Roman Social History

Susan Treggiari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134646692
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

This lively and original guidebook is the first to show students new to the subject exactly what Roman social history involves, and how they can study it for themselves. After presenting a short history of the development and current position of the discipline, the author discusses the kinds of evidence that can be used, and the full range of resources available. Two case-studies provide practical examples of how to approach sources, and what we can learn from them. Clear, concise and accessible, with all text extracts translated into English, this is the ideal introduction to an increasingly popular subject.

Chapter 1

Introduction

… memorable, but probably non-existent and therefore perhaps less important historically …

(W.G. Sellars and R.J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That: 18)

History, historiography, historians

Social history is part of history. The social historian needs general historical understanding. Anyone setting out to study Roman social history will do well to get a general grasp of the history of the ancient Romans first of all. To study history is to study human beings in the past. Everything that concerns the lives of individuals or groups of people may interest the historian.

Definitions

The word ‘history' is used in English in two main senses. First, it denotes what has happened in the past: in this sense ‘history' means much the same as ‘the past'. Second, it describes the study of that past and the writings produced by the student of the past, the historian. To Greeks and Romans the distinction would be clearer. For the first sense, they could talk of what human beings had done, as Herodotus at the beginning of his book talks of the ‘deeds' (erga) of the Greeks and the Persians, or a Roman might say 'res gestae', the things done. But such expressions may suggest a focus on events, which is too narrow to describe the human past as it is now understood. For the second sense, Herodotus (‘the Father of History’) uses 'historiai (plural), investigations or researches. Coming through Latin ‘historia' and French ‘histoire', this word was brought into English, by the fourteenth century, to mean, not so much the researches, as the written or oral ‘narrative of past events, account, tale, inquiry' (Oxford English Dictionary). It then comes to mean also ‘that branch of knowledge which deals with past events' and ‘the aggregate of past events in general: the course of events or human affairs'. We may use ‘historiography' to describe the writing down of the results of historical research, the text produced by the historian. The titles conventionally given to works of history may highlight either the subject matter (The Peloponnesian War) or the process of research (Histories, Studies) or the form in which the narrative is cast (Annals, Chronicles).

The historian will usually put his or her own name to a work. Herodotus begins with his own name in the possessive case ‘Herodotus the Halicarnassian's'. Then comes histories, also possessive, and finally apodexis, ‘exposition'. So we have great emphasis on the agent and his research. In English we might paraphrase ‘The book in your hands is the exposition (or showing forth) of the research (or investigation) of Herodotus of Halicarnassus'. He explains that his purpose is to prevent the great deeds of both Greeks and foreigners from being forgotten and to give the reasons why they fought what we call the Persian War.

To put it simply: something happens; a person (a historian or someone who becomes a historian in the process) thinks this something worth recording, investigates it and writes down the results of the research so that others may read them. People – and therefore human error, uncertainty and failings – are involved at every step of the process.

Time

How should we define the past? We may raise interesting theoretical questions about the exact chronological limits within which a historian may operate. The origins of the human species are in practice left to anthropologists with scientific qualifications, while preliterate human societies are the province of archaeologists. At the other end of the chronological span, where today becomes yesterday and tomorrow becomes today, a historian may be sharing territory with sociologists, specialists in politics and economics, and journalists. Historians write, for example, biographies of people who are still alive, and may speculate on what they will do in the future. But most historians will think about a period which is clearly ‘past'.

Until recently, history as a subject in schools and universities tended to have a stopping-point several decades earlier than the birth-date of their students. A distant viewpoint gives the viewer a chance to see things in relation to each other, without being confused by unnecessary detail or being himself or herself part of the scene. Objectivity, hard as it is to achieve in practice, remains the ideal for all historians. But to stop a class abruptly in 1900 or 1914 or 1945 frustrates students' desire to understand what has more immediately shaped their own world.

Such sharp breaks are artificial. As we look back from the commanding position of AD 2000 (or thereabouts), it is natural for us to help ourselves make sense of the human past by dividing history up into ‘periods'. The date in the form ‘AD 2000' immediately suggests a division of history into the pre-Christian and Christian eras. Periods are often marked by the beginning and end of a war or the accession and death of rulers. This is a convenient and tidy way to study history, but we must not be misled into missing the continuities. The impact of Christianity in human terms did not begin in AD 1. The Christian system of dating (BC ‘before Christ' and AD, anno Domini, ‘in the year of the Lord’) does not come naturally to non-Christians. But it is commonly recognised and is used by most English-speaking Roman historians. (It will be used here. The student will also come across books which use the same reckoning but refer to the ‘Common Era': BCE, ‘before the Common Era' and CE, ‘the Common Era', rather than BC and AD.)

Like this big division of time, our division into centuries or decades (‘the swinging Sixties’) or by dynasties or rulers (the Tudor period, the Victorian age) is crude and can hinder analysis. The divisions of time conventionally used for political history may be particularly unhelpful when we study social history. Each defined subject which a historian undertakes to study will confront him or her with problems about where to start and stop. Do we begin a biography with the birth of the subject, or must the parents and family be described? Do we end with the person's death, or did he or she have a continuing influence which should not be ignored? A historian of a war will usually, like Thucydides, examine its roots in the past. Ronald Syme, writing The Roman Revolution (1939), about the changes in the Roman state associated with Augustus, went back to 70 BC and the domination of Pompeius, but forty years later told a meeting of the Association of Ancient Historians in North America that if he had the task to do again he would have started a decade earlier, with the civil war and the domination of Sulla. In considering a topic in social history, we may find that different facets of our subject require different chronological divisions.

Space

Similarly, geographical limits may blinker us. It is obvious that you cannot investigate the foreign policy of a nation state without looking at the countries with which it comes in contact. It is equally true that the life of the smallest village must be studied in relation to neighbouring villages, to the county and wider area, as well as the state, in which it is set.

History involves time and space. The social historian usually begins his or her historical education with a broad training in history, which gives a chronological and geographical overview and a basic grasp of politico-military history. The Roman social historian may also have a background in Latin literature.

Social history

Definitions

The term ‘social history' denotes the study of people in relation to each other. Such a broad definition would embrace political and military history, and even constitutional history, since the systems set up to run states are developed by and for people. But we generally use the term to mean ‘not political or military or constitutional or diplomatic or legal history'.

Peter Burke has recently written:

G.M. Trevelyan's notorious definition of social history as ‘history with the politics left out' is now rejected by almost everyone. Instead we find concern with the social element in politics and the political element in society'.

(Burke 1991: 19)

His statement encapsulates the truth that the material of the historian should not be divided up into neat and watertight compartments. How politics were organised for a particular group may have a major impact on social life. Economic forces and law can scarcely be ignored. So the study of politics, legal history and economics may be part of the job of the social historian. It is a question of emphasis or focus. We focus on how individuals and groups relate to each other. The physical environment will be important: land, sea, climate, plants, animals; what people have made of their environment: the development of hunting, fishing, stock-keeping and cultivation, manufacture and trade; the demography of the human population: life expectancy, fertility, diseases; the institutions people developed: whether they lived in isolated houses, or villages or cities; at what age they married, how they treated their property, what customs or laws they set up. It is clearly hard for one individual fully to comprehend such a variety of topics even for a society narrowly defined in time and space. In practice, the themes selected by historians will be chosen in the light of their own interests and competence and the availability of material to study.

A ‘society' is a grouping in which human beings have something in common. The Latin common noun socius from which the abstract noun societas (and related adjectives) derived means ‘partner, sharer, ally'. In studying social history we shall usually focus on one society at a given time or over a given period. Societies come in many shapes, forms and sizes. We might want to explore how society was structured in England in the nineteenth century (and perhaps compare it with Scotland) or how people interacted with each other in the villages which circle the old common of Otmoor in Oxfordshire or how dukes married and had children. England as a society is defined by shared experience, geography, law and politics; Otmoor villages lie around what was a low-lying common, forming a geographical group; dukes, a select group of individuals, are defined by rank. We might want to look into the society formed by one family or household, or children playing in one street, or a soccer team or a learned society of social historians. We investigate how people within a given society relate to each other socially.

Roman history

In picking any such topic, we might find it directly relevant to our own experience. But the social history of Rome may well seem remote. The value of an intellectual pursuit should not be measured by its direct application to a practical purpose. Research in ‘pure' science, intended to expand human knowledge, may eventually produce practical applications (useful or harmful to humanity). To learn more about how human beings have behaved in the past extends our understanding of the human condition.

Roman history offers much of intrinsic interest. With many cultures and periods to choose from, many find that Rome is endlessly fascinating.

The traditional justification for studying it relies on twin arguments: the legacy of Rome and the gap between Romans and ourselves. Rome, by virtue of its expansion into an empire which controlled the Mediterranean and north-western Europe, acted as the conduit for Greek culture and for the transmission of Graeco-Roman culture to mediaeval western Europe and hence to all the areas of the world colonised by Europeans. Rome left us the Latin language (transformed later into the Romance languages) and a great body of Latin literature (which inspired all the later European literatures); Roman law (the basis of church and civil law and an effective model for common law); the structures of the western church, and a fruitful heritage in art and architecture. Rome is part of the ancient history of anyone descended from those reared or partly reared in this tradition. In saying such things, one does not intend to ignore the immense contribution to western thought and culture of the Greeks, spread and transmitted by the Romans, and continuing in the eastern ‘Roman' (but no longer Latin-speaking) empire, influencing the Islamic world, and to be more fully and immediately experienced in the West from the Renaissance onwards. The religious thought and scriptures of the Jews were part of the amalgam of Christianity from the beginning. The legacy of Rome is part of a complex web.

I have spoken so far of the most obvious influences. They are obvious because Jews, Greeks and Romans left written records which survived. Others contributed too through folk customs, art, religious sensitivities, technological know-how: the Celts are one example. Because being Roman was not a matter of ethnicity but a matter of legal definition (the Romans were relatively generous in conferring citizenship on foreigners), theirs was a diverse and complex society.

The Romans are among our spiritual ancestors. They are also remote enough in time for us not to ‘identify' with them and different enough to provide a contrast. Ideally, we can treat them more objectively than those whom we regard as our own recent ancestors. Historians aspire to represent objective truths and to control their own prejudices, although it is agreed that no-one can fully achieve this aim.¹

In exploring Roman history we may find much that is alien and much that may appear familiar. It has often been said that it seems easier to enter into the thought-processes, joys and sorrows of people in the Roman period than into those of our mediaeval precursors. Although the Romans lived before the industrial and scientific revolutions, in a society in which the institution of slavery was of major importance in law, in the economy and in shaping people's conceptions of themselves, the ways in which individuals reacted to their world strike chords with us. Cicero is as accessible as Addison, Caesar as the Duke of Wellington. We should beware of thinking any of them immediately accessible to us. But they are easier for most of us to understand than Francis of Assisi or Henry V of England.

The development of scholarship in Roman history

Because they wrote books, chiselled inscriptions, built stone buildings, struck coins, made statues, the Romans have left us material with which to study them. Because Church and State in the Middle Ages needed men who could read, use a pen and draft documents and therefore saw to it that they were trained in reading appropriate works of classical Latin literature, some people had a familiarity with at least some literary texts. From this developed an interest in historical and antiquarian matters. The ancient texts were quarried for material of contemporary relevance. Moral and constitutional ideas (as well as literary inspiration) could be extracted from the classical authors. The Renaissance, marking a breaking-away from mediaeval patterns of thought and the exciting rediscovery of texts which had not engaged the attention of monkish scholars, meant that thinkers, polemicists and rulers engaged with the ideas of Cicero or Tacitus. They became familiar with the texts and used them for their own purposes. (For Cicero see, e.g. Clarke 1965; for Tacitus see especially Ronald Mellor 1995. In general, see L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson 1991. For transmission of individual authors, down to Apuleius in the second century AD, see L.D. Reynolds 1983.) Professional scholars edited and commented on texts. But they were the common ‘classics' of all educated men (and a few women) in western Europe. High standards for research and exposition were set by masterpieces such as Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

As History became a subject of study for schoolchildren and undergraduates in the nineteenth century and research became institutionalised (a development led by Germany) and expected of university teachers (but happily never yet reserved for them), the study of Roman (and Greek) history advanced. Essential research tools were developed. Not only did the production of more accurate texts and the commentaries which help us understand them proceed. But the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the publication of collected inscriptions, papyri, coins, works of art; the creation of dictionaries, thesauri and encyclopaedias; the collection of laws and legal documents. Work on Roman history was, in the aftermath of the First World War, on a proper scientific footing. Few areas of history can boast such effective coverage in printed books. In recent decades, material available on CD-ROM and the Internet has begun to serve the scholar effectively. Bibliographies can be searched more effectively. Word-searches on literary texts and inscriptions can be performed electronically as well as through printed indices or by the patient labour of the individual. Illustrations of sites or works of art or the collections of the great museums can be tracked down on the Web. Discussion groups make it possible for us to submit questions on points which puzzle us to a huge group of international experts.

During the last century, people who classify themselves as ancient historians (the phrase in English, rather invidiously, is used chiefly of ancient Greek and Roman historians) have come to mark themselves off from ‘classicists' in general. (There are exceptions – ‘ambidextrous' scholars who work in both literature and history.) Because the teacher of ancient history at the university level must be competent in Greek and Latin, ancient historians have usually been trained in Classics before specialising in history. Nevertheless, university disciplines were set up partly as an accident of history, partly as an administrative convenience. In any department or faculty, people need links to kindred departments. It is the usual (but not invariable) practice in UK and Commonwealth universities for Roman historians to be placed in departments of Classics. In the US they may more commonly be found in departments of History, and may have studied for their doctorates in such departments. This makes a difference to their training, orientation and teaching responsibilities. There are advantages and disadvantages to both arrangements. Ancient historpians whose primary affiliation is to Classics need to reach out to other kinds of historian; those who are in History departments need to liaise with those who deal with Roman material from the literary or arthistorical point of view. This is the major responsibility. But an individual historian may have many others. For instance, it will be important for a Roman social historian to be alert to the work of Roman archaeologists and...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Roman Social History
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Evidence
• 3: A sketch of Roman society
• 4: Case study I: Tullia
• 5: Case study II: How holy was the house?
• 6: How to get further into the subject
• Appendix 1: Sources on Tullia
• Appendix 2: Select list of translations
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index