Ethnic Identity and Aristocratic Competition in Republican Rome

by Gary D. Farney

Overview

The ancient Romans are usually thought of as a monolithic ethnic group, though in fact they formed a self-consciously pluralistic society. In this book, Gary D. Farney explores how senators from Rome’s Republican period celebrated and manipulated their ethnic identity to get ahead in Rome’s political culture. He examines how politicians from these lands tried to advertise positive aspects of their ethnic identity, how others tried to re-create a negative identity into something positive, and how ethnic identity advertisement developed over the course of Republican history. Finally, in an epilogue, Farney addresses how the various Italic identities coalesced into a singular Italian identity in the Empire, and how Rome’s experience with Italic groups informed how it perceived other groups, such as Gauls, Germans, and Greeks.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521863315
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/18/2007
Pages:	358
Product dimensions:	6.22(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.98(d)

About the Author

Gary D. Farney is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University in Newark. A scholar of Roman history, he is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and has published in journals such as Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, Historia, and Athenaeum.

Read an Excerpt

Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-86331-5 - Ethnic Identity and Aristocratic Competition in Republican Rome - by Gary D. Farney
Excerpt

1 DUAE PATRIAE

1 PARTNERS IN EMPIRE

   “Because the Romans mixed with themselves Etruscans, Latins, and Sabines and regard there to be one blood from all of these, they have made one body from these various parts and one people composed of all of them.”¹ In this way, the second-century A.D. Roman historian Florus describes the traditional ethnic composition of Rome at the beginning of his chapter on the Social War, Rome’s war with its Italian allies which began in 91 B.C. Although he would judge the actions of the rebels to be criminal, he goes on to criticize Rome for not sharing the citizenship with the deserving peoples of Italy sooner.² After all, as a contemporary of Florus would echo in his history, the Italian upper classes had only led the revolt because they had desired to be “partners in empire instead of subjects.”³ Implicit within these comments is that the Latins, Sabines, and Etruscans had dared to hope this before and had succeeded, and now they were the dominant groups within the Roman state. Their dominance, however, seemed to exclude men from dozensof other groups from a place in the state, notably Rome’s allies that had exerted so much on its behalf.

   More than a century before, Velleius Paterculus, a descendant of a Campanian family that had collaborated with the Romans during the Social War, had also claimed that the Italian rebels, ethnic kin of the Romans, had reasons to complain:

Just as their fortune was terrible, so their cause was so very just: for they were seeking citizenship in that state whose empire they had protected by force of arms. Through all the years and in every war they had provided double the number of infantrymen and cavalrymen, but they had not received the same rights in that country which they had brought to such a point that it could despise men of the same ethnic origin and blood as though they were complete foreigners.⁴

It is very interesting that, just as Florus had described the Romans as a mix of Latin, Sabine, and Etruscan blood (unum ex omnibus sanguinem), Velleius regarded the rebels as “of the same ethnicity and blood” (eiusdem et gentis et sanguinis) as the Romans. One wonders how many Romans of the Republic would have agreed with these writers on these points. In fact, we may be suspicious of their attitudes altogether, because these men wrote in the more cosmopolitan periods of the Empire. They lived, after all, at a time when any Italian origin for an aristocrat was a sign of ancient familiarity with Rome. This may be why they saw Republican Italians in oversimplified terms as unus sanguis and idem gens,⁵ because they were a more cohesive ethnic unit when these historians operated in the Empire.⁶ It has been suggested, however, that their sentiments reflect the opinions of the Italian allies at the time of the Social War, “a relic of allied propaganda,” and not just the opinions of the writers in question.⁷ If so, then some of the slogans of the rebellious Italians contained an ethnic message, that Rome was mistreating its allies who were in fact the Romans’ kin and had earned the right to be “partners in empire,” just like the Latins, Sabines, and Etruscans.⁸

   In fact, some of these perceptions – to whomever they may belong – can be understood by what we know about the myths and history of the Republican aristocracy. The legends of early Rome uniformly insist that the state was a multiethnic venture.⁹ Romulus and his Latins “took” Sabine wives and shared the state with their Sabine kinsmen, and Rome even had a dynasty with connections to Etruria ruling over it until the foundation of the Republic. The very city of Rome itself could be called to witness the pluralistic nature of this “original” Roman state: various neighborhoods were later thought to have been ethnic “quarters” originally, so there was the vicus Tuscus and Caelian Hill for the Etruscans, and the Quirinal Hill for the Sabines.¹⁰ Latin and Sabine (and possibly a few Etruscan) families made up the Republican aristocracy (the tradition continued), but the new plebeian nobiles of the fourth and later centuries included more Latin families in the Senate than just those in and right around Rome. “Real” Sabines came into the state with the full enfranchisement of Sabinum proper in the third century and Sabine nobiles show electoral success almost immediately. At nearly the same time, the rest of Latium and then the “Latinized” inhabitants of what was later known as Latium adiectum, formerly the land of the Hernici, Volsci, and Aurunci, began to take up the civitas Romana and the attendant right to run for political office in the capital. But now the aristocracy, and the citizen body as a whole, closed its ranks to men from other parts of Italy.¹¹ By the time of the Social War, the Roman senatorial class consisted primarily of Latins and Sabines, with a few of Etruscan and other origins. Justly or unjustly, the Italian allies had reason to see Rome’s attitude to them as chauvinistic. Following the Social War and its attendant conflicts, however, men from all parts of Italy would start to make up the gap between them and the Latin and Sabine Romans.

   Of course, Rome would eventually come to embrace the idea of “partnership in empire” with Italy. In 70/69 B.C., on the occasion of the first censorship that actually enrolled many of the old allies as citizens, two Roman magistrates in charge of the mint struck commemorative coins that display Italia and Roma clasping hands with Italia holding a cornucopia between them. One of the magistrates was a Mucius Scaevola, from an old and distinguished Roman family; the other was Quintus Fufius Calenus, a man with ancestors from the lower ranks of the Senate whose cognomen betrays his origins from Cales in Auruncan Campania.¹² The handshake on their coins by representatives of their two worlds would seem to express hope for an accord between Italy and Rome brought about by the end of the war and the beginning of its resolution in 70/69 – that is, the census enrollment that would one day make partnership and prosperity possible.¹³

   Thus, the traditional history of the aristocracy and the rolls of the magistrates themselves seem to confirm what the writers of the Empire thought about the ethnic composition of the Republic’s political class. That is, it was composed of Latins and Sabines, but was more or less closed to other Italic aristocrats until the aftermath of the Social War and until Rome began in some way to adopt the ideas that the Italic allies had fought for. Eventually, aided by the increased pace of assimilation promoted by Caesar and Augustus, the Italians and Romans would be closer to one polity in reality, and this perception would later be such an accomplished fact that writers of the first and second centuries A.D. had trouble understanding the mind-set that made the Social War possible.

2. TWO HOMELANDS

   With the later second century a notable exception, throughout its history the Roman citizenry was reinventing (or was thought to be reinventing) its ethnic identity by incorporating the municipal elite of Italy, the domi nobiles as they were politely called, beginning with the people immediately around the capital.¹⁴ Cicero – whose status and prejudices as a novus homo and a man of “Further Latium” must always be kept in mind – believed it was the single most important factor in explaining Rome’s greatness,¹⁵ and he was later echoed in these sentiments by the emperor Claudius, whose family was of Sabine and patrician origin.¹⁶ This process of inclusion, however, may not have been fast enough in the opinion of some contemporaries and later writers. Regardless, by the dawn of the Empire the senatorial classes would hail from the whole of the Italian peninsula and, as the centuries progressed, the entire Mediterranean. As a result, the multiethnic composition of the Republic’s political culture would not be unfamiliar to the modern statesman – as would the struggles (personal and civil) that such selective inclusion and exclusion precipitated for political power.

   It follows then that Roman aristocrats of all periods would recognize the fact that they had two homelands, Rome and their actual origo, be the latter Latin, Sabine, or other. Cicero articulated this idea in the late Republic in his philosophical treatise, the Laws:

I do indeed think that all municipal men have two homelands [duae patriae], one by nature and the other by citizenship. Just so Cato, though he was born at Tusculum, took Roman citizenship. Thus, though he was Tusculan by birth, he was a Roman by citizenship: the one was his homeland by place, the other by law. In a likewise manner, your people of Attica, before Theseus ordered them to leave their fields and come into the city, still they regarded themselves as people of Attica. So we too regard that place where we were born and that place where we have been enfranchised as our homeland. But it is necessary for the latter to stand first in our affection, to which the name “Republic” has attached itself to us all. For this we must die, for this we must give ourselves entirely, and for this we must give all of our possessions as though for sacrifice. But that homeland which raised us is not much less sweet than that which has adopted us. Thus I shall never say that this is not my homeland, though that one is greater and this is contained in it. [In this way every municipal man] has [two] states, but thinks of them as one.¹⁷

Although Cicero here specifies the municeps for this peculiar situation of duae patriae, he may only have regarded this situation as particularly acute for men like himself. After all, they had come to the capital from their Italian subject communities within historical memory.

   To use an example outside the senatorial class, Quintus Ennius, a Messapian poet and teacher who acquired Roman citizenship in 184 B.C., expressed something similar when he said that he had “three hearts” (tria cordia), one Greek, one Oscan, and one Latin. This was interpreted by Aulus Gellius to mean that Ennius spoke three languages. In light of the “nested” nature of Roman (and indeed Italian) identity, however, perhaps we should see his self-description as both literary and cultural-ethnic, not dissimilar to Cicero’s. To account for this tripartite self-identification, one would note that Ennius was a Roman citizen from a locally powerful family of Messapian Rudiae who possessed a Hellenic legendary genealogy and presumably south Italian, Greek tastes and interests.¹⁸

   One might be tempted to see Ennius’s and Cicero’s professions and anxieties of a plural identity to be unique to their “outsider” status. Yet it is clear that even Roman nobles of the most antique origin celebrated their family’s arrival from Latin or Sabine locations just outside of Rome. In the late Republic, such remote origins were remembered in their august-sounding personal names, in their families’ legendary genealogies, and even in the monuments and place-names around the city. Just as Cicero attended to his family’s sacra at Arpinum, so too did patrician Romans perform familial rites at locations in the environs of the city, some on the sites of defunct Latin villages thought to have coalesced into Rome itself.¹⁹ With this in mind, it is demonstrative that Aulus Postumius Albinus, a patrician whose house supposedly existed even before the Republic, felt it worthy to note his own dual origin: in the beginning of his Histories, he introduces himself to his Greek audience as not just “a Roman,” but as “a Roman born in Latium.”²⁰ Obviously, Albinus’s parochial attachments to Latium are different than those of Cicero: they emphasize his ancient and highly aristocratic origins and are not just elements of a greater devotion to the Roman commonwealth.

   Although all Romans had a dual origin, this does not mean that municipal men – even Latin ones – were let off the hook for their “newness” to the Roman political scene or for their innate duality. Quite the contrary, bluer-blooded aristocrats lorded their “aboriginal” status over municipes. They taunted the municipal men by calling them foreigners,²¹ they cast doubt on their citizen status and free birth,²² and often they considered matrimonial ties with them a thing to be despised.²³ We hear about these attacks against municipales (the derisive term for the municipes) in the lawcourts and from the rostrum (the expected venues), as well as when the nobilissimi were attacking their fellows who cultivated connections with the domi nobiles of Italy. In reality, the bulk of the Roman aristocracy was intimately bound up by ties of marriage with the elite of Italy, having made a practice of it throughout its history.²⁴ But like aristocrats of other ages, the traditional Roman nobiles found it useful upon occasion to act like their gentes were ancient and pure, though most assuredly they knew in their hearts that the reality was quite different.²⁵

   Such superficialities aside, the perception was that most Romans had a dual origin, two homelands, often one from a municipium.²⁶ “How many of us are not of such an origin,” Cicero could ask his fellow senators in 44 B.C.²⁷ Being a Roman and a prospective politician meant having two homelands to consider, and oftentimes two attendant identities, particularly if his municipium was not Latin or Sabine. Sometimes these were places familiar and close to Rome. At other times, they were far away, and bespoke of an origo alien and even recently hostile to the Roman state. Such a situation was not always to be regretted or hidden from public view. Honorable origins, or at least origins that could be turned into something honorable, could be quite useful for a Roman with the ambition and the political savvy to use them to his advantage. In no instance could a Roman aristocrat ignore his origins completely, though he could try to hide them. Of course, the situation was more acute to the new nobility or those striving to break into it. Accordingly, Quintus Cicero exhorted his famous brother to recite three things to himself in his daily meditations while he was on the campaign trail for the consulship of 63 B.C.: “ ‘I am a novus. I seek the consulship.’ There is a third thing to remember. ‘This is Rome,’ a state formed by a gathering of nations.”²⁸ One could interpret Quintus’s words as a warning to his ambitious brother never to forget that the politics of ethnic identity loomed over the competitive political climate of the capital, especially for a “new” politician.²⁹

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© Cambridge University Press

Table of Contents

1. Duae patriae; 2. Homo Romanus natus in Latio; 3. Romanus atque Sabinus; 4. Tusci ac barbari; 5. Minicipalia illa prodigia; 6. Transferendo huc quod usquam egregium fuerit.

Editorial Reviews

"Ethnic Identity and Aristocratic Competition in Republican Rome is a very fine work of scholarship. The topic touches on a wide range of important debates in Roman history, and at the same time the core issues of multiculturalism, plurality, ethnicity, and identity politics bear in a timely fashion on contemporary discussions. Different readers, including the reviewer, will probably not agree with every single argument posited, but this is not surprising in a work that is provocative and original. Farney is to be commended."
-Michael P. Fronda, McGill University, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

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