M. Porcius Cato

Actually, were they? Chattel slavery has a high mortality rate even for adults -- seems like this would be a wasteful use of child slaves.

Best I recall, it was sweeping around the farm, carrying things, and light housework. Also seem to recall that there was a special down-filled garment for children of this age so that if they fell over, the pillow-like dress would catch their fall. The point of this labor wasn't really to put them to much production as much as to prepare them for their later responsibilities.

Happy to repost it. I'll look at expanding it to include the other Porcii, but I'm a bit dubious whether the sources will tell us how they're all connected.

Child labor has existed for millenia and has only recently become a scandal of Dickensian proportions. Even as recently as John Locke's day, children began work as early as age 3. If anything were to be unusual about child labor in the Roman world, it would be that we don't see much more evidence of it than this one small footprint.

Thanks Nephele! This is wonderful -- I wonder if there are any connections between the Porcii Catones and other gens-mates. Also (and maybe I missed it in your article), Cato the Elder seemed to think that the Porcii were of Sabine origins, something he was strangely proud of, and also liked to think of M Curius Dentatus as having some sort of family connection. Did you come across anything like that in your sources?

Thanks for the update. Can't wait to read it! I loved both of Harris' Roman novels.

Hooray!

I always wondered about the origin of Drusus, so thanks for another wonderful installment Nephele! (Oh, and happy birthday!)

I think we can agree on two important points. First, when talking about the practice of Roman voting, it's important to clarify exactly when we're talking about because the laws changed over time as did Roman demographics. Second, English common terms (landowners, men of property, etc) do not map neatly onto English translations of Latin legal terms, and this can give rise to another source of confusion and needless argument. Broadly speaking, there were two major classes of voters: assidui (citizens whose wealth--as little as 2 iugera of land in some cases-- sufficed to oblige their service in the legions) and proletarii (citizens whose wealth only obliged their service as rowers in the navy). During the Hannibalic War, it is clear that the assidui vastly outnumbered the proletarii. The best evidence for this comes from Livy (24.11.5-9, 26.35.1-36.12; 36.3.4-6), who reports that the senate in 214 was forced to recruit slaves for rowing duty due to insufficient number of eligible proletarii, suggesting that no more than 20,000 proletarii were serving in that capacity. This figure suggests that the proletarii composed only 10% of the citizenry (see Rosenstein, op. cit.; see also Brunt's estimate of the citizen population being 285,000 at the outset of the Hannibalic War). During the late republic, the number of proletarii may have been greater, though it isn't clear. According to Cicero (admittedly given to exaggeration), a single century of proletarii in the comitia centuriata contained a majority of citizens in the reign of Servius Tullius, a statement which -- if it has any validity at all -- might reflect conditions in his own day. Thus, purely from a demographic perspective, it seems highly unlikely that the rural tribes were dominated by idle rich landlords with the luxury of traveling to Rome to vote--the vast majority of citizens had their own land, were eligible to vote, and had sufficient time to serve in the legions, view triumphs, vote in elections, watch trials like Cicero prosecuting Verres, and otherwise participate in civic life. Moreover, to the extent that rural assidui could not come to Rome, they had plenty of tribesmen living in Rome itself, where they should have been easily able to outvote the very few "rich landlords" who wanted their voices heard too.

Your two ideas--(1) that there was no such thing as a poor landowner and (2) that farming precluded the ability to travel to Rome to vote--simply doesn't jibe with primary sources on Roman farming practices. I can discuss these matters in some detail in another thread; here, I'll simply refer you to an excellent study on the matter, "Rome at War: Farms, Families, and Death in the Middle Republic," by Nate Rosenstein. His study shows that subsistence farming (i.e., by families of poor landowners) was widespread throughout Italy (even during periods when it was thought to have been precluded by the rise of the latifundia), and the labor requirements of subsistence farming (being seasonal and shared by a family) did not conflict with participation in military and political service. Also, please refer back to the article by Ward (quoted above) regarding the enrollment of urban citizens in the rural tribes. The key point is not that urban citizens previously enrolled in urban tribes were permitted to switch; the point is that rural citizens previously enrolled in rural tribes remained in rural tribes even when they moved to the city for good and stopped farming. This is important for understanding politics in the late republic because by that point Rome's population had swelled with citizens enrolled in rural tribes (consider Cicero and Pompey as two vivid examples of many). Thus, in a tribal assembly in the late republic, rural assidui travelling to Rome to vote would have been outnumbered by the faces of their and their friends' urban relatives. In any case, the idea that the rural tribes were dominated by rich landowners simply doesn't receive any support in either the primary or secondary source material.

Leaving aside that Ward is only a secondary source, here's what he writes: At its origin, in the early fifth century B.C.,tribally organized voting was biased in favor of the rural men of property in the more numerous rural tribes. From the beginning, there were only four urban tribes, and the number of rural tribes was always greater. From 495 B.C. to 241 B.C. the number of rural tribes increased from 17 to 31, where it remained fixed thereafter. Therefore, the urban voters, who had only four tribal votes, were always outnumbered by the rural voters, no matter how few voted in each rural tribe. (p.109) ... In the middle Republic, the more numerous but poorer rural voters were at a distinct disadvantage in tribal assemblies. Then, in the late Republic, after an enormous influx of poor rural citizens into the urban center and its environs, where many of them seem to have retained registration in their rural tribes, poor urbanized voters in rural tribes could outweigh both the large and small landowners because they lived in Romewhere they could more easily vote. How easily a small number of urban residents registered in a rural tribe could determine the vote of that tribe is clear from the small percentage of citizens who actually voted. Ramsay MacMullen persuasively arguesthat only 2% of Roman citizens usually voted, which renders any notionof direct democracy nugatory.(p.111) Your summary of this was, "urban voters were easily outnumbered by the rural voters, no matter how few of them voted in each one of the 31 rural tribes, which were always controlled by the rich Landlords." But there is no evidence that the 31 rural tribes were controlled by rich landlords, and there is no claim of it in Ward's article. The closest phrase in Ward is "rural men of property", which should be taken literally -- that is, men who owned property (as opposed to slaves, women, migrant traders, etc) were eligible to vote in the rural tribes. Both in Ward's statement (and as a matter of law attested in primary source material), the rural tribes comprised freeborn small-holders (aka "peasants"), landlords, and--in the late republic--even the urban poor, who -- Ward points out -- could effectively dominate the rural tribes due to the timing and location of the elections, which were held on off-market days (i.e., when rural voters would be expected to come to Rome). Thus, far from supporting the idea that rural landlords dominated the tribal assembly or even their own rural tribes, Ward provides evidence that the opposite was true -- urban voters could enroll in the rural tribes and the timing of elections was biased to favor this urban mob. And, really, why should this come as a surprise? Had rural landowners *actually* controlled the tribal assembly, it would never have been possible to pass the various and sundry leges agrariae--some of which (like the lex Julia agraria de Campania) confiscated the lands of rural voters for the veterans of adventuring generals.

Nobiles ("the known") were the senators whose family-members had climbed the highest rungs of the cursus honorum. How many modern-day nobiles are in the US Senate? After the death of the nobile-st Senator, Ted Kennedy, somebody bothered to publish the results, and the results are good news for New Men like Nixon and Obama: US Senators with family-members in the Senate have never been lower. Check out THIS graph to see the dramatic fall from the 1st Congress to the 101st.

What's the evidence that the rural tribes "were always controlled by the rich Landlords"? Isn't it just another instance of your general supposition that the rich control everything and that the poor people are perpetually downtrodden by them? Is there any thing in the source material that specifically supports this claim?

I was always partial to THIS scene.

How much longer before we get to the Porcii? I can hardly wait!

Lime?

Needs aliens...

Los Angeles City Council is mulling whether to ask Uncle Sam for $ 30 million to sponsor Cirque du Soleil. Perhaps LACC will also adopt Panem et Circensis as the official city motto?

Very interesting. Another point made by the author of Clodius is that Cicero never says 'boo' about the issue -- and he was certainly eager to invent any outrage in the world to lay at Clodius' feet (though, I suppose, Clodia may have been crowding that particular space).

Let's be clear about our terms, shall we? All nobiles were descended from those who had previously attained high-ranking office (e.g., consul or praetor). Did the nobiles form "an almost entirely hereditary aristocracy with almost absolute monopoly of magistratures [sic]"? They certainly did not. Unlike the inherited titles of the ancien regime of France (where whole families were ennobled) or the hereditary peers of England (where only individuals were ennobled), the nobiles of the Roman republic were not granted any magistracy without the vote of the people, and the nobiles had to compete with each other as well as with new men for these votes. With the number of offices strictly limited and the number of nobiles potentially increasing exponentially from the birth of the republic, math dictates that the vast majority of nobiles would never be heard from again, never attaining any magistracy whatever, let alone achieving the rank voted to their ancestors. Thus, unlike the way the House of Lords used to operate, the Roman senate was almost always utterly bereft of the eldest sons of its most illustrious nobiles, often with centuries passing before an old noble name popped up again in the senate. Don't let the Cornelii and Fabii fool you -- for every Cornelius, there was another Larcius, Menenius, Aebutius, and Pinarius shaking his head at the downfall of his family's fortune. Not only were nobiles crowding each other out of the senate, so too were non-nobiles. Between men whose families had never held any senatorial rank whatever (the prototypic new man) and men whose families had contributed consuls (the prototypic nobile), there were men hailing from families whose members had never risen above quaestor, aedile, tribune, and praetor. Between 78-49 BCE, 7 non-nobiles held the consulship (11.5%), 91 non-nobiles held the praetorship (51% of known praetors), 27 non-nobiles held the aedileship (56.25% of known aediles), 80 non-nobiles held the tribuneship (71% of known tribunes), and 154 non-nobiles were ordinary senators (77% of known pedarii). Thus, after Sulla, the majority of magistracies were held by non-nobiles. (Before Sulla, I don't think we have enough names to do a similar statistical analysis, but I'd be happy to be corrected.) Now what kind of hereditary aristocracy is it where the majority of offices aren't even held by the 'aristocrats'?? Now what about the way magistrates earned their living? It's almost certainly true that the majority of them weren't wage-earning manual laborers, but so what? I'm sure the majority of them weren't computer programmers either, which is about as relevant -- the fact is that wage-earning manual labor was not the most common way to make a living. For most of the history of the republic, senators were drawn from property-owners who earned their money in agricultural goods, rents, and the like. Some of these senators (like Cato the Elder) had grown up working in their fields with their family slaves before going off to risk their necks in war. Others, like Cicero, came from families that washed clothes in urine. Maybe farming and piss-washing isn't "blue collar" enough for you, Sylla, because Cato and Cicero had other talents as well (gods forbid!), but the notion that magistracies were inherited by a bunch of soft plutocrats is just wrong.

Yes, but it wasn't a cakewalk for nobiles with money either -- with a name like Licinius and enough money to field an army, Crassus sure got some stiff competition from that provincial named Pompey.

Ave!

For C. Cato's relationships with all the other Catoni, see my Kinsmen of Cato stemma.

Did they? Seems to me that there were plenty of nobiles that--far from being wealthy--were saddled with so much debt that it would take the wealth of a whole nation (*cough* Gaul! *cough*) to pay it off.