Roman Social Relations
Ramsay MacMullen
Number of quotes: 28
Book ID: 188 Page: 1
Section: 4B
No one’s social relations were so limited and tenuous, so close to no relation at all, as the shepherd’s in the hills. His work kept him away from people. In those he did meet he had reason to fear an enemy...
Quote ID: 4138
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 188 Page: 4
Section: 4B
No one should build his farmhouse near a main road “because of the depredations of passing travelers.” That was the advice of a man who knew Italy well, at the height of its peace; while the advice of a contemporary in Palestine was, if one stopped the night at a wayside inn, to make one’s will. {13} Both warnings came to the same thing. Away from centers of population, one risked being robbed or killed.
Quote ID: 4139
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 188 Page: 7
Section: 4B
Throughout all our evidence, scattered through it is over several centuries, the methods employed and their openness point to the existence of extralegal kinds of power to a degree quite surprising. However majestic the background of Roman law and imperial administration, behold in the foreground a group of men who could launch a miniature war on their neighbor--and expected to get away with it!
Quote ID: 4140
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 188 Page: 11
Section: 4B
That being the case, we expect to find women especially among the victims--widows, wives whose husbands are away, but also orphans and minors. {40} They call attention to their state as “weak,” “without resources,” “with no one to turn to” (aboethetos). And of course they (or for that matter, anyone) will be most exposed to attack when they are away from home, on the road. Inhabitants of other villages are likely to prove hostile. {41}
Quote ID: 4142
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 188 Page: 16
Section: 4B
Rent- or tax-collectors who come out to the country face a hostile reception and can expect attempts to cheat and resist them, even by force. They respond with their own brutality. It is just such confrontations with an external enemy--government officials, landlords’ agents, crop damage by herds, or a quarrel over land or water with people of another locality--that unite the village.
Quote ID: 4144
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 188 Page: 21
Section: 4B
but throughout our period it is always true to say that the bulk of real property belonged not to the peasant but to someone who did no work himself and who, more often than not, lived elsewhere. When he did appear, it was as a master; when he took up residence, local office was his natural due. {64}
Quote ID: 4145
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 188 Page: 30
Section: 4B
Their life, says Cicero, “clashes with more polished elegance of a man”; and when he wants to vilify his enemies, he terms them “rustics and country folk.”
Quote ID: 4147
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 188 Page: 31
Section: 4B
A pure Latin was the pride of the ruling race, above the provincial variations that one detected in a man from northern Italy, worse still, from Spain or Africa. One blushed to be detected in an un-Roman slip. {5} Foreign words to be sure crept in; they even gained naturalized status in the course of time; but the emperor Claudius only exaggerated a very common prejudice when he withdrew the grant of citizenship from a man who could not speak good Latin. {6} Urbanitas opposed not only rusticitas but peregrinitas as well.
Quote ID: 4148
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 188 Page: 31
Section: 4B
But, as inscriptions prove, away from the city each mile marked a further deviation from correctness. {8} When one looks at the documents of an Egyptian village, corruptions are clearer still. {9} In sum, “there is a difference between rustics, semi-rustics, and the inhabitants of cities,” as Strabo says; and three centuries later, “how great a distance between city-dwellers and the rural,” exclaims St. Gregory of Nazianzus. {10}Finally, a curious etymological fact, that from one single Semitic root derive (in Syriac, Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew) the words for boor, idiot, crude ignorant fellow. The root means literally “outsider,” but in fact “outside the city.” {11}
Quote ID: 4149
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 188 Page: 34
Section: 2E2,4B
But peasants were afflicted by an affliction worse than locusts, worse than drought: the man from the city, come to collect rents or taxes.“Before the grain-tax is delivered, the poll-tax falls due.” {21} “The cities are set up by the state in order . . . to extort and oppress.” {22} So say our sources for Palestine, and truly. ...
Farmers could only defend themselves by a kind of economic suicide: If your demands drive us to desperation, they said to the officials, then we will flee our fields and you will get no yield at all. {24} It was no empty threat. ...
We will defer till later the discussion of these laborers and pass over the many studies of anachoresis, meaning flight from one’s fields, village, debts, and creditors in Egypt.
Quote ID: 4150
Time Periods: 123
Book ID: 188 Page: 38
Section: 4B
The third and fourth centuries, however, brought a change. The hoarding of grain for a rise in price and usurious loans to those who lacked food and seed corn seem to have grown more common. {31}
Quote ID: 4151
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 188 Page: 38
Section: 4B
The general background is easy to describe. Beginning at about the birth of Cicero, the tendency of the empire’s socioeconomic development over five centuries can be compressed into three words: fewer have more.
Quote ID: 4152
Time Periods: 01234
Book ID: 188 Page: 39
Section: 4B
Evidence for the end product, when collected, {34} dots the map of every part of the empire. The phenomenon could hardly be more widespread. And the master treated these villages as he was entitled to in law, as if the living community, its individual members, and its energies were his to do with as he wanted...
Quote ID: 4153
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 188 Page: 46
Section: 4B
Egypt offers a specially clear illustration of the cultural gulf. An edict published from the capital in 215 announces: All Egyptians who are in Alexandria, and particularly the countryfolk who have fled from other parts can easily be detected, are by all means to be expelled...
Quote ID: 4155
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 188 Page: 47
Section: 4B
The burnous framing a sun-blackened face and shaggy hair; the slow tongue, heavy step, and servile stupid address; the peasant’s belief in strange gods and stranger rustic spells--all these the city man tried to keep at a distance. He divided the human race into “duly registered, and country-dwelling.” {58} ...Though explicit proof of such success stories is rare, indirect evidence suggests a quite widespread phenomenon. People with native names, or sons and daughters of natives, appear in the honor rolls of many a provincial center, risen there surely from the countryside and Romanized, or Hellenized, by nomenclature, language, aspirations, and municipal office. Many a village surely honors in its chosen patron some hometown boy who made good.
Quote ID: 4156
Time Periods: 0123
Book ID: 188 Page: 47
Section: 4B
Various incentives encouraged those who had lived in a city to spend a part of the year or take up permanent residence on their estates. They qualified for village office (it was common to require real property for the rank){61}, and acknowledged the honor of election by paying for a new public bath, a portico, or the like. {62}
Quote ID: 4157
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 188 Page: 57
Section: 4B
The area of our study held two swollen giants of cities, Alexandria and the capital itself, both containing over half a million inhabitants. It held two other near-giants, Carthage and Antioch; perhaps a half-dozen others with more than seventy-five thousand; the rest, much smaller. Pompeii’s twenty thousands were typical. One could fairly call oneself a city-dweller and still be overwhelmed by the sheer size of Rome.
Quote ID: 4159
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 188 Page: 58
Section: 4B
Citizens of the capital felt themselves vastly superior to men of any other origin. Tacitus lists “among so many sorrows that saddened the city” in the year 33 the marriage of a woman of the royal family to someone “whose grandfather many remembered as a gentleman outside the senate, from Tivoli” {1} ...we lay bare an almost incredible snobbery ...that originates outside the city’s bounds” {2} --while Cicero, two centuries earlier, complained, “You see how all of us are looked down on who come from country towns.” {3}Pastor John’s Note: Even Cicero
Quote ID: 4160
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 188 Page: 59
Section: 4B
The Nicomedians, a contemporary reports, “are very proud of their larger population” than Nicaea’s--just because it was larger. Similarly, cities asserted the claim and attached to themselves the title “Greatest”, or quarreled over whose temple to Zeus or whose amphitheater was the bigger.
Quote ID: 4161
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 188 Page: 61
Section: 4B
Rich and poor alike loved the object that gave them standing in the world.They could not offer their lives for it; there was no call, no war; so those who could gave their wealth, with a generosity unequaled in any other period of human history. ...Their readiness to mortgage their estates or anticipate their income for years to come can be inferred from the size of their gifts, the achievements of which survive to us only as ruins, to be sure, but ruins of extraordinary magnificence. The physical magnificence of imperial civilization rested ultimately on sheer willingness.
Quote ID: 4162
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 188 Page: 62
Section: 4B
“Most people,” says Plutarch, “think that to be deprived of the chance to display their wealth is to be deprived of wealth itself.” It was the thirst for honor, the contest for applause, that worked so powerfully to impoverish the rich.
Quote ID: 4163
Time Periods: 12
Book ID: 188 Page: 106
Section: 2C
It was a Roman invention to set aside certain adjectives for certain dignities: “Most Grand” for ex-consuls, “Most Renowned” for ordinary senators, “Most Distinguished” or “Distinguished” for equites of all sorts from Cicero’s day on, and in townships, “Most Splendid” or “Splendid” while “Illustrious” described the upper equestrian rungs as a whole. {53} “Most Eminent,” “Most Perfect,” and “Outstanding” designated what we would call civil service grades.
Quote ID: 4164
Time Periods: 01234
Book ID: 188 Page: 114
Section: 4B
These little sweeteners accompanying the address of a poor man to a great were made still more welcome by abject deference. “The humble man humiliates himself in a disgraceful and undignified manner, throwing himself headlong to the ground upon his knees, clothing himself in a beggar’s rags, and heaping dust upon himself.” {80} It was a posture that invited the verbal kicks delivered indiscriminately to the whole body of the vulgus by Horace, Martial, Juvenal, Seneca, Tacitus (especially Tacitus), and other Latin authors. {81} A better defined contempt struck specific targets by name: weavers, fullers, and so on. {82} Cicero, speaking, as it happens, about the eastern regions, sweeps into the waste bin half their population of “craftsmen, petty shopkeepers, and all that filth of the cities.” {83}
Quote ID: 4165
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 188 Page: 115/116
Section: 4B
So much for the various “craftsmen” that Cicero dismissed; but what was wrong with the “petty tradesmen”? The answer to that question lay in their dependence on falsehood. It was their business to lie about their wares, a thing that no honorable man was capable of doing. {88} The same charge could be made against a slave, that his position required deception. “No one of the servile background can develop any great pride.” “It belongs to slavery not to speak for or against anyone you wish.” “When you see someone cringing before another or fawning on him against his real opinion, you can with confidence say this fellow is no free man.” And against the poor, too, the charge could be made that their very poverty reduced them to lying, cheating, stealing. The rich frankly confessed that only themselves could afford to be honest. {90} ...The poor deserve to be held in contempt because they have no money. Poverty in and out of itself is “vile,” “dishonored,” “ugly,” {91}
Quote ID: 4166
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 188 Page: 117
Section: 4B
We may take it as a true reflection of late Republican upper-class Roman morality, then, that in his mind the two words “rich” and “honorable” being together and thus appear so regularly in his speeches arm in arm, like a happily married couple. {93}
Quote ID: 4167
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 188 Page: 118
Section: 4B
The Romans indeed acknowledged a goddess called Money (Pecunia); but some of them were blinder devotees than others, and he cult was tributary to another Status (Philotimia)
Quote ID: 4168
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 188 Page: 119
Section: 4B
a Pompeian’s declaration, written up on a wall, “I hate poor people. If anyone wants something for nothing, he’s a fool. Let him pay up and he’ll get it.” {101}Poor people returned the hatred. A number of passages testify to this, at any rate as it was sensed by the rich. {102}
Quote ID: 4169
Time Periods: 012
Book ID: 188 Page: 126
Section: 4B
What could have induced the Romans to be so blind? Surely they saw that, in their gathering of wealth by conquest, they gathered a giant market. Surely someone realized that the great swelling of cities in later Republican Italy offered perfectly extraordinary economic opportunities, especially in luxury goods, services, trades, and crafts. But no; with unteachable conservatism, rich Romans turned to the land, and even those of relatively modest means could not lower themselves to the running of an arms factory or fuller’s mill. That left a vacuum, promptly filled by Greek freedmen
Quote ID: 4170
Time Periods: 0
End of quotes