‘A sceptical look at the Aventine’. Review of Mignone, L.M., The Republican Aventine and Rome’s Social Order (Ann Arbor 2016), CR 67.2 (2017) 466-8. (original) (raw)

The plebeian Aventine is a commonplace. We know it as the hill of the plebeian secessions, of Icilius' land distributions, of Gaius Gracchus' flight, of the plebeian Aventine Triad: the spiritual home of Rome's plebs and the literal home to many of them. Except that, as M. demonstrates, these are all fictions. Our sources report various destinations for the secessions; Icilius' law is a conundrum at best; Gracchus made his final stand elsewhere; and the temple of Ceres, Liber and Libera was not on the Aventine at all. The plebeian Aventine is a modern scholarly fiction, and M.'s superb demolition job puts us on notice: how many of our other treasured dogmas are equally unfounded? In some ways, M.'s target is an easy one. The idea of a 'plebeian' hill makes no sense. In the historical period, rich and poor plebeians had little in common: a distinctive 'plebeian' identity would have been hard to maintain. With so few patricians, all of Rome's hills were primarily occupied by plebeians. Or do we mean a hill primarily occupied by the poor? Hardly: such a convenient, salubrious spot was presumably dominated by the rich or by a mixed population. The plebeian Aventine cannot correspond to reality. One might object that even if the plebeian Aventine was an implausible myth, myths mattered to the Romans. And yet M. shows we cannot even reclaim the plebeian Aventine on the level of discourse. It is simply not there in the ancient sources: not in Plutarch's account of Gracchus' flight, not in Livy's telling of the secessions. The plebeian symbolic value of the Aventine has long gone unfootnoted, apparently because it has been universally accepted, but in fact because there is no evidence to cite. M. systematically unpicks an assumption entirely created by modern readers. Much of the heavy demolition work is done in the introduction, and the casual reader may be convinced of the primary argument by page 13 or so. The first four chapters that follow expand on individual facets of the argument: the secession narratives, the Lex Icilia, and literary, then archaeological evidence for patterns of occupation. Chapter 1 is particularly strong: M. makes a conclusive case that Romans did not associate the Aventine with secessions before Gracchus happened to flee there, and probably not afterwards either. The Lex Icilia de Aventino publicando is a harder nut to crack. Much of M.'s discussion focuses on the technical meaning of publicare, which she argues should be translated 'confiscate into public ownership' rather than 'make available for public use' before Augustus. Her logic is sound, but the argument sometimes blurs the circumstances of 456 B.C. with the mindset of later authors: can we even trust that Livy reported the law's original name? Still, the overall point stands: Dionysius might see this law as presaging late Republican land distributions, but he does not use it to connect agrarian reform or popularis politics, much less the plebs as a whole, with the Aventine. As we might expect, the literary and archaeological evidence for the hill's inhabitants mostly concerns the elite. It was well supplied with cult sites, though M. argues that the 'Aventine triad' of Ceres, Liber and Libera was not on the Aventine at all (and those topographers who do place it there tend to build their arguments precisely, and eventually circularly, on the plebeian nature of the hill). This vital part of the argument is oddly relegated to an appendix. For M., the evidence better supports a location at the foot of the Clivus Publicius in the Forum Boarium.