PART I
Brokered Empire
Roman, remember by your strength to rule
Earthâs peoplesâfor your arts are to be these:
To pacify, to impose the rule of law,
To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.
Virgil, Aeneid 6.851â853 (Fitzgerald 190)
The city of Rome has never been an important center of tradeâŚ. Perhaps no major city in Western history has had so little commercial and economic importance as has ancient, medieval, and modern Rome.
William 1. Davisson and James E. Harper (175)
From the time Rome became an imperial city until today she has been a parasite-city, living on gifts, rents, taxes, tribute. That does not make Rome any less a city, only a different kind of city from Genoa.
Sir Moses 1. Finley (12S)
Rome attempted, not merely to cope with the large quantities of people it had brought together, but to give to its otherwise degraded mass culture an appropriate urban guise, reflecting imperial magnificence. To investigate this contribution one must fortify oneself for an ordeal: to enjoy it, one must keep oneâs eyes open, but learn to close oneâs nose to the stench, oneâs ears to the screams of anguish and terror, oneâs gullet to the retching of oneâs own stomach. Above all, one must keep oneâs heart on ice and check any impulse to tenderness and pity, with a truly Roman stolidity. All the magnitudes will be stretched in Rome: not least the magnitude of debasement and evil.
Lewis Mumford (214)
1
Then and Now
The voices that speak to us from antiquity are overwhelmingly those of the cultured few, the elites. The modern voices that carry on their tale are overwhelmingly those of white, middle-class, European and North American males. These men can, and do, laud imperialistic, authoritarian slave societies. The scholarship of antiquity is often removed from the real world, hygienically free of value judgements. Of the value judgements, that is, of the voiceless masses, the 95% who knew how âthe other halfâ lived in antiquity.
The peasants form no part of the literate world on which most reconstructions of ancient history focus. Indeed, the peasantsâthe paganiâdid not even form part of the lowly Christian (town dwellerâs) world. They are almost lost to historical view, because of their illiteracy and localism.
Thomas F. Carney (xiv, 231 note 123)
The first century of the common era is obscured from our contemporary view by three giant filters. The past is recorded almost exclusively in the voices of elites and males, in the viewpoints of the wealthy and the powerful, in the visions of the literate and the educated. That already constricted report is available sometimes through the deliberate decision of later dominations but also through the vagaries of chance and luck, fate and accident. Either way, further constrictions. And our present looks back to the past, to that already doubly filtered past, dependent, of course, on where oneâs present is located, but, let us say in individualistic, democratic, urban, middle-class America, often with ethnocentric presumptions it is not even aware of projecting.
Some demographic statistics from the past may serve, therefore, not as proofs about anything but as warnings about everything. Bruce Malina speaks of classes and masses. âThe preindustrial city contained no more than ten percent of the entire population under its direct and immediate control. And of this ten percent that constituted the preindustrial urban population, perhaps less than two percent belonged to the elite or high classâ (1981:72). Thomas Carney writes of death and taxes. On death: âWe are used to a society in which very few infants are lost at birth or prior to weaning. Death, happily, tends to be remote from our experience, if we are below 30. People do not start dying in any numbers until their late fifties or, generally, their sixties or later. In preindustrial society, however, probably a third of the live births were dead before they reached the age of six. By sixteen something like 60% of these live births would have died, 75% by twenty-six, and 90% by forty-six. Very fewâ3% maybeâreached their sixtiesâ (88). On taxes: âIn general, resources extracted from the tax base were mostly redistributed to the men of the apparatusâwho mostly invested their official gains in large estates. Taxation was generally regressiveâŚ. At best they protected the tax base; they rarely developed itâmore often, indeed, they eroded itâŚ. They took a larger share, in fact, than did the elites in more primitive societies before them, or in industrial societies after themâ (341).
How, then, is it even possible for us to imagine the face of a Mediterranean Jewish peasant through those triple filters and across the gulf of those millennia? Three major sources help at least somewhat to counter those three filters just mentioned. First, on the macrocosmic level, there are anthropological or sociological studies and models, especially those using trans-temporal and cross-cultural disciplines. Next, on the mesocosmic and more local level, there are archaeological digs and discoveries. Finally, on the microcosmic level, there are papyrus documents and archives, documentary texts predominantly from Egypt in which ordinary peasants have preserved an individual voice and a personal presence normally denied them by their illiteracy and their poverty.
A Friendly Sea in a Hostile Landscape
Three terse judgments, sharp as Mediterranean shadows. âThe Mediterranean,â in the words of Jane Schneider, âis something of a paradox: a friendly sea surrounded by a hostile landscapeâ (3). âAll Mediterranean societies,â in the words of Julian Pitt-Rivers, âface the sea and their enemiesâ and customersâon the far side of itâ(1977:ix). âA double constraint,â in the words of Fernand Braudel, âhas always been at the heart of Mediterranean history: poverty and the uncertainty of the morrowâ (1.245). But even to speak of the social and cultural anthropology of the Mediterranean basin demands three steps, each controversial in its possibility and fraught with difficulties in its execution.
The first step proposes a valid pan-Mediterranean construct open to anthropological investigation. John Davis limits this Mediterranean unity exclusively to historical contacts. Early in his book The People of the Mediterranean he describes that unity as, âthose institutions, customs and practices which result from the conversation and commerce of thousands of years, the creation of very different peoples who have come into contact round the mediterranean shoresâ (13). That same judgment is reiterated at the bookâs conclusion: âover the millennia it has proved impossible for mediterranean people to ignore each other. They have conquered, colonised, converted; they have traded, administered, intermarriedâthe contacts are perpetual and inescapableâ (255).
Jeremy Boissevain, in reviewing Davisâs book, argues for a more profound unity, that of ecology. âThe Mediterranean is more than just a field of interaction, commerce, and conquest. In spite of his materialist analysis of honour, Davis, in my view, has missed the most obvious materialist parameters that together give the region its distinctive signature: sea, climate, terrain, and mode of productionâŚ. These materialist parameters, placed in a comparative historical framework, provide a basis on which various differences and similarities characteristic of mediterranean societies may be usefully comparedâŚ. Mediterranean men have done a great deal besides âconverseâ and âexchangeââŚ. Men and women around the middle sea have also worked hard to solve similar problems of production under comparable physical conditionsâ (Boissevain et al. 83).
David Gilmore, in an invited reply to Davisâs book and Boissevainâs review, pushes this ecological basis for circum-Mediterranean unity even further by specifying Boissevainâs use of Fernand Braudel, who began his huge and magnificent study The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II by devoting three hundred pages to ecology. He claims that Boissevain, âis missing the most important implication of Braudelâs work, which is not simply that the Mediterranean is ecologically homogeneous, but rather that this unity derives from the consistent juxtaposition of opposites within nations, the close proximity of rugged topography with fertile riverine basins. It is this intranational contrast between remote, inaccessible mountain peaks and rich agricultural valleys that lies at the heart of mediterranean ecosystems. Throughout the region, one finds independent, egalitarian communities of peasants, tribesmen, or pastoralists in the marginal hills and in the adjacent plains something vastly differentâthe latifundium, the great estate, the commercial farm, heir to the Roman villa ⌠often worked by day laborers under harsh conditionsâ (Boissevain et al. 88).
Writing for the same symposium of invited responses, Thomas Crump adds some other qualifications to the proposed ecological unity of the Mediterranean. âBoissevain is right to refer to the geophysical factors discussed by Braudel [but] he fails to note three critical sociocultural factors which give the area a quite distinctive character. The first, and perhaps the most important, is that almost every region of the Mediterranean has at some time in the pastâgenerally more than 300 years agoâbeen very much more important than it is now. ⌠The second factor is that the general hierarchical structure of Mediterranean societies has always been based on citiesâŚ. The third factor is that for more than 2,000 years every mediterranean society of any importance has had the use of a written languageâ (Boissevain et al. 86).
It seems, then, that we are dealing with a valid unity-in-diversity called Mediterranean society. But it is built up in interactive layers from geography and ecology, through technology and economics, and on to culture and politics.
The second step is particularly difficult for researchers trained to do specifically located fieldwork. Scholars begin with detailed ethnographies, say, of Andalusian villagers or Greek shepherds or Berber and Bedouin tribes. Next comes the call for comparison, from Davis, and for explanation of what such comparison means, from Boissevain. Analytically comparative social and cultural anthropology within the Mediterranean construct is precisely what the next step demands.
Consider, for example, a specific and indeed fascinating ethnographic case study conducted by Julian Pitt-Rivers between 1949 and 1952 and published as The People of the Sierra in 1954. It is one of the earlier results of the postwar surge in Mediterranean anthropology centered around E. E. Evans-Pritchard at Oxford University. The focal point of his investigation was Grazalema, or AlcalĂĄ, as he called it to protect the innocent, an Andalusian pueblo in the Sierra de CĂĄdiz. It is hardly possible to work comparatively with contemporary Grazalema and, say, ancient Nazareth, just because both are Mediterranean hill-villages with a population of about two thousand inhabitants. Before any such trans-temporal comparisons can be attempted, the data from Andalusia or anywhere else has to be analytically compared with other contemporary data to establish modern Mediterranean constants. Only the results of such analysis will have any chance of valid retrojection to the Mediterranean of two thousand years ago. I would note in passing, however, that reading even such isolated and contemporary accounts of traditional societies is an excellent therapeutic against presuming that an ancient Galilean village is like, say, a modern American one, only much smaller, older, and without electrical utilities or electronic toys.
In a recent article on the current state of Mediterranean anthropology, David Gilmore, presuming the ecological constants, summarizes the other ones that have been suggested within the Mediterranean construct. There are sociocultural constants: âa strong urban orientation; a corresponding disdain for the peasant way of life and for manual labor; sharp social, geographic, and economic stratification; political instability and a history of weak states; âatomisticâ community life; rigid sexual segregation; a tendency towards reliance on the smallest possible kinship units (nuclear families and shallow lineages); strong emphasis on shifting ego-centered, noncorporate coalitions; an honor-and-shame syndrome which defines both sexuality and personal reputation ⌠most villagers share an intense parochialism ⌠and intervillage rivalries are common ⌠There is a general gregariousness and interdependence of daily life characteristic of small, densely populated neighborhoods ⌠[There is] institutionalized hostile nicknamingâŚ. The evil eye belief is widespreadâ (1982:178â79). Later he calls that belief, âprobably one of the few true Mediterranean universals. It is also one of the oldest continuous religious constructs in the Mediterranean areaâ (1982:198). There are also religious, marital, and political constants: âreligion plays an important institutionalized role in both north and south, as do priests, saints, and holy men ⌠Dotal marriage [dowry] is practiced in only 4 percent of the worldâs cultures, and is limited geographically to eastern Eurasia and the mediterranean basin ⌠At the micropolitical level⌠emphasis on informal personal power rather than formal institutions is reflected in the reliance on patronageâ (1982:179).
The third step, then, is to control critically the retrojection of those constants from the modern to the ancient Mediterranean, and, that, to compound the problem, involves moving not only from now to then but from fieldwork among people to library work among texts. It must be said immediately that such forays have usually been conducted from ancient history into modern anthropology rather than in the opposite direction.
John Davis, who seems to have honed his writing style by watching fishmongers fillet fish, castigates his anthropological peers for ignoring history but then savages Pitt-Riversâs essay on honor for âhugger-mugger ⌠impression of potpourri⌠conceptual confusion which allows historical events, literature of the sort studied by literary critics, and folklore to tend to illustrate whatever real thing the general structure may beâ (253) and for âelegant use of historical and literary sources which, in a more methodology-minded age, demands careful and critical analysis of the kinds of reasoning underlying the introduction of wayward materialâ (257). But at least Pitt-Rivers was trying to move from now to then and from field to text.
He tried even more formally and deliberately in a later book on the anthropology of Mediterranean sexuality that began once again with the Sierra de CĂĄdiz in the early 1950s but ended with Shechem and the text of Genesis 34. His basic intuition on that text is that âthe limits of endogamy and exogamy are debated throughout the length of Genesisâ so that its stories ask repeatedly but implicitly, âhow closely related must you be in order to be one people and how other must you be in order to be a spouse? Other sex? Other family? Other lineage? Other tribe? Other nation?â (1977:154). One answer is given in the earlier nomadic situation of political dependence. In Genesis 12, 20, and 26 the patriarchs are willing to give their wives (as âsistersâ) to settled power brokers in exchange for pasture, a âform of sexual hospitality ⌠amply testified from ethnographies of many nomadic people, who use their women as a means of establishing relations with the sedentary populationâ (1977:159). A very different answer is given in their later sedentary situation of political independence. There are two significant transitions in the new answer of Genesis 34. Not only are wives no longer given in sexual hospitality to outsiders, but neither are daughters to be given to them in marriage. And the guardians of this new answer are the new generation, the womanâs brothers rather than her father. So Simeon and Levi destroy Shechem and his city rather than allow him to marry Dinah even after all the male citizens accepted circumcision. In Genesis 34:30 Jacob protests against their action, but the brothers get the last word, in 34:31, âShould he treat our sister as a harlot?â Notice, however, that in 34:28 the sons of Jacob take with them not only all the property of the murdered Shechemites but their wives as well. The politics of sex is exactly the same in Genesis 12, 20, 26, and in 34: superiors take the inferiorsâ women but do not give them their own. The difference is that in the former case the patriarchs are inferior, in the latter they are superior.
Pitt-Rivers had mentioned earlier that âthere is however one area of the world which, though it is noted for being traditionally organised in corporate and even kin groups, refuses to exchange women: the Mediterraneanâ (1977:120). He is willing, therefore, to generalize from Genesis 34 and suggest that âit records in the cr...