his role of demos-protector (25.1, 28.2), while the aristocratic Cimon was his counterpart. A. suggests Cleisthenes was the third ‘protector of the demos,’ after Solon and Peisistratus, and Isagoras opposed him, at least for a time (28.2). Both accounts start from the expulsion of the Peisistratids. They agree that it led to a power struggle between two men: (Hdt. 5.66.1–2) Ἀθῆναι, ἐοῦσαι καὶ πρὶν μεγάλαι, τότε ἀπαλλαχθεῖσαι τυράννων ἐγίνοντο μέζονες· ἐν δὲ αὐτῇσι δύο ἄνδρες ἐδυνάστευον, Κλεισθένης τε ἀνὴρ Ἀλκμεωνίδης . . . καὶ Ἰσαγόρης Τισάνδρου οἰκίης μὲν ἐὼν δοκίμου, ἀτὰρ τὰ ἀνέκαθεν οὐκ ἔχω φράσαι· θύουσι δὲ οἱ συγγενέες αὐτοῦ Διὶ Καρίῳ. οὗτοι οἱ ἄνδρες ἐστασίασαν περὶ δυνάμιος,

(Ath.Pol. 20.1) καταλυθείσης δὲ τῆς τυραννίδος, ἐστασίαζον πρὸς ἀλλήλους Ἰσαγόρας ὁ Τεισάνδρου φίλος ὢν τῶν τυράννων, καὶ Κλεισθένης τοῦ γένους ὢν τῶν Ἀλκμεωνιδῶν

220 Alex Gottesman ‘Athens, though powerful before, became even more powerful when it got rid of its tyrants. In it two men were in charge: Cleisthenes the Alcmaeonid and Isagoras son of Teisander. He was from a good family but I cannot comment on his ancestors. They sacrifice to Carian Zeus. These men were engaged in civil strife over power.’

‘When the tyranny was abolished, there engaged in civil strife against each other Isagoras son of Teisander, a friend of the tyrants, and Cleisthenes from the Alcmaeonid genos.’

Herodotus writes that both Cleisthenes and Isagoras were powerful men who ‘engaged in a stasis over control.’ A. turned that into ‘they engaged in a stasis against each other.’ This is a subtle change but not an insignificant one. More tellingly, whereas Herodotus says that he was unable to find much information about the family of Isagoras, A. confidently makes of Isagoras ‘a friend of the tyrants.’25 This is contrary to Herodotus, who involved Isagoras in Cleomenes’ earlier attack against the Pisistratid tyrants—hardly the work of a ‘friend.’ He tells us it was during that attack that the two met and got very familiar with each other, and he repeats some scurrilous gossip about Cleomenes’ over-familiarity with Isagoras’ wife (70.1). A. strikes out all of that and decorously states only that the two were guest-friends, xenoi (20.2). He thus clears the way for Isagoras to be a friend of the tyrants and a ‘protector of the nobles.’ If one of the two was a ‘friend of the tyrants,’ it was Cleisthenes, who apparently held the office of archon in 525/4 BC (IG 13.1031a; cp. Thuc. 6.54.6).26 Furthermore, for Herodotus the Alcmaeonid Cleisthenes had a better claim to aristocracy than Isagoras, about whose family Herodotus says he could find no information, except that ‘it was of a fine house [οἰκίης μὲν ἐὼν δοκίμου],’ albeit with a hint of foreign extraction.27 A. is on slightly firmer ground in reading Herodotus’ Cleisthenes as a ‘protector of the demos.’ But it is instructive to see how A. has altered Herodotus’ text. (Hdt. 5.66.2) ἑσσούμενος δὲ ὁ Κλεισθένης τὸν δῆμον προσεταιρίζεται, μετὰ δὲ τετραφύλους ἐόντας Ἀθηναίους δεκαφύλους ἐποίησε ‘Cleisthenes was losing, and so he “got clubby” with the demos, and later he turned the Athenians’ four tribes to ten.’

(Ath. Pol. 20.1) ἡττώμενος δὲ ταῖς ἑταιρείαις ὁ Κλεισθένης, προσηγάγετο τὸν δῆμον, ἀποδιδοὺς τῷ πλήθει τὴν πολιτείαν ‘Cleisthenes was losing in the clubs, and brought over the demos, giving the state over to the crowd.’

Herodotus states that Cleisthenes allied himself with the demos in his conflict with Isagoras (cp. 5.69.2). He does not explain what form that alliance took. He simply says that Cleisthenes ‘later’ reformed the tribes; this was Cleisthenes’

What is below? 221 claim to fame. A. takes him to mean that Isagoras was besting Cleisthenes in the ‘clubs’ (hetaireiai), so he had to turn to the demos. He apparently did not, or chose not to, understand what Herodotus meant by προσεταιρίζεται. His ἡττώμενος δὲ ταῖς ἑταιρείαις is a gloss and not a very good one. 28 He then connects the second part of Herodotus’ sentence to the first using a coordinating participle where Herodotus had used a finite verb. Herodotus did not write that the tribal reforms were a populist appeal for support, as A. clearly takes him to mean.29 Herodotus’ interpretation of the reforms actually precludes the possibility of the reforms as populist. He goes on to explain that they were similar to those of Cleisthenes’ grandfather, Cleisthenes the tyrant of Sicyon, who changed the traditional names of the tribes to humorously insulting ones out of spite, while reserving the name of Archelaoi or ‘Leaders of the People’ for his own tribe (5.68.1). A. continues to read Herodotus closely, but always through the same lens that obscures the civil side of the conflict: (5.72.1) Κλεομένης δὲ ὡς πέμπων ἐξέβαλλε Κλεισθένεα καὶ τοὺς ἐναγέας, Κλεισθένης μὲν αὐτὸς ὑπεξέσχε, μετὰ δὲ οὐδὲν ἧσσον παρῆν ἐς τὰς Ἀθήνας ὁ Κλεομένης οὐ σὺν μεγάλῃ χειρί, ἀπικόμενος δὲ ἀγηλατέει ἑπτακόσια ἐπίστια Ἀθηναίων, τά οἱ ὑπέθετο ὁ Ἰσαγόρης. ‘Cleomenes sent word to expel Cleisthenes and the accursed, and Cleisthenes himself departed. But nonetheless Cleomenes later arrived with no large a band. When he arrived he drove forth 700 Athenians’ epistia, which Isagoras pointed to him.’

(20.3) ὑπεξελθόντος δὲ τοῦ Κλεισθένους,

μετʼ ὀλίγων, ἡγηλάτει τῶν Ἀθηναίων ἑπτακοσίας οἰκίας ‘When Cleisthenes departed with a few, and drove forth 700 Athenians’ households.’

Herodotus has Cleomenes arrive οὐ σὺν μεγάλῃ χειρί, ‘not with a large force.’ A. says he arrived μετʼ ὀλίγων, ‘with a few.’ He had already dealt with Cylon, the source of the curse, in the lost beginning of the treatise, so along with the gossip about Cleomenes and Isagoras’ wife, he also omits Herodotus’ brief recap of the Cylon Affair immediately before the passage just quoted here (5.71). He does adopt Herodotus’ ἀγηλατέει, literally ‘drive out the pollution,’ despite its incongruously tragic tone. Clearly, Herodotus’ ἐπίστια was too much for him. He replaces the term with οἰκίας, although that is probably not what Herodotus intended. As Cromey argues, Herodotus probably thought these were Cleisthenes’ political supporters, not just the descendants of the Alcmaeonidae.30 Herodotus explains that these ἐπίστια were the ones that ‘Isagoras pointed out to him [τά οἱ ὑπέθετο ὁ Ἰσαγόρης],’ that is, they were people he considered his political enemies. A. omits that detail as well, presumably because households are self-evident, whereas political opponents are not.

222 Alex Gottesman A. now follows Herodotus very closely, to a point that today we would consider plagiarism: (5.72.1–3) ταῦτα δὲ ποιήσας δεύτερα τὴν βουλὴν καταλύειν ἐπειρᾶτο, τριηκοσίοισι δὲ τοῖσι Ἰσαγόρεω στασιώτῃσι τὰς ἀρχὰς ἐνεχείριζε. ἀντισταθείσης δὲ τῆς βουλῆς καὶ οὐ βουλομένης πείθεσθαι, ὅ τε Κλεομένης καὶ ὁ Ἰσαγόρης καὶ οἱ στασιῶται αὐτοῦ καταλαμβάνουσι τὴν ἀκρόπολιν. Ἀθηναίων δὲ οἱ λοιποὶ τὰ αὐτὰ φρονήσαντες ἐπολιόρκεον αὐτοὺς ἡμέρας δύο· τῇ δὲ τρίτῃ ὑπόσπονδοι ἐξέρχονται ἐκ τῆς χώρης ὅσοι ἦσαν αὐτῶν Λακεδαιμόνιοι. ‘After doing that, next he tried to dissolve the council, and tried to hand over the magistracies to three hundred of Isagoras’ partisans. When the council resisted and did not wish to go along with it, Cleomenes and Isagoras and his partisans occupied the Acropolis. The rest of the Athenians with one mind besieged them for two days. On the third day under a truce came out those among them who were Lacedaemonians.’

(20.3) ταῦτα δὲ διαπραξάμενος, τὴν μὲν βουλὴν ἐπειρᾶτο καταλύειν, Ἰσαγόραν δὲ καὶ τριακοσίους τῶν φίλων μετʼ αὐτοῦ κυρίους καθιστάναι τῆς πόλεως. τῆς δὲ βουλῆς ἀντιστάσης καὶ συναθροισθέντος τοῦ πλήθους, οἱ μὲν περὶ τὸν Κλεομένην καὶ Ἰσαγόραν κατέφυγον εἰς τὴν ἀκρόπολιν, ὁ δὲ δῆμος δύο μὲν ἡμέρας προσκαθεζόμενος ἐπολιόρκει, τῇ δὲ τρίτῃ Κλεομένην μὲν καὶ τοὺς μετʼ αὐτοῦ πάντας ἀφεῖσαν ὑποσπόνδους. ‘After managing that, he tried to dissolve the council, and to make Isagoras and three hundred of his friends masters of the city. When the council resisted and the crowd assembled, the associates of Cleomenes and Isagoras took refuge on the Acropolis. The demos sat down and besieged them for two days. On the third, they let go Cleomenes and all those with him under a truce.’

These closely parallel passages are the ones that Ober relied on for his theory of a popular insurrection. Taking the agent from A. (‘the demos’) with the action from Herodotus (‘thinking the same things’), he finds ‘a highly developed civic consciousness among the Athenian masses—a generalised ability to formulate a popular consensus and act upon common knowledge.’ 31 But Herodotus did not mention ‘Athenian masses’ or even ‘the demos’ gathering against Isagoras and Cleomenes. He wrote instead ‘the rest of the Athenians.’ The rest of the Athenians—as opposed to whom? Who is it below here? The answer should be obvious: it was not the demos, as opposed to the elites (as Ober takes him to mean), but it was the Athenians, as opposed to the Athenians on the Acropolis. Herodotus clearly conceives this incident as a stasis, while A. consistently and systematically rejects that view. Herodotus calls Isagoras’ 300 supporters stasiotai, ‘partisans.’ For A., they are simply ‘associates.’ Herodotus says that Isagoras sought to install his partisans in ‘official posts,’ archai. A. more vaguely says that he tried to make his ‘friends’ into ‘masters of the city.’ Along those lines, Herodotus imagines that Cleomenes and Isagoras ‘occupied’ the Acropolis as a way to assert control over the city, perhaps as he imagines Peisistratus did previously (cp. 1.59.6). A. instead

What is below? 223 has them ‘take refuge’ there. Herodotus was his only narrative source, so this is his interpretation of Herodotus’ text.32 Why does he change the story? My suggestion is that he has Cleomenes and Isagoras flee to the Acropolis rather than occupy it because he imagines the entire demos uniting against them and chasing them there. It is not surprising that A. left out Herodotus’ story about Cleomenes run-in with the priestess on the Acropolis (72.3–4). That kind of story fits Herodotus’ style but would be jarring in A.’s account. But his version of what happened next cannot be merely a stylistic difference. Herodotus wrote: ὑπόσπονδοι ἐξέρχονται ἐκ τῆς χώρης ὅσοι ἦσαν αὐτῶν Λακεδαιμόνιοι under a truce came out those among them who were Lacedaemonians In A. this becomes: Κλεομένην μὲν καὶ τοὺς μετʼ αὐτοῦ πάντας ἀφεῖσαν ὑποσπόνδους. they let go Cleomenes and all those with him under a truce. Herodotus is quite clear that it was only the Spartans who left the Acropolis under treaty. A. states instead that everyone left the Acropolis. 33 I cannot agree with Rhodes that A. ‘probably . . . has simply been careless in his paraphrase.’34 A.’s paraphrase is consistent with his purpose throughout this passage. He emphatically rejects Herodotus’ claim that non-Spartans (i.e. Athenians) who took part in the unsuccessful occupation of the Acropolis were executed. Herodotus repeats this claim emphatically: ‘The Athenians tied up the rest for death [τοὺς δὲ ἄλλους Ἀθηναῖοι κατέδησαν τὴν ἐπὶ θανάτῳ]’ (72.4). ‘They perished in bondage [οὗτοι μέν νυν δεδεμένοι ἐτελεύτησαν]’ (73.1). He even names one of those victims, the athlete Timesitheus of Delphi.35 The fact that he names a Delphian athlete does not mean that Herodotus did not think that Athenians shared his fate. It probably means that Herodotus knew of his participation independently of what he heard in Athens. Hence, he notes: ‘about [Timesitheus’] deeds of strength and courage I could say a lot’ (72.4).36 Pausanias also tells us that Timesitheus was a champion pancratiast who had won twice at Olympia (where he saw his statue) and three times at Delphi. He too attests to his execution at the hands of the Athenians after the siege ended, as ‘one of those left behind on the Acropolis [τῶν ἐγκαταληφθέντων ἐν τῇ ἀκροπόλει]’ (6.8.6). A. elsewhere contradicts Herodotus explicitly, noting that the demos in the postPeisistratid period showed ‘its characteristic restraint [χρώμενοι τῇ εἰωθυίᾳ τοῦ δήμου πρᾳότητι]’ (22.4).37

224 Alex Gottesman A.’s selective use of Herodotus’ text should be clear from the following chart, where he concludes his use of Herodotus and turns to another source of information: (72.3–73.2) τῇ δὲ τρίτῃ ὑπόσπονδοι ἐξέρχονται ἐκ τῆς χώρης ὅσοι ἦσαν αὐτῶν Λακεδαιμόνιοι. ἐπετελέετο δὲ τῷ Κλεομένεϊ ἡ φήμη etc. . . . τοὺς δὲ ἄλλους Ἀθηναῖοι κατέδησαν τὴν ἐπὶ θανάτῳ, ἐν δὲ αὐτοῖσι καὶ Τιμησίθεον τὸν Δελφόν, τοῦ ἔργα χειρῶν τε καὶ λήματος ἔχοιμʼ ἂν μέγιστα καταλέξαι. οὗτοι μέν νυν δεδεμένοι ἐτελεύτησαν, Ἀθηναῖοι δὲ μετὰ ταῦτα Κλεισθένεα καὶ τὰ ἑπτακόσια ἐπίστια τὰ διωχθέντα ὑπὸ Κλεομένεος μεταπεμψάμενοι πέμπουσι ἀγγέλους ἐς Σάρδις, συμμαχίην βουλόμενοι ποιήσασθαι πρὸς Πέρσας. ‘On the third day under a truce the Lacedaemonians among them departed the territory. Thus was the prophecy of Cleomenes fulfilled etc [i.e. the prophetic utterance of the priestess when he first entered the sanctuary on the Acropolis]. The rest the Athenians tied up and condemned to death, including among them Timesitheus of Delphi, about who feats and character I could say a great deal. These died in bonds. Later the Athenians summoned back Cleisthenes and the 700 epistia which had been expelled by Cleomenes, and sent word to Sardis because they wanted to make an alliance with the Persians.’

(20.3–4). τῇ δὲ τρίτῃ Κλεομένην μὲν καὶ τοὺς μετʼ αὐτοῦ πάντας ἀφεῖσαν ὑποσπόνδους, Κλεισθένην δὲ καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους φυγάδας μετεπέμψαντο. κατασχόντος δὲ τοῦ δήμου τὰ πράγματα, Κλεισθένης ἡγεμὼν ἦν καὶ τοῦ δήμου προστάτης.

‘On the third day they released Cleomenes and all those with him under a truce, and they summoned back Cleisthenes and the other fugitives. Then the demos took over matters. Cleisthenes was the leader and champion of the demos.’

He adopts Herodotus’ grammatical structure and vocabulary, except that he turns his string of connectives into a neat men/de structure. This is not mere carelessness. The careful effect is to compress the time frame in order to erase the executions. Without executions, he is able to present the siege as the spontaneous response of the united demos to a foreign invader. With that aim in mind, he turns Herodotus’ participle μεταπεμψάμενοι to the finite verb μετεπέμψαντο. He thus puts a hard stop right where Herodotus goes on to the uncomfortable topic of the Athenians’ appeal to Persia (which Ober also omits). If A. had included the Athenians’ overtures to Persia, it would put a very different light on his narrative.38 It would suggest that the Spartans’ exit from Athens was not the end of the matter. That would mean that the Athenians continued to fear Spartan involvement in their internal politics, which would further suggest that the unrest that accompanied Spartan intervention did not end when Cleomenes and his ‘friends’ withdrew from the Acropolis. Elsewhere A. refers to this period as tarachai or ‘troubles’ (22.4). His intent, it seems, is to portray it as anything but as factional conflict or stasis. Elsewhere he even suggests that ‘[Cleisthenes] had no factional opponent, since the group of Isagoras had fallen [τούτῳ μὲν οὐδεὶς ἦν ἀντιστασιώτης, ὡς ἐξέπεσον οἱ περὶ τὸν Ἰσαγόραν]’ (28.2). This comment is odd. He had already characterised Cleisthenes

What is below? 225 and Isagoras in terms of the categorical opposition between ‘protector of the demos’ and ‘protector of the nobles.’ Why would he mention the two opponents as instances of a categorical difference only to deny that they fit it? Furthermore, according to Herodotus, Isagoras had not fallen. The Spartans tried again to install him in power (74.1). But A. ignores the sequel of Herodotus’ story completely. Pro-nobility, pro-tyranny forces were behind the Acropolis siege. Once they failed, the field was clear for Cleisthenes, as ‘protector of the demos,’ to put in place his pro-demos reforms (21). Executions of Athenians and proposed alliances with Persia would only complicate his neat narrative about the arc of democracy. I don’t want to suggest that Herodotus’ account is true and that A.’s is false— although A.’s omissions suggest that Herodotus was perhaps closer to the truth. It is only because we are lucky to have both texts available to us, and that A. follows Herodotus so closely, that we can see the ‘deleted scenes’ that he left on his cutting room floor. When Herodotus for his part spoke to his informants, no less than 60 years had passed.39 They did not tell him the whole story behind the reforms of Cleisthenes. In lieu of an explanation for the reforms, he relates an amusing story about the tribal reforms of Cleisthenes’ grandfather at Sicyon, suggesting that perhaps the Athenian’s reforms were similar; note his introductory δοκέειν ἐμοί (5.67.1), suggesting this was his personal opinion, not something he was told. The next section will suggest that A.’s version of the events surrounding the reforms was actually closer to what most Athenians believed, or wanted to believe, probably by the time of Herodotus’ visit to Athens ca. 440, and perhaps even earlier. A veil of silence had already started falling on the events. It is to Herodotus’ great credit that he was able to pierce it as much as he did.

The minor sources When Aristophanes’ chorus of old men in his Lysistrata hear that women have occupied the Acropolis, they find inspiration in their siege of Cleomenes. If they could dislodge an honest-to-goodness Spartan king from the Acropolis, they should have no trouble with some women. They race to the city, singing: Not even Cleomenes, who occupied it first, went away un-molested, but, though huffing Laconically, he departed surrendering his arms to me, wearing a tiny little cloak, hungry, dishevelled, unplucked, unwashed for six years. That’s how I besieged that man: rough, seventeen shields deep by the gates—napping’ [οὕτως ἐπολιόρκησʼ ἐγὼ τὸν ἄνδρʼ ἐκεῖνον ὠμῶς ἐφʼ ἑπτακαίδεκʼ ἀσπίδων πρὸς ταῖς πύλαις καθεύδων] (273–82) It would be naïve to expect Aristophanes to give a reliable account of the siege. After all, a hoplite assault would probably not be the best way to besiege the Acropolis. As far as the chorus know, Cleomenes had ‘occupied’ the Acropolis,

226 Alex Gottesman like Herodotus wrote, rather than fled there, as in A.’s version. It is impossible to say if that is what Aristophanes believed or if that version simply works better as an analogy for Lysistrata’s action. More crucially, the chorus believe that the Spartans withdrew under a treaty. The old men imagine that if they set fire to the gates the women will run away, and as they come out they can molest them just as they once ‘molested’ a much tougher occupier. As they ‘remember’ the event, they simply showed up with their shields and the Spartans ran away. Regardless of whether Cleomenes occupied the Acropolis or sought refuge there, the joke would not work if the audience remembered Herodotus’ version of what happened while the old men were napping. The joke only works if the audience thought that all the occupiers of the Acropolis withdrew, humiliated and manhandled perhaps, but very much alive.40 As Thomas has shown about Athenians’ knowledge about the end of tyranny, divergent accounts could exist at the same time. As she notes, ‘Oral tradition can accommodate different tales or versions with contradictory implications.’41 An ancient scholar commenting on Aristophanes’ passage hit upon evidence of such a different version of the aftermath of Cleomenes’ siege. The evidence not only fills in Aristophanes’ silence about what happened after the siege ended, but, interestingly, it also reveals a gap in Herodotus’ text. This is what he found in his source: Cleomenes: Lacedaemonian general. Campaigned in Attica with some Athenians for tyranny, occupied the Acropolis, besieged by the Athenians and released under a treaty, on his way home again he occupied Eleusis. The Athenians destroyed the houses and confiscated the property of those who occupied Eleusis alongside Cleomenes, and condemned them to death. Writing it up on a bronze stele they placed it in the city near the Old Temple. (sch. ad Ar. Lys. 273) It should be obvious that Athenians fought on the side of Cleomenes because he was fighting on the side of Isagoras. But both A. and Aristophanes present the event primarily as a conflict between Athenians and Spartans, not as one in which Athenians faced off against Athenians. Athenian partisans do not feature in either account. If all we had was A. and Aristophanes, we would not have known that Athenians fought on the losing side and paid a steep price. The scholiast’s source makes clear that Athenians were executed, just as Herodotus tells us.42 He goes beyond Herodotus in stating that the punishment included razing their houses, confiscating their property and writing their names on a bronze stele on the Acropolis. The razing of the house ‘was clearly a very severe action,’ reserved for ‘murders . . . tyranny . . . and betraying one’s country for profit.’43 Forsdyke has argued that its carnivalesque atmosphere would have engaged the entire community in a dramatic and impactful experience, akin to stoning.44 House razing was an attempt to display or create a broad consensus in the community about a crime. Furthermore, bronze seems to have been a preferred medium for commemorating the punishment of especially serious crimes against the community or of those offenders whose punishment the community saw fit

What is below? 227 to make especially prominent and memorable.45 The scholiast’s source is very specific about the stele commemorating this event. Its placement on the Acropolis suggests that shortly after the events there was a clear desire to punish the ‘collaborators’ and to memorialise the fact of their punishment. The most surprising part of the scholiast’s information is how it differs from Herodotus’ account. While the scholiast agrees with Herodotus about the execution of Cleomenes’ Athenian partisans, his information does not line up with Herodotus.’ He is quite clear that the executed partisans cooperated with Cleomenes in Eleusis. He does not mention executions of those who occupied the Acropolis. He also says that Cleomenes occupied [κατέσχε] Eleusis on his way home. If Cleomenes only had a small group of Spartan soldiers with him, as Herodotus tells us, then either these must have been a select group indeed or many local partisans must have actively participated in its occupation. By contrast, Herodotus suggests that Cleomenes came back to Eleusis after gathering an army. He says it was a big army (74.2), in contrast to the earlier group (72.1). This army was entirely Peloponnesian. But amazingly, after the armies have assembled, the Peloponnesians simply dispersed (5.74.1–75.3). Herodotus’ version of the story suggests that not only were there no executions after the battle of Eleusis but there was also no battle of Eleusis! To believe Herodotus, this was at the same time a remarkably well-organised assault and a complete shambles. Cleomenes, according to Herodotus, could orchestrate a simultaneous attack from three fronts but could not convince his own countrymen to follow him. Regardless what kind of alliance the Peloponnesians had with their allies at this point (or the Boeotians or Euboeans for that matter), it is not believable that the Spartans did not know what they were up to. Careful readers of Herodotus have long suspected the historicity of this passage because it aligns very closely with later passages.46 The talk the Corinthians share among themselves anticipates the anti-tyranny speech of the Corinthian Socles (5.92). The falling-out between Demaretus and Cleomenes clearly looks forward to the dynastic intrigue that Cleomenes will conduct against Demaretus (6.64). It is safe to say that both those elements were not part of the story Herodotus heard. An Athenian story would hardly have included an aition about the rule that both Spartan kings may not both lead one expedition. But the belief that nothing worthwhile happened at Eleusis must have come from Herodotus’ informers. Herodotus would not have mentioned Eleusis if it did not figure in some way in the tradition. Perhaps, his informers told Herodotus that the Spartans came to Eleusis but nothing happened there, and Herodotus helpfully supplied the reason behind Spartan inaction. Regardless of what Herodotus heard or tells, something did happen at Eleusis.47 The scholiast did not make up the bronze stele he cites; he read about it somewhere. The specificity about the stele, including its material and its location, is a strong indication that it existed.48 A recent discovery in Thebes supports the scholiast’s suggestion that there was in fact violence in Eleusis. It also suggests that it did not go well for the side of Cleisthenes. In 2001, excavators in Thebes found a small fluted column buried

228 Alex Gottesman about half a mile north of the Cadmea, the Acropolis of Thebes. Its form suggests that it was originally the base for a modest dedication. Other objects found with it suggest that it once may have stood in a sanctuary. It was inscribed in a late sixthcentury/early fifth-century script as follows: . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

Oenoe and Phylae capturing Eleusis as well rescuing Chalcis they dedicated

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

ος ϝοινόας καὶ Φυλᾶς ἑλόντες κἐλευσῖνα αι Χαλκίδα λυσάμενοι μοι ἀνέθειαν

(SEG 56.521).49

It is impossible to say how much text has been lost. But enough text remains to indicate that the original dedication related to the Boeotian and Chalcidian invasion of Attica at the end of the sixth century. The combination of the place names fits the events almost perfectly. We do not know who dedicated the monument. Perhaps . . . moi are the last three letters of a plural masculine grammatical subject. If so, the dedicators cannot be the Boiotoi, who Herodotus puts on the scene (5.77.1). It could be a clan or group that took part in the events. It was not a very big monument, nor placed in a particularly prominent place (as far as we know). Alternatively, . . . moi could be the end of a deity’s name in the dative case to whom the dedication was made.50 All that we can say is that whoever dedicated it apparently did so in the belief that the events were worth remembering. It was not normal to give thanks for military defeats. Assuming with most scholars that the stone relates to the same events in Herodotus, it gives us a shockingly different view of them. According to Herodotus, Thebans, in coordination with Spartans and Chalcidians, swept into Attica and took Hysiae and Oenoe. These were both villages or demes on the border region between Athens and Thebes. The new inscription mentions Oenoe. It suggests that the Thebans, or whoever dedicated the monument, also captured the border stronghold of Phyle, which Herodotus does not mention. Quite contrary to Herodotus, who says that nothing happened at Eleusis, its dedicators further claim that they captured it. They are closer to Herodotus when they claim they λυσάμενοι or ‘rescued’ Chalcis.51 Herodotus also has the Boeotians ‘coming to the aid [βοηθέουσι]’ of the Chalcidians on the Euripus (5.77.1). But here the two versions diverge sharply once again. While the new column seems to suggest that its dedicators were victorious in all their battles, Herodotus tells us: When the Athenians saw the Boeotians they decided to deal with them before the Chalcidians. The Athenians attacked the Boeotians and they easily defeated them, they killed many and took 700 of them as prisoners. On the same day the Athenians crossed over to Euboea and attacked the Chalcidians, and defeating them as well they left four thousand clerouchs, or settlers, on

What is below? 229 the land of the hippobotai, or horse-breeders, who were the wealthy (lit. ‘fat ones’) in Chalcis. The prisoners they took they put in chains with the Boeotian prisoners they had previously captured. Eventually they released them at a price of 200 drachmae each (5.77.1–3). In his telling, Herodotus insists that not only did the Athenians win the day, they completely routed their enemies at the border, giving the clear impression that they did not get very far into Attica. His stirring account glides past some inconsistencies that are jarring once one notices them. For instance, what were the Chalcidians doing, who had already entered Attica (74.2), while the Athenians ran off to crush the Thebans who had come to their aid? Was it really possible for the Athenians to slaughter the Thebans coming to the aid of the Chalcidians who had entered Attica (while they seeming stood idly by) and then sail ‘on the same day,’ as Herodotus insists, to Euboea to punish all the Chalcidians there? Of course it is not impossible that the Athenian army, newly reformed under Cleisthenic lines,52 could wage a two-front offensive while simultaneously dealing with a potential third-front threat from the south; but it is implausible. Herodotus’ intent in extending his narrative to include the battles against Boeotia and Chalcis is to illustrate the power of isēgoria (5.78).53 For Herodotus, these first post-tyranny clashes show the sudden jolt of confidence and ambition that liberation can give to those formerly in tyranny’s grip. But he had good reason to suggest that the battles against the Thebans and Chalcidians marked a decisive break in Athenian history. And that is because the Athenians themselves made every effort to portray those events as a decisive break in their history. Athenians wanted to believe that after their tyrants fell they were free, democratic, and above all else, united. Herodotus goes on to tell us that the very chains those captive Boeotians and Chalcidians once wore were still hanging on the Acropolis in his day, ‘on walls burned in fire by the Mede [ἐκ τειχέων περιπεφλευσμένων πυρὶ ὑπὸ τοῦ Μήδου]’ (77.3). Not far from those chains, ‘on the left hand side as you enter the Propylaea,’ Herodotus also saw a four-horse chariot commemorating these events, inscribed as follows: The nations of the Boeotians and the Chalcidians they subjugated, The sons of the Athenians, in deeds of war, And quenched their arrogance in a painful bond of iron. They dedicated these mares as tithe to Pallas. ἔθνεα Βοιωτῶν καὶ Χαλκιδέων δαμάσαντες παῖδες Ἀθηναίων ἔργμασιν ἐν πολέμου, δεσμῷ ἐν ἀχνυόεντι σιδηρέῳ ἔσβεσαν ὕβριν· τῶν ἵππους δεκάτην Παλλάδι τάσδʼ ἔθεσαν

(77.4).

Fragments of the inscription have been found (IG 13.501A). They seem to correspond closely to what Herodotus recorded. Interestingly, an older inscription

230 Alex Gottesman has also been found. It seems to date to around 505, shortly after the battle it commemorates (IG 13.501B). The second inscription features the same language as the original inscription, except it transposes the first and third lines. The original monument emphasised the chains, the second the fact that it was the Thebans and Chalcidians who wore them. Herodotus could not have known it from his vantage point but this monument, as Anderson suggests, ‘seems to have been the very first commemoration in Athens of a collective military achievement.’54 The over-thetop character of this chauvinistic monument dovetailed with the over-the-top story that Herodotus told. Why did the Athenians feel the need for such a monument, and such a story, at this time? The usual way it is interpreted is as the expression of a desire to ennoble the Athenians collectively: hence a four-horse chariot and the Homeric ‘sons of the Athenians.’ I propose that the reason for the monument is that by encouraging Athenians to remember Thebes and Chalcis they could forget about what happened at Eleusis and the Acropolis. As Shrimpton notes, ‘Substitutions occur at a critical moment . . . when it becomes apparent that something has happened that will be difficult to forget, but has such disturbing aspects that reporting the details would scarcely meet with general approval.’55 In the sources we see a slow and progressive erasure of the past taking hold over time. Herodotus’ telling makes clear that by his time the events at Eleusis had been erased. The Thebans who dedicated the small column drum tell us that they fought in a battle there, and that they won. We know from Herodotus that the Thebans were on the side of Cleomenes and Isagoras, who ultimately lost. The scholiast also tells us that Cleomenes attacked Eleusis, and held it with the help of his Athenian allies. He cites as proof the stele commemorating their punishment for this treasonous act. Apparently, Herodotus did not notice this stele when he visited the Acropolis. He explicitly tells us that no battle happened in Eleusis! The Spartans just went home ἀκλεῶς, literally ‘without doing anything worth hearing about.’ The real action happened up north. No Athenians could have fought in a battle that did not happen. All the ‘sons of the Athenians’ were busy elsewhere, crushing the Thebans and sailing to conquer the Chalcidians ‘on the same day.’ A more complicated, and indeed more traumatic, story involving foreign alliances between competing aristocratic families and their followers fanning the vicious circle of violence between Athenians could be told instead as a stirring tale of the birth of the Athenian nation out of the crucible of battle. With this story in his mind, it is not surprising that when the author of the Athenaion Politeia read in Herodotus about stasis and executions, he erased them completely. By his time, the erasure had extended beyond Eleusis to include the Acropolis. In Athenian tradition, the conflict had become one between Spartans and the last vestiges of the tyrants against the united demos. Over time the story that Herodotus heard of a bloody stasis between the supporters of Cleisthenes and those of Isagoras lost out to the official one. Every time someone literally went ‘above,’ to the Acropolis, and saw the very chains there that restrained the first (foreign) enemies of tyrant-free Athens, the official story would efface the story ‘below.’ The trauma of civil violence

What is below? 231 could transform into jingoistic pride. The official story was evidently so important to remember that after the Persians sacked and burned the Acropolis in 480 BC, the Athenians remade the monument that commemorated their first posttyranny victory. In all likelihood they also rehung or perhaps even reforged the prisoners’ chains that Herodotus saw on the scorched walls.

Implications for history from below Some time ago, Hobsbawm cautioned that practitioners of history from below (or ‘grassroots history,’ as he called it) ‘cannot be positivists, believing that the questions and answers arise naturally out of the study of the material.’56 My argument here bears out this warning. Not only do our literary sources conceive of collective action differently than we do, and use different language to talk about it, but they also, deliberately or not, obscure important aspects of it. Herodotus, our main source about the events under consideration here, based his account on the stories he was told. It would be a mistake for practitioners of history from below to simply accept our sources at face value simply because they are ancient, or because Herodotus collected them when he visited Athens. After all, as he famously noted, he repeated what he was told, but he was not obligated to believe it.57 By the time of his visit to Athens, the pressures of social reconciliation and harmony had shaped the narrative he heard about the riot and its aftermath. Here the task of history from below is to read between the lines to recover the perspective of those who lost the battle for memory and for legitimacy, who were either consigned to oblivion or remembered as something other than what they were. As Cerutti notes, this is a kind of ‘salvage operation’: un travail de rachat d’autres systèmes de significations qui, ayant perdu leur bataille pour la légitimité, ont été “oubliés.” C’est donc un travail sur la mémoire et sur le pouvoir, sur tout ce que nous avons oublié ou qu’on nous a fait oublier.58 This kind of approach will not allow us to answer the questions that historians have asked about the riot. For instance, was it a Bastille-like moment? Was it a spontaneous uprising of the demos, or was it led by members of the elite? What my argument here has shown is that such questions are premature. Before we come to grips with the agents and meaning of the events, we first have to come to terms with how our sources transmitted them and how they shaped them to fit their interests and agendas. We may not yet know who is below in this case, but hopefully I have shown that there is more below than meets the eye.

Notes 1 See Rudé 1980, 1981 [1964]; Thompson 1971, reprinted and with responses to critics in Thompson 1993, 185–351. 2 As noted by Herman 2006, 213. The best attempt to recover Greek popular culture on Thompsonian lines is Forsdyke 2012, who interestingly did not find riots or much relevant in Athens.

232 Alex Gottesman 3 Canevaro 2017. 4 Hunter 1989, 22. See also Karpyuk 2000, who looks beyond Thucydides to note, ‘There is no evidence to prove any serious involvement of the crowd into the political life of the Greek cities in the archaic and classical periods’ (102). 5 Gottesman 2014. 6 Cerutti 2015, see also the Introduction to this volume. My thanks to the editors for calling my attention to this paper. 7 See especially Williams 1984. When Thompson revised his essay ‘Patricians and Plebs’ he dismissed Williams’ criticism with characteristic mordancy that should not conceal the fact that he had taken the criticism to heart. In a new passage he offered a metaphor for his view of pre-modern British society: ‘I am thinking of a school experiment (which no doubt I have got wrong) in which an electrical current magnetized a plate covered with iron filings. The filings, which were evenly distributed, arranged themselves sketchily as if directed toward opposing attractive poles. This is very much how I see eighteenth-century society, with, for many purposes, the crowd at one pole, the aristocracy and gentry at the other, and until late in the century, the professional and trading groups bound down by lines of magnetic dependency to the rulers, or on occasion hiding their faces in common action with the crowd’ (Thompson 1993, 73, my emphasis). This is not how he portrayed eighteenth century society in 1974. 8 Loraux 2002 [1997] and Shear 2011 are fundamental here. But as far as I know, only Shrimpton 2006 has appreciated the extent of this phenomenon. 9 See the catalogue of violence in Riess 2016. For akriton apokteinai see Carawan 1984, who does not believe that it ever actually happened, being ‘noteworthy only as a legal curiosity’ (121). 10 For starters, see Forsdyke 2012, 144–70. 11 See especially Lavelle 1993 on the tyranny, although he does not consider the immediate aftermath. On the aftermath, Flaig 2004 is excellent, focusing on the displacement of stasis through the myth of the tyrannicides. 12 See Anderson 2003, 197–211, who suggests that Cleisthenes himself obscured his role to make his reforms more palatable. 13 The general scholarly consensus about Cleisthenes is that by winning over the demos by means of his reforms, he (probably inadvertently) set the stage for subsequent democratic development. Ostwald 1969, 137–73 lays out this view cogently. For a recent, balanced discussion of Cleisthenes and his reforms, see Osborne 2009, 276–97. 14 Ober 1996, 35. 15 First set forth in Ober 1993, republished in Ober 1996, and in revised form in Ober 2007 (quote on 90). 16 Ober 2007, 84. 17 Anderson 2003, 197. 18 See Wade-Gery 1933, 18–9; Keaney 1969, 418–21; Ste. Croix 2004, 130. 19 According to Wade-Gery, from the laws of Cleisthenes themselves. 20 Historians have used this difference of opinion to suggest that the proposed reforms themselves might have prompted Isagoras to call in Cleomenes. This puts a lot of weight on Herodotus’ expression μετὰ δὲ, which can mean ‘next’ in a sequence, but can also mean ‘later,’ as in at ‘at some point subsequently.’ It does not appear that Herodotus knew, or cared about, the chronology of Cleisthenes’ tribal reforms. One source dates the reforms themselves to the archonship of Alcmaeon, which scholars date to 505 or 501 BC (see Develin 2003, 53). On the chronology see, most recently, Badian 2000. 21 See Trott 2014, 37–40, on how Aristotle applies this physical concept to politics. 22 See most recently Bertelli 2018, who wisely takes a middle position on the question of how much influence Aristotelian theory has on A. 23 Rhodes 1993, 346–7. 24 See Ghinatti 1970, 47–55; Stahl 1987, 66–69; Rhodes 1993, 179–88. His reading of Herodotus’ account of Peisistratus shows a similar interest (13.4–15.5; Hdt. 1.59–60).

What is below? 233 25 Stanton 1970 suggests that this term derives from Alcmaeonid propaganda in the context of the first ostracism. 26 I do not find persuasive the arguments of Dillon 2006 against the standard restoration of the archon fragment. 27 Plutarch thought this was the sugar before the spice: παραμιγνὺς πίστεως ἕνεκα τοῖς ψόγοις ἐπαίνους τινάς . . . εἰς Κᾶρας ὥσπερ εἰς κόρακας ἀποδιοπομπουμένου τὸν Ἰσαγόραν (De malig. Her. 830e). Bicknell 1972, 84–88; 1974, 153–4 suggested that Isagoras’ family was connected to the Cimonids. Most scholars think that if that were the case Herodotus would have said so. But Herodotus’ inability to discover a connection could also be due to the Philaids’ desire to conceal it. ‘That Isagoras son of Teisander? Not one of ours, must be from a foreign Teisander. . . .’ Ghinatti 1970, 101 similarly see ‘un palese desiderio di oscurare la fama di Isagora.’ On Herodotus and the Cimonids see now Samons 2017, especially: ‘Herodotus felt compelled to include even many uncomfortable tales, while nonetheless providing the explanations that sought to mitigate blame when such explanations were available’ (34). 28 See Ghinatti 1970, 14, 94, who argues that Herodotus merely meant ‘take into alliance,’ which A. interpreted through the lens of fifth century hetaireiai. 29 A.’s grasp of the reforms is muddled at best. He suggests they were a populist measure that also gave citizenship to people who did not have it before (21.1–2). 30 See Cromey 2000. I cannot follow his suggestion that these were the so-called neopolitai, non-citizens that owed their franchise and support to Cleisthenes. 31 Ober 2007, 93. 32 As is pointed out by Ober 1993, 223; 2007, 93. 33 As noted by Wade-Gery 1933, 17. Ostwald 1969, 144, n. 6 and Chambers 1990, 223 disagree that the difference is meaningful or intentional. 34 Rhodes 1993, 246. 35 ‘The fact that Hdt. 5.72.4–73.1 mentions Timesitheus of Delphi as one of the executed guarantees the accuracy of that part of the story’ (Ostwald 1969, 144, n. 7). 36 As Gray points out, Herodotus’ ‘I could say a lot’ strikes a somber note: ‘The assertion that he could tell many stories of the strength of his hands and his spirit suggest the pathos of one who was now bound and unable to use his hands or his spirit in his final appearance in life’ (2007, 208). 37 His basis for this belief is that the first known victim of ostracism was Hipparchus, son of Charmus, which he evidently found surprising because it conflicted with his belief that the Pisistratids had been decisively defeated and expelled. He rationalised this with the statement that ‘They permitted to dwell in the city all those who had not been implicated in the troubles [ὅσοι μὴ συνεξαμαρτάνοιεν ἐν ταῖς ταραχαῖς, εἴων οἰκεῖν τὴν πόλιν]’ (22.4). For a similar praise of the demos’ restraint after the civil war of 404/3, see 40.3. 38 See Hornblower 2013, 218–9, on why the attempted outreach to Persia cannot be dismissed out of hand. 39 On Herodotus’ visit to Athens, see Ostwald 1991. On his use, and criticism, of Athenian traditions see Blösel 2013. 40 For the complicated engagement of the Lysistrata with the popular tradition of liberation from tyranny, see Thomas 1989, 242–51. 41 Thomas 1989, 250. 42 ‘[P]erhaps Hellanikos,’ according to Bicknell 1972, 85, n. 10. 43 Connor 1985, 86; see for collection of evidence and discussion. 44 Forsdyke 2012, 158–63. 45 E.g., like the traitor Arthmius of Zelea (Dem. 19. 27, 9. 41), or the blasphemer Diagoras of Melos (Melanthius FGrH 342 F 3), or—most relevantly—the oligarch Antiphon ([Plut.] Vit X Or. 834b). For inscriptions on bronze, see Stroud 1963, 138, n. 1. 46 Schachermeyr suggests that it might be a ‘dittographie,’ where Herodotus was unsure where to put his Socles speech (Schachermeyr 1973, 213, n. 2).

234 Alex Gottesman 47 Oral tradition recalls some kind of glorious battle at Eleusis. Herodotus puts the death of his paradigmatic good citizen Tellus there, interestingly in a battle fought against the ‘city-neighbors [πρὸς τοὺς ἀστυγείτονας]’ (1.30.5). Isaeus has a speaker claim that his great-grandfather also died in a battle there, much to his glory (Isae. 5.42). On the historical indeterminacy of this battle, see Thomas 1989, 116–7. 48 Most historians have dismissed the stele because it contradicts Herodotus. For a voice of dissent see Tritle 1988. 49 The editio princeps is Aravantinos 2006. 50 As suggested by Aravantinos 2006, 376. 51 Aravantinos 2006, 376, followed by Berti 2010, 17–9, suggests that it commemorates ransoming the Chalcidian prisoners. While lyo in the middle voice does usually mean ‘to ransom,’ it does not always mean that (see LSJ 2b). 52 As argued, among others, by Anderson 2003, 148, with n. 3. 53 On isēgoria in Herodotus, see Nakategawa 1988. 54 Anderson 2003, 156; see also Rausch 1999, 120–5. 55 Shrimpton 1997, 91. 56 Hobsbawm 1988, 17. 57 Hdt. 7.152.3. For Herodotus himself as interested, in a way, in history from below, see Lang 1984. 58 Cerutti 2015, 952, original emphasis. Relevant here also is Assmann’s concept of ‘mnemo-history’ (see Assmann 1997, 8–17).

Bibliography Anderson, G. 2003. The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica, 508–490 BC. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Aravantinos, V. 2006. ‘A New Inscribed Kioniskos from Thebes.’ ABSA 101: 369–77. doi:10.1017/S0068245400021341. Assmann, J. 1997. Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Badian, E. 2000. ‘Back to Kleisthenic Chronology.’ In Polis & Politics: Studies in Ancient Greek History Presented to Mogens Herman Hansen on His Sixtieth Birthday, August 20, 2000, edited by P. Flensted-Jensen, T. H. Nielsen and L. Rubinstein, 447–64. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Bertelli, L. 2018. ‘The Athenion Politeia and Aristotle’s Political Theory.’ In Athenaion Politeiai tra storia, politica e sociologia, edited by C. Bearzot, M. Canevaro, T. Gargiulo and E. Poddighe, 71–86. Milano: LED. doi:10.7359/852–2018-bert. Berti, S. 2010. ‘La dedica degli Ateniesi per la vittoria su Beoti e Calcidesi del 506 a.C. (IG I³ 501) e la data del suo ripristino.’ Aevum 84 (1): 7–40. doi:10.4081/memo.2012.74. Bicknell, P. J. 1972. Studies in Athenian Politics and Genealogy. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag. Bicknell, P. J. 1974. ‘Athenian Politics and Geneaology: Some Pendants.’ Historia 23 (2): 146–63. Blösel, W. 2013. ‘Quellen—Kritik: Herodots Darstellung der Athener.’ In Herodots Quellen—Die Quellen Herodots, edited by B. Dunsch and K. Ruffing, 255–71. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Canevaro, M. 2017. ‘The Popular Culture of the Athenian Institutions: “Authorized” Popular Culture and “Unauthorized” Elite Culture in Classical Athens.’ In Popular Culture in the Ancient World, edited by L. Grig, 39–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781139871402.002.

What is below? 235 Carawan, E. 1984. ‘Akriton Apokteinai: Execution without Trial in Fourth-Century Athens.’ GRBS 25 (2): 111–21. Cerutti, S. 2015. ‘Who is below? E. P. Thompson, historien des sociétés modernes: une relecture.’ Annales (HSS) 70 (4): 931–56. doi:10.1353/ahs.2015.0167. Chambers, M. 1990. Aristoteles: Staat der Athener. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. doi:10.1524/ 9783050048697. Connor, W. R. 1985. ‘The Razing of the House in Greek Society.’ TAPhA 115: 79–102. doi:10.2307/284191. Cromey, R. D. 2000. ‘Kleisthenes’ 700 Epistia.’ AC 69: 43–63. Develin, R. 2003. Athenian Officials, 684–321 B.C. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511552625. Dillon, M. 2006. ‘Was Kleisthenes or Pleisthenes Archon at Athens in 525 BC?’ ZPE 155: 91–107. Flaig, E. 2004. ‘Der verlorene Gründungsmythos der athenischen Demokratie: wie der Volksaufstand von 507 v. Chr. vergessen wurde.’ HZ 279 (1): 35–61. doi:10.1524/ hzhz.2004.279.jg.35. Forsdyke, S. 2012. Slaves Tell Tales: And Other Episodes in the Politics of Popular Culture in Ancient Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.1515/9781400842155. Ghinatti, F. 1970. I gruppi politici ateniesi fino alle guerre persiane. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider. Gottesman, A. 2014. Politics and the Street in Democratic Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781107300507. Gray, V. 2007. ‘Structure and Significance (5.55–69).’ In Reading Herodotus: A Study of the Logoi in Book 5 of Herodotus’ Histories, edited by E. Greenwood and E. Irwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 202–26. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511482205.009. Herman, G. 2006. Morality and Behaviour in Democratic Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, E. J. 1988. ‘History from Below—Some Reflections.’ In History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology, edited by F. Krantz, 13–28. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hornblower, S., ed. 2013. Herodotus: Histories: Book V. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139050968. Hunter, V. 1989. ‘Thucydides and the Sociology of the Crowd.’ CJ 84: 17–30. Karpyuk, S. 2000. ‘Crowd in Archaic and Classical Greece.’ Hyperboreus 6 (1): 79–102. Keaney, J. J. 1969. ‘Ring Composition in Aristotle’s Athenaion Politeia.’ AJPh 90 (4): 406–23. doi:10.2307/292636. Lang, M. 1984. ‘Herodotus: Oral History with a Difference.’ PAPhS 128 (2): 93–103. Lavelle, B. M. 1993. The Sorrow and the Pity: A Prolegomenon to a History of Athens under the Peisistratids, c. 560–510 BC. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Loraux, N. 2002 [1997]. The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens. Translated by C. Pache and J. Fort. New York: Zone Books. Nakategawa, Y. 1988. ‘Isegoria in Herodotus.’ Historia 37 (3): 257–75. Ober, J. 1993. ‘The Athenian Revolution of 508/7 B.C.: Violence, Authority, and the Origins of Democracy.’ In Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics, edited by C. Dougherty and L. Kurke, 215–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (= Ober 1996, 32–52). doi:10.2307/j.ctv14164gc.7. Ober, J. 1996. The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv14164gc.

236 Alex Gottesman Ober, J. 2007. ‘“I Besieged that Man”: Democracy’s Revolutionary Start.’ In Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece, edited by K. Raaflaub, J. Ober, R. W. Wallace, P. Cartledge and C. Farrar, 83–104. Berkeley: University of California Press. Osborne, R. 2009. Greece in the Making: 1200–479 BC. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203880173. Ostwald, M. 1969. Nomos and the Beginning of the Athenian Democracy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ostwald, M. 1991. ‘Herodotus and Athens.’ ICS 16: 147–8. Rausch, M. 1999. Isonomia in Athen: Veränderungen des öffentlichen Lebens vom Sturz der Tyrannis bis zur zweiten Perserabwehr. Bern and Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Rhodes, P. J. 1993. A Commentary on the Aristotelian ‘Athenaion Politeia.’ 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Riess, W. 2016. ‘Where to Kill in Classical Athens: Assassinations, Executions, and the Athenian Public Space.’ In The Topography of Violence in the Greco-Roman World, edited by W. Riess and G. Fagan, 77–112. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rudé, G. F. E. 1980. Ideology and Popular Protest. New York: Pantheon Books. Rudé, G. F. E. 1981 [1964]. The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848. Revised edition. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Samons, L. J. 2017. ‘Herodotus on the Kimonids: Peisistratid Allies in Sixth-Century Athens.’ Historia 66 (1): 21–44. Schachermeyr, F. 1973. ‘Athen als Stadt des Grosskönigs.’ GB 1: 211–20. Shear, J. L. 2011. Polis and Revolution: Responding to Oligarchy in Classical Athens. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Shrimpton, G. S. 1997. History and Memory in Ancient Greece. Montreal and Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Shrimpton, G. S. 2006. ‘Oh, Those Rational Athenians! Civil War, Reconciliation, and Public Memory in Ancient Athens (ca. 630–403).’ Mouseion 3 (6): 293–311. doi:10.1353/ mou.2006.0005. Stahl, M. 1987. Aristokraten und Tyrannen im archaischen Athen: Untersuchungen zur Überlieferung, zur Sozialstruktur und zur Entstehung des Staates. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Stanton, G. R. 1970. ‘The Introduction of Ostracism and Alcmeonid Propaganda.’ JHS 90: 180–3. doi:10.2307/629760. Ste. Croix, G. E. M. de. 2004. Athenian Democratic Origins, and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199255177.001.0001. Stroud, R. S. 1963. ‘A Fragment of an Inscribed Bronze Stele from Athens.’ Hesperia 32 (2): 138–43. doi:10.2307/147174. Thomas, R. 1989. Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511597404. Thompson, E. P. 1971. ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.’ P&P 50 (February): 76–136. doi:10.1093/past/50.1.76. (= Thompson 1993, 185–258). Thompson, E. P. 1993. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. New York: The New Press. Tritle, L. 1988. ‘Kleomenes at Eleusis.’ Historia 37 (4): 457–60. Trott, A. 2014. Aristotle on the Nature of Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wade-Gery, H. T. 1933. ‘Studies in the Structure of Attic Society: II. The Laws of Kleisthenes.’ CQ 27 (1): 17–29. doi:10.1017/S0009838800025453. Williams, D. E. 1984. ‘Morals, Markets and the English Crowd in 1766.’ P&P 104 (August): 56–73. doi:10.1093/past/104.1.56.

11 Slave agency in Livy’s history of Rome Between rebellion and counterconspiracy Fábio Duarte Joly Introduction Ancient historiography presents some challenges for the study of the experiences and agencies of subaltern groups, particularly with regard to slaves and freedmen. Although freedom and slavery (at the political and philosophical levels) constitute one of the main guidelines of the narratives of Greek and Roman historians,1 slaves and freedmen, and their material and social lives, did not attract the attention of those authors. The Roman historian Tacitus offers a clear example of this fact, when, in his Annals, he compares the slaves of various origins and religions in Rome to a heterogeneous and disordered mob, as if they formed a kind of mud in need of control by fear.2 Slaves and freedmen are cited in historical narratives almost exclusively when they rebel, individually or collectively, or when, conversely, they are loyal and devoted to their masters and patrons, even at the cost of their own lives.3 Modern scholarship for a long time adopted a similar view that shares the elitist bias of the ancient sources. Ronald Syme, for instance, followed his biographed Tacitus when he stated that ‘though no man of station and independence could help despising the slave in bondage or emancipated, aristocratic families acknowledged the loyal devotion of slaves and dependents in evil days.’4 However, a closer analysis of ancient historiography may reveal a perspective to approach the agency of servile groups beyond the Graeco-Roman historians’ prejudices,5 as I intend to suggest by means of a study of the theme of slave agency in Livy’s work. Livy’s history of Rome is an important source for any study on the development of Roman slavery, especially in the political-military context of the early Republic. Not by chance, most of the references to slaves by Livy invariably refer to the practice of enslaving war captives.6 But slavery is not only a synonym exclusive to war captivity in Livy’s account. The master–slave relationship is also present as a powerful metaphor for qualifying non-slave social relations as well as political regimes. Monarchy, for instance, is depicted by Livy as a regime which has imposed ‘slavery’ on the Roman people. In Book 1, he portrays the slow and continuous degradation of the monarchy towards the rising of the res publica and libertas despite the individual contributions of each monarch for the creation of Roman institutions.7 Even after the end of the monarchy, tension between servitus DOI: 10.4324/9781003005148-15

238

Fábio Duarte Joly

and libertas is still pervasive in the narrative of the so-called ‘Struggle of the Orders’ between patricians and plebeians. In the discourses of the tribunes of the plebs, the image of the plebeians is repeatedly depicted as not that of full citizens but rather as that of slaves in relation to aristocrats who disregarded the common good.8 The metaphor of slavery is further present in the narration of the strategies adopted by individuals and communities involved in the process of the Roman military expansion in the Italian Peninsula. In his study of the language of Roman imperialism in Latin literature from the middle of the first century BC to the beginning of the third century AD,9 Myles Lavan has shown that accusations of enslavement by Rome are an important component in the discourses Livy and other writers attribute to unsatisfied Italian allies, barbarian leaders and hostile kings, who depict their position to Rome as ‘slavery’ (servitus). This notion is also present from the Roman conqueror’s viewpoint in which slavery appears as a legitimate form of domination of non-Romans.10 These groups of evidence are relevant for an in-depth understanding of how Livy dealt with the issue of slavery in his historical writing. However, as my concern in this chapter will be restricted to the theme of slave agency, it should be noted from the start that ‘agency’ usually appears in the studies on ancient slavery related to ‘resistance’ in its diverse forms, such as individual flights, collective rebellions or the adoption of specific cultural and religious practices. 11 Therefore, the emphasis is on what Peter Hunt has called ‘contrary strategies,’ that is, those actions that were clearly against the interests of slaveholders. This methodological choice thus leaves aside what Hunt defines as ‘collaborative strategies,’ those that could reinforce the authority of masters or even those strategies that benefited slaves as individuals due to their relationships with other people than their owners.12 An approach that only discusses resistance in order to try to ‘give back to the oppressed their agency,’ in Walter Johnson’s words, diverts us from inquiring about the political dimension of slave agency, which encompasses the internal politics of slave community as well as how slaves interacted with other members and institutions of the community at large.13 The aforementioned individual strategies of slaves, as delineated by Hunt, are intrinsically interrelated in servile agency, so that enslaved people could transform and give new meanings to their lives in the struggle against alienation generated by slavery. Taking this theoretical framework into account, the argument here is that Livy is notably concerned in discussing the limits of the loyalty (fides) of slaves in view of their positions not just in the domus, but in the res publica as well. His main idea is that loyalty to the state should prevail over loyalty to one’s own master or mistress. In this sense, slave agency could at the same time disrupt an important sphere of Roman society—being a contrary strategy, in Hunt’s words—the private one, to preserve public order, thus being a collaborative strategy in regard to the state. Livy stresses this latent socio-political tension in the res publica throughout his treatment of slave agency in the context of conspiracies, so that his view of this matter permits an insight into the servile strategies of exploring aspects of the

Slave agency in Livy’s history of Rome

239

same political system, which legitimised the coercion of slavery, to achieve the slave’s own objectives, as freedom. In the first section I discuss how Livy recounts what he calls ‘slave conspiracies’ in Rome or other Italian cities. My analysis here will focus on how the historian regards his contemporary audience, when dealing with the theme of slavery, manumission and public order, in the Augustan context when the enrolment of ex-slaves in the civitas was a crucial question as illustrated by the enactment of a legislation concerning manumission and the status of freedmen. In the second section, I take into account the role of slaves as counterconspirators in aristocratic conspiracies and, in the conclusion, I point out how this case study of slave agency in Livy can be related to some central issues of the writing of history from below, as the relationship between structure and agency.

‘An enemy in his own household’: slaves as conspirators Unfortunately, it is not possible to obtain from Livy’s narrative many details about the motivations and strategies of slaves in episodes of social turmoil. In general, he just succinctly mentions the outbreak and repression of slave revolts, noting if any slaves denounced the plots and if they were rewarded with freedom and money afterwards. However, it is significant that he usually employs the word coniuratio to describe the collective actions of slaves who caused some unrest in Rome or other Italian cities. Debra Nousek notes that: all together, of the more than 70 instances where Livy uses coniuratio or its cognates in his History, all but three (22.38.4, 26.25.11, 45.2.2, which indicate the swearing of a military oath) refer to plots hatched to subvert the legitimate or established authority.14 Coniuratio has thus a dual nature, or, as Thomas Habinek puts it, a Janus-like character. On the one hand, it refers to a moment of extraordinary conditions: when the city is endangered, a tumultus is declared and soldiers are sworn altogether in a procedure known as coniuratio. On the other hand, the same word may be used to refer to an external attack by foreigners or an internal attack by citizens and slaves.15 Livy adopts this latter meaning since he presupposes that the slave population in Rome should be taken as a kind of internal enemy. This point first appears in the story of a certain Appius Herdonius (perhaps of Sabine ancestry), who, in 460 BC, with thousands of followers, captured the Capitoline hill as part of an attempt to dominate Rome. His army is described by Livy as being made up of 2,500 exiles and slaves (exsules servique).16 Livy thus stresses—more clearly than Dionysius of Halicarnassus, for instance—the servile status of part of Herdonius’ followers.17 He is also more concerned than the Greek author with the impact of this attempted coup in the Roman households, mainly because he seems to portray the event as an internal insurrection.18

240

Fábio Duarte Joly

Whereas Dionysius quickly dismisses the possibility of the slaves joining Herdonius despite his promise of granting freedom to them,19 Livy narrates the increasing tension in Rome which led the consuls to not know how exactly to organise a reaction. They were: afraid either to arm the plebs or to leave them unarmed, not knowing whence this sudden attack upon the City had come, whether from without or from within, from the hatred of the plebs or the treachery of slaves (ab servili fraude).20 Herdonius, whose characterisation by Livy is reminiscent of Sallust’s Catiline,21 emphasises the fear that slaves leave their masters to obtain the freedom offered by Herdonius (Servos ad libertatem Ap. Herdonius ex Capitolio vocabat; . . . et servitiis grave iugum demeret), who places himself as a redeemer of the most miserable in Rome (se miserrimi cuiusque suscepisse causam).22 In consequence of these affairs of state, the situation in the city is described by Livy as becoming even more strained in view of the risk of a slave revolt: Men’s fears were many and various; above all the rest stood out their dread of the slaves (terror servilis). Everybody suspected that he had an enemy in his own household (ne suus cuique domi hostis esset), whom it was safe neither to trust, nor, from want of confidence, to refuse to trust, lest his hostility should be intensified.23 Due to the vital military support provided to Rome by the Tusculans, the insurrection was crushed and the rebels were punished according as they were free or slave.24 Although Livy pinpoints in this story of Herdonius a gradual crescendo of a fear of slave uprising in Rome, his same narrative indirectly suggests that the slaves’ loyalty to their masters had remained unshaken: the slaves of Herdonius stayed with him until death as did the slaves of the Roman citizens who did not rush to side with the rebels.25 After the story of Herdonius, Livy continues to narrate cases of slave conspiracies, but he begins to mention the strategy of the Roman state in granting freedom and money to those slaves who denounce conspirators. The following episode, placed in 419 BC, exemplifies his narrative pattern: It was a year remarkable, thanks to the good fortune of the Roman People, for a great danger but not a disaster. The slaves conspired to set fire to the City at points remote from one another (Servitia urbem ut incenderent distantibus locis coniurarunt), and, while the people should be busy everywhere with rescuing their houses, to seize the Citadel and the Capitol with an armed force. Jupiter brought their wicked schemes to naught, and on the evidence of two of their number, the guilty were arrested and punished. Each informant was rewarded from the public treasury (ex aerario) with ten thousand pounds of bronze— which passed for wealth in those days—and with freedom (libertas).26

Slave agency in Livy’s history of Rome 241 In his comments about this event, Ogilvie remarked that the rewards ‘would not at this date have been paid from the aerarium,’27 but perhaps what is at issue here is the interest of Livy in putting emphasis on the need of a political strategy to weaken the solidarity between slaves by means of rewards to those who acted as counterconspirators. This same logic is hinted at when Livy mentions two other slave revolts. In his narrative of the year 216 BC, he briefly cites that 25 slaves were crucified in Rome on the charge of having conspired in the Campus Martius and that ‘the informer was rewarded with freedom and twenty thousand sesterces’ (Indici data libertas et aeris gravis viginti milia).28 Livy does not give details about the slaves involved in this rebellion, such as if their slavery derived from war captivity or not. However, in his account of a slave revolt (servilis tumultus) that took place in Sestia in 198 BC this latter fact is a determinant one. Carthaginian hostages were being kept under guard at the Latin colony following a Roman policy of removing the elite of a defeated enemy from their home town, thus turning them into a kind of prisoners of the state. By detaching them from their previous network of formal and informal relations, it would ensure against organising rebellions against Rome.29 According to Livy, many of these hostages were children of dignitaries accompanied by a large body of slaves (ut principum liberis magna vis servorum erat).30 The number of slaves was further increased as the inhabitants of Setia began purchasing many Carthaginian war prisoners as slaves, and these started a conspiracy (coniuratio).31 The rebels first tried to incite rebellion with the slaves in the territory of Setia and later with those around Norba and Cerceii. Livy says ‘Sestia was captured in the bloody and unforeseen uproar’ (Setia per caedem et repentinum tumultum capta), and then the slaves turned to Norba and Cerceii.32 The Roman military reaction started after two slaves denounced what the rebels had done as well as what was likely to come to the urban praetor Lucius Cornelius Lentulus. As a reward, the denunciators received freedom and money: Sterling service had thus been provided by two slave informers and one free man (egregia duorum opera servorum indicum et unius liberi fuit). The senate ordered the latter be awarded 100,000 asses, and the slaves 25,000 asses each plus their freedom (libertas); their masters were reimbursed their price from the public purse (ex aerario).33 Two years later in 196 BC, another slave conspiracy (coniuratio servorum) occurred in Etruria. The praetor Manius Acilius Glabrio defeated some of the rebels in battle, and ‘many were killed and many taken prisoner. Some—those who had been ringleaders in the conspiracy—he flogged and crucified, others he returned to their masters (alios verberatos crucibus adfixit, qui principes coniurationis fuerant, alios dominis restituit).’34 Livy also records a slave uprising (magnus motus servilis) in Apulia in 185 BC named by the author as a conspiracy of herdsmen (pastorum coniuratio). The praetor Lucius Postumius condemned about seven thousand men.35 A common feature of Livy’s account of the above slave revolts is that the granting of freedom to individual slaves who helped the Roman state overcome the

242

Fábio Duarte Joly

rebellions is not followed by Roman citizenship, even though it was possible in a slave society such as that of Rome. Libertas, for the historian, does not immediately imply nor necessarily entail civitas. The story of the siege of Artena in 404 BC is even more exemplary in this sense. Livy narrates that the Romans almost gave up in their attempts to take the city by assault due to its garrison and sufficient amount of grain in the fortress. However, a local slave admitted some soldiers inside by way of a steep approach, and they captured the citadel. Livy writes that ‘the traitor was given the property of two families as a reward, besides his liberty, and was named Servius Romanus’ (Proditori praeter libertatem duarum familiarum bona in praemium data; Servius Romanus vocitatus).36 The episode is perhaps a reflection of how the Romans once named freedmen of the state.37 Ogilvie, in his commentary, is skeptical about any historical value of the story, arguing that it should be compared with the legend of Servius Tullius’ origins, whose name is also explained by servus.38 Notwithstanding the insufficient evidence to verify Livy’s account about this slave in particular and about the slave revolts in general, these episodes may be interpreted considering the message about slavery and manumission that Livy wants to deliver to his contemporary audience. The author is very critical of an immediate connection between manumission and citizenship since he emphasises in some passages of his work the need of carefully granting citizenship to allies and freedmen. The speech of Camillus, in 337 BC, to the Senate on how the Roman state should conduct itself towards the conquered Latin peoples, and the Senate’s response to him, is an illustration of Livy’s concern with the issue of a selective distribution of Roman citizenship. Whereas the consul asked if the Senate would follow the example of its ancestors and augment the Roman state by receiving its conquered enemies as citizens (Voltis exemplo maiorum augere rem Romanam victos in civitatem accipiendo?),39 the leading senators argued that ‘since the Latins were not all in like case, his advice could best be carried out if the consuls would introduce proposals concerning the several peoples by name, as each should seem to merit’ (cum aliorum causa alia esset, ita expediri posse consilium dicere, si, ut pro merito cuiusque statueretur).40 Full Roman citizenship should thus be a reward according to the merit of the recipient state.41 Still in this context, Livy also mentions that in 177 BC some allies (socii) ‘in order to evade the requirement that they should leave offspring at home, they would give their sons to any Romans whatsoever in slavery, on the condition that they should be manumitted and thus become citizens of freedman condition’ (Nam et ne stirpem domi relinquerent, liberos suos quibusquibus Romanis in eam condicionem ut manu mitterentur mancipio dabant, libertinique ciues essent).42 A senatus consultum was furthermore passed to prevent Latins from fraudulently enslaving themselves to Romans to obtain citizenship by manumissio censu.43 Livy, therefore, shows in his historical narrative a concern regarding the interrelationships between manumission, freedom, and citizenship. The latter could only be granted after weighing the merits of those who deserved to enter in the Roman civic community. It should be noted that the historian wrote his work in the Augustan context of an intense political debate about the place of freedmen in

Slave agency in Livy’s history of Rome 243 Roman society that gave rise to a specific legislation to manage this issue.44 The lex Iunia (probably enacted in 17 BC) regulated and assigned a legal personality to freedmen who previously were informally manumitted and yet remained as slaves before civil law. They now become Latini Iuniani, freedmen without Roman citizenship.45 Junian Latins did not have the right of conubium and they could not transmit property to their natural heirs. Upon death, their possessions were reverted to their patrons as a slave’s peculium. At the same time for Junian Latins to acquire the status of Roman citizens, they depended either on the will of their masters or on an imperial grant, or they had to marry a Roman or a Latin, and have children, or perform services for the Roman state: in the case of Rome, serving in the cohorts of vigiles, building ships to transport wheat, or making bread for the state. In sum, they had to strive to become citizens by means of actions considered beneficial to the res publica.46 Besides the creation of this new legal status, the practice of manumission as a whole became regulated by the state since it established criteria of age (of masters and slaves) for manumission (by the lex Aelia Sentia, of AD 4) and stipulated the allowed number of slaves to be freed by will (by the lex Fufia Caninia, of 2 BC).47 In short, following the Augustan laws on manumission, personal freedom and civic freedom were no longer necessarily combined in the status of freedmen. This development somehow underlies the way Livy portrays the practice of manumission to his audience.48 The denunciation of a conspiracy, the main agency that the author attributes to slaves as a possibility of changing their social position, did not invariably result in a conferment of citizenship. Libertas and civitas are not interrelated notions. As it will be seen below, only once does Livy draw attention to the granting of such privilege for a slave, and precisely for one who has denounced a conspiracy of nobles against the Republic that put the libertas rei publicae at risk.

Slaves as counterconspirators: Livy and the idea of libertas The possibility of slaves betraying their masters is a fundamental assumption for Livy although his approach to the issue is an ambivalent one since the negation of fides towards masters can also be praiseworthy when the state is threatened by conspiracies arising among the aristocracy. In Book 2, Livy describes a conspiracy led by two brothers of the Aquillii family and two of the Vitellii family, who planned the return of Tarquinius, the king who had recently been cast out of Rome. The conspiracy had the support of the sons of Brutus, who played a main role in freeing the Roman people from the tyranny of Tarquinius. A slave belonging to the Vitellii learned of the negotiations and denounced the plot to the consuls. In the repression that followed, the sons of Brutus were executed. The slave, in turn, was rewarded with freedom.49 According to the author: When the guilty had suffered, that the example might be in both respects a notable deterrent from crime, the informer was rewarded with money from the treasury, emancipation, and citizenship (Secundum poenam nocentium,

244

Fábio Duarte Joly ut in utramque partem arcendis sceleribus exemplum nobile esset, praemium indici pecunia ex aerario, libertas et civitas data).50

Livy further uses this episode as an etiological explanation of the manumission vindicta since the slave’s name was Vindicius.51 First of all, this account is part of the more general theme of political libertas in Book 2: it is an individual deprived of personal freedom, the one who helps to save the freedom of the res publica.52 The conduct of Vindicius is presented as a counterpoint to that of the sons of Brutus, who although noble and freeborn, preferred to choose monarchy, which is equated with ‘slavery.’ Secondly, this same portrait of the slave can be understood as an inquiry about the slave agency to obtain freedom. Marc Kleijwegt noted the expression ut in utramque partem, which referred to a typical rhetorical device used by the schools of declamation at the end of the Republic through which the student had to argue against and in favour of a certain theme. Therefore, Livy could be problematising the question of whether the slave’s conduct was right or wrong in denouncing the conspiracy to the authorities.53 Livy does not mention what the slave had in mind by denouncing the conspiracy,54 nor does he mention any lack of fides, but the question inherent to the disputatio focuses on the qualities required from a slave to be a citizen. While Livy believed that Vindicius had a commendable attitude in saving the Republic thus deserving his freedom, he also points out to the problems of immediate and generalised granting of citizenship to all slaves. In this sense, the historian seems to be, in general, very cautious about the possibilities available to the social mobility of slaves despite the fact that their agency could be fundamental in moments of rupture of public order.55 In Book 8 Livy recounts another aristocratic conspiracy, but differently from that above described, and even from the slave revolts cited in the previous section, slave women had an important role in its development. In 331 BC, a slave woman accused a group of women of poisoning which had caused several deaths in Rome: When the leading citizens were falling ill with the same kind of malady, which had, in almost every case the same fatal termination, a certain serving-woman (ancilla) came to Quintus Fabius Maximus, the curule aedile, and declared that she would reveal the cause of the general calamity, if he would give her a pledge that she should not suffer for her testimony (si ab eo fides sibi data esset haud futurum noxae iudicium). Fabius at once referred the matter to the consuls, and the consuls to the senate, and a pledge was given to the witness with the unanimous approval of that body. She then disclosed the fact that the City was afflicted by the criminal practices of the women; that they who prepared these poisons were matrons, whom, if they would instantly attend her, they might take in the very act.56 Twenty women were brought to the forum, and two of them, Cornelia and Sergia, asserted that the drugs were salutary. The ancilla challenged them to drink the cups, and after deliberating among the others, the women openly, in the sight of all, drank the poison and died.57 The slaves of other women betrayed their mistresses;

Slave agency in Livy’s history of Rome 245 in all, 170 were found guilty.58 According to Livy, this was the first time that a case of poisoning had ever been brought in Rome. The entire affair struck the Romans as unusual, and they attributed the matter to madness rather than criminal intent.59 So, on the basis of a precedent from the olden times of the secession of the plebs, the people decided to elect a dictator to drive in a nail (clavi figendi causa).60 Once Gnaeus Quinctius performed this ritual, he resigned.61 Livy does not allow us to think about the motives that led to the slave’s action although he implicitly considers her strategy of denouncing a positive one. The episode, however, is constructed, as Victoria Pagán has noted, either to refer the reader to the deeds of the gens Quinctia, marked by a devotion to the res publica,62 or to reinforce the stereotype of women as conspirators. In her words, ‘patrician women were concocting poisons in secret and killing citizens. In a counterconspiracy, slave women, as agents provocateurs, provided the information leading to the arrest of the poisoners, thereby preserving the state from an internal threat.’63 Nonetheless, the central point is how to foster a collaborative agency of slaves towards the Roman state, even if it means putting loyalty to masters at risk. For Livy, the mere concession of freedom (and, more rarely, of citizenship) and payment of money are strategies that are not ultimately enough because they presuppose that slave agency is concerned above all with achieving personal freedom and not so much with safeguarding the freedom of the Roman state. A real allegiance to the welfare of the res publica must not be one that has to be bought, but it has to be an inherent individual trait of citizens and slaves alike. It is ultimately a matter of virtus.64 This problem is clearly illustrated by Livy in narrating the enrolment of slaves, the so called volones, by Tiberius Gracchus in the Roman army against the Carthaginians in 214 BC.65 On that occasion, Gracchus, authorised by the Senate, promised to grant freedom to the slaves who fought with valour (virtus) against the Carthaginians and brought the head of an enemy back to the camp. However, in the course of the battle near Beneventum, as soon as the slaves succeeded in obtaining a head, they stopped fighting and returned to the camp. Gracchus was compelled to exhort them to fight until the final defeat of the enemy, so that only then would freedom be granted. Victory achieved, he fulfilled his promise by granting freedom to both the valiant and those, about 4,000, who had retreated to a hill fearful of punishment as they did not fight properly in battle. However, Gracchus warned them that: Before making you all equals by the right of freedom, . . . to prevent the loss of every distinction between valour and cowardice (ne discrimen omne virtutis ignaviaeque pereat), I shall order the names of those who, remembering their refusal to fight, . . . and summoning them one by one I shall make them swear that, excepting men who shall have illness as an excuse, they will take food and drink standing only, so long as they shall be in the service. This penalty you will bear with patience, if you will reflect that you could not have been marked with any slighter sign of cowardice.66

246

Fábio Duarte Joly

This division between worthy and unworthy was kept at the banquets offered by the people of Beneventum to the troops, so that ‘wearing caps or white woollen headbands, the volunteers feasted (Pilleati aut lana alba velatis capitibus volones epulati sunt), some reclining, and some standing served and ate at the same time.’67 Gracchus, on his return to Rome, commissioned a representation of that day of festivity to be painted in the Temple of Liberty to be built on the Aventine. As Koortbojian points out, the conditions Gracchus had imposed on some of his soldiers’ newly acquired freedom had compelled them to comport themselves as if such freedom had never been granted, so that: for Rome’s citizens, and above all, the aristocratic class, the message of Gracchus’ painting was clear: to fight for Rome was a privilege and a responsibility, and those who failed in their obligations to the state were not real Romans; they were to be considered no better than slaves.68 The tension between individual and state freedom is thus central to Livy and largely determine how the historian presents slave agency to his audience.

Conclusions The analysis of slave agency in Livy’s history of Rome, as exemplified by the selected passages in the previous sections, reveals, on the one hand, the difficulty of extracting more precise information about the social diversity of slaves, their aspirations and daily strategies for survival and resistance. But, on the other hand, this same analysis may also allow some insight, even if indirect, to the agency of slaves, making possible a history from below despite the limits imposed by the ancient literary genre of history. A possibility inspired by the study of the Livian vision of servile agency is that the action of slaves cannot be framed by a rigid dichotomy between strategies of resistance and strategies of collaboration. As Livy’s narrative of conspiracies indicates, the denunciation, by some slaves, of subversive plots to the Roman authorities proves to be both a resistance to slavery, as a strategy for obtaining individual advantages by other ways than by the will of the master, and a form of collaboration, once the denunciation of rebellious slaves or aristocrats ultimately reinforces the very political structure that keeps slaves, as a group, subdued. Put in these terms, this is a question directly linked to the relationship between agency and structure, since the slaves, in an ambivalent manner, demonstrated that they pursued their own interests exploring alternatives opened by the Roman structure of domination, and thus could profit from its repressive policies or from exceptional circumstances due to war times (as in the case of the volones) to achieve their ends.69 Furthermore, the theme of slave agency in Livy equally refers, as Kostas Vlassopoulos has remarked, to the ‘ways in which subaltern people made use of institutions and processes in which they did not have an independent voice of their own,’ by taking part ‘in conflicts that were in theory an affair among the members of the

Slave agency in Livy’s history of Rome 247 elite.’70 The Roman historian allows us to indirectly observe this process since his historical account shows a Roman state pervaded by an intrinsic instability due to a fierce aristocratic competition for honour and prestige, and the aristocratic conspiracies were sharp examples of this state of affairs. Slaves, in this context, became active agents by denouncing conspiracy leaders and thus participated someway in the political struggles of the Roman Republic. In sum, ancient historiography has privileged narratives of events that, to a large extent, are related to the action of elite men and women, and consequently it has transmitted an image of slaves according to an ideology in which they mostly appear as internal enemies to be controlled for the public good. However, it is still possible to recur to these same narratives to write how slaves used conflicts within the elite to carry out their own personal interests, as the quest for freedom. Ancient historiography, with its stereotype of the slave as counterconspirator, can open us a window to aspects of the ‘politics of survival’71 of slaves in the Graeco-Roman world.

Notes * This chapter is part of the ‘Slavery, Freedom, and Citizenship, from Augustus to Nero’ project, funded by the CNPq, National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (grant number 302301/2018–6). I thank the editors and the conference participants, especially Fábio Faversani, for their suggestions and criticism of an earlier draft of this text. I am also grateful to Brenda Lalicker for her revision of my English text. Unless otherwise stated, all translations of ancient authors are taken from the Loeb editions. 1 For slavery in Tacitus, see Joly 2004. Schwitter 2017 provides a brief overview of slavery in Livy. There is no comprehensive study about slavery in the Roman historians comparable to that of Tamiolaki 2010 concerning Greek historiography. 2 Tac. Ann. 14.44: postquam vero nationes in familiis habemus, quibus diversi ritus, externa sacra aut nulla sunt, conluviem istam non nisi metu coercueris. 3 See Vogt 1975 on the theme of slave loyalty (fides) in Latin literature. 4 Syme 1967, 532. 5 Knapp 2011, 110, for whom ‘the standard elite sources can be used if care is taken to account for their social point of view.’ 6 Livy particularly provides information on mass enslavement in the period from 218 to 167 BC, whether or not citing specific numbers (see Bradley 1990, 63, with the respective references). 7 Liv. 1.46.3. See also 1.17.3–4, 1.57.2–3 and 2.1.4–6. Cf. Vasaly 2015, 219. 8 See, e.g. the episode of the decemvirs in Book 3, which points out to a kind of reversion to monarchy (3.36.5), as well as the episode of the preparations for the siege of Veii, in Book 5, when the Roman generals proposed a strategy of winter campaigns. Livy says that it was a novelty for the soldiers, so that the tribunes argued that this would be an insult to the freedom of the plebs, and that the soldiers were free men and citizens, not slaves (5.2.11: liberos et cives eorum, non servos). 9 Lavan 2013. 10 In Livy, for instance, such theme is exemplified in the discourse of Publius Scipio before a battle against Hannibal, when the Roman commander says to the troops ‘to fight not just with the spirit you show against other enemies but with outrage and anger, as if you were seeing your slaves suddenly taking up arms against you’ (non eo solum animo quo adversus alios hostes soletis, pugnare velim, sed cum indignatione quadam atque ira, velut si servos videatis vestros arma repente contra vos ferentes) (Liv. 21.41.10), cf. Lavan 2013, 89.

248

Fábio Duarte Joly

11 Keith Bradley, one of the leading authorities on the study of slave resistance in the Roman world, concedes that ‘consent, coercion and resistance were threads woven inextricably together all of a piece’ (Bradley 2011, 379), although he does not deal in detail with the problem of consent. 12 Hunt 2016. 13 Cf. Johnson 2003. See also Morales 2014 (and this volume) for a defence of a broader concept of politics to incorporate the non-citizens (as slaves and metics) as inhabitants of the community who had a political agency. See Hunt 1998 for an insightful study of the military role of slaves in classical Greece, a fact disregarded by Greek historians due to the preeminence of a civic ideology that associated warfare only with the citizen body of the Greek city-states. 14 Nousek 2010, 161. 15 Habinek 1998, 76–77 and Pagán 2004, 13. 16 Liv. 3.15.5. 17 Dionysius mentions that Herdonius gathered 4,000 followers (Ant. Rom. 10.14–17) among clients and servants (συνήθροιζε τοὺς πελάτας καὶ τῶν θεραπόντων οὓς εἶχε τοὺς εὐτολμοτάτους). But note that therapon, although it could be used to denote a chattel slave, may also be applied to free persons, as simply ‘servant’ (cf. Zelnick-Abramovitz 2005, 27). Dionysius elsewhere in his narrative of the episode uses the term doulos to refer to the slaves in Rome to whom Herdonius wished to grant freedom if they joined him (Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 10.14.3, 15.1). 18 Forsythe (2005, 205) notes that, differently from Livy, ‘Dionysius describes the seizure as a military expedition originating upstream from Rome in the Sabine territory.’ However, as Cornell 1989, 286 concludes, ‘there can be no certainty about the incident, which remains a mystery.’ The attempted coup by Appius Herdonius and his followers in 460, anyway, is an illustration, among others, of the continuation of a strong tradition of personal, gens-based armies in central Italy that dates back to the seventh and sixth centuries BC (Armstrong 2016, 71; see also Cornell 1995, 143–5). 19 Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 10.15.1. 20 Liv. 3.15.7. 21 On the depiction of Herdonius as similar to Catiline, see Apostol (2016, 122), for whom ‘by repeatedly alluding to Sallust’s hostile description of Catiline and his co-conspirators, both in specific language and by making Herdonius’ demands and programme basically the same as Catiline’s (freedom for slaves, return of exiles, threat of armed intervention from abroad, etc.), Livy essentially states that they are members of the same category and class of criminal.’ 22 Liv. 3.15.9. For discussion of this social aspect of the revolt, see Capozza 1966, 37–64. 23 Liv. 3.16.3. 24 Liv. 3.18.10. 25 This latter fact is implied in the discourse of the consul Publius Valerius to the tribunes of the plebs, motivating them to counterattack the movement led by Herdonius: ‘Has he who could not arouse the slaves been so successful in corrupting you?’ (Tam felix vobis corrumpendis fuit qui servitia non commovit auctor?) (Liv. 3.17.2). See also Ogilvie 1965, 424–5 for the Catilinarian overtones introduced by Livy. 26 Liv. 4.45.1–2. 27 Ogilvie 1965, 603. 28 Liv. 22.33.2. 29 Roselaar 2012, 190–2. 30 Liv. 32.26.5–6. 31 Liv. 32.26.7. 32 Liv. 32.26.8. 33 Liv. 32.26.14. 34 Liv. 33.36.3.

Slave agency in Livy’s history of Rome 249 35 Liv. 39.29.8–9. This same praetor repressed large-scale conspiracies of herdsmen in southern Italy in 184 BC. Livy relates this action to the repression of the Bacchanalian conspiracy at Rome in 186 BC. See Shaw 2001, 69. 36 Liv. 4.61.10. 37 Easton 2019, 26. See also Eder 1980, 115–6. 38 Ogilvie 1965, 623. On Servius Tullius’ origins, Liv. 1.39.5. 39 Liv. 8.13.16. 40 Liv. 8.14.1. 41 See Sherwin-White 1980, 59–60, for discussion. For the author, ‘in this chapter, one of the most careful in the whole of Livy, the distinction between the two forms of civitas is most jealously observed.’ The distinction is between civitas optimo iure, which included the right to vote in Rome (suffragium), and civitas sine suffragio. 42 Liv. 41.8.9–10. 43 Treggiari 1969, 27. 44 This is also the case of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who wrote his Roman Antiquities in the Augustan Age. The Greek author praises the Roman principle of incorporating slaves as citizens in the political community through manumission, dating this practice from the time of king Servius Tullius. But he also argues (more explicitly than Livy, for instance) against the indiscriminate granting of citizenship to slaves. In his opinion, this practice ended up being a prize for those who had a bad behaviour, and hence the need for an intervention by the censors or consuls to examine the merits of those who would be manumitted (Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 4.24.5–6). The topic of manumission in Dionysius of Halicarnassus is a common concern for Greek intellectuals who are worried about the demographic decline of Greek cities and its political consequences. Dionysius criticises the narrow conception of citizenship in cities like Sparta, Athens or Thebes, which in the end jeopardised their hegemonies, causing a shortage of soldiers. Rome, on the contrary, though a deliberate policy, followed a different path, renewing its body of citizens with former slaves, and consequently maintaining an army of its own. See Briquel 2000. 45 On Junian Latins, see Koops 2014. 46 As remarked by Perry (2016, 5), ‘all these pathways emphasize two components of good citizenship, childbirth and civic service, and characterize manumission as a citizenbuilding enterprise.’ 47 For an overview of the Augustan legislation on manumission, see Mouritsen 2011, 80–92. 48 In taking into account the Augustan context for interpreting Livy’s references to manumission, I follow Kleijwegt, for whom it was a ‘period in which many authorities, including the emperor himself, had serious misgivings that manumission and citizenship were bestowed on undeserving slaves’ (2009, 324). 49 On Vindicius as the stereotype of the virtuous slave who denounced a conspiracy and saved the Republic, see Millot 2013, 150. I have argued elsewhere (Joly 2018) for a probable Tacitean allusion to Livy’s Vindicius in his depiction of the freedman Milichus, who denounced to emperor Nero the conspiracy of Piso in AD 65 (Ann. 15.54). Cogitore 2002, 43–45 notes the recurrence of the theme of slave loyalty in the conspiracy narratives of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. 50 Liv. 2.5.9–10. 51 Dionysius of Halicarnassus does not mention this point. It should be noted that Livy’s narrative differs from those of Dionysius and Plutarch. For more details, see Ogilvie 1965, 241–3 and Oakley 2018, 144–8. 52 Kleijwegt 2009, 324. 53 Kleijwegt 2009, 323–4. 54 Liv. 2.4.6. 55 Roller 2001, 232 also notes that Livy, ‘describing the first manumissio vindicta, presents the fact that citizenship was conferred at the same time as freedom as striking and

250

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Fábio Duarte Joly

precedent setting.’ Livy equally seems to be critical of the social ascension of slaves to citizenry. This issue may be glimpsed in the way the historian rejects the tradition that attributed a servile origin to the sixth king of Rome, Servius Tullius. Livy stresses that Servius ‘turned out to be of a truly royal nature, and when Tarquinius sought a son-inlaw there was no other young Roman who could be at all compared to Servius; and the king accordingly betrothed his daughter to him. This great honour, for whatever cause conferred on him, forbids us to suppose that his mother was a slave and that he himself had been in a state of servitude as a child’ (Hic quacumque de causa tantus illi honos habitus credere prohibet serva natum eum parvumque ipsum servisse) (Liv. 1.39.5). Livy follows here a tradition in which Servius Tullius was a posthumous son of Servius Tullius, notable of Corniculum, and his wife, Ocrisia. After the seizure of the city by the Romans and her husband’s death, Ocrisia, who would be made a slave like all other women, is spared because of her noble origin. Queen Tanaquil then considered her as a friend and took her to the court where Servius was born. Ocrisia and the son escaped, therefore, from the infamous condition of slaves. This account differs from those of Cicero and Plutarch, and even from that of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who took for granted the servile origin of Servius, even if it was a temporary one. This version is of no interest for Livy, since he preferred to highlight an aristocratic tradition attached to the image of Servius Tullius, in opposition to another one, democratic, which presented him as a Roman parallel to Solon, a legislator devoted to popular causes. For both literary traditions, see Fromentin 2002. Liv. 8.18.4–7. Liv. 8.18.8–10. Liv. 8.18.11. Liv. 8.18.11–2. Liv. 8.18.13. I follow here the account of Pagán 2008, 36. See Gaughan 2010, 77–79, for the legal aspects of this event. On this image of the Quinctii, see the more detailed analysis of Vasaly 1999. Pagán 2008, 39. This gender stereotyped portrayal of conspirators and counterconspirators alike also determines how slave agency is presented by Livy: whereas men do not fear to denounce conspiracies and are rewarded with freedom and money, women act with fear of being punished (as was common in the case of evidence given by slaves since it was usually valid only if taken under torture) and receive neither freedom nor money. For the essential role of virtus in Livy, see Balmaceda 2017, 83–128. Liv. 24.14–6. Liv. 24.16.11–4. Liv. 24.16.18–9. Koortbojian 2002, 43. See also Arena 2012, 38–9. See Port 2015, 111 for the relationship between agency and structure considering the ambiguities and ambivalences of behaviour in oppressive regimes, an important issue to history from below, the history of everyday life, and microhistory. See Vlassopoulos in this volume. I take this expression from Vincent Brown (2009, 1246), for whom it is imperative to supplant the idea of ‘social death,’ as proposed by Orlando Patterson (1982), to get a fuller understanding of how ‘the struggles of slaves were not simply beset by the depredations of slavery but were shaped and directed by them.’

Bibliography Apostol, R. 2016. ‘State Counter-Terrorism in Ancient Rome: Toward a New Basis for the Diachronic Study of Terror.’ In Re-Visioning Terrorism: A Humanistic Perspective, edited by E. Coda and B. Lawton, 119–36. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press.

Slave agency in Livy’s history of Rome 251 Arena, V. 2012. Libertas and the Practice of Politics in the Late Roman Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Armstrong, J. 2016. War and Society in Early Rome: From Warlords to Generals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316145241. Balmaceda, C. 2017. Virtus Romana: Politics and Morality in the Roman Historians. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Bradley, K. R. 1990. ‘Approvvigionamento e allevamento di schiavi a Roma.’ In La schiavitù nel mondo antico, edited by M. I. Finley, 59–94. Rome-Bari: Laterza. Bradley, K. R. 2011. ‘Resisting Slavery at Rome.’ In The Cambridge World History of Slavery. Vol. 1: The Ancient Mediterranean World, edited by K. Bradley and P. Cartledge, 362–84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521840668.019. Briquel, D. 2000. ‘Petite histoire d’une grande idée: l’ouverture de la citoyenneté aux anciens esclaves, source de la puissance de Rome.’ ACD 36: 31–49. doi:10.3406/ bsnaf.2001.11182. Brown, V. 2009. ‘Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery.’ AHR 114 (5): 1231–49. doi:10.1086/ahr.114.5.1231. Capozza, M. 1966. Movimenti servili nel mondo romano in età repubblicana: dal 501 al 184 a. Cr. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider. Cogitore, I. 2002. La légitimité dynastique d’Auguste à Néron à l’épreuve des conspirations. Rome: École Française de Rome. Cornell, T. 1989. ‘The Conquest of Italy.’ In The Cambridge Ancient History. Vol. 7.2: The Rise of Rome to 220 B.C., edited by A. Drummond, F. Walbank, A. Astin, M. Frederiksen and R. Ogilvie, 351–419. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/ CHOL9780521234467.009. Cornell, T. 1995. The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000–264 BC). London and New York: Routledge. Easton, J. A. 2019. Rising from Below: The Families of Roman Municipal Freedmen and Social Mobility in the Roman Empire. PhD diss., University of Toronto. Eder, W. 1980. Servitus Publica. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner. Forsythe, G. 2005. A Critical History of Early Rome: From Prehistory to the First Punic War. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fromentin, V. 2002. ‘Servius Tullius sans Fortuna? ou la figure du roi Servius Tullius chez Denys d’Halicarnasse.’ In Pouvoir des hommes, signes des Dieux dans le monde antique. Actes des rencontres de Besançon (1999–2000), edited by M. Fartzoff, E. Smadja and E. Geny, 53–78. Besançon: Institut des Sciences et Techniques de l’Antiquité. Gaughan, J. E. 2010. Murder Was Not a Crime: Homicide and Power in the Roman Republic. Austin: University of Texas Press. Habinek, T. N. 1998. The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity, and Empire in Ancient Rome. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hodkinson, S., M. Kleijwegt and K. Vlassopoulos, eds. 2016. The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hunt, P. 1998. Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hunt, P. 2016. ‘Slaves as Active Subjects: Individual Strategies.’ In Hodkinson, Kleijwegt and Vlassopoulos 2016. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199575251.013.19. Johnson, W. 2003. ‘On Agency.’ Journal of Social History 37 (1): 113–24. doi:10.1353/ jsh.2003.0143. Joly, F. D. 2004. Tácito e a Metáfora da Escravidão: Um Estudo de Cultura Política Romana. São Paulo: Edusp.

252

Fábio Duarte Joly

Joly, F. D. 2018. ‘Tacitus’ Milichus and Livy’s Vindicius: fides between domus and res publica.’ In Sources et modèles des historiens anciens, edited by O. Devillers and B. B. Sebastiani, 211–9. Bordeaux: Ausonius. Kleijwegt, M. 2009. ‘Creating New Citizens: Freed Slaves, the State and Citizenship in Early Rome and under Augustus.’ European Review of History/Revue européenne d’histoire 16: 319–30. doi:10.1080/13507480902916829. Knapp, R. C. 2011. Invisible Romans: Prostitutes, Outlaws, Slaves, Gladiators, Ordinary Men and Women . . . the Romans that History Forgot. London: Profile Books. Koops, E. 2014. ‘Masters and Freedmen: Junian Latins and the Struggle for Citizenship.’ In Integration in Rome and in the Roman World: Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop of the International Network Impact of Empire, edited by G. de Kleijn and S. Benoist, 105–26. Leiden: Brill. doi:10.1163/9789004256675_009. Koortbojian, M. 2002. ‘A Painted Exemplum at Rome’s Temple of Liberty.’ JRS 92: 33–48. doi:10.2307/3184858. Lavan, M. 2013. Slaves to Rome: Paradigms of Empire in Roman Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139199025. Millot, R. 2013. ‘Le conspirateur sous la République: conception, utilisation et influence d’un stéréotype dans la culture politique romaine.’ In Miroir des autres, reflet de soi (2): stéréotypes, politique et société dans le monde occidental (de l’Antiquité romaine à l’époque contemporaine), edited by H. Ménard and C. Courrier, 144–68. Paris: Michel Houdiard Éd. Morales, F. A. 2014. A Democracia Ateniense pelo Avesso: Os Metecos e a Política de Lísias. São Paulo: Edusp. Mouritsen, H. 2011. The Freedman in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511975639. Nousek, D. 2010. ‘Echoes of Cicero in Livy’s Bacchanalian Narrative (39.8–19).’ CQ 60 (1): 156–66. doi:10.1017/S0009838809990504. Oakley, S. 2018. ‘The Expansive Scale of the Roman Antiquities.’ In Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Augustan Rome: Rhetoric, Criticism and Historiography, edited by R. Hunter and C. de Jonge, 127–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/97811086 47632.006. Ogilvie, R. M. 1965. A Commentary on Livy, Books 1–5. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pagán, V. E. 2004. Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History. Austin: University of Texas Press. Pagán, V. E. 2008. ‘Toward a Model of Conspiracy Theory for Ancient Rome.’ New German Critique 103: 27–49. doi:10.1215/0094033X-2007-017. Patterson, O. 1982. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Perry, M. J. 2016. ‘Manumission, Citizenship, and Acculturation in the Roman World.’ In Hodkinson, Kleijwegt and Vlassopoulos 2016. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199575251.013.10. Port, A. I. 2015. ‘History from Below, the History of Everyday Life, and Microhistory.’ In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, edited by J. D. Wright. 2nd edition. Vol. 11, 108–13. Amsterdam: Elsevier. doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.62156–6. Roller, M. 2001. Constructing Autocracy: Aristocrats and Emperors in Julio-Claudian Rome. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Roselaar, S. T. 2012. ‘Roman State Prisoners in Latin and Italian Cities.’ CQ 62 (1): 189–200. doi:10.1017/S0009838811000644. Schwitter, R. 2017. ‘Livius.’ In Handwörterbuch der antiken Sklaverei, edited by H. Heinen, cols. 1800–4. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Shaw, B. D. 2001. Spartacus and the Slave Wars: A Brief History with Documents. Boston, MA: Bedford/St Martin’s.

Slave agency in Livy’s history of Rome 253 Sherwin-White, A. N. 1980. The Roman Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Syme, R. 1967. Tacitus. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tamiolaki, M. 2010. Liberté et esclavage chez les historiens grecs classiques. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne. Treggiari, S. 1969. Roman Freedmen during the Late Republic. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Vasaly, A. 1999. ‘The Quinctii in Livy’s First Pentad: The Rhetoric of Anti-Rhetoric.’ CW 92 (6): 513–30. Vasaly, A. 2015. ‘The Composition of the Ab Urbe Condita: The Case of the First Pentad.’ In A Companion to Livy, edited by B. Mineo, 217–29. Malden: Wiley Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781118339015.ch17. Vogt, J. 1975. ‘The Faithful Slave.’ In J. Vogt, Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man. Translated by T. Wiedemann, 129–45. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zelnick-Abramovitz, R. 2005. Not Wholly Free: The Concept of Manumission and the Status of Manumitted Slaves in the Ancient Greek World. Leiden: Brill. doi:10.1163/9789047408178.

12 The crowd in late antiquity Problems and possibilities of an inquiry Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira

Introduction Ancient urban social history has often succumbed to what E. P. Thompson called ‘a spasmodic view of popular history,’ according to which the interventions of the common people in the historical scene are interpreted as occasional and compulsive reactions to external stimuli.1 This is especially the case of the study of crowds in late antiquity. Modern scholars have long debated the magnitude and impact of urban violence in the period. Much of the discussion, however, has tended to turn around questions whether the supposed stability of the classical city would have persisted in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries and whether Christianity would be responsible for the transformation of this equilibrium.2 Scholars have also disputed whether Christian leaders were actually able to rouse large crowds or only engaged more manageable numbers of clients and thugs.3 Otherwise, the tendency of the scholarship until recent years was simply to juxtapose (or classify) dissociated episodes (or types) of disorder.4 Despite differences of approach, what all these studies have in common is a persistent focus on the role of leadership, on the general level of tension in society or on the broad features of riots, to the detriment of the motivations of participants and their reasons for acting.5 Within the two last decades or so, this has begun to change. A number of ancient historians, and not only those studying late antiquity, have begun to pay far more attention to ancient crowds in their own terms. Thus, Sara Forsdyke has studied the ritualised and theatrical aspects of crowd action in archaic and classical Greek citystates, focusing on the methods of popular justice as a crucial context for the symbolic interaction of elites and masses.6 Cyril Courrier has explored exhaustively the political culture of the plebs in the city of Rome, from the late Republic to the early Empire, with a particular focus on its collective actions, group consciousness and motivation.7 As for late antiquity, Carlos Galvão-Sobrinho, Leslie Dossey and Brent D. Shaw have brought new and insightful contributions to our understanding of the motivations and logic of participants in religious riots and peasant rebellions.8 Peter Bell used an array of modern theories to understand the nature of social conflict in the Justinian Age, particularly of the religious and circus faction riots.9 More sceptical about the use of modern approaches, Peter Van Nuffelen has focused on the moral dimension of disturbances, as evoked by ancient sources, DOI: 10.4324/9781003005148-16

The crowd in late antiquity 255 to highlight the agency of crowds.10 Although the late Marianne Sághy observed how rare studies ‘on crowd dynamics, crowd empowerment, ingroup dynamics, crowd psychology, intergroup contacts or crowd politics’ remain to this day, recent projects have begun to handle exactly these questions.11 At the time of this writing, at least two major research projects on ancient crowds and riots over a long period of time were being conducted in the Netherlands and France. I am referring here, respectively, to Daniëlle Slootjes’ project on urban crowd behaviour in pre-modern Europe, 500 BC–AD 1500, and to Sylvain Janniard and Anna Heller’s project on popular riots in the Roman East, from the second century BC to the seventh century AD.12 Although the focus of these projects is not necessarily on history from below (Slootjes’ project is indeed focused on crowd control), they testify to a growing interest in the study of crowds in antiquity. As we have seen in the introduction to this volume, this interest is, at least in part, derived and will be surely fuelled by recent political developments that have brought the themes of urban riots and civil commotion to the forefront of contemporary reflection, from the Arab Spring in North Africa and the Middle East to the ‘Occupy’ movement in the West, from the massive protests of June 2013 in Brazil to the yellow vests movement in France. As the field of crowd studies was in the late 1950s and 1960s the crucial laboratory for what then came to be called ‘history from below,’ it is fair to assume that a close examination of the possibilities and challenges involved in the study of crowds in terms of the common people’s own experiences and aspirations will be essential for the objectives of this book, as Alex Gottesman has already highlighted in his chapter.13 In this chapter, I would like to discuss the main problems I have had to deal with and the approaches I have adopted in my own investigations into late antique crowds in the past two decades.14 I will then exemplify some of the possibilities of analysis through a case study, the riot of AD 354 in Antioch. I will conclude with a wider discussion of the implications of these approaches for the writing of history and for the critical reflection about our own time.

The crowd and its problems Sources The first problem involved in any study of crowds in the ancient world is how to begin our investigation given the nature of our sources. Historians have tended to start with the available descriptions of crowd behaviour and violence in ancient literate sources and then to discuss the emerging features of the events. Nicholas Purcell has appropriately compared this situation to ‘the temptation of the person who has lost something in a shadowy room to look for it not where it was lost, but where the light is.’15 And this is not how an ancient history from below can be written. As Eric Hobsbawm pointed out, even for better documented periods: the grassroots historian finds only what he is looking for, not what is already waiting for him. Most sources for grassroots history have only been recognized

256

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira as sources because someone has asked a question and then prospected desperately around for some way—any way—of answering it.16

In the case of ancient history, there are additional problems in restricting our approaches to the exegesis of the available accounts of popular protest and rioting. Ancient accounts rarely allow us any insight on what George Rudé called the ‘faces in the crowd.’17 As Cyril Courrier and Nicolas Tran have already noted in this volume, descriptions of urban populations by ancient authors are often vague and highly moralising accounts. Terms like plebs, populus, multitudo, turba, vulgus, in Latin, or demos, ochlos, hoi polloi, plēthos, in Greek, are frequently used in these texts synonymously to describe the objectionable habits of the masses, the infamy of their condition or the inconstancy of their positions.18 Despite some important changes in late antiquity, this elite perspective remains dominant in our period and with it the tradition of despising the crowd. Descriptions of urban violence by Christians also carry their own biases. Christian preachers and polemicists, for example, always depicted the actions of crowds mobilised by their sectarian enemies in the most negative light but portrayed their own crowds as the true ‘people of God.’ This is not to ignore the possibilities offered by the late antique source materials, especially by contrast with previous centuries. The evidence of the law codes, for instance, offers insights, in ways that are completely new, not only on some of the incentives to popular manifestation and measures devised to contain it but also on many aspects of the life of the underclasses. Our narrative sources also focus on public disorder in a way that earlier texts did not, sometimes even transcribing in detail the sequence of rhythmic slogans that accompanied episodes of popular contention. Similarly, the disapproving and normative documents of the Christian Church can offer insights on popular practices and conceptions in ways that are unparalleled for earlier periods, which is due to the very fact that clerics were trying to transform popular habits and attitudes. ‘This fact,’ as Lucy Grig rightly observed, ‘brings about its own not insubstantial methodological challenges, but it also marks a striking change: for almost the first time in the Mediterranean world we can see the elite taking a sustained interest in the activities of the non-elite.’19 There is no need, therefore, to exaggerate the distortions of the (late) ancient literate sources. As Carlo Ginzburg put it in a similar context, ‘The fact that a source is not “objective” (for that matter, neither is an inventory) does not mean that it is useless. . . . [E]ven meagre, scattered, and obscure documentation can be put to good use.’20 A hostile account can still furnish precious testimony about a crowd in revolt, its targets and its forms of action, and when this testimony is confronted with other sources of various origins and genres, we can identify patterns that cannot be attributed to the descriptive tradition of the objectionable habits of the ‘mob.’ Moreover, we can discern the very process of distortion involved in the construction of these kinds of sources and then turn them upside down.21 The dialogical nature of some kinds of texts also means that we are able to identify ‘the marks of the communicative processes in which they are engaged.’22 This is especially the case of the sermons of bishops like Augustine, which have been

The crowd in late antiquity 257 suggestively called ‘dialogues with the crowd.’23 Submitting these texts to the practice of ‘symptomatic reading’ or ‘reading against the grain,’ we can recover the traces of the opinions, the arguments and even the voices of the members of the multitude the preacher addresses. Definitions, preconditions and frameworks My point, however, is that to select and approach our sources we need previously to set out our agenda and establish some basic definitions and frameworks. Despite the tendency of our sources to use the same terms to describe three different groups, namely the urban population, the demos of entitled plebeians and the crowd, this latter collective was never the exact microcosm of the whole population, nor was it restricted in all circumstances to the adult male citizens.24 A crowd can better be defined as ‘a changeable coalition composed of different categories . . . whose frontiers could vary according to the successive conjunctures that crystalized it.’25 Since the pioneering work of Georges Lefebvre in the 1930s, however, generations of historians and sociologists have also emphasised that a crowd—any crowd—in the sense of a group of people capable of acting collectively, is never the result of the ephemeral aggregation of atomised individuals. On the contrary, its very existence presumes a prior culture, shared experiences and social bonds.26 Already in his masterful Great Fear, Lefebvre drew attention to the need of ‘a deeper contextualization of popular life, a profounder understanding of the submerged history of the common people of which riots were but one manifestation.’27 Consequently, to understand the processes of crowd formation in late antiquity, we need to start by taking fully into account the formative experiences in the life of the urban populace, the networks that joined urban subaltern social groups and the culture that shaped their actions. Hence, it is necessary to study (1) the levels and changing composition of urban populations in the different regions and localities under study, (2) the economic activities and living conditions of the urban subaltern social groups, (3) their connections and various relations with urban leaders or holders of power and wealth, (4) the daily habits and associations that, independently of such vertical relations, enabled the formation of subaltern networks and communities, and (5) the institutional and non-institutional roles of ‘the people’ (however defined) in local cultural, religious and political life (in ceremonies, festivities, elections, decision-making processes), which offered occasions, references and models for various forms of crowd action. Levels of urban population are certainly an important factor in any analysis of collective action, although not in the sense it was usually conceived. There is little doubt, for instance, that the mobilisation of a crowd was easier in the most populous cities of the Mediterranean than in small towns. As Richard Alston observed, a ‘crowd consisting of 10 per cent of adult males in a city of about 20,000 was probably around 500, whereas 500 men in Alexandria was probably less than 0.5 per cent of the male population.’28 This, however, does not allow us to see violence as a natural consequence of living in crowded cities, like ‘filth, disease, fire and earthquake.’29 There is also no direct correlation between immigration,

258

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira

poverty, underemployment and violence, as it used to be thought. In a classic statement of this position, Évelyne Patlagean postulated that, from the fourth through the seventh centuries, an unprecedented immigration of the destitute from the countryside to the cities of the Roman East would have resulted in massive underemployment, unprecedented impoverishment and increasing urban violence.30 Now it is clear that mobility between the countryside and the towns was constant at all times.31 Nor is a static view of the Roman economy sustainable in the light of recent archaeological research. The regions that witnessed an urban population growth from the fourth to the sixth centuries, notably Egypt, the Near East and Asia Minor, were precisely those regions that witnessed at the same time a real economic boom.32 Of course, the general prosperity of a region does not mean that the majority of its urban population was never economically in trouble. Quite the reverse: the greater the importance of the manufacturing and trading sector in a city, the greater the sensitivity of its population to economic changes and the vagaries of the market.33 From the fourth to sixth centuries, the majority of city-dwellers, at least where dense populations remained important, continued to be engaged in the urban economy of production, distribution and services, rather than in the cultivation of the surrounding fields or as domestic employees of the great houses.34 The truly destitute, homeless and often starving, who were certainly numerous in the biggest cities, remained a minority in the total urban population.35 It is true that levels of intensive, specialised production and exchange—and, therefore, the possibilities of urban employment—varied greatly across Europe and the Mediterranean.36 But there is little doubt that the main manpower for riots in late antique cities was provided by men and (eventually) women actively and permanently engaged in this urban economy, rather than by outsiders or the truly destitute.37 The occasional insights offered by our sources on the composition of urban crowds in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries always point to the presence of artisans, shopkeepers and petty traders, if not of individuals of a better sort, and even the unskilled wage labourers involved seem to have had some stake in their community. Thus, the pauperes and the plebs infima who, according to the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, put on fire the house of the prefect of Rome Lampadius in 365 turn out to be shopkeepers who protested against the unjust requisition of iron, lead and bronze determined by the prefect.38 Likewise, the lynching of an imperial official accused of systematic extortions in the North African port of Hippo (Bône/ Annaba, Algeria) in 412, which we know through one of Augustine’s sermons, resulted from the alliance between merchants practising maritime commerce and the pauperes. Once again, these ‘poor men,’ on close inspection, turn out to be artisans and shopkeepers who were at the port to purchase their raw materials or products for resale.39 This is to be expected. Protests and riots, in all historical periods, always depend on existing community structures and goals to occur, which means also that the poorest, most marginalised sectors of the population can rarely mount collective action.40 What is beyond doubt is that the vast majority of the urban population, despite its differences, remained in an unmistakable subaltern condition in relation to the

The crowd in late antiquity 259 landowning aristocracies. In late Roman society, quite as much as in previous centuries, wealth was inextricably linked to privilege and to power, and, throughout the empire, the patterns of landowning continued to structure local politics.41 Yet an ambiguity that had for centuries marked the relations between the local notables and the urban populace became more apparent from the fourth century onwards: the contradiction between how aristocrats extracted and accumulated their wealth and how they justified their domination.42 As major landowners in their regions, the senators of Rome and the local notables elsewhere owed much of their income to the selling of the products of their estates to captive urban markets. This naturally means that the majority of the urban population was not only dependent on its own rulers for the supply of staple food but also vulnerable to the elite practices of hoarding and speculation.43 Some aristocratic landowners also had overarching interests in trade and manufacture, even if they distanced themselves publicly from these activities. This is evident not only in the cases of business run by their agents (slaves, freedmen or clients) but also in the ways they managed to extract profits even from the activities of independent artisans and shopkeepers, either by making loans or by constructing and renting to them shops and workshops.44 At the same time, however, urban notables had traditionally justified their domination by projecting a very different image. Since the Hellenistic period, local elites had justified the oligarchic regime set in place in their cities by showing their concern for the common good, distributing benefits, such as handouts, public buildings and games, that only the wealthy could provide to the community.45 Yet, from the beginning of the fourth century, the increasing centralisation of the imperial power and the expansion of the bureaucratic function encouraged many provincial aristocrats to transfer their ambitions towards the imperial service. Local elites became more fragmented, while new leaders, such as the Christian bishops, competed for the support of the populace.46 As I have argued elsewhere, these transformations had important consequences because they made urban rulers more vulnerable to challenges from below.47 In fact, while the fragmentation of the elites exposed the weak points of local power, the fact that many magnates ‘now felt that they no longer needed to cut a figure by showing love for their own city’48 made the traditional justifications for domination more difficult to maintain. For many historians, however, the rise of a more arrogant elite empowered by its connections with the imperial administration and the supposed deterioration of the condition of hoi polloi in late antiquity would only have resulted in the expansion of the ties of clientship and in the increasing difficulty for the majority of the urban population to assert its rights.49 Consequently, even when they rioted, so it is argued, the populace would inevitably be ‘subservient to, and directed by, elite interests.’50 The main problem with this view is that it supposes that subordinates are unable to develop their own horizontal ties of solidarity and social interactions outside the control of social superiors and are, therefore, incapable of resisting or, at least, negotiating the terms of their domination. Here lies the importance of the investigation of the daily habits and associations that joined urban subalterns. As I have shown in my book and in other contributions, based mainly on the rich North African evidence, there is no indication in the archaeological record that most

260

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira

craftsmen and shopkeepers had to live and work under the direct control of their social superiors.51 On the contrary, there are numerous references in the textual sources to the many occasions in which the common people could gather together in the streets, taverns, shops and places of entertainment to hear and discuss the latest rumours and news, read or hear the reading of a text, chant their chansons and mutualise their sentiments and opinions.52 As Kostas Vlassopoulos observed in his contribution to this volume, even if not exclusively subaltern, the substantial subaltern membership in these networks and communities was what made possible the identification of common interests, the sharing of experiences, stories and values, and the practical mastery of forms of collective expression and deliberation that were essential for any form of autonomous crowd action.53 Another common assumption in the scholarship was to attribute the riotous behaviour of crowds in the later Roman Empire to the absence or the decline of institutional forms of political participation.54 This view is now difficult to maintain, and this for several reasons. Firstly, riots in the ancient world occurred whether people were regularly consulted or not. As Gottesman showed in this volume, riots were a feature even of democratic Athens. Secondly, even in the late Roman Empire, the collectivity of citizens still had a role to play in the public polity, in municipal elections and decision-making processes, at least until the first half of the fifth century.55 As Carlos Machado recently showed for the case of Italy through a careful study of the epigraphic documentation, the members of the populus, the plebs, the city regions or the collegia still voted and awarded honours according to their own objectives and their own political priorities, playing a role parallel to that held by the town councils and the magistrates.56 One important change in the forms of popular political participation, however, was the prevalence of expressions of popular will by acclamation (the rhythmic shouting of slogans), in either formal or informal occasion.57 Viewed as an expression of unanimity and divine inspiration, acclamations were increasingly valued as a source of authority for both secular and ecclesiastical leaders. Constantine (emperor from 306 to 337) and his successors further encouraged this development with their authorisation to the local populations to send the emperor a copy of the acclamations they have issued for or against a governor, thus according to the verbatim recording of these opinions an administrative value.58 Another change was that, in a context of increasing fragmentation of the elite and continuous disputes between rival religious groups, urban leaders came to look more and more towards sheer numbers as a barometer of their social power and religious success.59 In the long run, these changes will tend to efface the distinction between citizen and city-dweller. But the immediate consequence, as Charlotte Roueché pointed out, was that ‘public gatherings for the purpose of entertainment or of ceremony were endowed with a new importance.’60 Taking into account all these occasions, institutional and non-institutional, in which ‘the people’ (however defined) were invited to occupy the public space as representatives of the community, is crucial because, as several scholars have noted, ‘crowds frequently operated under conventions that were implicitly sanctioned by authority.’61 Historians of medieval and early modern Europe have also

The crowd in late antiquity 261 shown that ceremonies and festivities not only offered the occasion for the expression of popular discontent but also shaped popular political activity. While Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie famously showed in his Carnival in Romans how a festive revelry could be turned into protest, Peter Burke and others observed that rituals of popular justice in early modern Europe adopted numerous features of Carnival.62 Although it might be argued that the evidence for the Greco-Roman antiquity is not as unequivocal as in the late medieval and early modern periods, there are various indications that ancient urban lower classes also used festive rituals and symbols to give voice to their political discontent, not only during ceremonies, festivities, theatre shows and games but also when rioting outside these contexts.63 In late antiquity, the frequent participation of crowds in festivities and official events held at theatres, circuses, streets and churches enabled ordinary people to express their discontent based on the principles and conventions learned on these occasions, sometimes even mimicking or mocking official rituals and processions.64 This brings us to the last and most decisive questions of our inquiry: how, why and when did the common people engage in a contentious action in the period under study? Three features of collective action should guide this investigation: the repertoires of contention, which enable the collective expression of discontent according to learned modes of action; the cultural frameworks, which justify and give meaning to collective action; and the political opportunities and threats, which open windows for contentious politics. I have spoken extensively about this in a recent article published on the pages of Past & Present,65 and I do not intend to repeat myself here except to underline the contributions of this approach to an understanding of ancient crowds from below. Taking into account the repertoire of contention—that is, the ‘whole set of means [a group] has for making claims of different types on different individuals’66—is a way to observe the options that the common people had, even in the absence of any guidance, to coordinate their actions and express their discontent. Analysing the shared stories or inherited understandings through which people define their situation as unjust or immoral or mark themselves off from their opponents is a way to discover what inspired the lower-class participants in late antique protests and riots to engage in these claim-making processes, even when mobilised by a bishop or a member of the elite. Finally, paying attention to the ‘political opportunities and threats’67 is a way to explore not only the wider changes that increased or lessened the collective capacity of lower-class groups to resist control or even challenge those in power, as we have already seen earlier, but also how in specific occasions ordinary people, by perceiving opportunities, managed to achieve their own goals.

A case study: the riot of AD 354 in Antioch Let me now exemplify how these methods and approaches can be concretely applied through a case study. My purpose here is to examine one of the most memorable episodes of popular violence in the fourth century by placing it in the broader context of popular life and the political dynamics of a major Mediterranean urban centre. I am referring to the lynching of Theophilus, the governor

262

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira

of Syria, and the burning down of the house of a leading notable during a food shortage in 354 at Antioch. The events are reported by the historian Ammianus Marcellinus (330–395) and the rhetor Libanius (314–393), two Antiochenes born to wealthy families who, certainly in the case of the latter and probably in the case of the former, had been eyewitnesses. Antioch-on-the-Orontes (Antakya, modern Turkey) was one of the largest and most densely populated cities of the Eastern Empire. For the time of John Chrysostom (Christian priest in the city between 386 and 393), estimations for the total Antiochene population, including children, slaves and people living in the suburbs, have varied between 200,000 and 500,000.68 Situated 17 km from the sea and extending from the banks and an island on the Orontes River to the foothills of Mount Silpios, Antioch was well located at the intersection of ancient and important trade routes and in the middle of a fertile and well-watered landscape.69 Former capital of the Seleucid royal power, the city remained under the Roman Empire as an important political, cultural and religious centre. In the fourth century, Antioch was the capital of the province of Syria, administered by a consular governor, as well as of the Diocese of the East, administered by the comes Orientis (the ‘Count of the East’). Given its strategic proximity with the Persian (Sassanian) Empire, the city also became on several occasions a seat of emperors, as was the case in 354. The upper class of Antioch was decidedly urban. Unlike their equivalents in other regions, such as the Gaul of Sidonius Apollinaris, they did not usually retire to their estates during the months of summer but only to the fashionable suburban villas of Daphne.70 This also helps to explain why their urban mansions became at the same time a symbol of power and an easy target of protests. As major landowners, however, their wealth ‘was grounded in the economic systems at work in Antioch’s hinterland.’71 As the surveys of the archaeological remains of the entire Amuq Valley suggest, the exploitation of this territory of plains and hills was based on the production not only of cereals for supplying the urban market but also ‘of olive oil for distant markets as well as for the consumption of cities, above all Antioch.’72 This is not to say that the Antiochene notables were uninterested in the profits that they could extract, directly or indirectly, from urban trade and manufacture—far from it! In a passage of his satirical essay Misopogon, Emperor Julian blamed some of the town councillors of Antioch for resisting his attempts to lower prices of basic foodstuffs not to lose their profits in their double condition of landowners and ‘shopkeepers,’ that is to say, of proprietors of shops run by their agents or rented to independent traders.73 The dependency on the economic power of these aristocrats and the precarity of life of most Antiochene artisans, shopkeepers and hired workers are confirmed by the writings of Libanius and Chrysostom.74 With the exception of the fabricenses (craftspeople working in the imperial factories), who formed a privileged group, the working population as a whole had to submit to numerous abuses.75 Living under the constant threat of impoverishment and aware of their reliance on the large landowners for the supply of the city with basic foodstuffs, they could well have agreed with the saying that Libanius attributed to an artisan in explaining how even free persons could be enslaved by the circumstances: ‘the fear of

The crowd in late antiquity 263 starvation is our master; it makes us worry night and day, threatening us with the direst death if we are idle.’76 Due to the lack of good archaeological data, we are almost completely ignorant about the tissu urbain of Antioch, but it seems that small and independent units of work had prevailed. As Wolfgang Liebeschuetz observed, even the imperial factories established in the city ‘appear to have been associations of individual craftsmen.’77 What is clear is that horizontal forms of cooperation were not unusual among this productive sector: John Chrysostom noticed, for instance, that even artisans working in different trades within the same row of shops contributed to a common fund to pay their rents.78 It was in these conditions that a popular culture of discussions could take root. Libanius noted that the Antiochene ergasteria (shops serving simultaneously as workshops) were common centres of social gossip, while Ammianus even portrayed Gallus Caesar wandering in disguise among the taverns and crossroads of Antioch to find out what the common people actually thought of him.79 The reaction of governors on the first rumours that spread through these channels in times of shortage clearly shows that the Antiochene authorities were well aware of the risk that informal conversations could lead to more serious protests and uprisings. Thus, in 383, Governor Philagrios ordered the scourging of bakers in Antioch after hearing rumours that he was being accused of having been bought so as not to prevent prices from rising.80 The crisis that amounted to the murder of Theophilus and the burning down of the house of the notable Eubulus in 354 was, indeed, only one in a series of confrontations between the Antiochene populace and the town councillors about the food supply of the city during the lifetimes of Libanius and Ammianus.81 In all cases, popular indignation was aroused not by hunger per se but by the perception that the elite, abandoning their moral obligation to guarantee the supply of the market, did not hesitate to take advantage of the situation of dependence, which was the plight of the majority of the urban population.82 Sometimes, this indignation was expressed in what Thompson defined as a ‘theatre of threat and sedition’: a set of ritualised acts calculated to frighten the elite.83 Such forms of expression could take place during or after spectacles, games and festivities and were inevitably shaped by the atmosphere of festive revelry.84 Thus, during the feast of the Kalends of January of 384, after the chariot race, a mocking parade of young men gathered in front of the house of a leading notable held responsible for the food shortages of the previous year. Torches in hand, they called upon him ‘to disgorge all that he had unjustly consumed.’85 Why, then, in 354 did the urban populace decide to seek redress for their grievances through the much more confrontational methods of lynching and arson? The reason must be sought in the political context. According to Ammianus, the main person responsible for the fate of the governor Theophilus was Gallus Caesar (ruler of the eastern provinces of the Empire from 351 to 354). The co-emperor was then staying in the city during his preparations for a campaign against the Persians. At the first signs of the food crisis, Gallus tried to force the general lowering of prices. Then, facing the resistance of the leading members of the town council of Antioch, he ordered their imprisonment and execution, but he finally spared their

264

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira

lives after the intervention of the Count of the East.86 Later, when Gallus was already preparing to leave with his army for Hierapolis, the populace of Antioch (Antiochensis plebs) appealed to him to save them from imminent famine. However, as Ammianus pointed out, he did not bring in supplies from the surrounding provinces. Instead: To the multitude, which was in fear of the direst necessity, he delivered up Theophilus, consular governor of Syria, who was standing nearby, constantly repeating that no one could lack food if the governor did not wish it. These words increased the audacity of the most vile populace (vulgi sordidioris audaciam), and when the lack of provisions became more acute, driven by hunger and rage, they set fire to the pretentious house of a certain Eubulus, a man of distinction among his own people; then, as if the governor had been delivered into their hands by an imperial edict, they assailed him with kicks and blows, and trampling him under foot when he was half-dead, with awful mutilation tore him to pieces. After his wretched death each man saw in the end of one person an image of his own peril and dreaded a fate like that which he had just witnessed.87 Identifying himself with the town councillors of Antioch, Ammianus had no sympathy for Gallus, and he had nothing but contempt for the crowd. He was, therefore, deliberately silent about any responsibility of the local aristocracy in manipulating the prices to their advantage, preferring to emphasise the consequences of Gallus’s tyrannical character.88 Now there is little doubt that the crisis was multifactorial: poor harvests were a probable reason; the need to supply the army stationed around Antioch was another.89 By dissociating himself from his governor, it is therefore clear that Gallus was ignoring his own responsibility in this crisis. But in this sense, he was doing nothing other than following the policy adopted by all the emperors since Constantine, who had invited the provincial populations to expose their grievances about their governors.90 The long-term effect of this imperial ‘populism’ would be precisely to encourage the populace to take the law into their own hands. Not surprisingly, a significant number among the reported targets of lynching in late antiquity are of imperial officers accused of the same crimes punishable by late antique law with a death penalty.91 Anyway, in 354, it was the governor’s apparent inaction, when the shortages reached their peak, that led the crowd to believe that Theophilus was an accomplice to the leaders of the city council held responsible for the rising prices, among whom they undoubtedly counted Eubulus. Gallus’s saying only increased the popular perception of the opportunity and urgency of their action by encouraging them to act as surrogates for the imperial authority. The crowd in this episode expressed discontent following a well-known pattern of protest during the food crisis: first by means of a verbal protest (undoubtedly in the hippodrome) and only later through an open assault on the authorities.92 The very sequence of lynching followed a recurrent model, which almost always involved the quartering of the victim at the hands of the crowd, dragging the

The crowd in late antiquity 265 corpse through the streets and disposing of the remains in the sea or a river, or in the sewage system.93 The festive, satirical and mocking character of this form of popular action is confirmed for the events of 354 by Libanius’s memories. In his Autobiography, first written in 374 and then revised throughout his life, he recalled how on this day his cousin ‘came puffing and panting up the stairs and reported that the governor was murdered, his body was being dragged along as sport for the murderers.’ He also remembered that ‘Eubulus and his son had fled before their brickbats to seek refuge somewhere on the hilltops, while the mob, cheated of their persons, vented its wrath against his house.’94 This description, together with another speech where Libanius recollected that Theophilus had been attacked at the hippodrome during the chariot races, also enables us to illuminate the topography of the rebellion.95 While the hippodrome was situated at the island on the Orontes, the house attacked was undoubtedly on the left-bank district, not far from the mountain that served as refuge for Eubulus and his son.96 This suggests a parade with the body of Theophilus through a large part of the city and a trajectory of the rioters similar to that we saw in the case of the Kalends of January of 384: from the hippodrome to the houses of the elite. Ammianus’s account does not enable us any glimpse into the composition of the crowd. His vocabulary only betrays his contempt for the urban lower classes: they were the sordidior vulgus (the most vile populace, the lowest classes) and the plebs promiscua (the contemptible plebs, the rabble).97 Libanius, however, observed in one of his speeches that the attack on Theophilus at the hippodrome was led by five metalworkers.98 There is a strong possibility that these metalworkers were employees of the state arms factories of Antioch.99 John Matthews has even suggested that, if this was the case, they could have combined ‘the interests of imperial establishment and populace against the alliance of consularis and the leading member of the city council whose mansion was burned down.’100 This view, however, is still too top-down. There is no reason to suppose that working for the state would necessarily have engaged these employees into the defence of the imperial establishment. The leadership of the rebellion assumed by these metalworkers can rather be explained by their self-confidence as a privileged group. Gregory of Nazianzus, for instance, observed about ‘the men from the small-arms factory’ of Cappadocian Caesarea that they were ‘specially hot-tempered and daring, because of the liberty allowed them.’101 A similar caution must guide our interpretation of a final precision offered by Ammianus. According to the historian, in the inquiry ordered, after the fall of Gallus, by Constantius II (emperor from 337 to 361), some ‘rich men’ (divites) escaped the consequences of their involvement in the murder of Theophilus, while certain ‘poor men’ (pauperes, probably Libanius’s metalworkers) were executed.102 What role these divites played in the incident is not clear, but there is no reason to see in them the planners of the whole rebellion who, ‘[m]anovrando un piccolo gruppo di facinorosi, . . . guidarono la folla a trovare un facile capro espiatorio.’103 There is little doubt that these rich people were supporters of Gallus among the Antiochene upper class, but they may have been accused either of not having come to the aid of the governor or of having contributed to the dissemination of the

266

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira

accusations which had aroused the ire of the plebs. Yet even if this last option was the case, these divites helped awaken a power they could not control. It is for this reason that, as Ammianus observed, the assassination of Theophilus remained in the minds of every member of the elite in Antioch as ‘the image of his own peril.’ And, indeed, it is as a warning to his pairs that Libanius evoked this episode for decades after the events. In sum, the riot of 354 was not an irrational reaction to hunger nor even a response to an order spread through the chains of patronage. What animated and united the participants in this collective action was rather their indignation with the attitudes of the authorities and the elite that seemed to abandon their responsibilities in supplying the urban market. The imperial incentives and the splits between the Antiochene upper class only offered the occasion for a crowd action and encouraged the populace to choose more confrontational methods to redress their grievances. But once triggered, this manifestation of popular power would remain present in the ‘theatre of threat and sedition’ of the crowd and in the memory of the local elite and governors for decades to come.

Conclusions Ammianus wrote in a well-known passage of his Histories that non omnia narratu sunt digna quae per squalidas transiere personas (‘not everything that happened among persons of the lowest classes is worth to be narrated’).104 Walter Benjamin, in his Theses on the Concept of History stated a diametrically opposed conception: ‘nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to history.’ For the radical philosopher, not doing this means leaving the oppressed classes of past and present in ‘the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling classes.’ As Benjamin observed, since ‘all rulers are the heirs of prior conquerors,’ empathising with the ruling classes of the past ‘invariably benefits the current rulers.’ The only way of ‘fanning the spark of hope in the past’ is to break away with conformism, rescuing dimensions of history (the tradition of the oppressed) that have been toned down, obliterated or denied by the winners in the past and the historians identified with them in the present.105 This conformism has marked many of the studies on urban crowds in the ancient world. The reason for this is not only that modern scholars have tended to identify with ancient elites, even though, as Lucy Grig rightly pointed out, much of the history of the (late) ancient city has actually been written from an unashamedly elitist viewpoint.106 This conformism is also due to the influence of the predominant sociological models, which have been more preoccupied with explaining the functioning of societies than their transformations.107 As Boaventura de Souza Santos has observed, unlike the emerging ‘epistemologies of the South,’ for which the topics of social struggle and resistance are essential, Eurocentric social theory, Marxism excluded, has always treated these themes ‘as a mere subtopic of the social question, the privileged focus being on social order rather than on social conflict.’108 Most approaches to ancient crowds have indeed ranged from breakdown theories to an emphasis on elite manipulation.109 In all cases we are dealing with approaches

The crowd in late antiquity 267 that, even if not explicitly conservative, focus on social order as a given fact, which therefore contributes to denying, obliterating or toning down the political character of the actions of the subaltern social groups. While the image of a society entangled in patronage ties is founded on the supposition that the subordinated accepted without resistance the superiority and guidance of dominant groups, the emphasis on collective violence as a result of the breakdown of society is founded on the assumption that stability characterises societies, rather than conflict, which is not far from the supposition that the cause of violence is an insufficient or inept imposition of control, of ‘law and order,’ a central statement (it should be said) in the discourse of the contemporary right.110 The current revival of psychological analyses of crowd behaviour is not essentially different. Although its proponents stress the agency of ancient crowds, their emphasis on the irrational behaviour and the sense of empowerment of individuals in a crowd to explain why a collective action turns violent is fundamentally disabling for any attempt to reconstruct the logic and aims of participants in a contentious action.111 Nor is the emphasis on the presence of discontent a viable alternative to the effacement of subaltern social groups as historical agents. Grievance theories, after all, always treat collective action as merely reactive, ignoring that, as Leslie Dossey put it, ‘What causes social tensions is often not the appearance of new grievances, but rather a new ability to articulate grievances in ways those in power find difficult to ignore.’112 Like other contributors to this book and in line with some major interventions in the field of crowd studies, I have always started from a different position, based on two theoretical principles: firstly, that ‘conflict is perennial in social life, though the forms and strength of the accompanying violence vary’;113 and secondly, ‘that to every oppression corresponds a reaction, that the capacity for intervention is always present, dynamei, in potential.’114 Of course, I am not pretending that crowds in history were always independent and, still less, radical. My emphasis on subaltern agency rather means that, despite all historical and social constraints, ‘ordinary people have at least some command on their lives and social interaction.’115 For this very reason, any attempt to understand the phenomenon of popular disturbance should pay attention to the logic and aims pursued by the participants in a crowd, and this even when they were mobilised from above. As James Scott pointed out, far from being a sign of some political handicap, swift, direct forms of crowd action can rather be seen as ‘a popular tactical wisdom developed in conscious response to the political constraints realistically faced.’116 The absence of any formal organisation and the impromptu nature of crowd actions are often a response to situations in which permanent political opposition is impossible. Their apparent spontaneity, however, conceals other forms of coordination achieved through the informal networks of community that join members of subordinate groups. Over time, the repeated forms of action became part and parcel of a popular culture, forming a repertoire of contention from which people construct their strategies of action. As we have seen in the episode of 354, the occasion for a collective action and the choice of a more or less confrontational strategy depend on the perception of political opportunities or of threats to the interests, values or the very survival of the group. But as this same episode also illustrates, the

268

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira

mobilisation process relies ultimately on a collective understanding of the situation by the participants in a crowd, an understanding that is often based on inherited conceptions, such as the proper social, economic or religious practices in society, or shared stories, such as the past offences of the group’s enemies. Seen in this light, the study of ancient crowds also has much to say to our own world. The 2007–2008 economic crisis and the worsening austerity of twenty-firstcentury neoliberalism have made labour relations more flexible, thus undermining the permanent workers’ organisations. As a result, we see the emergence of what anthropologist Rosana Pinheiro-Machado has called ‘ambiguous uprisings,’ protests whose political content is not univocal and which more often than not take the form of the riot (barricades, attacks on buildings, car fires). As a characteristic of a world of precarious workers, these uprisings occur without any centralised or strategic planning, ‘expressing a feeling of revolt against something concretely experienced in a daily life marked by difficulties.’117 With their eyes on the different political world of the twentieth century, a world of solid trade unions, non-violent strikes and demonstrations, and clear political alternatives, few commentators have been concerned with understanding these recent revolts in their own terms and in their own contradiction and complexity. In this context, returning to a world in which the prevailing modes of collective action were still the riots or other evanescent forms of direct action, such as was the Roman Empire, and understanding them in the terms of the common people’s own experiences and aspirations can help us to reflect on this determinant characteristic of our time. More generally speaking, exploring how subordinate groups in history managed to achieve their own goals and understand their reasons for acting even when they were mobilised by religious or political leaders is a way to oppose some of the contemporary assumptions that have undermined democracy and limited possibilities of more liberating social transformations. In the last decades, throughout the world, insecure politicians, on both the left and the right, have preferred to blame ‘populism’ and the wrong choices of the electorate, rather than to revivify real and active democracy nationally and internationally. In their opinion, the people are only right when they ratify the guidelines already adopted by the ‘decision makers.’118 In my own country, some sectors of the left have resigned themselves to explaining their defeats in the same condescending way: the Brazilian people do not know how to vote because they are ignorant and manipulated. Even after the historic defeat of 2018, which brought to Brazil’s presidency one of the most authoritarian, far-right leaders in the whole democratic world, the institutional left did not fail to blame the popular classes for the political obscurantism to which we succumbed, deliberately ignoring the reasons for the conservative co-optation of the people.119 The warning that Brazilian rapper Mano Brown gave to leftist militants in a memorable speech during that fateful presidential campaign brings us to the central aspect that I have sustained throughout this chapter: What kills us is blindness. . . . Whoever failed to understand the people, is lost. . . . You have to understand what the people want. If you don’t know, go back to the base and try to understand.120

The crowd in late antiquity 269

Notes * I owe thanks to Ben Brown, Cyril Courrier, Éric Fournier, Pedro Paulo A. Funari, Lucy Grig, Brent D. Shaw and John Weisweiler. I also have to mention the institutional support of the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), University of São Paulo and École française de Rome. I am however the only responsible for the ideas expressed in this chapter. 1 Thompson 1971, 76; Purcell 1999, 157. 2 Liebeschuetz 2001, 249–83; Whitby 2006. 3 MacMullen 1990; McLynn 1992; Lizzi Testa 1995. 4 Gregory 1984. On the problems of drawing strict distinctions between different types of disturbance, see Greatrex 2020, 392. 5 I have discussed this historiography in Magalhães de Oliveira 2020a, 2020b. 6 Forsdyke 2012. 7 Courrier 2014. 8 Galvão-Sobrinho 2006; Dossey 2010; Shaw 2011. 9 Bell 2013. 10 Van Nuffelen 2007, 2018. 11 Sághy 2020, 117–8. For the trends in recent research on urban violence in late antiquity, see Greatrex 2020, 390–4. 12 Slootjes 2015; Janniard and Heller, personal communication. 13 Gottesman, this volume. For an introduction to the historiography of the field of crowd studies, see Rogers 1998, 1–17. 14 Magalhães de Oliveira 2004, 2006, 2012, 2014, 2017a, 2018, 2020a, 2020b. 15 Purcell 1999, 135. 16 Hobsbawm 1997, 205. 17 Rudé 1964, 195–214. 18 Courrier and Tran, this volume; Courrier 2014, 489–97. 19 Grig 2014. On the privileged conditions offered by the late antique documentation for the study of the urban plebs, see also Giardina 1981. 20 Ginzburg 1992, xvii. 21 Magalhães de Oliveira 2020a, 153–6; Gottesman, this volume. 22 Rebillard 2012, 6. 23 Mandouze 1968, 591–663; Brown 2012, 339–58. 24 On these three ways of perceiving a city populace, see Purcell 1999, 135. 25 Anderson 1980, 42. See also Gregory 1984, 138: ‘The crowd, in fact, is likely to have been a continuously shifting entity whose composition changed with changing issues.’ 26 Lefebvre 1932; Thompson 1971; Davis 1973; Tilly 2001. 27 Rogers 1998, 5, discussing Lefebvre 1932. 28 Alston 2002, 234. 29 Gregory 1984, 138. 30 Patlagean 1977, 156–235. 31 Horden and Purcell 2000, 383–91. See also Bowes, this volume, for the archaeological indications of the constant mobility and change among the rural non-elites. 32 Freu 2012, 389–91. 33 Alston 2002, 234. 34 Bagnall 1993, 78–92. On the importance of the textile production in the urban economy of late antiquity, see Carrié 2004. 35 According to John Chrysostom, Homily 66 on Matthew 3 (PG 58, 630), ‘the poor who have nothing at all’ amounted to no more than 10 percent of the total population of forth-century Antioch. See Brown 2002, 14. On the living conditions of the homeless in the Roman cities, see Rosillo-López, this volume. 36 Wickham 2005, 693–824; Ward-Perkins 2008. 37 Brown 2002, 53.

270 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira Amm. Marc. 27.3.8–10. August. Serm. 302, with Magalhães de Oliveira 2004 and 2012, 275–97. Tilly 2001, 191. Wickham 2005, 155–68; Brown 2012, 3–30. Brown 1992, 78–89. Cracco Ruggini 1961, 112–52; Garnsey 1988, 257–68. Liebeschuetz 1972, 61; Giardina 1981; Wilson 2002, 260–1. On this aristocratic ideology of gift-giving, see Veyne 1976, to be read in conjunction with Andreau, Schmitt and Schnapp 1978. See also Zuiderhoek 2007. Brown 1992, 71–117. Magalhães de Oliveira 2020b, 13–5. Brown 2012, 65. Bang 2007, 22. Van Nuffelen 2018, 236, discussing this model. For some examples of this view, see Lewin 1995; Lizzi Testa 1995; Cracco Ruggini 1999. The postulate of extensive elite manipulation behind any form of crowd action was also advanced for earlier periods of Roman history, for example, by Vanderbroeck 1987 and Kröss 2017. Contra, see Courrier 2014, 497–546. Magalhães de Oliveira 2012, 43–123. Magalhães de Oliveira 2012, 125–55 and 2017b. Vlassopoulos, this volume. MacMullen 1980, 25: ‘shouting and yelling crowds of partisans in large cities, and occasional outbursts of mass arson, vandalism and lynching, are perhaps better taken as signs that the masses were really excluded from choice of all sorts.’ See also Liebeschuetz 2001, 214. Magalhães de Oliveira 2018. Machado 2018. Roueché 1984; Harries 2003. Cod. Theod. 1.16.6–7; 8.5.32. Lim 1999. Roueché 1984, 198. Rogers 1998, 13. Le Roy Ladurie 1979; Burke 1994, 192. Zuiderhoek 2007, 207–11. Van Nuffelen 2007. Magalhães de Oliveira 2020b. Tilly 1986, 2. On the concept, see Tarrow 2011, ch. 8. Downey 1958. Lassus 1976; De Giorgi 2007. Liebeschuetz 1972, 51. De Giorgi 2007, 297. Horden and Purcell 2000, 274. Julian. Mis. 350 a–b; Liebeschuetz 1972, 61; Giardina 1981, 135–6. Evidence summarised in Liebeschuetz 1972, 40–100. Liebeschuetz 1972, 58. Lib. Or. 20.36–7. Liebeschuetz 1972, 57. J. Chrys. Homiliae ad populum Antiochenum 16.6 (PG 49, 172). Lib. Or. 8.4; 31.25; 48.13; Amm. Marc. 28.4.29. Lib. Or. 1.207–8. Lib. Or. 1.103, 205–9, 230; 15.23. Erdkamp 2002. Thompson 1993, 67.

The crowd in late antiquity 271 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117

On the festive satire in Antioch, see Gleason 1986. Lib. Or. 1.230 (ed. Foerster, vol. 1, 184; Loeb trans. Norman, vol. 1, 287–9). Amm. Marc. 14.7.2. Amm. Marc. 14.7.5–6 (Loeb trans. Rolfe, vol. 1, 54–7, revised). On Ammianus’ account of Gallus, see Thompson 1943 and Blockley 1972. On the conflicting relations between some fourth-century emperors and the municipal elite of Antioch, see Carvalho and Silva 2017. Matthews 1989, 406; Stathakopoulos 2004, 187–8. Carrié 1998, 28–29. For the targets of lynching in late antiquity, see Magalhães de Oliveira 2014, 2020b, 47–8 (list of cases). For the ‘populist’ features of late antique emperors, see Weisweiler 2017; Cooper 2019. Kneppe 1979, 22–25, 43; Stathakopoulos 2004, 70–72; Filipczak 2017, 328. Magalhães de Oliveira 2020b, 27–28. Lib. Or. 1.103 (Loeb trans. Norman, 169). Attack at the hippodrome: Lib. Or. 19.47. Filipczak 2017, 327–32. Amm. Marc. 14.7.6; 15.13.2. Lib. Or. 19.47. Liebeschuetz 1972, 58. The fabricae clibanaria, scutaria et armorum of Antioch are mentioned in Not. Dig. Or. 9.21–2. Matthews 1989, 408. Gregory of Nazianzen, Or. 43.57, trans. C. G. Browne and J. E. Swallow. Amm. Marc. 15.13.2. Lizzi 1995, 125. Amm. Marc. 28.1.15. Benjamin 2006, 390–1 (quotations respectively from Theses III, VI and VII). See Löwy 2005, 34–57. Grig 2013, 564–5. Funari 2001, 14–5. Santos 2018, 63. To give just a few examples: for Haas (1997, 12), acts of popular violence always ‘resulted from some specific breakdown in the normal structures of urban conflict resolution.’ Brown (1995, 49) also sees acts of iconoclasm and arson as ‘departures from a more orderly norm.’ For Gregory (1984, 155), the main reason for the frequency of urban violence in late antiquity was the absence of a police force in the cities and the unwillingness of the state to provoke a massive bloodshed by sending the troops. For Lizzi Testa (1995, 140), by contrast, riots of the urban plebs and disputes involving the Christian people ‘non erano niente altro che un indice della capacità di controllo della popolazione da parte dei potenti, che si spartivano il governo dello spazio urbano.’ Alston (2002, 232–5) also emphasises political manipulation as a cause of ethnic and religious violence. For critiques of such views along these same lines, see Purcell 1999, 157–8; Funari 2001. For the recent attempts to apply theories of collective psychology to ancient crowds, see Van Nuffelen 2018, 236; Dijkstra 2020. Dossey 2010, 5. Davis 1973, 90. Garraffoni and Funari 2020, 285. Funari 2018. Scott 1990, 151. Pinheiro-Machado 2018. Clover 2016 has also called our time the Age of Riots. For a similar logic of action, but now in a more revolutionary context, see Ryzova 2020, a fascinating account of one of the street battles during the Arab Spring in Cairo.

272

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira

118 Robert 2003. 119 Pinheiro-Machado 2019, 125–31. 120 Apud Pinheiro-Machado 2019, 129–30.

Bibliography Alston, R. 2002. The City in Roman and Byzantine Egypt. London and New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203469262. Anderson, P. 1980. Arguments with English Marxism. London: Verso. Andreau, J., P. Schmitt and A. Schnapp. 1978. ‘Paul Veyne et l’évergétisme.’ Annales ESC 33 (2): 307–25. Bagnall, R. S. 1993. Egypt in Late Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv1fkgd4p. Bang, P. F. 2007. ‘Trade and Empire—In Search of Organizing Concepts for the Roman Economy.’ P&P 195 (May): 3–54. doi:10.1093/pastj/gtl031. Bell, P. N. 2013. Social Conflict in the Age of Justinian. Its Nature, Management, and Mediation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199567331.001.0001. Benjamin, W. 2006. Selected Writings. Vol. 4: 1938–1940, edited by H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press. Blockley, R. C. 1972. ‘Constantius Gallus and Julian as Caesars of Constantius II.’ Latomus 31 (2): 433–68. Brown, P. 1992. Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Brown, P. 1995. Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511802355. Brown, P. 2002. Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire. Hanover and London: University Press of New England. Brown, P. 2012. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. doi:10.1515/9781400844531. Burke, P. 1994. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, revised repr. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Carrié, J.-M. 1998. ‘Le gouverneur romain à l’époque tardive: les directions possibles de l’enquête.’ AnTard 6: 17–30. doi:10.1484/J.AT.2.300871. Carrié, J.-M. 2004. ‘Vitalité de l’industrie textile à la fin de l’antiquité: considérations économiques et technologiques.’ AnTard 12: 13–43. doi:10.1484/J.AT.2.300059. Carvalho, M. M. and E. C. M. Silva. 2017. ‘Imperator et bouleutes na Antiguidade Tardia: os conflitos entre César Galo, Juliano, Teodósio e a elite municipal antioquena (século IV d.C.).’ In Religiões e religiosidades na Antiguidade Tardia, edited by M. M. Carvalho, P. P. A. Funari, C. U. Carlan and H. A. Papa, 115–44. São Paulo: Prismas. Clover, J. 2016. Riot. Strike. Riot. The New Era of Uprisings. London: Verso. Cooper, K. 2019. ‘Constantine the Populist.’ JECS 27 (2): 241–70. doi:10.1353/ earl.2019.0020. Courrier, C. 2014. La plèbe de Rome et sa culture (fin du IIe s. av. J.-C.–fin du Ier s. ap. J.-C.). Rome: École française de Rome. Cracco Ruggini, L. 1961. Economia e società nell’Italia Annonaria. Milan: A. Giuffre. Cracco Ruggini, L. 1999. ‘Clientele e violenze urbane a Roma tra IV e VI secolo.’ In Corruzione, repressione e rivolta morale nella tarda Antichità, edited by R. Soraci, 7–52. Catania: CULC.

The crowd in late antiquity 273 Davis, N. Z. 1973. ‘The Rites of Violence: Religious Riots in Sixteenth-Century France.’ P&P 59 (May): 51–91. doi:10.1093/past/59.1.51. De Giorgi, A. U. 2007. ‘The Formation of the Roman Landscape: The Case of Antioch.’ JRA 20: 382–90. doi:10.1017/S1047759400005420. Dijkstra, J. H. F. 2020. ‘Crowd Behaviour and the Destruction of the Serapeum at Alexandria in 391/392 CE.’ In Dijkstra and Raschle 2020, 286–305. doi:10.1017/9781108860215.016. Dijkstra, J. H. F. and C. R. Raschle, eds. 2020. Religious Violence in the Ancient World: From Classical Athens to Late Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108860215. Dossey, L. 2010. Peasant and Empire in Christian North Africa. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Downey, G. 1958. ‘The Size of the Population of Antioch.’ TAPhA 89: 84–91. doi:10.2307/283667. Erdkamp, P. 2002. ‘A Starving Mob Has No Respect: Urban Markets and Food Riots in the Roman World, 100 BC–400 AD.’ In The Transformation of Economic Life under the Roman Empire, edited by L. de Blois and J. Rich, 93–115. Leiden: Brill. doi:10.1163/9789004401624_010. Filipczak, P. 2017. ‘Antioch on the Orontes: The Topography of Social Conflicts (4th-7th cent. AD).’ Syria [Online] 94: 325–45. doi:10.4000/syria.5606. Forsdyke, S. 2012. Slaves Tell Tales and Other Episodes in the Politics of Popular Culture in Ancient Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. doi:10.1515/ 9781400842155. Freu, C. 2012. ‘Les pauvres en société à l’époque protobyzantine: regards historiographiques sur l’œuvre d’Évelyne Patlagean.’ In Les réseaux familiaux, Antiquité tardive et Moyen Âge, in memoriam A. Laiou et É. Patlagean, edited by B. Caseau, 373–92. Paris: Collège de France-CNRS. Funari, P. P. A. 2001. ‘Uma antiguidade sem conflitos?’ Boletim do CPA 6 (11): 13–24. Funari, P. P. A. 2018. ‘On How to Deal with Ordinary People in the Past.’ Commentary presented at the Conference “Ancient History from Below: Possibilities and Challenges,” São Paulo, 22nd–23rd March 2018. Accessed January 9, 2021. www.academia. edu/36128155/On_how_to_deal_with_ordinary_people_in_the_past. Galvão-Sobrinho, C. R. 2006. ‘Embodied Theologies: Christian Identity and Violence in Alexandria in the Early Arian Controversy.’ In Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices, edited by H. D. Drake, 321–31. Aldershot: Ashgate. Garnsey, P. 1988. Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511583827. Garraffoni, R. S. and P. P. A. Funari. 2020. ‘As vozes das mulheres no início do Principado Romano: Linguagem, discursos e escrita.’ In Mujeres, género y estudios clássicos: Un diálogo entre España y Brasil—Mulheres, gênero e estudos clássicos: Um diálogo entre Espanha e Brasil, edited by M. García Sánchez and R. S. Garraffoni, 281–92. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona; Curitiba, PR: Editora UFPR. Giardina, A. 1981. ‘Aristocrazie terriere e piccola mercatura. Sui rapporti tra potere politico e formazione dei prezzi nel tardo impero romano.’ QUCC 7: 123–46. Ginzburg, C. 1992. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Translated by J. and A. Tedeschi. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Gleason, M. 1986. ‘Festive Satire: Julian’s Misopogon and the New Year at Antioch.’ JRS 76: 108–19. doi:10.2307/300368. Greatrex, G. 2020. ‘The Emperor, the People and Urban Violence in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries.’ In Dijkstra and Raschle 2020, 389–405. doi:10.1017/9781108860215.021.

274

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira

Gregory, T. 1984. ‘Urban Violence in Late Antiquity.’ In Aspects of Graeco-Roman Urbanism: Essays on the Classical City, edited by R. T. Marchese, 138–57. Oxford: BAR. Grig, L. 2013. ‘Cities in the “Long” Late Antiquity, 2000–2012—A Survey Essay.’ Urban History 40 (3): 554–66. doi:10.1017/S0963926813000369. Grig, L. 2014. ‘Popular Culture and Social Conflict in Late Antiquity.’ Paper presented at the XXIII Finnish Symposium of Late Antiquity, “Conflict in Late Antiquity,” Tvärminne, Finland, 17–18 Oct. Haas, C. 1997. Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict. Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Harries, J. 2003. ‘Favor populi: Pagans, Christians and Public Entertainment in Late Antique Italy.’ In ‘Bread and Circuses’: Euergetism and Municipal Patronage in Roman Italy, edited by K. Lomas and T. Cornell, 125–41. London and New York: Routledge. Harris, W. V., ed. 1999. The Transformations of Vrbs Roma in Late Antiquity. JRA Suppl. 33. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology. Hobsbawm, E. J. 1997. ‘On History from Below.’ In On History, 201–16. New York: the New Press. Horden, P. and N. Purcell. 2000. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kneppe, A. 1979. Untersuchungen zur städtischen Plebs des 4. Jahrhunderts n. Ch. Bonn: R. Habelt. Kröss, K. 2017. Die politische Rolle der stadtrömischen Plebs in der Kaiserzeit. Leiden and Boston: Brill. doi:10.1163/9789004339743. Lassus, J. 1976. ‘Antioch on the Orontes.’ In The Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites, edited by R. Stillwell and W. L. MacDonald, 61–63. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lefebvre, G. 1932. La Grande Peur de 1789. Paris: Armand Colin. Le Roy Ladurie, E. 1979. Carnival in Romans. Translated by Mary Feeney. New York: George Braziller. Lewin, A. 1995. Assemblee popolari e lotta politica nelle città dell’impero romano. Firenze: Editrice La Giuntina. Liebeschuetz, J. H. W. G. 1972. Antioch: City and Imperial Administration in the Later Roman Empire. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Liebeschuetz, J. H. W. G. 2001. The Decline and Fall of the Roman City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lim, R. 1999. ‘People as Power: Games, Munificence, and Contested Topography.’ In Harris 1999, 256–81. Lizzi Testa, R. 1995. ‘Discordia in urbe: pagani e cristiani in rivolta.’ In Pagani e cristiani da Giuliano l’Apostata al sacco di Roma (Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Rende, 12/13 novembre 1993), edited by F. E. Consolino, 115–40. Messina: Rubbettino. Löwy, M. 2005. Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History.’ Translated by C. Turner. London: Verso. Machado, C. 2018. ‘Civic Honours and Political Participation in Late Antique Italy.’ AnTard 26: 51–71. doi:10.1484/J.AT.5.116748. MacMullen, R. 1980. ‘Response to Henry Chadwick.’ In The Role of the Christian Bishop in Ancient Society, Protocol of the 35th Colloquy of the Center for Hermeneutical Studies, 25 February 1979, edited by E. C. Hobbs and W. Muellner, 25–29. Berkeley, CA: Center for Hermeneutical Studies.

The crowd in late antiquity 275 MacMullen, R. 1990. ‘The Historical Role of the Masses in Late Antiquity.’ In Changes in the Roman Empire: Essays in the Ordinary, 250–76 and 385–93. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Magalhães de Oliveira, J. C. 2004. ‘Le “pouvoir du peuple”: une émeute à Hippone au début du Ve siècle connue par le sermon 302 de saint Augustin pour la fête de saint Laurent.’ AnTard 12: 302–24. doi:10.1484/J.AT.2.300083. Magalhães de Oliveira, J. C. 2006. ‘“Vt maiores pagani non sint!” Pouvoir, iconoclasme et action populaire à Carthage au début du Ve siècle (saint Augustin, Sermons 24, 279 et Morin 1).’ AnTard 14: 245–62. doi:10.1484/J.AT.2.302433. Magalhães de Oliveira, J. C. 2012. Potestas Populi: participation populaire et action collective dans les villes de l’Afrique romaine tardive (vers 300–430 apr. J.-C.). Turnhout: Brepols. Magalhães de Oliveira, J. C. 2014. ‘“Morto pelas mãos do povo”: rituais de execução e justiça popular na Antiguidade Tardia.’ Classica (Brasil) 27: 261–84. doi:10.24277/ classica.v27i1.343. Magalhães de Oliveira, J. C. 2017a. ‘The Emperor is Dead! Rumours, Protests, and Political Opportunities in Late Antiquity.’ In Political Communication in the Roman World, edited by C. Rosillo-López, 165–78. Leiden: Brill. doi:10.1163/9789004350847_009. Magalhães de Oliveira, J. C. 2017b. ‘Communication and Plebeian Sociability in Late Antiquity: The View from North Africa in the Age of Augustine.’ In Popular Culture in the Ancient World, edited by L. Grig, 296–317. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781139871402.014. Magalhães de Oliveira, J. C. 2018. ‘Le peuple et le gouvernement des cités (IVe–VIe siècles).’ AnTard 26: 23–49. doi:10.1484/J.AT.5.116747. Magalhães de Oliveira, J. C. 2020a. ‘Controllers of Crowds? Popular Mobilization and Episcopal Leadership in Late Roman North Africa.’ In Manders and Slootjes 2020, 151–61. Magalhães de Oliveira, J. C. 2020b. ‘Late Antiquity: The Age of Crowds?’ P&P 249 (November): 3–52. doi:10.1093/pastj/gtz063. Manders, E. and D. Slootjes, eds. 2020. Leadership, Ideology, and Crowds in the Roman Empire of the Fourth Century AD. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Mandouze, A. 1968. Saint Augustin: L’aventure de la raison et de la grâce. Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes. Matthews, J. 1989. The Roman Empire of Ammianus. London: Duckworth. McLynn, N. 1992. ‘Christian Controversy and Violence in the Fourth Century.’ Kodai 3: 15–44. Patlagean, E. 1977. Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance, 4e–7e siècles. Paris: Mouton. Pinheiro-Machado, R. 2018. ‘França está reeditando os protestos de 2013 no Brasil. Um manual para entender as revoltas ambíguas do século 21.’ The Intercept Brasil, December 4. https://theintercept.com/2018/12/03/franca-protestos-2013-brasil/. Pinheiro-Machado, R. 2019. Amanhã vai ser maior: O que aconteceu com o Brasil e possíveis rotas de fuga para a crise atual. São Paulo: Planeta do Brasil. Purcell, N. 1999. ‘The Populace of Rome in Late Antiquity: Problems of Classification and Historical Description.’ In Harris 1999, 135–61. Rebillard, E. 2012. Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200–450 CE. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Robert, A.-C. 2003. ‘Government without the People.’ Le Monde Diplomatique, November. https://mondediplo.com/2003/11/07democracy.

276

Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira

Rogers, N. 1998. Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roueché, C. 1984. ‘Acclamations in the Later Roman Empire: New Evidence from Aphrodisias.’ JRS 74: 181–99. doi:10.2307/299014. Rudé, G. 1964. The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848. London: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Ryzova, L. 2020. ‘The Battle of Muhammad Mahmoud Street in Cairo: The Politics and Poetics of Urban Violence in Revolutionary Time.’ P&P 247 (May): 273–317. doi:10.1093/pastj/gtz029. Sághy, M. 2020. ‘Damasus and the Charioteers: Crowds, Leadership and Media in Late Antique Rome.’ In Manders and Slootjes 2020, 117–33. Santos, B. S. 2018. The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Durham and London: Duke University Press. doi:10.1215/9781478002000. Scott, J. C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shaw, B. D. 2011. Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511762079. Slootjes, D. 2015. ‘Crowd Behaviour in Late Antique Rome.’ In Pagans and Christians in Late Antique Rome. Conflict, Competition and Coexistence in the Fourth Century, edited by M. Sághy, M. Salzman and R. Lizzi Testa, 178–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316274989.008. Stathakopoulos, D. C. 2004. Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire. A Systematic Survey of Subsistence Crises and Epidemics. Aldershot: Ashgate. Tarrow, S. 2011. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. 3rd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511973529. Thompson, E. A. 1943. ‘Ammianus’ Account of Gallus Caesar.’ AJPh, 64 (3): 302–15. doi:10.2307/291014. Thompson, E. P. 1971. ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.’ P&P 50 (February): 76–136. doi:10.1093/past/50.1.76. (= Thompson 1993, 185–258). Thompson, E. P. 1993. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. New York: The New Press. Tilly, C. 1986. The Contentious French. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tilly, C. 2001. ‘Collective action.’ In Encyclopedia of European Social History. From 1350 to 2000. Vol. 3, edited by P. N. Stearns, 189–203. New York: Charles Scribners & Sons. Vanderbroeck, P. J. J. 1987. Popular Leadership and Collective Behavior in the Late Roman Republic. Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben. Van Nuffelen, P. 2007. ‘Late Antique State and “Mirror Rituals”: Procopius of Caesarea on Riots.’ In Continuity and Change: Late Antique Historiography between Order and Disorder, edited by D. Brodka and M. Stachura, 61–72. Cracow: Jagiellonian University Press. Van Nuffelen, P. 2018. ‘“A Wise Madness.” A Virtue-Based Model for Crowd Behaviour in Late Antiquity.’ In Reconceiving Religious Conflict: New Views from the Formative Centuries of Christianity, edited by C. De Wet and W. Mayer, 234–58. London and New York: Routledge. Veyne, P. 1976. Le Pain et le cirque: sociologie historique d’un pluralisme politique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Ward-Perkins, B. 2008. ‘Specialized Production and Exchange.’ In The Cambridge Ancient History. Vol. 14: Late Antiquity: Empire and Successors, AD 425–600, edited by

The crowd in late antiquity 277 A. Cameron, B. Ward-Perkins and M. Whitby, 346–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521325912.014. Weisweiler, J. 2017. ‘Populist Despotism and Infrastructural Power in the Later Roman Empire.’ In Ancient States and Infrastructural Power: Europe, Asia, and America, edited by C. Ando and S. Richardson, 149–78. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. doi:10.9783/9780812294170–006. Whitby, M. 2006. ‘Factions, Bishops, Violence and Urban Decline.’ In Die Stadt in der Spätantike: Niedergang oder Wandel? Edited by J.-U. Krause and C. Witschel, 441–61. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Wickham, C. 2005. Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, A. 2002. ‘Urban Production in the Roman World: The View from North Africa.’ PBSR 70: 231–73. doi:10.1017/S0068246200002166. Zuiderhoek, A. 2007. ‘The Ambiguity of Munificence.’ Historia 56 (2): 196–213. doi: 10.2307/25598388.

Epilogue Agency, past, present and future Pedro Paulo A. Funari

Agency is a key concept in contemporary social theory and social life.1 The question of independent thinking and action or constraints beyond individual or social control is present in different guises since the inception of written documents, at least several thousand years ago.2 Agency (‫בל‬, heart, in the Hebrew Bible) and constraints have always been challenges.3 Augustine’s De Libero Arbitrio (AD 395) discusses the subject, and free will and predestination4 are both taken into account. It is only in the past few centuries when philosophy and later scholarly disciplines considered it beyond a deist frame. Individual or collective agency has been considered in relation not to God but to society as a whole. It is symptomatic that those supporting the status quo ante and the powerful are often those stating that people do not respect social norms and need to be controlled by force. Disrespect for norms was taken as defiance to the divine order, to be subdued by physical imposition. Later on, respect for norms was displaced from the divine to society, and violence was justified in order to keep law and order. On the other hand, those more open to inequalities were those struck by the acceptance of norms, even if such norms are contrary to the well-being of people themselves. This was the case of the ancient speaking truth to power.5 This was later the concern expressed by several people, as Étienne de la Boétie in his Discours de la servitude volontaire ou le Contr’un (Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, or the Anti-Dictator, ca. 1550) referring to consent. Karl Marx explained compliance this way: Die Gedanken der herrschenden Klasse sind in jeder Epoche die herrschenden Gedanken, d. h. die Klasse, welche die herrschende materielle Macht der Gesellschaft ist, ist zugleich ihre herrschende geistige Macht. Die Klasse, die die Mittel zur materiellen Produktion zu ihrer Verfügung hat, disponiert damit zugleich über die Mittel zur geistigen Produktion, so daß ihr damit zugleich im Durchschnitt die Gedanken derer, denen die Mittel zur geistigen Produktion abgehen, unterworfen sind. Die herrschenden Gedanken sind weiter Nichts als der ideelle Ausdruck der herrschenden materiellen Verhältnisse, die als Gedanken gefaßten herrschenden materiellen Verhältnisse; also der Verhältnisse, die eben die eine Klasse zur herrschenden machen, also die Gedanken ihrer Herrschaft.6

Epilogue

279

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.7 The key word here is unterwerfen, subdue, submit, subordinate, literally put or bend down. It appears as the subject in the given translation, but the subject is more ambiguous in English, as it may refer to a part of a sentence that contains the person or thing performing the action (or verb) in a sentence. In British usage, subject means citizen or national.8 There is no such ambiguity in the original German term. Marx thus explained submission, as did several other scholars critical of inequalities—Gramsci, Foucault or Bourdieu—trying to understand how those imbalances are kept and accepted. Paradoxically, those defending the status quo ante seem to stress disrespect, while the social order critics stress compliance. However, this paradox is only apparent or partial, for all agree on the ubiquity of resistance, rebellion or other forms of social conflict. The defenders of the status quo ante propose or accept the use of violence to enforce imposed norms, while challengers of the social order defend active or passive resistance, individual and collective. Agency, resistance and dissent are key in contemporary social movements9 and surface all over the volume Ancient History from Below. Constraints are not absent or underestimated, but still the main focus rests on agency, not subjection. Exclusion, injustice, domination, inequality, distress, exploitation and manipulation do not preclude agency, solidarity, reciprocity, marginality, diversity, riot, rebellion and counterconspiracy, among others. Agency is also taken beyond the binary poles, dominant/dominated, powerful/powerless or any other, as city/country, nomad/settled10 and many more. Gender, race, ethnicity,11 among others, contribute to understand agency much beyond former simple dichotomies.12 People were and are indeed exploited, excluded and considered as subaltern but at the same time as powerful and capable of acting and thinking for themselves as individuals and as collectives. This is time and again stated in this volume, in the introduction, as the editors review the historical trajectory of history from below and people agency, within and without scholarship. Bertold Brecht and Marc Bloch are put in an unexpected interaction, as are Walter Benjamin and Lucien Febvre. The relationship between constraint and agency is given by a second key concept: the relationship of past, present and future. Let us start by quoting Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce: ‘ogni vera storia è storia contemporanea’ (every true history is contemporary history). The English translation does not bear the amphibology of storia, history and story at the same time, as both refer to invention, in the original Latin meaning: finding

280

Pedro Paulo A. Funari

and inventing (invenio). Croce emphasises this inevitable disputable character of telling a story/history, its subjectivity. Truth is thus also related to standpoints, so that a true story/history is related to the subject, or author, not to diaphanous objective facts. It must be in tune with the times, ‘bringing together a stretch or piece of time,’ contemporaneous. The contributors often refer to the historicity of history writing about the subject, paying attention to how modern historiography shaped the understanding of the ancient evidence using and abusing of modern prejudices and engagement with power inside and outside. Elite male viewpoints prevailed for some time, particularly from the start of historical scholarship in the nineteenth century. This was a break from pre-modern perceptions, such as the agency of women as debated in the querelles des femmes, the woman question, from the 1400s to the 1700s, the agency of ordinary people in their culture expressions13 or the bottom-up theological concepts, such as the purgatory.14 Modern historiography adopted an array of concepts to naturalise the oppression of women, the blacks, the poor, the colonials, the mob, among others. To dismantle those tenets, an etymological (sensu Agamben) or archaeological (sensu Foucault) approach explores the semantics of ancient and modern concepts, such as ancient penia, egens, pauperes, barbaroi, perioikoi, metics, stasis, on the one hand, and agency, the subaltern, reciprocity, human rights, ethnicity, the post-colonial condition,15 social movements, neoliberal concepts, occupy movement, among others, are studied and considered in tandem. Interest, inter + est, being in-between present and past, present and future, is another key for the whole volume. Often mentioned in the volume, Walter Benjamin states in the 14th thesis on history: Ursprung ist das Ziel. Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen I Die Geschichte ist Gegenstand einer Konstruktion, deren Ort nicht die homogene und leere Zeit sondern die von Jetztzeit erfüllte bildet. So war für Robespierre das antike Rom eine mit Jetztzeit geladene Vergangenheit, die er aus dem Kontinuum der Geschichte heraussprengte. Die französische Revolution verstand sich als ein wiedergekehrtes Rom.16 ‘Origin is the goal [Ziel: terminus]’—Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen I [Words in Verse]. History is the object of a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time but in that which is fulfilled by the here and now (Jetztzeit). For Robespierre, Roman antiquity was a past charged with the here and now, which he exploded out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution thought of itself as a latter-day Rome.17 The here and now surfaces in references to postcolonialism, social movements, neoliberal tenets, Arab Spring18 and Occupy movements, human rights, all presentday concerns mentioned by the contributors looking for a different future. It may seem unexpected that a volume on ancient history turns to those issues, but it is in fact

Epilogue 281 symptomatic of the increasing important role of an informed and critical relationship with the past. François Hartog follows a series of scholars stressing the key role of the classics, lato sensu, for the bringing up of a critical citizenry, able to transcend the narrow concern with the present, so strong in general, and in formal education.19 The role of Hebrew,20 Greek and Latin culture and history is at the heart of such authors as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Michael Hardt, Tony Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler—none of them a historian nor classicist, all of them most influential in today’s understanding of today’s challenges. Focusing only on contemporary culture, confined to national or even subnational borders, leads to citizens devoid of means of coping with such subjects as climate change, overcoming a literal understanding of religious texts or even accepting the most unsubstantiated claims, such as that the earth is flat! While in the United States it is usual to learn history and geography ‘from coast to coast,’ in Africa and Asia ancient history and Western history in general are part of formal education syllabus. To challenge the misuse of the past for the exclusion of others, the only way is to engage with a scholarly and well-informed knowledge.21 The invention of national myths excluding diversity is grounded on ignorance of the sutlelties of social life.22 The push against the humanities and social sciences and the so-called emphasis on practical bringing up is top of the agenda of neoliberal, reactionary governments. Social agency depends on knowledge of tradition to transcend it.23 This volume is part of the struggle for history, ancient history and culture, as a way of claiming justice and speaking truth to power, of challenging presentism, sensu Hartog, the overarching dominance of the present over the past and over a different future. Contributors come from different quarters, including the Global South and other peripheral or semi-peripheral areas, including also females and non-native English speakers. Those ‘from below’ or subaltern include now not only the workers or enslaved, adult males, but also the indigenous, anticolonial, antiracist, feminist and anti-war, beyond the original working class of E. P. Thompson.24 This move has been compounded by the inclusion of scholars of different backgrounds and social engagement, particularly from the edge, dealing with such subjects as women,25 freedpersons,26 LGBTQ+ or Queer,27 the infamous,28 children,29 indigenous,30 among others ‘from below.’ Intersectionality may be a useful concept here.31 History writing ‘from below’ at large, including all kinds of subjection, must be at the root of the whole ‘history from below’ project. Even if there is no forgetting of barbarism, sensu Benjamin, there is also a stress on solidarity, individual and collective agency, conviviality, respect for diversity, in the past, in the present and aiming at a different future.32 This is no mean task, but this is a path worth taking.

Notes * I owe thanks to Marina Cavicchioli, Lourdes Feitosa, Renata Senna Garraffoni, Claudiomar dos Reis Gonçalves (in memoriam), Ray Laurence, Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira, Luciano Pinto, Renato Pinto, Filipe Noé Silva and Glaydson José da Silva. I mention the institutional support of the Brazilian National Science Foundation (CNPq), São Paulo State Science Foundation (FAPESP) and the University of Campinas (Unicamp). The responsibility for the ideas is my own and I am solely responsible.

282 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Pedro Paulo A. Funari

Bleiker 2003. Chin 2019. Birch 1994; Steward 2016. Peterson 2017. Boland and Clogher 2017. Marx and Engels 1959 [1845/6], 46. Marx and Engels 1970, 64. Translation by C. J. Arthur. Koessler 1946. Karatzogianni and Schandorf 2016. Magalhães de Oliveira 2020, 33–54. Harding, Pérez-Bustos and Fernández-Pinto 2019. Góes 2014. Bakhtine 1970. Gurevich 1990; Funari 1994. Bhabha 1996. Benjamin 1980, 701. www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm. Translation by Dennis Redmond. Boeddeling 2020. Hartog 2020 following Grafton, Most and Settis 2010. Levinas 1995; Steward 2016. Vianna and Stetsenko 2019. Silva 2008; Funari 2011; Sand 2012. Wight 2004. Batzell et al. 2015. Cavicchioli 2008; Bélo 2020. Gonçalves 2000. Pinto and Pinto 2013. Feitosa and Garraffoni 2010. Garraffoni and Laurence 2013. Silva 2020. Raman 2020. Ombrosi 2008.

Bibliography Bakhtine, M. 1970. L’œuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance. Translated by A. Robe. Paris: Gallimard. Batzell, R., S. Beckert, A. Gordon and G. Winant. 2015. ‘E. P. Thompson, Politics and History: Writing Social History Fifty Years after The Making of the English Working Class.’ Journal of Social History 48 (4): 753–8. doi:10.1093/jsh/shv036. Bélo, T. P. 2020. Boudica and the Female Facets over Time: Nationalism, Feminism, Power and the Collective Memory. Embu das Artes: Alexa cultural. Benjamin, W. 1980. ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte.’ In Gesammelte Schrifte, Band I.2. Edited by R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser with the participation of T. W. Adorno, 691–704. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bhabha, H. K. 1996. ‘Postmodernism/Postcolonialism.’ In Critical Terms for Art History, edited by R. S. Nelson and R. Shiff, 435–51. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Birch, B. 1994. ‘Moral Agency, Community, and the Character of God in the Hebrew Bible.’ Semeia 66: 23–41. Bleiker, R. 2003. ‘Discourse and Human Agency.’ Contemporary Political Theory 2: 25–47. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300073.

Epilogue 283 Boeddeling, J. 2020. From Resistance to Revolutionary Praxis: Subaltern Politics in the Tunisian Revolution. PhD diss., The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/4174/ Boland, T. and P. Clogher. 2017. ‘A Genealogy of Critique: From Parrhesia to Prophecy.’ Critical Research on Religion 5 (2): 116–32. doi:10.1177%2F2050303217690896. Cavicchioli, M. R. 2008. ‘The Erotic Collection of Pompeii: Archaeology, Identity, and Sexuality.’ In Funari, Garraffoni and Letalien 2008, 187–94. Chin, C. 2019. ‘The Concept of Belonging: Critical, Normative and Multicultural’ Etnicities 19 (5): 715–39. doi:10.1177/1468796819827406. Croce, B. 2011 [1941]. Teoria e storia della Storiografia. Milano: Adelphi. Feitosa, L. M. G. C. and R. S. Garraffoni. 2010. ‘Dignitas and infamia: Rethinking Marginalized Masculinities in Early Principate.’ SHHA 28: 57–73. Funari, P. P. A. 1994. ‘Resenha de Medieval popular culture.’ LPH: Revista de História (Ouro Preto, Brazil) 4: 225–7. Funari, P. P. A. 2011. ‘A invenção do povo judeu: estudo sobre a construção moderna da nacionalidade.’ Diálogos (Maringá, Brazil) 15: 233–5. Funari, P. P. A., R. S. Garraffoni and B. Letalien, eds. 2008. New Perspectives on the Ancient World. Modern Perceptions, Ancient Representations. Oxford: Archeopress. Garraffoni, R. S. and R. Laurence. 2013. ‘Writing in Public Space from Child to Adult: The Meaning of Graffiti.’ In Written Space in the Latin West, 200 BC to AD 300, edited by G. Sears, P. Keegan and R. Laurence, 123–34. London: Bloomsbury. doi:10.5040/ 9781472555908.ch-007. Góes, C. M. de. 2014. Existe um pensamento político subalterno? Um estudo sobre os subaltern studies: 1982–2000. Master’s Diss., University of São Paulo, Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas. doi:10.11606/D.8.2015.tde-12062015-114259. Gonçalves, C. R. 2000. ‘La ficción como verdad. La invención de la cultura de los libertos en la historiografía y en la “Cena Trimalchionis”.’ Limes (Santiago, Chile) 12 (12): 85–103. Grafton, A., G. W. Most and S. Settis. 2010. The Classical Tradition. Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Gurevich, A. 1990. Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception. Translated by J. M. Bak and P. A. Hollingsworth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harding, S., T. Pérez-Bustos and M. Fernández-Pinto. 2019. ‘Entangled Sciences of Gender, Sexuality and Race: Latin American Issues.’ Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society 2 (1): 335–9. doi:10.1080/25729861.2019.1685754. Hartog, F. 2020. Chronos: L’Occident aux prises avec le Temps. Paris: Gallimard. Karatzogianni, A. and M. Schandorf. 2016. ‘Surfing the Revolutionary Wave 2010–12: A Social Theory of Agency, Resistance, and Orders of Dissent in Contemporary Social Movements.’ In Making Humans: Religious, Technological and Aesthetic Perspectives, edited by A. Ornella, 43–73. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press. Koessler, M. 1946. ‘“Subject,” “Citizen,” “National” and “Permanent Allegiance”.’ Yale Law Journal 56 (1): 58–76. doi:10.2307/793250. Levinas, E. 1995. Altérité et transcendance. Montpellier: Fata Morgana. Magalhães de Oliveira, J. C. 2020. Sociedade e Cultura na África Romana: oito ensaios e duas traduções. São Paulo: Intermeios. Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1959 [1845/6]. Die deutsche Ideologie. Kritik der neuesten deutschen Philosophie in ihren Repräsentanten Feuerbach, B. Bauer und Stirner, und des deutschen Sozialismus in seinen verschiedenen Propheten (geschrieben 1845–1846, nach den Handschriften) = Marx-Engels Werke. Vol. 3. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.

284

Pedro Paulo A. Funari

Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1970. The German Ideology, Part One. Edited and translated by C. J. Arthur. New York: International Publishers. Ombrosi, O. 2008. ‘Histoire et messianisme: Benjamin et Levinas pensent le Jugement Dernier.’ Reflexão 33 (94): 111–21. Peterson, B. 2017. ‘Augustine: Advocate of Free Will, Defender of Predestination.’ Theology (May): 1–13. Pinto, R. and L. C. G. Pinto. 2013. ‘Transgendered Archaeology: The Galli and The Catterick “Transvestite”.’ In TRAC 2012: Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference, Frankfurt 2012, edited by A. Bokern, M. Bolder-Boos, S. Krmnicek, D. Maschek and S. Page, 99–111. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Raman, K. R. 2020. ‘Can the Dalit Woman Speak? How “Intersectionality” Helps Advance Postcolonial Organization Studies.’Organization 27 (2): 272–90. doi:10.1177/1350508419888899. Sand, S. 2012. The Invention of the Land of Israel, from Holy Land to Homeland. London: Verso. Silva, F. N. 2020. ‘Diversidade étnica e cultural na África Romana: uma introdução a partir da epigrafia.’ In A África e o Mediterrâneo Antigo: aproximações contemporâneas, edited by F. N. Silva, R. S. Funari and C. U. Carlan, 138–49. Riga: Novas Edições Acadêmicas. Silva, G. J. 2008. ‘Antiquity at the Service of France’s “Extreme Rights”: GRECE, Front National and Terre et Peuple.’ In Funari, Garraffoni and Letalien 2008, 35–46. Steward, A. W. 2016. ‘Moral Agency in the Hebrew Bible.’ In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion (religion.oxfordre.com). doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.92. Vianna, E. and A. Stetsenko. 2019. ‘Turning Resistance into Passion for Knowledge with the Tools of Agency: Teaching-Learning about Theories of Evolution for Social Justice among Foster Youth.’ Perspectiva (Florianópolis-SC, Brazil) 37 (4): 864–86. doi:10.5007/2175-795X.2019.e61082. Wight, C. 2004. ‘State Agency: Social Action without Human Activity?’ Review of International Studies 30 (2): 269–80. doi:10.1017/S0260210504006060.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate a figure and page numbers in bold indicate a table on the corresponding page. Abbott, Frank F. 178–179 Abu-Lughod, Lila 17 Acilius Glabrio, Manius 241 Acropolis 223 Agamben, Giorgio 281 agency: of crowds 255; definition 14–15; history of the concept 278–279; subaltern 15, 35, 39–40, 42, 46–47, 267; Thompson on 14, 68; see also subaltern agriculture 122–123; agrobusiness 123; agronomic literature 124; agronomic rotation practices 133–134; cereal and pastoral crops 122, 132, 133; crop rotational schemes 144; elite villas or large estates 122–145; field drain 132; filling the gap between elite and smallholder agriculture 125–130; grape production 122; investment in animals 145; labour force 13, 49; labourers 41; managing resources 130–139; production and profit maximisation 124; self-sufficiency 145; smallholder agriculture of majority 122–145; sowing 123–125; threshing 139–144; triticum aestivum 136; Villa excavations 143 Aix-en-Provence 56, 61, 67 Ammianus Marcellinus 112, 258, 262–264, 266 ancient historiography 35, 216–219, 237, 247 Anderson, Greg 218, 230 Androtion 83, 95n16 Annales School 4 antichretic loans 87 Antioch 255, 262; artisans 262; bakers 263; populace of 264; riot of AD 354 261–266; town council 263–264

Appian 36, 108 Appius Herdonius 239 Apronius Raptor, C. (nauta and wine merchant in Lyon) 60 Arab Spring 7, 280 Areopagus 206 aristocracies 37–39, 219–220, 243, 259, 264 Aristophanes 225–226 Aristotle 158–159, 166–167, 199; Politics 159, 168, 187, 199–200 Arles 56–58, 60–61, 71n15; Arlesian working world 69; freedman 57; funerary stele of Chia and her patroness 66; funerary stele of M. Iulius Felix 67; inhabitants of 69; naviculari 63; social fabric 64 Artena, siege of 242 Asamphamiōtai 161 asebeia 206 Athenaeus 160 Athenian(s) 44, 210; citizens, civic rights 195–196; democracy 201–202; democratic revolution 218; metoikia 196, 202, 207–208; penētes 88; slavery 195, 198; slave system 196; slavesociety approach 196; social imaginaire 44; society 88; socioeconomical citizenship 201 Augustine of Hippo 107, 256–257, 278; De Libero Arbitrio 278 Avilius Hyacinthus, Q. (freedman from Nîmes) 57 Baird, Jennifer A. 179 Barbarian 169–170

286

Index

barbaroi perioikoi (Aristotle) 159, 166 barley 136 Battle of Cunaxa 162 beggars 105, 107, 112–113 Bell, Peter 254 ‘below’, concept 12–13, 55–57; see also history from below Benjamin, Walter 2, 20n5–6, 266, 279–281 Berlin, Ira 39 Béziers 63 Bhabha, Homi 281 Black and civil rights movements 175 Black Guard youth 114 Bloch, Marc 4, 279 boatmen 63 Boiotoi 228 bonus agricola 124 Boudon, Jacques-Olivier 7 Bowes, Kim 10, 18 Brazilian historiography 7 Brazilian labour movement 7 Brecht, Bertolt 1–2, 20n1, 38, 279 British colonialism 159 British Cultural Studies 5 British Marxist historians 4–5, 9 Brown, Mano 268 Brown, Wendy 281 Brunaux, Jean-Louis 92 Brunt, Peter 9 Burke, Peter 261 businessmen 60 Butler, Judith 281 Caldelli, Maria Letizia 55 Callistratus 160 Camillus, Lucius Furius 242 Cannadine, David 45 Carrié, Jean-Michel 107 Case Nuove (Cinigiano), 138 Cato the Elder 127 centonarii (textile professionals) 57, 60, 63 Cerutti, Simona 12, 66, 68, 217, 231, 232n6, 234n58 children 43, 87–88, 91–93, 113, 116n47, 167, 281 Christian communities 43 Christianity 10, 254 Christian social language 46 Christol, Michel 60 Chrysostom, John 262–263, 269n35 citizen community 44 citizen-polis ideology 200

citizenship 167; Athenian 201; civic ideology and 197; Greek 167; Roman 9, 242–245, 247 civil wars 35 classes 12–14, 37–39, 43; class in itself 40; concept of 40; formation 40; Marxist theory of 40; social 39; socioeconomic 39 Claudius (emperor) 109 Cleisthenes 218–219 Cleomenes 226 clivus Aricinus (Rome) 114 cognomina 68 Coin-Longeray, Sandrine 108 collaborative strategies 238 collective actions 239, 254, 258 collegia/corpora (associations) 59, 64, 260 Colle Massari (Cinigiano) 132 colonial subaltern groups 159 colonies 63; Greek 160; of veterans in southern Gaul 63 Columella 127, 130–132, 137; De re rustica 128, 128 Communist Party Historians’ Group 4 community formation 41–42; see also subaltern communities in antiquity conflictual relationship 37 conspiracy of herdsmen (pastorum coniuratio) 241 contrary strategies 238 Contursi, Paola 166, 170n1 Cornelius Lentulus, L. 241 Cornelius Scipio, P. 247n10 Cornelius Zosimus, Q. 69 Corpus Lysiacum 208 Courrier, Cyril 18, 254, 256 crafts 56 Croce, Benedetto 279–280 crowd 55; autonomous crowd actions 260; definitions, preconditions and frameworks 257–261; depictions by the elite 55, 259; dialogues with the crowd 257; moral economy 5–6; riot of AD 354 in Antioch 261–266; sources for the study 254–257; studies 255, 267; see also riots Cultural Studies movement 5 culture, defined 5 cunnum lingere 186 Davis, Natalie Zemon 6 debt bondage 87; children sell, Thracians 93; interpretations 90; poverty and

Index 86–88; and slavery 89–91; and slave trade 91–93; see also slaves/slavery debt-bondsman/debt-bondswoman 89 debt slavery: in Athens 83; defined 91; women and children 92; see also slaves/slavery decolonisation 176 Decumani Narbonenses 62, 62 Deleuze, Gilles 281 Democracy (Athens) 201; restoration of 403 196, 202–205, 207–208, 210, 217 demos 95n19, 256 dendrophori 64 destitute (ptōchoí) 106 destitution 105–106, 112 Dilthey, Wilhelm 16 Dionysius (Arlesian slave) 61 Dionysius of Halicarnassus 239, 248n17, 249n44, 249n51, 249n55, 250n55 displacement 113 distress, language of 46 domination 38–39, 42 Dossey, Leslie 254 douleia 89 Dover, Kenneth 208 Durkheimian models 8 economic (in)equality 82 eisphorai 208 elites 35–38, 41, 43, 45–47; aristocratic norms 69; municipal 57; Roman society 56; of subaltern people 57–58 emmer (triticum diococcum) wheats 136 enchytrismos 166 Erathosthenes 204 ethnicity 19, 42, 56, 157–170; incolae 56; indigenous populations 56, 63, 157, 159, 162, 168; pagani 69; peregrini 69; see also Hellenicity Eubulus (Antiochene notable) 263–265 eviction 111 exclusion, language of 45–46 experience 15–16, 255–257, 268 exploitation, language of 47 fabri 64 fabri tignuarii 59, 63 Fadius Secundus Musa, Sex. (magistrate of Narbonne) 58, 58 family, language of 45 Farge, Arlette 107 farro 136 fascism 4

287

Febvre, Lucien 4, 279 Feitosa, Lourdes M. G. C. 179, 185 females: pawns 96n67; slaves 92 feminism 175 Finley, Moses I. 8–9, 22n63, 124 floods 113 fodder/legumes 133 food shortages 106, 262–263 formula provinciae (Pliny the Elder) 62 Forsdyke, Sara 254 Foucault, Michel 7, 66, 175, 279, 281 Foxhall, Lin 87 freeborn 56, 68–69 Freedman, Paul 46 freedmen 56–57, 62–63, 67–68, 70n2, 208, 237, 239, 242–243, 281 freedwomen 66 Freeman, Edward A. 159 French historiography 4 French Revolution 39–40 Frontonius Euporus, M. (navicularius in Arles) p 57, 60 Funari, Pedro Paulo A. 178–179 function 45–46 function/work, language of 45 Gaius (jurist) 108 Galvão-Sobrinho, Carlos 254 Gallus, Caesar, brother of Julian 109–110, 263–264; economic policy 110 Garraffoni, Renata Senna 19, 186 gay liberation 175 gender 7, 175–177 Geographic Information Software 124, 131 Giddens, Antony 14 Ginzburg, Carlo 6, 256 Gladiatorial propaganda 183, 185–187 Gortyn Code 88 Gottesman, Alex 216 Gracchan crisis 36, 39 graffiti 176–187 Gramsci, Antonio 6, 13–14, 157–158 grape production 122 Greco, Emanuele 166 Greek citizenship/urbanity 167 Greek colonies 160 Greek communities 36 Gregory of Nazianzus 265 Grievance theories 267 Grig, Lucy 11, 56, 177, 256, 266s Guha, Ranajit 6, 13

288

Index

Haas, Christopher 271n109 Habinek, Thomas 239 Hadrian (emperor) 170 Hailwood, Mark 12, 56 Hall, Jonathan 167 Hall, Stuart 5 Hardt, Michael 281 heartier durum (triticum durum) wheat 136 hektemoroi 95n16 Hellenicity 157–170 Hellenisation 11 Herdonius, Appius (rebellious Sabine in Rome) 239–240, 248n17, 248n21 Herodotus 92, 159, 163, 220–221, 229; Histories 89; on Cleomenes 221; grammatical structure and vocabulary 224; interpretation of reforms 221 Hesiod 46; Ways and Means 46; Works and Days 87 hierarchies 68; language of 45; multiplicity of 65; parallel 65; Romans 56, 60, 64 Hill, Christopher 4 Hilton, Rodney 4 Hingley, Richard 176–177 history from below 1–2, 56; ancient history 8–12; in Brazil 7; context 3–20; defined 4–5; objective 5 Hitchcock, Tim 107 Hobsbawm, Eric 4, 9, 55, 144–145, 231, 255 Hoggart, Richard 5, 12–13 hoi polloi 256, 259 homelessness 104–106, 108, 112–113, defined 105; sanitary conditions 106 homeless people 104, 107–108, 111–114, 115n11 homoeroticism 179 homosexuality 175 housing 104; market 104, 111; planning 109; poverty 104 human capabilities 15 Hunt, Peter 238 hybridisation 160 iconoclasm 271n109 Indian Subalternists 6 inequality, language of 46 injustice, language of 46 Inthatius Vitalis, M. (nauta and wine merchant in Lyon) 59, 60 Isaac, Benjamin 160 isegoria 202 Ismenus felattor (male prostitute?) 186

Isocrates 171n39 Israel 93 Italian Marxist historians 8 Iulius Felix, M. (freedman in Arles) 66 Iuventius Celsus, Publius (jurist) 107 Johns, Catherine 175 Johnson, Walter 15, 238, 248n13 Joly, Fábio Duarte 20 Julian (emperor), Misopogon 262 Justinianic Code 43 kakoi 95n19 Kallias’ prostates 206 Kamen, Deborah 208 kapeloi 85–86 katakeimenoi 88 Kiernan, Victor 4 klarōtai 161 Klazomenai 163 Kleijwegt, Marc 244 Kohronen, Kalle 182 Koortbojian, Michael 246 Kyllyrioi in Syracuse 159, 166 Kyrtatas, Dimitris 47 labour 41–42, 46–47, 57–62, 64–65, 68, 262–263 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy 6, 261 Lampadius (prefect of Rome) 258 landowners 87 languages: of distress 46; of domination 46–47; epigraphy as a discourse 56–57, 60–65, 71n21; invisibility 61, 63, 68, 167; linguistic turn 7, 43, 65–66; of reciprocity 45; of the social 43–47; wealth 45 Latini Iuniani 243 Laurence, Ray 186, 281 Lavan, Myles 238 law of Tarentum 109 Lefebvre, Georges 4, 257 Lenski, Noel 195 lex Aelia Sentia 243 lex Fufia Caninia 243 lex Iunia 243 LGBTQ+ 2, 281 Libanius 262–263, 265–266 libertas 238 Liebeschuetz, Wolfgang 263 Linebaugh, Peter 7 liturgies 208 Livy 237–247; aristocratic conspiracy 244; loyalty ( fides) of slaves 238; mass

Index enslavement 247n6; slave agency, treatment of 238; slave conspiracies 239; Vindicius 244, 249n49 Lo Cascio, Elio 106 lupanar (Pompeii) 186 lynching of Theophilus 261–262 Lyon 56–60, 59, 68, 71n17 Lysias 81, 196, 198, 203–206, 208; Against Erathosthenes 203–205; For Kallias 205–206; Against Philon 204–205 Machado, Carlos 260 MacMullen, Ramsey 180 Magalhães de Oliveira, Julio Cesar 20, 42, 64, 71n14 magistri pagi (southern Gaul) 62 Malkin, Irad 161, 170n1 Mallon, Florencia 6, 94 manumission 239, 242–244, 249n44, 249n46 Mariandynoi 160 Marx, Karl 14–15, 278 Marxism 5, 8, 14, 22n57, 40, 266 masculinities 19, 175–176; and excluded memories 183–187; graffiti on Pompeian walls 177–183; painted inscriptions 180; power and marginality 176–177 master–slave relationships 127, 205–207, 237 Mayer, Emanuel 55 meat consumption 134 Mediterranean migration 160 Me mnesikakein (amnesty agreement of 403) 203–204, 217 Menander, Heros 89 mental universe 6 Mesopotamia 93 metabolē 219 metanarrative 35, 39–40, 47 Metoikia (Athens) 196, 202, 207–209; better democrats than citizens 202; and exclusions 197; forms of agency 197, 199; historiography 197; metics and slaves 197–198, 201–202, 207–210; population 202; slave owners 202–207 microhistory 6 middle class (Mayer) 55 Millar, Fergus 12 ministri Laribus (Arles) 61 Mommsen, Theodor 123 Morales, Fábio Augusto 19

289

multitudo 55, 256 municipal code of Malaca 109 murders: of Androcles and Phrynichus 217; of Ephialtes 217; of Theophilus 263 mythical Theseus 218 Narbonne 56–58, 58, 61, 62, 63–65, 68, 71n17 natural slavery 158 nautae 59–60 navicularius 58, 60, 68 negotiatores 58, 60 negotiator frumentarius 60 Negri, Tony 281 Nicolet, Claude 9, 55, 70n8, 71n10 Nîmes 56–57, 63–64, 71n17, 71n26 Nissinen, Laura 182, 187 North Africa 7, 42, 255, 258–259 Nousek, Debra 239 Nuffelen, Peter Van 254 Occupy Movement 7, 255, 280 ochlos 216, 256 Ogilvie, Robert Maxwell 241–242 oikountes 199 oil and wine production 123 Old Oligarch 201–202, 208, 210 Olitius Apollonius, P. (navicularius and negotiator in Narbonne) 58, 60 olive production 122 oppression, language of 45, 47 ordines (Nicolet) 55 Osborne, Robin 157 Paestum 164 Pagán, Victoria 245 pagani pagi Lucreti (Arles) 69 Panegyrikos 169 panegyris for Apollo 97n80 Paquius, Pardalas, G. (patron of corpora in Arles) 60, 63 Patlagean, Évelyne 10 pauperes (Caldelli) 55 pawnship 87 peasant 122 peasant rebellions 6, 10, 254 Pébarthe, Christophe 199 Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de 69 Peisistratus 222–223 pelatai 95n16 Peloponnesian War 36 penētes 44, 95n16

290

Index

penichros 83, 95n17 peregrini 69 Peregrinus (Arlesian slave) 61 perioikoi of Greece 169 Petronius Asclepiades, P. (patron of the lenuncularii in Arles) 63 Phokaia 163 Phrygia 93 Pickering, Michael 16 pig breed 134 Pinheiro-Machado, Rosana 268, 271n117 Piraeus 202–205, 209 Plato 158–159, 166–167; Laws 158–159, 168; Republic 209 plebeian circles 55 plebeian culture 216; see also Thompson, Edward P. plebs 55, 70n3, 256, 260; Antiochensis plebs 264; plebs frumentaria 106; incondita 55; infima 258; media (Veyne) 55; promiscua 265; tumultuosa 55; ventosa 55 plēthos 256 ploughing 130 plousioi 44 Plutarch 36, 83–84, 233n27 polarisation 9 Polis (Athens): Aristotle’s definition 197; citizens and inhabitants 199–202; civic ideology and citizenship 197; community of citizens 195, 197; community of inhabitants 200; defined by allegiance to democracy 205; historiography 197–198; its others 197–199; slave-owners 207 politeia 199–200 political opportunities 261, 267 Pompeiian wall graffiti 177–183 Ponte di Ferro: burials at 165; loom weight worn on a necklet 165 Pontike, Herakleia 160 poor ( penestai) 106; attitudes towards 10; see also poverty (penia) popinae ( pervigiles popinae) 112 popular culture 5–7, 11–12, 178–179, 231n2, 263, 267 popular politics 260–261 popular violence 271n109 populism 268 populus 55, 256, 260 Port, Andrew 7 port societies 57, 61, 63, 65 Poseidonia 163 Postumius, Lucius 241

poverty ( penia) 81, 105; ancient and modern conceptualisations 82; categorisation 84; and debt 84–86; and debt bondage 86–93; defined 82–84, 104–105; dependency 81–82; and dependent labour 93–94; historiography 17–18; poor 81–84, 269n35; precarity 81–82; vulnerability 81–82 Primius, Secundianus, M. (nauta and merchant of fish-sauces in Lyon) 59 professions: professional hierarchies 69; professional identity 57, 60–61, 65 property speculation 109 Prostates 197, 206, 208 ptōchoi 85 ptōchoi/ptōcheia 83 public financing system 208 publicity stunts 217 Purcell, Nicholas 255 quarters (Rome) 110 Quinctius, Gnaeus (dictator) 245 reciprocity, language of 45 Rediker, Marcus 7 reforms of Cleisthenes 218 religious riots 6 rental market 107–108, 110, 112–114 repertoire of contention 261, 267 residential property (negotiandi causa) 109 resistance 3, 7, 10, 15–16, 238, 246, 279 restibilis 132 Rhodes, Peter J. 197, 202, 219, 223 Rhône 61 Richlin, Amy 175 riot of AD 354 in Antioch 261–266 riots in Athens of 508/7 BC 216–218; Athenaion Politeia 219; Herodotus 219; major sources 218–225; minor sources 225–231; stasis 217 Roller, Matthew 249n55 Roman agriculture see agriculture Romanisation 10–11, 177 Romans: citizenship 9; corpora in southern Gaul 56; narrative histories 36; sexuality 185; social heritage 55; villas 128 Rome: allies of 238; difficulties of living in 108–112; monarchy 237, 244, 247n8; slavery in 237–250 Rosillo-López, Cristina 18 Rostovtzeff, Mikhail 123, 178 Roueché, Charlotte 260 Rudé, George 4, 55, 216, 255–256

Index Sabbatini Tumolesi, Patricia 183, 185 Said, Edward 281 Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux 61 Sanctius, Marcus, L. (civis Helvetius) 64 Santos, Boaventura de Souza 17, 266 Saône River 59 Saville, John 4 Scheidel, Walter 107 Scott, James C. 267 Selassie, Haile 9 Sempronius Gracchus, Ti. 47, 180, 245–246 Septimani Baeterrenses 62 servants of Compitalia (Arles) 60 servitus 237 Servius Romanus (in Livy) 242 Servius Tullius 250n55 Sestia 241 Settefinestre 124 Seviri Augustales (southern Gaul) 58–59, 61, 68–69, 71n14 Sextani Arelatenses 62 sexual graffiti 19, 186 sexual intercourse 185, 187 sexuality 7, 175, 179, 184–186; see also gender; masculinities Sharpe, Jim 8 Shaw, Brent D. 254 slave agency in Livy 237–239; slaves as conspirators 239–243; slaves as counterconspirators 243–246 slave-society approach 196 slaves/slavery 7, 37, 39; Aegean-wide slave trade 91; agency 198, 207, 237–247; apophora (payment to the master) 197, 202, 209; Athenian 195, 196, 198; Augustan-period 60; Brazil 7; community 42; conspiracy (coniuratio servorum) 241, 243; in court 200; exclusions 207; family 42; in Greece 9–10; historiography 3, 7, 9–10, 15; katakeimenoi 88; living conditions 9–10; loyalty 237–238, 240, 245, 247n3, 249n49; manumission 207–210, 239; market 91; metaphor of 238; owning 140; peculium 60, 243; religion 17; resistance 10, 238; revolt (servilis tumultus) 10, 241; Roman economy and 9; in Rome 9–10, 61, 237–250; strategies 208; systems 208; in Tacitus 247n1; in Thracia and Phrygia 207; trades 91; war prisoners as 167, 241; women and children 92

291

slums 104–105 small farmer 123 social changes 176 social circles 57 social cohesion 68 social crisis 43 social and economic dependency 86 social exclusion 84 social experience 17 social heritage 55 social identity of workers 71n14 social inequalities 93 social languages 45; distress 46; domination 46–47; exclusion 45–46; exploitation 47; family 45; function/ work 45; hierarchy 45; inequality 46; injustice 46; oppression 45, 47; reciprocity 45; solidarity 45 social mobility 20, 110, 244 Socles (Corinthian citizen) 226 Socrates 209 soil and water management 125 solidarity, language of 45 Solon 89–90, 95n19–23; poor 84; reforms of 39, 83; seisachtheia 83–84 sordidior vulgus 265 southern Gaul, epigraphy of 55–57, 65–69; extreme visibility of exceptions 57–61; subaltern peoples 61–65 South Etruria Project 129 Spartans 224 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 13, 62, 158, 170n2 Stanton, Greg R. 233n25 stasis 20, 204, 217, 222, 224, 230, 232n11, 280 Ste. Croix, G. E. M. de. 10, 22, 38 stoning of Lycidas 217 Storey, Glenn R. 104 Struggle of the Orders 238 Subaediani, fabri (Narbonne) 58; negotiantes (Arles) 74n98 subaltern 6–7, 9, 11, 13, 56; agency 20, 42; classes 2, 6, 13; communities 35; in contradistinction 37, 55; defined 13; experiences 17; groups 3, 11, 13, 17–20, 47; insurgency 6, 11; people 2, 14; role in politics 12; Romans 60–65; social category 13; social groups 13, 23n98, 56, 257, 267; voices 14 subaltern communities in antiquity 18, 35, 47; formation of 41–43; history from below 38–41; languages of social 43–47; methodological issues 35–38

292

Index

subalternity: in ancient world 19; definition 6, 13–14, 18–19; reformulation of idea 14 subalternity and ethnicity 157–158; archaeological record 163–168; barbaroi perioikoi 168–169; from below 157; binary structure 168–169; and colonisation 158–163; culture 168; ethnic identity 169; gender 169; legal status 168; politai 168–169 subaltern masculinities see masculinities Subaltern Studies Group 6, 13 Syme, Ronald 237 Syria 17, 262, 264 Tacitus 108, 113, 237, 247n1 Tanzer, Helen H. 178–179 Tarquinius Superbus 243, 250n55 Tarragoni, Federico 12 Taylor, Claire 10, 18, 41, 179, 198 Temple of Liberty 246 Testa, Lizzi 271n109 Testart, Alain 92 Thebans, slaughter 228 Thébert, Yvon 10 Theodosian Code 43, 108 Theophilus (governor of Syria) 261, 263–266 Theophrastos 86 thēteia 87 Thirty’s oligarchy (Athens) 203–204, 208–209 Thompson, Dorothy 4 Thompson, Edward P. 3–5, 7, 11–12, 16, 55–56, 66, 68, 216, 254, 263 Thracians 91–93, 97n90 Thracian slaves 92; see also debt slavery Thratta (in Aristophanes) 92 threshing 139–144 Thucydides 216 Tiber Valley 131 tituli picti 180 Toutius, Incitatus (nauta, centonarius honoratus and negotiator frumentarius in Lyon) 60 trades 57–58, 61, 63, 68–69 traders, long distance 58 Trajan 170 Tran, Nicolas 18, 256 transhumant subsistence strategies 167 Tresques 64 Trevizam, Matheus 126 triticum aestivum 136

turba 55, 256 Turner, Victor 16 two-agricultures model 139 Ugernum (Beaucaire) 64 Ulpian 108 Urban Graveyard Effect 106 urban population 105, 256–259, 263 urban poverty 104–114 urban riots 10 urban violence 254, 256, 258, 271n109, 273 Urbs 55; see also Rome utricularii (transport professionals) 57, 64 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 8 Veyne, Paul 55, 71n10 Viitanen, Eeva Maria 182, 187 villa of Horace at Vacone 138–139 villa rustica 128 Vindicius (slave) 244, 249n49 Vitruvius 126; Vitruvius’ villa urbana 128 Vlassopoulos, Kostas 3, 8, 18, 89, 160, 170n7, 198, 201, 207, 210, 246, 260 voices from below 7 volones 245–246 vulgus 55, 256 Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew 187 wealth 37–38, 41, 44–46, 63, 65, 67–69 Weber, Max 123 Weberian models 8 Williams, Raymond 5, 15, 232n7 wine 122 women 8, 11, 22n87, 86–87, 92–93, 111, 113, 162–163, 168–169, 183, 200, 244–245, 281; enslaved 9; immigrant 200; kapeloi 86; skilled 87; slave 245; suppress the voices of 2; Thracians 92; upper and upper-middle classes 2; vulnerability 93 working poor in Rome 110–111 written space 180–181, 184, 186 Xenophon 161–162; Anabasis 161 Yavetz, Zvi 9, 55 Zeleia 161 zooarchaeological work 134 Zuchtriegel, Gabriel 19, 170