(Re)moving the Masses: Colonisation as Domestic Displacement in the Roman Republic

Abstract

Metaphors move—and displace—people. This paper starts from this premise, focusing on how elites have deployed metaphors of water and waste to form a rhetorical consensus around the displacement of non-elite citizens in ancient Roman contexts, with reference to similar discourses in the contemporary Global North and Brazil. The notion of ‘domestic displacement’—the forced movement of citizens within their own sovereign territory—elucidates how these metaphors were used by elite citizens, such as Cicero, to mark out non-elite citizens for removal from the city of Rome through colonisation programmes. In the elite discourse of the late Republican and early Augustan periods, physical proximity to and figurative equation with the refuse of the city repeatedly signals the low social and legal status of potential colonists, while a corresponding metaphor of ‘draining’ expresses the elite desire to displace these groups to colonial sites. The material outcome of these metaphors emerges in the non-elite demographic texture of Julius Caesar’s colonists, many of whom were drawn from the plebs urbana and freedmen. An elite rationale, detectable in the writings of Cicero, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and others, underpins the notion of Roman colonisation as a mechanism of displacement. On this view, the colony served to alleviate the founding city—Rome—of its surplus population, politically volatile elements, and socially marginalised citizens, and in so doing, populate the margins of its empire too. Romulus’ asylum, read anew as an Alban colony, serves as one prototype for this model of colonisation and offers a contrast to recent readings that have deployed the asylum as an ethical example for contemporary immigration and asylum seeker policy. The invocation of Romulus’ asylum in 19th century debates about the Australian penal colonies further illustrates the dangers of appropriating the asylum towards an ethics of virtue. At its core, this paper drills down into the question of Roman colonists’ volition, considering the evidence for their voluntary and involuntary movement to a colonial site and challenging the current understanding of this movement as a straightforward, series of voluntary ‘mass migrations’. In recognising the agency wielded by non-elite citizens as prospective colonists, this paper contends that Roman colonisation, when understood as a form of domestic displacement, opens up another avenue for coming to grips with the dynamics of ‘popular’ politics in the Republican period.

Citizenship’s Insular Cases, from Ancient Greece and Rome to Puerto Rico

“…52 For the rhetorical practices of these nationalisms, see (Müller 2016); on the background to the contemporary "age of anger," (Mishra 2017). 53 See, e.g., (Beard 2015), as critiqued by Jewell (2019) in this volume. I have succumbed to this temptation, or at the very least failed to subject my own flirtations with it to more searching examination: compare (Padilla Peralta 2015b, 2017b).…”

“…For imperial recourse to denaturalization, see the remarks of (Ando 2016b, p. 185). On the imprint of the Caesarian and Augustan colonization/forced resettlement programs in the construction of Rome's civic imaginaries, see Jewell (2019) in this volume.…”

Ancient Wandering and Permanent Temporariness

“…It does not just extend the possibilities inherent in the lived experience of citizenship, which is more flexible than its idealised form, as Gray's (2018) paper in this volume showcases. 78 A flexibility that could also be marginalising of certain citizen groups, as Jewell's (2019) paper in this volume demonstrates. Instead, there is an inadvertent enactment of the cosmopolitan ideal, as embodied within the very diversity of the ten thousand, 79 and with it, a reimagining not only of home but also of the good citizen, even if they are apolis-without a state, or outside it.…”

Middle Republican Connectivities

“…Hellenistic mercenaries: Griffith [1935] 1968; Marinovic 1988; Loman 2005 on accompanying wives and children. Roman colonisation: Pelgrom and Stek 2014 and Pelgrom 2018 for the limitations of the traditional paradigm; Stek 2018 for the benefits of moving ‘beyond the Romanising agrotown’ in tracking colonisation's variable footprint; Kim 2021 on the dating of Roman centuriation at Luceria; Jewell 2019 on colonisation as forced displacement.…”