Fall Of The Republic

[Gaius Octavius]

From: The Education of Julius Caesar - A Biography, A Reconstruction; Arthur D Kahn; Schocken Books, 1986, p. 87.

 

From a speech Sallust assigns to Macer:

"....Macer chided the commons for expressing gratitude at the recent 'hastily enacted law for the distribution of grain...by which they have valued all your liberties at five pecks [monthly] per man, an allowance actually not much greater than the rations of a prison.' "

" The most profound crisis in the commonwealth, according to Macer, concerned 'the country people, who are cut down in the quarrels of the great and sent to the provinces [as legionaries] as gifts to the magistrates. Thus they fight and conquer for the benefit of a few, but whatever happens, the commons are treated as vanquished.' Dispatched to distant countries for campaigns of indefinite duration, the peasants won booty and hoardes of slaves for their commanders, while their families at home were often driven out of their farmsteads by usurers or powerful neighbors. With their loot aristocrats displaced Italian peasants with slave gangs of peasants transported as captives from frontier lands. (In the decades following upon the Sullan expulsions and resettlements, one half of the rural population of Italy would leave the countryside, their lands appropriated for vineyards, olive groves, orchards and herds of cattle and sheep. It was this momentus social upheaval accompanied, of course, by unimaginable suffering, scarcely alluded to by public figures or historians of the day, that underlay the tensions that would ultimately lead, in Caesar's final years, to the overthrow of the oligarchic Republic.)"

 

Comment: The finely tuned rhetoric of the oligarchs belies the facts of the time. Nonetheless, as it was at one Ending, it was at the last Ending and has ever since been so. One set of aristocrats replaces the prior one. The commons always seem to lose out in the end.

[Favonius Cornelius]

Quite true. I see plenty of that going on right now.

[Ursus]

For the empire to work, I believe the provincial aristocrats had to have some positive incentive to become a part of it. The passing of the old Aristocracy from Rome to encompass a larger segment - first Italy, then the provinces - is nothing to eschew in my book.

 

 

Did the commons lose out? I suppose in some ways. But remember in the late empire a commoner who showed talent in the military could rise quickly in the ranks, and from there to considerable posts in the civilian administration. There were forms of social advancement after the Fall of the Republic - in the form of administrative and military channels rather than the citizens' assembly.