Читать книгу Urban Life and Local Politics in Roman Bithynia - Tonnes Bekker-Nielsen - Страница 6

The ancient world as we know it would be unthinkable without the city. The world of classical Greece was a world of city-states; the Roman Empire was an empire of cities. From the fourth century BC onwards, most cities were no longer sovereign, self-governing poleis, but they were still governing on behalf of their Hellenistic or Roman rulers. The administrative functions of the city and the readiness of its elite to participate in its administration were crucial to the success of, and crucial to our understanding of, the Roman imperial project.

Hybris and stasis

Aristotle famously defined man as a politikon zôon,¹ sometimes translated as “a political animal” and sometimes as “a creature that lives in cities”. The exact meaning lies somewhere between the two: man is not “political” in the modern sense of the English word, but neither is he merely a city-dweller. It would be clumsier, but perhaps more precise to translate politikon zôon as “a being that participates in a city”. To our eyes, ancient Greek cities were characterised by a high degree of citizen participation in the political process, not only because it was perceived as the duty of an adult male citizen, but also because it provided an opportunity for public display of positive personal qualities.

For the majority of the male citizens, a large part of the day was spent in public spaces: the street, the agora, the gymnasium, and a correspondingly smaller part within the confines of the nuclear family, the dwelling or the workplace. The public nature of the social environment favoured the creation of an agonistic urban society where the place of the individual within the group and within the citizen body was continually being defined and redefined through ties of family, friendship, loyalty, patronage and clientage, and where visible personal qualities (honour, “face”, bearing, speech, education) were very important, tangible but impersonal status markers (wealth, possessions) less important. As the Book of Proverbs expresses it: “a good name is more desirable than great riches; to be esteemed is better than silver or gold”.²

The social environment of a Greek city thus placed the male individual in a sink-or-swim situation: his status or “honour” had to be displayed on a regular basis, marking his place within the social hierarchy of the community and enabling him to establish advantageous long-term relationships of patronage, clientage, friendship or marriage. On the other hand, the city was not a social jungle where one animal ate another: the agôn took place within a restraining framework of written and unwritten rules, ensuring that conflicts rarely got out of hand. Two central concepts in this connection are hybris and stasis.

The familiar meaning of hybris is “intolerable arrogance” but in a wider sense, hybris encompasses violent or anti-social behaviour in general. Sailing off to explore the land of the Cyclopes, Odysseus desires to know “what manner of men live there, whether they are arrogant men (hybristai) that do not have laws, or kind to strangers (philoxenoi) and god-fearing in their hearts”.³ The form of life that he finds there is the exact antithesis of the civilized urban lifestyle: the Cyclops lives alone in his cave, follows no laws and does not fear the gods. As if to underline his disregard for Greek norms of social behaviour, which emphasize hospitality to strangers, the Cyclops not only treats his guests badly; he eats them.

Arrogant and self-gratifying behaviour transgressing established norms of social behaviour could not be tolerated within the polis, since it threatened the social cohesion and solidarity of the community, which was vital for survival in a conflict with other poleis. Another threat was stasis, disruptive conflict within the community, which could take the form of extreme factionalism or actual political violence. In the Politics, the clinching argument of Aristotle in favour of his “middle” constitution is that it is “free from stasis” (astasiaskos)⁴ and according to the Memorabilia of Xenophon, Sokrates defined the “good” citizen as one who “puts an end to stasis”.⁵

The social structure of republican Rome had a good deal in common with contemporary Greek cities, and Romans shared the Greek horror of civic violence. At an early stage, the Republic adopted the Etruscan fasces as an emblem of public office, symbolic of the magistrate’s authority to impose order and punish transgressors with beating (the rods) or death (the axe). Such a concentration of power in the hands of the state’s leaders ensured stability – but it could be a terrible weapon in the wrong hands. So, firstly, power was always held jointly by two or more magistrates, except in emergencies; secondly, access to the magistracies was restricted to the right sort of people, originally members of certain (“patrician”) families, later those who met a property qualification, the census.⁶ There might be a census threshold for entering the urban council of an Italian town (the ordo decurionum), there was a higher one for the equestrian order and a still higher one for the senate, the real locus of power in republican Rome. The census was not the only social dividing line, however, and within the Roman senate a distinction between members of established consular families and more recent arrivals (homines novi) lingered well into the early Empire.

For all its admirable qualities – and despite the admiration lavished on it by generations of classical scholars – the ancient urban community was a fragile social structure, as its members were well aware. Internal tensions within the community were kept in check, after a fashion, by laws and unwritten codes to restrain individualistic behaviour going beyond the bounds of the agôn and threatening the cohesion, hence the survival, of the community. To modern eyes, some of these restrictions may seem peculiar and sometimes comical, for instance, the Athenian institution of ostracism, the Spartan prohibition on embellishing one’s front door⁷ or Trajan’s refusal to permit a fire brigade in Nikomedia because the city was “plagued by political factionalism” (factionibus vexata).⁸ But the fear of civil violence among the many or of oppression by the few was real enough, and well founded. Friendly competition and social rivalry within the agôn could easily get out of control and once public order had broken down, it was difficult to restore.