Invisible Romans (18 page)

A sick raven said to his weeping mother, ‘Don’t cry, mother. Rather, ask the gods to deliver me from my deadly disease and from my sufferings.’ ‘My child,’ his mother replied, ‘which god will want to save you? For which is the god whose altar you have not robbed?’ (Babrius,
Fables
78)

The enforcing mechanisms – most saliently and effectively gossip, ridicule, reproach, oral censure, and, ultimately, ostracism – are social, lacking anything like a police presence, which seldom if ever is visible as a part of the mind world of the poor. These are, of course, imperfect weapons, often directed unfairly (to our way of thinking) and often without appeal – the
opinio communis
of the group being imposed without a formal venue for reply. The roiling effects of this situation are seen in family feuds, in a generalized conviction that self-aggrandizement (within certain limits, of course) is acceptable, and similar selfish acts. As a result, the poor are loath to be too trusting, even of friends, as the proverb attests: ‘Treat your friend as if he might become an enemy’ (Publilius Syrus, Maxim 401).

An aspect of the mind world of the poor that has always attracted the attention of the not-poor has been the poor’s attitude toward work. Throughout ancient literature there runs the accusation that the poor are lazy. However, looking beyond the negative stereotype of the elite, the fact is that the poor value working hard. Fables along these lines are numerous: ‘The Ant and the Fly,’ ‘The Old Bull and the Young Steer,’ ‘How the Lark Knew When to Leave,’ and ‘When the Sluggard Went to the Ant’ are a few examples. Nevertheless, although the poor work hard, they are
not
interested in working themselves to death. In fact, their outlook makes it senseless to do that. The basic existential fact for the poor is that they are poor, and that there is very little possibility to become un-poor. Their goal is to survive, not to thrive, for their precarious existence has taught that the risks needed to ‘move on up’ – to thrive instead of merely survive – are not worth the very real chance that striving for more through changed technologies or social arrangements will, in fact, boomerang and destroy them. Hence they are very cautious and wary of venturing beyond the conservative. This risk aversion is well expressed in the fable of ‘The Fisherman and the Sprat’:

A fisherman who fished all over the sea and lived by the produce of his pole once caught on his horsehair line a little fish of the kind suitable to be fried up. The struggling fishlet begged the fisherman to listen to his plea: ‘What profit will I gain you? How much will I sell for? I still could grow a lot bigger. It’s only a few days ago that mother brought me forth among the seaweed near this rocky shore. Let me go today; don’t kill me to no purpose. Later, after I have grown fat on feeding in the sea, I’ll become a grand fish, suitable for the table of the rich, and you will come back here and catch me again.’ So the little fish spoke, lamenting as he gasped for life. But he could not persuade the old man, who, while sticking him on his sharp cane stringer, replied, ‘It is crazy to let go of the little you have for certain in the hope of gaining what is uncertain in the future.’ (Babrius,
Fables
6)

Modern studies have indicated that as the poor work harder and squeeze more out of whatever resources they have, their family size grows and a new equilibrium between product and needs is established at approximately the same level of living as before – only now for more people. In addition, the poor sense that producing more will just mean that more is taken from them, not that they will have more in the long run. The zero-sum nature of the economy (or, at least, its perceived ‘zero-sum-ness’) also reinforces this tendency to stop working at a certain point, for the group as a whole will put pressure on the subunits not to work too hard, not to garner more than an appropriate share of available resources, because for one unit to gain, another must lose. These factors channel clearly into Alexander Chanyanov’s ‘theory of drudgery,’ originally developed through the study of Russian peasants in the early twentieth century, but subsequently found to be generally applicable. According to this theory, a poor person will stop working once the judgment is made that more work will not yield sufficient gain to outweigh the irksomeness of the extra work. Seen from without, a poor person may seem to be irrationally lazy when in fact the calculation has been made, in all likelihood subconsciously based on past experience and/or tradition, that more work is not remunerative, so why do it? Thus, the outlook of the poor makes it perfectly acceptable to work until the basic needs are met, and then to knock off. Just the same sort of calculation, over the
long haul, leads to the poor not striving mightily to escape their poverty, whether or not this represents an acceptance of the dominant ideology locating them in a subordinate position in society. The ‘laziness’ of the poor is embedded in their practical view of life’s possibilities.

Religion

Human societies have difficulty policing themselves by themselves. There is often recourse to the supernatural as the ultimate enforcer; the rules of the community, supra-communal, emanate from and are enforced by a higher power or powers, which thus in theory at least puts all the players on the same level playing field and at the same time provides a ready reason why some things/persons succeed and others fail. Not surprisingly, the mind world of the poor embraces this human constant. But it does it in a particularly pragmatic, down-to-earth way, because of the proximity of the poor to the contingencies of life.

A basic element in the poor’s religious outlook is the ‘will of the gods.’ This ‘will’ aspect supports the traditional values and situation of the social group by emphasizing that, in theory at least, the gods set down rules of action and reward behavior such as piety and justice, while punishing their opposites. But observable reality is that the gods do not consistently enforce this ‘will’ by punishing those who err and rewarding those who comply. Faced with this clash of expectation and reality, the power of Fate/Fortune steps in to fill the need for an explanation. This power exists not only outside human control, but even that of the gods; both are powerless against Fate. In a way, Fate stands outside of the entire natural order of things, the great explainer of why things often do not seem to happen as the rules of the game indicate they should. Fate comes into play both through a resignation to the hand the future might deal and through a conviction that life’s good and bad experiences somehow ultimately balance out. The former is illustrated in ‘The Force of Destiny’ (Babrius,
Fables
136), in which a father tries to avoid the fated death of his son by locking him away, only to lose him through an accident in his prison. The moral is ‘Bear bravely what is given you by Fate and do not try to avoid it by clever devices; you cannot not escape what is bound to be.’ The latter is exemplified in a fable from the
Collectio Augustana:

Some fishermen were drawing a dragnet. Since it was heavy they danced for joy, thinking that they had a great catch. But after they had drawn it to shore and found that the net was full of stones and wood but few fish, they became very heavy-hearted, not so much angry at what had happened as at their having expected the contrary. But one of them, an old fellow, said: ‘Friends, let’s stop this. Grief, it seems, is the sister of joy, and since we had so much pleasure beforehand, we had to have some grief as well.’ (
Collectio Augustana
/Hansen)

A fatalistic vision also permeates much of the proverb literature: ‘It is easier to get a favor from Fortune than to keep it’ (Publilius Syrus, Maxim 198); ‘When Fortune flatters, she does it to betray’ (Maxim 197); ‘Fortune is not satisfied with inflicting one calamity’ (Maxim 213).

A perhaps unexpected result of Fate’s role in the world of the poor is its encouragement of self-reliance. Since the gods cannot be counted upon, and Fate is whimsical, the safest bet is on one’s own hard work and resourcefulness. The fable of ‘Heracles and the Ox-Driver’ illustrates this:

An ox-driver was driving his cart home from a village, when the cart pitched down into a deep ditch. The drover, rather than try to pull it out, just sat there, not doing anything except calling on Hercules, the only god he honored and sincerely worshiped. The god appeared to him and spoke: ‘Put your hands to the wheels and whip the oxen. Call on the gods only when you are doing something to help yourself, or you will call on them in vain.’ (Babrius,
Fables
20)

Such an outlook feeds into the generally positive attitude toward work (but not too much of it) I have discussed as another aspect of the mind world of the poor.

As I have mentioned, an intrinsic aspect of being poor is being in a subordinate relationship to others, who, among other things, redirect some of the poor’s produce toward their own ends. Thus the poor find themselves in a subjected position; the origins of that subjection are often mythologized, sometimes historicized, but the ultimate reality is that it is the way life is, and the poor act within this reality. One would suppose that there was a dark humor about this condition, and perhaps a joke from the
Philogelos,
a Greek book of humor, fits that mold:

Wanting to train his donkey not to eat, a numbskull stopped giving him any food. When the donkey died of starvation, the man said: ‘What a loss! Just when he had learned not to eat, he died.’ (
Philogelas
/Hansen)

The fundamental fact of subjection means that the poor’s production is always to some extent at the mercy of those in power. The fable ‘More Fearsome than Ever’ catches this reality:

A lion went crazy with anger. A fawn who saw him from the forest cried out, ‘Woe is us! What will he not do in a rage – he is already unbearable for us when he is sane!’ (Babrius,
Fables
90)

Lucian captures some of the frustration of the poor in the face of the rich when he has a character in his
Saturnalia
address the titan Cronos and ask him to reinstate the Golden Age, when:

… men themselves were gold and poverty was nowhere near. As for us [poor folk], we could not even be thought of as lead, but something meaner, if such there be; and for most of us food is won with toil; and poverty, want, and helplessness, and ‘alas!’, and ‘how can I get it?’, and ‘oh, what bad luck!’ and such exclamations are plentiful, at least among us poor. We should be less distressed about it, you may be sure, if we did not see the rich living in such bliss, who, though they have such gold, such silver in their safes, though they have all that clothing and own slaves and carriage-horses and tenements and farms, each and all in large numbers, not only have never shared them with us, but never deign even to notice ordinary people. This is what sticks in our throats most of all, Cronos, and we think it an intolerable thing for such a man to lie in his purple clothes and gorge himself on all those good things, belching, receiving his guest’s congratulations, and feasting without a break, while I and my sort dream where we can get four obols to be able to sleep after a fill of bread or barley, with cress or thyme or onion as a relish. (Lucian,
Saturnalia
20–21/Kilburn)

In their subordinate position, the poor still felt self-worth and desired
to be treated decently. An episode in the
Satyricon
captures this. Corax has been hired as a porter, a typical day-laborer’s job, and roughly asserted his value as a person:

Come on now! Do you think that I am a beast of burden or some ship to carry stone? I hired out to do a man’s work, not a horse’s. I am no less free than you, even if my father left me a pauper. (
Satyricon
117)

Yet within the potential of absolute power over the poor, a
modus vivendi
is established that sees the demands of the powerful take as much as possible, while leaving the poor with just enough to survive on. I am, of course, speaking of a relationship in equilibrium: if the powerful demand too much, they can destroy themselves as the poor rise up (a rare occurrence, admittedly), or they can destroy the poor – driving them off, or killing them through starvation. In the latter case the powerful are working against their own self-interest; hence, the equilibrium, even given the very asymmetrical power relationship.

Reciprocity, as in horizontal relationships, is the key leverage that the poor have to deal with this vertical asymmetry. Usually expressed in patron-client structures, the basic ideal is that each side has something the other needs, and so they symbiotically support each other. The poor have respect and income for the powerful; the powerful have resources that can help the poor in times of distress, and are obligated to use them. There is an interesting fable that speaks to this from the perspective of the poor, ‘The Lion and the Mouse.’ In it, the ability of the powerless to help the powerful is affirmed:

A lion having caught a mouse was going to eat it. But that little domestic thief, seeing his end near, babbled out a plea: ‘If you want to fill your stomach with meat, you really should hunt animals with large horns – deer and bulls. But to eat a mouse! This really isn’t enough to even taste as it touches the edges of your lips. Spare me, I beg you. Just possibly, as small as I am, I shall some day be able to show you my gratitude.’ The lion laughed and let the suppliant live. Later, pursued by youthful hunters, he fell into their nets and found himself tied very tightly so he could be killed. The mouse then stealthily emerged from his hole, cut the strands of rope with his tiny teeth, and set the lion free. By saving the lion in his turn, he repaid him who had let
him
live. (Babrius,
Fables
107)