Jerry Toner - Popular Culture in Ancient Rome

Introduction: Elite and Popular Cultures

This is a book about popular culture in the Roman world. Popular culture is probably best defined in a negative way as the culture of the non-elite. The non-elite (I shall also call them simply the people) comprised a whole host of different social groups peasants, craftsmen and artisans, labourers, healers, fortune-tellers, storytellers and entertainers, shopkeepers and traders but also consisted of their women, their children, and the have-nots of Roman society: slaves and those who had fallen into destitution and beggary. The culture these groups shared was very much the unofficial and subordinate culture of Roman society.

In total, we are talking about tens of millions of people inhabiting a region stretching from the damp lowlands of Scotland to the baking-hot banks of the river Nile. Dozens of local languages, most of which we have little or no trace of, jostled alongside the official Latin and Greek. It will never be possible to re-create the richness of each of these local cultures. We are also looking at a period spanning hundreds of years, from roughly 100 BCE to 500 CE. The evidence is so scanty that we cannot examine the popular culture of any one point in time. Regrettable though this is, it need not present an insurmountable obstacle. The argument of this book is that the popular culture can best be understood as a whole. Popular culture represented a set of attitudes, which in many ways can be seen as responses to the broadly similar social, economic and environmental conditions that the majority of the population of the Roman Empire faced throughout its history. I will be trying to look at the themes that characterized and dominated the lives of these largely voiceless people.

The non-elite were too great a hotchpotch of differing groups to be united by a single, monolithic culture. They inhabited a complex world of different geographies, wealth and status levels that meant that no uniform way of life could ever exist. One of the main internal divisions was between slaves and the free. Most Roman citizens saw themselves as anything but servile. But the poorest of the free could easily find themselves in a far worse material condition than most of the slave population. An increasing number of them drew their ancestry from the slave body. That might explain their vigorous protests against the execution in 61 CE of Pedanius Secunduss entire household of 400 slaves, after his murder by one of them. The fervent desire for freedom that we encounter among many slaves argues for a shared outlook with the free. Both free and slave valued the same privileges. They took their pleasures in the same boisterous way. They faced the same social pressures, albeit in varying degrees. Both had to cope with a system of hierarchy that placed them at the whim of the powerful, even more so as the value of citizenship declined under the empire. The people had their own marginals too: beggars, bandits, the mad. There was never just a simple division between free and slave.

The non-elite were not unified by class interests: few if any elements of class consciousness can be sensed in the surviving record. Most of them saw their neighbours as competitors not comrades in the harsh struggle for scarce resources. To have nothing was to be nothing in the Roman world. Theirs was a culture where people strove to look down on their neighbours with something of the same disdain that the elite looked down on them. For the most part, these were people who were far too busy getting on in the world, or just striving to maintain what little they had, than to worry about whether anything fundamental was wrong with the system itself.