Re: ****ny Happy Caliphate

On May 15, 3:53 pm, mimus <tinmimu...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
 concept of busy townsfolk as opposed to the idle, slavering citizens
of
> > the classic polis.
>
> Um . . . under the Roman "Republic" (plutocracy),


I would say it was never a true plutocracy, but an
oligarchy.  Oligarchs are never poor, after all, but
those who dealt in commerce were forbidden to
hold office in the republic.

When the tribunate was at its peak, Rome might
even have been a real republic, for a while.

 anyway, the Roman "mob"
> was principally composed of those Roman citizens and their descendants

Again it depends on the  time.  Much of the mob
consisted of the descendants of freed slaves by
the  time of the late republic.  Of course, a freed
slave does become a citizen, so you are correct
in that sense.

But by 100 BC, for example, it would probably
not be correct to say  that they were descended
primarily from dispossessed Latin/Etruscan farmers.
The social wars that followed would have swelled
the mob further with dispossessed non-citizens.

 who
> had been driven off their lands

It was a beautiful system, for the rich.  Start a
war, the farmers go off to fight it, come back
years later and the farm is ruined, sell it for
a song, join the mob.

The only problem being that next war there are
fewer farmers to fight.  So eventually you have to
hire the mob to fight.  And then the fun begins.

>by the patricians

The patricians were not coincident with the wealthy
class, or even the nobles.  Most of the nobles
were not patrician, and the vast majority of the
rich were not.  Patricians could be poor-rich, though
I don't know of any that were actually poor.  By
the time of Caesar, there were actually comparatively few patricians
left.  Caesar
was a patrician, for example (and not a rich one until he conquered
Gaul), but Pompey was not.

 in the course of their
> establishment of the slave-estates.
>
> And who were of course then and thereafter subjected to the usual
> invective by the apologists of slavery, like Cicero

Don't get me started on  that bastard!  Did more
to destroy the Republic than anyone, in my view.

But I'd say he was more an apologist for the aristocracy than for
slavery as such - mainly because there was no need for that.

>
> The "citizens" (slaves-- it was really really ugly by then, sons
required
> by law to take up their fathers' professions,

That started with Diocletian.


William Hyde