A PECULIAR INSTITUTION?

There is a problem about patronage. Patronage has traditionally been viewed as a defining feature of Roman society, an institution of pivotal importance, offering a vital clue to the relative stability of that society over time. It was an institution as quintessentially and centrally Roman as patria potestas, the authority of a Roman male head of household. Nowadays, however, historians are saying that patronage was much less significant than it has been made out to be, especially in the sphere that (in their judgment) really mattered, politics. That is, in the first instance, for the period of the republic, when political office was highly regarded and fiercely competed for within the framework of a republican constitution – before monarchy arrived and transformed the nature of politics. It used to be thought, to put it simply and starkly, that the Roman aristocracy under the republic controlled the voting population of citizens through patronage, that what counted in elections was the quantity and quality of one's clients. The experts don't believe this any more. They follow Peter Brunt in his conviction that patronage relations were fragile, peripheral, short-lived, and did not count for very much – especially, but not only, in the late republican period.

As to the principate, again there is an old idea, now regarded as an anachronism, that with an emperor in charge private patronage became redundant. The emperor was universal patron, patron of all citizens, patron of all subjects.

This book has its origin in the Carlyle Lectures delivered at Oxford University in Hilary Term 2005. I would like to thank George Garnett and the other members of the Carlyle Committee for honouring me with their invitation to give the lectures, and the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College for extending to me their hospitality for the period concerned. I benefited greatly from discussing matters arising from the lectures with members of the audience during my time in Oxford. In composing a work of this kind, I have inevitably drawn on the learning of a large number of scholars who have written extensively and expertly in aspects of my subject. In addition, colleagues and friends have generously read my work or parts of it in draft and given me encouragement and advice. They include Margaret Atkins, Tim Blanning, Anthony Bowen, Peter Brown, Myles Burnyeat, Luigi Capogrossi Colognesi, Patricia Crone, John Crook, Michael Frede, Raymond Geuss, Richard Gordon, Verity Harte, Caroline Humfress, David Ibbetson, Melissa Lane, Geoffrey Lloyd, John Marenbon, Dieter Nörr, Michael O'Brien, Glenn Olsen, Christopher Rowland, Magnus Ryan, Malcolm Schofield, David Sedley, Quentin Skinner, Gareth Stedman Jones, John Thompson, Robert Tombs and Frank Walbank. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Raymond Geuss, Richard Gordon and Caroline Humfress for raising my sights and lifting my spirits. Niketas Siniossoglou has given me invaluable assistance in the closing stages. My family has been as usual tolerant, patient and supportive.

There were six lectures in the first instance.

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

In 1840 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon of Besançon, a printer and an autodidact, published What is Property? and answered his own question: ‘Property is Theft.’ Karl Marx was twenty-one years of age at the time, and writing his dissertation for the University of Jena on the difference between the natural philosophy of Democritus and of Epicurus. After a brief opening chapter on methodology, Proudhon moves on to definitions. He begins in this way:

‘Roman law defines property as the right to use and abuse a thing within the limits of the law’ – and he provides the Latin: ‘Jus utendi et abutendi re sua, quatenus iuris ratio patitur.’ Abuse of property, he says sardonically, is really indistinguishable from use of property. One way or another, the proprietor can do what he likes with his land. He can ‘let the crops rot underfoot, sow his field with salt, milk his cows on the sand, turn his vineyard into a desert, and use his vegetable garden as a park’.

Further definitions follow. According to the Declaration of Rights, published as a preface to the French Constitution of 1793, property is ‘the right to enjoy and dispose at will of one's goods, one's income, and the fruit of one's labour and industry’.

INTRODUCTION

Plato's ideal polity, or Kallipolis, is often characterized as a communistic society, in part or as a whole. Communism has been recently defined in this way:

The author proceeds to apply this (perfectly acceptable) definition to the ideal polity of the Republic: ‘The idea of communism as collectively owned property first appears in classical Greece. Plato's Republic contains a notable defence.’

This claim is mistaken. There is no collective or communal ownership of property in the ideal state of the Republic. Rather, Plato has Socrates prescribe for the political leadership and military (the Guards and Auxiliaries) an absence of property (coupled with a denial of individual families), or, to view it from a more positive angle, a community of use and a community of minds, involving the sharing of basic accommodation and subsistence, women and children, feelings and emotions.

INTRODUCTION

On 7 May 1318 four men were burned at the stake in the market place of the city of Marseille. According to a contemporary writer:

The four victims are only names to us; the writer was Angelo Clareno, a member of the Franciscan order, Fratres Minores, or Brothers Minor. In protest at what he saw as laxity and corruption in the Order, Clareno tried to form a breakaway group more in tune with the ideals of St Francis. He won temporary success, when Pope Celestine IV created for them a new Order called the Poor Hermits of Pope Celestine, under his own rather than Franciscan jurisdiction. However, Celestine was forced out of office after only four months (in 1294), his acts were nullified by the new Pope, Boniface VIII, and the Poor Hermits fled to Greece (in the first instance).

PRELIMINARIES

‘In revolutionary France of April 1849, a banquet was held of “socialist priests”, 33 of them, 3 in cassocks, and the rest dressed as lay men. 600 working men joined the festivity, and toasted Jesus of Nazareth, father of socialism.’

In 1891 Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum. The early chapters carry the message that socialism is unjust and deleterious to workers' interests, whereas private property is natural, blessed by God, and conducive to the common and private good. That principle once established, the Pope is now ready to pronounce on the issue of how the class struggle can be moderated, through a proper understanding of how wealth should be used. For guidance on this point, he says, the place to turn is not to philosophy but to the teachings of the Church; and the Pope now cites authorities. Thomas Aquinas receives pride of place, followed by New Testament texts urging charitable giving. We hear that in God's view, ‘there is nothing disgraceful in poverty, nor cause for shame in having to work for a living’: 2 Corinthians 8:9 is cited, where St Paul says of Christ: ‘He who was rich became poor for our sake.’

INTRODUCTION: PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON AND THEODOR MOMMSEN

In 1849 a cartoon appeared in Germany depicting The Progress of Learning (‘der Fortschritt der Wissenschaft’) over 300 years. Three panels present scholarly figures in dress appropriate to the academic profession of their epochs, the sixteenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Each panel bears a caption, apparently drawn from Roman law.

On the left: ‘Justice is the constant and unwavering determination to give to each his right.’ This is a citation, attributed to the classical jurist Ulpian (d. 223), from the sixth-century Digest of Justinian.

In the centre: ‘The king is completely exempt from all law.’ This is an Absolutist State's version of a statement of the same jurist, Ulpian: the emperor is exempt from the laws.

On the right: ‘Property is theft’ (Dominium est furtum). No Roman jurist, we may be sure, ever made this pronouncement. The slight figure in this panel is full of nervous energy as he points emphatically at his audience. He is Theodor Mommsen, Extraordinary Professor of Roman Law at Leipzig. At the time only thirty-one years of age, he was later to become arguably the greatest historian of ancient Rome of all time. In 1840 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon of Besançon had posed the question: ‘Qu'est-ce que la propriété?’ and had given as his answer: ‘La Propriété, c'est le vol.’ Nine years later we find Mommsen being credited with a Latinized version.

It may not be a natural or human right to own property, but it is no accident that humans in complex societies strive assiduously to acquire, possess and attach the label ‘mine’ to external objects that are felt to be needed or seen to be of value. Aristotle was reflecting the communis opinio, then as now, when he claimed that a private property regime was preferable to one of communal ownership. His specific arguments, too, have struck a chord with theorists and politicians down the ages. They are primarily utilitarian: private property makes good social and economic as well as moral sense. It is important however not to overlook two other aspects of his intervention: first, the fact that he spoke out at all, and second, the fact that he misrepresented Plato in the course of doing so.

On the first of these points: Aristotle was provoked by the arrangements that Plato prescribed for his ideal state. It was the same with slavery (though in this case Plato was not the provocateur). There is no reason to suppose that Aristotle would ever have produced his theory of natural slavery, had not its basis been queried by certain (unnamed) individuals. Private property was an even more firmly established institution in Greek society than was slavery.

INTRODUCTION

When Aristotle was launching his enquiry into the end of political science, he resolved to consider first the opinions of ordinary people rather than philosophers, or at least ‘those [opinions] which are most prevalent or have something to be said for them’. Taking a leaf out of his book, I begin with a quotation from the Guardian of 10 January 2007:

My interest is less in the proliferation and trivialization of human rights in the modern world (to which this citation bears eloquent witness), than in the representation of property as an established natural right, worthy company for the right to life itself. In this chapter I put this judgement or assumption to the test with the aid of philosophers, theologians, jurists and politicians from the middle of the twelfth century to the end of the eighteenth.

THE EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT

Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), Samuel Pufendorf (1632–94) and John Locke (1632–1704) all sought to give private property the status of natural law by locating its emergence in the state of nature. The problem they faced was that they were working within a tradition, stretching right back into antiquity, according to which the primeval condition was a form of communality in which all humanity had equal access to the resources of the earth. Moreover, late antiquity and the Middle Ages had produced a Christian reading of this tradition, by which the Christian God had ordered things in this way. Their response to the challenge was twofold. First, in order to counter the possible charge that mankind had thwarted God's purpose, they argued that the establishment of private property, while not a direct consequence of a dictate of God, was man's rational response to the divine command to use the resources of the world for his self-preservation and increase. Secondly, in order to justify the apparent breach of the principle of equal access to material resources, Grotius and Pufendorf proposed that agreement, tacit or express, must have preceded first occupatio; while for Locke the crucial step in the establishment of rights over unoccupied land was creative labour.

The contributions to property theory of these philosophers of the early Enlightenment should be seen as part of a wider concern with the great political issues of the time, domestic and international.

PRELIMINARIES

‘When I roll out the whole of this text of Plato's (or of Socrates’) Republic which I have in my hands, I know very well that I won't find those words.' The speaker is Pier Candido Decembrio, and the work Dialogues against Lactantius, written c.1443 by the Franciscan Antonio da Rho (Antonius Raudensis). Da Rho is putting forward Decembrio, in real life his friend and collaborator, as the defender of Plato against the early fourth-century Christian apologist Lactantius. The work as a whole belongs in the context of the contemporary debate between advocates of Plato and advocates of Aristotle. What Decembrio knew he would be unable to find, as he ‘scrolled down’ the Republic, was any statement to the effect that in Plato's ideal polity resources should be in common among the citizens. It just isn't there, said Decembrio. He was quite right. Platonic communality was for the Guards and Auxiliaries alone. It was Aristotle who first, for his own purposes, blandly stated that Plato's arrangements embraced the whole citizenry; and the late antique Neoplatonists told the same story, again, for their own purposes.

I'll come back in due course to Decembrio and the wider debate. For the present, let us note that it was unusual to charge Aristotle with misreading the text of Plato, with being, in effect, a bad historian of philosophy. More generally, it was unusual to apply source criticism to a text.