Regent's Now Magazine 2019 WEB

REGENT’S NOW FEATURES
Many wealthy Romans had grown yet wealthier from wartime
profiteering. Meanwhile, in the decade after Sulla, the urban plebs
suffered some of the most serious corn shortages in Roman history.
While the elite clung to the fruits of victory, a succession of Roman
demagogues capitalised on widespread hunger and poverty, on
the social trauma suffered by the urban plebs, and on the political
anger which they justly carried. Yet how far can one sympathise,
not only with a language of political violence, but with a demand
for corn which was enacted through eagerness to exploit empire,
diverting provincial supplies of grain to the city of Rome; or with
metaphorical complaints about enslavement which lament political
oppression by appropriating the sufferings of slaves?
Sallust’s Histories trace the disintegrating nature of civic life
which caused this language of political violence and the further
disintegrations which were, in turn, fuelled by it. Ultimately, it
led again to civil war and to the end of the Roman republican
order. The text of the Histories does not survive in full, but even
the partial account which remains offers a caustic and sorrowful,
and ultimately deeply moving, testimony of a man witnessing the
collapse of his world.
Dr J. Alison Rosenblitt is Senior Lecturer and Director of Studies in
Classics and Ancient History at Regent’s Park College. She is the author
of several books, including E.E. Cummings’ Modernism and the
Classics: Each Imperishable Stanza (Oxford, 2016), winner of a First
Book Award from the Classical Association of the Middle West and South
(CAMS) in 2018. Her latest book, Rome after Sulla, is published by
Bloomsbury Academic.
“For me, studying this language
and these ideas in ancient Rome is
not a deflection of its urgency but
rather an opportunity, and one
which is all the more compelling
on account of the ambivalences of
sympathy which it provokes.”
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