The study of archaic Rome and archaic Greece is quite different. The Greeks began writing history in the fifth century and had already been writing poetry for three centuries before that. In contrast, the Romans did not begin writing history or poetry until the third century. Furthermore, it was writers such as Livy and Cassius Dio who wrote the most detailed accounts of what the Romans did in the fifth century, a time that was a good four hundred years prior to their own times. This problem is compounded by how in 390 BCE the Gauls sacked Rome. While writers such as Livy insist that they are using very old documents, it seems unlikely that any of these documents survived that sack.
I wanted to review the problems with using Livy for archaic Roman history to get you into a thoroughly doubtful frame of mind when I recount the story of Appius Herdonius. Livy tells us that in 460 BCE, a certain exile returned to Rome and rallied a group of 4,500 men to seize the Roman Capitol. Livy insists that this group of men was a combination of exiles and slaves, and indeed much of the narrative around this seizure of the Capitol is an exploration of Roman anxiety about slaves. I’m particularly interested in how Livy uses this episode both to depict slaves as outsiders and for how he blends literal and metaphorical slavery. I’ll review this second point first.
Livy explains that after seizing the Citadel in the middle of the night, Herdonicus spoke to the city:
“… [he] was calling the slaves to assert their freedom: he had, he proclaimed, espoused the cause of all Rome’s downtrodden so that he might bring back to their country those who had been wrongfully driven into exile and might lift the heavy yoke of slavery from those who bore it; he hoped that the Roman people would support him…” (3.15 trans TJ Luce)
Herdonius even goes so far as to assert that he will call upon Rome’s hated enemies, the Volsci and the Aequi, to free Rome’s downtrodden. What strikes me about this passage is that Livy has Herdonius first address the literal slaves. He calls upon them to rise up and become equal to the Roman citizens. Then he uses the metaphor of slavery to explain the oppression that the Roman plebs faced from the patricians. In this way, Herdonicus combines two fears of the Roman patricians: fear of the plebs and fear of their slaves.
For Livy, this combination of plebs and slaves is quite unusual. In contrast, the historian primarily explains Rome’s internal politics as a conflict between the different interests of the plebs and the patricians. Since slaves are not political people, they do not participate in what Livy calls “the struggle of the orders”. Livy emphasizes how this episode is a departure from the ordinary when he writes that the senators and consuls at that moment thought that the “problem [of the plebs] was mild by comparison, one that arose when others were abeyance and now seemed lulled to rest in face of this foreign threat.” (3.16 trans. TJ Luce) Part of the reason that the slaves are normally not political is that they are outsiders.
So far this analysis fits perfectly with Orlando Patterson’s theory of slavery, since he describes slaves as people who are socially dead and natally alienated from the society in which they work as slaves. However, the Herdonius episode suggests that such a description does not capture how political borders are always permeable. For Herdonius articulates how exiles continue to have some sort of political connection to, and therefore political power within, Rome. While Livy writes of Herdonius as threatening to unite the slaves and plebs, he nonetheless writes that it is a given that slaves and exiles share an antagonism towards Rome.
But while the exiles are removed from Rome through space, slaves are not. Indeed, Livy depicts slaves are the ultimate internal enemy, as they are not merely within the borders of the city of Rome but that they are within Romans’ own households:
“Many and various were the fears that beset them; yet the slaves alarmed them particularly. Each man had a potential enemy within his house whom he could not safely trust nor, lest disaffection grow, mistrust: living in harmony scarcely seemed possible.” (3.16 trans. TJ Luce)