Popular Politics on the Threshold of Violence during the Crisis of the Roman Republic
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Abstract
In this article we analyze the way in which a part of modern historiography and classical authors approached the popular modes of collective action in the crisis of the Roman Republic. Protests, agitations and riots, along with other ways of struggling were attributed —by writers such as Cicero—to a natural predisposition to debauchery as well as a tendency to manipulation and irrationality of the mob that expressed itself with excessive violence. We understand that this discursive configuration responded to an undervaluation of the people as a political subject that questioned the legitimacy of those behaviors that transgressed the desirable limits for the ruling class. Consequently, we propose to identify the way in which the plebeian praxis, in the process of subjectivation fostered by the demand for public land, indicates a different orientation that challenges this scheme, affirming the status of the people in the field of litigation.
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