Popular Culture in Ancient Rome

J. P. Toner

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745654904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua romana

The mass of the Roman people constituted well over 90% of the population. Much ancient history, however, has focused on the lives, politics and culture of the minority elite. This book helps redress the balance by focusing on the non-elite in the Roman world. It builds a vivid account of the everyday lives of the masses, including their social and family life, health, leisure and religious beliefs, and the ways in which their popular culture resisted the domination of the ruling elite. The book highlights previously under-considered aspects of popular culture of the period to give a fuller picture. It is the first book to take fully into account the level of mental health: given the physical and social environment that most people faced, their overall mental health mirrored their poor physical health. It also reveals fascinating details about the ways in which people solved problems, turning frequently to oracles for advice and guidance when confronted by difficulties. Our understanding of the non-elite world is further enriched through the depiction of sensory dimensions: Toner illustrates how attitudes to smell, touch, and noise all varied with social status and created conflict, and how the emperors tried to resolve these disputes as part of their regeneration of urban life. Popular Culture in Ancient Rome offers a rich and accessible introduction to the usefulness of the notion of popular culture in studying the ancient world and will be enjoyed by students and general readers alike.

1

Problem-solving

Problems and risk

This chapter deals with the attitudes, tactics and beliefs that helped the overwhelming majority of the non-elite make a relatively reasonable living in all but the most exacting periods of crisis. I have characterized this approach as one of problem-solving because it seems to me that life for most people represented a series of difficulties to be overcome, of a varying nature and size. Most of these problems had arisen before and were already addressed by cultural attitudes that people had learned at their mother’s or father’s knee. The non-elite therefore came ready prepared to address most of the troubles that were likely to come their way.

Difficult problems tend to share certain characteristics. First, they lack clarity in that it is often unclear exactly what the problem is, what has caused it or what will be the outcome of doing nothing. Difficult problems also tend to force people to confront multiple goals that they might have and to decide between them by selecting a least-bad option. Above all, difficult problems are complex – they include a variety of interrelated factors and often involve the pressure of time constraints too. Modern management textbooks tell us that the resolution of tough problems like these requires each factor to be tackled in turn. The problem for the average Roman was they had only very limited knowledge on which to base their decisions. They did not have the luxury of modern analysis. I would argue that, in such an uncertain environment,¹ the popular approach to problems was generally characterized by one or more of the following: keeping to simple, clearly defined solutions; focusing on one primary aim; relying on trusted techniques; sticking firmly to their own areas of expertise; referring to backward-looking precedents; trusting individual cunning first and turning to mutualism only occasionally; and finally trying to kick the problem upstairs to those with more resources to cope with the situation.

Exactly what constitutes a problem is often socially constructed. It is not just a rational balancing act between a fixed set of dilemmas. Certain priorities are probably fairly universal – food, marriage plans, threats to safety – but others vary considerably in the degree of importance which people attach to them. As is so often the case in Roman society, status concerns loomed large. A significant portion of the oracles and spells of the Roman world concerned the removal of perceived and actual threats to status, opportunities for status advancement, and gaining revenge for actions by social competitors that had resulted in a loss of face.

The main variable that confronted any member of the non-elite when facing a problem was that of risk. Risk means facing an uncertain future and in a world where the average person considered themselves ‘vulnerable to impoverishment’,² and even middling sorts ‘lived under a permanent threat of impoverishment’,³ levels of uncertainty were high. Put simply, the man in the street was never far from becoming the man on the street. Gallant has shown that when faced with a ‘capricious natural environment and armed with a rudimentary technology, Greek peasants developed an extensive but delicate web of risk-management strategies’ to help them cope.⁴ Recently, Eidinow has provided us with a remarkable study of how the ancient Greeks used oracles and curses to control risk, finding that ‘those who used oracles were uncertain and wanted to be sure they were making the right choice; those who turned to curses were usually already in a situation of danger and wanted to limit the damage their enemies might inflict’.⁵ In addition to this, I suggest that risk can usefully be thought of as representing volatility, as it does in modern portfolio management theory.⁶ The problem with the term ‘risk’ is that it tends to highlight the downside. Volatility is a more neutral term that reflects the fact that risk can produce equally good and bad results. Risk in itself, therefore, is not the problem. It is the vulnerability of the risk-taker to negative events that will dictate their appetite for taking risk.

Risk perceptions changed according to social status. The rich were able to tolerate high degrees of volatility of returns and so were happy to invest in speculative ventures such as shipping. Those close to subsistence level were much more vulnerable to volatility and so focused on controlling their downside risks, even if this came at the expense of giving up some upside possibility. Broadly speaking, risk tolerance was inversely related to social status. Compare the extravagantly reckless speculation of the nouveau riche Trimalchio in the Satyricon, where his fortunes oscillate to the tune of tens of millions per day, with the natural conservatism of the rustic in the Aesop Romance, riding an ass, loaded with wood, to which he says, ‘The sooner we get there and get the wood sold for a dozen farthings, the sooner you’ll get two of them for fodder. I’ll take two for myself, and we’ll keep the eight against bad times, for fear we’ll get sick or some bad weather will come along unexpectedly and keep us from getting out.’⁷ Trimalchio is mocked because his behaviour is a caricature of rich freedmen aping the risk-taking attitudes of the elite to an absurd degree. By contrast, the peasant living on little more than subsistence income levels has to employ basic risk-management techniques – ensure a sale, save for a rainy day – to keep himself from falling into starvation. He has prioritized his aims and adopted a clear, tried-and-tested strategy, revolving around the utilization of his own area of expertise, which, in this case, is selling firewood. Interestingly, Tacitus notes that both the utterly poor and the vastly rich could be shamelessly reckless.⁸ In fact, recklessness was associated with the needy.⁹ Perhaps by the time an individual sank into destitution their risk appetite increased again; either they had nothing further to lose or they needed to take substantial risks in order to make any meaningful difference to their lives.

An additional issue concerning risk that affected people’s handling of it was that harvests in the Roman world varied considerably from year to year. Agricultural volatility can be exceptionally high in the Mediterranean region, with average variations in interannual wheat yields in excess of 60 per cent in Tunisia.¹⁰ Egypt at 12 per cent has the lowest annual variation in yield, which helps account for the reliance emperors had on it for generating tax revenues and surplus grain supplies. The distribution of the crop returns will not therefore have exhibited the bell-shaped, normal distribution curve that statistics tell us to expect from a particular set of outcomes. In practice, the curve for Roman harvests will have exhibited kurtosis, meaning that it had ‘fat tails’. Whereas a normal curve tells us to expect two thirds of outcomes to be within one standard deviation of the norm, with only an occasional extreme event, the reality was that extreme, four or five standard deviation events happened far more frequently than would statistically be expected. Bumper harvests could easily be followed by years of dearth. Unless reserves had been put aside, the impact of these shocks could be devastating. The effect of these two additional factors was to place even more emphasis on risk control. The overriding aim of the vulnerably poor, those close to the threshold of subsistence, was to secure stability of income at or above subsistence and try and put something by for a rainy day. Those with greater assets at their disposal could afford to take a more liberal attitude to risk-taking. For all, life involved constant calculation, weighing up the risk and likely outcomes based on what had happened in the past.

As well as employing risk-control techniques, the non-elite sought to spread their risk and so limit their potential downside by diversification. Peasants sowed a variety of crops, lest one should be hit by disease. Younger family members might be sent out to work as apprentices to provide a valuable additional income from a source less correlated with agricultural returns. It was an attitude that spread to whatever they were doing, so that when faced with illness it seemed natural to use a variety of resources in order to find a cure, be they magical incantations, folk remedies or Greek medicine. Patrons needed to be cultivated so that they might help out in times of dearth. Networks of friends, kin and neighbours also had to be established as an insurance policy against hard times. The mantra of ‘spread risk, diversify sources of income’ informed much of non-elite life.

In many ways the popular attitude to volatility was derived from their idea of the ‘limited good’.¹¹ The non-elite saw everything as a zero-sum game. They did well only to the extent that another did badly. Moreover, ‘limited good’ means that another’s good fortune is a direct threat to your own. In fact, one’s own misfortune comes to be seen as the direct result of another’s gain. This was a sensible position to adopt in a society where economic growth was close to zero. If the size of the pie stayed the same then someone having a good feed was having it at another’s expense. This is why putting curses on social competitors was not just the result of ‘envy, fuelled by gossip’ that might lead to supernatural attack;¹² it was a desperate attempt by people to stop someone else taking what little they had, leaving them stranded on the wrong side of the subsistence threshold.

Likewise a belief in the power of luck, which the non-elite almost uniformly seem to have shared, can be seen as a belief in the power of averaging (in that over the long term luck will even out). This is itself just another restatement of the limited-good hypothesis. If a person were having more than their fair share of luck, it meant by definition he or she must either be cheating or relying on the manipulation of magical powers to sustain it. The only rational response to such a situation was to launch a counter-attack to try and rebalance the position, through means such as curses. This was a mindset born of a society that fostered fear, envy and intense rivalry among its members. People fought not just for basic subsistence but for what might be termed ‘subsistence status’. The non-elite were prepared to act vigorously to maintain their limited interests and standing in the world if they perceived it to be under attack from another.

Did it work? Did the popular approach to solving the problems they faced make them happy and fulfilled human beings? That is too much to answer. But what happiness economics can tell us is that their approach was a good one for maximizing their overall levels of satisfaction given the low level of resources available to them. The Easterlin paradox observes that at low levels of income happiness increases quickly for only minor additional increases in income, but not beyond. People’s aspirations increase along with their income and, after their basic needs have been met, most find satisfaction only in being relatively better off than others. The wealthy, it seems, are like dogs chasing the tail of their own happiness, only ever content if they are richer than their neighbour.¹³ Rome was a world where even small changes in income or luck could have a major impact on the quality of life of the average person. It could also have significant concomitant effects on their relative standing within the community, which in itself would likely have an additional impact on their quality of life. Their focus, naturally therefore, was on doing everything in their power to ensure that they secured those small additional boosts ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Elite and Popular Cultures
• 1 Problem-solving
• 2 Mental Health
• 3 The World Turned Bottom Up
• 4 Common Scents, Common Senses
• 5 Popular Resistance
• Conclusion: Towards a Christian Popular Culture
• Select Bibliography
• Index