A lot is made in the press, recently, about social and economic classes and the inequities that exist between them. You know, the “haves” and the “have-nots”. The “99%” and the “1%”. And on, and on, and on. Heck, the idea of class struggle—class warfare, as it was defined—spawned the very concept of communism itself. And while we instinctively know that the concept of class struggle is not new, we sometimes forget what a long history this facet of human behavior really has.
Our modern world exists within a paradigm of three classes; the upper, the lower, and the middle. Fairly nondescript terms, sociologists are clearly not the most imaginative of people! But a similar paradigm existed in Ancient Rome during the period that great civilization was ruled by a republican form of government. Rome had an aristocratic Patrician class, a pedestrian Plebeian class, and between them—but generally with much more money than we would associate with today’s “middle class”—was the Equestrian class. Of course we shouldn’t forget that Rome had a slave population as well, one which increased dramatically in the years before the empire was established by Octavian (Augustus Caesar) in 27 BC.
To talk about Roman classes requires inevitably that we start with the Plebeian class, if for no other reason than these folks made up some 95 percent of the population and spanned the widest possible range of social and economic influence. The Plebeians, or Plebs for short, as a class of citizen covered a range of humanity from the lowest gangster skulking in the shadows to—from 367 BC onward, at least—one of the two Consuls standing the preeminent post within the Senate itself.
The ranks of Roman legions were filled by the Plebeian class—no surprise there. But up until Gaius Marius reformed the army in 107 BC, ownership of property was a prerequisite for enlistment. This seems counter-intuitive, perhaps, but was true nonetheless, the idea being that land-owners had a vested interest in seeing the state survive and thus would fight harder to protect it. The lower class citizenry, it may be implied, had no land of their own and so could potentially be bought off by an enterprising enemy, allowing them to take their liquid assets and simply move away. But land-owners … they had ties to their community and so would, logically, fight harder to defend it.
So goes the theory, at least. But for the Plebeian class, especially the small farmers that filled out Republican Roman legions, the more time they spent under arms—under the standard, as it was—the less time they spent working and improving their lands. With the increased, extended warfare of the Punic Wars (246 - 146 BC), these men were away from their holdings and families for ever-longer periods of time, and the homesteads were not doing well in their absence.
The longer Rome’s conflicts lasted then—and the greater need to post military garrisons in far-away places after those wars were won—the longer its Plebeian farmer/soldiers were away from home. Simply put, the farms were failing. Many Roman soldiers returned from a successful campaign only to find their home seized and their family enslaved in order to pay mounting debts. It doesn’t take a genius to imagine the consternation this caused, especially since the only people with the money to buy these forfeited lands were in the upper two classes.
Thus when you read of an enduring and growing dissatisfaction amongst the Plebs, understand there’s a pretty good reason for such discontent beyond simple wealth disparity. The apparent wages for defending their state, for facing the horrors of war and gruesome death on a far-off battlefield, was the forfeiture of their ancestral homes and enslavement of those they held dear.
To make matters worse, having lost their lands and homes, returning Roman soldiers needed to find jobs to survive. But their very success on the battlefield had led to the enslavement of incredible numbers of human beings, and all roads led to Rome. You can almost feel the intense frustration these men must have experienced upon their homecoming, and thus understand why, perhaps, the Plebeian class was increasingly ready to fight their social and economic superiors.
At the other end of the spectrum, of course, lay the Patrician class. Those haughty, entitled individuals virtually monopolized the Roman government, and seem to have been born with an arrogance that would shock even the richest of families today.
Romans put great stock in the value of aristocratic blood and so laws were in place for much of the Republican Era that prohibited marriage between a Patrician and a Pleb. Patricians didn’t necessarily need to be rich, though their economic status was generally maintained through the ownership of land. Their status within society was measured more by the accumulation of political power, in the form of position within the government and/or accrued favors. These favors were sometimes granted to other Patricians, but largely were extended to members of the Plebeian class as these were most in need. A single Patrician family might have hundreds or thousands of supporters they could call upon in an “emergency”.
This created the existence of small, informal “armies” of Plebs that could carry out the wishes of the Patrician class and, to a certain extent, this set a precedent for what would follow. Once Marius eliminated the property clause for enlistment, the legionaries owed their allegiance to individual Patricians instead of to the state. Since Republican Rome’s senators were also its military leaders, this seemingly minor adjustment in recruiting policy placed large armies of well-trained and combat-tested men in the hands of ambitious politicians with entirely predictable results.
Because of the need to secure government position—usually through democratic-looking elections—an ambitious Patrician was constantly looking toward his next electoral campaign, and those cost money. In fact, the longer Rome’s system of government lasted, with its two Consuls acting sometimes like a bi-polar head of state, the more corrupt the electoral system became. Thus when Gaius Julius Caesar, of all people, ran for the office of Pontifex Maximus in 63 BC and then Praetor the following year, he went deep into debt to do so. This resulted in his being forbidden by his creditors from leaving the city in order to take governorship in Spain. Julius Caesar! You feel like reaching into history and screaming, “Do you know who this guy is?!?” And yet this was not terribly abnormal at the time.
With a system like this in place, and a palpable need fostered in them from childhood to achieve ever-greater fame and power for one’s family, it’s easy to understand how Roman Patricians became the power-lusting, trample-anyone-who-stands-in-their-way government officials they often appear in ancient writings. It also made great fodder, I don’t mind saying, for my upcoming novel “Q.Fulvius” as the constant tension among these upper class Romans makes for a never-ending supply of smile-to-your-face, stab-you-in-the-back drama worthy of the very best (or worst?) of reality TV shows!
And let’s not forget the “middle” class, the Roman Equestrians. You can’t really think of them in terms of the modern middle class as these families were rich. Think in terms of the venture capitalist, the tax collector, the wine merchant, the slave trader. This was really the big business class of Rome, and unlike the aristocratic Patricians, they maintained liquid assets and weren’t afraid to invest them.
While money creates political power—the link between politics and corruption being fairly ubiquitous throughout human history, it seems—according to Livy this class of Roman citizen despised the never-ending politicking of the Patricians and pursued lives of luxury absent any civic responsibility. Thus this class often, it seems, financed the political careers of ambitious Patricians (a redundant title, perhaps), intertwining them with that hyper-political class. But as the fiscal power over their ostensible betters grew, they began to seek greater influence over the affairs of state.
You see, as armies of soon-to-be penniless Plebeian soldiers conquered ever-greater swaths of foreign land, it was the Equestrian class that would swoop in to exploit these new acquisitions. This meant everything from legitimately buying up new markets to establishing mining concessions to bidding for the right to collect taxes on behalf of the government. These were all Equestrian functions and so for them, war and conflict paid … and paid BIG!!
The inevitable result was the Equestrians began pushing the Senate to conquer this or that wealthy country or people. This, in turn, would lead to Patricians fighting for the right to lead the invading army (advancing their family’s prestige and political influence in the process), the inevitable victory and enslavement of even more foreigners to do the menial labor of Rome, and the driving of more Plebeian farmer/soldiers into destitution, feeding the growing lower-class discontent.
Eventually, Gaius Gracchus, as Tribune of the Plebs, would realize the potential power of the rising Equestrian class and, with promises of greater government access, used them as a weapon against the Patricians in order to secure concessions for the Plebs. A dizzying chain of events, perhaps, but it started to work … and the Patricians took action to protect themselves. Their violent reaction, together with his brother’s murder by the senate eleven years prior, helped to enshrine mass violence as a means to achieve political ends in Republican Rome. The civil wars which followed soon thereafter destroyed the Republic, but were nonetheless a logical consequence.
Economic and social inequality are not new, they’re as old as humanity itself. It is, perhaps, in our nature to seek generational improvement, to leave behind a “better world” for the next generation than the one we inherited. This desire can create tension with those around us as they too seek to improve their lives and those of their children. But the development, and ultimate demise, of the Roman Republic offers a lesson in the danger of unintended consequences, and the need to really understand how potential remedies can cause much greater problems down the line.
This is a lesson not only for our nation’s leaders, but for us, the voting public, as well. We’ve been forewarned by history what happens when we consistently prioritize short-term political gains over well thought-out, longer-term solutions. In a world where, just like for the Roman Patricians, the next election is always just around the corner, I’m afraid we’ve not created the best of conditions for the seeking of long-term fixes to national-level concerns. Significantly contributing to this problem, the attention span of the average voter today is—sadly—much shorter than the time it took to read this belabored post.
M.G. Haynes