Roman Society: A Review

Abstract

REVIEWESSAY RomanSociety:AReview The Oxford Handbook of Social Relations in the Roman World. Edited by Michael PEACHIN. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xvi + 738. Hardback,£95.00/$150.00. ISBN 978-0-19-518800-4. Rostovtzeff included in the Social and Economic History of Rome many images of men and women at work. A swineherd with his pigs appears on a stele from Bologna , a shepherd with a flock of sheep on a monument from Mainz, a woman selling slippers on a fresco from Pompeii. There are the clothes traders of the Igel monument, a navvy unloading an amphora of wine on the Torlonia relief, a cobbler on a stele from Rheims, a ship-builder on a relief from Ravenna. The images presume that labor was an inherent source for many humble men and women of dignity and esteem: an inscription on the item from Ravenna says that P. Longidienus the ship-builder is “hurryingonwith hiswork” (ad onus properat).1 The people portrayed were not incidental figures. They were, or represent, the vast majority of the Roman imperial population, who in a myriad of skilled and unskilled occupations spent their lives working to earn their daily bread. Just how numerous they were emerges from MacMullen’s estimates, in his seminal Roman Social Relations, of Rome’s upper orders. “The senatorial stratum,” he wrote, assuming a population at the turn of the second century of fifty millions, “amounted to something like two-thousandths of one percent,” and “Equites probably totaled less than a tenth of one percent.”2 Allowance has to be made for the decurial sector, amorphous and incorporating individuals of many grades from community to community, which MacMullen found impossible to approximate . But whatever the final aggregate, the socially dominant were clearly no 1 Rostovtzeff (1957), plates III.1, XVI.1, XXIV.1, XXIV.5, XXVI.1, XXVIII.4, XXX.3. This is an abbreviated list. See for comparable collections Kampen (1981) (women); Zimmer (1982) (handicrafts); and for mosaics with scenes of rural work and fishing, Parrish (1984) 25-42; Blanchard-Lemée, Ennaïffer, Slim and Slim (1996) chapters II and V (making clear that working life was for many controlled by the cycle of the seasons). For the initial impact made by Rostovtzeff’s images, see Momigliano (1994) 32 (originally from 1954). Inscription: CIL XI 139= ILS 7725. 2 MacMullen (1974) 88-89. REVIEW ESSAY 231 more than a minuscule proportion of the total imperial population, far outnumbered by a dense and populous mass. One result is to make any concept of marginalityindiscussionsof Romansocietyproblematical.3 In the Oxford Handbook of Social Relations in the Roman World, Michael Peachin begins his fine introductory survey of scholarship on Roman society with Rostovtzeff, and acknowledges MacMullen’s crucial study in his discussion. But in the following seven hundred pages or so men and women of the sort identified above do not figure prominently. The shopkeepers, manufacturers, laborers , artisans and peasants who made up the bulk of Rome’s population can be presumed to have experienced social relationships with one another, both within their families and in the workplaces where much of their time was spent. At times indeed familial and working relations were inseparable.4 It is the elite, however (or the “elites” as they are constantly, and awkwardly to my mind, called), who receive most attention. Every reader will understand that this is due to the nature of the literary sources on which knowledge of Roman society chiefly depends; but given the legacy of Rostovtzeff, the social lives of the majority might have received more attention. What for instance might be said of the social world of men like the nauta Bussus, a Celtic ship-owner who seemingly traded with Rome’s troops on the Rhine, and whose funerary monument – he died at the age ofseventy-five –showsstrong indications amonghis family of “Romanization”?5 One of the book’s sections, it is true, is called “Marginalized Persons.” Two of its categories, however, women and children, are too broad to be historically practicable. The consort of an emperor was hardly comparable, simply by being female, with an ordinary piscatrix, and senators’ sons were hardly comparable, simply...