This week, we’re going to talk a bit about the brothers Tiberius (trib. 133) and Gaius (trib. 123-2) Gracchus, the famous Roman reformers of the late second century. There’s actually a fair bit to say about both of them, so we’re going to split this treatment over two weeks, talking about Tiberius this week and Gaius next week.
Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus’ tribunates – both of which ended with them being killed (I think it is perfectly fair to say ‘murdered’) – typically occupy a position in survey coverage of the Roman Republic as the inciting incident that begins (if not quite causes) the collapse of the Republic itself, the first outbreak of violence in Roman politics, the first escalation in a spiral that would lead to the repeated outbreak of civil war in the first century. And that is certainly how they were understood in antiquity; both Plutarch and Appian make this claim (App. BCiv. 1.17; Plut. Ti. Gracch. 20.1). And in part because the sources (again, Plutarch and Appian) frame the Gracchi quite positively and in part, to be frank, because their reforms are generally ‘left-coded’ in a university environment that is inherently sympathetic to left-coded things, the Gracchi tend to come across to students as righteous reformers killed by foolish, hidebound and greedy reactionary Roman senators. And that is, to be fair, a potentially valid reading (if employed with some caveats).
But it is also generally the only reading students get and it is not the only valid reading of the evidence we have. So for this week, I want to complicate the Gracchi, presenting a some of the details that often get left out of introductory surveys. In particular, we’re going to discuss the problems that Tiberius Gracchus’ key law, the Lex Sempronia Agraria was designed to solve and I am going to argue that Tiberius was attempting to solve a problem that didn’t exist (though he couldn’t have known it), a view which is now quite common in the scholarship but almost entirely absent in how we tend to teach the Gracchi.
But more to the point, I am going to argue that Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus’ behavior did, in fact, violate the norms of the Republic and that it was not entirely unreasonable for the senatorial elite to conclude these men, in their unrestrained and nakedly ambitious approach to politics, represented a real threat to the Roman political order and that they might be aiming for something approaching a ‘soft coup’ in the context of a political order whose features – including the democratic ones – worked through an unwritten constitution of norms (what the Romans called the mos maiorum, “the customs of the ancestors”), which both brothers actively undermined. The claim that the Gracchi threatened to make themselves tyrants was not an empty claim and that is the dark reflection of their role as well intentioned reformers.
In short, then, if the only version of the Gracchi you have encountered is that of the near-saintly, then martyred proto-progressive reformers, that’s not quite the complete picture (and the left-coding of their ideas is decidedly anachronistic). Naturally, in trying to complicate this picture, I am essentially taking the position of prosecutor, so this ‘take’ is going to be far more negative on the Gracchi than how I would, say, teach them in class or, indeed, how I regard them myself.
So the way we’re going to approach this problem is first to discuss the problem that Tiberius Gracchus thought he was addressing (and some of the issues there), before walking through the means he used to push forward the Lex Sempronia Agraria. Then I want to look at some of the wide-ranging laws proposed by Gaius Gracchus to assess the degree to which those laws cohere and ways we might understand his program and actions, potentially rather more negatively.
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(Bibliography Note: If you have access to it, it is hard for me to do better than Sakia Roselaar’s Oxford Bibliography entry for “The Gracchi Brothers.” As Roselaar notes, however, this is an area where – for the general reader – the bibliography that exists is unsatisfactory. The main problem is that, in English at least, there has not been a sustained monograph on the Gracchi in English in quite some time and during that time, as we’re going to see, the scholarship on some key issues, particularly the underlying conditions the lex Sempronia Agraria was supposed to be addressing, has changed significantly. Consequently, while the standard reading in English tends to be Boren, The Gracchi (1986) and Stockton, The Gracchi (1979), both pre-date those shifts. Works in other languages (Gabba’s treatment in Storia di Roma vol. 2 (1990) or Perelli, I Gracchi (1993)) are more recent, but also don’t capture those shifts. Meanwhile, among scholars, nearly everything about both brothers is the subject of at least some debate, often quite a lot of debate. The result is, at the moment, somewhat unfortunate: there really isn’t, to my knowledge, a good place for a beginner to get an up-to-date treatment of the Gracchi, short of reading the older works, then reading a lot of articles (often in difficult to obtain publications, many not in English) to catch up on the debates. Needless to say, an up-to-date accessible monograph covering both brothers and presenting the points of contention about them is desideratum.)
The Sources and Tiberius Gracchus’ Background
Now I should note at the outset that our sources for the Gracchi are not what we might like. Tiberius Gracchus’ year as tribune was in 133 and the late second century is a period where our best sources largely cut out. Polybius, of course, was writing in the 140s and so is unavailable for later events. Livy, always useful, did write the history of this period, but it is lost save for extremely brief summaries of his books known as the Periochae. Instead, we’re reliant primarily on Plutarch and Appian. Both sources are writing much later, in the second century AD and are writing in a context where we might question if we’re getting an entirely straight narrative. As I’ve noted before, Plutarch’s biographies in his Parallel Lives (of which there is one for Tiberius Gracchus and one for Gaius Gracchus) are intended to be moralizing essays rather than straight historical accounts and Plutarch is not above bending the truth to fit his narrative; he also tends to leave out details if they don’t fit his narrative.
Meanwhile, as D.J. Gargola has noted, Appian is also bending his account of Tiberius Gracchus’ reforms, in particular by presenting the Lex Sempronia Agraria as an entirely traditional, convention response to a pressing crisis.1 But in fact, the provisions of the Lex Sempronia Agraria were not traditional: no similar law (save for a reenactment by Gaius Gracchus) – had ever or would ever be passed in Rome and the legal precedent that Appian presents as providing the foundation for Tiberius’ law appears to be at least substantially an anachronistic invention. Meanwhile, the crisis Appian thinks Tiberius Gracchus thought he was addressing probably didn’t exist in the form he understood it.
But that’s what we have, so it is what we must work with. And we should note that both Plutarch and Appian are quite favorable to the Gracchi, even though both men were clearly very controversial in their day. So in a sense this is a reverse of the situation we had with Cleopatra, where we had to contend with relentlessly negative sources: here the sources are broadly positive.
So, on with what we know.
Tiberius Gracchus was elected tribune in 133. His election was already unusual in that he seems to have run on something like a program (land reform, which we’ll get to); Romans generally ran on character and background rather than promising specific political actions if elected, so this was unusual. Part of the reason for it was doubtless that Tiberius Gracchus’ political fortunes were in difficulties. Now we should note here that while Tiberius Gracchus was a plebian (that is, not a patrician) that doesn’t make him a political outsider: Tiberius Gracchus was not remotely a political outsider or poor man or lacking in influence. His father (also Ti. Sempronius Gracchus) had been consul in 177 and 163 and censor in 169; his father (or grandfather) was consul in 215 and 213. Our Tiberius Gracchus’ mother, Cornelia, was the daughter of P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus, the man who defeated Hannibal. Tiberius Gracchus was born into substantial wealth and influence, the sort of man whose eventual political ascent was almost guaranteed.
(Indeed, it was so guaranteed that he gets to bend the rules and hold many of his offices early. He’s quaestor at just 26, which implies that he started his military service at 15 or 16 instead of the normal 17, doing so as a military tribune, not a common soldier. I do think this is relevant to understanding Tiberius Gracchus: this was a man born with a silver spoon and a carefully paved, flat-and-easy road to power and influence laid out for him by his family and his political backers, the most notable among whom was his key supporter Scipio Aemilianus (destroyer of Carthage and shortly Numantia).)
Except. Except he got wrapped up in something of a nasty foreign policy scandal during his year as quaestor, when he was assigned to the amazingly named but less amazingly capable C. Hostilius Mancinus who as consul in 137 was supposed to deal with Numantia in Spain. Mancinus blew it and got his army effectively trapped and sent Tiberius – his quaestor and the next highest ranking Roman present – to negotiate to get his army out. Tiberius did this, but the whole thing caused a great stink and a scandal at Rome (Roman armies are supposed to go down fighting, not negotiate shameful retreats!). Indeed, the Senate was so enraged they rejected the treaty and instead sent Mancinus, bound in chains, to the Numantines as part of a ritual process by which his treaty was disowned. Tiberius doesn’t get packed off to Numantia, but some of the political stink does rub off on him, so while he’s connected enough to get elected as a plebeian tribune in 133, he must know he needs a big second act to get his political career back on track, or he may never reach the consulship. That context – a political insider who had a golden ticket but must now win it back, rather than an outside without connections – is important for understanding the reaction he is going to get.
The Supposed Land Crisis
The issue Tiberius Gracchus seizes on is land reform and both Plutarch (Ti. Gracch. 8.1-3) and Appian (B Civ 7-8) present similar visions of the problem he thought he was addressing. When Rome had expanded in Italy, it had often taken land from defeated enemies, some of which was resettled or sold, but some of which was kept as ‘public land’ (ager publicus), leased out by the state at very favorable rates. By the late second century, Tiberius Gracchus and others are observing two conjoined facts: on the one hand, the number of Romans eligible for conscription (the assidui) has begun to decline. On the other hand, the city of Rome itself is increasingly full of landless poor looking for labor and hoping for some option that will give them a chance at land.2
What they assume is taking place is that the wealthiest Romans – who have, in fact, grown fantastically wealthy from Rome’s overseas wars – have used that wealth to acquire most of the land, either buying up the small freeholds of smaller Roman farmers or getting the leases for that public land. Meanwhile, the Roman small farmer class does most of Rome’s fighting and so the assumption – by Appian – is that these guys are being ground underfoot by heavy military deployments, although as best we can tell, military deployments in the 150s, 140s and 130s are substantially lighter than those from 218-168 (but they’re also in less profitable, more difficult places like Spain, put a pin in that). Those wealthy Romans then work the land not with free laborers, but with slaves, because Roman conquests – remember, we’re at the tail end of Rome’s ‘iron century’ of conquests from 264 to 148 – have brought enormous numbers of enslaved laborers to Italy. Those poor Romans, now displaced, have no land and flock to Rome and are no longer liable for the Roman census.
Except notice the data points being used to come up with this story: the visible population of landless men in Rome and the Roman census returns. But, as we’ve discussed, the Roman census is self-reported, and the report of a bit of wealth like a small farm is what makes an individual liable for taxes and conscription.
In short the story we have above is an interpretation of the available data but not the only one and both our sources and Tiberius Gracchus simply lack the tools necessary to gather the information they’d need to sound out if their interpretation is correct.
All of which now, at last, brings us to the scholarship of the last several decades which has, by and large, concluded that Tiberius Gracchus probably misunderstood the nature of Roman social and economic problems in the late second century and as a result applied the wrong solution.3 The initial problem is that the above model assumes a basically stagnant Italian population: you’re just shifting people around, not generating new people. But survey archaeology shows growing urban centers and new land coming under cultivation, suggesting a modestly rising population, a conclusion reinforced by demographic modeling which recognizes the likely marked decline in military mortality in the back half of the second century. Moreover, the vast expansion of villa estates we ought to be seeing in this period really only comes later, in the first century BC and the first two centuries AD; there’s some expansion (and these patterns are very regionalized) but not enough to explain what we’re being told is happening.4 Those observations, emerging in the 90s and early 2000s, provided the necessary evidence to vindicate the theory advanced by J.W. Rich in the 1980s that the problem was quite different than Tiberius Gracchus understood, in part to explain the one curious fact we could always see about Tiberius’ land reforms, which is that they happened, they went ahead as planned and also they didn’t fix the problem.
Instead what is happening is this: Roman military deployments had, for a long time, been massive. Rome had careened from the major Samnite Wars (343–341, 326–304, and 298–290) to the high-casualty Pyrrhic War (280-275) to the much higher casualty First (264-241) and Second (218-201) Punic Wars. But the big wars of the early second century had involved a lot more winning and thus somewhat less dying (deaths from disease always outweighed combat losses, but Roman armies are smaller from 201-168, so less disease death too), while after the Third Macedonian War (171-168), Rome doesn’t have any more peer-opponent wars left to fight and so the number of men under arms declines again after 168 and especially after 148. Roman society was thus structured to sustain itself in a situation where military mortality for males was high. And then it dropped.
But recall the average Roman farm is small, so what you have now are suddenly a whole bunch of second and third sons who between 350 and 201 would have gone off to fight and died (or their elder brother would have) but are now alive, but can’t possible inherit the family farm because they have a living brother and the farm is much too small to split further (or to support an entire second nuclear family unit). Where do they go? Well, to Rome, of course, where they want what Rome has done in the past to deal with this sort of problem: the foundation of new Roman communities (colonies) where they can have land. But there isn’t any Italy left to conquer (Rome controls all of it) and we aren’t yet to founding Roman colonies overseas, so not only is the mortality much lower (and so you have more of these guys) the traditional release valve is stuck. So they’re piling up in the one place that there is meaningful amount of wage labor available (the city of Rome), where they are very visible to the Roman ruling elite.
Meanwhile, Elder Brother-Who-Lived is back on the farm and should, in theory, still be eligible for call-up. But whereas in previous decades he could hope to get sent to fight in places like Greece or Italy or against Carthage where the rewards in loot from defeating wealthy enemies were substantial, in the 130s, the main problem was Numantia: a Celtiberian community perched in a particularly troublesome hillfort in a relatively poor, difficult part of Spain. Campaigns to take the place often failed (see above) but even if they succeeded, there would be little real loot. Moreover, a lack of success made the wars deeply unpopular. Elder Brother doesn’t want to get drafted to go fight in Spain, it’s just not a good bargain for him (unlike earlier wars).
But he has a solution: the census is self-reported. While his younger brothers are in Rome looking for work, he can just not report the farm on the census (or not report his military aged son), understating his wealth to drop below the qualifying requirement for military service. Because the Roman census pays functionally no attention to such men – the capite censi (those counted by their heads) – Elder Brother’s household almost seems to vanish in the census returns and the number of men liable for conscription ticks down by one.
And so you have falling census returns, combined with crowds of poor Romans in the city of Rome, but without it necessarily having anything to do with ager publicus or lost farms. And this is, we think, probably what is happening: surely there is some elite villa-estate expansion and some replacement of freeholding farmers with enslaved workers on that land but in fact the problem the Romans are facing is classic land scarcity with a growing population, but they don’t know that’s the problem because draft-resistance appears in the census as population decline and the census is all they have.
But you can see immediately the problem for Tiberius Gracchus’ land reform: while there is certainly some ager publicus to redistribute (to the great annoyance of the elites holding it), they’re not enough, because the core of this problem isn’t changing land use patterns (more villas, less small farms) but rising population creating economic strain at the bottom (while, it is true, imperial expansion creates vast almost unimaginable amounts of wealth at the top).
But we’re actually not quite done with problems, there’s one more: not all of the ager publicus was being farmed by Romans. Quite a lot of it seems, instead, to have been in the hands of local Italians – the socii. This is another convenient simplification by Appian and Plutarch, a product of them both writing in the imperial period long after citizenship had been extended across Italy. But that hasn’t happened yet. So any law to redistribute ager publicus would mean taking land from the socii who were currently using it for a land-giveaway in which only Roman citizens will be eligible.
You may well imagine that doing something like that might really damage relations with the socii and also fundamentally change the ‘bargain’ by which the Roman alliance system functioned, as before Tiberius Gracchus, the socii seem to have been eligable to settle in Roman colonial foundations on conquered land, but they will not be eligible to get land in Tiberius Gracchus’ land reform bill.
You can quickly flip ahead to the year 91 to see how that turns out in the long run.
Tiberius Gracchus’ Tribunate (133)
Tiberius Gracchus’ proposal to fix this problem was the lex Sempronia Agraria. The law proposed to enforce a legal but long ignored limit on the holding of ager publicus,5 restricting individuals to holding just 500 iugera (c. 311 acres), with the state revoking the leases on the remainder and using the reclaimed land to then provide small plots for free to the Roman poor, with a rider that these plots could not be sold (to avoid them being reconsolidated into elite estates).
And here it is worth noting that kind of government the Romans had to understand the response. The Roman Republic had written laws but no written constitution – instead, the rules for office holding, for conducting the business of the Senate, for running the assemblies and so on were all customary: the Romans governed themselves in accordance with what they called the mos maiorum, “the custom of the ancestors.” In a sense then, certain practices, if practiced long enough, became a sort of law-of-tradition to themselves and of course one of those customs – practiced at this point for, at minimum around 150 years – was the continual leasing of large amounts of ager publicus to the point that the leases were treated as a form of ownership: people used that land as security for loans, they built houses on it, they buried their parents on it and so on. Because the leases were presumptively renewable and had been for decades if not centuries, under the mos maiorum, the holders of ager publicus had long considered the land theirs. And of course the upset parties are rich and powerful, so their opposition was significant and meaningful, politically.
In brief, the way this plays out is that while Tiberius Gracchus does have significant popular support for his motion (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 9.1), much of the elite are opposed. He draws up a quite conciliatory version of the law, which proposes to compensate the holders of large amounts of ager publicus for their lost leasing rights and to then give them the remainder of their leased land (so they needn’t fear a second lex agraria and a third and a fourth and so on), but according to Plutarch in the face of continued elite opposition, shifts back to a less conciliatory version of the law (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 10.3). The resistance to his law centers on another tribune, Marcus Octavius, himself a large holder of public lands, who plans to veto the law and uses his own powers as a tribune to disrupt the process (along with some fairly clear shenanigans by some of the wealthy, like trying to hide the voting urns to prevent a vote on the law and so on).
Now there are a few things to note at this juncture in the story. First, there being ten tribunes, it must never have been very hard to find a tribute willing to gum up the passage of a given law, but that, traditionally, this was a tactic of delay, rather than a hard-stop the way Octavius is using it. At the same time, with real public momentum to make this law happen, one could easily imagine simply waiting Octavius out – he only has one year in office. Except. Except that, remember, Tiberius Gracchus needs a big victory in his tribunate to get his political career on track, a consideration that was clearly significant (thus the reason we’re informed of his quaestorship; we usually don’t know much about even very significant figure’s time in junior offices!). That consideration, I think, serves as important context for Tiberius’ decision to escalate every time he encounters resistance: he cannot afford to simply be the prelude to someone else passing this law: he needs to pass it himself.
The normal method for ‘deconflicting’ two magistrates with opposing vetoes like this was to go to the Senate, which Tiberius Gracchus, hoping his influential supporters would carry the day, did. Instead, according to Plutarch (Ti. Gracch. 11.2) the Senate was merely no help, whereas Appian (BCiv 1.12) describes the Senate as openly upbraiding Tiberius, a strong negative response. Now under the mos maiorum, that would be the end of it: the authority of the Senate (the auctoritas senatus) ought to be so intense that when the Senate speaks in one voice and says, “not right now” then you desist. Remember that in the Roman conception, the Republic is a partnership of sorts between the Senate and the People (the S and the P in SPQR), rather than a situation in which the Senate is purely subordinate to the popular will: if the Senate is strongly opposed, that is supposed to be a veto point that is respected.
But remember: Tiberius Gracchus cannot, politically, desist. He must push through because his political career requires a victory this year. Note that the cause does not require a victory in 133; there is nothing to stop another tribune in 132 from trying to advance the same bill or a more limited or different version of it. But Tiberius Gracchus’ career absolutely requires success in 133. So instead of desisting, he escalates.
He now breaks clearly with the mos maiorum and plans to take his law directly to the people against the advice of the Senate. Octavius is obviously a problem – he’ll veto anything Tiberius Gracchus tries to do – so Tiberius Gracchus introduces a law to depose Octavius from office. The Roman Republic doesn’t have anything like impeachment, there is no framework to remove someone from office. Instead, the way the Republic works is that all of the offices are held for short duration (one year) and while tribunes and office holders with imperium are immune from prosecution while in office, they can be prosecuted the moment they leave office for any crimes they committed. There is no framework for booting out a tribune like this; the remedy in the customary Roman system is to make sure the next year you elect tribunes who support the idea and try to pass it then. But that remedy doesn’t work for Tiberius Gracchus.
So Tiberius Gracchus passes the law deposing Octavius and then has him dragged from the speaker’s platform (the rostra) and now we have a problem. Because of course Octavius’ supporters are going to view this law itself as illegal and invalid: tribunes are, you will recall sacrosanct, so it’s not clear they can be deposed and it is very clear they cannot be assaulted or dragged. Violating the sacrosanctity of a tribune is, at least notionally, a capital offense and a severe violation of religion and if you think that Tiberius Gracchus’ legal basis for all of this is rubbish, you think he just did it twice. Of course, Tiberius is also a tribune, so you can’t attack him now, but once his year is done, you are probably planning to haul him in to court and let a jury decide if what he did was legal or not.6
In any case, with Octavius removed, Tiberius passes his land reform bill. The law provided for a three-man commission to handle the assessment of what public land was held in excess and then to hand it out. Tiberius Gracchus names as those commissioners himself, his brother and his father-in-law (Appius Claudius Pulcher (cos. 143)). Needless to say, that is a set of commissioners which does not inspire a lot of confidence that the commission will be uncorrupted by politics, a point we’ll get back to in just a moment.
In the meantime, the Senate looked to exert its traditional prerogative over state funds (as it advised the quaestors who superintended the treasury) to hamstring the new commission, but Tiberius Gracchus took advantage of the recent death of Attalus III, King of Pergamum. Attalus had notionally willed his kingdom ‘to the Roman people’ – he had no clear heirs and so perhaps thought by this act to get the Romans to pick one of his relatives to run the kingdom, thus avoiding a damaging civil war – but instead Tiberius, getting the news early, rushed to pass a law annexing the kingdom and using the windfall to fund his commission. The law passes, but this is a breach both of the Senate’s traditional power over state finances, but also its very important role managing Roman foreign policy.
What I want to note in this sequence which is important for understanding what comes next is that Tiberius Gracchus has just demonstrated that, so long as he remained popular, he could use the powers of the tribunate to essentially run the Roman state from the tribune’s chair. Tiberius has now forced not merely a domestic land issue, but also a finance issue and a foreign policy issue over the objection of the Senate and another elected tribune, essentially running roughshod over all of the customary limits intended to keep any one Roman politician from coming to dominate the Roman political system.
Of course if you were an opponent of Tiberius Gracchus, you could at least tell yourself that this is all bad, but at the very least, Tiberius Gracchus will be out of office next year, as it was contrary to custom to run for any office immediately after holding it. Indeed, it was unusual to hold basically any office more than once, save for the consulship (and even then, only for very successful consuls and never multiple years in a row). Those limits are customary but everything about the Roman Republic is customary; if you discounted the mos maiorum, there wouldn’t be any republic left. You’d instead expect that Tiberius would go back to being a senator for a few years while planning his shot at the praetorship – during which he’ll have to survive a series of court battles over the legality of his actions.
So even if he is doing potentially outrageous, dangerous things, at least he’ll be gone in a year, right?
The Elections for 132
So Tiberius Gracchus announces he intends to run for the tribunate for 132 and all hell breaks loose.
When the day for the election comes, there’s evidently a dispute among the tribunes over if Tiberius Gracchus can even run (App. BCiv. 1.14), which Tiberius may not have been winning, while the voting crowd got rowdy and there seem to have been difficulties in carrying out the vote (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 17-18). At the same time, the Senate met at the Temple of Fides, on the Capitoline right by where the voting would have been taking place, trying to figure out what to do about the impending chaos. They’d be aware that fights were breaking out in the voting below and that the crowd was getting out of control (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 18.1) and perhaps rumors that the elections had been disrupted and that Tiberius Gracchus had declared himself a tribune anyway (App. BCiv. 1.15).
In the Senate meeting, the senators, led by Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio (cos. 138; pont. max. 141-132) demanded the consuls take action, fearing that Tiberius Gracchus was attempting to overthrow the state. Reportedly, the consul present (Publius Mucius Scaevola, cos. 133 and a supporter of Gracchus) responded with prevarication (Plut. Ti Gracch. 19.3) saying he’d throw out the results of the vote if it was illegal, but perhaps not specifying if that meant he’d rule Tiberius himself an unlawful candidate. Scipio Nasica, perhaps assuming that this sort of prevaricating inaction was intended to let Tiberius ‘steal a march’ and make himself tribune anyway, instead pulled up his toga (‘capite velato‘ (“with head veiled”), a gesture indicating he was embarking, in his office as Pontifex Maximus, on a religious ritual (in this case a ritual murder) and lead the Senate out (presumably with many of their clients) as a mob to stop Tiberius Gracchus.
That mob of senators, with makeshift weapons, met an equally makeshift mob around Tiberius Gracchus (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 19.1) and in the resulting street battle with clubs and fists, Tiberius Gracchus is killed.
And on the one hand, I think it’s easy to see how this gets simplified down to the easy narrative of the martyred reformer in a classroom environment: Tiberius Gracchus proposed a law to help the poor which would have mildly inconvenienced the rich and they killed him for it. And that’s not wrong but it is incomplete.
Consider the matter from the perspective of another senator or even just a regular Roman who didn’t support Tiberius Gracchus.
Tiberius Gracchus had spent the first half of 133 demonstrating that if you were willing to exceed the customary limits on the power of the tribune, that so long as you were popular and charismatic, it was possible to subvert the entire state. In short, Tiberius Gracchus had done a six-month practicum on how to rule the Roman Republic as a tyrant with just the powers of a tribune. If that sounds absurd, let me remind you that the legal basis for the domestic powers of the Roman emperors will be a simple grant of tribunicia potestas – the powers of the tribunate. It was a very powerful office, constrained by the customary sense of its limited objectives and purpose and the assumption that unless the tribunes were acting as a body on behalf of the people, that they would be deferential to the Senate.
Now Tiberius Gracchus’ land commission was going to grind into gear, handing out free land (and equipment and supplies to build farms on it) to Roman citizens. Under Roman social customs, those citizens will have become, by that act, clients of Tiberius Gracchus – or of the other two commissioners, who are, I should note, his brother and father-in-law – so Tiberius Gracchus is about to use state funds to mint thousands of voters who are, by the bonds of Roman culture, loyal to him – they will be bound by Roman honor culture, to vote for him.
Now if Tiberius Gracchus intended to follow the traditions of Roman office holding, that might not be too bad. His charisma, clients and influence might or might not get him out of the tough legal fights ahead, but even if he survived the inevitable trial for deposing Octavius, he’d be at most one more influential Roman, one of several: he’d win the praetorship and the consulship easily, sure, but get one year of each, cycling back into the Senate where his voice would carry a lot of weight, but hardly be the only voice. He would be a figure of the sort of influence of his own patron, Scipio Aemilianus.
All of which is why I think that violence only breaks out when he tries to run for a second term. Tiberius Gracchus had, of course, just demonstrated how powerful a tribune could be who was willing to use those powers to the fullest and then by declaring his intention to run for a second consecutive term, his intent to potentially never give up this power. And there were ten spots for the tribune: the chances of denying a figure as popular as Tiberius Gracchus – with a built in mass of new clients who are honor-bound to support him – were basically non-existent. Having breached the no-consecutive-office-holding norm once, there was no reason he couldn’t keep running and keep winning.
Which would mean Tiberius Gracchus running the state from the tribune’s chair, immune from prosecution, permanently.
And then you have the event itself, where Tiberius’ supporters – as the voting is prepared to get underway and the tribunes and senate are trying to figure out if Tiberius even can run – get violent. Appian and Plutarch tell us that when the magistrates (with their lictors, who carried the fasces, the emblems of state authority) tried to stand in Tiberius’ way into the voting space (on the grounds that his candidacy might be illegal – something that was being actively debated by the tribunes, you will recall), his supporters seized their fasces and broken them, beating them and forcing them from the voting place with such violence that many of the other tribunes flee and it is in that context that the Senate is hearing rumors that perhaps Tiberius has deposed the other tribunes or declared himself tribune without an election (App. BCiv. 1.15) or – worst yet – (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 19.1) that he had motioned to his head to demand a crown, they panic that what is in fact happening is a coup, that Tiberius is intending to seize extra-constitutional power.
Because if you were going to do it, this is exactly how you would do it. Indeed, as the Roman senators could hardly have been unaware by this point, this was the standard way for tyrants to seize power in Greek poleis.
And I think that’s important to understand what we’re told next, which is that the Romans themselves were, in the moment, deeply divided about what had just happened. Some, we’re told, mourned deeply, but equally Appian reports rejoicing (App. BCiv 1.17). According to Plutarch (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 21.4), Scipio Aemilianus – Tiberius Gracchus’ most important supporter, off besieging Numantia in 133 – when he heard of Tiberius Gracchus death, responded with a line of Homer (Ody 1.43), ὡς ἀπόλοιτο καὶ ἄλλος, ὅτις τοιαῦτά γε ῥέζοι, “So too may perish utterly, any other who does such things.” That quip, we’re told, cost Scipio Aemilianus much of his favor with the people, but it is striking coming from a man who was one of his strongest backers and yet concluded at Tiberius Gracchus’ death that he should have been killed for what he had done (and so too any who tried again after him).
Remembering Tiberius Gracchus
Now even in this run-down, it is not hard to see the Tiberius Gracchus most students will recognize: the well-meaning reformer who saw a problem – the poor being crushed underfoot – and aimed to solve it and when his solution ran afoul of the elite he was murdered for it.
But there is another Tiberius Gracchus.
The Tiberius Gracchus who misdiagnosed a non-existent problem and then proposed a solution that, as we’ll see next week, didn’t do much to solve that problem (notably, the Lex Sempronia Agraria was not repealed after Tiberius’ death, but staffed, funded and allowed to go forward) but did set up an even more significant future crisis. This he may have done because he cared deeply about the poor but equally he may have done it because he was an extremely elite Roman himself whose door to power and influence – once wide open and easy – was swiftly swinging shut and such a dramatic political agenda was necessary to save his career, the republic be damned (a motive, I will note, that Plutarch admits to hearing rumored, Plut. Ti. Gracch. 8.6). Meanwhile, contrary to Appian, the reform he proposed was hardly traditional, but a radical revision of how the Roman state redistributed land to its citizens, one which would play a part in degrading the Roman relationship with the socii.
In that pursuit – again, of a misguided reform that would not solve the problem it did not understand – Tiberius Gracchus ruptured the (unwritten) constitutional structure of the Republic, demonstrating that one could use the powers of the tribunate combined with a committed body of followers to effectively run the Roman state out of the tribune’s assembly (the concilium plebis) in defiance of the Senate and even, if necessary, in defiance of other tribunes. It is worth not forgetting that Marcus Octavius who Tiberius Gracchus deposed was every bit as elected as Tiberius.
And then, there really is no way around saying it: Tiberius Gracchus does everything one would do if he was planning to set himself up as a tyrant. Having stocked his land commission with a committee of himself and his relatives, he runs for a second term in violation of custom to his powerful office while his supporters deploy as a mob chasing other officials away from the voting. This is, to be clear, what the pro-Tiberius Gracchus sources tell us (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 19.1; App. BCiv 1.15).
None of which should be taken as a defense of Marcus Octavius or Scipio Nasica. In this moment, as in subsequent moments, the conservative Roman aristocracy of the Late Republic demonstrates its great flaw: it would sacrifice everything in order to compromise nothing. There were obvious off-ramps that could have been taken in this confrontation which do not seem to have been attempted. Tiberius Gracchus’ earlier, more conciliatory version of the law fell by the wayside, but also once the agrarian law was passed the Senate could have signaled that they would not countenance its repeal, removing the public justification Tiberius had for running again (to protect the law that had passed). It’s not clear to me if Tiberius Gracchus would have taken such a deal, but it would have been revealing of his motives either way.
Instead, Scipio Nasica takes a bad situation and makes is much worse. One of the great counter-factuals of this moment, of course is what if Scipio Aemilianus had been in Rome instead of besieging Numantia: a supporter and friend of Tiberius Gracchus but evidently also alarmed by his actions, one wonders if Aemilianus could have used his tremendous popularity and influence to broker a less violent, destabilizing resolution.
Appian renders his judgement on Tiberius Gracchus that he died, “on account of an excellent proposal he pursued with violence,”7 putting the final blame not on Scipio Nasica but on Tiberius Gracchus, and of course we must again note that Appian is, in fact, fudging his details to make Tiberius’ proposal look more reasonable and traditional than it actually was.
Tiberius Gracchus was not an uncomplicatedly positive reformer figure, but a messy political figure whose actions would have been dangerous even had they succeeded, whose motivations are at best dubious and who shook the republic to its foundations in pursuit of a poorly thought out reform to address either a problem which didn’t exist (the land crisis) or existed for only one man (Tiberius Gracchus’ political career). Curse the folly of Scipio Nasica, but praise Tiberius Gracchus only with caution and caveats.
As, we’ll see, will be even more true for his less compromising, more violent and fiery brother.
- D.J. Gargola, “The Gracchan Reform and Appian’s Representation of an Agrarian Crisis” in People, Land and Politics, eds. L. De Ligt and S.J. Northwood (2008).
- To pause for a second: for the sake of making this understandable, I am using the relatively simple category of ager publicus. However, as Gargola (op. cit.) notes, in actual Roman law, ager publicus was a messy super-category of lands governed by an exciting range of different rules and conditions (some leased, some sold, some held by the state, etc.) – ager censorius, ager quaestorius, ager occupatorius, ager diuisus et adsignatus, the ager Campanus and ager in trientabulis. Simplifying this and treating all of these lands as if they had been governed under the same rubric which Tiberius is merely now enforcing is one of Appian’s deceptive simplifications.
- For the scholarship, this reaction begins with J.W. Rich, “The Supposed Roman Manpower Shortage of the Later Second Century B.C.” Historia 32 (1983). The next major phase comes out of the high-count/low-count population debates around Roman demography because older demographic models, like those of PA Brunt (Italian Manpower (1971)) had assumed a static Roman population, but as noted we increasingly had evidence for a modestly increasing population. The implications of that get worked out in books like N. Rosenstein, Rome at War: Farms, Families and Death in the Middle Republic (2004) and L. De Ligt, Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers (2012). Finally, you also have a recognition that while the wars in Spain were unpopular, they didn’t have massive manpower demands, e.g. Taylor, “Goodbye to All That: The Roman Citizen Militia After the Great Wars” in A Community in Transition, eds. M. Balbo and F. Santangelo (2023).
- In Italy, I should be clear: the pervasiveness and speed with which rich Romans seem to accumulate Sicilian estates suggests a lot of the land acquisition may be happening outside of the ager Romanus.
- Which, again, noting the complications above, probably means applying that limit for the first time to at least some classifications of land it had not applied to before and also applying it against the socii.
- The Roman court system leaves questions of law – which in most modern courts would be decided by a judge – to the jury itself.
- ἀρίστου βουλεύματος ἕνεκα, βιαίως αὐτῷ προσιών, very literally, “on account of an excellent proposal, he [Tiberius Gracchus] having added violence to it.” As I read it, there is no ambiguity here that it is Tiberius Gracchus’ who is adding the violence, προσιών (active participle, masculine, nominative, singular) is picking up Γράκχος (Gracchus) earlier in the sentence.
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You mention that Rome isn’t in the business of setting up colonies outside of Italy itself at this time. Why not? The Roman Republic at least exerted political control over pretty much the entire Mediterranean basin by this point; and even if they’re misdiagnosing why there are all these young men suddenly in Rome who would really like some land to settle down on, the solution seems fairly obvious.
But if it’s that obvious, I’m probably missing something, since this explanation requires lots of people with experience in the political system to all be kind of dumb. Why was property within Italy at such a premium and not opening up lands (or simply expropriating and redistributing them) somewhere further from Rome and less politically risky than poking at this powderkeg?
It’s sort of hard to see, because there’s no written constitution etc., but every obligation of citizenship involves walking to Rome once or more times a year. Settle your hoped-for soldiers too far away and they’re just gone. It’s the same reason there weren’t basic socii in the Balkans.
I mean, sure, they’d be taken off the citizen rolls or whatever they had back then to keep track of things. But it helps stabilize the situation, it gets them out of Rome where they’re causing all sorts of issues.
I guess the corollary of your answer is that the senatorial elite was worried about a decline in the number of conscriptable people more so than the rise of a burgeoning unemployed urban poor in Rome. But at least my (very possibly wrong) sense of things was that what the elite in Rome were worried about first and foremost were all these young men corwding the streets of Rome and their presence being politically unstable.
More importantly *voting* required going to Rome, which meant that what colonies existed generally only sent a few notables to Rome to become citizens, which meant moving to Rome. This was perfectly acceptable and it wasn’t a massive hindrance to a politician to be born in a colony in good standing, but there wasn’t really a system for migrating to Rome just for an election and there was no local representation being sent to Rome; all elections occurred in Rome, in public, in person. Certain clients states or socii might vote as a tribe or something, but to my knowledge they did so *in Rome, in person*.
The issues of the other Roman citizenship rights could be dealt with as needed; marriage, migration, military service, etc. still happened (a strategic local colony served a critical military purpose even if the citizens weren’t levied directly anyway) but voting was just not practical.
Hence the conclusion of my other post and our esteemed host; the solution worked for Rome, but not Tiberius Gracchus. He doesn’t get several thousand voters out of it
“there was no local representation being sent to Rome; all elections occurred in Rome, in public, in person”
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the colonies/ socii had been able to periodically send representatives to Rome, even just as ambassadors.
But I gather that permanent ambassadors were not something the ancient world ever did.
Dr. Deveraux already answers this.
The roman elite didn’t KNOW that this was the problem. They didn’t realize less young adult male mortality and less participation in the census was going on. They thought other issues were causing the problems.
They knew that they had a problem of a bunch of poor, landless young men drifting into the capital city and being tinder for any political firestorms that might ignite. They could see them in the streets every day. They might be mistaken of the root source as to why there were so many young men coming to Rome, but not the immediate problem: that they were there and in large numbers.
Sending them off to say, France or Spain or North Africa where they could farm on lands carved out from Roman conquests, but more importantly be very far away does solve the problem. And it’s agnostic as to what exactly is the root cause.
They did, but from what I’m understanding at this time colonies outside Italy we’re not given Roman citizenship, but rather given their own Polis that was explicitly subservient and protected by Rome as clients, similarly . They, as provincials, had a sort of quasi status that often blended into citizenship when convenient, mostly when dealing with local “big men” being given citizenship so they could serve in Roman politics. This wasn’t uncommon as they were often related or clients of to whatever general had conquered the land.
For an example see Italica, which was founded near 206 BC in Spain. These basically operated as clients, and if well behaved were basically operating under the Latin Rights, minus right to vote.
So they had local power, were given land, and had a role in the Roman state, but couldn’t *vote*. Which neatly ties into the thesis that while there were plenty of off roads, none worked for *Tiberius Gracchus*. He couldn’t mint several thousand new voters for himself, despite that this *would absolutely have worked*. In fact it so clearly would have worked that part of the stabilization of the Roman state under the empire is because they started doing this more. They set up veteran colonies on the borders for auxillaries and legionnaires and granted them citizenship as a traditional reward *very* often, creating an expensive Roman loyalist cohort out in the provinces both for themselves and the state. Hence how later Emperors could casually call up armies of veterans *whilst away from Rome* even before citizenship reforms gave everyone citizenship except slaves.
Of course by then both the political situation had changed to a de facto autocratic system and citizenship had been simplified and expanded, so let’s not assign too much blame to a single person; later Emperors were no more judicious than our friend Tiberius here, the system of power had just changed so their actions changed with it. All Tiberius really did was cotton on to a way to break the Roman state by being transgressive whilst simultaneously being too socially inept amongst his peers to see where this led.
I think it’s worth mentioning that from what I understand, the most important of the “citizenship reforms” and the one which did the most expanding was actually the Edict of Caracalla – yes, the same one whose not-even-a-caricature millions of people just saw in Gladiator II, and who was otherwise a military strongman first, second and third.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutio_Antoniniana
I must say, for a reform which seems monumental at least on paper (and in the opinions of at least SOME historians like Mary Beard, as seen at the end of that article) it’s not really covered much there – or seemingly in most other publicly available sources, with only a very cursory overview of its implications. Perhaps this subject would deserve a post in its own right?
Debatably. While the edict expanded the citizenship to the greatest number of people arguably the most important were the reforms at the end of the Socii war and of Julius Caesar. The result of the Socii war is self explanatory-Rome was Italy, Italy was Rome-but the reforms of Caesar and the Emperors were equally impactful.
One thing of note-by this point senators were basically appointed by fiat by the emperors. There were some vestiges of democracy, but de facto everything was an appointed position. This means that the previously noted issues with not being able to vote don’t really apply, and hence a huge part of the sequence of events in between these steps and Tiberius Gracchus was the fall of the Republic and the establishment of the empire. There was no longer a reason to keep citizenship limited in the periphery because voting was no longer a concern.
Caesar kickstarted the process of expanding the Latin rights throughout the empire and setting up more veteran colonies that steadily spread citizenship through marriage with the locals. Augustus and Claudius then expanded and encouraged a system that gave citizenship to auxiliaries, locally raised troops, that hailed from the provinces, and settled them in other provinces. This was vital to keeping the provinces from becoming what *we’d* think of as colonies, disenfranchised regions subservient to an imperial core that had to be suppressed by force (although there was that), and instead made them Roman.
Resettling the Auxilia also thoroughly mixed the populations of the empire and spread traditions previously kept isolated far and wide, including cavalry and archer traditions previously geographically limited. This kind of cultural admixing was of military value, but also helped break tribal allegiance. It was also very clearly a specific, well thought out, and intentional policy of the Roman Emperors, not a happy accident-they actually didn’t do this at first and faced rebellions, so they adapted. Part of this adaptation was formalizing the system of rewarding citizenship for good service.
The final step of just saying “screwit, you’re all Roman” was secondary to the three centuries of groundwork that got to that point, where citizenship was steadily expanded as a reward for service and the value, responsibilities, and expectations of being a roman citizen established.
Of course that’s one view. I’m not sure I even ascribe to it fully-I think the reforms could have progressed much faster and maintained their effect, but it’s a good debate to have. It depends on if you think building the culture of citizenship over the centuries was the critical step or if the culture of citizenship followed the law. The end effect was Roman military and economic dominance of the Mediterranean, either way.
Great comment with seemingly little to add. A pity no-one else felt it necessary to continue with this discussion.
The tie-in to the thesis/polemic is only neat if you exclude agency for the masses of second and third sons. Some large part of which would have been Gracchus supporters and probably an influential if not core base of momentum and power. Their interest could have and likely would have kept the aim on land reforms rather than the traditional coloniae.
I’d guess that the Romans gave land to citizens so they could be soldiers for Rome, and at this time, they don’t recruit Roman soldiers (as opposed to local allies) from outside of Italy. The system simply was not set up to conscript Roman soldiers from far away.
But I’d be interested in a better informed answer.
I think this might still be a point in time where the legal basis of a province is being an assignment for a Roman official to manage the collection of tribute, rather than an actually incorporated territory of the Roman state. Maybe where they’re also still navigating the question of how they can appoint governors to faraway places without having them develop independent power bases that can decide to keep that wealth entirely for themselves or otherwise oppose the Roman state.
I have wondered at this as well. the first explanation I’ve head is that the romans took what was convenient. In the early days, they rustled cattle. When the republic got rolling and started taking italy, they took land. And when they started adventuring overseas, they took portable wealth as booty because you could bring that home.
this feels like a an oversimplification, but I think there’s some truth there. ALso there was a lack of military necessity, since the colonies were often explicitly intended to keep an eye on nearby socii, which didn’t exist outside of italy. and I imagine that non-italian colonies would be a lot less popular with soldiers. Far away land would be less safe, have different climate/soils/crops.
None of that, though, feels sufficient for the number of colonies to fall to basically 0 given that they seem a low cost way to solve problems
I don’t think it requires a lot of people being dumb, but only them being people. A strong initial framing of an issue can obscure other answers very effectively, to the point where it requires a lot of effort to challenge that framing. Overblown example, but the racist framing of “There are superior and inferior races and we whites need to stay superior” resulted in the question of “What do we do when a black and a white person have a child” in being viewed for a long time through that racist lens, and thus the answers were only in the spectrum of “We need to make sure that never happens” to “We need to make sure we can track lineage well enough to know who has black ancestors”, before political pressure got big enough to challenge the premise and gave the different answer of “Maybe the state has no business caring about this fake problem”.
Similarly, while I don’t know the sources enough to know whether there were elite discussions about the effects that Tiberius built his thesis on, or if was just something the censors thought “Huh, that’s strange” about, I bet my hat that to the population at large, they first heard of it through Tiberius’s framing of “The rich took your land and are weakening Rome by doing so”. And that meant the answers that were considered were tinted by that framing.
Which is why the release valve that not long after will be used by Caesar wasn’t on the table: Founding colonies overseas would have gotten the people out of the city, but not increased the number of available soldiers, and also not “solved” the non-existent problem of land consolidation.
They did try at various points in the late 2nd and early 1st century BC: none other than Gaius Gracchus himself tried to set up a colony on the former site of Carthage. Generally speaking, these were extremely unpopular. At the Senatorial level for bickering political reasons
At the ground level, Romans just didn’t want to leave Italy. Even when the provinces were part of the Roman res publica, they were still considered (culturally) foreign. Going off to a foreign land full of foreign people with foreign crops and a long way removed from home and everyone you’d ever met wasn’t very appealing. You see this especially with Sulla’s veterans who absolutely demand to be settled on Italian land (that Sulla stolen from the Socii) and refuse to countenance being given land in recently conquered Asia. Even when colonies in the provinces do pick up in the late 1st century BC and through the Principate, they’re mostly veteran colonies of demobilised legionaries rather than the unemployed urban poor.
Thanks for the detailed explainer. Indeed when you put it like that it paints a very different picture from the way they are usually mentionned.
I wonder if you could maybe, when you discuss the perception of the Gracchi’s legacy, discuss how the French proto-socialist revolutionnary Gracchus Babœuf, who changed his first name in reference to the Gracchi, fits into this. On the other hand, I understand if this is quite far from your usual area of expertise.
Analogies with the present day are presumably left as an exercise for the reader.
There are quite a number of analogies that could point in a number of different directions, so trying to imply things is a poor idea.
Because I’m perfectly willing to be “that guy” here…
There are several lessons here, but not direct political analogies. A society that cannot handle-and in this case handle means *bring into account by force*-a popular leader who simply refuses to honor the law is vulnerable. Likewise if they aren’t bought to heel violence is inevitable anyway and their survival is very uncertain, although it signals greater horrors to come so is small consolation. Similarly if violence is needed to stop them society has already failed and you’re on dangerous ground *even if it’s necessary* something that will become clear as our host details what comes next for Rome.
But in terms of specific policy it’s unhelpful except to showcase that material conditions and power dynamics, not tribalistic cultural signalling, are the best indicators of a political movements maliciousness or benevolence.
Land reform and antislavery are modern leftist policy, but in the ancient world the dynamics of preindustrial sustenance severely warp how both processes work. Land has to come from somewhere, and while capital improvement in land exists it is much closer to a zero sum game than modern agriculture, so the social dynamics of land reform are much more violent.
The liberal left is generally pro peace, multiculturalism, and social egalitarianism, as implications of rationalist principles. However in the Roman world peace *contradicts* social egalitarianism, you *must* distribute land from someone to someone, and while you could redistribute it more evenly there just wasn’t that much agricultural slack to play with. The Romans had a relatively multicultural and egalitarian society yet were incredibly bellicose.
Similarly modern leftist ideals of prosperity and labor rights oppose slavery universally, but in the Roman world certain jobs needed to be done and were horrible. We focus on agricultural slavery here, which while not fun is at least not a meat grinder. Mine slaves, however, were almost literally sentenced to death via mining, it was that brutal, and yet they were *vital* to the power and prosperity of the Roman state. How else did all those legionnaires get their expensive kit? In many ways that’s the mystery of where all the war slaves went, they got funnelled into the mines to further future conquests. Men go in, metal cones out.
There simply wasn’t a way to do that job without killing thousands of men, so peace and antislavery was also at odds with the labor rights and dignity of citizens. States that weren’t willing to coercively compel labor lost.
This has all changed with industrialization, we can design machines to do the hyper lethal jobs much more safely, and so utterly outproduce Roman farms that it’s laughable, so any analogy that tries to paint policy allegories directly completely fails. I suspect this poisons some of the discourse severely, because no one in the modern day defends slavery as acceptable unless they’re a complete monster, but in the Roman world it was *necessary*.
Hence we aggrandize land reformers who opposed institutions of slavery in any way, seeking simple moral virtues, despite their inapplicability. Even when those same reformers actually have more parallels in social role to far right strongman than any post-industrial land reformer, proposing ineffectual reforms that promise egalitarianism only among an in-group at the expense of the politically disenfranchised solely as a front for their own autocratic rise in power on the back of their transgressive violation of social norms and values.
I doubt that the terrible mining conditions in antiquity were necessary. Living as a miner in the middle ages for example was rather bad, but it was quite a bit better that being a mining slave in antiquity. In general, jobs that slaves can do can also be done by free laborers, but you can squeeze more labor out of a slave at the slaves expense. And if the supply of slaves is higher than the demand, you can do that to a mortality level where you are working the slaves to death.
But I supect if Rome didn’t have slaves, that wouldn’t have restricted their metal supply in a way that would have hindered their conquests. They would just need to use more people in the mines to account for slower work speed and more breaks/days off. More expensive but perfectly doable. (Though admittedly I haven’t crunched the numbers. We probably don’t have Roman data, but from early modern times it should be possible to compare the outputs and costs of mines with free vs forced labor.)
Free laborers tend to work harder than slaves, because they actually benefit from their labor. The boss wants slaves because they’re cheaper.
The issue is that mines were so dangerous due to circulation, flooding, and collapse risks that free men just wouldn’t work there, at least not in the truly awful ones. If you were starving that badly or otherwise that desperate for work you weren’t useful. The amount of people willing to take that risk was just not enough for high intensity labor demand, not in a human population.
They also favored children because they needed small people to fit in some tunnels and no sane free man would send their child to the mines.
If course I’m making assumptions here, but they are consistent with the archeological evidence for almost ubiquitous slavery in ancient mines. Ancient mining was horrifying
I think it depends on whether the labor is easy to monitor. In US Southern plantation slavery, the slave owner could measure, say, cotton picking, and could force a required productivity. But for other jobs, slaves needed incentives to work–and got them. Frederick Douglass, for example, was free to negotiate his wage in Baltimore, as long as he remitted a fixed sum to his master. In New Orleans, black labor (which might possibly have been free: I’m uncertain) commanded more money than Irish immigrant labor.
Even in tobacco farming, the farmers found it easier to reward the slaves for a good crop than monitor them closely enough to punish them for failure.
Probably true in that few things are truly necessary despite my essentializing for effect, but in the high-state power world of antiquity I maintain that it’s very risky for the state to not practice slavery in this specific way, or at least that’s my hypothesis. I don’t have any hard data, but the ubiquity of mine slavery among successful empires supports that idea. The economics of metallurgy are just so tight in the ancient world that maintaining livable conditions may really have just been prohibitively expensive, at least if you wanted output like successful empires seem to have maintained.
Also medieval mining was lower intensity because medieval states were weaker and hence medieval warfare was less metal intensive. Notably, as our host has pointed out elsewhere, when medieval extraction rates increase we see rapid deterioration of conditions into de facto economic slavery that also coincides with mass slave labor in the colonies to extract precious metals, particularly by Spain and Portugal.
Elsewhere in this instance being the series on mining. https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-mining/
It’s possible that the Roman state could have transitioned to a lower output system after it destroyed its rivals, hell maybe it did and my ignorance of the late empire masks it, but I honestly think a more metal poor Roman Republic never leaves Italy. The Punic wars weren’t a sure thing in particular.
I think the one counterpoint to my idea is the Incan empire, which maintained silver and copper mines with no system of slavery through a sort of collectivized autocracy that determined labor allocation owed to the state, but I know far too little to comment on them with authority. Any other instances of powerful preindustrial states that maintained primary free mine laborers and high output would contradict me.
From my (admittedly limited) understanding the Inca state collected taxes partly in the form of forced labor which while not slavery per se I doubt was particularly pleasant.
Not sure about this (mining). Medieval mining was hard work, but quite sophisticated in its operation (see Agricola’s de re Metallica), operated by free men who seem to have been quite high on the social scale. There is probably an interaction between slavery and low basic technique (although the Roman state did apply these techniques on a large scale).
Which is another way that the existence of dwarves alters the D&D world.
From my (admittedly limited) understanding the Inca state collected taxes partly in the form of forced labor which while not slavery per se I doubt was particularly pleasant.
Unless we have actual records from the 16th c (and probably not even then) we don’t really know how Inca subjects thought about the forced labor taxes. The cultural tradition of indigenous people (and even a fair number of mixed-race people) in that part of the world tend to look fairly favorably on the Inca empire, for what it’s worth, especially for people who are left leaning.
I don’t know what 15th or 16th c Peruvian peasants thought any more than you do, but I would *guess* their view of the regime depended on whether they felt like they were getting something back in exchange for the forced labor.
Anyway, as you concede, it wasn’t *slavery* which is what Dan was specifically addressing.
“Land reform and antislavery are modern leftist policy . . . .”–I’m not sure what “modern” means here. I’m so old that I remember when Andrew Jackson was a hero of the academic left. (One reason I tend to consider the academic left as fatuous morons.) And indeed Andrew Jackson did aim to supply with his landless followers with land: the Cherokees’ land. There isn’t any way to get him into the antislavery camp. though. Basically, “he was not an uncomplicatedly positive reformer figure,” the way he was taught when I was in grade school, “but a messy political figure.” As might also be said of FDR, who violated quite a few of the mores maiorum, and of Reagan, although there’s no danger of Bret’s generation teaching their students any hagiography on his account.
When was Andrew Jackson ever a hero of the left?
Dunno about being a hero of the left but he has historically been viewed as a populist and a champion of the common man and was positively regarded by Democratic-leaning historians as a result until fairly recently.
I’ve seen leftists who rather like the man, but they were old-school labor organizers rather than “vanguard of the proletariat” academic types.
When I say “the left,” I mean liberals of the Arthur Schlesinger variety (who wrote in 1945: you can read his book). Of course the mainstream histories of the 40s and 50s were what I was taught in grade school, by mostly liberal schoolteachers, in the 60s and 70s. I don’t know that Jackson was ever a hero of the Marxist left: I’ve never read any Marxist American history written in the 40s and 50s, if there was any.
He was hero of liberal Democrats up to about the 1980s.
As for the further left, I have never seen this film (maybe it will turn up on TCM someday), but it exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Remarkable_Andrew
It depends a lot on whether you view the defining feature of the Left as a descent from antifascism or a decsent from anticapitalism. The former, in American discourse, treats racism as a value that cannot be negotiated with or excused as a temporary price. In that view, there is no place for Andrew Jackson (celebrated Re-Founder of the Democratic Party, still occasionally honored at local events around the country (when I was in Iowa in 2010 there was a movement among all the Party employees and other campaigners to call the big annual fundraising dinner “the J-J” but that was not a formal name change and I think it was only late in the Obama era that you started to see State Parties change the name to Founder’s Dinner or Day or whatnot)), who did a lot of popular-with-the-legal-electorate things with no regard to how evil or stupid they were.
Meanwhile the anticapitalist tradition in the USA struggles with the fact that there’s not really a difference in justification (or outcome for the legal-electorate) between the Trail of Tears and dekulakization.
“Meanwhile the anticapitalist tradition in the USA struggles with the fact that there’s not really a difference in justification (or outcome for the legal-electorate) between the Trail of Tears and dekulakization.”
The Soviets aren’t popular amongst modern anticapitalist leftists, despite what the state *desperately* wants you to believe. Leftists tend to have a more nuanced views of the revolution, mostly because they’re significantly better informed about the Soviets rather than consuming exclusively state propaganda, but if anything the greatest hatred I’ve heard of them comes from the left. You might perform scorn of demonized people publicly, but you *hate* traitors. The left view the Soviets, particularly that era of Soviets, as traitors.
You’re right that an older generation of leftists did struggle with the Soviets idealogically, but we’re talking about an era from the 1940’s, when the state was lightly progressive on labor and there was a brief stint where the Soviets were our allies and treated as such by state propaganda. They’re long gone.
The number of Soviet spies among the Left seems to indicate that that has more to do with the Soviet Union imploding than anything else.
Meanwhile the anticapitalist tradition in the USA struggles with the fact that there’s not really a difference in justification (or outcome for the legal-electorate) between the Trail of Tears and dekulakization.
I think of the left as a descent from anticapitalism, first and foremost, but that doesn’t follow at all. Cherokees, Choctaw and others were *nations*, not economic classes, so that analogy doesn’t make sense.
Also, you can believe in full or partial socialization of the economy, and even of agriculture, without supporting “dekulakization” in the Stalinist sense. Rapid industrialization and Stalinist style collectivization were controversial within the Soviet communist party (until Stalin purged his rivals), many elements of Stalin’s agricultural policy (though not enough of them) were rolled back after his death, and most other communist states learned from the Stalinist experience and didn’t repeat the same mistakes. Which is why other Eastern European countries socialized their agricultural sectors without the famines that the Soviet Union had.
“The Soviets aren’t popular amongst modern power-worshiping anticapitalist leftists, since they lost the Cold War and their empire collapsed.”
FTFY.
@ey81:
Yes, it’s certainly true that a lot of people follow the strong horse, as they say, and that when an ideology is associated with a superpower or an advanced civilization, a lot of people will adopt the ideology for that very reason. That was the reason that communism used to have a lot of followers (certainly more than today), and it’s also the reason that American values (capitalist ownership, free enterprise, liberal democracy, multiculturalism, etc.) are popular today, and going further back in history it’s also the reason that Christianity, Islam and Hinduism attracted lots of converts at various points. One of the major reasons, anyway.
By the same token though, if America was ever to fall into internal chaos or even to decline in influence, you would see capitalism, liberal democracy, multiculturalism etc. decline in popularity too, as people decided to adopt the values of the new rising power.
And *also* by the same token, the fact that there are still communists today (and monarchists, and Zoroastrians and neopagans and followers of all sorts of other creeds that have declined in power and influence) also means that it’s not just about ‘power worship’, some of us actually do care about ideology.
Have you heard of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.? (Sean Wilentz, who’s still kicking around, champions a modified version of that view even today)
I don’t actually know of any leftist histories that are particularly kind to Andrew Jackson, although I know a few which aren’t rabidly, and what i view as properly, critical of him. I tend to see a lot more support from what I’d term “centrist liberals”, whom view centrism as inherently good and popularized the “fair for it’s day” rejoinder, and whom I view as exactly the type of fatuous moron you described. I find their admiration is based on the idea that he delayed the civil war, and that they actually like him because in their heart of hearts they think letting slavery persist was an acceptable compromise to preserve the civility of politics, which amounts to a psychological obsession with civility politics and technocracy.
Of course I’m also not an expert on his historiography. I’m ready to be thoroughly disillusioned with a bunch of authors if it comes to that.
In actuality Andrew Jackson is actually a great analogy for dear Tiberius here, in that he represents basically the same exact social figure. In fact I’m sure he’d consider that a compliment if you could call up his ghost.
The bigger point is that land reform *globally* is a popular leftist policy, consistently enough that basically any socialist of organization could marshall a few million supporters just by promising it throughout the early 20th century. Antislavery is more nuanced in that you have to acknowledge the local systems, but almost universally leftists were against serfdom, debt slavery, caste systems, etc. for the same time frame. Of course leftism is broad enough that you can dispute that thoroughly with numerous leaders; I’m playing the trend, I’m not going to die on the hill that, I don’t know, Ho Chi Ming was antislavery in his views.
In American politics it’s been the case for my lifetime, though.
Andrew Jackson did a lot more than “let slavery persist,” though maybe liberal historians who want to maintain his good name have presented it that way.
I suspect that your (Dan’s) lifetime has been shorter than mine. Liberal Democrats of the New Yorker (magazine) variety were very sympathetic to the Confederacy, not too long ago. Self-determination, fighting against Northern capitalist plutocracy, etc.
I’m not going to die on the hill that, I don’t know, Ho Chi Ming was antislavery in his views.
Ho Chi Minh was a Marxist and a communist, of course he was opposed to slavery. I doubt he thought much about it though, since slavery wasn’t really a live issue in his place and time, he was probably much more concerned about landlordism and agricultural land ownership.
At least to other people’s owning slaves
When I say “the left,” I mean liberals of the Arthur Schlesinger variety (who wrote in 1945: you can read his book). Of course the mainstream histories of the 40s and 50s were what I was taught in grade school, by mostly liberal schoolteachers, in the 60s and 70s. I don’t know that Jackson was ever a hero of the Marxist left: I’ve never read any Marxist American history written in the 40s and 50s, if there was any.
Got it- I was confused because I don’t think of liberals as being “the left”, i generally see (small-L) liberalism as an ideology of the centre.
As might also be said of FDR, who violated quite a few of the mores maiorum,
I think people on the other side of the ideological fence from you would say that in many cases (not all) the cultural mores exist, not because they’re good for society as a whole, but because they’re good for one particular group, and therefore that they (by design) stand in the way of needed changes.
And so they say no matter how often they knock down the mores in the name of needed changes, and they not only don’t get the good they were claiming for the needed changes, they discover that the mores were for the good of society.
My understanding is that slavery existed in a lot of preindustrial societies mostly because it lubricated the labour market. That is, most people were reluctant to leave the family farm, because your family are the people you rely on when times are bad – famine, war, pestilence, and so on.
But if everyone stays on the family farm, no one can move to take advantage of new opportunities or avoid new problems. The advantage of slaves was that you could buy them when you needed new workers and sell them when you needed fewer ones. You can’t treat family members like that.
Late Medieval/ Early Modern Europe got around that because people often placed their children as servants to people wealthier and better connected than themselves, and these people filled the mobile-labour-force niche.
“The advantage of slaves was that you could buy them when you needed new workers and sell them when you needed fewer ones. You can’t treat family members like that.”
Maybe this reflects poorly on me, but I laughed when I read that pair of sentences.
Well, it’s a bit of an exaggeration – you could sell family members into slavery in many times and places, but most people would have some emotional resistance to doing so. And it would often be very difficult to find and redeem them later.
But I was hoping to amuse someone.
Completely outside the scope of this post, but: the buying part is coming closer. Over the last decades, a number of highly-visible medical advances have happened (approximately rounding to “IVF” and hence surrogacy as a legal arrangement), as have some less visible ones.
Less importantly, burning one end of the cord is — largely motivated by stem cell research — the ability to keep embryos alive ever longer. More important is that neonatal incubators are likewise improving, and indeed in the last several decades they have improved enough to have forced a revision of the classification boundary between miscarriage and preterm birth. Scientific progress will keep happening until they meet in the middle. And well before that, the intentional use of incubators (whether coupled with surrogacy or not) will become a thing.
(Obvious objection: don’t incubator babies have unimpressive outcomes? Yes, but that’s largely because we only put babies in incubators if something has already gone very wrong. Use them as plan A, and immediately the outcome statistics will markedly improve.
And, obviously, more experience with them will lead to further refinement.)
So, um, technically you can already buy new family members (see articles on e.g. the Öztürk family doing this in bulk: 21 within the span of 19 months), merely the price is currently very high; but over the next several decades, it’s going to come down substantially.
There is a noticeable “Devereaux’s Mirror” in a lot of his posts, anytime he describes the Roman Republic he is really reflecting a certain modern country…
Mentalités. Imagine a feudal king, used to dealing with tribes and kingdoms, taking clientelism and personalistic rule for granted. And imagine his state of mind, his confusion, upon encountering a bureaucratic republic.
– Which single person do I even talk to if I want to negotiate a treaty?
– Kings, vassals, appointed governors, and tribal Big Men are not always trustworthy, but I can know they will at least remember we made an agreement. Those in foreign polities occasionally lose their power due to internal turmoil; such is life. But this guy I found I could talk to says he’s going to leave office next year, and his successor isn’t going to have a long term, either. How can I make with them a treaty that lasts longer than a few years even in principle?
– This guy I found keeps delaying and prevaricating, always talking about “ratification”, never giving a straight answer. And then he has dares make me offers on yes-or-no terms — if I try to make a counteroffer, he has the gall to start weaseling again. Smarmy git. I hope next time they elect a more reasonable guy.
– Argh, I detest that loathsome republic. It would be easier for me to achieve my policy objectives if they were replaced with a proper government, for example a kingdom. Unless/until that happens, I will be making treaties with the polities I can talk to without making my head hurt — those where one guy makes all the laws everyone else are subject to, thus where I can sit down with him and negotiate an agreement in an afternoon.
– My foreign policy advisor harumphs a bit, because it isn’t a part of the realist school that I feel social-class camaraderie with other kings/nobility, having empathy — as in, being easily able to imagine myself in their shoes — whereas I do not do so toward any of the republi-chiefs because I find their standpoint alien. Too bad.
One might note that it has been argued that even “Liberal Democracies” often seem to prefer to deal with 3rd world Dictators and Autocrats rather than emerging Democratic governments.
Not because “one guy” is more likely to keep the terms of an agreement than elected official (the record of autocrats for keeping treaties isn’t particularly good), but because it’s easier to get an agreement from them in the first place.
Basically, the argument goes, both the dictator and the democratically elected official have a constituency they answer to. It’s just that Dictator’s is much smaller since it consists only of the set of military and civil supporters who keep him in power (always a minority of the total population, and often a small one), while the elected official’s constituency may be as large as a majority of the population of the state.
So to the outside power trying to conduct foreign policy, the Dictator is much easier to cut a deal with – he has less people he needs to please and is thus much cheaper to buy off.
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bruce-bueno-de-mesquita/the-dictators-handbook/9781610390453/
That is why those of us who have been reading the current events commentary of academics for 40 years (remember Lester Thurow? Paul Kennedy? the list goes on) and have noticed how habitually wrong they have been distrust all academic historiography.
I think that when Dr. Devereaux talks about the Roman Republic he is really talking about the Roman Republic. If he were trying to talk about America by proxy, it seems unlikely that he would form firmly negative opinions on (for instance) both Sulla and the Gracchi.
A political conservative in the post-2016 and especially post-2020 era would tend to lionize Sulla. A political liberal/progressive/whatever-you-call tends to lionize the Gracchi. It takes someone who is actually passionately interested in talking about Rome, in and of itself, as such to stop and say “both Gracchi and also Sulla were all trying to solve problems that may have been hallucinatory and their methods for doing so were ultimately destructive to the Republic.”
I’m a political conservative and I strongly disapprove of Sulla’s distortion of the Republican Constitution.
Huh. I remembered hers reading a book on the Gracchi — or maybe it was chapters in a book on the republic — back in high school, the early 80’s. I was generically left-leaning then, like most teenagers are. I came away with an entirely negative view of the Gracchi (amidst a view of the republic that was only somewhat nuanced, but gently positive). Based on what I remember of the book, I’d say it was written in the 60’s. Can anyone identify that?
Identify no, but it was definitely not a unique thing. I likewise read a distinctly negative view of the Gracchi dating to 1971, way back when.
Their… monetarily gifted background was covered to a considerable extent, although not the personal & career reasons that motivated them. Nevertheless, their break with the norms and a view of the Senate’s actions as necessary self-defence were quite explicit. Their reforms were also considered ill-advised, albeit for different reasons than established here.
I should emphasize that this was very much pophistory, not an academic work (and it shows), but as an indicator of that era’s interpretation of the Gracchi, it works. They were by no means considered universally positive figures in the 60s and 70s.
So T Gracchus was (technically legally) the subject of a human sacrifice? Does this connect to the future uses by the Roman authorities of claims that various groups (especially Druids) performed human sacrifices, as a way of declaring that those groups must be exterminated?
We’d say ritual murder, rather than human sacrifice. In a sacrifice, the victim is given to the god, made sacred. Here, Tiberius is just murdered – there is no divinity receiving his death. Instead of human sacrifice, I think the parallel here might be the execution of someone convicted of sacrilege.
Considering that T Grachhus’ death was at the hands of a state official who was acting under state auspices, wouldn’t it be more accurate to label it an execution instead of a murder?
I think execution implies it was being done in accordance with a legal process. The Pontifix Maximus didn’t have the legal authority to just up and kill a citizen without trial.
The hatred for human sacrifice predates this; Carthage was already a long beaten foe by now, and Romans pretty clearly thought their practice of sacrificial infanticide (which we, unfortunately, have steadily accumulated archeological support for) was beyond the pale, although most but not all of the sources we do have that mention it post-date Carthage.
As for this event, the Romans had very clear justifications for why the few religious rites they had that involved humans dying weren’t human sacrifice. There were traditionally three major ones attested to, that of enemy soldiers during gladiatorial games, enemy leaders at the end of a triumph (and we have record that this was occasionally deferred) and that of unchaste vestigial virgins. The first is disputed somewhat and more complicated than a religious rite, the second was reasonably rare and not really a *sacrifice* so much as a celebration, and the last was a particularly grim punishment.
That said you can decide if those distinctions matter yourself; at the very least it appears Romans were much less sacrifice prone than many of their contemporaries.
As I understand it, the Vestal Virgins were very specifically *not* killed, they were bricked up with an insufficient amount of food and water for a given duration. They would inevitably die, but the Romans considered this distinct from an execution, which was important because Vestal Virgins were as sacrosanct as tribunes.
And here is where I don’t think the distinctions matter, but ymmv. Some people consider that form of ritualistic honor killing to be a form of human sacrifice, but that’s a political question that has some nasty edges; I can elaborate, but it’s not pleasant and touches on bigotry. Suffice it to say that you’re right that the *Romans* considered it distinct.
That does make me wonder if the Romans would have used a similar justification if it ever proved necessary to kill a sitting tribune, though I don’t believe that ever happened as by the time norms had degraded that badly Julius Caesar was just removing tribunes arbitrarily.
If you brick someone up with insufficient food and water and then abandon them, you’re killing them. You’re just doing it in a fashion that lets you pretend you didn’t kill them.
Yes, well, the Romans actually believed in their religion, and in their religion it was apparently very important that no one specifically… [VERB] a Vestal Virgin.
And I’d normally use the word ‘kill’ in place of [VERB] but in this case there’s a very precise formal definition that doesn’t quite line up with the English word ‘kill.’ Because [VERB] means not “to be the cause corresponding to the eventual effect that a person dies,” but rather “to personally perform a specific action with lethal intent that is mechanically, directly, materially, in and of itself, the proximate cause of a person’s death.”
So leaving someone in a death trap to die of thirst or starvation absolutely is ‘killing’ them by the English verb for ‘to kill,’ but it’s not an act of [VERB]-ing them, and therefore will not specifically anger the gods who have very clear ideas about ritual impurity incurred by acts of [VERB]-ing.
I realize this is a typo, but I kind of like it anyhow.
>The hatred for human sacrifice predates this; Carthage was already a long beaten foe by now, and Romans pretty clearly thought their practice of sacrificial infanticide (which we, unfortunately, have steadily accumulated archeological support for) was beyond the pale, although most but not all of the sources we do have that mention it post-date Carthage.
It is worth noting that the evidence is as follows:
– Roman literary sources mention aggressive mass-sacrifice as of the 3rd Punic war, sacrifice of first-born newborns in particular, although not limited to those
– taking these sources at face value and ignoring issues such as the noticeably not-sacrificed Hannibal supposedly being a firstborn son, it is nevertheless worth mentioning that this was a situation in which Carthage faced literal extinction, and not necessarily cultural standard
– also, previously, Rome allied with Carthage against Pyrrhus, and used Carthaginian assets in its wars against the hellenistic states in the east. The Little Carthaginian, a play previously mentioned on this blog, also depicted Carthaginians quite positively. The Romans can’t have been /that/ put off by the Carthaginians
– might’ve been that the Romans weren’t entirely opposed to human sacrifice at the time, of course. They did do some sacrificing themselves after Cannae, after all
– we have found Carthaginian cemeteries. Their urns do contain dedications to the gods, implying human sacrifice
– but a significant percentage of the skeletons in these urns was from stillborns, and the overall age ratio appears to be a match for child mortality by age in antiquity, which is difficult to explain unless human sacrifice rates matched natural child mortality by age
– also mentioned previously on this blog, overall mortality rates in this era were high enough that to maintain, yet alone slowly grow the population, it was necessary to get all the offspring you can get. Human sacrifices at the rate claimed by the Roman authors are /impossible/ without Carthage rendering itself extinct. There’s a reason mass-sacrificing societies (Aztecs, Shang) sacrificed mostly their /enemies/ and only rarely their own children.
– this being said, Carthaginian cultural context, coming from the levantine cultural context, where some degree of human sacrifice is documented well enough, makes the existence of human sacrifice likely enough.
I’d consider it likely that some human sacrifice occurred in Carthage. To the degree claimed by the Romans however… if that had been a case, Carthage wouldn’t have existed for very long.
Whilst this is an excellent and well researched reply, mass sacrifice of infant slaves or lower class citizens is possible from a demographic perspective. Slave children weren’t precisely well cared for so it could be masked by death rates, but there are some archeological finds consistent with specifically infanticide rather than natural causes.
I’m not an expert on the current archeological evidence though.
” a significant percentage of the skeletons in these urns was from stillborns, ”
What is the evidence for this?
I know the early archeologists hypothesized this. OTOH, they also claimed that children that young were not buried in family graveyards. This has been refuted. (Skeletons of small children are tricky to dig up; they may have just missed them.09
A fascinating article.
I wonder is there is any good data on the actual distribution of land and slaves from polities conquered by the Roman legions. Was it largely given to Senate families, retired soldiers, or other type of people?
Seems like a really important topic for the distribution of land and power within the Roman Republic.
I need this to be made into a book, then a TV series, then a movie. In that order.
This story is fascinating. It has all the charm of a hit silver screen drama. Hollywood, get on it, stat!
I miss HBOs Rome.
… actually, this could be framed as a prequel show, an exploration where things went wrong that led to the hedonistic mess that we see there. Execs unironically love to revive shows like that decades later as prequels, it gives them some hard data to go off of when deciding if they want to greenlight something and an easy way to market the show. Hell, Gladiator 2 just dropped, there’s simultaneously a wave of Roman interest and a backlash to the simplification of history, just like happened with Rome and Gladiator 1.
Can we do a miniseries of the Anabasis first? I so want a miniseries of the Anabasis.
“The Warriors” wasn’t enough for you?
If military mortality for men was at one point so high that *removing* that factor caused the population of Rome to explode, what was happening to women at the first point? Sure death in childbirth but I don’t think death in childbirth has ever been as bad as military losses in a really bad war. Lots of widows raising children alone? Lots of women dying childless? Illegitimate births? Quasi-legal-polygyny enabled by it being easy for men to get divorced?
There were certainly a lot of widows raising children alone, enough that the legal system set up a way of handling that other than remarriage, though I don’t know if that covers the full numbers. Especially given that men traditionally married after completing their military service, so the military mortality would be before they got married.
Rome also purportedly performed infanticide/abandonment, which could easily be sex-selective; I don’t know whether that’s confirmed by current scholarship.
Urbanisation was still relatively low during the Middle Republic, so it didn’t necessarily take a major change in Italy’s demographics to make an impact on Rome.
Keep in mind population grows exponentially. A shift from slightly above replacement rate to slightly more above can cause a significant change. The trend is presumably there since the Punic Wars and before, what with evidence for greatly improved armour on the average Roman conscript in that period – it’s a summary effect with multiple causes. Even the bad years are individual years. The factor isn’t removed, it’s slowly improving over generations.
That said, death in childbirth is significant.
Military mortality doesn’t just kill men either. When armies plunder, pillage, raze, ransack, and loot the country, women die too. What Brett glosses over is that it’s not just that the Romans post Hannibal fight smaller wars, but that those wars aren’t against other Italians. When it was Italians fighting Italians on Italian lands, all the casualties (battle and otherwise) suffered by both sides depress the population of Italy. When it’s Romans fighting in Iberia or Greece, most of them don’t.
Part of it is probably that when Rome was expanding in Italy it wasn’t unusual for there to be colonies founded in conquered land. Hence if the younger sons didn’t get killed in war, then the conquests they made would make land for them available, meaning they don’t need to split the family farm to provide for the younger sons, and in a losing war the attritional style of Roman warfare would make it much more likely the younger son would die in combat. (As for the women, presumably it simply meant a longer journey to their husband’s household.)
A question I find interesting in this regard is how much farmer-sons moving into the city was a problem of worse material conditions and how much it was a problem of status and mental stress.
As far as I can tell, the urban poor in Rome were not starving to death. Cities had higher mortality because of higher disease load, but besides that, are there any indication that living in the city was physically worse? Did they have less food and more backbreaking work?
Or was status and the psychological impact the bigger problem? The urban poor were perceived and (I presume) perceived themselves as lower on the social ladder, and their votes did count less then those of freeholding farmers in the Consular elections. In one of the previous posts (either the “bread and circuses” one or the one about ancient money) it was explained that wage labor was irregular on a day-by-day basis, so that the pay of one day needed to last for several. I imagine insecurity on a day to day basis that depends on the whims of potential employers is more stressful than a farmers insecurity on a year to year basis that depends on the whims of the gods (mostly the weather, sometimes war).
Mob violence. Don’t forget that. It’s hard to whip up a mob when people are spread over miles and miles of countryside.
Since I was thinking about problems from the point of view of the urban poor, I guess we can extend this to crime generally. A city offers more targets for theft etc and more people means more potential criminals. Also more anonymity and places to hide, mutual control in the community through shaming is less effective.
From viewpoint of those in authority, it’s the mob violence that really gets you.
Also more anonymity and places to hide, mutual control in the community through shaming is less effective.
I think this is a *really* important factor in crime rates and general misbehaviour, all over the world, and often an underrated one.
Not as such. Crime rates are generally predicated on socioeconomic conditions. People simply mistake rate and number. Cities have more crime because they have more people, but not necessarily always more crime rate when controlling for socioeconomic factors. But also law enforcement in rural areas is, frankly, worse and more corrupt and less likely to put crimes into the system.
It’s slower, because the people you are trying to whip up are further apart. But its also slower for the authorities to react, because their supporters are also further apart. So I’m not sure that is has to be harder.
Also the distance makes it easier for the first people you whip up to cool off again, and to gather the people. Mobs are not something that can be done slowly, over time.
The only reason it cannot happen is that when it does happen, we call it not a rioting mob but rather a peasant uprising (Jacquerie, rebel militia/army, &c).
That’s somewhat less likely and so less of a danger. Also, unless you’re caught in an unfortunate location, your odds of escape are vastly better.
Remember, the army of Rome is still derived from conscripted freeholding farmers at this point. The apparent crisis is that the prosperous middle class is vanishing and the strength of Rome to defend itself is growing weaker. So trying to resolve the problem is going to be a compelling interest simply in terms of perpetuating the state and doing right by the Roman people and the customary Roman way of life.
The better candidate for the actual problem is still itself a major problem- this is not a society which can easily absorb a sudden surplus of proletarii, but which also cannot send them out as settlers without effectively stripping them of citizenship due to the distances involved, which would in turn prompt significant resistance from said proletarii and their friends and relatives.
It’s a problem so intractable that 2000 years later empires were still resorting to mass incarceration and ‘transportation’ to address it. But I would modify your “actual problem” diagnosis: It’s not that the society *can’t* absorb the surplus, it’s that the elites in the society *won’t.* A polity can simply allow a growing urban majority to outvote a static rural population; it changes some immediate priorities (and tends to limit the wealthy more), but by no means does it result in the end of the society, or even the substantial transformation of the society. Look at the continuity of autocracy in the iterations of Russia for instance.
Possibly-ignorant question here: is Scipio Nasica related to Tiberius Gracchus through the maternal line?
Yes. His father Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Corculum was the cousin of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, which, if I got the terminology right, makes Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus the second cousin once removed of Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio.
This was an interesting read for someone who either didn’t learn or doesn’t remember learning about the Gracchi, but I’m especially interested now in going to read about C. Hostilius Mancinus and what went so badly there.
Rosenstein “‘Imperatores victi’: the case of C Hostilius Mancinus” Classical Antiquity 5 (1986) pp 230–252, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25010850, is probably what you want to read.
Aristotle may have been on to something:
Experience supports the testimony of theory, that it is the duty of the lawgiver rather to study how he may frame his legislation both with regard to warfare and in other departments for the object of leisure and of peace. Most military states remain safe while at war but perish when they have won their empire; in peace-time they lose their keen temper, like iron. The lawgiver is to blame, because he did not educate them to be able to employ leisure
That’s a problem a lot harder to fix, namely that your society is set up to require war.
I mean, Rome solved that problem for a long long time by never going very long without finding another war.
Yup, and this is the point at which the problem comes to a head.
The Republic might have fallen because the bribes/loot to obey were gone and the only way out was to care less what the citizens thought.
Well now I’m wondering how the Republic made it so far before something like this happened. Surely it didn’t take until 133 for someone to realize they’d get more political benefit from a popular law being passed in their year in office? What was the way this got defused before this?
I would presume that the usual way “A popular magistrate from a high-class background wants to pass a highly popular law” worked out was that the Senate agreed and the law passed. A tribune with an eye on their future career prospects doesn’t want to cross the Senate *and the assembly* at the same time, so they’re probably not going to veto it. On the other side of things, if the Senate says no to the law and the magistrate brings it to a vote anyways, all the voters have heard the Senate opposes it, which may well prompt them to vote it down. Even if they don’t, the magistrate leaves office next year to become a regular senator no one likes.
I’d say probably a lot of others weren’t trying to recover from such an acute political fallout that put their entire future career in jeopardy, combined with not having such a particular kind of crisis to deal with.
And some might just be attributable to Tiberius Gracchus as a person. If a lot is dependent on norms, one might be left to conclude that there are several ways in which people become genuinely invested in the norms (or the norms at least balance themselves in a way that helps perpetuate them), such that you can go a long time with people following the social script, before somebody with the right kind of personality comes along and tries to test the boundaries of just… not doing that.
Like, look at just how he was defying the will of the Senate, compared to points in the past about how Romans seem to have had a lot of social conditioning to make them really take the auctoritas of the Senate seriously. It may well be that for many before, such defiance isn’t just a matter of any practical safeguards but that everything they value says that you just do not go against the collective will of all the most venerable and accomplished elder statesmen of the city. That it’s unthinkable, or at least deeply vulgar and shameful.
It also required a lot of people to go along with the breach of norms. If the assembly had refused point blank to remove a tribune or pass the law he’d have been stopped cold.
Also seems curious how the crowd was on Gracchus’s side that much. I wonder just how disillusioned the Roman people – the plebeians – were with the current political system.
Seems easier to push for more radical reforms if you’re convinced and can convince others that, if you’re stopped, all hell will break loose, and the entire political establishment will just be torn apart by a rabid mob of the angry masses.
Probably because he was hitting on a point where the interests of the broader public and the senators were strongly adverse; he was basically proposing to take wealth from the upper class and give it to the lower class. The urban poor and the small farmers could see themselves or their second sons getting a farm out of this.
Also, the Senate was presently failing to win a non-existential war over territory the public didn’t care about with little loot to show for it.
Worth noting, incidentally, that the proposal must have been supported by a lot more than just the urban poor; the assembly he’d have been taking it to was geographically based and non-proportional, so he’d need to win a significant portion of the rural population (who showed up to vote) to pass the law.
It’s hard to start and maintain a mob fight if there are no actual grievances (real or felt). The more so if – as in the Roman case – much of the ‘mob’ has to make a significant effort to turn up. So whetever the merits of Gracchus’ actions, his support base was convinced that radical action was imperative.
I think Tiberius’ age also factors into this. Data does show that young adult males are more inclined to transgressive behaviour (the data is about crime nowadays, but I don’t think we need to focus on legality) on average. Without being fast-tracked into power, Tiberius might not have been as much of a problem.
Subtweeting myself to also add that the Roman social mores probably also made the problem worse: Tiberius must have acutely felt the need to portray his virtus and not be “content with modest successes” in this situation. If he’d not felt the need to score a political win right this year or drop off the political ladder forever, he might not have pushed things as far.
His patron also transcribed norms by having himself elected consul before he was legally eligible, so that might have helped steer Tiberius to the idea
It was all the lead pipes. 😉
Look how long the United States went (150 years) before someone successfully breached the norm of no more than two presidential terms. Unwritten norms can be very powerful.
The Great Depression and World War II are pretty exceptional like that.
Think about it this way. Rome in 133 has become the center of a massive empire, and over the course of the last century, roughly speaking, has destroyed or subjugated all of its peer competitors as threats. This means that there is an increasing divergence in the rewards from ascending the cursus honorum, because there’s simply more money floating around for Romans to skim off. The distance between a magnate and a humble member of the assidui was growing as a consequence. So the stakes for failure to achieve, or for losing time, are growing higher, especially for a rich kid like Tiberius Gracchus.
But at the same time, the material consequences for breaching political norms are becoming more remote and abstract. Rome’s armies go to beat down insolent Numantia (or in a few decades on, insolent Pontus, et cetera). That is, the terror that by breaching the mos maiorum you might well bring devastation upon Rome itself is weaker, because there are fewer things that can plausibly serve as consequences. Jupiter Optimus Maximus or Mars might well be angry, but their anger must mostly work through things in the world, and so you can believe that the breach can always be amended and the anger assuaged and made good before the consequences become existentially threatening.
So there are stronger reasons to breach those norms and weaker reasons to not breach those norms, and both of them are temporally contingent and would not have existed in the same degree in the past. Beyond that, of course, there have been fairly recent breaches of norms by Scipio Aemilianus, who nevertheless has covered himself in glory and is now well-respected, providing a model for why going further might work out for the better.
This is not to say the Republic was doomed after 168, but rather, the stresses on it increased and would begin to create crises or apparent crises in which these reasons would become more salient for people’s actions.
Good thinking. Also the mechanism for governing a city state was inadequate to the governance of an empire.
I think this was the foundation upon which all the other problems and challenges grew. The Roman Republic was destroyed by the stresses caused by it’s own expansion.
And its expansion was driven by the impossibility of its working in time of peace.
There’s a deep rooted problem here.
In addition to other responses, the histories of early Rome describe a lot of political conflict (succession, political battles over pay, etc.) and in the middle period you have things like Scipio Africanus going around the Senate by grabbing some volunteers. Likely a number of norms were broken in the past, or similar incidents happened, and possibly the Semprionius Gracchus land reform affair wouldn’t get much notice outside of historians if it hadn’t been followed by decades of civil war. Though a politician being killed is a big deal, which leads to:…
Circumstances may have pushed a more extreme situation. (This is a mix of speculation and gut reaction, so read even less into this than usual for these comments.) The intense reaction by opponents seems to be what made the situation a lot worse. I get the sense this may come from Rome’s long run of success but more recent difficulties (Carthage and Numantia taking so long to conquer, unpopular Spanish wars, in general commentary says Roman armies didn’t seem to be fighting as well.) Seems a good recipe for a Senate/leaders that have learned to expect lots of power and respect, but isn’t getting that at the moment. Which leads them to react badly to challenges they would have handled better in the past, and a Gracchus equivalent wit less reason to/is more politically harmed by pushing as hard and breaking tons of expectations to carry out the program.
For the most part, none of the Senators ever needed that much political benefit.
I mean. the poor were still right there suffering supposedly. the how he does it might have gotten wrong and the why, but the problem is a problem that is right there.
and the dont have farms for these specifics for reasons, but them rich do…
the narrative is a nice messy thing for the future.
also forgive me on the rumored dont bring weapons into Rome but the senators and their cronies did? its been a while since ive gotten into it or the details.
“Now, the attendants of the senators carried clubs and staves which they had brought from home; but the senators themselves seized the fragments and legs of the benches that were shattered by the crowd in its flight, and went up against Tiberius, at the same time smiting those who were drawn up to protect him. Of these there was a rout and a slaughter, and as Tiberius himself turned to fly, someone laid hold of his garments.
6.So he let his toga go and fled in his tunic. But he stumbled and fell to the ground among some bodies that lay in front of him. As he strove to rise to his feet, he received his first blow, as everybody admits, from Publius Satyreius, one of his colleagues, who smote him on the head with the leg of a bench; to the second blow claim was made by Lucius Rufus, who plumed himself upon it as upon some noble deed. And of the rest more than three hundred were slain by blows from sticks and stones, but not one by the sword.”
Perseus Digital Library
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu
Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus, chapter 19, section 5 and 6
They didn’t have formal weapons, but the oldest weapons are prehistoric for a reason. As our host said, much of Roman law ultimately relied on the social norms of society, not actual enforcement of legal code.
I have to admit, I find something oddly compelling about the point that the senators would respond to such a threat (or at least a slight) as this by personally congregating and going out into the fray, even if they were accompanied by their clients. Not least because these would not have been young men. I suppose that’s one thing that might arise when membership of your venerable council of elders is generally dependent on having experience in warfare.
I’d heard before about the fault in the basic image of the Gracchi, both in terms of the popular rendition of the land question and how Tiberius violated a lot of the norms first, but it’s nice to get an easily digested but detailed summary of what the counternarrative is.
Also interesting to see how this fits into the general tapestry of the Republic’s transformation, such as what some of the consequences of their expansion were and exactly why every single strongman for the next seven or eight decades is going to have a high concern with finding land for their retired veterans.
Dr. Devereaux is trying to beat the allegations of being a leftist shill I see. (I joke).
I had only ever heard the story about the Gracchi brothers trying to cope with the land crisis caused by the replacement of free farmers with slave labor so I am interested to see where this goes next. I know Dr. Devereaux is skeptical about the application of Malthusian analysis to premodern societies but this sort of situation seems to show why it is often still useful. Part of the worldbuilding for the fantasy novel I occasionally work on is having the main landmass “naturally” expand at a relatively fast pace so that there is always enough land to go around but I’m thinking about dropping it since it seems very problematic after further considering the logistical implications.
I’m curious whether this series is a precursor to one on Julius Caesar since he is an obvious successor to the Gracchi both in being seen as a man of the people and in his extra-constitutional actions.
Not just Caesar. The Gracchi’s example destabilized the whole Roman system of government and set the stage for a whole line of ambitious men who, to be fair, were also trying to solve various problems in the face of often mindless conservative noble opposition.
I think the reason this shouldn’t be seen as Malthusian is because it isn’t a proposition of the population expanding to a point where farming can no longer support people living. This isn’t about growing beyond what could be supported (I’m not seeing any suggestion of famine or the prospect of it), but livelihood.
Like, the poor in the city are being forced to resort to wage labour, which is inconstant and probably often miserable, but liveable. It might be at the point where some compromises have to be made for wellbeing, but within a functional range.
I at least regard that as distinct from the question of how property is distributed within a society, which seems to often be a concern no matter how much or how little wealth and land is available.
Famine is the worst-case scenario but greater poverty as a result of an increasing population without a corresponding increase in the means of subsistence is the main prediction of Malthusian theory.
[ “(I’m not seeing any suggestion of famine or the prospect of it)” ]
Already, into the Punic Wars Rome was importing grain from other sources, particularly, seemingly,oddly, from North Africa, as well as Sicily. But the conquest of those territories opened up control for Romans of more fertile lands, which could be farmed more cheaply with slave labor, which made their cereals and grains cheaper than those grown in Italy.
And of course, iirc, Rome was already importing grain from Egypt, but it wasn’t yet the primary source of grain for them, which began in 27 BC – AD 14.
I think the import of grain is not necessarily an indicator that the domestic supply of grain is disastrously low, even if it might become so under increasing pressure some time following an expected import being suddenly cut off.
Why should it be odd that North Africa was a good source of grain?
North Africa was Carthage’s backyard, especially in the Second Punic War. That the naval-powered Carthage would allow grain shipments to the city that they were in a death match with is odd
Much of the north coast of Africa in this period was so lush that it could support local populations of wild elephants.
I mean, parts of North Africa have been agriculturally very productive in quite recent times. Algeria was the world’s biggest wine exporter during the mid 20th c, I believe, though that ended after decolonization led the French to stop importing Algerian wine.
The urban poor weren’t even starving at a rate distinct from the rural poor at this point. The Roman system had always had a lower barrier to political participation for people with urban residences, but most of the time up to this point that had meant a handful of poor urban voices drowned out by solid majorities of landowners and their clients. The crisis at this point was the appearance of a trend that could plausibly have eventually led to the need to listen to some poor people, and that inspired a century of elite panics that ended the Republic.
If you recall how votes are distributed in the assembly, that isn’t an “issue”. The assemblies either had a hundred votes of which the landless poor had one, or 35 votes of which the urban population had 4. No amount of city population growth would upset the voting system.
There is the issue that at some point the urban poor might say “wait a minute, this is bullshit.” and overthrow the system, but there’s no way within the system for their votes to outweigh the assuidi.
Political participation is not just voting, but rural poor generally don’t have the ability to participate in mass demonstrations in urban areas, whereas urban poor find it easy to do so (and sometimes difficult to avoid doing so).
The sci-fi novel I occasionally work on involves aliens who have evolved out of a species whose adaptive strategy in the wild was to lay thousands of eggs and expect many of the spawn to eat each other. In a sorta napoleonic age, the nation-states keep a close eye on food sources, because it would be relatively easy to spawn an army from nothing if you could feed them.
Some high-latitude states are going to go on a journey. Cut down the vast pine forests, grind them all to sawdust (use wood-fueled steam engines if nothing better is available) and feed that to fungi/insects/rats.
Of course, the holy grail would be to convert mineral coal into foodstuffs without going through photosynthesis. Carbohydrates look, as a matter of chemical composition, as though they were a mixture of carbon and water (this was at some point believed to be the case, hence the name), but even after this turns out to not be quite so simple, there would be an awful lot of research in this area, looking for some combination of chemistry and fermentation. There are, in fact, real solutions to this problem. Probably the industrially simplest is coal -> (calcium) carbide -> acetylene -> acetaldehyde -> acetic acid (if you need further, -> chloroacetic acid -> glycine) which is not quite food but probably there are bacteria/fungi that can take it from there. Presumably, more efficient paths (syngas -> methanol) would be later discovered.
Frederick Pohl’s Gateway series uses this basic idea for food synthesis, IIRC.
Wait, you could duck military service by simply *not reporting your farm* to the census? What am I missing? How could anything that important be that simple to evade?
Remember, for a lot of the Republic’s history, military service was an opportunity for wealth in the form of plunder and being on the scene to receive patronage. When most of your smallish farmer class see going to war as an opportunity, they’re not going to try to duck out of it.
And, if I read Bret’s pieces on Roman armor correctly, the risk of actual death seemed pretty low. The results of some of the battles (in his description of the Macedonian war?) indicated very lopsided results.
The Romans would presumably be as vulnerable to disease as anyone. AIUI, combat deaths were generally lower than disease deaths anyway.
So the risk of death would be dominated by disease.
Random aside, the Romans instituted military hygiene practices that, while not anything like modern, were actually significant. It’s highly likely they actually had fewer deaths from disease during war than contemporaries; I can’t find the hard data just googling it, but I can see enough to know that someone has.
Up until the age of Exploration, non-combat military deaths (and some combat military deaths!) were all from causes that you could also die from at home working on the farm. The rate of death in the military was still a significant change, but there was no certainty of life if you stayed home.
Certainly people died on farms sometimes, but going to war meant living crammed together with thousands of other men with worse-than-farm sanitation.
@bullseye That’s not wrong, but humans are not capable of accurately assessing risk. The youth back then weren’t facing the modern cliche of ‘go on an adventure and maybe die’ vs. ‘stay home and live safe.’ Those young men were deciding between ‘go on an adventure and maybe die’ vs. ‘stay home and maybe die.’
I think it should be noted that lopsided results are the norm of premodern warfare, regardless of the level of armour involved (it’s just that in the case where one side is heavily armoured and the other is not, the lopsidedness will typically favour the former). Killing large numbers of people with melee weapons is just really difficult, so the process of battle tends to be two sides exerting pressure on one another’s morale and/or formations until one of them cracks, and then the other chases them down and massacres them.
It takes guns and cannon to give a losing army the kind of damage output that can really bloody their opponents up even if you ultimately fall back or disintegrate.
ACW and the Crimean War start to bring this to public consciousness, but it’s not till WWI that enough people grok it.
Remember that your census wealth class also counted for your voting rights in the top assembly. Everyone who didn’t report the wealth to serve in the army was shoved into a single century, while the higher classes were split into a lot. So if you wanted your vote to matter in a consular election, you needed to report your farm.
Also, for the average Roman in the Middle Republic, military service was an economic opportunity and where boys became men. The social pressure to report enough wealth to serve would have been intense.
As for it being simple to evade, the Romans didn’t have a large bueracracy. The total manpower devoted to the Census would consist of two Censors, a small set of professionals, and whoever the Censors could personally bring. It would be less than a hundred guys responsible for counting every Roman in Italy. They’re not able to check the size of anyone’s farmstead. The US Census is our largest nonmilitary endeavour.
In the Information Age we assume that the State knows everything all the time, but esp in the past it was not so. Even something as simple as knowing how many people live in Rome would require several assessors dedicating their lives to going around counting their fellow citizens. And they could be easily fooled into double-counting, overlooking people, being given the wrong name etc. You can only do it on the basis of people voluntarily coming in and counting themselves.
Brett had an article on the complex distribution of farmland in medieval Europe, where each family would have many diverse, tiny plots all over. Admittedly this was not the Roman system, but imagine surveying some random village like that. Mapping out where each plot ends and who owns it would be very difficult and not worth the time it takes. It’s likely easier to just go and take 10% and let the villagers sort the aftermath out among themselves. Assuming that you can find the village in the first place.
Even with today’s massive bureaucracy dedicated to tracking things using computers, we still have title insurance, undeclared offshore assets, declared but too-hard-to-parse corp structures etc. 50% tax rates, totalitarianism etc are only possible because we now have the maps, lists and motorized transport which allow one guy to survey and report thousands of people that in the past would’ve been too difficult to yoke.
Fundamentally you have an elite population that cannot understand the idea that a person would not want to serve in the army. And a lot of the rest of the population did in fact function that way, as people with an emotional-social need to send their sons to serve militarily or to serve militarily themselves.
A part of me feels bad for poor Tiberius here…
But another part wonders- Just how bad would it have been for him to accept his career was over and to just settle on his family’s villa?
He wouldn’t have been destitute or anything, but his mother was heavily involved in her sons’ political success so he’d be a disappointment to her personally. It would also be ignominious for the son of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (cos. 177, 163 BC) and descendant of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (cos. 215, 213 BC) and Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (cos. 238 BC) not to achieve anything higher than the tribunate and become a senate backbencher.
Ask a Kennedy.
Bitter shame of the sort where you see other people take what you’ve always expected from life because you were dealt a bad hand when you were in your 20s that you had nothing to do with.
Your father was twice consul and twice rode the triumphal chariot; your mother is the daughter of the most famous and successful Roman general to date. You grew up alongside other members of the elite. How can you live with yourself when all your childhood friends who used to envy your parentage sit in the consular chair and speak first in the senate – after you stalled out at praetor, the magistrate where all the novi homines (termed broadly per Brunt) also ended up?
There are few things more dangerous than a man who believes he has found a righteous cause.
It sounds like the righteous cause Tiberius Gracchus found was Tiberius Gracchus. Otherwise, he would have been happy to see his proposed law become law the following year, with the sponsorship of a new Tribune.
The fact that he was so desperate to have his bill passed by himself, rather than someone else, suggests he mostly wanted the credit for the bill and the resulting loyal supporters of himself, not to righteously aid the landless poor.
(But it is true that a righteous man can be a lot harder to deter than a selfish one, as many victims of suicide bombing could tell you. As long as they survived to tell you anything.)
The post says at the beginning that it is deliberately slanting against Graccus somewhat (compared to what an independent description by the same person would do.), never mind the usual problems of interpreting people’s actions, especially from thousands of years ago with details missing. There are plenty of other possible motivations to get mixed in:
-Intense opposition means/makes it appear that others can’t be trusted to pass the law and apply it properly.
–Heck, lots of people want to do things themselves, just as a general thing tho do.
–Numantia difficulties and other issues might suggest current political system isn’t up for the job.
-If this was mostly Tiberius’s proposal, he might not want someone else to steal the credit and rewards a general principle.
-Family obligations, he needs to not let them down/hurt family reputation (In a highly successful family, Numantia surrender + failure to get a law in place could well be seen this way)
If I’m a roman smallholding farmer, how do I get away with not reporting myself on the census? Doesn’t that come with legal repurcussions like potential loss of citizenship if I’m found out?
That question is already addressed elsewhere in these comments (it can be summarised as “the census worked on a premise that people were more incentivized to report accurately and lacked the resources to independently investigate claims”), but even then I think you’re overestimating the range of options for punishment available to them. Crimes in the Roman Republic are typically punished by fine or exile, and very occasionally by death.
It is my understanding that revoking citizenship was not only something well beyond the par for something like this (if it was even the kind of thing perceived as a crime), but actually kind of inconceivable to carry out. Citizenship was highly valued, verging on actually sacred, and to strip it from somebody would be quite grave. I think that even if magistrates of the time had a mind to be empowered to do so, getting a law passed for it would be kind of a non-starter because you need that to be approved by the very people who hold their possession of it so dear.
If I’m correct, even people like the purported conspirators summarily executed by Cicero remained citizens at the time, which would have been part of why it was so controversial for him to do so, as it would have been seen as contravening their rights as citizens. I would imagine that if it was straightforward to revoke citizenship, even for something as grave as conspiring against the state, he would have done so as a precursor to the execution.
Interestingly, the C. Hostilius Mancinus mentioned in this post who somewhat caused Tiberius’ fortunes to fall had his citizenship stripped for his fumbling of the war. Though he also successfully campaigned to have it reinstated later, and even held office once or twice after that.
I think the argument as a whole is well made, but there’s one element I don’t particularly understand. It’s implied that, had Tiberius genuinely cared more about his proposed legislation rather than his own ambition, he could simply have waited until both he and Octavius left office and let some future tribune pass the law. But it’s also said that “it must never have been very hard to find a tribute willing to gum up the passage of a given law.” Given that only one tribune out of ten was needed to block legislation, and that this power was renewed with every set of annual elections (rather than being limited to a certain number of usages per bill, like the UK House of Lords’ delaying powers), what hope did Tiberius have that his opponents would ever actually run out of vetos?
Of course, it’s perfectly legitimate to argue – as people regularly do with regard to things like the filibuster in the US Senate – that the inability of the state to pass major legislation without broad cross-factional consensus is a vital stabilising feature, not a bug. Still, you can see that this does impose a genuine moral dilemma on those who believe that that a crisis cannot be solved without measures that will inherently antagonise one part of society. At the very least, this seems like a data point in favour of the “Tiberius the sincere extremist” interpretation rather than “Tiberius the cynical demagogue.”
Certainly Tiberius’s political prospects had taken a hit but that was a side effect of severe damage to his dignitas from being intimately associated with failure. He must have felt very strongly about the lessening of his personal reputation and honor and that of his family. So it wouldn’t have been a matter of cool, political calculation but something more visceral. To do him justice Tiberius also believed he’d identified the cause of a serious problem threatening the security of Rome, one that had to be fixed immediately. All of which explains his impatience and his sheer anger at those impeding him
I must say, as much as this post makes a good case for Tiberius’ actions being selfish, reckless and very likely an attempt to seize ultimate power, it REALLY doesn’t make the Roman Senate look good that the main reason his fortunes fell so far to make him so reckless in the first place was their dissatisfaction with his PEACE deal which actually DID preserve the lives of the soldiers who would (apparently) very likely have been massacred otherwise. It echoes somewhat how the real-world Macrinus ended up swiftly murdered and replaced with very obviously unqualified Elagabalus in large part because too many legionaries were intent on fighting Caracalla’s unwinnable war against Parthia which he brought to a conclusion (that, and their attachment to Caracalla’s completely unsustainable pay hikes.)
It also makes me wonder – while the plebeians obviously supported Tiberius’ land reform, is there any indication in contemporary sources that they viewed his actions in preserving the lives of common soldiers FAR more favourably than the Roman elites, and that this was a substantial complementary reason for their support of him?
Lastly, this post implies that if Lex Sempronia Agraria was implemented as planned, it would have had very likely fastforwarded the Social War. Yet, it then says the text of the actual proposal was to enforce the already-existing limit of 311 acres per individual. Just HOW MANY Socii landholders actually were over the limit – and how many of those were popular enough in their society to inspire others to fight for the sake of that privilege?
I only control 311 acres. And my brother. And my brother-in-law. And my brother’s brother-in-law. We all also manage several holdings for other relatives, not benefiting at all from doing so.
Since my accident, I’m renting my holdings to several young men of worthy ambition. They’ll help to oppose the Romans stealing our land.
As an aside,
> Tiberius Gracchus’ proposal to fix this problem was the lex Sempronia Agraria. The law proposed to enforce a legal but long ignored limit on the holding of ager publicus,5 restricting individuals to holding just 500 iugera (c. 311 acres), with the state revoking the leases on the remainder and using the reclaimed land to then provide small plots for free to the Roman poor, with a rider that these plots could not be sold (to avoid them being reconsolidated into elite estates).
Interesting how the ABSENCE of that same rider approximately 2,000 years later was one of the greatest reasons why the “Manifesto” (to use its formal name) of Emperor Alexander II which had finally formally liberated the serfs in the Russian Empire in 1861 is now viewed as a poor compromise which satisfied few people. Nobles with serfs were allowed to retain too much land so the parcels of lands allocated to freed serfs were small and often ended up sold back almost immediately. That, and the fact the Empire actually pledged to compensate nobles for their serfs – and the cost of that was passed onto the serfs themselves, saddling them with debt immediately after their liberation – was one of the reasons the Manifesto failed to stem the revolutionary sentiment in a meaningful manner. (Alexander II was himself infamously assassinated on the 7TH attempt – which simply convinced the heir, Alexander III, that the mistake was in giving any slack and he needed to crack down harder.)
So the only benefit to the former serfs was that their former owners could not torture or rape them any more? I think I would see that as something of a plus, myself.
But who cares what the peasants think? Not many old Bolsheviks were peasants.
Successful revolutions have got nothing to do with the desires of the powerless. Successful revolutions are made by the powerful, as both George Washington and the people he owned could have told you.
Successful revolutions are generally made by the bourgeoise. The proles don’t have the knowledge to replace the overthrown system with something workable, the elites have no reason to want change.
If a million peasants turn up with pitchforks, is it they or the guy in the suit who is making the revolution?
If working class people are lacking in knowledge of how to build organisational systems, how have they ever been able to unionise?
I think it’s more precise to say that it’s usually an alliance between the middle class and the lower classes that make for successful revolutions. The middle classes provide the skills and the money, the proles provide the numbers.
The proles don’t have the knowledge to replace the overthrown system with something workable
In an age of mass education (and I don’t mean universal education, i mean education to the point where even illiterate peasants *know people* who have been to school and interact with them), that’s much much less true than it was in previous centuries.
Also, even in countries where the actual peasants and workers really don’t have the literacy and exposure to think about alternative social models, i wouldn’t say revolutions are usually made by the bourgeoisie. Very often they’re made by the military. Who are arguably an elite of sorts, but a very different kind of elite whose power doesn’t come from ownership of factories and businesses, but rather from ownership of the ‘means of destruction’.
In the 1917 election (generally regarded as free and fair), 70% of the voters went for revolutionary parties (Social Revolutionaries, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks). This speaks to the deep dissatisfaction with the existing order. A good many people have called for revolution and been arrested when nobody showed up.
And even if we account for the fact that not every political entity bothered showing up (possibly because they would have been beaten with sticks) it’s still true that amongst both the rural and city folk the majority were leftists, as evidenced by, well, the actual mechanisms of revolution in March.
Point being that even if you dispute that the election was free and fair Russia in 1917 was determining which form of socialism it went with and how much of the old system to keep, not if the Tzar or nobles got to keep power. Even the most centrist aligned were firm republican liberals, and they were almost completely politically inconsequential.
Excellent point, and worth pointing out that the Socialist Revolutionaries themselves were divided on how to deal with the Bolsheviks. A good chunk of them were in favor of a coalition, and an even bigger chunk, when the civil war happened, thought they were preferable to the Whites.
“Not many old Bolsheviks were peasants.”
This is both a technically true statement and utterly wrong. The Bolsheviks weren’t peasants, but the Socialist Revolutionaries, whom formed the majority of the government the overthrew the Tzar by the votes in the one election, were. A large part of why the March revolution (or February revolution, calendar weirdness I think) succeeded was that three groups, the military, the industrial workers, and the peasants, all united in class unity.
The military was broadly dissatisfied with the war due to the incredible casualties along with the class inequality of the military hierarchy in Russia, the workers were dealing with the same effect due to rationing and war labor demands (in addition the forming much of the military conscripts), and the peasants were thoroughly disillusioned with the nobility after centuries of abuse.
Hence the *entirety of the country* spontaneously rose up against the Tzar. There was no planned rebellion, the people just *stopped following orders* and marched on the government, particularly in Petrograd, and the entire system of nobility fell apart in months.
The October revolution in turn happened because the interests of these three groups within the class structure diverged. The military and workers wanted the war to end *immediately* but were a minority of the voters. The Agrarian peasants, meanwhile, actually hadn’t faced as much hardship from the war and hence favored continuing it, and the leadership which had their support did so. This caused a *successful* revolution to then fracture further into several warring factions, notably when the Bolsheviks declared the elections null and had their military supporters fire on protestors.
The resulting Bolshevik government formed a pseudo-bourgeoise and technocratic semi-nobility that governed on party lines, but the original revolution predated that. The March revolution was not organized by the powerful, not organized by the bourgeoise, and worked.
Except it didn’t work, because it was almost immediately supplanted by another government organized along different lines.
” the peasants were thoroughly disillusioned with the nobility after centuries of abuse.”
And they hadn’t managed to do anything effective in all those centuries of abuse. But when the army turned against the regime, it was over. Because the army had power.
There is a reason they used to think that the draft and democracy went well together.
I would say rather that the state collapsed rather than people rose up. There wasn’t widespread refusal to obey the car outside of the capitol. But the capital is where the organs of control were directed from and when the car gave up so did they.
That’s not relevant to if the revolution worked. Revolutions destroy the current power structure, building a new one is harder. The Bolsheviks were too willing to flip the table, and the SR not understanding enough of the horrors of WW1 to compromise, so that new system defaulted to violence, but they absolutely destroyed the Tzar and the nobility-it was exterminated utterly. They wanted change, they got it.
The tragedy of the Russian revolution is that war made revolution possible but war also made nation building impossible, such that the flaws of Russian society became fault lines that led to incredible suffering. But Russia was probably never surviving WW1, or even just the rigors of time-it had been mismanaged for too long, the people abused too severely, the wounds left to rot.
The only standard of success for revolutions is if the system changed. It can be a bad change or a good change or any other adjective you want to use, but if the revolution forced change it worked.
Also, the assertion is not quite true. The Bolsheviks ultimately got more or less what they wanted. It was the SR that failed. Of course what the Bolsheviks wanted was ultimately flawed, because they didn’t have sufficient checks on state power wielded by technocrats, but they *wanted* that system and *got* it. It just didn’t work like they thought, but so goes politics.
Hell, the *American* revolutionaries got the system they wanted and *instantly* saw it stop working as intended! Political parties weren’t supposed to be a thing, the supreme court wasn’t supposed to be powerful, the executive was also supposed to be weak, and the legislature was supposed to be the branch wielding real power. Yet just over fifty years later we see Andrew Jackson dueling not just with the legislature, but with the *supreme court*, over powers the founders barely intended either branch to even have!
Point being-political reform doesn’t work according to design in the best of times. Add in violence and you’re playing Russian roulette with the future.
They destroy the original and replace it. Just as a robbery where you get the goods and then drown as you try to row away in your overloaded rowboat is a failure, so to is a revolution that amounts to a change in who your oppressor is.
“And they hadn’t managed to do anything effective in all those centuries of abuse. But when the army turned against the regime, it was over. Because the army had power.
There is a reason they used to think that the draft and democracy went well together.”
That’s not how the March revolution happened. If that was true we’d expect to see an army led coup, but that simply did not occur; the population in Petrograd rioted and the soldiers within the military refused orders *after being confronted by the population*. The generals weren’t revolutionary but they simply could not control their units. The generals themselves were likely to be of the nobility, as were the officer corps in general, and they *certainly* didn’t support the revolution.
In other words-the military didn’t turn against the government, the soldiers did. This is a point of grammar-when I referred to the military above I meant as a social class, not an organization. The military as an organization was pro Tzar, but the soldiers mutinied.
Also, the peasants *had* successfully forced change multiple times before, most recently in 1905 when they managed to force a constitution into place. They just hadn’t managed to keep reforms active because the lack of industrialization concentrated power *in the military*, which was the only organization that could communicate and move over the vast distances. Because the army had a strict hierarchy it preserved the status quo, and whatever system was created was rapidly couped and reverted to noble control, as happened in 1907 after the revolution of 1905.
However as Russia industrialized the cities became bastions of communication, coordination, and manpower, and they were both able and wiling to defy the Tzar whilst simultaneously becoming key to industrial warfare. The Tzar could not refuse to industrialize because it crippled the army as it fought peers, yet by industrializing they created a more complicated political dynamic. The soviets and other industrial organizations could and did marshal manpower to confront the army, but they also infiltrated the army because the cities were the only places to recruit from. Likewise the peasants had been organizing and similar collectives among the agrarian class were able to defy the state as well.
So when the revolution started they were able to paralyze the military, march on the government buildings, and started controlling the rail lines to the extent they could stop the Tzar from entering the capital and within days were in control of enough of the rail lines that it’s unlikely the Tzar could have escaped them. There were local soviets springing up deep into Asia that took control of the rail lines as early as March 2nd, there was nowhere for him to go-the one plan that almost manifested was for the government to flee to England.
The narrative that they just paralyzed the government is hence wrong too-they managed to *decapitate* the government. The Tzar was either going to surrender in March or get shot. He also really didn’t have a clear power base to flee to, assuming he somehow survived. The refusal to obey the Tzar was basically ubiquitous.
It’s simply not true that the military as a political power bloc switched to the revolution and so it succeeded-the revolution *captured the soldiery* and thus succeeded. The revolutionary fervor came first, and the military expression of it was grassroots.
“the soldiers within the military refused orders *after being confronted by the population*.”
Dan, the logic of this is that the important decisions were made by the soldiers, not the rioters. And note that this is true even though the rioters were in the capital, and far closer to the centre of power than any peasant out in the countryside.
So what the workers in the capital wanted mattered a little. What the soldiers in the capital wanted mattered a lot. And what the peasants out in the countryside wanted mattered not at all.
Except that’s also false. The soldiers in the capital didn’t start the revolution and didn’t make any of the critical decisions. They were reacting on the revolutionaries side, but they also weren’t the only armed force. They were also, to be clear, *conscripts from the working class*.
They also weren’t the key reason the revolution worked-honestly that’s probably the rail workers who rapidly subverted the transit system, allowing revolutionaries to move faster than the Tzar or his loyalists. I say this with some confidence because in 1905 the army didn’t side with the revolution, yet the revolution still forced a political settlement. And the revolutionaries were stronger in 1917 than 1905, better organized and more numerous.
It’s also factually incorrect that the opinions of the peasantry were irrelevant, mostly because it limited the Tzars options severely. In the past the Tzars armies had occasionally been forced away from the cities, but turned to the countryside instead and rallied. But that simply wasn’t an option here.
The reason the revolution worked so well was down to the unity of *all three* major classes I mentioned effectively robbing the Tzar of any support base. They really did all matter.
See the later revolution for what happens when they *aren’t* united. The soldiery sided with the Soviets against the peasantry, and it took four to five years to have a victor precisely because alternative governments can and did flee into the countryside. It’s not clear anything would have prevented the Tzar from doing that himself if the peasantry wasn’t so hostile, except possibility the rail soviets controlling the lines east.
“The only standard of success for revolutions is if the system changed.”–Well, if you define it that way. That’s like a coach saying, “We lost the game, but we beat the point spread,” or a hedge fund manager saying, “We underperformed the S&P, but we beat the return on money market funds.” Most people who go to a stadium, or invest in a hedge fund, or participate in a revolution, are hoping for a little more than that. Like, in the last case, a better life for themselves and their children.
The distinction is that revolution isn’t a game. The subtextual thread of revolution is that no one can know where the use of violence for political means will end, so all revolution is a gamble. Sane people know that.
Revolution is the last resort of the powerless. The specific grievances and hopes are secondary to that powerlessness..
If they succeed in exercising power that’s victory.
A quick check through the 60 odd Old Bolsheviks who were the leaders in 1917 shows around half came from worker or peasant families. They were often bright enough to have reached high school, but by no means could be called bourgeois.
“The soldiers in the capital didn’t start the revolution and didn’t make any of the critical decisions. ”
They decided not to shoot down the rebels. Since every previous revolution, peasant revolt etc had been shot down by the soldiers, that seems to have been quite a critical decision.
Rebellions don’t suddenly succeed because the rebels decide they want to be treated better. They always wanted to be treated better, there is never anything new about wanting to be treated better. What changes is the willingness and ability of the regime supporters to shoot them down.
That is an ahistorical view.
Not unless you are using an atypical definition of “historical.”
The soldiers refused to shoot, but who were the soldiers? In 1905 they were the Guard and the Cossacks. In 1917 they were the conscript veterans of three years of war looking at their fellows in the street. Perils of mass mobilisation.
Same thing happened in Iran in 1978 – the Imperial Guard was happy to shoot demonstrators – the wider mass of the army was not (and shot the Guard on at least one occasion).
A quick check through the 60 odd Old Bolsheviks who were the leaders in 1917 shows around half came from worker or peasant families. They were often bright enough to have reached high school, but by no means could be called bourgeois.
Thanks for looking that up!
I’d also add that even if you just look at the top tier Old Bolsheviks and conclude that they were mostly intelligentsia rather than working class, that definitely wasn’t true either of 1) the post-Stalin Soviet leaders and party cadres, or 2) the leaders of most of the Warsaw Pact states in Eastern Europe, who tended to be from either working class or artisan backgrounds. Think of Ulbricht, Kadar, Tito, Gottwald, even Khrushchev and Brezhnev, etc.. I think Albania was the only Eastern European communist country to be run by an upper middle class intellectual, and maybe it’s not an accident that they were also the most ideologically extreme / wacky.
““The only standard of success for revolutions is if the system changed.”–Well, if you define it that way.”
That’s the only possible way to define it, because it’s the only objective measure. Defining it in terms of “were things better afterwards” is going to be unanswerable without getting into questions like “better for whom?”, “better in what regards”, or “better over what time frame?”, and people are always going to disagree about those based on their ideological viewpoint.
No, it’s not objective. There’s a reason why the American embassy recommended La Russie en 1839 by the Marquis de Custine as the best book to understand the Soviet Union.
As for “better” that’s by the standards of those who staged the revolution. Just as you judge robberies as successful by the standards of the robbers.
No, it’s not objective. There’s a reason why the American embassy recommended La Russie en 1839 by the Marquis de Custine as the best book to understand the Soviet Union.
I mean, the US embassay and US government in general said *all manner* of things about the Soviet Union, and about other communist states, just like the communist states said all manner of things about their ideological rivals as well. I’m not sure why, in either case, I’m expected to take these statements as gospel truth- there is clearly in both cases an ideological agenda behind them.
I actually do agree that there are many significant ways in which the Soviet Union was continuous with pre-1917 Russian culture, for better or worse. That’s been argued by lots of academics, both those sympathetic to communism and those opposed to it, and I’m more likely to listen to them than I am to the US embassy. However, there are lots of other ways in which October 1917 really was a sharp break with the past. Not least in terms of class structures.
As for “better” that’s by the standards of those who staged the revolution
The people who *actually* staged the revolution, at the top levels anyway, mostly ended up executed by Stalin, but in terms of those who had broad ideological sympathy with them, they have never been in agreement over what extent the Soviet revolution was a success or a failure, so that doesn’t really solve the question. Maybe it’s an unanswerable question that never really will be solved.
Notice the guy arguing for objectivity literally dismisses information from people who had more experience of the USSR that he does with nothing more than a claim it was all propaganda.
Perhaps the Tsarist government wasn’t overthrown, and Lenin just was secretly crowned Tsar. All claims to the contrary are ideologically driven.
Probably a small portion of the population, but heavily concentrated among the most influential people. With land being the main source of wealth, the main way to invest is to buy more land. Then you need labor to work the land, and while some of that comes from slaves a chunk comes from tenant farmers, who want you to keep renting that land to them. Then along comes a guy in Rome, who proposes taking the land away from you and giving it to a bunch of Romans, who will each hold a farm small enough to work with just their families and so won’t need tenant farmers. Your tenant farmers, who legally can’t get their own farm out of this deal, are likely to be as displeased as you. Meanwhile your urban poor are also upset because they’d like to get in on this land deal but can’t.
And that’s just the people who are directly upset about what the law itself does. Everyone else is going to see that Rome has unilaterally swiped stuff from the Socii to give to Romans and will be worried about what else they’re going to take.
> it would sacrifice everything in order to compromise nothing.
If there’s one thing I learnt from Historia Civilis, this is practically the theme of the fall of Roman Republic. I don’t know if this civil war between S and P is inevitable when there’s no more peer enemies on the border, but I guess that’s what happened.
There was no civil war between S and P. It was always between S and S.
I will say, I find it hard to believe that the problem Tiberius Gracchus thought he was solving just didn’t exist. If large estates really were expanding and buying out their smaller neighbours, that would be the kind of thing that would leave a lot of evidence (i.e., since the census was the reason he though this was happening in the first place, wouldn’t he also expect to see a few large holders vastly increasing their self-reported wealth?), so it seems implausible to me that Gracchus could just imagine that was happening when it wasn’t. In general though, I’m always a bit suspicious of claims that we can understand the problems facing a historical society better than the people actually living then.
As a side-note, I find it amazing that the census apparently had no mechanism to keep people honest, particularly since the main form of wealth (land) was something that’s not exactly easy to hide.
Your first point is a good one and I hope Dr. Devereaux addresses it.
As for the second point, the census is self-reported and there is not much of an organized bureaucracy in Rome in this time period.
Devereaux mentioned that there was *some* buying up of land by rich men. I suppose some of Graccus’ rich friends were doing it, and he overestimated how much it was happening.
The mechanism to keep the census honest was that men who could afford to join the army *wanted* to join the army to get plunder, and also the Republic had voting rules that favored men who were assigned to a higher economic class.
Consequentially, it turns on there being a war where you could expect to get plunder. See Aristotle about states not having laws designed for peace as well as war.
I can understand your scepticism, but in this case the evidence is very clear that we understand the problem better than the people of the time. Firstly, we know the procedures they had to measure this, and that they were inadequate. They did not have large land surveys assessing properties and generating statistics from that, they just had the self-reported census. And that census couldn’t tell them that a lot of the disappearing small farmers were draft dodgers, and that the wealth of the upper class wasn’t in Italian land, but in tax income and Sicilian land.
And secondly, because of the amount of evidence left behind, we have been able to measure this archaeologically and get very precise about shifting land use patterns – because we have done the thing the Romans didn’t, which is survey the land systematically.
I am very hesitant to call 2100 year old archeological evidence “very precise.”
> I’m always a bit suspicious of claims that we can understand the problems facing a historical society better than the people actually living then.
Some of the people of the time agreed with T Gracchus thoughts about the root of the problem. Not all of them. So even if we defer to contemporary opinion rather than modern archaeological analysis, it still doesn’t mean that we have to agree with Tiberius.
I know Gracchus’ proposed splutions to the problem receiced a lot of criticism from his contemporaries, but were there people at the time saying that the problem he thought he was solving just straight-up didn’t exist?
It is striking that the failing census returns in the Roman Republic shared a similar underlying logic with the Imperial Chinese census returns.
Beginning in 1712, Qing emperors pushed a reform to eliminate the poll tax (head tax) and only collected land tax instead (摊丁入亩). Then, the census returns – the population number on paper – **doubled** within 70 years. Traditional historiography understood it as a usual population boom in a peaceful and prosperous period. Recent research pointed out that the poll tax likely discouraged landless commoners from registering themselves as taxable subjects, and the census returns before 1712 probably underestimated the actual population.
So (on Prof. Deveraux recommendation) I’ve been listening to the Partial Historians podcast and they’ve been going through some sources (mainly Livy, because he’s the most consistent) on rome “From the Founding of the City”, they’re up to about the year 400 B.C. now.
Now, obviously they’re still dealing with largely mythical history at this point. There’s an entire question of what the Struggle of the Orders *was* or even *if* it was. There’s the entire office of “Military tribune with consular powers” and to what extent that’s just an attempt by the sources to make contradictory sources (eg. “We know there should only be two consuls but this year the sources lists 6, so what’s going on?”) etc.
So to be clear, it’s more about what later-era romans thought than about the actual events.
But the thing here is that Livy seems to basically back-project the Gracchi: He keeps having tribunes of the plebs show up and want to pass agrarian laws. (or other stuff regarding the conflict of the Orders) and then having the patricians/elites either block them (or , in the case of some non-tribune politicians, murder them) it’s like a theme. (and I think Dionysos of Halicarnassus does something similar)
As said, this is likely back-projecting, he’s putting proto-Gracchi (I think in at least one case an alleged ancestor, the romans love having families do similar things) into the narrative in places where they probably don’t belong.
I find that a fascinating thing. The Gracchi (and Octavian) clearly left a mark on the idea of the tribunate to the poitn of it leading to an effect where all tribunes are seemingly proto-Gracchi in being.
It’s not like Tiberius invented the concept of a government redistributing land. This blog post: https://acoup.blog/2019/09/12/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-v-spartan-government/ describes a similar attempted program by a Spartan king for much the same reasons (having enough armor-affording landholders to fill out the army) and which runs into similar political issues (even down to the killing of the reformer) 378 years before Tiberius became tribune.
I suspect this was not the first time land tenure came up in the Roman Republic.
Scratch that, only 112 years. Still a long time though.
For those of us
who aren’t very knowledgable on our history it would be much appreciated if you could put a BC or AD by your dates! The problem with Roman history is that either is superficially plausible for many of the dates!
The republic is always BC, 1 AD was during Augustus’ term as emperor
The whole thing with Roman farmers under reporting their wealth makes the wealth skewing of both the Roman Republic and other political systems make a lot more sense. You’re incentivizing people you cannot otherwise compel to give their resources to the state by “paying” them in political power.
Not just political power, but status too. For the very wealthy, you can think of liturgies and donations to construction projects as optional taxes, with the dividend being prestige. In some cases the social pressure to be generous was so large that it functionally ceased to be optional.
“For the very wealthy, you can think of liturgies and donations to construction projects as optional taxes, with the dividend being prestige.”
It feels like this is something ancient societies can teach us about how to manage otherwise-unmanageable wealth for societal good.
In a world of billionnaires that are very capable and willing of avoiding practically any and all taxes levied upon them, one way of co-opting some of that wealth for social good would be to incentivise them to voluntarily contribute to the social good by rewarding them with prestige.
E.g. the 19th century robber barons.
(A) https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-top-400-individual-income-tax-returns-with-the-largest-adjusted-gross-incomes
the richest pay a lot of tax
(B) extract some societal good? something like “we’ll make them build a global supermarket where you can buy almost any good you can think of and they’ll ship it to your house for free” or “build huge rockets to cut the cost to launch stuff into space by orders of magnitude”?
we already extract huge societal goods from billionaires. that’s how they got to be billionaires, by generating enormous social good then skimming some off the top. They’re not dragons hoarding gold.
“that’s how they got to be billionaires, by generating enormous social good then skimming some off the top. They’re not dragons hoarding gold.”
I expect we’ll have to agree to disagree on how exploitative we understand this relationship to be, and their net ‘social good’ considering their exploitative business practices are actively driving income deprivation (and all the social ills that follow) in favour of ever greater personal profits.
I don’t believe the DeBeers fortune based on generating artificial scarcity of diamonds through monopolising their supply counts as ‘generating enormous social good’.
Nor do I think the social good of providing next-day-shipping is worth the conditions Amazon workers endure (nor their vehemently anti-union stance, nor attempted monopolising of online commerce).
Nor do I believe creating a populist, intentionally divisionary, propagandistic media empire used to sow racism, discord among progressive political movements, and general anti-labour sentiment counts as ‘enormous social good’.
You’re looking at income tax data. Most of the capital held by the wealthiest individuals is in the form of securities and investments, for which the tax is much less.
@Demarquis
yes, income tax data. that includes both normal income (wages) and capital income. the rich do make more capital income than wage income, but that’s utterly irrelevant to the point at hand. if you think capital income isn’t included you just don’t know how taxes work.
@Ynneadwraith
> I don’t believe the DeBeers fortune based on generating artificial scarcity of diamonds through monopolising their supply counts as ‘generating enormous social good’.
they mined the diamonds and sold the diamonds and people were happy to get the diamonds. that you don’t like their choices doesn’t mean they weren’t happy with them.
Beyond that though, I notice you go straight to debeers, which essentially began life as a government granted monopoly. You are ignoring walmart, spacex, or amazon, which did not.
> Nor do I think the social good of providing next-day-shipping is worth the conditions Amazon workers endure (nor their vehemently anti-union stance, nor attempted monopolising of online commerce).
Wow, look at those goal posts move! But putting that aside, again, not your choice to make. the people shopping and working at amazon do like their choices, and you have no right to deny them that. you especially don’t have the right to ignore the surplus they’re seeing when you’re trying to add up all the social surplus.
I think a more sophisticated idea of what a social good is needed than “lots of people like it”, especially in the face of arguments about the extent to which it inflicts harm.
Like… there absolutely is a right to deny people things that they like if it sufficiently comes at the expense of the well being of others. Industrialists argued against child labour laws with appeals to both their profit margins and the idea that it would harm the consumer.
(And as has been said, billionaire level wealth isn’t really drawn directly from the likes of a CEO income, it’s based in various other forms of financial instrumentality that are increasingly removed from direct contributions of labour.
Even within the scope of executive incomes, as a business, Amazon could really easily distribute its profits in a way that contributes to higher standard of living for the entirety of its work force, most of whom make more direct and substantial contributions to making its desirable service work, than concentrating it in its executives.)
“Lots of people like it” is more sophisticated than “I don’t like it,” and a lot of reformers have the second idea.
Furthermore, the second idea is the one that leads to mass murder as the reformers try to force compliance.
@formerlycassander
As I said, I expect we’ll have to agree to disagree. This is a highly charged political topic, and I doubt either of us will make any headway in the comments of a history blog.
I do not see any goalposts moving. ‘Social benefit’ is fairly broadly defined, and those two examples fit within it as a concept.
I did not ignore Amazon, you quoted my example of it in the very next paragraph. Walmart fits into the same predatory employment model. As do many employers with billionnaires at their head.
I expect many families who sent their children to the mines were grateful of the work. That is not an adequate measure of whether something is a net social good.
@Isator Levi Even within the scope of executive incomes, as a business, Amazon could really easily distribute its profits in a way that contributes to higher standard of living for the entirety of its work force, most of whom make more direct and substantial contributions to making its desirable service work, than concentrating it in its executives.)
Eloquently put. I can very well believe that there are many millionnaires who have contributed a net ‘enormous social good’. To become richer than Smaug (to use cassander’s example of dragons sitting on gold) in a business venture takes a deliberate decision to denude wealth from your workers for personal gain. Considering the broad-ranging social, health and economic impacts of just a tiny bit more money at that level, and the absolutely nil social/health/economic benefits of hoarding it under one person, I would argue this puts an insurmountable ‘net social harm’ into many billionnaires’ ledger.
Furthermore, by pushing the boundaries of what you can get away with as an employer, they’re setting an example for other unscrupulous bastards on how to degrade the quality of life of their workers for personal gain.
Net social harm.
Do you have any idea how many impoverished souls are utterly dependent on the stock they hold in those companies, whose pensions you are cavalierly appropriating?
Not to mention the zero-sum reasoning. How much of the wealth you complain of would simply not exist without them?
@isator
> (And as has been said, billionaire level wealth isn’t really drawn directly from the likes of a CEO income, it’s based in various other forms of financial instrumentality that are increasingly removed from direct contributions of labour.
It was said wrongly. CEO wealth is derived from ownership stake in the company. it’s very straight forward.
@Ynneadwraith
> in a business venture takes a deliberate decision to denude wealth from your workers for personal gain.
Again you fall to caricature. businesses do not profit by squeezing workers, they profit by generating value for customers. you can’t ignore that value, then proclaim the company is a net negative.
“businesses do not profit by squeezing workers”
Tell that to Amazon and Walmart employees. Tell that to the workers of P&O who were illegally mass-fired and re-hired on zero-hour contracts.
Social value =/= financial value. Unless you want to start arguing that things like the British’s trade in opium to China was providing ‘a social good’ to China because it was profitable.
I can see how you could struggle to see how billionnaires are a bad thing if you do not see that as a meaningful distinction.
@Mary Catelli
“the second idea leads to mass murder”
Liberal democracies of the past one or two hundred years contain numerous examples of things that have been curtailed by reform, regardless of their popularity at the time, that didn’t entail mass murder. Often they didn’t even require much intervention.
Nobody was killed over banning smoking in public places.
Regardless of their popularity? Which ones are you talking about?
@formerlycassender
“CEO wealth is derived from ownership stake in the company.”
Ownership isn’t a contribution. It’s barely a capacity to threaten to take your ball and go home, since they’d hardly withdraw their own source of wealth.
Nor do I think the social good of providing next-day-shipping is worth the conditions Amazon workers endure (nor their vehemently anti-union stance, nor attempted monopolising of online commerce).
I don’t even think I would go as far in conceding what you do- I think we all got along fine before Amazon was created, and I doubt we were any less happy before we had next day shipping, certainly I don’t think I was.
Perhaps we should ask rural people instead of you. Why, after all, is your opinion dispositive of the matter?
> incentivise them to voluntarily contribute to the social good
They do that, when you agree with their ideas; otherwise the causes they fund are subversive, nefarious or outright evil 🙂
I wonder why a state where most of the taxes are paid by the wealthy would be eager to upset them.
Historically, I believe that prestige has been largely a function of inherited wealth, with the implication that the descendants of the founder of the clan owe their privileges to the role they play in society more than just the wealth. This doesn’t seem to be true of our current crop of billionaire oligarchs.
Society sneers at those who inherit their wealth. That may be a factor.
The “current crop of billionaire oligarchs” doesn’t have inherited wealth. And the combination of equal inheritance and the ceaseless creative destruction of capitalism has worked to destroy dynastic wealth in America. There are still Winthrops and Adamses, Lees and Polks, Astors and Vanderbilts, but none of them are billionaires and many are not wealthy at all. It’s nothing like the antiquity of the Claudii or the Cornelii. I can think of a few exceptions–though they are only multimillionaires–like the Sulzbergers and the Mellons, and they often do think of themselves as entrusted with a degree of social responsibility.
“It feels like this is something ancient societies can teach us about how to manage otherwise-unmanageable wealth for societal good.”
Our society does quite a good job at incentivizing the wealthy to give for the public benefit: take a look at the names on your local public library, the dorms at your local college, the wings of your local hospital etc. And there are the less visible programs funded by organizations from the Ford Foundation to the Gates Foundation. These are all public benefits comparable to the things the Roman elite did. (The differences in overall socioeconomic systems would make any direct quantitative comparison impossible, I think.)
I feel like we could do better considering the widening wealth gap…
I’d say it’s worth measuring those contributions relative to both the long term operating costs of those systems and the total wealth of the billionaires, and see if it amounts to more than just buying a plaque to generate good press for themselves.
Because the incentive might just be to generate optics to provide a shallow argument against deeper analysis of whether or not they ought to possess such wealth (or, more directly, good will against cases where actual civil or criminal liability is brought against them).
The assertion that modern society is strongly hostile against capitalism is absurd in the face of the existence of such tremendously wealthy people in the first place. Families from centuries prior aren’t becoming less wealthy by comparison because governments and the world at large are being so mean to rich people, they’re either losing money or being rapidly outpaced by others because the foundations of their wealthy are retrograde (and indeed, being inherited, often assigned to people who don’t really have the capability to improve upon them).
I’d say it’s worth measuring those contributions relative to both the long term operating costs of those systems and the total wealth of the billionaires,
right, if you have a billion dollars you don’t get credit for giving away 50 million of it (or really, even 500 million of it). not from me, at any rate.
Why on earth should we not reward people with what they actually want in order to appease you? What will we get out of YOU in return for this?
“see if it amounts to more than just buying a plaque to generate good press for themselves”
Once again the goalposts move. The original topic was the civic generosity of the Roman elites, and how to get our elites to emulate them. I pointed out that our elites do behave in the same way, and suddenly the issue has dramatically transformed; now it’s whether elite generosity is done with a pure heart and whether it transforms the system, even though there’s no evidence that Roman elites had purer hearts or more transformative force that elites today.
@ey81 Two points. I don’t much care about their motivation for civic-mindedness, nor do I think that’s what Isator Levi was implying. It’s more about relative proportionality. Is the donation commensurate with the wealth they hold? Is it proportionate to that provided by ancient wealthy people? Is it a token gesture, which would have been derided back in the day of Athens as much as it should be derided now?
Secondly, there’s been thousands of years of development in other areas of civic society. I, for one, feel it’s wholly appropriate that we should move some goalposts about this aspect as well (and continue to do so, in the spirit of the betterment of civilised society).
Should we find a way to make the riches 0.1% of the population genuinely care about the poorest, such that their donations *are* coming from a place of genuine care…I see this is a good thing for the betterment of mankind as a whole.
Why stop at the richest 0.1%? Athens targeted a much larger group, about 2.5%. And since we are so much richer than they were we should target a larger group.
Let’s target you.
Should we find a way to make YOU genuinely care about the poorest, such that your donations *are* coming from a place of genuine care? I see this is a good thing for the betterment of mankind as a whole.
@Mary Catelli Not sure if you were replying to me, but in case you were.
“Why stop at the richest 0.1%? Athens targeted a much larger group, about 2.5%. And since we are so much richer than they were we should target a larger group.”
Sounds good to me.
“Let’s target you.”
Please do. I work as a commissioner for NHS children’s mental health services, and have dedicated my working career to improving the lot of some really thoroughly disadvantaged people (at considerable impact to the amount of wealth that I have personally been able to generate for myself compared to what I could be earning in a similar position in the private sector).
I also give a credible (though by no means a majority) of my earnings to charities I personally believe are doing good work.
I personally feel like I’m doing my part, so to speak, though you could certainly make the argument that I could do more. I’m not perfect. Perfection is not what I’m advocating for. Just better.
For complete transparency, I’m in the top 18% of earners in the UK (I believe those stats are of yearly taxable income, so exclude a significant proportion of the super-wealthy whose wealth sits in non-taxable sources, but I am by no means poor myself). If you want to start that rate of ‘people who should pay more’ slap bang where I am…go ahead. I have seen firsthand the truly crap lives people are living way down at the bottom end of that scale. I’d much prefer it if they didn’t.
In fact, I am payed pretty much exactly at the point the higher rate of tax is applied in the UK. I am perfectly happy to pay it should I be given a pay rise. I am perfectly happy if the top rate is lowered so more of my earnings sit within it (and have consistently voted for political parties I believe are most likely to do so). Though I would prefer to do that *and* attempt to make the super rich pull more weight as well (considering they will feel the impact less, and the amount of revenue raised is larger).
I’m not saying all of this stuff as virtue signalling. I’m saying it to explain my position as someone who would very much rather a bit more wealth is distributed more fairly, explain why I hold that position (personal experience and scientific evidence of the negative impacts of wealth inequality), and attempt to demonstrate that I’m not just some empty hypocrite who is calling for this sort of change but won’t stomach it themselves.
You’re working for a government bureaucracy with a history of mounting armed guards at the deathbed of a dying child to forcibly prevent anyone else’s trying to save his life or even look at his condition.
Also you have stated literally nothing of what you DO.
If you say so Mary.
It was in all the papers, Ynneadwraith. There’s no use denying it.
@Mary I’m not denying it.
I’m questioning your conclusion that a single questionable action negates the social good delivered by completely separate arms of the same organisation. Perhaps it’s your opinion that it outweighs that social good, similar to my argument about Amazon below. It’s fine that you hold that opinion. But I’m not engaging with it because I think it’s a bonkers assessment to make, and I don’t want to get stuck into the mire of batting back and forth with it. We’ve done enough of that already.
I’m also questioning the statement that in all of what I’ve written I haven’t articulated what I actually do. It seems like you’re using a definition of ‘do’ that excludes actions undertaken through employment, charitable donations, voting history, and deliberate decisions to curtail my own personal gain in pursuit of delivering something that I believe does the world good. Suffice to say that is a very strange usage of the word ‘do’, to the point that it feels like the beginning of a bad faith argument, and I don’t particularly feel like getting into it.
Unless it’s a simple lack of understanding about what a children’s mental health commissioner does, in which case that answer is eminently google-able.
Again, you’re free to respond to this, and I will read and consider your reply, but I’ll no longer be responding. This is not an admission that your arguments have persuaded me.
“I’m not denying it.”
You did deny it.
“I’m questioning your conclusion that a single questionable action negates the social good delivered by completely separate arms of the same organisation.”
An organization capable of an act that evil is capable of any amount of evil. Some of it has even leaked out such as refusal to treat the elderly, down to and including refusing them food and water.
Furthermore, it is a branch of the British government. As we can all see, the government has been, for decades, actively aiding and abetting the enslavement and gang rape of minors — giving slaps on the wrist to the perpetrators when absolutely cornered, but actively tracking down and punishing those who merely publicized the crimes. A government capable of that is not entitled to the benefit of the doubt.
All the more in that those who call the shots in the NHS notoriously avail themselves of private medical care.
It’s blatantly loaded, in that it implies other politicians care about the “the correct course of action.”
The thing is, the modern administrative state can just assess people’s wealth by its own power. Modern states also have budgets and expenditures that dwarf even the richest of their citizen’s individual wealth
And, ah, if you’re worried about the disproportionate power of the very wealthy, I suspect multiplying votes based on wealth is unlikely to help.
I’d rather that billionaries didn’t exist, than that we pressured them to contribute voluntarily to the social good. But, considering that we seem to be stuck with them for the time being, I think your suggestion has a lot of merit to it.
i remember once hearing someone, about ten years ago, make an offhand suggestion like that, to the effect of ‘what if, once you reached a certain level of wealth, you could never actually make any more money, but you were guaranteed prestige, social rank, deference, and everything else you wanted for life?’ it’s kind of stuck with me ever since.
Lots of premodern societies had institutions whose purpose was to trade off material wealth for prestige and to dissipate concentrations of wealth- I’m thinking of things like Melanesian communal pig feasts here. The book “Creation of Inequality” is good on this stuff:
https://www.amazon.com/Creation-Inequality-Prehistoric-Ancestors-Monarchy/dp/0674064690
you can’t have a world without billionaires that isn’t impoverished. take amazon. it’s out there making 600 billion in revenue a year. every year, someone gets to decide what to spend that money on. even if you took every share of stock away from bezos, that just means someone will have that authority, power and influence. as long as amazon exists, you can’t make that go away, at best you can move it around. and moving it around, of course, is great work for the movers, who always manage to get their pound of flesh.
the only way to change that is to destroy amazon. and not just amazon, every other large entity. and that means giving up on huge chunks of modern technology, because you can’t make jet engines or semiconductors with 20 dudes in a garage. even if you could, again, being the guy who gets to decide which companies are too big is very lucrative work, if you can get it.
Very lucrative and dead-weight loss. We get nothing out of it for all the work put in.
I’m puzzled as to what you think the ultra-rich do gain for their last $99 billion other than prestige, social rank, deference etc. Political power? It’s counterbalanced by the political efforts of the multibillionaires on the other side, as George Soros and Tom Steyer fight it out against David Koch and Elon Musk. In the end, it’s not a multibillionaire who ends up as president. Is it ultraluxurious consumption? Jeff Bezos doesn’t live better than a man with $1 billion in the bank, and mostly not better than a man with $100 million. And who cares anyway? So what is the ill you’re trying to prevent?
@formerlycassander “you can’t have a world without billionaires that isn’t impoverished”
I don’t think there’s any evidence that this is the case. We have a sample of 1, and incredible confounding variables that happened alongside the rise of billionnaires and the general growth in wealth of the world in general. Sufficient that it is entirely unclear if billionnaires are even a functioning part of the wealth we’ve created, a disbenefit, a side-effect, or a simple correlation.
I’m not particularly advocating for taking every last share away from Bezos. He started a successful business, and should be rewarded from it. And as you say, now that it’s created, someone needs to run the thing (“need” here is doing a lot of heavy lifting, there’s always the option to just stop having Amazon).
But as @ey81 says so eloquently, what’s the difference (other than dick measuring) between Bezos having 248 billion dollars, and Bezos having 100 billion dollars and giving each and every Amazon worker $95,000 (an utterly transformative amount of money, with tangible measurable impacts on health, social problems, and a host of other life outcomes). Or investing it in providing something else of worth to the people who help actually make him the money (should that wealth not be liquidatable).
Note that I’m not even talking about redistribution of tax here (which is a separate issue, though one I doubt we see eye-to-eye on either). I’m talking about an internal business decision to hoard your profit for precisely zero social impact (if not a net negative one, depending on how exploitative you are of your workforce)…or to deliberately make a decision to benefit more people than just yourself.
This is what I mean when I talk about social value.
Why should we take the money from him and give it to you? He’s running the business. You’re doing nothing.
@Ynneadwraith
> I don’t think there’s any evidence that this is the case.
you can’t have a organizations the size of amazon and not have billionaires. Or, rather, you can’t have them without people who have the power and influence (and thus money) of billionaires. Because that’s what a billionaire is, a guy who controls a billion dollars or more of stuff. it’s axiomatic.
> But as @ey81 says so eloquently, what’s the difference (other than dick measuring) between Bezos having 248 billion dollars, and Bezos having 100 billion dollars and giving each and every Amazon worker $95,000 (an utterly transformative amount of money, with tangible measurable impacts on health, social problems, and a host of other life outcomes).
Bezos doesn’t have 148 billion dollars lying around. he has 148 billion in amazon stock. if he gave up that stock, he would no longer control the company. someone else would.
> Or investing it in providing something else of worth to the people who help actually make him the money (should that wealth not be liquidatable).
he has invested it, in amazon. and by doing so, he’s provides millions with jobs and given millions more goods cheaper/faster/better than they would get elsewhere. that’s a tremendous amount of social value you don’t seem to be counting. and amazon famously doesn’t take large profits or pay a dividend, but reinvests almost everything into the company.
> Note that I’m not even talking about redistribution of tax here (which is a separate issue, though one I doubt we see eye-to-eye on either).
I’m not talking about redistribution either. I’m saying that if you have large companies, you have people controlling where they spend their money. and that control will effectively make you a billionaire regardless of how much money is in their bank account. the only alternative is not having large organizations, which is not really an alternative.
> I’m talking about an internal business decision to hoard your profit for precisely zero social impact
again, FAR from 0 social impact. amazon has huge positive impact, that’s why it makes money. millions of people get good from them instead of alternatives they deem inferior.
@formerlycassander
“you can’t have a organizations the size of amazon and not have billionaires. Or, rather, you can’t have them without people who have the power and influence (and thus money) of billionaires.”
You can through collective ownership of capital. Works perfectly fine for the decent number of co-operative banks out there. I see no reason why it couldn’t be used to run a company like Amazon.
“Bezos doesn’t have 148 billion dollars lying around. he has 148 billion in amazon stock. if he gave up that stock, he would no longer control the company. someone else would.”
Good. May I suggest the workers of Amazon, who actually produce the lion’s share of the social value by doing the work.
“he has invested it, in amazon. and by doing so, he’s provides millions with jobs and given millions more goods cheaper/faster/better than they would get elsewhere. that’s a tremendous amount of social value you don’t seem to be counting. and amazon famously doesn’t take large profits or pay a dividend, but reinvests almost everything into the company.”
I’m counting it just fine. Considering there are alternative marketplaces that provide something similar enough (affordable good and employment) but don’t have someone with more wealth than Smaug at their head, I don’t weight it as particularly impactful (though I never meant to imply it was zero, just zero or less than zero net).
Considering that Amazon also famously militant in its approach to unionisation, and the majority of its workers famously lack a good number of what I consider to be basic employment rights, and that its owner is famously exceedingly rich, I don’t think the social good provided is equal to the social harm. Hence a net social harm.
I would have a lot more time for them as a company should they choose to invest even a little more in the people who work for the company, rather than the company itself.
“I’m not talking about redistribution either.”
You briefly mentioned it here, so I thought I’d head that off:
“at best you can move it around. and moving it around, of course, is great work for the movers”
“the only alternative is not having large organizations, which is not really an alternative.”
See my point above about collective ownership. This could even be done in a way that ensures Bezos keeps a commanding stake in the company.
“amazon has huge positive impact, that’s why it makes money.”
Amazon has huge positive impact *and* huge negative impact (aforementioned treatment of workers when it would be extremely easy to take less profit and remove that as an issue). As I’ve mentioned earlier, this sets an example to other business owners about how much it is possible to squeeze your workers for personal gain so the negative impact ripples beyond just Amazon as a company. It’s a race to the bottom, and the way it ends is with even worse wealth inequality which has numerous provable negative health and social effects.
That’s not even touching on things like the lobbying Amazon has done across multiple nations attempting to degrade things like consumer privacy protections. These are not things that are in the public interest, but they are very much in the interest of Bezos making more money (which he categorically does not need). Or the wilful drive towards monopoly, which we know turns what social good a large company does provide into harm as more opportunity is taken to gouge profit from a captive market.
These are things that are inherent in any large company, but the bigger and more powerful the company, and the more they lean into profit generation over making *enough* profit and using the rest to maximise their potential for social good, the worse their balance becomes.
It’s my opinion (and it is an opinion), that the ‘social good’ balance of a company stops way, way below where Amazon is as a company, and where Bezos is as a CEO.
“You can through collective ownership of capital.”
You either have control by committee — and everyone knows the effect committees have on control — or control is delegated to one person who effectively controls all of it.
” Works perfectly fine for the decent number of co-operative banks out there. I see no reason why it couldn’t be used to run a company like Amazon.”
Perhaps you should consider the matter further. There are obvious differences, starting with the bank not needing to make rapid adjustments in same way.
@Mary Catelli “Why should we take the money from him and give it to you? He’s running the business. You’re doing nothing.”
How do you know what we’re doing?
I’m not particularly suggesting that he gives it to me (though I am indirectly through tax I suppose, which would be used to fund services I may use). I’m mainly suggesting that he redistribute a significant proportion of his wealth to the people who help generate it (i.e. his workers).
If you wanted to look at it from a whole system perspective, you could make an argument that his consumers are also a part of helping him generate his wealth, thus justifying paying tax that is spent on keeping them healthy and in a good financial state to be buying stuff from Amazon (though considering the former argument barely flies for most folks in the US, I doubt this will go very far).
Really, the answer to “Why should we take the money from him and give it to [someone else]?” is ‘because it has the potential to make the world a much, much better place for a hell of a lot of people, meanwhile he’s unlikely to notice other than losing a place or three on the ‘richest people in the world’ list’.
Though I appreciate that this is pretty much *the* line that modern politics is drawn across, so I don’t much expect that answer to carry us very far.
Really, the answer to “Why should we take the money from him and give it to [someone else]?” is ‘because it has the potential to make the world a much, much better place for a hell of a lot of people, meanwhile he’s unlikely to notice other than losing a place or three on the ‘richest people in the world’ list’.
Burden of proof is on you. Thus far the history of letting people like you take money from whom they please and give to whom they please has evinced no such potential. It has certainly shown it can make the world a much, much, MUCH worse place for a hell of a lot of people, but it has never made it much, much better for anyone.
Also since the people who take the money never do badly out of it, yes, that you’re trying to give to yourself is a reasonable assumption.
> You can through collective ownership of capital. Works perfectly fine for the decent number of co-operative banks out there. I see no reason why it couldn’t be used to run a company like Amazon.
that’s called a publicly traded company. amazon is already one. congrats, you’ve just reinvested shareholder capitalism! there’s still going to be one ceo or chairman, though, and that guy is going to be a billionaire.
> Good. May I suggest the workers of Amazon, who actually produce the lion’s share of the social value by doing the work.
please, show your math on how you calculated that. And be sure to include the fact that amazon already spends 500 billion dollars a year, the vast majority of it on their salaries. Workers DO get a huge share of the value that amazon creates.
>are alternative marketplaces that provide something similar enough (affordable good and employment) but don’t have someone with more wealth than Smaug at their head,
No, there aren’t. amazon is vastly larger than than every other retailer except walmart.
>of what I consider to be basic employment rights
your consideration and an empty sack is worth the sack. Why does you opinion trump theirs?
> , and that its owner is famously exceedingly rich, I don’t think the social good provided is equal to the social harm. Hence a net social harm.
again, please show your math.
> I would have a lot more time for them as a company should they choose to invest even a little more in the people who work for the company, rather than the company itself.
amazon pays hundreds of billions in salaries every year.
“I’m not talking about redistribution either.”
> See my point above about collective ownership. This could even be done in a way that ensures Bezos keeps a commanding stake in the company.
No, it can’t. if bezos, or anyone else, decides what amazon does, he effectively commands billions of dollars and is a billionaire. there is no alterative
“amazon has huge positive impact, that’s why it makes money.”
> Amazon has huge positive impact *and* huge negative impact (aforementioned treatment of workers when it would be extremely easy to take less profit and remove that as an issue).
again, people choose to work there. your opinion that they shouldn’t isn’t more valid than theirs.
@Mary “Thus far the history of letting people like you take money from whom they please and give to whom they please has evinced no such potential. It has certainly shown it can make the world a much, much, MUCH worse place for a hell of a lot of people, but it has never made it much, much better for anyone.”
Do you ever get the impression that someone is living in a completely different world to the one you do?
We already live in a world that uses tax dollars and charitable donations to make the world a much, much better place. I’m asking for little more than a bit more of that. It’s hardly radical.
Believe it or not, there’s a lot of middleground between the current US and the USSR.
As I say though, this is *the* dividing line of modern politics. I doubt we’re going to convince each other.
“We already live in a world that uses tax dollars and charitable donations to make the world a much, much better place.”
That’s wishful thinking. The vast majority of the improvements in human life are caused by the free enterprise that you loathe so much.
As for tax dollars, we have ample evidence of their doing more harm than good in so many situations that the government has no business in, and indeed drawing the government away from its duties when your attitude is applied.
@formerlycassander “that’s called a publicly traded company. amazon is already one. congrats, you’ve just reinvested shareholder capitalism”
Precisely. Absolutely nothing of what I’m asking is in any way radical or new. It’s all stuff that we already do all over the place.
“there’s still going to be one ceo or chairman, though, and that guy is going to be a billionaire.”
There are absolutely tons of large companies whose CEOs or chairmen are not billionnaires, so this statement is false.
“Workers DO get a huge share of the value that amazon creates.”
You seem to be putting words in my mouth fairly frequently and I’m starting to get a little tired of it. At what point did I suggest that Amazon workers don’t get a large share of the value that Amazon creates? They do.
I do not believe they get enough proportionally. Amazon is a phenomenally successful company (as demonstrated by the wealth of its headman). I would like to see that success shared more with the other members of that company, rather than hoarded by its chairman.
“No, there aren’t. amazon is vastly larger than than every other retailer except walmart.”
And why is larger innately better? Amazon’s competitors seem to be able to offer prices comparable to Amazon (one of the two principle social goods that you are suggesting Amazon provides). Meanwhile Amazon’s runaway success risks monopoly, which even hardcore capitalists understand to be a bad thing.
“Why does you opinion trump theirs?”
Again with putting words in my mouth. It doesn’t. I haven’t suggested it does. I’ve laid out my reasoning for why I think my opinion is more reasonable. This is the comments section of a military history blog. I’m hardly trying to influence Amazon corporate policy from here.
“again, please show your math.”
I shan’t because it’s very difficult to quantify, and I’m not spending a masters thesis amount of time doing so in the comments of a military history blog. I suspect this is the same reason why you haven’t proffered your maths for the social benefit that Amazon provides, other than stating that it employs people (as did slave plantations, and we’re fine calling them a bad thing, so simply employing people is not sufficient to call something a social good).
“amazon pays hundreds of billions in salaries every year.”
And it can very much afford to pay a little more, with practically nil impact on its worth as a company or the life experience of its CEO. Choosing not to do this is one of the reasons I have singled out Amazon among the multitude of other companies.
“No, it can’t. if bezos, or anyone else, decides what amazon does, he effectively commands billions of dollars and is a billionaire. there is no alterative”
Gee, I wonder how all the other companies do it. Is there a reason we need one person in charge of it all?
“again, people choose to work there. your opinion that they shouldn’t isn’t more valid than theirs.”
People chose to work in Victorian-era factories. People chose to work mining sulphur without adequate safety equipment. Hell, people chose to sell their children into slavery. People choose to work in all sorts of rubbish places. Just because people choose to work there, does not mean that place is providing a net social good. Especially when it would be enormously easy (as evidenced by the wealth of its CEO) to change their situation for the better.
And you’re putting words in my mouth *again*. At what point have I suggested people shouldn’t work for Amazon? I’d like you to quote it. I suppose right at the start I mentioned there being an alternative that Amazon could just ‘not exist’, but we moved very quickly past that and I haven’t suggested that as a genuine desirable outcome.
Please, this is a civil conversation about a relatively fraught topic. We’ve done well so far to stop it devolving into the typical bad faith arguing against straw men and the like. I’d appreciate a little more care about that.
@formerlycassander Apologies, I mispoke in my reply here:
“And it can very much afford to pay a little more, with practically nil impact on its worth as a company or the life experience of its CEO.”
What that should say is ‘with practically nil impact on its *viability* as a company’.
Deliberately forgoing profits in order to pay your workers better will absolutely devalue the company. This is, in fact, one of the ways I’d propose to avoid having billionnaires whose net worth is primarily in stocks. A company can be any size it can attain, but if it deliberately prioritises delivering social good instead of that eking that last little bit of profit out, those stock will be worth less, the world would be a better place, we wouldn’t have billionnaires, and we could keep many of the benefits that are reaped by having large, complex companies.
There’s arguments to be made that the sheer wealth of billionnaires allows them to invest in starting new ventures that would otherwise not have existed, and there is merit in that. But again, it’s my opinion that this is outweighed by the negative social aspects of having this degree of wealth inequality in the world, and the various ways by which the owners of large companies erode the liberties of the general public (case in point, Amazon’s lobbying for removal of privacy laws).
There’s also arguments to be made that allowing billionnaires encourages growth from people who want to be billionnaires. Again, there’s merit in this. But do we need billionnaires to do this? I strongly suspect just having millionnaires is incentive enough for this sort of grass-roots approach to generating growth and business activity.
“if it deliberately prioritises delivering social good instead of that eking that last little bit of profit out, those stock will be worth less, the world would be a better place, we wouldn’t have billionnaires, and we could keep many of the benefits that are reaped by having large, complex companies.”
Old people will die of hunger.
Perhaps we consider “feeding the old” to be a higher purpose than “catering to what Ynneadwraith likes.”
@Mary “You either have control by committee — and everyone knows the effect committees have on control — or control is delegated to one person who effectively controls all of it.”
And the reason the person controlling it all has to be in an ownership position is…?
There are thousands upon thousands of successful companies whose executive function is an employed salaried role, but whose ownership is diffused through boards of shareholders (as an example). In fact, I suspect this is the norm with large companies.
Again, what I’m proposing is not radical.
I notice that you literally quoted the sentence where I pointed out that ownership was secondary to control and yet you ignore it.
Moot point. The reason why we want him to own stock, and preferably lots of stock, is to avoid an agency-principle problem. What you advocate for is a situation where the CEO literally has no incentive to run it for the good of society or for even the good of the company and its stockholders, but solely and purely for himself. With the added bonus that he can throw the stockholders into the poorhouse on the pretense that he’s acting for the good of society — which can’t sue him for lying about that.
@Mary “What you advocate for is a situation where the CEO literally has no incentive to run it for the good of society or for even the good of the company and its stockholders, but solely and purely for himself. With the added bonus that he can throw the stockholders into the poorhouse on the pretense that he’s acting for the good of society — which can’t sue him for lying about that.”
Funny how that doesn’t happen in the vast majority of companies, who are run this way. It’s almost as if there’s a middle ground somewhere between ‘a single owner has absolute power’ and ‘a diffuse number of shareholders have absolutely zero say in how a company is run’.
Really we’re getting a little off topic though. It’s preferable in my eyes to have diffuse ownership of companies because it spreads the wealth generated over more people (with measurable social and health improvements because of it), even moreso if those stakeholders include the people who work for the company. It’s more preferable in my eyes for companies to be run with less of a blind rush for profit, and more of a consideration for delivering positive social impacts. This can be achieved regardless of how the ownership of a company is organised, through adopting social mores that drive it (which was my original suggestion right at the start).
“I notice that you literally quoted the sentence where I pointed out that ownership was secondary to control and yet you ignore it.”
Apologies, I had a paragraph addressing that but I deleted it as it didn’t flow well with the other paragraphs, and forgot to add it back in at the end.
Control alone does not make one a billionaire. Heads of State control vastly more resources than heads of industry, yet we don’t conceptualise that control as ownership…and thus don’t conceptualise them as billionaires.
Salaried CEOs often control similar amounts of wealth as Bezos, yet we don’t conceptualise that control as ownership…and thus don’t conceptualise them as billionaires.
It’s not control I have an issue with, it’s ownership, and thus who benefits disproportionately from profits. Though I’ll concede that ‘disproportionately’ is likely an opinion on both sides of the argument, thus how it’s a tricky thing to resolve.
As I have said a number of times, this is *the* political debate of modern times. I’m not surprised that we hold different opinions on how things should be organised.
” It’s preferable in my eyes to have diffuse ownership of companies because it spreads the wealth generated over more people”
We do. The pension funds.
And you are arguing about of both sides of your mouth, because you have also literally complained that the wealth goes to the stockholders. You want the wealth to not be spread over more people but spent by the CEO in the name of society. Presumably without the authority of the stockholders to call him to heel.
@Mary “We do. The pension funds.”
And the reason we can’t do a bit more of that is…
And the reason this is the only way to achieve that is…
“And you are arguing about of both sides of your mouth, because you have also literally complained that the wealth goes to the stockholders. You want the wealth to not be spread over more people but spent by the CEO in the name of society. Presumably without the authority of the stockholders to call him to heel.”
What about ‘Option A would be preferable but option B would be more preferable’ did I not articulate properly? From where I’m sitting it was fairly clear.
“You want the wealth to not be spread over more people but spent by the CEO in the name of society.”
I’ve already stated that having distributed ownership is preferable, but that either option works fine for wealth distribution. I don’t care if $100 extra is given by 1 person, or $10 is given by 10 people. Makes no difference. Here, I’ll quote it for you:
“[Delivering more social good instead of profit] can be achieved regardless of how the ownership of a company is organised, through adopting social mores that drive it.”
“Presumably without the authority of the stockholders to call him to heel.”
I’m starting to wonder if you’ve actually read my comment because I addressed this directly, so the assumption you’ve made here is puzzling. I’ll quote the paragraph:
“It’s almost as if there’s a middle ground somewhere between ‘a single owner has absolute power’ and ‘a diffuse number of shareholders have absolutely zero say in how a company is run’.”
Admittedly it may not have been as clear as I could have put it. To sum up both points as clearly as I can make them:
I think that it is preferable to have diffuse ownership that has a reasonable amount of say in what a salaried CEO does with the company than having ownership by a single billionaire.
I think it is more preferable than this to have stronger social mores that encourage companies (regardless of their ownership structure) to deliver more social good instead of raw profit (through whichever mechanism is preferable, I don’t overly care).
These are two separate, though interrelated, arguments. It may well be easier to leverage a single owner/CEO to deliver more social good instead of profit (simply because it’s easier to influence a single person than it is to influence multiple people). In which case, fine. I don’t care that much about diffusion of ownership. I care more about delivering more social good. Hence why I stated it was ‘more preferable’.
“What about ‘Option A would be preferable but option B would be more preferable’ did I not articulate properly? From where I’m sitting it was fairly clear.”
The point where you said it about stockholders? Your only option that you declared more preferable was that billionaires “not exist.”
“I think it is more preferable than this to have stronger social mores that encourage companies (regardless of their ownership structure) to deliver more social good instead of raw profit (through whichever mechanism is preferable, I don’t overly care).”
“Social mores” is a horrible way to do such a thing, since it subjects the matter to the judgment of those not in a particularly good position to judge, even if they greatly cared, which they wouldn’t.
In particular, it’s an excellent way for sociopaths to exploit both for their own good and for the detriment of others, both those whose injury benefits them and that of society in general. It’s not like they are bad at that in general, but putting them in charge of a company and then forcing an agent-principle problem on the situation by refusing to let them own shares and so suffer the consequences of their actions is actively aggravating it.
@ynneadwraith
> There’s arguments to be made that the sheer wealth of billionnaires allows them to invest in starting new ventures that would otherwise not have existed, and there is merit in that.
There isn’t; capital isn’t really more than the ability to incentivize people to labour for you when they’re otherwise uninterested in doing so. In a society that’s more like the one you (and I) envisage, the difference between not working and working is smaller, so the ability to “start good new ventures” ought to gravitate to the people with good ideas, not the people who already have money. To the extent that the people with good ideas are the ones with money (axiomatic to your interlocutors, more debatable to us) there is no difference.
“the difference between not working and working is smaller, ”
How so?
@R. C. James Harlow Sounds sensible to me!
> In a world of billionnaires that are very capable and willing of avoiding practically any and all taxes levied upon them
Given sufficient motivation western governments are able to crack down on Russian oligarchs who had the backing of an entire nation in their money laundering efforts. Cracking down on evasion by our own billionaires who do not have a nation aiding their money laundering efforts is a problem of political will not technocratic difficulty.
“Cracking down on evasion by our own billionaires who do not have a nation aiding their money laundering efforts is a problem of political will not technocratic difficulty.”
Absolutely, 100% agree.
“own billionaires who do not have a nation aiding their money laundering efforts”
I would argue that our nations are the ones aiding their money-laundering efforts, precisely by leaving open loopholes that allow them to continue.
There’s the challenge of closing all the loopholes at the same time so you don’t suddenly have every single billionaire operating out of San Marino, but that’s a challenge of international organisation and political will. Surmountable, should we want to enough.
Political will? How about awareness of consequences? You will give them new and powerful reasons to evade your taxes even if by the simple expedient of not earning money.
About census evasion…
Rome DID have punishments for census evasion. These were harsh if convicted. A census evader, “incensus”, could have his property confiscated and sold for the state, AND be himself sold as a slave.
A question was, how likely was a censor to spot census evaders. Well, he did not have a large police apparatus – but there were neighbours and enemies. If someone reported a Roman as incensus and prosecuted him… It actually happened. One of Cicero´s cases was precisely of a citizen prosecuted for missing a census. Cicero argued that his client had missed census with sufficient excuse – being in active service during census was acceptable excuse – but for a poor Roman freeholder who could not afford to hire Cicero for his defence, what were the chances of getting sold as a slave for missing census? In quite another speech, Cicero quotes incensus as example of someone rightfully enslaved.
I realized something about the Roman agriculture…
How common or rare in Italy were personally free tenants?
I recall Plinius the Younger discussing a landed estate he was, don´t recall if considering to buy or had just bought, where there had been a management mistake. The land was rented to tenants, who fell into arrears of rent. The landowner or his manager… foreclosed on tenants´ available property. Except it was the oxen needed to work the land. Which made the tenants even less capable of paying the rent.
This clearly refers to personally free tenants, who owned the oxen but not the land.
Another point to notice:
Roman census classes were clearly defined in terms of capital value of property. So and so many sesterces. NOT so and so many pounds per year, as the English would do from 11th to at least 19th century.
But this means that Roman tax and military obligations lay on capital – income was tax-free. Someone who rented rather than owned the land he worked on could, even if prosperous, correctly declare that he was poor – the land wasn´t his, and his tools were a small fraction of the land value.
It might have mattered less if the burdens of capital had been proportional – if the landlord had to pay the same tax than his tenants would have owed if they had owned the land, then the landlord would have to shift his tax to tenants by including it in their rent.
But after 168 BC, Romans in Italy were free of tax (tributum). The one remaining service they owed was personal military service.
And that was not proportional. It was heavily regressive.
In early Republic, there had been private armies, like the 300 Fabii who fought a private war. Not in middle Republic. No private armies. If someone who owned (and reported) HS 100 000 capital was liable to report to service as one legionary in heavy armour, then someone who owned HS 1 000 000 capital was NOT required (or allowed) to personally hire and arm 9 private soldiers and report to service as the officer of his own retinue – at most he was liable to be made knight and serve as 1 cavalryman.
Which means that if a Roman village in 219 BC had, say, 20 peasant freeholders owning HS 50 000 mainly land each and 1 richer citizen owning HS 200 000 – thus owing the service of 20 third class citizens equipped well enough for a legion, and 1 first class citizen, total 21 infantryman – then the same village in 133 might have 1 landowner owning HS 1 000 000 worth land and 20 tenants who reported HS 10 000 (residence, tools…) and correctly claimed to be proletarians. Just 1 horseman owed.
Now, does archaeology distinguish between a freeholder and a prosperous tenant?
As for villas: a landowner who rented his land to free tenants rather than operate it with gangs of slaves like Cato did not need a villa. He could rely on his tenants or managers bringing their rents to his urban residence, with only brief visits to supervise.
Also: since Romans taxed capital not income, if the economic growth in Rome included increasing share of manufacturers/artisans (in towns and countryside) then as long as the artisans chose to keep their capital down, rent not own their workshops… they were also tax-free.
this is a very good comment and it’s a shame it’s so far down. next time you decide to be insightful you should do it more promptly!
Was the association with Mancinus and his defeat that big of a deal? I’m sure it soured Tiberius reputation, but if his supposed motive was fixing his political prospects most of the stuff he did seems rather counterproductive.
The civil govt of Rome wasn’t just about getting elected every year. Each higher rank had fewer and fewer positions to be elected to, so it acts as a weeding out system as well. T. Gracchus must have seen the possibility that he’d be “stuck” at the level he was at for a few years and didn’t want to wait that long.
>a gesture indicating he was embarking, in his office as Pontifex Maximus, on a religious ritual (in this case a ritual murder)
I’m curious, is this like, an official listed power that the Pontifex Maximus has (state executioner or something)? Or is it more “as high priest, I’m declaring that the Gods will support me in this”?
Like, it just seems super weird to describe gathering a mob of your supporters to beat someone to death as a “religious ritual.”
that’s the joy of being the roman senate. everything you do is a religious ritual!
> In any case, with Octavius removed, Tiberius passes his land reform bill. The law provided for a three-man commission to handle the assessment of what public land was held in excess and then to hand it out. Tiberius Gracchus names as those commissioners himself, his brother and his father-in-law (Appius Claudius Pulcher (cos. 143)). Needless to say, that is a set of commissioners which does not inspire a lot of confidence that the commission will be uncorrupted by politics, a point we’ll get back to in just a moment.
So, it seems like I’m going to be the first to ask what appears to be an obvious question. How did it not occur to the Romans to prohibit this kind of nepotism in some formal way? And for that matter, how many preindustrial societies did in fact formally move against it – if any actually did? Granted, such prohibitions would not be practical when the population size is too low, but surely Rome and other major societies would have passed that threshold soon enough?
The term “nepotism” comes to us from the medieval church. The reason the term derives from that late is that it was the first time when nepotism was seen as corruption rather than just bad luck when it went against you. Of course you did good things for your family members.
The term “nepotism” comes to us from the medieval church.
That would make sense of the etymology- since bishops were celibate, they couldn’t pass their office to their children, so your nephew was the next most plausible candidate. In the Assyrian Church uncle-to-nephew inheritance of bishoprics was quite common, I think. In 1920 a 12 year old boy was ordained as head of the church to succeed his uncle.
> How did it not occur to the Romans to prohibit this kind of nepotism in some formal way
Because informal norms overwhelmingly ran their political system. Even the word Republic is referring to informal norms; ‘re publica’ is literally “thing of the public” which is an extremely vague term compared to something like “democracy” (greek for rule of the people) or “civitas popularis” (latin for city of popular vote)
Also, the Romans saw patronage as a good thing so asking why they dont prevent nepotism is a bit like asking why Americans dont make political parties illegal to prevent criminals from getting elected.
“Also, the Romans saw patronage as a good thing so asking why they dont prevent nepotism is a bit like asking why Americans dont make political parties illegal to prevent criminals from getting elected.”
Or, as it would appear from the conversation above, asking (I’m assuming) Americans to countenance a company deliberately making *just a little bit less profit* in order to benefit their workers, or god forbid the general public…
“Or, as it would appear from the conversation above, asking (I’m assuming) Americans to countenance a company deliberately making *just a little bit less profit* in order to benefit their workers, or god forbid the general public…”
Ynneadwraith, you are literally asking us to snatch food out from the mouths of the poor. You do realize that you are saying that cutting pensions is a benefit to the general public?
“Ynneadwraith, you are literally asking us to snatch food out from the mouths of the poor. You do realize that you are saying that cutting pensions is a benefit to the general public?”
That’s an almighty leap of logic. Care to break it down for me?
Yes I am aware that pensions are driven by the concept of unlimited economic growth.
Perhaps, again, there is a middle ground between ‘we have to deliver unlimited economic growth to feed the elderly’ and ‘let’s let the elderly starve’. Possibly something like delivering some of the profits of successful economic ventures to provide food for the elderly.
You know, the thing I’ve been advocating for since the start. The thing that we already do some of through mechanisms like tax.
Nothing that I’m saying is radical. It’s all stuff that we already do, and could stand to do more of to make the world a better place, with practically nil impact on the viability of companies or the life experience of their owners.
Your seeming unwillingness to conceptualise of a society between ‘how the US is run at this very moment’ and ‘utter societal ruin’ is an interesting one, considering that there are many, many successful countries run in exactly this middle ground now.
But you are completely unaware that pension funds are literally invested in stocks? That what you advocate for here — delivering some of the profits of successful economic ventures to provide food for the elderly — is ALREADY IN PLACE and you are advocating HAMPERING IT?
You are proposing to snatch food from the mouths of the poor, and you DIDN’T BOTHER TO NOTICE.
“The thing that we already do some of through mechanisms like tax.”
For completeness, this should read ‘through mechanisms like tax and charitable donations’.
No, because then your side gets into a snit about not having any say over what people give to charities. We have in this very thread people whining about billionaires who have given scads to charities on the grounds that it doesn’t count.
“No, because then your side gets into a snit about not having any say over what people give to charities.”
My side? Sorry, I wasn’t aware I was arguing from a ‘side’. I was simply proffering my thoughts on a social and economic issue, and then replying to the points raised by yourself and FormerlyCassander. Your conceptualisation of it as a partisan division of arguments is enlightening.
For reference, I don’t care which charities they give to provided they can evidence they’re not shell-charities designed simply to hide wealth from the tax man. If you want to define that as ‘my side getting in a snit about which charities get funded’ go ahead.
“We have in this very thread people whining about billionaires who have given scads to charities on the grounds that it doesn’t count.”
Please stop putting arguments in my mouth when I have been very careful to articulate them. I do not think that the money given to charities does not count. I do think that it doesn’t outweigh the social harm they create. I’ll quote the start of the paragraph as it’s too long to quote the whole thing, but will enable you to search for it:
“Amazon has huge positive impact *and* huge negative impact”
Look, this discussion is at risk of getting acrimonious. You’re normally very good at identifying logical errors like straw man arguments Mary, so something in this discussion feels like it’s getting to you.
I’m going to do us both a favour and stop responding to these comments. This is not an admission that I have conceded my arguments. I have not found any of the arguments proffered by yourself or FormerlyCassander particularly persuasive, though I have found it to be a helpful discussion nonetheless.
You’re free to respond to this comment, or my final comment in the other thread as you wish. I’m not attempting to silence you, or cut the argument short when I’ve had the last say, or anything like that. I will read any comments you make, and consider them, but will not be responding to them.
“Look, this discussion is at risk of getting acrimonious. You’re normally very good at identifying logical errors like straw man arguments Mary, so something in this discussion feels like it’s getting to you.”
Ad hominem.
Amazing how many people resort to claiming I’m angry to cut off discussion.
“I don’t care which charities they give to provided they can evidence they’re not shell-charities designed simply to hide wealth from the tax man.”
That’s a definite snit. The high frequency of such blatant shells getting a pass when the people have the left politics makes it a non-starter.
“We have in this very thread people whining about billionaires who have given scads to charities on the grounds that it doesn’t count.”
Please stop putting arguments in my mouth when I have been very careful to articulate them. I do not think that the money given to charities does not count.
THEY do. They have said so in this very thread.
You must give some reason why people should care what you think and not what they think to make your system work. Those whining people are part of the situation, and part that you must deal with.
@Mary I’m not stating that you’re angry (again, putting words in my mouth). I’m stating that you’re making logical mistakes you don’t usually make (numerous straw man arguments), and not reading my comments such that I have to quote them back to you. I’m finding this bad faith approach to discussion tiresome.
It’s not ad hominem because I’m not using personal attacks to discredit your arguments, I’m using it to justify why me personally will no longer be engaging with them. You can carry on making them as much as you like, and anyone reading them (myself included) can take them on merit.
If you want to define that as ad hominem, be my guest, but I’ve got better things to do with my time.
That’s enough for me. Have a good afternoon Mary.
” something in this discussion feels like it’s getting to you.”
vs.
“I’m not stating that you’re angry (again, putting words in my mouth).”
Pick one.
“I’m using it to justify why me personally will no longer be engaging with them”
Too late!
“getting to you” =/= “angry”. That’s your own insertion.
“Too late!”
You’ve got me there. See you around Mary.
“Getting to you” does indeed mean angry.
Sigh, no it does not. It implies “something” is up but is agnostic as to what the cause is. I simply noted the presence of ‘something’ and you helpfully filled the blank in with the suggestion of ‘anger’. At least, that’s my assumption. You’re free to deny it.
Though if it is a repeated occurrence as you say, perhaps some personal reflection might do you some good.
Now really, I am leaving. See you around.
“Sigh, no it does not.”
Yes, it does.
One notes that base insinuations and then getting indignant when called on them, on the grounds that you hadn’t stated what you clearly meant, is a particularly vicious form of the social pressure you are advocating for, and does not do the good you impute to it
Apologies if that’s how it came across, that’s not what I intended, nor how I understand that phrase.
Please replace for ‘something is up’, or a phrase of your choosing that means the same thing, and let’s move on.
“Something is up” means the same thing.
I dont generally like comparisons between the breakdown of Roman and American institutions but I think it’s interesting to see the parallels between the way that T. Grachus and contemporary American politicians are viewed as “populist” without regards to intersectionality.
A poor socii male probably would not be happy to see the rich socii who provides him with wage labor and sharecropping opportunities get replaced with a small holder who needs neither. Both socii and roman women are probably going through a rough time that Grachus doesn’t address. All the men being away for war or dead means more employment opportunities and self determination for women so it’s no wonder women could politically mass mobalize in 193. The decades since those gains would be rolled back and now Grachus is solidifying those positions. And an enslaved person isn’t exactly doing great as chattle on latifunda but would probably do even worse if suddenly the socii all sell their slaves (breaking up families and communities) and there is a slave market glut (less incentive to care for them). So it’s a “populist” position that is extremely unconcerned with consequences for anyone who wasn’t a male of the in-group.
Which perfectly mimics the misuse of the term “populist” today. Trump is “populist” for rolling back lgbt+ rights and wanting to deport immigrants, two groups that are financially worse off then the average voter. Opposing TPP was “populist” despite it offering unprecedented incentives for developing countries to improve labor rights because the poor non voters dont count. Anti-feminism in Korea is “populist” despite women being a majority of the population and the country desperately needing to stop holding them back. Getting the Amazon HQ in NYC (gainfully employing the middle class) replaced with a casino (preying on the poor) is populist (I guess Biff Tannen from Back to the Future 2 was a populist!)
Yet these reflexive failures of intersectionality persist, even in the academia supposedly overrun with critical race and gender studies. It really shows why critical race and gender studies are needed.
> All the men being away for war or dead means more employment opportunities and self determination for women
But this was an era with fewer men being away for war or dead; hence the city being full of poor men.
“So it’s a “populist” position that is extremely unconcerned with consequences for anyone who wasn’t a male of the in-group.”
This feels like something that pops up so frequently with populist movements that I suspect it’s a feature not a bug.
My understanding of the definition of populism is something along the lines of ‘do what’s politically popular enough to maintain your power regardless of whether it is the correct course of action or not’. The bit about ‘popular enough to maintain your power’ is a key aspect, as it’s not necessarily ‘popular with the majority’ but often means ‘popular with the people who you need to vote for you’.
Perhaps that’s a misunderstanding of the term ‘populist’, but it seems to be one with a good amount of descriptive power.
Yeah, this sounds really scary. It’s a good thing it’s all in the past, and in the modern day a powerful but limited figure would never win popular support with promises to use stupid solutions to fix problems that don’t really exist, exploit traditional immunity from prosecution to use violence against legitimate political opponents, illegally create powerful new offices to staff with loyal cronies, and in so doing destabilize the most powerful single polity in the world.
Can you imagine? That would suck
Another thing that I imagine tied into the increased census dodging was that the wars had been moving further away from Rome for centuries. In the Punic Wars, the Samnite Wars, and the Pyrrhic Wars, Rome itself (and its socii) were directly under threat. It’s a lot easier to get soldiers willing to go to war and risk death when their mother city (and very possibly their own family homestead) is under threat of destruction. But for the past century+, Rome has been fighting wars of conquest, a long way away from Italy. Rome itself hasn’t been under threat in living memory. And as a result, Roman assidui are beginning to say “What’s the point of going to fight a war on the other end of the Mediterranean, against people who probably are no threat to us? Why am I risking my life fighting these people, when I should be at home working my land and making sure my family is fed?”