The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies)

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    This dog-eat-dog condition of life among the haves is mentioned repeatedly below see, e. In short, did those of the lower class believe in and value that disposition for establishing social rank—something that often strikes the modern observer as an incredible snobbery—to which we so plainly see the elite clinging?

    Various things point generally toward an affirmative answer to this question. First, one might expect significant displeasure with the existing social order, if there was such, to have resulted in some notable outward manifestation of a desire for change. We encounter really nothing of the sort. There was, especially during the Hellenistic period, a vogue of writing on utopian societies, which were often imagined as being egalitarian in their social structures; this n.

    However, this kind of writing appears largely to have faded away by the later Roman republican period, and seems never to have occasioned, at least so far as we can tell, any pragmatic results. The corollary would be, of course, that they ultimately held even if with a large dose of cynicism attitudes regarding society that resembled those known to us from elite-produced source materials. Several extended studies of some aspects of non-elite culture have likewise tended to reflect an overall conformity with elite attitudes.

    And again, this is a theme that surfaces repeatedly in the pages that will follow here. Even so, we still want to know with as much precision as our evidence will allow , whether persons of lower social levels actually competed with one another on a daily basis for social distinction. In other words, we can frequently observe intra-class struggles among say the members of the senatorial order over relative social rank. But did the same kind of thing go on in the taverns of Pompeii, or out in country villages? While one might incline to suppose that such things must have occurred there too, all of this has yet to be studied properly.

    And of course, it could well be that we would find slightly differing versions of the same basic phenomenon as we look for its manifestations within different social classes. Be that as it may, the essays in this volume will push us toward assuming a very widespread taste within any given social class for a quotidian wrangling over social preeminence. In short, it would seem that pretty well everyone in the Roman world felt a need constantly to jostle for social position, and did so via a complicated, wide-ranging, and highly formalized or ritualized series of mechanisms.

    For now, though, let me provide merely two epigraphic texts, to illustrate at least roughly this phenomenon, and in particular, to show the kinds of evidence we have they are meager , and how that evidence might be squeezed for information with a large measure of conjecture. All four were slaves. But one of these men, his name was Dama thus, he was of Greek origins , was listed first.

    Apparently because he belonged to the emperor Augustus' grandson, Agrippa Postumus. That will have brought Dama significant social cachet among his fellow slaves. Next, we read in the rules and regulations of a club collegium that operated at Lanuvium that if anyone were to insult another club member at one of the association's dinner parties, the offender would have to pay a fine of twelve sestertii. Obviously, this kind of evidence offers us nothing like the detail that say Pliny's correspondence does. However, with Pliny and his kind in the background, perhaps material such as these two stones can indeed reveal something about the social attitudes of their creators.

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    The points to be made might then go like this. These more humble individuals, when functioning among themselves, rather than inventing and implementing a world where equality would reign, apparently preferred to arrange themselves into socially determined hierarchies. Their mini-communities, in other words, were constructed socially in a fashion quite similar to the larger universe in which they revolved. A group of slaves does not seek parity within its little circle; rather, its members gravitate to a hierarchical ordering of themselves.

    Or, in an aggregation such as a collegium , the established mini-hierarchy might function in determining, for example, the punishment of misdeeds—and not at all dissimilarly to the way in which such things were done in the broader commonwealth.

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    The Romans often enough gravitated to distressingly violent behavior. In short, to grasp the outsider is very often to grasp some quite essential things about the insider—who she or he is, how she or he perceives her or himself, and then, how such individuals will be likely to relate to others. There are relatively few illustrations as one might expect, most of these are positioned in the two chapters that deal specifically with material culture , but full details regarding source and provenance are included. He has published widely since , his most significant works being Dionisio II. Childhood in Ancient Athens offers an in-depth st… More. London: Thames and Hudson. D'Arms, J.

    That is to say, some members of the collegium were obviously better p. Further, there was clearly a competitive streak to the social interactions of these lesser persons. That emerges in the kind of one-upmanship indicated by the Lanuvian association's attempt to regulate insulting behavior at its dinner parties. It was precisely such abusive behavior that often served to establish the pecking order at an elite banquet see D'Arms , followed by Peachin So, this club apparently hoped to establish a less combative tone at its dinner parties.

    Was the intent also to create a more egalitarian atmosphere? And did that succeed? We cannot know cf.

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    Dunbabin and Slater in this volume; also Perry. However, we can be confident that the kind of competitive and abusive behavior we are familiar with from elite dinner parties was not foreign to the soirees of these lesser individuals. And finally, the evidence from the countryside beyond the walls of Pompeii shows that we should not be surprised to find what we know from many an urban context cropping up in more rustic settings. When left to themselves, the Roman underdogs seemingly opted for something along the lines of the dog-eat-dog communal ethos celebrated by Pliny. Thus, it would begin to appear that where the operational principles of social relations are concerned, the Roman world was, from social top to social bottom, and in both town and country, fairly unified in its preferences.

    Indeed, it might be argued that to internalize the sundry nuances of this taste for an eternal ranking of people was a chief hallmark of being Roman. One last suggestion is perhaps worth making.

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    It may well be that we should avoid the temptation to presume—despite an understandable inclination to do so, given the preponderance, the intellectual and aesthetic allure, and the unflinchingly assertive tone of our extant elite-produced source materials—that this manner of structuring interpersonal relations was inevitably and entirely devised at the top and imposed from above.

    It is probably better to accept that the societal dispositions that we suspect colored the entire Roman cosmos may well have been generated in a roughly discursive manner that involved degrees of creativity at both the top and the bottom of the social scale.

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    In this book, we examine a variety of interactions that occurred in the ancient these Roman community. It is to be hoped that the interactions we have chosen will be broadly representative of Roman social relations writ large. It has now also been argued in this introduction that the most basic driving force in the world of these Roman social relations involved an intense appetite for ranking people socially, for constantly establishing finely tuned hierarchies. It has furthermore been proposed that this habit infected all the social levels of the Roman community.

    To the extent that this all holds, then we ought to be very close to the bottom line of Roman society altogether. In other words, to be socially a Roman, and to relate to others in the Roman social fashion, should have involved most essentially a perpetual attempt to establish, as it were, one's social auctoritas influence, authority, prestige, ascendancy, esteem ; and for doing that there were particular mechanisms, which could ultimately be comprehended as Roman. Let us now proceed to observe a social world thoroughly informed by this kind of thinking and doing.

    Achard, G.

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