Toga Parties

 “Class Struggle in the Roman Republic” by Alan Woods, 2023

For most people, the history of Rome is a long, confusing mix of bloodshed, warfare, orgies and ultimate failure, filled with togas, Caesars, chariots and wine. Woods makes sense out of the seeming chaos of the Republic by following the economic structure, relations of production and class struggles underlying this confusing welter.  Essentially it was the slave economy that led to the fall of Roman civil life in a society which first attempted to pattern itself after the Greek 'demos.' After the Republic fell the formal rule of the Empire and the Caesars arose, though empire-building was part of the life of the Republic too. Its semi-democratic 'Republican' character could not continue as the limitations of a slave and conquest economy moved it towards dictatorship and Emperors. If much of this book reminds you of processes now occurring in the U.S. and world, it is no accident.

Rome first defeated the local Latin tribes, then the Italian Etruscans and the Samnites, then dominated the Greek cities of southern Italy. With the final defeat of Carthage (located in present day Tunisia) in the 3 Punic wars Rome ruled the whole 'middle of the earth' – the Medi-terranean. These wars brought more and more slaves into the economy, strengthening the hand of the large landlords and later, the money-lenders and merchants.  The latter were called 'equites' or 'equestrians' - initially, those commoners who could afford a horse for the cavalry.

Class Issues

Patricians and plebeians, 'equestrian' merchants and aristocratic latifundists, ethnic Italians and Roman citizens, coloni peasants, slaves and proletarii – are the classes and groups at issue. The original Roman proletarii were those who produced babies and were dependents of the state and its free grain, not workers. The wealthy nobiles, in turn, used the somewhat privileged Roman poor against 'external' Italians in several ethnic political fights as a way of splitting the popular forces. Land became the focus of the class struggle, as the patricians and wealthy monopolized the common lands, driving out small-holders through large plots worked by slave labor. The slaves, a group of which in Latin are called 'familia' - were the main productive class. Slaves also worked in small industries - baskets, mining, pottery-making, metalwork and the like, so an actual working proletariat was small to non-existent. It was the wealthy strata's control of the common lands that was key.

As the Republic grew, money lenders and merchants also built a money economy out of the loss of common land by small holders and the seizure of wealth from abroad. Debt from lack of land turned plebeians and small farmers into debt 'slaves' when they could no longer pay their bills or loan payments. The Senate (from senex – old men) represented the power center of 'gens' aristocrats, the nouveaux riche and the landlords who dominated Rome. They recruited rich plebs into their circle too – the 1% wooing the 9% so to speak. The Senate negotiated with the populace, passed mild or unenforced reforms under pressure, bought off, lied, split and eventually used armed force against its opponents. A plebeian Tribune had been established in 494 B.C. which the Senate had to deal with. At first it was relatively powerless. Starting in 133 B.C. the elite Grachus brothers were voted in as Tribunes by the poor and plebeian masses. The Grachians wanted to bring back small-holder agriculture and give the common land leased to the rich back to small farmers. The wealthy could not abide this agrarian revolution. The brothers Grachii were murdered, their supporters slaughtered as political violence entered politics in a massive way. The elite killed, jailed, cast out and fined the 'populares' in Rome again around 88 B.C., guaranteeing a deep class hatred for years.

Violence & Politics

The early Republican army was a 'citizens militia' in which small peasants and plebeians with property served in the ranks. As the small property classes were decimated by slavery or debt, their farms ruined by long periods of military service, the army became professionalized. Its soldiers were instead paid and provisioned, its training better, its generals prominent. The army went from being staffed by those with some property to being open to anyone, including the proletarii and former 'barbarians.' It became a soldier-class, and whomever led it gained great wealth, while the ranks depended on their generals for loot. At the same time factions developed in the ruling class between the old landed aristocracy and the new money equestrians in the Senate. Generals would take sides, switch sides or stand aloof between these two ruling-class factions. Yet when 'push came to kill' over treatment of the poor, the ruling elite usually united, along with the most prominent generals like Marius.

Class struggle, civil war and revolution see-sawed around Rome for more than a hundred years between 133 B.C. and 27 B.C. A successful 'red terror' under Cinna took over Rome in 87-83 B.C. and slaughtered the Roman wealthy, passing laws to benefit debtors, the Roman proletarii and the land-poor. At the time General Marius had changed sides and allied with the populists. Then a 'white terror' under Sulla in 82 B.C defeated Cinna, butchered the rebels and their allies and changed laws on voting, land, debt, citizenship and grain to benefit the Roman rich. These laws had been slowly won in the past by the party of the Roman poor and Cinna's rebellion. Sulla became the first real 'dictator' of Rome, keeping the Senate as a front while he ruled Rome and Italy through his army. Initially dictators were temporary Roman figures dealing with an emergency. Not so Sulla who was declared dictator for life. Woods calls Sulla an early example of 'Bonapartism' and even similar to fascism – rising above the classes as a military power, while still ensuring the production system and the wealthy class. During this period a rebellion of the heavily oppressed Italians against Rome came to naught. The Estruscan 'fasces' image – a bundle of sticks with an axe inside the bundle - became a symbol of Rome and origin of the word 'fascism.' It originally meant the ability of a king to punish his subjects. Quite appropriate.

During Sulla's reign the ostentatious rich ran riot, flaunting their wealth in food, clothes, houses, debauchery and accoutrements as part of their revenge against the plebeian insurrection. Even Sulla tried to reign them in but this was a time of severe inequality, reminding us of other periods in history – the French royals, the Gilded Age and now, the time of billionaires. This 'triumph of wealth' happened again after the victory of Caesar Augustus, the first Roman emperor, in another celebration of untrammeled spoils and exploitation that went on for years. Can you say Caligula and Nero?

Empire-Ism and It's Discontents

The outer provinces of Thrace, Greece, Gaul, Spain, Sythia, Illyria, Syria, Judea, Turkey and Egypt were sources of plunder, raw materials, land, taxation and slaves. Debt led to land and property being turned over to Romans. These provinces had to pay to quarter Roman soldiers and functionaries after losses in war and had no legal power to challenge Roman rule. Their lands were given to soldiers of the legion and the Roman rich; their citizens turned into slaves or gladiators. One rebellion by Mithradates, a king of east Asia was partly successful, but he too was defeated. The empire was created by this need for slaves, land, taxes and wealth, which were the material forces that pushed its constant expansion.

Spartacus confronts the slavers

Two large slave revolts broke out in Sicily due to the cruelty of the new Roman Republican slave masters after they defeated Carthage. At one point a slave army of thousands controlled the whole island of Sicily. The great rebellion of Spartacus on the Italian mainland was the last slave rebellion of note, called the Third Servile War. His army was made up of slaves from outside Italy, with Spartacus being Thracian (northern Greece, southern Bulgaria, western tip of Turkey). Woods pays special attention to this sprawling rebellion from 73 B.C. to 71 B.C., which defeated Roman forces time and time again up and down the peninsula. At one point there were 100K gladiators and ex-slaves in Spartacus' army. Later thousands of women, children and some peasants and proletarii joined them. They were ultimately undone by internal splits within the army and a confused goal – i.e. to escape Italy, to plunder Italy or to attack Rome and behead the state. Spartacus, trying to escape Italy, halted before the Alps at one point enroute to Gaul (France), then was betrayed by pirates in a plan to sail his forces to Sicily at another.

Woods defends both Howard Fast's book 'Spartacus' and the 1960 film 'Spartacus' as mostly historical, using art to strengthen several points. Remember the chorus of “I am Spartacus” in the film? Karl Marx called Spartacus “the most capital fellow in antiquity” while the German Bolsheviks first called their organization the Spartakus Bunde. Woods says that because Spartacus could not make links with the Roman and Italian poor and peasants, his rebellion was condemned to failure. If he had gotten away I'm not so sure of that, as there were still places Roman rule was weaker. In a way, what happened also happened during the Mexican revolution, when Villa and Zapata refused to take state power due to their rural outlook, and returned home.

Caesar and Caesarism

Woods finally concentrates on the legacy of Julius Caesar, a Julian aristocrat who became the transitional figure to Empire.  His supporter, Octavian/ Augustus, became the first 'imperator' of Rome. After Augustus, all Roman emperors were named 'Caesar,' along with the copycats like the German 'Kaiser' or the Russian 'Tsar.' Caesar first built a base with the populists, as he was linked by marriage to both Cinna and Marius. Caesar secretly backed the “Catiline Conspiracy” of demobilized soldiers, the Roman lumpen-proletariat, criminals, out-aristocrats, bankrupts and debtors. They lined up behind Catiline, a populist out-aristocrat similar to Caesar who wanted to cancel debts. They planned to murder conservative Senators and start an armed revolt. The conspiracy collapsed after news of it reached Cicero and Cato the Younger, representatives of the aristocracy. Do we know of any 'out-aristocrats' that claim some kind of populism now?

Caesar taking the surrender of Vercingetorix

Caesar, power-hungry, then allied with the successful general Pompey, and the richest money-lender in Rome, Crassus, in the first “Triumvirate.' With his base in a powerful army that had slaughtered hundreds of thousands in Gaul, the populist allegiance of the Roman lumpen-proletariat and new marriage links to the rich, Caesar became the new ruler of Rome. He turned on his former ally and defeated Pompey in battle in Greece. He became the second unquestioned military ruler, rising above both main classes as did Sulla. He enforced the class power of the rich slavers and merchants, but now without any dissent from anyone. His 'strong arms' ruled, a method that was called 'Caesarism.' He ignored the key demands of the populares. The Senate became a hollow joke. As Marx put it in the Communist Manifesto, “the mutual ruin of the contending classes” resulted in dictatorship and eventually formal Empire. This occurs in various forms when 'democracy' of any kind no longer functions due to class tensions and struggle, so 'order' must be restored somehow. The factional conservative 'Republicans' in the Senate famously assassinated Caesar on the 15^th of March, thinking his death would end dictatorship. It had the reverse effect, speeding the transition to Empire.

The approach or victory of authoritarianism, militarism, bourgeois factionalism and fascism within bourgeois democracy are signs that the 'old' economy can no longer tolerate a challenge or change. This is actually our situation now. In Rome the stagnation of the slave economy eventually led to 'free peasants' replacing the falling numbers of slaves, but the 'free' coloni peasants became legally tied to the land and landlords by Emperor Constantine. Slavery as a system has very low productivity, so it was bound to fail. This is the origin of feudalism and serfdom, which slowly replaced the Roman slave economy. Rome's Empire lasted hundreds of years, but collapsed due to economic failure and invasions by tribal forces outside Rome. Woods contends this led to a 1,000 years of political, cultural, economic and technical stagnation in Europe, the well-known 'dark ages' when Christianity and kings ruled Europe.

Woods's sources on Roman history are Marx, Engels, Hegel, Kautsky, Livy, Plutarch, Diodorus, Mommsen, Cicero, Appian, Pliny, Suetonius and others. If you are tired of the exotic confusion of HBO streaming series like 'Rome,' this might be your thing. It is an excellent book for those who want a detailed, socialist look at Rome and clarity about what the hell really happened during the Republic.

Prior blog reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Reason in Revolt,” “The History of Philosophy” and “Beethoven and Shostakovich” (all 3 by Woods); “Spartacus” (Fast); “Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict,” “The Italian Brand,” “Debt” (Graeber) or the words 'slavery' or 'debt.' 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog, January 4, 2024