Pompeii (37 page)

On the day of the election, we must imagine that the local citizens would have turned up in the Forum, divided into their different districts, returned their district vote and then acclaimed as winning candidates those who had secured the votes of the majority of the districts. Exactly how they voted is not so clear, but almost certainly by some form of secret ballot. One ingenious recent suggestion is that the main purpose of the closing devices, still visible at the entranceways to the Forum, was to keep out those not qualified to vote on election days.

All these voters were men. Leaving aside the occasional monarchy which produced a queen or two, there was no city or state in the Greek or Roman world that gave women any formal political power. Nowhere did women have the vote. But one of the surprising facts about the electoral notices known in Pompeii is that more than fifty of them name a woman, or a group of women, as the candidate’s backers. Does this demonstrate an active interest from women in a political process from which they were excluded? In some cases, yes – even if it was not always a narrowly political engagement that was at stake. Taedia Secunda, for example, who put her name to Lucius Popidius Secundus’ attempt to win the office of aedile, was, as the electoral notice explicitly states, the man’s grandmother. On many other occasions family or personal loyalty must have been the reason for the women’s support. Nonetheless, the simple fact that it was felt worthwhile to parade their backing is another indication of the
visibility
of women in public life at Pompeii.

But sometimes there might have been more to these slogans than at first meets the eye. Several women’s names are found on the outside wall of a bar on the Via dell’Abbondanza lending their support to different candidates: they were Asellina, Aegle, Zmyrina and Maria. It is a fair guess that these were the women who worked as the barmaids inside (the single names, two of them, Aegle and Zmyrina, decidedly Greek in origin, suggest that they were slaves). Maybe they had their favourite candidates and commissioned the local signwriters to display these preferences. Or maybe there is a joke, or a bit of negative propaganda, going on here. Some street-corner satirist, or political opponent, has arranged the usual kind of election notices – but inserted the local barmaids’ names as the supporters.

Whoever the sponsors behind these posters actually were, Caius Julius Polybius and his friends were certainly not pleased. For in the notice in which Zmyrina declares her support for ‘C. I. P.’ (Julius Polybius was a man so familiar that he could be abbreviated down to his initials) someone has come along later and carried out exactly the kind of defacement that Aemilius Celer had in mind when he threatened anyone who blotted out his handiwork with ‘catching something nasty’. Or at least they have partly done so. For here just Zmyrina’s name has been obliterated under a layer of lime, the rest left legible, as if the eager candidate was concerned only to remove that dangerous hint of unsuitable support.

The parade of unsuitable support seems, in fact, to have been the way negative propaganda was delivered on more than one occasion in Pompeian elections. None of the posters we have found so far list the failings of a particular candidate, or try to dissuade the electorate from casting their votes that way. But we do find some very odd supporters indeed. It may be that the poster which has ‘the late drinkers’ endorsing Marcus Cerrinius Vatia’s campaign to become aedile was a friendly joke – a notice commissioned perhaps after one of their late-night drinking sessions. But it is hard to imagine that the support of ‘the pickpockets’, or ‘the runaway slaves’ or ‘the idlers’ was meant to be anything other than encouragement to vote against.

What reasons do the supporters give for voting for their chosen candidates? If they are specified at all, these are mostly as formulaic as the notices themselves. The favourite word, occurring time and time again, is
dignus
– meaning ‘worthy’ or ‘suitable for office’. A more loaded term in Latin than in English, this has important connotations of public esteem and honour (it was, for example, to protect his
dignitas
that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE and embarked on civil war against his rival, Pompey). But there is still very little in any of these posters that even hints at what action might win or justify such esteem, or make a successful aedile or
duumvir
. One graffito – not apparently an election notice, though it has long since disappeared – praised Marcus Casellius Marcellus as ‘a good aedile and a great games-giver’. The few attempts to give some concrete reason for electoral support add up to little more than ‘he brings good bread’ (which may refer either to Caius Julius Polybius’ qualities as a bakery owner or to some plans for a distribution of free bread) and ‘he won’t squander the city’s money’ (which may hint at Bruttius Balbus’ economic prudence in local finances – or, more likely, at his willingness to be generous with his own cash in the public interest).

It is possible, of course, that all kinds of debates about city policy and politics went on amongst the electorate – over dinner, in the Forum or in the bars – that never made a mark on the standardised wording of these posters. Pompeii may have been an intensely political culture. But it is equally likely that for the men in the city, just as for the women, it was family connections, personal loyalty and friendship that were most at issue in choosing a candidate. Taedia Secunda is the only one to make a particular family relationship clear, but a number of the supporters identify themselves as the ‘client’ or ‘neighbour’ of the candidate concerned. This is still ‘politics’, of course, but with a very different flavour. Certainly, the role of the posters was more declaratory than persuasive. That is to say, they were intended to demonstrate support, rather than attempting to change the voters’ minds with argument – a process which (on the reasonable assumption that Caius Julius Polybius did live in the house named after him) reaches its logical conclusion in the endorsement of a candidate inside his own house.

No poster has yet been found endorsing the election of young Aulus Umbricius Scaurus, either as aedile as
duumvir
. This is not too surprising because he probably held office a couple of decades before the eruption, even before the earthquake of 62. True, there are some election notices that survive from earlier periods in the town’s history. A few even go back slightly before the formal establishment of the colony in 80 BCE and almost a dozen are written in Oscan. But the vast majority are, as you would expect, from the last years of the city’s life, and later than the damage caused by the earthquake and the redecoration that it prompted. For this period, there are several candidates who appear in well over a hundred different notices. And this density of evidence has encouraged historians to try to draw even more detailed conclusions about Pompeian politics than what can be extracted from the wording itself.

Some of the most intricate pieces of research have tried to establish, first, a relative order to the electoral campaigns represented – and then, if possible, to work out a complete chronology of the Pompeian elections in its last decade or so. Who stood for what office in what year? The method that lies behind this is effectively an ‘archaeology’ of the painted surface of the walls, and it is helped by the fact that electoral notices were not washed off or otherwise removed once the particular campaign was finished, but simply covered over the next year with new versions for the new candidates. If you start with the topmost layer of painting, you find that the election notices for some candidates both survive in very large numbers and never appear to be painted over by others. It is logical to suppose that these were the candidates for office in the last elections that took place in 79 CE (probably in the spring, to take up office in July). If so, then the candidates for the post of aedile in the last year of the city’s life were Marcus Sabellius Modestus, who seems to have been running with Cnaeus Helvius Sabinus, against Lucius Popidius Secundus and Caius Cuspius Pansa. The candidates for the office of
duumvir
were, on the same line of reasoning, Caius Gavius Rufus and Marcus Holconius Priscus.

Peeling back through the layers of posters, the next task is to determine which overlie which – and so which are later than others. From this it should be possible in theory to build up a chronology of candidates. This operation is much trickier than merely identifying the very latest candidates. As the walls decay and the paintings fade, it is not always easy to establish the precise relationship between different notices, not to mention the fact that co-ordinating the evidence from different parts of the city is very complicated indeed. There is no single list of candidates even for the 70s CE that has convinced everyone. That said, one thing is universally agreed: that there were many more candidates for election to aedile than to
duumvir
. In fact, on one reconstruction, between 71 and 79, there were only ever two men each year standing for the duovirate: only as many candidates as there were places, in other words.

If that were the case (and it certainly was in some years), then the purpose of the posters could not have been to persuade the voters to choose one candidate over another. At first sight, it also gives a gloomy impression of Pompeian democracy. That is to say, despite the appearance of a lively democratic culture, no choice was offered to the electorate in filling their major elected office. On reflection, things seem rather different. For since it was the rule in Pompeii (as in Roman towns in general) that no one could become
duumvir
without first having been aedile, and since only two aediles were elected each year, competition for the higher office would by definition be almost non-existent.

There was sometimes strong competition to become aedile: Cnaeus Helvius Sabinus, a candidate of 79, had made at least one previous and unsuccessful attempt to be elected, as we can tell from what must be earlier notices. There need only have been competition to become
duumvir
if more than two of those eligible were keen to hold the office in the same year – perhaps because they were particularly keen to be elected to the more prestigious post of
duumvir quinquennalis
, or because they wanted to hold the office more than once. In fact, unless every ex-aedile was available to be elected
duumvir
(and a few at least would have died in the intervening years, or moved away, or changed their minds about public office), then some men would have had to become
duumvir
more than once, simply in order to fill the slots. In other words, the competitive gateway to public office and prominence in Pompeii was the office of aedile.

The crucial fact to remember, however, in thinking about political life in Pompeii is that the number of electors was small. Suppose we return to the rough estimates of total population that I suggested in the last chapter: 12,000 in the town, 24,000 in the surrounding countryside. If we follow one very rough-and-ready rule of thumb commonly used in calculations like this, we can reckon that approximately half of those people would have been slaves. And of the remainder more than half must have been women and children, not entitled to vote. This means that in the town itself the electorate would have been something in the region of 2500, in the countryside round about, perhaps 5000. In other words, the voters resident in Pompeii itself were roughly the same in number as the pupils in a large British comprehensive school or US high school. The grand total, including those resident in the surrounding area, was less than half the student population of an average British university.

These comparisons give a useful sense of proportion. There has been much talk in recent discussions of Pompeian elections of the role of ‘electoral agents’ or of various means of ‘marshalling support’, and I myself have referred to ‘propagandists’ and more than once to an electoral ‘campaign’. But all these expressions suggest a process on much too grand a scale and much too formally organised. Of course, all kinds of ideological controversies might have divided the Pompeian population, especially in that period when the colonists were imposed on the town after the Social War and we have hints of various kinds of internal tension. But it is hard to resist the likely conclusion (as the election posters themselves suggest) that in the final years of the city’s life most elections were conducted as an extension of family, friendship and other personal relationships. It is often asked how in a community like Pompeii, with no sign of any official way of proving one’s identity or right to vote, participation in the elections was policed. How, for example, did they stop slaves or foreigners turning up and usurping political rights? The answer is very simple. By the time the few thousand voters had arrived at the Forum, been let through the barrier and divided into their various voting districts, any interloper would have been easily spotted. These were people who knew each other.

The burdens of office?

Size is not the only factor in understanding the political culture of Pompeii. There is also the question of the degree of autonomy the town enjoyed and the type of decisions that fell to the local community. In Pompeii, the male citizens came together to elect their aediles and
duoviri
. The assembly of citizens had no other functions than that (any wider powers they once held in the pre-Roman period had been lost when the town became a Roman colony). Indirectly, though, since the aediles were drafted into the local council or
ordo
, the assembly also elected the council – or, as we shall soon see, the majority of it. But what did these elected officials do? What powers did they or the
ordo
have? Why might the electorate’s choice matter? As a Roman town from the early first century BCE, Pompeii had no big decisions of peace and war or national policy to make. Those were made in the capital. But it was Roman practice to leave local communities to govern their own local affairs. So what exactly was at stake?