Europe: A History (36 page)
Important distinctions developed within the patrician oligarchy of the later Republic. A handful of the most ancient and senior clans, the
gentes maiores
, formed an aristocracy among the patricians—the Valerii, Fabii, Cornelii, Claudii, and others. The
nobiles
were a wider but still senatorial group, consisting of all who could claim descent from a consul. They possessed the highly valued right of displaying in public the waxen portraits of their ancestors. The
equites
or ‘knights’ formed a sub-senatorial propertied class which possessed the means to belong to the cavalry. They had the right to wear a toga edged with two thin purple stripes, the
angusticlavia
, as opposed to the senator’s toga with broad purple stripes, the
latidavia
. In the theatre, they sat in the first fourteen rows, immediately behind the
orchestra
, reserved for senators. They were the chief beneficiaries of promotions under Augustus, when they largely displaced the nobiles as the backbone of the ruling class.
The strong contrast between city and countryside persisted. Like Rome itself, the provincial cities developed into major urban centres, characterized by imposing public works—paved streets, aqueducts, baths, theatres, temples, monuments—and by the growth of merchant, artisan, and proletarian classes. The city mob—constantly pacified, in Juvenal’s words, ‘through bread and circuses’,
panem et circenses
, became a vital social factor. In the countryside, the villas of local dignitaries stood out above the toiling mass of slaves who worked the great latifundia. An intermediate and, in the nature of things, enterprising group of
lib-ertini
or ‘freed slaves’ grew in importance, as the import of fresh slave populations tailed off with the end of the Republic’s conquests,
[
SPARTACUS
]
Despite the extreme contrasts of Roman society—between the vast power and wealth of the patricians and the lot of their slaves, between the opulence of many city-dwellers and the backwardness of the desert tribes and barbarian settlers on the periphery—it is a tribute to the flexible paternalism of the Roman social tradition that the outbreaks of class conflict were relatively few and far between. Blood relations carried great weight in Rome, where elaborate kinship groups proliferated. The patriciate presided over society at large just as the
paterfamilias
presided over every extended family. The patricians were originally divided into three tribes; the tribes into thirty
curiae
or parishes; and the parishes into
gentes
or clans and families. In later times the
gens
was composed of persons boasting the same remote male ancestor, whilst the
familia
was narrowed to mean ‘household group’. The absolute rights of fathers over all members of their family, the
patria potestas
was one of the corner-stones of family law.
[
NOMEN
]
SPARTACUS
S
PARTACUS
(d. 71 BC) was a gladiator, and the leader of the ancient world’s most extensive slave uprising. A Thracian by birth, he had served in the Roman army before deserting and being sold into slavery to the gladiatorial school in Capua. In 73
BC,
he broke out, and with a band of fellow fugitives set up camp on Mount Vesuvius. For the next two years he defied all attempts to catch him. His army swelled to almost 100,000 desperate men, who marched the length and breadth of Italy, to the Alps and the straits of Messina. In 72
BC
he defeated each of the reigning consuls in turn in pitched battles. He was finally cornered at Petelia in Lucania, separated from his Gallic and German allies, and annihilated by the forces of the praetor, M. Licinius Crassus. Spartacus died sword in hand, having first killed his horse to render further flight impossible.
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Appropriately enough, Crassus was one of the wealthiest slave-owners in Rome. He had benefited from the estates sequestered from the faction of Marius, and grew vastly rich by training his slaves in lucrative trades and by mining silver. Known as ‘Dives’, he was Consul in 70 with Pompey, and triumvir with Pompey and Caesar in 60. He celebrated his victory over Spartacus by lining 120 miles of the road from Capua to Rome with crucified prisoners, and by treating the Roman populace to a banquet of ten thousand tables. He enriched himself further as Governor of Syria, only to be killed in 53
BC
by the Parthians. His head was cut off, the mouth stuffed with molten gold. The accompanying notice from the Parthian king read: ‘Gorge yourself in death with the metal you so craved in life.’
Slavery was omnipresent in Roman society, and in some estimations the key institution of the economy. It provided the manpower for agriculture and industry, and underpinned the luxury of the cities. It involved the total physical, economic, and sexual exploitation of the slaves and their children. It was supported by the wars of the Republic, which brought in millions of captives, and in later centuries by systematic slave-raiding and slave-trading. Julius Caesar sold off 53,000 Gallic prisoners after one battle alone, at Atuatia (Namur). The island of Delos served as the principal entrepôt for barbarians brought from the East, and from beyond the Danube.
Slavery continued to be a feature of European life long after Roman times—as it was in most other cultures. It persisted throughout medieval Christendom, though it was gradually overtaken by the institution of serfdom. It was generally permitted among Christians so long as the slaves themselves were not Christian. It was still common enough in Renaissance Italy, where Muslim slaves were treated much as in their countries of origin. In more modern times, the European powers only tolerated it in their overseas colonies, where it survived the conversion of the slaves to Christianity.
The abolition of slavery was one of the chief social products of the European Enlightenment. It progressed through three main stages. The outlawry of slave-owning in the home countries was followed by the suppression of the international slave trade and then of slave-owning in the overseas colonies. In Britain’s case, these stages were reached in 1772, 1807, and 1833. Abolition did not occur, however, through revolts such as that of Spartacus. It occurred, as Emerson remarked, ‘through the repentance of the tyrant’.
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In modern times, Spartacus was adopted as a historical hero by the communist movement. His name was borrowed by the forerunner of the KPD, the Spartakusbund of 1916–19; and it was used by Arthur Koestler for the protagonist of his novel
The Gladiators
(1939). Slave revolts, in the Marxist view, were a necessary feature of ancient society, and were given suitable prominence in communist textbooks. A partner for Spartacus was found in Saumacus, leader of an earlier revolt among the Scythian slaves of Crimea, i.e. on ‘Soviet territory’. Soviet historians did not care to emphasize the parallels between the world of Spartacus and Crassus and that of the Gulag, forced collectivization, and the
nomenklatura.
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[CHERSONESOS]
There was a profusion of popular assemblies in Rome, which had both social and political functions. The patricians met on their own in the
comitia curiata
, their ‘parish meetings’, where, among other things, they ratified the appointment of the consuls. The plebeians, too, met regularly in the
comitia tributa
or ‘tribal meetings’, where they discussed their communal affairs and elected their officials—the tribunes, or ‘spokesmen of the tribes’, the
quaestores
and the
aediles
the plebeian magistrates. After 449
BC
they could be summoned by the consuls as well as by the tribunes. They met in the Forum; and in the
plebiscita
, or ‘voting of the plebs’, they gave their opinion on any matter put to them.
For military purposes, patricians and plebeians met together in the
comitia cen-turiata
or the ‘meetings of the centuries’. They assembled outside the city, on the vast Campus Martius, the Field of Mars, where they were drawn up in their thirty-five tribes. Each tribe was divided according to wealth into five classes, with the
equites
or ‘knights of the cavalry’ at the top and the poorest of the
pedites
or ‘infantry’ at the bottom. In time, there was also an unpropertied class of
proletarii
or ‘proles’. Each of the classes was organized in turn into
centuriae
or ‘centuries’, and each century into ‘seniors’ (men aged between 45–60, on the reserve list) and ‘juniors’ (men aged between 17–45, liable for active service). The census of 241
BC
showed a total of 260,000 citizens in 373 centuries, which works out at almost 700 men per century. Here was the whole of Roman (male) society in full view. These
comitia centuriata
gradually assumed the functions once reserved for the patricians, including the elections of the chief magistrates, the conferment of the
imperium
or ‘right of command’ on military leaders, the ratification of laws, and decisions of war and peace. They voted by dropping clay tablets into one of two baskets as they filed out of their century enclosures. Their proceedings were required to be completed within one day.
NOMEN
C
LAN
and family provided the basis for the Roman system of personal names. All patrician males had three names. The
praenomen
or forename was generally chosen from a shortlist of twelve, usually written in abbreviated form:
C(G) = Gaius, Gn = Gnaeus, D = Decimus, Fl = Flavius, L = Lucius, M = Marcus, N = Numerius, P = Publius, Q = Ouintus, R = Rufus, S = Sextus, T = Titus
The
nomen
indicated a man’s clan, the
cognomen
his family. Hence ‘C. Julius Caesar’ stood for Gaius, from the
gens
or clan of the Julii, and the
domus
or family of Caesar.
All men belonging to the same patrician clan shared the same
nomen
, whilst all their paternal male kin shared both
nomen
and
cognomen
. At any one time, therefore, there were several ‘Julius Caesars’ in circulation, each distinguished by his
praenomen
. The famous general’s father was L. lulius Caesar. When several members of the same family had all three names in common, they were differentiated by additional epithets:
P. Cornelius Scipio, tribune 396–395 BC
P. Cornelius Scipio Barbatus (‘the Beard’), dictator 306
P. Cornelius Scipio Asina (‘the She-Ass’), consul 221
P. Cornelius Scipio, consul 218; father of Africanus
P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus Maior (‘the Elder African’ 236–184), general, consul 205,194, victor over Hannibal
L. Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus (‘the Asian’); brother of Africanus
P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus Minor (‘the Younger African’); son of Africanus Maior
P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus Minor Numantinus (‘the Numantian’, 184–129 BC); adopted son of Africanus Minor, destroyer of Carthage
P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica (‘the Nose’), consul 191
P. Cornelius Scipio Corculum (‘Little Heart’), pontifex maximus 150
Plebeians, like G. Marius or M. Antonius, possessed no
nomen
.
Women, in contrast, were given only one name—either the feminine
nomen
of the clan for patricians or the feminine
cognomen
of the family for plebeians. Hence all the daughters of the Julii were called ‘Julia’, or of the Livii ‘Livia’. Sisters were not differentiated. The two daughters of Mark Antony were both called ‘Antonia’. One became the mother of German-icus, the other the grandmother of Nero. All the daughters of Marius were called ‘Maria’. It is a sign of Roman women’slowly standing that they were denied a full individual identity.
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As Roman practice shows, multiple names were only required by citizens with independent legal status. For much of European history, therefore, most people made do with much less. All they had was a forename, or ‘Christian name’, together with a patronymic or adjectival description. All the languages of Europe had their counterparts for ‘Little John, son of Big Tom’. In addition to a personal name, women often used a term denoting whose wife or daughter they were. In the Slavonic world, this took the form of the suffixes
-ova
or
-ovna
. ‘Maria Stefanowa’ (Polish) stood for ‘Stephen’s wife, Mary’; ‘Elena Borisovna’ (Russian) for ‘Helen, daughter of Boris’. Well-known people and foreigners often acquired names indicating their place of origin.
In the Middle Ages, the feudal nobility needed to associate themselves with the fief or landed property which justified their rank. As a result, they adopted place-based surnames using either a prefix, such as
von
, or
di
, or suffix, such as
-ski
. Hence, the French prince Charles de Lorraine would be known in German as ‘Karl von Lotharingen’ or in Polish as ‘Karol Lotarinski’. Members of guilds adopted names denoting their craft or trade. The ubiquitous Bakers, Carters, Millers, and Smiths belonged to the largest group to fix on the custom of family surnames. More recently, state governments have turned custom into a legal requirement, bringing individuals into the net of censuses, tax-collecting, and conscription.
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The Gaels of Scotland and the Jews of Poland were two ancient communities who long escaped surnames. Both had enjoyed communal autonomy, surviving for centuries with traditional name forms using either patronymics (such as the Jewish ‘Abraham Ben Isaac’, i.e. Abraham, son of Isaac) or personal epithets. The famous Highland outlaw, whom the English-speaking Lowlanders called Rob Roy MacGregor, c.1660–1732, was known to his own as Rob Ruadh (Red Robert) of Inversnaid. Both the Gaelic and the Jewish nomenclatures fell victim to state bureaucracies in the late eighteenth century. After the Jacobite defeat, the Scottish Highlanders were registered according to clan names which they had previously rarely used, thereby giving rise to thousands upon thousands of MacGregors, MacDonalds, and MacLeods. After the Partitions of Poland, Polish Jews in Russia usually took the names of their home towns or of their noble employers. In Prussia and Austria they were allotted German surnames by state officials. From 1795 to 1806, the Jewish community of Warsaw found itself at the mercy of E. T. A. Hoffmann, then chief Prussian administrator of the city, who handed out surnames according to his fancy. The lucky ones came away with Apfelbaum, Himmelfarb, or Vogelsang: the less fortunate with Fischbein, Hosenduft, or Katzenellenbogen.
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