The plebeian Aventine is a commonplace. We know it as the hill of the plebeian secessions, of Icilius’ land distributions, of Gaius Gracchus’ flight, of the plebeian Aventine Triad: the spiritual home of Rome's plebs and the literal home to many of them. Except that, as M. demonstrates, these are all fictions. Our sources report various destinations for the secessions; Icilius’ law is a conundrum at best; Gracchus made his final stand elsewhere; and the temple of Ceres, Liber and Libera was not on the Aventine at all. The plebeian Aventine is a modern scholarly fiction, and M.’s superb demolition job puts us on notice: how many of our other treasured dogmas are equally unfounded?
In some ways, M.’s target is an easy one. The idea of a ‘plebeian’ hill makes no sense. In the historical period, rich and poor plebeians had little in common: a distinctive ‘plebeian’ identity would have been hard to maintain. With so few patricians, all of Rome's hills were primarily occupied by plebeians. Or do we mean a hill primarily occupied by the poor? Hardly: such a convenient, salubrious spot was presumably dominated by the rich or by a mixed population. The plebeian Aventine cannot correspond to reality.
One might object that even if the plebeian Aventine was an implausible myth, myths mattered to the Romans. And yet M. shows we cannot even reclaim the plebeian Aventine on the level of discourse. It is simply not there in the ancient sources: not in Plutarch's account of Gracchus’ flight, not in Livy's telling of the secessions. The plebeian symbolic value of the Aventine has long gone unfootnoted, apparently because it has been universally accepted, but in fact because there is no evidence to cite. M. systematically unpicks an assumption entirely created by modern readers.
Much of the heavy demolition work is done in the introduction, and the casual reader may be convinced of the primary argument by page 13 or so. The first four chapters that follow expand on individual facets of the argument: the secession narratives, the Lex Icilia, and literary, then archaeological evidence for patterns of occupation. Chapter 1 is particularly strong: M. makes a conclusive case that Romans did not associate the Aventine with secessions before Gracchus happened to flee there, and probably not afterwards either.
The Lex Icilia de Aventino publicando is a harder nut to crack. Much of M.’s discussion focuses on the technical meaning of publicare, which she argues should be translated ‘confiscate into public ownership’ rather than ‘make available for public use’ before Augustus. Her logic is sound, but the argument sometimes blurs the circumstances of 456 b.c. with the mindset of later authors: can we even trust that Livy reported the law's original name? Still, the overall point stands: Dionysius might see this law as presaging late Republican land distributions, but he does not use it to connect agrarian reform or popularis politics, much less the plebs as a whole, with the Aventine.
As we might expect, the literary and archaeological evidence for the hill's inhabitants mostly concerns the elite. It was well supplied with cult sites, though M. argues that the ‘Aventine triad’ of Ceres, Liber and Libera was not on the Aventine at all (and those topographers who do place it there tend to build their arguments precisely, and eventually circularly, on the plebeian nature of the hill). This vital part of the argument is oddly relegated to an appendix. For M., the evidence better supports a location at the foot of the Clivus Publicius in the Forum Boarium.
It is a pity we do not hear more about what the Aventine was, rather than what it was not, but M.’s sceptical methodology determines that the evidence cannot easily support any such generalisations. Instead, in Chapter 5, she takes a different tack, arguing that the mixed occupation characteristic of ancient Rome (an inference M. derives from comparative evidence from Pompeii and Ostia, the Regionaries and the Marble Plan, rather than her Aventine studies) was a force for social cohesion. In the space of one chapter, which answers to the ‘social order’ of the title but seems somewhat detached from the rest of the book, her results can only be suggestive. A more thorough comparative study, based on real data for both modern and pre-modern cities rather than the contemporary zoning models M. lays out, would be welcome.
An epilogue discusses the modern fortunes of the plebeian Aventine. The narrative is fascinating, though we never learn the true moment of the myth's creation: it seems to spring to birth fully formed in the mid nineteenth century. There is another story still to be written here.
The plebeian Aventine is no straw man: it has placed circular arguments at the foundations of swathes of modern scholarship. Historians have corrected Livy to make the Aventine the location of the first secession simply because we believe it to be the plebeian hill par excellence. There, at least, there is a variant tradition attested, of which Piso was the auctor (Livy 2.32.3: the source or the inventor?); we are on even shakier ground if we call Aventine Diana or Juno Regina plebeian, or assign Ennius plebeian sympathies because he lived on the Aventine.
So what survives? Without a plebeian Aventine, E. Orlin's zone of incorporation for foreign deities (MAAR 47 [2002], 1–18) needs significant reworking, though its place within the urban area but outside the pomerium is still worth investigating; J. Garreau's ‘edge city’ model (Edge City: Life on the Urban Frontier [1991]), which S. Malmberg and H. Bjur apply to the Esquiline (‘Movement and Urban Development at Two City Gates in Rome’, in R. Laurence and D. Newsome [edd.], Rome, Ostia, Pompeii: Movement and Space [2011], pp. 361–85; ‘The Suburb as Centre’, in H. Bjur and B. Santillo Frizell [edd.], Via Tiburtina: Space, Movement, and Artefacts in the Urban Landscape [2009], pp. 109–28) could be put against the older zoning models M. discusses in Chapter 5. ‘Plebeian’ Diana and Juno, and probably Mercury, have to go, though plebeian religion can survive in some form: we might not have an Aventine, but we still have Pudicitia Plebeia, the plebeian myrtle and the ludi plebeii. Nor does T.P. Wiseman's plebeian Remus (1995) necessarily need his Aventine home. But the Aventine is woven through all modern accounts of plebeian identity, and they are all now ripe for re-evaluation.
M.’s scepticism about the Aventine tradition is rigorous and bracing. She even contends that ‘mythic geography does not intersect or condition the conceptualization of the Aventine’ (p. 48 n. 1): a direct challenge to the primary methodology of much Roman topography. She does not always carry through the same sceptical attitude to other debates: the account of the history of ager publicus (pp. 52–3) is traditional, for example, with contemporary objections relegated to the footnotes. I do not suggest that M. should have taken the other point of view, as more sceptical and thus more virtuous, on this or any other individual question, or that her view on mythic geography is an overstep. Rather, a book like this inevitably raises the question of the limits and uses of scepticism. Historical scholarship follows an inexorable pattern of construction and demolition: one generation builds a narrative, of ager publicus or plebeian religion or the location of the temple of Ceres, only for the next to destroy it (and the one after that to rehabilitate it). But M.’s central argument, that the Aventine was never plebeian, is of a different order. The plebeian Aventine is not a reading of the ancient sources, there to be compared with and ranked against other potential readings using criteria that change from generation to generation. It is a ghost, and it should stay gone.
