Patricians, Professionals, and Political Science

Abstract

For centuries, writing about political events was largely the avocation of clergy and persons of private fortune. There were church scribes and court chroniclers who recorded developments in a manner pleasing to their overlords. And there were gentlemen amateur scholars who wrote for a like-minded audience of gentlemen readers. The accounts they produced were of a patrician literary genre, much like epic and tragedy, concerned with the monumental deeds of great personages, depicting a world in which the lower classes played no role other than an occasionally troublesome one. Antiquity gave us numerous upper-class chroniclers— –Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Josephus, Tacitus, and others, none of whom thought very highly of the common people, if they bothered to think about them at all. 1 The wealthy Roman senator Cicero was part of an already established aristocratic tradition when he described the plebs urbana as the “city dirt and filth,” “the unruly and inferior.” Whenever the Roman people agitated for land redistribution, debt easement, rent cancellation, bread subsidies, and work projects, they became in Cicero’s mind that most odious of all creatures, the “mob.” (Cicero 1967: I.16, 11 and I.19, 4; Cicero 1989: XI.7.1) What is remarkable is that this view of the Roman poor has been embraced by most classicists down through the ages even into the modern era (Parenti 2003). A century after Cicero, the noted chronicler Josephus, a man of high lineage, blamed the rebellion in Judea not on the boundless rapacity of the ruling Roman imperialists but on the base emotions of the rebels themselves, whom he characterized as “the mob,” “mischief-makers” and “factious folk” who were “by temperament addicted to change and delighting in sedition.” Josephus actually led the first Jewish rebellion against Rome in A.D. 67. Surviving that, he showed little sympathy for the uprisings that followed. As a Pharisee, he switched to the Roman imperial cause, recognizing it as less threatening to his