Contentious politics

Contentious politics is a political-process theory that accounts for the role that grievances, emotion, and identity play in political conflict. It is defined as public, collective interactions when at least some of the interaction adopts non-institutional forms, the government is an object or a party to the claim, and the claim would, if realised, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants.Footnote ³ Contentious politics, thus, is the public component of the multifaceted relationships among political actors, and its four main components – interactions, governments, claimants, and their claims – have proximate effects such as the reorganisation of social relations, realignments of relationships between participants, changes in the character of repression, and changes or displacements which occur as a consequence of the realisation of claims. Together, they produce political and social effects beyond the immediate outcomes of collective activities.Footnote ⁴

As a conceptual framework, contentious politics allows an analysis of collective behaviour to go deeper than a mere descriptive discussion by providing the means to reconstruct narratives of political conflict, a useful tool when dealing with difficult or sparse source material. However, the public performance of political contention is only one part of the puzzle. In his ground-breaking work on the moral economy of the eighteenth-century CE English crowd, E. P. Thompson argued that focusing on the most explosive types of collective action (i.e. riots) as demarcative events runs the risk of obscuring the broader political context of these protests.Footnote ⁵ In the Roman world too, it was not just rioting and violence that emperors and their imperial administration had to worry about. The public jeers and contempt for Didius Julianus and Macrinus, as vividly portrayed by Herodian (2.7.2–3, 2.7.5) in the first instance and Dio Cassius (79.20) in the second, precipitated the fall of both emperors. In other words, relatively innocuous, non-violent claim-making could produce outsized effects. Why this would be so when power was an asymmetrical reality has much to do with how conceptions of collective identity were closely intertwined with cultural norms and expectations, and with the specific nature of Rome’s urban environment. Yet, when we consider that much of our source material forms part of the ‘official’ record, evidence of popular resistance or subversive thought in the capital are but meagre scraps in comparison. Scott’s concepts of ‘hidden transcripts’ allows us to fill those gaps and demonstrate how Roman social networks and spatial practices were important mechanisms by which people could perceive nascent opportunities for political action.

Moreover, Lefebvre’s spatial triad allows us to pull back the layers of meaning of Rome’s spaces – contested, shared, public, and private – and provides context for specific examples of collective action, as every person’s social setting influenced how they perceived and interacted with the world around them. Lefebvre’s theory of the social production of space, along with Scott’s concept of hidden transcripts, explains why Roman contentious politics did not occur every time the city had a grievance.Footnote ⁶ Lefebvre and Scott’s theories also explain why contentious performances changed over time, because the social and political meaning of civic spaces shifted, sometimes directly because of those very performances.

Reading spatial practice

Contentious politics, or any sort of politics for that matter, does not take place in a sterile vacuum. Martin and Miller contend that ‘spatial perspectives can illuminate a wide range of issues in contentious politics including how and why groups make claims to territory, the relationship between the spatial constitution of daily life and collective identity formation’.Footnote ⁷ Certainly, contentious politics often involves the symbolic, often subversive use of space, and we should view spatial processes and practices as inseparable from (and indeed a primary component of) social processes and practices.Footnote ⁸ We ‘read’ the urban arrangement of ancient Rome using Lefebvre’s spatial triad as a lens through which we can analyse Roman contentious politics and its close interrelationship with the physical and symbolic dimensions of urban space.Footnote ⁹

Lefebvre’s spatial triad consists of three different types of space: perceived space (or what Lefebvre refers to as ‘spatial practice’), conceived space, and lived space. Each of these three types of spaces can exist in the same place at the same time and can shift as people’s use of that space changes. The overlapping, layered nature of Lefebvre’s triad means that a particular place can have vastly different meanings according to who, when, and why it is used, which makes it a useful tool with which we can tease out socio-political contradictions and conflicts.Footnote ¹⁰

Perceived space describes the built environment in which people live their daily lives. The neighbourhood, its shops, bars, workplaces, social venues, and places of worship are social settings certainly, but they are perceived differently by people according to socio-economic status and patterns of movement for example. Perceived space is thus sensitive to tradition and shaped by extant power relations, since many aspects of social control rest upon the ability to control the social activities connected to specific spaces.Footnote ¹¹

Conceived space is space designed to shape discourse. In Lefebvre’s words, conceived space is the ‘place for the practices of social and political power; in essence, it is these spaces that are designed to manipulate those who exist within them’.Footnote ¹² The considered urban design of Rome’s imperial fora and the monumental approach to some of the city’s public buildings and thoroughfares were the realisation of a rational – and official – conception of Roman civic space. Certainly, the planning and division of spaces into separate elements according to ideology is an abstract concept of space but it does have a significant impact on both social and political practice since it represents the dominant space of society.Footnote ¹³

Lived space, or representational space, encompasses the interaction of the first two types of space. It is the space of its inhabitants directly lived through their history and experience, and therefore is not necessarily consistent or cohesive. As the space of lived material and symbolic experience, it is linked to the underground side of social life,Footnote ¹⁴ and it is fertile terrain for the creation of spaces of resistance.Footnote ¹⁵ For example, a compital shrine, as the spatial heart of a Roman vicus, operated as perceived space for the local inhabitants who would use it as a worship site and local meeting place. As conceived space, a compitum was presided over by the Lares compitales, who were a reminder not just of the vicus’s guardian spirit but of the state religion, and the state itself. We can see how compita operated as lived spaces through the celebration of populist politicians during the Late Republican period. Commemorative statues and altars for M. Marius Gratidianus were erected in the city’s compita in 85 BCE. In a similar manner, statues were also erected for the Gracchi brothers after their deaths.Footnote ¹⁶ Cicero claimed that people expressed their gratitude to Gratidianus by offering wine and incense before his images at their compita. Plutarch noted that people made offerings and worshipped daily at the Gracchi’s statues, and during this period, the Compitalia became closely associated with subversive political machinations. Unsurprisingly, the Compitalian games were banned alongside the collegia in 64 BCE.Footnote ¹⁷ Later, Augustus incorporated the cult of his genius to that of the Lares compitales partly to assert control over the magistri vicorum (those responsible for the Ludi Compitalicii), who also played a role in the political violence of the 50s BCE.Footnote ¹⁸ And with this action, the emperor inserted himself – the state – into the spatial practices of the neighbourhood. Here, as Lefebvre outlines with his spatial triad, the social and the spatial are indivisible.

Examining the interrelationship between perceived, conceived, and lived space thus enrichens our understanding of Roman contentious politics because it recognises the simultaneous and at times contradictory perception and conception of space, and so the potential for resistance and even rejection of the dominant order and discourse.Footnote ¹⁹ Given the stratified nature of Roman society and the overlapping, permeable experiences provided by the urban environment, Rome’s spaces and the activities and movements within and across them shaped contentious performances at symbolic sites across the city. By situating collective behaviour, especially subaltern action, within a contentious politics framework and incorporating Lefebvre’s spatial theory and Scott’s transcripts, we can gain a better comprehension of the cultural, spatial, and temporal factors that shaped the interaction between political actors, and as a result, the ability to relate the resulting narratives to wider historical themes.Footnote ²⁰

Roman ‘transcripts’

Scott’s conception of hidden and public transcripts provides us with a framework to reinterpret the politics of power. A social scientist and anthropologist, Scott focused his research on the ‘infrapolitics’ of peasant revolutions and agrarian societies, or the everyday forms of resistance employed by subaltern groups.Footnote ²¹ As the concept of transcripts is used in discussions of power and resistance, it is particularly applicable to stratified and pre-digital societies (that is, societies where subaltern discourse can be transmitted without manipulation). Reading through the lines of imperial Rome’s conventional and stylised public performances (the ‘public transcript’) and the dissident responses that emerged in unobserved social spaces (‘hidden transcripts’) provides us with a way to conceptualise how Roman social networks, shared identities and spaces had a direct influence on the performance of contentious politics, particularly where the primary source material is lacking.

Performative political participation had long been an integral part of the Roman psyche, and it was embedded in the dynamic interactions between actors and the spaces in which they protested.Footnote ²² Rome’s key civic spaces were locations intended for mass audiences and active involvement, and how people made claims would continue to be shaped by such spatial routines and memories. Republican Rome hosted open air assemblies, funerals, triumphs, festivals, trials, lawsuits, and electioneering activities that were an amalgamation of religious ceremonial, public performance, and displays of power and social stratification. Popular political participation was often verbal in nature – approval or disapproval at the contiones was communicated via a show of hands, shouting, or proffered suggestions.Footnote ²³ In the theatres, audiences would make their feelings known directly; Cicero commented that for politicians who were guided by popular opinion and rumour, applause at the theatre seemed like immortality and hissing, death.Footnote ²⁴

By the imperial era, the spectacles had become the central element in the web of communication, which instantiated the position of the emperor in the body politic.Footnote ²⁵ The emperor was the chief patron of the city, and his relationship with its inhabitants was both a symbolic and performative one that linked all urban political actors together as a polity. Consensus required reciprocity. Political actors accepted legitimacy claims in return for the provision of social goods, a ‘moral economy’, that in essence defined their identity.Footnote ²⁶ Rituals of consensus performed at the spectacles formed part of the imperial ‘public transcript’: the conventional and ritualised public interaction between ruler and ruled.Footnote ²⁷

This public transcript was primarily informal and verbal in nature, a repertoire that included acclamations, singing, rhythmic applause, and direct communication with the emperor. Josephus describes how the urban plebs would ‘gather enthusiastically in the Circus and there assembled throngs make requests of the emperors according to their own pleasure. Emperors who rule that there can be no question about granting such petitions are by no means unpopular.’Footnote ²⁸ Acclamations ranged in complexity from simple clapping or shouted words to more elaborate titles or phrases that could be chanted or sung. However, a recognisable repertoire of rhythms and stock phrases made it relatively simple for a large number of people to deliver the same message together like modern-day soccer chants.Footnote ²⁹ Like requests and petitions, imperial acclamations often constituted one side of a two-way discussion, a call-and-response pattern that had its roots in Republican practices of flagitatio and convicium.

Public transcripts were performed at the types of spaces that Lefebvre would call ‘conceived’, in that they were engineered, in effect, to mirror and amplify existing social hierarchies. But as Hayagreeva Rao and Sunasir Dutta argue, large gatherings and processions are actually liminal spaces that heighten emotions and allow the ‘communication of voices and meanings that challenge existing interpretations of hierarchy, justice and convention’.Footnote ³⁰ This may seem like a contradiction, but while such structures of power were designed to facilitate collective behaviour in the interests of imperial regimes, all structures of power create their own resistance, and the potential for rituals of consensus effortlessly to become rituals of contention instead. The sheer scale, sectioned seating, free (or relatively cheap) entrance, and the collective, verbal nature of the public transcript combined with a hectic festival schedule that was specific to the Circus created specialised spatial routines that facilitated collective behaviour in the same way that Republican electoral performances did in the Forum decades earlier.

Interestingly, the form of some chants and acclamations appears to have been specific to the city itself. When Nero compelled some rustic Italians to praise his theatre performance at sword point, their ignorance of acclamation formulas and rhythmic clapping disrupted the applause of the rest of the audience.Footnote ³¹ While some chants and rhythms were rehearsed and official (Nero’s claqueurs even had specific applause types),Footnote ³² verbal contention, on the other hand, was often a by-product of collective identity. Inscriptions from the public auditoria at Aphrodisias suggests that blocks of spectacle seating could be assigned or taken by collegia, so that neighbours, fellow cult, or trade members could chant and applaud together.Footnote ³³ True control of the crowd by the authorities was a pipe dream, as the shouts of so many people could not be restricted to the ‘official’ script. Indeed, the carnivalesque nature of many of Rome’s religious festivals and shows temporarily permitted acts of sanctioned deviance and provided occasions where dominant authority structures could be challenged, and political opportunities recognised. Aside from the emotional pull of a large crowd, the intrinsic structure of the rituals associated with spectacle space could threaten social order by removing audience members from their ordinary spatial routines and by temporarily rendering power relations transparent, making the maintenance of social structure reliant on collective action.Footnote ³⁴ Also, given that the performative aspect of the moral contract between emperor and plebs was one of face-to-face communication, when the pulvinar or imperial box was empty, spectacle space could operate more as a ‘free’ space than as a site of power. What this meant was that these spaces, although under the nominal control of the emperor, could embrace multiple political views and claims, and could operate as both conceived and lived space for its audiences, because they simultaneously represented the state and popular culture – two umbrella concepts that could tie many disparate people together under strong if temporary bonds of collective identity.

There was, then, another side to the open and stylised forms of dialogue practised at the shows and other civic spaces. If the public interaction between the imperial regime and its subjects was a public transcript, then the subversive discourse that took place away from direct observation of the regime was what Scott terms the ‘hidden transcript’. Scott argues that ‘most of the political life of subordinate groups is to be found neither in the overt collective defiance of powerholders nor in complete hegemonic compliance, but in the vast territory between these two polar opposites’.Footnote ³⁵ The social practices actors usually employed in more local, ‘private’ settings, including rumour and gossip, are the hidden transcripts that are the loci of both political support and resistance.Footnote ³⁶ In these spaces, official discourse could be reinterpreted and independently framed by local communities, generating opportunities for contentious politics. The public reaction to Agrippina’s murder in 59 CE for example, included the circulation of libels, rumour, curses, and insults directed towards Nero; his statues were graffitied with ominous threats, and, later, verses were spread regarding his role in the Great Fire; clear demonstrations that many people rejected the ‘official’ line.Footnote ³⁷ While the imperial regime and its subjects did collaborate paradoxically to produce public transcripts that served to legitimise the hierarchical status quo, hidden acts of resistance circulated under the surface and could bubble over when grievance met political opportunity.Footnote ³⁸ The boundary between ‘public’ and ‘private’ space and discourse was a permeable one, and when the hitherto unobserved strands of identity and informal communication were realised in the open, it became a visible performance of pre-formed resistance.Footnote ³⁹

Of particular importance here is that a hidden transcript is often specific to a site or a particular set of actors. Local community spaces allowed people in the course of their daily routines to discuss information that was relevant to them, and this information, for the most part, was unable to be manipulated or controlled from above. Scott contends that ‘if the social location par excellence of the public transcript is the public assemblies of subordinates summoned by elites, then the social location par excellence for the hidden transcript lies in the unauthorised and unmonitored assemblies of subordinates’.Footnote ⁴⁰ As hidden transcripts were essentially the ‘offstage’ discourses not characterised by the deference of the dominated to the elite, they were born and nurtured in the spatial and temporal havens of the neighbourhood, the sites of anti-hegemonic discourse.Footnote ⁴¹ Certainly, local perceived spaces were crucial to the formation not only of contentious thought and practice, but also of the collective identities that bound people together.

Roman spatial practices were intensified by the high population densities and communal style of living in many parts of the city. As discussed earlier, the social structures of the vici were implicated in the political turmoil of the Late Republic. As with other densely populated cities both ancient and modern, many ordinary Romans people lived most of their lives outside their small insulae, working, eating, and worshipping alongside their neighbours. Tabernae, compita, lacus, balnea, collegia rooms, popinae, and thermopoliae were both significant infrastructure and also information exchanges where like-minded people could meet to discuss social, political, and economic issues, and where hidden transcripts could safely circulate.Footnote ⁴² John Lott has shown how central the street-corner compital shrines were to that neighbourhood’s inhabitants, and how little oversight the authorities had over their everyday functions, regardless of the imperial cult. Certainly, the aim was to bind the urban plebs into a relationship with the imperial presence, but as lived space they functioned separately.Footnote ⁴³ These spaces were given temporal rhythm by rites and collective celebrations and further afield by the calendar of festivals and public spectacles.Footnote ⁴⁴ The spatial practices of the vicus combined with the built environment provided spatial diversity and flexibility and therefore played a vital role in shaping the lived experience of Romans and how they perceived space as ‘place’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Indeed, being part of a vicus with its shared social, religious, and economic spaces meant that neighbourhood spaces operated as firm cultural and political boundaries, allowing hidden transcripts to flourish unhindered by surveillance or control.Footnote ⁴⁶ Trades, often highly specialised, made up a sizeable portion of the urban market economy, and their collegia and other localised social networks played a significant role in many people’s lives. Approximately 700 inscriptions from Rome and the existence of at least 500 different types of association attest to their social importance,Footnote ⁴⁷ and although shopkeepers, collegia members, neighbourhood groups, and artisans cannot be viewed as a distinct class, these groups still shared identities generated and reinforced at the lower levels of the city landscape.Footnote ⁴⁸ Solidarities engendered through participation in voluntary associations such as collegia, vici associations, sodalitates, or apprenticeship networks are evidenced in no small part by the way in which participants described each other as amici subaediani (friends and construction workers), convivae marmorarii (mates and marble workers), and comestores (eating companions).Footnote ⁴⁹ A study of inscriptions and other evidence from ancient Transtiberim also strongly suggests that the neighbourhood had a strong community identity centred, at least in part, on shared ethnic backgrounds, religious routines, and shared trades.Footnote ⁵⁰ This link between spatial proximity and identity has also been observed in other urban environments: Roger Gould for instance demonstrated in his study of the Paris Commune that collective identities based around neighbourhood played a much more critical role in motivating people to collective action than class.Footnote ⁵¹ In what may be an example of the enduring strength of neighbourhood identities in the city, each of the rioni (city districts) of nineteenth-century Rome determined their own leader (capopopolo) by popular designation in nightly conversations in local taverns.Footnote ⁵² From these examples, we can recognise that an integral part of ‘Roman’ identity for many of the city’s inhabitants was a product of accumulated biographical, economic, and spatial experiences. These locally based identities in turn had the potential to facilitate place-based solidarities in other spaces and contexts.Footnote ⁵³

Charles Tilly notes that mobilised crowds ‘often consist not of living, breathing individuals but of groups, organisations, bundles of social relations and social sites such as occupations and neighbourhoods’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Tilly’s underlying question here, however, is: what sorts of people are likely to engage in contentious politics?Footnote ⁵⁵ Collegia and some vici associations had established hierarchies and organisational structures that could be effective mechanisms for mobilisation, as P. Clodius Pulcher successfully exploited them in the 60s BCE.Footnote ⁵⁶ Perhaps just as importantly, many of the people within these associations probably had shared perceptions of current opportunities and threats, what the available means of action were, and the likely consequences of those actions.Footnote ⁵⁷ Since many non-elite urbanites were integrated and organised in such separate but flexible communities, they were able to merge and support contention around common issues easily. In fact, the level of organisation of an episode of contention corresponds to the degree of pre-existing social organisation, and the stronger and more cohesive the pre-existing organisation, the more coherent and successful is the mobilisation. The civic order offered by these associations gave those who were elsewhere defined by inferiority and exclusion an alternative not tied to the public transcript. Thus, rather than being seen as a deliberate mirroring of elite hierarchies, local social networks should be seen as more independent and representative of hidden transcripts than official ideologies, and these independent identities were intimately tied to the neighbourhood environment that sheltered them from overt interference.Footnote ⁵⁸

Unfortunately for us, much of the point of hidden transcripts was that they could be expressed safely away from the eyes of the dominant, which leaves few traces in the historical record, but we do find scattered evidence. The term circulus for example is referenced over several centuries by our sources as a non-technical term to describe informal social gatherings usually of the non-elite.Footnote ⁵⁹ Although they could form anywhere, they are often mentioned in connection with neighbourhood spaces. Horace described the ‘chilling rumour’ that flew from the rostra by means of the compita, while Livy linked the spreading of rumours in the city to the plebs.Footnote ⁶⁰ Ammianus Marcellinus records that groups of people often gathered (circulos multos collectos), in the fora, compita, the streets, and other meeting-places to discuss affairs.Footnote ⁶¹ Horace, Propertius, Ovid, and Juvenal all mention the circulation of gossip and news at the crossroads, and informal chat also took place on street corners, in porticoes, at the temples and tabernae.Footnote ⁶² Of note, collegia also met regularly in the temples around the Forum when they planned for public festivals.Footnote ⁶³

Circuli, especially those that formed on the streets, were a primary oral conduit of hidden transcripts, not least because this form of speech was seen as part and parcel of subversive political thought and a mode of communication hard to control by the authorities.Footnote ⁶⁴ They are often described as being formed by non-elites at moments of crisis (including during the night), and were recognised as a venue for venting anger at the authorities and planning popular action over several centuries, evidence of their enduring form.Footnote ⁶⁵ Interestingly, whereas acclamations were often site or city specific, circuli were known to form outside urban centres and social structures. The Life of Probus explicitly links the circulus with political action in an incident where soldiers gathered to discuss (per multos circulos) who should be the next emperor, with their acclamation of Probus shortly after.Footnote ⁶⁶ It is also no coincidence that itinerant carriers of hidden transcripts like astrologers, fortune-tellers, and philosophers were known to have found audiences in … vulgi circulis.Footnote ⁶⁷ Epictetus tells how people would sometimes vilify the emperor and share their complaints in the taverns.Footnote ⁶⁸ Graffiti, neighbourhood songs,Footnote ⁶⁹ nicknames, lampoons, placards and verses posted on city walls or transmitted orally, and the anonymous defacing, destruction, or erection of statues were also the physical expression of the hidden transcripts discussed away from prying eyes.Footnote ⁷⁰

It was one thing to grumble or graffiti a statue by night, but when an opportunity arose, hidden transcripts could become contentious politics in the blink of an eye. When news of Caracalla’s death reached Rome in 217 CE, people gathered to speak evil of the deceased emperor, reciting lists of his bloody deeds and victims, demanding that the horse-race celebrated on his birthday should be abolished, and his statuary be melted down.Footnote ⁷¹ On the death of Commodus in 193 CE, the populace (τοῦ δήμου) assembled outside the Curia took up familiar chants from the shows to curse the former emperor, referring to him as an accursed wretch and a tyrant. Dio describes the crowd (ὁ ὄχλος) using ‘all the shouts that they had been accustomed to utter with a kind of rhythmic swing in the amphitheatre by way of paying court to Commodus … now chanted with certain changes that made them altogether laughable’.Footnote ⁷² This anecdote is interesting, for it shows that a crowd gathered because rumours of Commodus’ death flew around the city despite the late hour, circulated, it may be presumed, for the express purpose of making a collective claim against Commodus’ regime using a subverted version of the public transcript.Footnote ⁷³ In 238 CE, Gordian I’s attempted coup began in Rome with the assassination of the praetorian prefect Vitalianus during his salutatio matutina and the publication of a message to the people.Footnote ⁷⁴ People gathered in the porticoes and spaces where Gordian’s declaration was posted, and rumours quickly spread that Maximinus was dead. From this point, crowds (ὄχλοι κοῦφοι … ὑπὸ τοῦ ὀ ́χλου) who had ‘milled about as if possessed’ (ὁδῆμος ὥσπερ ἐνθουσιῶν διέθει πανταχοῦ) went through the city destroying the emblems of Maximinus’ power, including statues and paintings of his battle victories, and imperial informers were lynched and thrown into the sewers.Footnote ⁷⁵ In terms of political contention, the close association between local social networks and spaces (perceived space and hidden transcripts) and the ensuing contentious claims that either targeted or subverted imperial symbols (acclamatory formulae, statues, regime officials) are clear.

The ability of ordinary Romans to reaffirm collective identities in their local spaces, and create and circulate hidden transcripts, enabled groups to mark out political identities and lived space that were separate from the dominant discourse. The importance of these spaces and forms of contention and communication lay in their mobilising abilities. These spaces created and nurtured shared beliefs that could strengthen and organise a community response in the face of crisis or uncertainty, and these beliefs could shape public dialogue. By bringing together Lefebvre’s insights that lived space is inherently political and contestable and the evidence for Rome’s hidden transcripts alongside the collective, verbal performances that made up the public transcript of the spectacles, we can come to a new understanding of how Roman contentious performances could redefine symbolic spaces by subverting official scripts or through complete innovation. Both were languages that the city’s inhabitants could understand.

Imperial control of hidden transcripts

Authorities had long been aware of the link between the discourse that occurred within local networks and the potential for subversive collective action. Circuli were actively delegitimised by elites concerned by the power of this type of unofficial news network.Footnote ⁷⁶ Night meetings between plebeians (coetus nocturni) were allegedly banned by the Twelve Tables.Footnote ⁷⁷ Civil collegia were also banned in 64 BCE, then later brought under the control of the Senate because they had become a powerful mobilising unit for political violence. Although sanctioned associations were given legal protection from the second century CE on, collegia illicita continued to exist, concerning authorities.Footnote ⁷⁸ Tiberius for instance, banned the sale of baked goods in taverns; Claudius went further, closing taverns where collegia met and banning the sale of meat and hot water. Nero reiterated the ban on meat, allowing only pulses and vegetables to be served, which suggests they were concerned about people getting comfy and having overlong discussions.Footnote ⁷⁹ Trajan meanwhile turned down Pliny’s request for a firefighting collegium in Nicomedia because ‘we must remember that it is associations like these which have been responsible for the political disturbances in your province, particularly its towns. If people assemble for a common purpose, whatever name we give them and for whatever reason, they soon turn into a political club.’Footnote ⁸⁰ Each example demonstrates that emperors took steps to disrupt or at least gain some control over local social networks and the free spaces in which they gathered. Asserting control not just over some spaces and social units, but over what activities could actually occur in those spaces, shows that imperial regimes had a clear understanding that controlling space meant controlling the social production of space.

It is no surprise that imperial regimes also tried to control more transient urban subgroups who acted as carriers of hidden transcripts and as mobilisers of contention, not just in Rome itself but elsewhere in the empire.Footnote ⁸¹ Pantomime actors for example were a prominent lightning rod for subversive undercurrents. As mimes did not speak on stage and were a relatively small social group, their ability to organise and lead contentious behaviour rested on their connections with larger groups. They were well structured with their own collegia and attracted loyal partisans and factions that seem to have been organised by street and region and also included many equites and senators.Footnote ⁸² The ability to facilitate action in association with their collegia and factions of different classes using streets and neighbourhood spaces for coordination indicates that pantomimes were able to tap into the lived spaces (and thus, the social networks) of their audiences. Indeed, pantomimes instigated at least three major theatre riots during Tiberius’ reign, and their ability to play a part in such transgressive contention meant they were regularly expelled from the city, as were philosophers, astrologers, and magicians. The latter two groups were banned at least eight (and perhaps up to eleven) times between 139 BCE and 175 CE, Ulpian claiming that they were so often targeted ‘because they practice[d] base arts against the public peace and the imperium of the Roman people’.Footnote ⁸³

The centrality of social networks in the creation and circulation of hidden transcripts should not, therefore, be underestimated. None of these structures or processes were a uniquely Roman phenomenon; the role of trade guilds and other more informal associations of artisans and shopkeepers figures prominently in contentious urban politics across a wide variety of cultures and times.Footnote ⁸⁴ And certainly, our (elite) sources do describes such sub-groups (e.g. tabernarii, opifices, chierotechnai) as participants in politically contentious performances.Footnote ⁸⁵ As we have seen, the emperor may have controlled the public transcripts and much of the city’s conceived spaces, but the discourse of the city’s perceived spaces of the neighbourhoods, taverns, and cooperatives bound people together in shared experiences and environments that at times were demonstrably independent of sanctioned dialogues and identities.

From hidden to open: The performance of contentious politics

Theoretically, there is an infinite array of actions and spaces a collective could employ in the performance of contentious politics, yet people tend to stick with a limited number of performances that can be understood by the rest of society. Episodes of contention create a history – a collective memory – of interaction between parties, providing each with information about the propensities and tactics of the other. This ‘script’ of recognisable action defines a contentious performance, and its repetition between the same claimant–object pairs, like the theatre, is a repertoire that defines the nature of that contention in time and space. Accordingly, a repertoire is simultaneously a cultural and structural concept, involving not only what people do during episodes of contention, but how they know what to do and what others expect them to do.Footnote ⁸⁶

In Rome, how the built environment was used and experienced shaped the formation of repertories. When Republican crowds made public claims relating to food issues, they intimidated politicians, threw stones, and occupied symbolic spaces in and around the Forum; actions that mirrored the open air, communal political processes of the time.Footnote ⁸⁷ At the spectacles, audiences verbally made their contentious claims known. Audiences demonstrated their hostility to Caligula at the Circus Maximus by deliberately refusing to applaud for his favoured performers, instead cheering for those he disliked.Footnote ⁸⁸ Vitellius used force against circus fans whom he believed deliberately insulted the Blues faction in contempt of himself (and in anticipation of a change of ruler).Footnote ⁸⁹ Claudius had to issue an edict reprimanding theatre crowds who shouted insults, and Galba was mocked by a theatre audience who finished singing the chorus from an Atellan farce about a stingy old man, presumably meaning the emperor.Footnote ⁹⁰ A circus crowd protested the privileging of the Praetorian Guard and Caracalla’s repressive use of the military by chanting in unison ‘we shall do the living to death, that we may bury the dead’,Footnote ⁹¹ and shouting insults at the emperor’s favourite charioteer at a subsequent show. In these cases, as with audiences who presented demands, an emperor had two choices. He could tolerate dissent, or he could repress it. Caligula and Vitellius both chose the latter, but it proved costly in terms of public opinion.

In many cases though, the verbal claims made at the spectacles were deliberate and structured subversions of the public transcript. During Septimius Severus’ reign, traditional acclamatory formulas were used at the Circus Maximus to express hidden transcripts. At the last horse-race before the Saturnalia, a ‘countless throng’ of people flocked to the stadium (συνέδραμεν ἐς αὐτὴν ἄπλετόν τι χρῆμα ἀνθρώπων). Dio describes the crowd:

A decade later, another circus audience took up a chant regarding the now all-powerful Plautianus: ‘Why do you tremble? Why are you pale? You possess more than do the three’ (Severus and his two sons).Footnote ⁹² Subverting the speech patterns, gestures, and practices utilised in the public domain to contradict and deny dominant discourse meant that the inherent power of a location endowed by routine political life was able to be wrested away by claim-makers, demonstrating that a feedback loop existed between ‘public’ and ‘private’ space, and hidden and public transcripts.Footnote ⁹³

Severan control of imperial conceived space

As the spatial triad underlines the dialectical relationship between representation, identity, and space, Severus too was acutely aware of the potential for Circus protests to become mass mobilisation events. The emperor’s solution was to create new or refurbished public spaces in which he could shape the collective experiences and memories attached to them. The placement and design of one particular building, the Septizodium, perhaps demonstrates how the emperor attempted to direct attention away from the Circus and create new spatial routines associated primarily with his regime, a reconceiving of the space (in Lefebvrian terms) in response to the actual spatial practices which had allowed such protests. A large and lavishly decorated nymphaeum, the Septizodium was constructed on a prominent site at the south-east corner of the Palatine. Charmaine Gorrie has noted that Severus created a sizeable artificial terrace on the Palatine extending in the direction of the Circus. This terrace substantially enlarged the plateau on the top of the hill where the Septizodium was located. As Gorrie points out, the Septizodium ‘seems to have been intended to create an imposing façade for the hill when viewed from the Circus Maximus’, visually advertising a Severan presence above the track.Footnote ⁹⁴ The Septizodium was also located at a busy urban hub. The Via Appia through the Porta Capena terminated here, as did the streets that flanked the Circus and Palatine. This meant that it quickly became a popular meeting place: during Ammianus Marcellinus’ time, the nymphaeum was still a well-known leisure space for the urban plebs.Footnote ⁹⁵ Gorrie claims that with one prominent building, Severus was able to create a new space and social routines directly linked to his dynasty and promise of stability and renewal. The Septizodium, it can be argued, shifted attention away from the contentious routines of the Circus and reminded spectators of the power that loomed above them, more important at a time when the pulvinar and imperial palace were more often than not unoccupied by the emperor.

Severus also better defined the powers of the praefectus urbi, especially around the prefect’s responsibility for keeping the peace. Ulpian records that the prefect had to station soldiers (milites stationarii) at the spectacles to maintain order and ‘to keep himself informed of all that goes on’.Footnote ⁹⁶ The prefect also had the power to prosecute members of illicit collegia, could banish anyone from the city and the spectacles and forbid them their trade or business; the latter suggests a deliberate targeting of the transient urban sub-groups who acted as carriers of hidden transcripts – actors, magicians, philosophers, and other prophets.Footnote ⁹⁷ By controlling the visual and spatial narrative of the city, and restoring economic and political stability, the emperor could confidently proclaim himself as restitutor Urbis.Footnote ⁹⁸

This reshaping of the spatial landscape could be viewed as somewhat successful – certainly contention at the Circus returned to more ‘acceptable’ versions of protest during Severus’ reign. However, contentious politics continued at the site in following years. In 222 CE in what appears to be a deliberate inversion of imperial ceremonial, the Historia Augusta claims that Elagabalus’ body was dragged around the Circus Maximus before it was thrown into the Tiber. And when news of Maximinus Thrax’s death was proclaimed in early 238 CE, crowds poured into the Circus Maximus to celebrate ‘as if a public assembly (ὥσπερ ἐκκλησιάζοντες) were being held there’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Ammianus Marcellinus’ observation that the Circus was the ‘plebs’ temple, home, meeting-place and source of hope’ demonstrates that it had assumed a particular significance over the other locations where the multi circuli gathered (the fora et compita et plateas et conventicula), to which reference has been made above, as a lived space for contentious politics.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The Gemonian Steps

However, it is important to note that while the Circus was an extraordinary space in terms of its scale and its central role in the performance of consensus between emperor and the populace, the deliberate and symbolic use of other sites for contentious politics indicates that the same conceptions of collective identity and space were at play. Another example of the subversion of the public transcript and the intersection of conceived and lived space was the Gemonian Steps. A flight of stairs leading from the Arx of the Capitoline Hill down to the Roman Forum, it was both an everyday thoroughfare and a site for the performance of imperial justice. Tiberius had many of his political opponents executed and their bodies thrown down the stairs; Trajan had Decebalus’ head thrown down the stairs in 106 CE.Footnote ¹⁰¹ While the public script for that space was one of passive observation of ritual punishment, it was appropriated and subverted by the populace. In 20 CE, while the Senate was deliberating the alleged crimes of Cn. Calpurnius Piso, a crowd shouting that ‘they would take the law into their own hands’, dragged Piso’s statues to the stairs and smashed them.Footnote ¹⁰² In 31 CE, a crowd anticipating the formal condemnation of Sejanus dragged his statues to the stairs and smashed them in view of the man himself.Footnote ¹⁰³ Crowds suggested that the ‘hook and stairs’ be used on Tiberius on news of his death in 37 CE.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In 69 CE, popular pressure forced Vitellius to hand over his urban prefect Flavius Sabinus to a crowd who killed and mutilated him and dragged his headless body to the stairs.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ A day later, Vitellius himself was dragged half naked from the imperial palace by forces loyal to Vespasian through a gauntlet of jeering plebs to the Steps where his corpse was mutilated, dragged by a hook, and thrown into the Tiber while soldiers paraded his head around the city.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

We do not hear about the Gemonian Steps being repeatedly used for protest after 69 CE, although Aurelius Victor notes that after the fall of Gallienus in 268 CE, the Senate ordered the former emperor’s entourage and relatives to be thrown down the Steps, with the ensuing violence ascribed to the nobilitas plebesque, an intriguing example where different groups of people made a contentious claim together.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The successful performance of contentious politics at the site meant that it became a ready model for other contentious claims. Crowds on the news of Commodus’ death demanded that they be able to drag the emperor’s body with a hook, tear it limb from limb, and cast it into the Tiber.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ A few years earlier in 190 CE, after a staged protest at the Circus and street-battle with Commodus’ troops, a crowd paraded the head of the emperor’s hated minister Cleander, dragged his body through the streets, and mutilated his corpse before consigning the body to the sewer.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In 222 CE, the heads of Elagabalus and Julia Soemias were cut off, and their bodies dragged through the city before the emperor was thrown either into the public sewer (Herodian) or the Tiber (Dio).Footnote ¹¹⁰ The bodies of Maximinus Thrax and his son were desecrated and thrown into ‘running water’ in 238 CE.Footnote ¹¹¹ Mutilation and exposure, use of a hook, and disposal via the Tiber or the sewers had overt links with traditional execution, vengeance and damnation. By appropriating the forms used for official punishment at one of the most visible sites in Rome no less, participants legitimised the people’s right to exact justice on behalf of the community, which, in a closed, autocratic regime, was a powerful form of contention against the regime. It was ancient behaviour performed by new actors in new settings – demonstrating the modularity of the popular justice repertoire.Footnote ¹¹²

Consequently, the contentious use of the Gemonian Steps meant its new significance as lived space overtook its use as conceived space, and as with Circus chants, its official use provided a repertoire that could be refashioned as popular justice. This repertoire provided participants with temporary power over the spaces they used for their claim-making and in doing so, expanded their rights to the city since they had demonstrated that they could use it the same way as the authorities. Contentious politics theory and Lefebvre are therefore in agreement– the purpose of the popular justice repertoire was to demonstrate the people’s right not only to participate in the execution of justice but also to appropriate it, and to imprint their views on the space and time of Rome’s urban spaces.Footnote ¹¹³

The spatiality of contentious politics

In sum, the social production of space in Rome mattered in the practice of contentious politics. The central premise of my argument is not only that the performance of contentious politics had its origins in the local identities and interactions of Rome’s subaltern groups, but also that the public performance of dissent more often than not subverted the ‘official’ uses of those spaces, and so transformed public spaces into lived space. From the spatial practices of ordinary Romans and the hidden transcripts that circulated within them, to the conceived spaces of the spectacles and the performance of the public transcript, Lefebvrian thought, and Scott’s concepts provide an interdisciplinary scaffold that not only accounts for the spatial aspects of subaltern contentious politics, but also the cultural vocabularies that were essentially the building blocks of dominance and resistance. They provide us with a better understanding of how’s Rome built environment was coded by its inhabitants, and then used to perform recognisable displays of dissent when a political opportunity arose.Footnote ¹¹⁴

How opportunities are perceived (or not, as the case may be), I argue, has much to do with the social production of space. For example, when spaces were deliberately used as emblematic monuments for the dramatisation of popular demands, each instance laid down new histories, altering spatial routines, collective memory, and the emblematic value of the location. Public transcripts and contentious politics often shared a common language and were performed at the same sites, but the collective, contentious aspect to hidden transcripts reveals the stark, albeit temporary switch from conceived to lived space, an insight that allows us to build on Lefebvre’s spatial triad and conceptualise it as a fluid, flexible continuum. It is not merely the case that locations like the Circus or the Gemonian Steps just happened to be visible, spectacular sites (and thus practical) sites for protest. They had become lived spaces, rendering each as relational, power-laden, and contestable constructions, which meant that political actors could, and would, engage with such spaces strategically to challenge existing power relations.Footnote ¹¹⁵

This engagement of protesters with these spaces and hence their transformation into lived space is significant because the contentious repertoires associated with these locations persisted for centuries. A key reason for this is because the manipulation and subversion of the symbolic status of these spaces provided meaning and consequence to action. As with the 2021 protests at the US Capitol and the more recent protests at the NZ Parliament grounds in 2022, appropriating civic architecture says many things but, above all, it is a declaration that the space belongs to the ‘people’ and by extension, the protest is legitimate. Such spatial politics allowed these groups to wrest conceived space into protest space, that is, a space of representation. Lefebvre argues that conceived spaces like the Circus and Steps were meant to imply a contract, ‘a non-aggression pact … [that] imposes reciprocity’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The Roman public transcript was certainly focused on the idea of consensus and reciprocity, yet the ability of these locations to represent different things to different people at different times demonstrates how it was a social product of its users.

Roman contentious politics was the public face of hidden subversion and in large part resulted from the transcripts of resistance that were part of everyday social life and routines.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The socially embedded networks that generated subversive thought were relatively opaque to authorities but were indispensable to contentious politics, and spatial theory can be a means to recover and explain hidden transcripts that are often no more than a fleeting comment in our source material. Protest has always been more than a mere interruption to the status quo – the cumulative effects of contention generate new political actors, identities, and repertories of contention. Over time, the modes of collective action attached to hidden transcripts become part of popular culture, and as such, the Roman contentious politics discussed in this article had cues and structures that could be enacted by many different people who knew the basic plot. As Scott explains, ‘anonymous mass action of this kind is thus entirely dependent on the existence of a social site for the hidden transcript, a site where social links and traditions can grow with a degree of autonomy from dominant elites. In its absence, nothing of the kind would be possible.’Footnote ¹¹⁸

Lefebvre’s spatial triad and Scott’s framework, therefore, give agency to those Romans who participated in contentious politics. Many readers may find that an obvious conclusion – those who protest, undoubtably make some sort of choice. However, by appropriating and changing the meanings and strategic uses of their built environment, Roman protesters exercised spatial agency, and in doing so help to shape the collective identity of the city. As the examples of the vici, compita, Circus, and Gemonian Steps have (I hope) demonstrated, as lived spaces they were not just locations where either politics or the mundane took place, they were objects of struggle in their own right.Footnote ¹¹⁹