Ancient and modern / How the Roman plebs made modern democracy |
For otherwise healthy plebs in the Roman world, survival depended on the four ‘Fs’: farming (your sole source of food and money), fighting, family and friends. Everything else that made life worth living meant having some degree of control over your life, which could be summed up in the fifth ‘F’, freedom, or political equality. But the elite had little time for such goodwill towards men. For the plebs, there’s the rub.
In the 40s bc, the historian Livy began writing a history of Rome from its foundation in 753 BC. It was first ruled by a series of seven kings (none actually Roman!) who were finally thrown out as tyrants in 509 BC. During that period the plebs, summoned from their farms as necessary, were in almost constant conflict with surrounding tribes over possession of land, and Rome ended up about twice the size of local rivals (c. 350 square miles and a population of 40,000) and with a formidable plebeian (but not standing) army.
It was at this point that Livy describes Rome’s overnight (rather unlikely) transformation into a........