Certainly, the awareness of concentration of wealth as a destroyer of the commonwealth runs throughout every single Roman historian I've read (see my review of Plutarch). Parenti sets out to remedy this bias by recreating the class struggles between the Populi and the Optimates, often by reading liberally between the lines of the histories that have survived.Ĭritics attack Parenti for turning Roman history into his own vision of Marxist class struggle, but I would say just the opposite: it would be unrealistic NOT to look at Roman history, and ALL history from the viewpoint of Rich vs Poor. (Edward Gibbon, for example, who wrote "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," sat in England's House of Lords). This is one of his main points: that Roman historians gave the masses one last kick in the ass by refusing to personify them or tell their stories, and that historians since then have perpetrated this error because they, too, mostly come from a privileged class eager to accept that vision of the poor. Parenti blames the lack of reporting of this aspect of Roman society to the class bias of the wealthy historians whose works have survived. Roman rhetoric, like that of our own times, characterized them as ignorant, lazy, shiftless and parasitic. These were the urban masses so despised by Cicero and others. Thus, landholdings grew into vast latifundias worked by slaves brought home from the wars, and the newly-landless soldiers and their families had no choice but to move to Rome and try to scratch a living among the tenements and filthy streets of Rome's slums. As soldiers were killed or tied up in endless wars, their small farms failed, and those with the gold could scoop up the land sold by the desperate survivors. Decisions of foreign policy rested with the elite, as did the command and spoils, but they reaped a double-benefit. Having started with a base of citizen/farmers, the elites endlessly engendered wars of conquest, in which small farmers formed the rank and file troops. The elites had an excellent system for effecting this. The starving masses depicted by gentlemen historians of Rome (all of them from the upper classes) didn't start that way: they were methodically created by the ruling class. Going through a long list of attempted reformers over the course of about a hundred years and their miserable ends, Parenti shows how the wealthy elites of Rome systematically impoverished, disempowered and, when necessary, murdered its more humble citizens in an insatiable pursuit of wealth. In doing so, he reveals Rome not only as the vicious war machine that we all know and love, but as a place where the ruling class turns the acquisitiveness and violence of its foreign policy on its own people. Parenti traces the current of attempted Populist reform and Elite repression that ended with Caesar's assassination and the Civil Wars that terminated the Republic. Who were they? How did they live? And most importantly, how did they get that way? I've read estimates that in the late Roman Republic up to 70% of the population was either in slavery or impoverished urban proletariats on the dole. Michael Parenti chooses to focus exactly on this group of people. The common people are usually depicted as violent, shiftless mobs who didn't have the good sense to get born into a wealthy family or make a ton of money. It's as if someone wrote the history of the United States but never mentioned anyone who earned less than $500,000/yr. With Sallust, Plutarch, Tacitus, Seutonius, Cicero and others, what's left out is the 99.9% of the population that are NOT wealthy politicians or generals. Above all, you get a growing sense that things are being left out. Julius Caesar: Kennedy-like reformer or cynical opportunist? Cicero: defender of the Republic or grasping tool of the supperrich? You begin to get a feel for Rome's march through time, from the increasingly unstable Republic to the thundering military dictatorship of imperial Rome. As you read more you start to get multiple ancient viewpoints of a single figure. When you embark on ancient history, the first historians you read seem dull and obscure, referring to events and personalities you've never heard of, or have heard of as vague heroic figures. So partly this review is about reading history, just as Parenti's book is about writing history. I've read nearly all the original sources that Michael Parenti drew on for his analysis of the Late Republic era of Rome, some of them twice. I should precede this review with the confession that I've been obsessively reading Roman History for the last few years. How much did I like this book? Enough to go on Amazon and slap the daylights out of idiot negative reviewers 4 years after the fact.
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