Re: ****ny Happy Caliphate

On May 15, 5:11 pm, mimus <tinmimu...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On Thu, 15 May 2008 13:48:51 -0700, William Hyde wrote:
> > On May 15, 3:53 pm, mimus <tinmimu...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>
> > 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.

This is true, but it does not make the republic
a plutocracy.  It was also ignored on occasion.

> As well as being of the "right" ancestry.

Not quite. Neither Cicero nor Marius had any
of the right ancestry.  Both were "new men".
The fact that there was need for such a term
shows how rare it was, but it did happen that
someone without any ancestors of note would
win office and enter the senate.

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

I don't think Sulla did this. He expanded the size
of the senate, and  the number of offices that
qualified a person for it, so had the republic gone
on he would have created new noble families
in this way.

Augustus created new Patricians, though.  Some
priesthoods could only be held by Patricians, and
were going vacant.  There was a reason the
Plebians hadn't won the right to these priesthoods.
Not many people would take these even as a gift.


> >  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.

Again, nobles, not Patricians.

If you were politically active it was impossible.  Your
opponents would uncover any scheme you had. But
if you had no intention of entering the Senate, I don't
think there was a problem.

A favourite scheme was to use a freed slave.  Roman ex-slaves were not
entirely free.  They still owed their old master respect and
clientage.  This meant that, in particular, if they failed in this
they
could be re-enslaved.  So a former slave of yours
made an excellent business partner - he basically
couldn't cheat you.  Thus a smart aristocrat could
find a smart young slave, get him trained in business,
free him and set him up, reaping profits as a silent
partner.

The slave's grandson might enter the senate, and
repeat the process.

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

Roman aristocrats were only allowed to earn money
from war or land. They were an ancestor-wor****ping bunch, and the
early Romans gained wealth only in these ways.

Land was extended to include money from forestry or mining,  though
some traditionalists were against that.  Crassus extended it to making
money from
running a private fire department.  But since he
was not paid a fee for putting out the fires, but
bought and sold the land, it still counted as making
money from land.  At least technically.


> Horace was a suck-up as well.

He was the  grandson of a slave, was he not?

But he is sucking up to autocracy, not oligarchy.


> 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 .

I get the impression that in the decades just before
the Punic wars, the power of the senate was much
less than that of the more democratic bodies, the
tribal assembly and centuriate assembly.  During
the long wars, though, practical power was ceded
to the experienced old men in the senate.

Classical Athens is OK, if you are not a slave (25%
of the population) or a resident foreigner.

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

Never, but I only lived in the US for ten years.

William Hyde