Ordinary lives

The story of the political conflicts of this period tends to be the story of the clash of political principles and of widely divergent views about how Rome should be governed. It is a story of big ideas, and almost inevitably it becomes a story of big men, from Scipio Aemilianus to Sulla. For that is how the Roman writers, on whose accounts we now depend, told it, focusing on the heroes and anti-heroes, the larger-than-life personalities who appear to have determined the course of both war and politics. They also drew on material, now largely lost, that came from the pens of those men themselves: the speeches of Gaius Gracchus or – one of the saddest losses in the whole of classical literature – the shamelessly self-justificatory autobiography of Sulla, written in twenty-two volumes during his retirement, that later writers occasionally mentioned and consulted.

What is missing is the perspective of those outside this exclusive group: the view of the ordinary soldiers or voters, of the women or – with the exception of the many fictions about Spartacus – the slaves. The men who jumped from rooftop to rooftop in Carthage, the people who scrawled the graffiti urging Tiberius to land reform, the loose-tongued servant who insulted the supporters of Gaius, and the five wives of Sulla remain in the background or are at best bit-part players. Even when ordinary people do speak for themselves, their surviving words tend to be brief and non-committal: ‘To Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, dictator, son of Lucius, from his ex-slaves’, as one inscription on a stone pedestal runs; but who they were, what stood on top of the pedestal and why they were dedicating it to him is anyone’s guess. Just as uncertain is how far the life of many men and women in the street went on more or less as normal throughout most of this period while those at the top fought it out with their legions. Or did the violence and disintegration of civic order dog most of the population most of the time?

Occasionally it is possible to see the effects of these conflicts trickling down into ordinary, everyday life. Pompeii was one of those little rebel towns that gained Roman citizenship after the Social War but was soon forced to welcome a couple of thousand ex-soldiers, who were given land that belonged to the locals. It was not a happy mixture. Although far fewer than the original citizens, the veterans soon made their presence aggressively felt. A couple of the richest of them sponsored a vast new amphitheatre, though that may have been as welcome an amenity to the original inhabitants as it was to the Sullan thugs who were predictably keen on gladiatorial spectacle. The record of office holding in the city for this period shows that the new colonists somehow managed to exclude the old families of the town. And in the 60s BCE, Cicero referred to long-running, chronic disputes at Pompeii about, among other things, voting rights. The knock-on effects of Sulla’s siege were still being felt on the streets of Pompeii decades later.

The most vivid testimony, however, to the risks and dilemmas for the ordinary people caught up in these wars comes from a story about the outbreak of the Social War at Asculum in 91 BCE. An eager audience, a mixture of Romans and locals, was enjoying some shows in the town theatre when the drama moved offstage. The Roman part of the crowd had not liked the anti-Roman stance of one comic performer and attacked him so fiercely that they left the hapless actor dead. The next comedian on the bill was a travelling player of Latin origin and a great favourite with Roman audiences for his jokes and mimicry. Terrified that the other side of the audience would now turn on him, he had no option but to walk on to the stage where the other man had just been killed and to talk and joke his way out of trouble. ‘I’m not a Roman either,’ he said to the spectators. ‘I travel throughout Italy searching for favours by making people laugh and giving pleasure. So spare the swallow, which the gods allow to nest safely in all your houses!’ This touched them, and they sat back to watch the rest of the show. But it was only a brief comic interlude: soon after, all the Romans in the town were killed.

It is a poignant and revealing story, which captures the point of view of an ordinary stand-up comic facing an ordinary audience, which on this occasion was not just hostile but potentially murderous. And it is a powerful reminder of the very fine line throughout this period between normal civic life – going to the theatre, enjoying a comic turn or two – and deadly massacre. Sometimes the swallows were not spared.