Re: ****ny Happy Caliphate

On Thu, 15 May 2008 13:48:51 -0700, William Hyde wrote:

> 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.

You had to be worth so much, in landed estate, to serve in the Senate.

As well as being of the "right" ancestry.

Not that Sulla IIRC didn't have to appoint some new Patrician families, to
make up for the ones wot he killed.

>  Oligarchs are never poor, after all, but
> those who dealt in commerce were forbidden to
> hold office in the republic.

I thought the Patricians had their little ways of getting around that.

It's interesting that ordinary commerce was deprecated but slave-owning
and slave-production wasn't (agriculture, vine-yards, olive-oil, mines).

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

Close, but not very, and, yes, "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.

I count the Social War as signaling the end of the "Republic", since it
embodied a rejection of Federalism, which might've saved it for yet more
ruckuses leading to occasional improvements (see Machiavelli's
_Discourses_).

>>  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.

Horace was a suck-up as well.

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

I guess the high point of (the-slow-approach-to-)civilization in Europe
for about fifteen hundred years (five hundred before that and a thousand
after) was the establishment of the Tribunate . . . .

But then again, I'm prejudiced in favor of the libertarian democratic
republic with social and environmental guarantees.

-- 

When was the last time you heard an American politician
use the word "plutocracy"?