Invisible Romans (17 page)

To return to the poor themselves: They lived in a socioeconomically disadvantaged and contingent condition, and this determined their mind world. This sweeping statement hides an important everyday reality of the Romano-Grecian world. The condition of the poor differed in detail from place to place. Careful analysis would involve looking at the poor in Britain to study their local traditions and ecology;
or examining poor inhabitants of Egypt in the light of their very different cultural background and economic possibilities. The poor who lived in a world of climate extremes that erratically produced floods or sandstorms or drought might have a different attitude toward fate than those living in a more predictable environment. I do not mean to minimize this variety of human experience. I do want to emphasize, however, the commonality of their life-on-the-edge experience and how that led to sharing outlooks in important ways. For the world of dearth was the only world they knew firsthand. The natural world was an ever-present, if at times only a potential, threat; the social world was organized to oppress them. The poor’s outlook saw the world of the empire as one of turbulence and inequality. Uncertainty in the instant was the constant in their lives. Their sociopolitical situation was one of subjection, whether it be to tax collector, state official, landlord, moneylender, or simple want; they were not free agents in any sense. On the other hand, the inevitability of the status quo also provided a constant for their thinking. The fable of ‘The Snake’s Tail’ shows the wisdom of bowing to the natural essence of elite leadership:

One day a snake’s tail decided that the head shouldn’t go first and was no longer willing to follow its lead creeping along. ‘I ought to run things in my turn,’ the tail said. [It tries to lead, but the snake falls into a pit and is very bruised.] … A victim of its presumption, the tail humbly implored the head, saying, ‘Save us, please, mistress head. I confess that evil strife has ended badly for us all. I’ll obey you, if you’ll just put me back as I was before. You will not have to think about those things that happened before – they will never happen again.’ (Babrius,
Fables,
134)

Proverbs seem to view the world as stable, rather than (as often in elite literature) as in decline. The implication is that the order of the universe is static, that social perspectives do not change; they must be the way they are. The ‘is’ and ‘ought to be’ of the world are the same. This creates a very constraining, conservative mind world. People have and can make choices, but the range is very limited – they often lack options. A corollary is that there is no indication of social progress over generations in popular thought. Every life is the same life, only
with different players. This very stability shows a sense of how much was impossible for most people; proverbs express popular wisdom’s attitude that life is very difficult, and that much is done in vain. ‘The frailty and destruction of all human life is a pervasive theme,’ as Teresa Morgan puts it. The poor must deal with both environmental uncertainty and social certainty. Neither allows much chance of navigating away from the current situation, and both encourage attitudes that will enable survival within it.

Coping

At the heart of the poor’s response to their precarious lives lies a system of beliefs and values that, growing out of life’s realities, organizes it, drives it, sustains it, and keeps it from changing. This mind world is dominated by responses to their fundamental condition: dealing with the ever-present reality of possibly failing to have enough to survive. It focuses on dealing with the inevitable crises of life and tries to encourage social and moral action that will most aid survival in the immediate situation and social continuity in the long run. There is not a lot of time for thought and contemplation; the focus is on action, not beliefs. The wisdom of the poor is full of what to do and what not to do; abstractions of specific interactional behavior are rare. This does not mean that the poor person is uncreative; it just means that his creative thinking is limited because he has to focus on the first order of business, overcoming challenges of his fellow men and the physical world around him. The poor are very practical as they strive to survive.

A corollary to this perspective is that there is in their thinking little ‘interiority’ – the attempt to examine oneself and arrive at behavior-dictating conclusions from it. To the mind of the poor, ‘know thyself’ is not a contemplative admonition, but rather an admonition to active thinking about how to balance competing imperatives (e.g. friendship vs. gain). Philosophy tended to be idealistically oriented; the mind of the poor was fixed in practicality. Thus the outlook of popular morality as evidenced in fables and proverbs is markedly different from that of ‘high’ philosophical systems of the day. The mind of the poor views wisdom as a way for an individual to survive in a hostile world, not as a source of ‘knowledge’ or social problem-solving on a supra-individual
scale, or any other abstraction. It is difficult if not impossible to find any of the main philosophical concepts of the elite’s philosophical schools reflected with much importance in the mind world of the poor. Popular morality cares not a fig for the search for
eudaimonia
(happiness); contemplating the good as the main aim of human life, i.e. virtue for its own sake (Plato), is foreign; the Stoic ideals of
apatheia
and
ataraxia
(detachment) would only mystify; the Cynic obsession with the value of poverty would be completely lost on the irrevocably poor; any conflict between fate and free will is unknown, for they coexist without tension; the whole idea of rejecting norms of social life per Epicureans or Cynics is a luxury outside the experience of the poor. However, high philosophy and the outlook of the poor do share many points of view and many ‘heroes’; in popular thinking the most-quoted authorities are (in order) the Seven Sages, Aesop, and Socrates, who account for over half of all cited famous men. Just how and to what extent they came to interact with one another and influence one another is another matter, and hard to determine. On the whole, it is much more likely that high philosophy drew on the well of popular thinking than that ideas of any significance or number percolated down from that philosophy to the poor man on the street. We lack evidence for such ‘percolation’ and, indeed, it is very hard to think how this could have happened, while the integration of ‘folk wisdom’ into more elaborated philosophical discourse seems easier to imagine.

Within their practical world the basic values of the poor are complex. Driven by the fundamental, ever-present imperative of the struggle to survive, these values emphasize two opposite ‘pulls.’ The first is the need to maintain a general environment in which, should everything fall apart, the cooperation of one’s fellows can be relied upon to provide emergency aid. In tension with this is the imperative to push the needs of the basic social unit – usually the family – as the most important activity, even if it means acting to the detriment of one’s fellows. The first ‘pull’ is worked out in the universe of positive reciprocity. Obligations of reciprocity, whether they be vertical (most typically, of the patron-client variety), or horizontal, are the key to ‘social insurance’ for times of trouble. At this macro-level, families develop relationships with other families in order to have their aid in difficult times. In this context, positive behavioral traits include friendship, bravery, harming enemies,
hospitality, justice, honesty (including speaking the truth), helpfulness, and generosity to those in need; fables deal with these extensively, often dwelling on ambiguities.

At the micro-level, the members of a family use kinship as the basis for a complicated network of mutual expectations that are met in a social environment where everyone is simply and unexpressedly expected to help in certain ways, without getting any specific reward in return. Interestingly, the poor’s mind world does not dwell on these crucial intra-family relationships. To judge by the fables and proverbs, relationships such as husband and wife, the economy of the household, and parent-child issues are not problematized in their thinking, for these things are seldom if ever the topic of popular thinking as it is recorded. These aspects of their existence seem to be so clearly regulated in their minds that conflicts of the sort resolved in fables and proverbs do not occur. Unfortunately, therefore, wisdom literature does not help us to understand the poor in these aspects of their lives.

The second ‘pull’ is expressed in habits of strife. For the poor, human life is full of failure and negation. In this environment, strife is endemic. The world of fables is one of constant danger and conflict. This, interestingly, has not received nearly the attention in the secondary literature that one would expect, given that all primary research on the poor – in fact, mostly on peasants – stresses the competitive nature of daily life. As social units struggle to maximize their potential for survival, antisocial habits are rampant. Popular literature focuses constantly on how to deal with the negative qualities of arrogance, flattery, untrustworthiness, stubbornness, ill-temper, cowardice (the subject of many proverbs), deceit, slander, greed, boasting, and inappropriate social behavior in general.

Most particularly, among the poor there is competition – for honor and status as well as for material advantages – and its fellow travelers, pride, envy, and revenge. The fable world is full of antisocial behavior. For example, in ‘The Roosters and the Partridge,’ ‘like’ (the roosters) are in conflict with each other as well as with ‘different’ (the partridge):

A certain man who kept roosters came upon a tame partridge for sale, bought it, and took it home to rear along with the roosters. Since, however, the other birds beat and pursued the partridge, it was heavy at heart, concluding that it was looked down upon as being a different kind of bird. But when it shortly observed that the roosters also fought one another, not parting till they had drawn blood, it said to itself: ‘Well, I’m no longer going to be upset when I’m beaten by them, for I see that they don’t even spare one another.’ (
Collectio Augustana
/Hansen)

The destructive nature of greed is told in ‘The Dog and His Shadow’:

A dog stole a piece of meat from a kitchen. He trotted along the bank of a river. Seeing the shadow of his meat much magnified in the stream, he let go of the piece he had and lunged for the shadow. But he ended up with neither the shadow-meat, nor the real meat he had let go. So he returned, very hungry, back again across the ford by which he had come. (Babrius,
Fables
79)

As it is in the proverb ‘Never thrust your sickle into another’s wheat’ (Publilius Syrus, Maxim 593). Equally destructive habits such as boasting and envy are also taken to task in the fables. As a final example, a person will directly harm others to protect his own survival, as the fable of ‘The Fisherman Striking the Water’ illustrates:

A fisherman was fishing in a certain river. He stretched his net tight so as to span the stream from one side to the other, then tied a cord onto a stone and started striking the water with it so that the fish in their reckless flight might happen into his net. One of the persons, who lived in the area, seeing him doing this, upbraided him for muddying the water and so not allowing them to drink clear water. But he replied: ‘But if I don’t stir up the river like this, I’ll have to die of starvation.’ (
Collectio Augustana
/Hansen)

These potentially (and, often enough, actually) disruptive modes of behavior are, however, by tacit agreement not allowed to overwhelm the fundamentally cooperative nature of the enterprise. The fables are full of lessons on cooperation. Here are some examples. ‘The Horse and the Ass’ teaches the value of sharing burdens:

A man had a horse he was in the habit of leading around without any burden, since he laid the entire load onto an aged ass. The ass, being at the end of his rope, went up to the horse and said, ‘If you would be so kind as to take a portion of my burden, I’d be able to manage; if not, I’ll surely die.’ ‘Go away,’ replied the horse, ‘I don’t give a damn.’ The ass plodded along in silence. Finally, exhausted by toil he fell down dead, just as he had predicted. The master brought the horse over and removing all the load from the dead ass, he put it on the horse’s back along with the pack saddle, adding for good measure the hide of the ass that he first flayed. ‘What an idiot I was!’ said the horse to himself. ‘I didn’t want to carry a little of the load and necessity has now laid everything on my back.’ (Babrius,
Fables
7)

‘The Fire-Bearing Fox’ teaches the importance of keeping one’s temper:

A man wanted to take a novel type of revenge on a fox who was ravaging his vineyard and garden. He tied a bundle of tow to the animal’s tail and setting it aflame, he turned the fox loose. But a god looking down guided the fox to the very field of the man who had harmed the animal. There the fox set fire to all around him. It was harvest season; the fat heads of grain held high hopes. The man ran after the fox, anguishing over the loss of his considerable labor. None of his grain ever saw the threshing floor. (Babrius,
Fables
11)

‘Divide and Conquer’ also teaches that the poor must stick together:

Three bulls grazed along always together. A lion lying in wait for an opportunity to seize them realized that he wouldn’t be able to take them all at once. Sowing contention among them by sly suggestions and outright lies, he caused them to become enemies of one another. Having divided them against each other, the lion easily took each as prey, one at a time. (Babrius,
Fables
44)

‘No Use Praying for a Robber’ shows that unfair actions mean you will not get help when you need it: