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2012-11-11 04:18:13
In the ancient world, the rich held themselves to very different standards from
the poor. Not much has changed, argues classical historian Mary Beard.
Low life in ancient Rome could be very low indeed.
There were gangs of ne'er-do-wells and down-and-outs who spent all night in
cheap bars, drowning their sorrows. Apart from talk about the top chariot
racers (the ancient equivalent of footballers), the only entertainment on offer
was brawling and gambling.
They would sit hunched over their gaming tables, making horrible snorting
sounds through their quivering nostrils.
(The Greeks and Romans seem to have been particularly sensitive to odd nasal
noises. One pundit in the early 2nd Century - the aptly named Dio the Golden
Mouth - gave a whole lecture to the people of the city of Tarsus, urging them
to control their snorting. It must count as one of the most curious works of
ancient literature to have come down to us.)
Needless to say, this picture of the life of the Roman poor as one of
wall-to-wall boozing and gambling does not come from the poor themselves.
I've been quoting, more or less word for word, the description of social
conditions in the capital city of the Roman Empire given by a decidedly
upmarket historian of the 4th Century, Ammianus Marcellinus.
To be fair to Ammianus, he had some pretty sharp things to say about the elite,
too. They're the sort of people who are all over you one day and don't even
recognise you the next, the sort who spend far too much money on posh dining or
- to introduce a characteristically Roman touch - the sort who surround
themselves with battalions of eunuch servants.
But his view of the behaviour of the underclass is the kind of fantasy that the
rich have had about the poor ever since.
My guess is that Ammianus had never actually set foot in an ordinary Roman bar
and had never thought about the sheer illogicality of what he was claiming - if
these guys really were desperately poor, how on earth could they afford to
drink all night?
As for the gambling, it's a classic case of moral double standards. The Roman
elite were keen gamblers.
Roman mosaic Fighting, another popular entertainment
The emperor Claudius even wrote a book about how to win at dice, and one of the
most famous phrases ever spoken by a Roman general comes straight from the
gaming table: "Alea iacta est" (the dice has been thrown), as Julius Caesar is
supposed to have said as he crossed the river Rubicon in 49BC.
But as soon as the poor showed any similar fondness for games of chance, the
elite got into a frightful sweat and started predicting imminent moral
collapse.
Start Quote
If I'd been advising Andrew Mitchell, my line would have been an unrepentant
one: 'If I did use the word pleb - or better plebs - it would have been
intended to flatter the officer'
It's not all that different from the double standards on view at the Lady
Chatterley trial in 1960, when the prosecuting counsel famously suggested that
it was the kind of book that people like himself could be trusted with, but
asked if it was something one would wish one's wife or servants to read?
Ammianus, I am sure, would have said firmly no.
By and large, posh Romans didn't have much time for poor Romans, free or slave
- although they were no doubt a bit scared of them too. They regularly referred
to them as a "turba" (rabble) or "multitudo" (the masses).
Interestingly, given the recent fuss, plebs wasn't usually their insult of
choice. It's true that they did sometimes use the word in that way.
The historian Tacitus, for example, wrote of the plebs sordida (and you don't
need me to translate that). But plebs was just as often used to refer, in
neutral or even complimentary terms, to the noble stock of the worthy Roman
yeomanry.
It was only in English, and in the late 18th Century that the word lost its
final "s" and became solely derogatory, as in "you filthy little pleb".
In fact, if I'd been advising Andrew Mitchell after his spot of bother, my line
would have been an unrepentant one: "If I did use the word pleb - or better
plebs - it would have been intended to flatter the officer."
Lady Chatterley But would you want your servant reading it?
But whatever slurs and nicknames were used, the misdemeanours attributed to the
ancient Roman poor by their rich critics are strikingly similar to those we
still hear now.
For a start, the poor were often said to be guilty of abusing the services
offered to them - not by the welfare state but by rich benefactors.
Ammianus, for example, pointed in disgust to the way that the poor spent their
days lurking under the awnings in the theatre, which had actually been put up
so that the ordinary Roman theatre-goers could be protected from the beating
sun during performances in the open air.
Here, he huffed, were people practically living under them.
Presumably it hadn't occurred to him that these must have been people with
nowhere else to go for shelter. I mean, why spend your life under an awning if
you've got a home to go to?
Theatre awnings aren't of course a big issue for us. But, all the same,
Ammianus' moans have got quite a lot in common with modern complaints about
"benefit scroungers" (and about as little hard logic).
My mother, who had lived through the foundation of the NHS, always remembered
how in the late 1940s and early 50s the press was full of stories about people
who were bringing the nation to its financial knees by managing to acquire not
just one, but two, pairs of NHS spectacles, as well as two pairs of NHS false
teeth.
As she often pointed out, what could you possibly have needed two pairs of
dentures for? To have a spare, in case you lost one?
More recent obsessions have focused on those immoral wastrels who supposedly
choose to have another baby in order to increase their state benefits by a
couple of thousand a year.
I guess that there may be a few people who do try this - if so, they probably
need a few lessons in home economics and maths rather than in morals.
But what a preposterous view of the whole reproductive process you must have,
with all its uncertainties, pain, disruption, responsibilities and expense, to
imagine that people are going down this route in large numbers. It's not a line
I hear coming from many women.
Nero The Emperor Nero - mourned only by the "filthy poor" according to Tacitus
The other way in which the comfortably-off traditionally talk of those less
fortunate than themselves is, of course, to divide them into the Good Poor and
the Bad Poor.
In fact, when Tacitus wrote of the plebs sordida it was explicitly to contrast
them with what he called "the respectable elements among the common people".
Talking about the death of the monstrous emperor Nero, he claimed the "filthy
poor", the squanderers and the racing addicts, lamented the death (for Nero had
been an easy touch for entertainments and hand-outs).
Predictably enough, the "respectable elements" were those who welcomed the new
regime of austerity and cost-cutting under the in-coming emperor Galba.
That division is still with us. The 19th Century notoriously had its
"deserving" and "undeserving poor". Our own equivalent of the "deserving poor"
is "hard-working families".
Politicians of all parties are forever parroting this pious phrase on
television or radio. It's almost as if they've been told to never say the
simple word "families" without its knee-jerk accompanying adjective.
Full and empty piggybanks
Maybe I'm peculiarly counter-suggestible. But whenever I hear them at it, I
feel a great well of support coming over me for the feckless and lazy, or - for
heaven's sake - for the singletons who don't have families. Are you any less
worthy of our political time and care just because you haven't got kids?
But there are more serious points at issue here.
For a start, it doesn't take much political calculation to see that if you
treat some people as undeserving, they will quickly become so. There's no surer
way to turn a child into a problem then to relegate him or her to the "naughty
step".
But - OK, at the risk of sounding a bit pious myself - there's also a niggling
question of human progress. It would be nice to think that we had actually
"come on a bit" since the time of Ammianus more than 1,500 years ago.
In some respects, of course, we have - let's count ourselves lucky that the
rich today don't surround themselves with battalions of castrated servants.
But wouldn't it also be a sign of the advance of civilisation if we treated
everyone as worth caring for, whether deserving or hard working or not.
It would be nice to think, in other words, that we could make it a priority to
look after the anti-social, the overweight, the smokers, the plebs sordida and
the snorter too.
I'm afraid we don't do that yet. "Honk honk!" as the snorter would say.