Introduction

It is possible to write (or, at least, conceive of writing) two histories of the city of Rome under the Republic. One is the history of the Roman elite and the way in which the city formed a privileged stage for their political rivalries, played out both in the formal settings of the Senate and the popular assemblies and in less formal but equally important contexts which included the display of their wealth, influence, and distinction through the construction of houses and public buildings, the entertainments they organized for the Roman populace, and the tombs they set up on the roads which led into the city.

The other is the history of the mass of the People of Rome: how the city’s population expanded dramatically during the republican period, and especially in the first century, as large numbers of slaves were brought to the city and individuals migrated to Rome from all over Italy and, increasingly, beyond; the implications of the crowded and unsanitary conditions in which, for the most part, the inhabitants of Rome below the level of the elite had to live; and the strategies devised to supply the growing city’s population with food and water.

This chapter sets out not only to outline the histories of‘‘elite Rome’’ and ‘‘Rome of the masses,’’ but also to explore how far these two histories can be seen to interrelate from the political, social, and economic points of view and the extent to which rich, poor, and not-so-poor interacted in various urban contexts. The focus will be predominantly on the period between the late fourth and late first centuries, but with occasional reference back to the early years of the Republic.

The historian of the city of Rome is faced with two main problems: one a more acute version of those characteristic of the history of the Republic in general and the other specifically relating to the reconstruction of urban topography in this period. For the study of competition within the Roman elite, we are of course reliant on the various literary narratives and biographies - Livy, Plutarch, and so on - influenced by the various perspectives which derive from the sources on which their work is based, coupled with those deriving from the context and period in which the individual authors themselves are writing. Also valuable (for the first century) are

The contemporary writings of Cicero and Sallust. There are considerable discrepancies in the amount of information available for different periods, most of the third century and the years between 167 and 133 being particularly thinly documented. For traditions relating to particular locations in the city, we can draw on the fragments preserved of Roman antiquarian writers such as Varro and Festus; while Livy’s summaries of the events of each year preserve valuable information about the construction and dedication of public buildings in particular.1

Writing the history of the poor in a society is in general much more difficult than writing that of the wealthy, and this is particularly true in the case of the Roman Republic. Often we have to extrapolate from evidence relating to the Imperial period, and for both Republic and Empire we frequently need also to draw on comparative material from better-documented pre-industrial societies. Similarly, reconstructing the topography of republican Rome is even more difficult than conducting the same exercise for the Imperial period. There are very few standing monuments of republican date, the temples of the Forum Boarium and Largo Argentina being exceptional in this respect (see Figures 4.2 and 24.5-6). In addition to being covered by the later buildings of modern, renaissance, and mediaeval Rome - especially in areas of dense later habitation like the Campus Martius - the republican levels of the city are largely concealed by the remains of the Imperial city. The preserved fragments of the Marble Plan of Rome once displayed in the Temple of Peace likewise depict Rome as it was in the early third century ad. The interpretation of the excavations of the republican city that took place in the late nineteenth century (those of Boni in the Forum Romanum, for example) were controversial at the time and continue to be a focus of debate and discussion. Some inscriptions, mostly funerary or related to the dedication of buildings or statues, do survive from the city of the mid - and late Republic, as do images of monuments on coins that date from the late second century onward (though the accuracy of the images they display is frequently very dubious). Some stress must therefore be laid on the provisional nature of conclusions derived from the study of the topography of the city, which need continually to be revised as new excavations take place and more information comes to light.