Garnsey & Saller, Ranks in Rome
Roman ranking customs influenced European medieval social ranking
Social Science Files research exhibit focusing on precursor ‘ranking’.
Category type 7 rank over status society
The Source:
Peter Garnsey* and Richard Saller, The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture, University of California Press 2015, Second Edition
[*Longtime subscriber to Social Science Files]
Chapter 8
The social hierarchy
The Principate of Augustus was preceded by two decades of civil war, in which armies of a size not previously seen in Roman history fought for the supremacy of their generals. The confusion of traditional social distinctions that accompanied the collapse of Republican political institutions is illustrated by two anecdotes relating to the first of the civil-war victors, Julius Caesar.
Caesar was said to have admitted to the Roman senate ‘men of foreign birth, including semi-civilized Gauls who had been granted Roman citizenship’, and who now discarded trousers for togas. A stage performance before Caesar won for the actor Decimus Laberius equestrian rank, which he had lost because of his lowly profession, ‘so that he could walk straight from stage to orchestra, where fourteen rows of seats were reserved for his order’.
The social disruption penetrated to the household and family. Appian claimed that the pressure of the triumviral proscriptions, supervised by the second of the civil-war victors, Caesar’s heir Octavian (later Augustus), caused men to fear betrayal even by their wives, children, freedmen and slaves. The result was
‘a shocking change in the condition of senators, consulars, praetors, tribunes . . . who threw themselves with lamentations at the feet of their own slaves, giving to the servant the character of saviour and master. But the most lamentable thing was that even after this humiliation, they did not win pity’ (BC 4.13).
Against this background of social turmoil, Augustus established his military supremacy and restored peace and constitutional government. Augustus’ policy went beyond simple social conservatism: the pattern of social inequality and differentiation continued from the Republic, but innovations now gave distinctions of rank sharper definition.
The social order that he established was stable and enduring. Under the Principate as a whole, the divisions and tensions deriving from the unequal distribution of wealth, rank and status were counterbalanced by forces of cohesion such as family and household, structured vertical and horizontal relationships between individuals and households, and the ideological apparatus of the state. …
[2nd section]
Orders
Orders are those social categories defined by the state through statutory or customary rules. Augustus restored the Republican system of orders (ordo, rank), but with sharper definition. The senatorial order remained the most prestigious, a small circle of several hundred families perceived to be worthy by the traditional standards of birth, wealth and moral excellence.
Augustus set out to rebuild the senate and revive its shattered morale by purging it of members of dubious standing who had infiltrated the order during the civil wars — a series of revisions brought the senate down from about 1,200 to 600 — and by accentuating the difference between senators and those of lower rank. During the late Republic, senators had had to meet a census requirement of 400,000 sesterces, which was no different from that set for equestrians. Augustus fixed a substantially higher qualification for senators, one million sesterces.
In addition, the wearing of the toga with the broad purple stripe (latus clavus) was restricted to senators and their sons and to equestrians who had been given permission to stand for office. The recruitment of new senatorial families now lay with the emperor. Moreover, prohibitions on unworthy behaviour were formally legislated and not left to the whim of censors as in the past. Augustus disallowed legitimate marriage between senators and freedwomen. A later senatorial decree of AD 19 banned senators and their families (and equestrians) from disgracing themselves by performing in public spectacles.
The senatorial order was emphatically not a hereditary aristocracy. Yet the prestige ascribed to high birth led Augustus to promote the hereditary principle in order to raise the senate’s stature. Thus, sons of senators were encouraged to follow in their father’s footsteps, not only by wearing thelatus clavus, but also by attending meetings of the senate with their fathers (Suetonius, Aug. 38). Furthermore, senatorial distinction was recognized as extending to descendants of senators for three generations (Digest 23.2.44 pref.), and the order was offered incentives to reproduce itself.
The second, equestrian, order was also characterized by an aristocratic, not a professional, ethos. In the view of the historian Cassius Dio (52.19.4), the equestrian order resembled the senatorial in possessing similar criteria for membership — high birth, excellence and wealth — but in the second degree. In terms of wealth, the Republican census requirement of 400,000 sesterces remained in force. To that was added in the reign of Tiberius a requirement of two previous generations of free birth — another effort to increase the social distance between the privileged orders and those of servile origin (Pliny, HN 33.32). Like senators, equestrians were the subject of attempts to legislate moral respectability, as in the senatus consultum mentioned above banning members of the two leading orders from performing in public spectacles.
The equestrian order was much larger than the senatorial order, numbering in the thousands, and was correspondingly more amorphous. Historians differ on precisely what constituted membership in the order — property at the required level and free birth, or possession of the ‘public horse’ by imperial grant. The decree of AD 19 identified the order vaguely as ‘those who have the right of sitting in equestrian places’ at public spectacles. According to Pliny the elder (HN 33.32), Tiberius later brought the order ‘into unity’, but nothing is said of the administrative procedures introduced to accomplish this.
The ‘unity’ did not preclude diversity. Under the Republic, some equestrians had had only modest fortunes and no political ambitions beyond their home towns, while others, particularly the leading public contractors (publicani) referred to by Cicero as the ‘flower of the order’, had enjoyed wealth and political influence comparable to senators’ (Cicero, Planc. 23). Under the Principate, the emperors began to give administrative as well as military responsibilities to equestrians; as the number of equestrian offices increased and their hierarchy developed, the office-holding minority of the order came to resemble senators insofar as they derived honour from the rank of their office. By the end of the Principate, the leading equestrian, the praetorian prefect, actually took precedence in court protocol over senators.
The rank-conscious Romans would not allow the vast social gap between the greatest and humblest equestrian to go unmarked, and so by the late second century a new hierarchy of epithets was invented to designate the office-holding equestrians (egregius or ‘excellent’ for procurators, perfectissimus or ‘most accomplished’ for senior prefects, and eminentissimus or ‘most renowned’ for praetorian prefects).
These several hundred specially distinguished equestrians were the minority of the order belonging to the imperial elite centred in Rome; the majority were essentially local notables, marked out by a golden ring and a narrow purple stripe on the toga (angustus clavus).
The decurions or councillors of the towns across the empire constituted the third of the aristocratic orders — ‘aristocratic’ insofar as decurions, like senators and equestrians, were expected to possess respectable birth, wealth and moral worth.
The definition of respectable birth was less stringent for decurions than equestrians; sons of freedmen – not, ordinarily, freedmen themselves – were admitted to town councils. Just as the size of towns varied, so did the wealth of its leading citizens; in the major cities the wealth of some decurions exceeded that required of senators. The census qualification of the unexceptional town of Comum in northern Italy was set at 100,000 sesterces, or a quarter of the equestrian census (Pliny, Ep. 1.19). Moral excellence was more difficult to guarantee, but at least men with a criminal past and those in demeaning occupations, such as auctioneers and undertakers, were excluded.
These requirements were designed to ensure that local councils were composed of men of property, whose social standing was not in question. Sometimes, however, people were admitted who were not highly approved in the Roman value system. The third-century jurist Callistratus wrote that, although traders should not be barred absolutely from the local council, ‘yet I believe it to be dishonourable for persons of this sort, who have been subject to the whippings [of aediles in the marketplace], to be received into the order, and especially in those cities that have an abundance of honourable men (honesti viri). On the other hand, a needful shortage of the latter men requires even the former for municipal office, if they have the resources’ (Digest 50.2.12).
Wealth was permitted to override other criteria of social acceptability for strictly practical reasons. Not only were councillors and magistrates unpaid; they were actually required to contribute fees to the public treasury on entry into the council or into an office or priesthood. Their wealth was used in addition for other, voluntary expenditures to justify their privileged status in the community, and was the ultimate surety for the tax payments due to the imperial treasury.
The three elite orders comprised only a tiny fraction of the population of the empire. Below them in the official hierarchy came the great mass of the humble free, and at the bottom of the heap, the slaves. Within the former category the principal legal divisions lay between freeborn and freed, and between citizen and non-citizen. The formal legal disabilities of being a freedman were not in practice very inhibiting: a slave properly manumitted by a citizen became a citizen, but was barred from the elite orders, from service in the legions and from legitimate marriage to senators.
The citizen/non-citizen distinction lost much of its significance in the course of the Principate. At first Roman citizens, at any rate those residing in the city of Rome, remained in possession of at least the vestiges of the rights they had enjoyed under the Republic, and the benefits that accrued from empire. Gradually the exclusivity on which privileges were based was lost, as the citizen body grew to incorporate provincials, a development culminating in Caracalla’s grant of citizenship to virtually all free inhabitants of the empire in AD 212.
As the distinction between victor and conquered disappeared, the legal divisions within the population tended to be overshadowed by social divisions based on the elite system of values. The result was the emergence by the reign of Hadrian of the formal distinction between the elite and the humble masses (honestiores and humiliores).
The privileged honestiores included the three aristocratic orders and veterans, rewarded for their service in protecting the social order. The remainder of the free population fell into the category of humiliores, the legal disadvantages of which will be considered shortly.
In applying this rough, binary classification to the free population, we run the risk of oversimplifying and thus distorting the social reality. In particular, a sizeable heterogeneous group of men of free birth can be distinguished from both the elite orders and the humble masses. The apparitores, that is, the lictors, scribes and other staff of Roman magistrates to whom attention has recently been drawn, are but a small segment of this group. However, the apparitores actually serve to confirm the essential dichotomy, insofar as their rank derived from their position as appendages to the ruling aristocrats. There was no genuine ‘middle class’ in the sense of an intermediate group with independent economic resources or social standing.
Finally, slaves. In Roman law, slaves were classified as chattel, not persons, as a ‘speaking tool’ (instrumentum vocale) that could be bought and sold or punished at the will of the masters. Some imperial rulings gave limited recognition to their humanity. For instance, Claudius decided that masters who abandoned sick slaves to avoid the costs of caring for them could not reclaim them if they recovered health. By the reign of Hadrian, ergastula (the private prisons on estates where slaves were kept in chains) were prohibited by imperial law, the punitive sale of slaves was regulated, and the master’s right of life and death over his slaves was taken away. Such laws may have suppressed some of the worst abuses, but they did not alter the slave’s fundamental lack of power and honour vis-à-vis his master. The psychological oppression associated with lack of freedom, the threat of the whip, of the break-up of slave families and of sexual abuse, continued unabated.
In a culture so sensitive to rank, how was the hierarchy of rank made known and reinforced across culturally diverse communities? Rank was asserted in the clothing that people wore. For senators and their sons Augustus reserved the toga with the broad purple stripe. Equestrians were marked out by the gold rings on their fingers and the narrow purple stripes on their togas. So strong was the association of rank with apparel that some unworthies at the beginning of the Principate usurped equestrian privileges simply by wearing a gold ring, prompting Tiberius’ regulations to restrict the rank to the deserving (Pliny, HN 33.32). Similarly, Claudius threatened punishment against non-citizens who called themselves by the tria nomina, the three names that, along with the toga, indicated possession of Roman citizenship.
Romans paraded their rank whenever they appeared in public, and nowhere more conspicuously than at public spectacles in theatre, amphitheatre and circus. In Rome, Augustus confirmed and extended late Republican arrangements that allocated special seats or rows of seats to senators, equestrians and citizens:
He issued special regulations to prevent the disorderly and haphazard system by which spectators secured seats for these shows, having been outraged by the insult to a senator who, on entering the crowded theatre at Puteoli, was not offered a seat by a single member of the audience. The consequent senatus consultum provided that at every performance, wherever held, the front row of stalls must be reserved for senators . . .
Other rules of his included the separation of soldiers from civilians; the assignment of special seats to married commoners, to boys not yet come of age, and, close by, to their tutors; and a ban on the wearing of dark clothes, except in the back rows.
In the municipalities, the seating was arranged to give spatial definition to the distinction between the curial order and ordinary citizens. Caesar’s law for the colony of Urso in Spain had already specified detailed regulations for seating in the amphitheatre and theatre, and laid down enormous fines for violations – an indication that something more was at stake than getting a good seat to watch the show.
Putting everyone in his proper place was a visual affirmation of the dominance of the imperial social structure, and one calculated to impress the bulk of the population of the empire.
There were other displays of rank, such as the annual parade in Rome for equestrians, which Augustus renewed (Suetonius, Aug. 38.3; Cassius Dio 55.31.2), and the public banquets and distributions in the municipalities, at which the quantity of food or money was handed out in proportion to rank, not need. The impoverished may have resented this principle, even as public event after public event imprinted it in the communal consciousness.
If the advantages of high rank were conspicuous and real, so also were the disadvantages of falling outside the circle of privilege. Under the Republic, citizens had won legal protection against flogging, torture and execution, and in general, against the arbitrary use of force by magistrates. In the imperial age, these rights survived for a time; as is well known, they were asserted by St. Paul on more than one occasion.
However, as the honestiores/humiliores distinction came to supersede that between citizens and non-citizens, the privilege of exemption from corporal punishment came to be reserved for honestiores, and in a parallel development, cruel penalties associated with slaves were extended to the humble free. The dual- penalty system, together with a differential evaluation of legal testimony in accordance with rank, were formally enunciated in law by the end of the second century, but must have long been practised by judges, for they were deeply rooted in traditional, aristocratic values.
Some decades before the earliest reference in the extant legal sources to a formal honestiores/ humiliores distinction, the younger Pliny advised a provincial governor in Spain to preserve ‘the distinction of orders and dignity’ in legal hearings, because
‘if these distinctions are confused, nothing is more unequal than equality itself’ (Ep. 9.5).
[END of section on ‘Orders’]
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