Invisible Romans (19 page)

The reality was that the powerful held all the cards, as usual. Clients may have cast their case in moral terms – they didn’t have much real bargaining power – but the patronage that came in return was hardly reliable. One good strategy often seemed to be to just escape notice and stay out of trouble, as in the fable of ‘The Fisherman and the Fish’:

A fisherman cast out his net and after a short time drew it back in. His luck was good: It was full of all sorts of delectable fish. But the smaller ones swam to the bottom of the net and escaped through the meshes, while the larger ones were pulled up and lay flopping in the boat. (Babrius,
Fables
4)

Of course, there was always the possibility of violent conflict between the poor and those with power over them. Aelian gives an example from Hellenistic times of the poor reaching the end of their rope, and rising up:

Theokles and Thrasonides in Korinth and Praxis in Mytilene placed little value in property and instead displayed magnanimity seeing their co-citizens in a state of poverty while they themselves were rich. They also advised others to lighten the burden of poverty for those in need. And, after they did not succeed in convincing others, they themselves remitted the debts owed to them, and thus gained not money but life itself. For those whose debts were not remitted attacked their creditors, and wielding the arms of rage, and proffering the most reasonable claim, that of utter destitution, slew their creditors. (Aelian,
Historical Miscellany
14.24/Gallant)

The possibility of less radical, but still bothersome resistance is illustrated in the fable ‘The Battle of the Bull and the Mouse’:

A mouse bit a bull. The bull rushed on the mouse to avenge himself. The mouse forestalled the bull by taking refuge at the back of his hole. The bull found himself reduced to striking the wall with his horns until, worn out, he sank down and went to sleep before the opening. Then the mouse peeped out, emerged, slipped over to him, bit him again, and quickly fled back. The bull jumped up, not knowing what to do. The mouse said to him in his tiny voice, ‘The biggest are not always the most powerful. Sometimes the small and humble prevail.’ (Babrius,
Fable
112)

A revolt that could turn the tables on the rich had a certain appeal, as this oracle prophecy from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt testifies:

… upheaval and war … and the rich will suffer sorely. Their arrogance will be defeated, and their possessions seized and given to others … (P.
Oxy.
31.2554)

Revolts of the poor have caught the attention of both the powerful and those sympathetic to the poor. But the usually overwhelming ability of the powerful to direct effective force against the recalcitrant poor explains in large measure why such revolts are few and far between, and why they are never successful in replacing the powerful with a hegemony of the poor. The norm is that a revolt is suppressed with as much blood as necessary, and probably more; or the leadership of the revolt becomes distant from the poor themselves. In either case, things return to the status quo of subjection; this is as true of the Romano-Grecian world as of any other. The memory of failed revolts probably lingered in the culture of the poor, and served as an effective deterrent to further revolt, at least until conditions became again totally intolerable in terms of subsistence and survival.

But there is another possibility: That the poor believed in the status quo – the ‘great chain of being’ – internalized their position in society as just and right, and played their subjected role willingly. In another time, Charles Dickens captured this underling mentality in his novelette
The Chimes:

Oh let us love our occupations,

Bless the squire and his relations,

Live upon our daily rations,

And always know our proper stations.

I would call this a consciousness of acceptance – of the alignment of the poor’s values with those of the elite. ‘How the Kite Lost His Voice’ teaches that if you try to become something better than you are, you risk losing everything:

A kite of old had a different cry than now, a sharper one. Having heard a horse let out a sonorous neigh, he determined to copy it. But in imitating the horse he ended up with neither the powerful voice he wanted, nor the cry he had had before. (Babrius,
Fables
73)

Every ancient social uprising that I know of had as its aim the twin goals of cancellation of debt and redistribution of land. These are, at heart, conservative goals – an attempt to reestablish the just world of before in which everyone had land and was free from debt-dependence on others. Presumably, the same hierarchical and hegemonic power distribution would continue to exist in this reformed world – the only change would be that everyone would have a fair share of resources. In other words, the complaint is not against the power structure per se, but against its unjust incarnations. Such an attitude implies that the poor accepted an exploitative system.

But the poor could also conceive of a world when the worm had turned. While there is no evidence that there was anything like the ideologies of human worth available from the eighteenth century and seen most explosively in Marxist reconfiguration and aggressive presentation of the rightful expectations and potentialities of the working poor, a world turned upside down could be imagined. Lucian in one of his satires has Micyllus, a poor tanner who has been called to Hades by the Fates, remark:

But as for me, having nothing at stake in life, neither farm nor tenement nor gold nor gear nor reputation nor statues, of course I was in marching order, and when Atropos did but sign to me I gladly flung away my knife and my leather (I was working on a sandal) and sprang up at once and followed her, barefooted as I was and without even washing off the blacking. In fact, I led the way, with my eyes to the fore, since there was nothing in the rear to turn me about and call me back. And by Heaven I see already that everything is splendid here with you, for that all should have equal rank and nobody be any better than his neighbor is more than pleasant, to me at least. And I infer that there is no dunning of debtors here and no paying of taxes, and above all no freezing in winter or falling ill or being thrashed by men of greater consequence. All are at peace, and the tables are turned, for we paupers laugh while the rich are distressed and lament. (
Downward Journey
15/Harmon)

More than revenge, though, the poor sought justice. The poor were convinced that were everyone, most especially the rich, to live within the rules, there would be a stable environment for staying alive, performing their ceremonies, and paying their dues. The fable ‘Once in Utopia’ captures the normal height of aspiration for the poor – a happy world in which the powerful were somehow compelled to properly exercise their power appropriately:

A lion became the ruler, but he did not have the usual cruel, mean temper. He did not always resort to violence to settle affairs; rather he was just and gentle, rather like a man. As he ruled, so they say, the wild animals gathered in assembly in order there to have their cases heard, and to give and receive legal decisions. Each animal called another to account, the lamb the wolf, the wild goat the leopard, the deer the tiger; each was satisfied. Everyone was at peace. Then the rabbit spoke up: ‘This is the day I have long prayed for, the day when even the weak are feared by the strong.’ (Babrius,
Fables
102)

And there are a number of fables that urge the rich to shear, not flay, the poor, such as the tale concerning the widow and her sheep quoted below, and the following:

A groom sold the barley meant for his horse to an innkeeper. After drinking late into the evening, he spent the next day currying the horse. The horse said to him, ‘If you really want me to look great, don’t sell my food.’ (Babrius,
Fables
83)

But as there was a lack of practical alternatives to the status quo, this must have had the effect of making acceptance of the dominant
worldview as the right and just one much easier than we can imagine it today. So there were few local and no empire-wide disturbances by the poor because the poor demanded not the overthrow of the existing order, but rather, if anything, its reform. And that reform never came, just as the poor strongly suspected it would not.

If we think of the definition of justice as giving each person his due, we are on the track of the view of the poor. Thus the powerful can remain powerful, but must allow the poor their ‘due’ as well – the basic opportunity to live out their lives without the sort of exploitation that endangers their social and alimentary subsistence. Apollonius of Tyana is made by Philostratus to give just such advice to the emperor Vespasian; he tells him that ‘[you] make better use of your wealth than any ruler before you, if you employ it in offering aid to the poor, while at the same time that you render the possessions of the rich secure’ (
Life of Apollonius
5.36).

The fables are full of lectures on justice. For example, ‘Fleece Me, But Don’t Flay Me’:

Once a widow kept a sheep in her home. Wishing to clip its wool in as long strands as possible, she sheared it clumsily and trimmed the fleece so close to the skin that she cut into its flesh here and there. The suffering sheep bleated to her, ‘Don’t abuse me. My blood won’t increase the weight of my fleece. Mistress, if you need my flesh, there is a butcher who can kill me efficiently. If you need fleece and not flesh, there is a professional shearer who can shear and yet spare me.’ (Babrius,
Fables
51)

Other fables deal with similar issues: ‘Close to the Law but Far from Justice’ (human justice often does not touch the poor); ‘The Knight and His Horse’ (an appeal against arbitrary exploitation); ‘A Double Standard of Justice’ and ‘The Mills of the Gods Grind Slow’ (be fair to your fellows as you wish the gods to be fair to you). Proverbs are quite skeptical of judicial systems, although they emphasize justice. The poor are like the swallow, near to the courts, but far from their protection:

A trilling swallow, a bird that shares the dwelling of men, built in the springtime her nest under the roofline of a law-court building where old men in charge of the laws held forth. There she became a mother to seven small ones whose wings were not yet covered with purple feathers. A snake gliding from a hole ate them up one and all. The poor mother lamented their untimely deaths. ‘Alas,’ she said, ‘how unfortunate I am! Right here where the laws and judgments of men abide, from that place I must flee – a swallow who has been wronged.’ (Babrius,
Fables
118)

Justice is therefore independent of any human way to achieve it – the enforcement is left to the gods, as in sayings such as ‘the divine brings the bad to justice.’ Humans have in reality little access to it – certainly no sure access to it. The law is mostly mentioned to emphasize the disparity between it and justice. Popular morality believes in justice, but not in the law as able to achieve it. And with some reason. There is practically nothing in the law texts relating to the poor. The rights of fisherfolk might be noted in a decision, and generalities about the powerful not getting special treatment occur, but it is clear that the poor are involved in cases very rarely – there are no treatments of hired labor, for example. The law simply did not care very much about the very poor. And when they did get involved in a legal matter, they could count on coming out badly, as Jesus’ advice indicates clearly:

For while you are going with your opponent to appear before the magistrate, on your way there make an effort to settle with him, so that he may not drag you before the judge, and the judge turn you over to the officer, and the officer throw you into prison. I say to you, you will not get out of there until you have paid the very last cent. (Luke 12:58–9)

Knowing the inefficacy of the legal system and of the justice of the powerful to protect them, the poor must resort to informal means of dispute resolution, or simply knuckle under.

On a daily basis, however, proverbs and fables advise strategies for dealing with the more powerful. They emphasize the futility of trying to get the better of the rich. No matter what you do, you will be eaten anyway, as ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’ teaches:

A wolf seeing one day a lamb that had wandered away from its flock did not attack him to carry him off by force, but rather sought a specious pretext to justify his hostility. ‘Did you not slander me last year, small as you were?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t slander you at all last year; I was only born
this
year,’ was the reply. ‘Aren’t you grazing on grass that is mine?’ continued the wolf. ‘I have never touched any greenery.’ ‘Have you not taken up water which is mine?’ persisted the wolf. ‘Up to this very moment, it is only my mother’s teat that nourishes me,’ came the riposte. Then the wolf seized the lamb and said to it as it downed the meal, ‘You can’t keep a wolf from his dinner, even though you answer easily all my complaints.’ (Babrius,
Fables
89)

A good defense against the powerful was to avoid confrontation as much as possible, as in ‘The Oak and the Reeds’:

The wind having uprooted an oak tree made it fall from the mountainside into a river. The churning torrent carried along this giant ancient tree, planted by men of old. At the same time many rushes rose firm on both sides of the river, drinking water on the banks. The oak was astonished that plants so frail and weak were not torn away, since his own strong trunk had been uprooted. A rush spoke wisely to him, ‘Don’t be surprised. You fought against the wind and so you were vanquished. We, on the other hand, bend, disposed to adjust to our situation, whenever a light breeze moves our tops.’ (Babrius,
Fables
36)