Outcasting and the Elite Gaze in Late-Imperial Narratives of Urban Lower-Class Unrest. The Cases of Alexandria and Constantinople (original) (raw)
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The universal presence of rumours that precede and accompany riots everywhere in the world and everywhere in history had for long led scholars to interpret the phenomenon as a sort of social disease. According to this view, rumours that circulate in times of crisis would be seen as a natural product of a “breakdown” of society, demonstrating the mental underdevelopment of individuals or the unconscious motives of a group. Against this psycho-pathological paradigm, a number of historians and social scientists adopting a more interactive approach have emphasized that rumours are not the cause of collective violence, but only a practice of communication and social interaction available to a group. Rumours, in this sense, are a key to understanding the interpretive framework that protesters give to their action and to the “political opportunities” they perceive as available to them. The objective of this essay is to explore, in this light, the relationship between the spread of news of the death of an emperor and the irruption of riots in late antique cities. My aim is to understand how the urban plebs, the religious factions or their leaders perceived (and encouraged) the flow of official or unofficial news about the fate of the ruler as a “window of opportunity” and as a method of mobilizing an action.
Vox Populi: Oratory, Sedition, and the Roman People as 'Collective Agents'
Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in Ancient History, Cardiff University, 2024
*Edited transcript of paper delivered to the 2024 Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in Ancient History Conference at Cardiff University. Although the lower-classes were an important pillar of the political structures of Republican and Imperial Rome, the ancient literary tradition is replete with derogatory, dismissive portrayals of ‘the People’ as a ravenous entity, whose appetite is satiated through a regular appetite of bread, circuses and theatre. Such portrayals are often embedded within narratives in which the lower-classes are easily persuaded by the rhetorical theatrics of a persuasive orator, who – in their desire for power and licence – employ a ‘ready-tongue’ to goad the ‘unsophisticated’ mob into violent acts of insubordination. This paper interrogates this ancient literary tradition in order to consider the processes by which Roman authors delegitimized the agency of the lower-classes through the topos of the ‘incited mob’. Through examination of two case-studies (The Pannonian Legion Mutiny and Mark Antony’s Funeral Oration), my paper illustrates the common literary tropes Roman authors exploited in order to depict the lower-classes as a mindless mob susceptible to misdirection by the theatricality of persuasive oratory. I trace this proclivity for denying agency to the ‘mob’ as symptomatic of elite views on collective gatherings as having inherently lacked conscious agency, owing to the obliteration of individual identity and personal responsibility, in place of a shared, fickle consciousness that is vulnerable to persuasive rhetoric and spectacle. Riots have often been regarded as serving a ‘politically communicative function’ for discontented people, being characterized as ‘the language of the unheard’. By analysing the literary constructions of ancient resistance narratives, I argue that a greater understanding as to how elite Roman authors conceptualized these acts of lower-class collective insubordination can be elucidated. Moreover, it is hoped that a consideration of the depiction of individuals ‘provoking’ popular unrest in the ancient context will (in turn) provoke our own discussions as to what extent ‘the people’ can be said to act as ‘collective agents.’
The unresolved difficulty of Acts 18.12–17 involves finding an adequate explanation for the (seemingly) unprovoked hostile reaction of the crowd toward Sosthenes, the ruler of the synagogue in Corinth. This investigation places this incident within the larger social context of urban uprisings and mob violence in the Roman world in order to highlight the socioeconomic factors (poverty, overcrowding, etc.) that inevitably gave rise to such frequent outbursts of urban aggression during this period. As such, this study illumines not only Acts 18, but other passages in Acts where mob violence plays a leading role. Whenever a blast of turbulence falls upon the assembly. .. we find jibes and brawling and laughter. Dio Chrysostom Luke's brief account of the mobbing of Sosthenes in Acts 18.12–17 presents historians and exegetes with a fascinating set of questions, not least of which is accounting for the sudden rush of the crowd on Sosthenes, the unsuspecting and unprepared ruler of the synagogue in Corinth. Surprisingly, this issue receives scant discussion in commentaries and secondary literature, with most appealing without argument to an anti-Jewish bias on the part of the assembly and the pro-consul Gallio, who turned a blind eye to the disturbance. 1 While xenophobic 1 E.g. H.
Die Welt des Islams 54/3–4, 2014
In 1730, the so-called ‘Patrona Halil rebellion’ resulted in the abdication of Sultan Ahmed III (r. 1703–1730) and in the execution of his long-serving Grand Vizier Nevşehirli Damad Irahim Paşsa (r. 1718–1730). This article addresses the question of how contemporary Ottoman chroniclers came to terms with this unusual situation of political and social tension and, in particular, how they coped with lower-strata individuals and groups involved in the rebellion. It is argued that the chroniclers had considerable problems in explaining that lower-strata people whom they perceived as “the riff-raff and mob” possessed an agency of their own, even if they might be a useful instrument in intra-elite quarrels. Despite nuances of judgement, the chroniclers represent the lower strata in a highly negative fashion by rendering their political activities as unruly violations of norms. The chroniclers employed discoursive strategies based on the elite concepts of morality, purity, honour and order, which they used both, for delegitimising the social and political behaviour of the urban lower strata, and for criticising Ibrahim Paşa and his government. When the new regime of Mahmud I (r. 1730–1754) resorted to violence in order suppress the rebels, this was unanimously welcomed by the chroniclers as the re-establishment of order. Thus, their representations of the rebellion clearly reaffirm elite notions of social and political order.
Urban Violence in Alexandria in Antiquity: A Historical Distortion?
Classica et Christiana, 2021
The paper draws attention to the metropolis of Alexandria in Egypt, the third biggest city of the late Roman world. Part of recent historiography tends to look very optimistically at the late antique city as a place of religious neutrality at least until the end of the fourth Century. Far from an irenic vision of the late antique urban communities, the latest monograph on late antique Alexandria pictured the city as a place of constant conflicts between Jews, Pagans and Christians. Religion in Alexandria seems to be the main source of urban unrest. In order to measure the relevance of this position, it is necessary to examine the events seen by contemporaries as episodes of urban violence so as to understand their motivations. In order to refute the postulate that Alexandria had a rebellious tradition and that it experienced a renewal of violent tensions at the end of Antiquity, this article proposes to expand the chronological boundaries by including the Ptolemaic and Roman periods in it.
The City Speaks: Cities, Citizens, and Civic Discourse in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
Traditio, 2020
This article investigates how civic discourse connects the virtue of citizens and the fortunes of cities in a variety of late antique and early medieval sources in the post-Roman west. It reveals how cities assume human qualities through the rhetorical technique of personification and, crucially, the ways in which individuals and communities likewise are described with civic terminology. It also analyzes the ways in which the city and the civic community are made to speak to one another at times of crisis and celebration. By examining a diverse range of sources including epideictic poetry, chronicles, hagiographies, and epigraphic inscriptions, this article addresses multiple modes of late antique and early medieval thought that utilize civic discourse. It first explores how late antique and early medieval authors employed civic discourse in non-urban contexts, including how they conceptualized the interior construction of an individual’s mind and soul as a fortified citadel, how they praised ecclesiastical and secular leaders as city structures, and how they extended civic terminology to the preeminently non-urban space of the monastery. The article then examines how personified cities spoke to their citizens and how citizens could join their cities in song through urban procession. Civic encomia and invective further illustrate how medieval authors sought to unify the virtuous conduct of citizens with the ultimate fate of the city’s security. The article concludes with a historical and epigraphic case study of two programs of mural construction in ninth-century Rome. Ultimately, this article argues that the repeated and emphatic exhortations to civic virtue provide access to how late antique and early medieval authors sought to intertwine the fate of the city with the conduct of her citizens, in order to persuade their audiences to act in accordance with the precepts of virtue.
Unrest in the Roman Empire. A Discursive History
edited by Lisa Pilar Eberle and Myles Lavan (Frankfurt/Chicago: Campus, 2024), 2024
Despite Roman claims to have brought peace, unrest was widespread in the Roman empire. Revolts, protests and piracy were common occurrences. How did contemporaries relate to such phenomena? How did they make sense of them? This volume gathers eleven contributions by specialists in the various literatures and modes of thinking that flourished in the empire between the second century BCE and the fifth century CE - including Graeco-Roman historiography and philosophy, Jewish prophecy, Christian apology and the writings of the Tannaitic rabbis - to investigate these questions. Each contribution analyses the discourses by which the diverse authors of these texts understood instances of unrest. Together the contributions expand our understanding of the varied politics that pervaded the Roman empire. They highlight the intellectual labour at every level of society that went to (re)making this imperial formation throughout its long history.