Bread and circuses: historical sociology and political pluralism

514 Pages·1990·51.68 MB·English

by  Veyne Paul

Lircuscs
H I S T O R I C AL S O C I O L O GY AND
P O L I T I C AL P L U R A L I SM
P A UL V Ε Υ Ν E
TRANSLATED BY BRIAN P E A R CE
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY OSWYN MURRAY
PENGUIN BOOKS
BREAD AND CIRCUSES
Leading historian of the classical world and theoretician of history, Paul
Veyne is Professor of Roman History at the Collège de France. Among
his other books are Writing History (1984), A History of Private Life,
Voli: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium (1987), Roman Erotic Elegy (1988),
René Char en ses poèmes (1990) and La société romaine (1991).
PAUL VEYNE
BREAD AND CIRCUSES
HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY AND
POLITICAL PLURALISM
ABRIDGED
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
OSWYN MURRAY
TRANSLATED BY BRIAN PEARCE
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Boob USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published in France, under the title Le Pain et le arque, by Éditions du Seuil 1976
This abridgement in English translation first published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 1990
Published in Penguin Boob 1992
13579108642
Copyright Ο Éditions du Seuil, 1976
Introduction copyright Ο Oswyn Murray, 1990
Translation copyright Ο Brian Pearce, 1990
All rights reserved
Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition mat it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Contents
Introduction by Oswyn Murray vii
Bibliography xxiii
The Subject of This Book ι
I THE AGENTS AND THEIR BEHAVIOUR 5
1. The gift in Roman society: a narrative outline 5
2. What is euergetism? 10
3. Magnificence 13
4. Invariants and modifications 18
5. Euergetism and Christian charity 19
6. The Hellenistic and Roman city 34
7. The regime of the notables 42
8. Work and leisure 46
9. Economic analysis of sumptuary expenditure 54
Notes 60
II GREEK EUERGETISM 70
1. Before euergetism: classical Athens 71
2. The oligarchy of the notables 83
3. The origins of euergetism 85
4. Hellenistic euergetism: a general survey 101
5. The system in detail 131
6. Envy, legitimation, social superiority 152
Notes 156
III THE REPUBLICAN OLIGARCHY IN ROME 201
1. The government of the oligarchy 204
2. Why the magistrates provided games 208
3. Symbolic gifts 214
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Contents
4. Electoral 'corruption' 219
5. Euergetism political, not social 232
6. The corn dole and the moral order 236
7. Patronage of the state 246
Notes 261
IV THE EMPEROR AND HIS CAPITAL 2Ç2
1. Autonomy and heteronomy 293
2. Submission or public opinion 295
3. The sovereign by absolute right 302
4. The deification of the Emperors and the notion of charisma 306
5. The Emperor: owner and 'boss'? 321
6. The Emperor's benefactions 347
7. What ideology is for and how people believe it 377
8. The expression of majesty 380
9. The Circus and politicization 398
Conclusion: festival and folklore 416
Summary 417
Notes 419
Index 483
Introduction
Historians are supposed to write books full of facts, and it is often
assumed that their chief function is to tell us new facts or correct old
ones about the past. This is a safe and convenient belief, because it
means that we can happily leave the writing (and the reading) of those
books to professionals, who will sort it all out for us, and save us the
trouble of worrying about the past, which is anyway dead and irrel­
evant to the present. At best historians niake good holiday reading,
because truth is often stranger and more exciting than fiction, and
because history books tend to be longer (whether because historians
are more verbose, or because history is more boundless than the
imagination), which is always an advantage when there is time to
kill.
There are many good and many bad history books of this sort. But
historians have often felt that the discovery of facts (even true ones) is
only a preliminary to a higher activity, that of understanding the facts.
And at this point history becomes dangerous, because it disturbs the
dust of the past. It takes what was already perfectly well known, and
even quite satisfactorily arranged, and rearranges it into a new pattern,
so that the familiar becomes foreign and the past begins to threaten us.
Though it is dangerous to the social order, this activity is also useful,
because it is not true that the past is dead. It determines our present
lives, not absolutely (we have a certain freedom in at least some
societies, some of the time, to make our own mistakes), but certainly
more strongly than any power of reason, or any alleged law of politics
or sociology or economics. Changing the past therefore means also
changing the present, whether by direct example, or by liberating us
from our historically determined prejudices so as to enable us to make
more rational decisions.
This role of history was well understood in earlier centuries. The
Renaissance learned how to free itself from religion through study of
the past; in the eighteenth century the history of facts, antiquarian
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Introduction
history, was contrasted with the history of explanations, philosophical
history, by men like Voltaire, Montesquieu, and the greatest of all
English historians, Edward Gibbon. In the nineteenth century, when
history became a science, it was immediately recognized as the queen
of the social sciences, providing laws for society, reasons for politics,
and justifications for legal systems. Scientific history created the nation-
states of Europe, and the two world wars which destroyed their power.
But that sort of history is now an ageing queen: no one (except
politicians) seriously believes that political history has lessons for the
present; no one (except lawyers) seriously believes that a legal system
should be justified by historical precedent; and no one (except his­
torians) seriously believes that a just society is best built on the past.
Nowadays history is an academic discipline, part of the educational
system, a device for wasting the time of the young, or a relaxation for
consenting adults.
Of course that is not true: the real history, the unsafe philosophical
nineteenth-century sort of history, lives on, and the reader should
beware. Consider our greatest modern philosophical historian, Michel
Foucault. Foucault's histories of madness set out to demonstrate that
madness was a social disease, whose nature changed in different periods,
but which always reflected the need for society to find outsiders to
punish and imprison, in order that the prison of the social order should
seem like freedom. These books were read by psychologists in one of
the most oppressive European systems of mental care; and as a result
it was decided to abolish lunatic asylums, to return the mad into the
care of the society which had created them. Approve or disapprove,
Foucault had an effect on a country not even his own: the streets of
Italy are witness to the liberation of many innocents who owe their
freedom to the power of his analysis. The asylums themselves have
been given to the universities to keep their ideas in.
Historians (like history) do not always intend their consequences.
Take Foucault again: he wrote a History of Sexuality to show how
society had always sought to problematize sexual activity in order
to use natural instincts as an organ of social control: inhibition and
repression are weapons in the subordination of the individual to the
group. On past experience he might have hoped for a sexual revolution
from such a work; but liberating the insane is one thing, liberating the
sane quite another. Instead his thesis seems set to be the theory before
the times, for we are now experiencing a new wave of sexual puri-
tanism which he could not have predicted and did not live to see, as
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Introduction
governments seek once again to control the sexual mores of their
subjects.
So history is dangerous for your health, both too much of it and
too little. But ancient history is a long way away (more than 2,000
years ago), and surely safer. Not so; as my scientist son once remarked
to me, it is only a hundred generations since Homer: the origins of
our civilization are closer to us than we realize. They can also present
lessons more clearly, because their systems were simpler, freer from
tradition, or merely further away, and therefore less distinct, capable
of being seen only in significant outline. The study of the ancient
world presents a distinguished tradition of philosophical historians,
from Gibbon onwards. In the Romantic period the German historian
B. G. Niebuhr, financial adviser to the kings of Denmark and Prussia,
studied the peasantry of Rome in order to build an alternative to
the revolutionary proletariat of Napoleonic France. Later the Uberai
politician Theodor Mommsen wrote a History of Rome as a precursor
to German nationalism, and a Römisches Staatsrecht to try to control it
through the constitution. In England the banker George Grote wrote
a Utilitarian History of Greece in order to explain and justify the English
radicals. These are, of course, crude simplifications, but they serve to
bring out that relationship between past and present which is so
necessary and so beneficial to philosophical history, and so deplored
by the professional antiquarian.
What makes great historians is not, however, political bias or a time-
bound message; it is a quality of the imagination that perceives a grand
theme, resonant for the age, and frees discussion of it through placing
it in the past: society, not the historian, is responsible for the conse­
quences it may draw. People often deplore in modern historians that
fear of the grand theme; but once again the history of the ancient
world has not been without its exponents of the art. Rostovtzeff's
Social and Economic Histories of the Roman and Hellenistic worlds
revealed the fascinating complexity of the bourgeois civilization that
lay behind the clash of great empires, and perhaps defended the pre-
revolutionary values of a Russian exile. Sir Ronald Syme's depiction
of the relationship between ideology and oligarchy in the development
of a dictatorship, The Roman Revolution, was a product of the thirties.
Most recently the grand theme has emerged again, in G. E. M. de
Sainte-Croìx's The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, an attempt
to reassert the values of orthodox Marxism for 4,000 years of history.
It is a waste of time to agree or disagree with such works; they float
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like icebergs of interpretation, around which lesser books must needs
manoeuvre with care if they do not wish to be sunk with all their
readers lost.
Paul Veyne belongs to a society where the great historian is a cult
figure: it is impossible to understand modern French intellectual atti-*
tudes without reference to the influence of a succession of exponents
of the historical art, such as Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, Georges
Duby, Michel Foucault and Tzvetan Todorov. But to mention such
names is already to point to the fact that in France the 'sciences of man'
are not separated into competing disciplines as they are in England,
and therefore the concepts of the grand theme and the unity of history
are central to the historian's task. Like others of his generation, Veyne
has deliberately sought to bring the history of the ancient world into
relationship with this tradition, rescuing it from an older alliance with
antiquarian philological and literary studies. A former student at the
École Normale Supérieure and the French School at Rome, he was
educated in the old style, and his learning and technical expertise
remain outstanding. But, Provençal by origin and professor at Aix for
many years, he chooses to portray himself deliberately as a provincial,
tilting at the Paris establishment. That claim in 1976 won him the
paradoxical honour of a place in the inner cabinet of French intellectual
life, a professorship at the Collège de France.
His reputation was made by two books of the seventies that com­
plement each other: a book on the theory of history and this present
work, which exemplifies that theory in practice. Comment on écrit
l'histoire (1971) was translated as Writing History (1984). In it he sought
to demolish all theories of history based on generalizations and social
laws, and to claim that history was a common-sense activity devoted
to describing the specific, rather than exemplifying the universal; it has
no method and no aim other than that of giving an account of anything
considered interesting: 'history has neither structure nor method, and
it is certain in advance that every theory in this domain is still-born\
History is the account of man's activities in the 'sublunary' world
of the particular, which uses generalizations only to illuminate the
particular.
Shocking and liberating as such a proclamation appeared in the
French world of '-isms', it is more likely to seem shockingly familiar
in our citadel of empiric virtue. But even to an English reader there
are new aspects to Veyne's defence of common sense, because of its
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