2025/05/05 by Tonya Rushmer · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #American Constitutional Law and Politics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1515/9783111705446-014
openalex publication_date 2025/05/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
The Romans themselves believed that public distributions of grain were as old as the Republic.Commentators have deemed the system to be an unwieldy mess.These same scholars argue that in 46 Caesar solved the problem by creating two new annual plebeian aediles (aediles Ceriales) dedicated to the grain supply and limiting the number of recipients after conducting an expansive recensus.Praise for his interventions rests on assumptions about the history of grain distributions during the Republic and, especially, a belief that Rome's political class (as a whole) paid less attention that was needed to the provision of food.However, what is represented as a solution can in fact be viewed as creeping authoritarianism writ large.The better aspects of this administrative reform were a continuation and extension of what had gone before while the startling decision to set an upper limit to the number of eligible recipients created a special class of citizenone who held the privilege of receiving publicly funded grain while his or her peers did not.This distinction divided and infantilised a previously active urban plebs and enabled one man to monopolize not only the patronage of the privileged group but to claim that it represented the Roman People as a whole. Badian (2012), Morrell (2015), Raaflaub (2021), Taylor (2023) consider the aggression and destructiveness of Caesar's actions in Gaul.Even in undergraduate courses I have met resistance from students to the idea of a genocidal Caesar.