Coming off of some of the discussion of Gladiator II (I, II), this week I want to discuss the place of ‘bread and circuses’ in the narrative of Roman decadence and decline. This is one of those phrases which long ago entered the standard lexicon, but which gets used and interpreted in a range of ways. Indeed, I was a bit surprised, bringing it up on Bluesky, the relatively broad range of interpretations for the phrase, some quite sharply at variance with its initial usage.
There was ‘bread and circuses were necessary to maintain order’ (a broadly positive reading of the phrase and very much not its initial intent, as we’ll see), or alternately ‘bread and circuses as a means of suppressing the masses’ or even ‘bread and circuses as the means by which the Romans were bribed into surrendering their republic’ (closer, but also not quite the original use), but also ‘bread and circuses as metonym for Roman decadence and thus decline.’ But generally I find among my students something a bit more vague, that ‘bread and circuses’ are bad in a vague, non-specific but-decadence-implying sense and the phrase may thus be used as a cudgel to be wielded at any policy deemed ‘over-indulgent’ towards the People, though with fault for that over-indulgence being variably defined: it can be the fault of the elites for spoiling their political children or equally the fault of the people, voting themselves gifts from the treasury.
But I want to unpack this phrase and its meaning this week with a bit more substance. So we will first look at its original appearance in the satires of Juvenal to see what Juvenal meant by it, and then we’ll broaden out our discussion of ‘bread’ and ‘circuses’ to ask if Juvenal’s interpretation is right and what we might make of bread and circuses.
(All translations below are mine, which is why they hit the ears like bricks, but I promise Juvenal is more elegant in Latin)
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Juvenal
So the phrase ‘bread and circuses’ – panem et circenses – originates in Juvenal’s 10th satire. Juvenal – Decimus Junius Juvenalis – was a Roman satirist who would have been writing in the first few decades of the second century AD (in the reigns of the emperors Trajan and Hadrian). Satire (satura in Latin) was a genre of Roman poetry that had emerged during the late second century BC (so during the transition from the Middle to Late Republics) to describe the poetry of Gaius Lucilius. An indigenous, Latin literary form (it has no Greek precursor; never let it be said the Romans didn’t develop any new forms of literature) it was a genre of poetry used for critique, generally social critique, often delivered quite harshly.
The thing is, this is something of a playful, humorous sort of genre – Juvenal is not writing straight didactic literature. It is thus more than a little awkward that a lot of his convenient little phrases – Juvenal is very good at memorable, compact little phrases – studied by Latin students for centuries, have become proverbs of sorts, because not all of them were intended to be read fully ‘straight,’ as it were. For instance, another phrase from Satire 10 has become just as famous as bread and circuses: mens sana in corpore sano (Juv. 10.356), “a sound mind in a sound body” which gets used entirely straight as the motto for athletics and fitness clubs and military training institutions and you can see it referenced by figures like Teddy Roosevelt during the Progressive Era as part of his emphasis on physical fitness.
Except the context of that line isn’t entirely straight. Satire 10 – where our bread and circuses come from as well – is a poem musing on the misuse of prayer and how men who get what they pray for are often destroyed by it. It is in that context at the very end of the poem, that he says what someone should pray for is mens sana in corpore sano, but here too the the context (Juvenal 10.346-366) and framing resists a direct reading: Juvenal leads into that statement by declaring “If you want advice, let the divine powers themselves weigh out what suits us and is useful in our affairs: for the gods give that which is most fitting, rather than pleasing” and then only concedes that if you must pray for something, “however, that you might ask something and vow, in little shrines the entrails and little sausages of a shining little white pig, you ought pray for a sound mind in a sound body.” Or put another way, ‘if you must do this foolish, selfish, crass little thing, at least do it this way.’
Advice which is then immediately undercut, because Juvenal declares he is showing you “that which you are able to give to yourself” and that Fortuna, to whom everyone is praying, “would have no divine power, if there was prudence; it is we, who place you, Fortuna, as a goddess in the sky.” Which is to say, ‘at least this way you are praying for something you can do yourself, rather than being reliant on Fortuna. So while it’s fair to read mens sana in corpore sano as something the speaker thinks is good, that phrase is coming in the context of, to paraphrase, “you shouldn’t ask for anything, because asking is self-destructive (because you don’t know what you need), but if you do ask for something (you idiot), ask for this thing, because it something you can give yourself without needing to ask and thus harmless and the only reason any of this matters is because we humans are idiots.” Again, the passage resists straight readings – instead, its meaning and intent change depending on how you turn it. That’s part of what makes it great literature.
Added on top of this is Juvenal’s persona generally over all of the poems. Juvenal is famous for his harsh, moralizing tone, most frequently directed at the excesses of the elite and what he sees as the moral decline of the Romans, but he equally targets other non-conforming behavior or simple cultural otherness: you may recall us already referencing his anti-Jewish bigotry in our series on diversity in the Roman world. There is some discussion by scholars as to if we should understand Juvenal’s tone as perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek – that he’s playing the role of a humorless, moralizing, intolerant scold – which is an interesting reading, but I tend to read his grumpy intolerance largely straight. Nevertheless, you can see how that reading adds further layers of uncertainty and complication in reading basically anything this guy says, because the poems themselves are often tongue in cheek and then on top of that, the implied author may himself be insincere (and generally speaking, it can be perilous to assume the implied author is the author himself: ancient writers as easily as modern writers construct a mask – more or less indicative of their authentic self – behind which they write).
Bread and Circuses
All of which at last brings us to the part of the poem where our line about ‘bread and circuses’ is.
The line occurs relatively early in the poem and here we should note that Latin poetry was written to be performed. This is a spoken genre first (although certainly also a literary genre as well), so when you consider a line, you want to consider it in light of what is immediately around it. We know how the poem ends (because we just talked about it above), but the “bread and circuses” phrase is on line 81, less than a third of the way into the 366 line poem. So while later lines can re-contextualize earlier ones, I think its important to keep in mind that at first listening, the initial impact is based on the context of the line where it is and a listener, unlike a reader, cannot flip back to check an earlier line.
The lines immediately preceding our passage muse on the folly of praying for power (potentia, political power) and Juvenal chooses as his example Sejanus (Lucius Aelius Sejanus, c. 20BC-31AD). Sejanus had risen to the heights of power under the the second emperor, Tiberius (r. 14-37) as his praetorian prefect. Tiberius, never much enjoying the role of being emperor, became increasingly reclusive over his reign, retreating to his villa at Capri and entrusting the day to day affairs in Rome to Sejanus, who as a result was fantastically powerful. Sejanus in turn seems to have plotted a coup, which was revealed and failed in 31. Sejanus was executed, along with his family and followers, his statues destroyed and Tiberius, who had always had a paranoid streak, launched a purge through the elite. Juvenal describes statues of Sejanus being melted down and turned into little jugs and chamber pots, to the celebration of the crowd, on the whim of an emperor (“but under what crime was he slain? What witness, what evidence proved the case?” “Nothing in this case; a wordy and grand letter came from Capri” “Ah, well done, I have no more questions.” (Juv. 10.69-72)). And it is in that immediate context that we get our passage.
In the event, the passage – and my bad translation – runs thusly:
…sed quid
turba Remi? sequitur fortunam, ut semper, et odit
damnatos. idem populus, si Nortia Tusco
favisset, si oppressa foret secura senectus
principis, hac ipsa Seianum diceret hora
Augustum. iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli
vendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim
imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se
continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat,
panem et circenses.
(Juvenal 10.72-81)But what of Remus’ mob? They follow Fortuna, as always, and hate the condemned. The very same people, if Nortia had favored her Etruscan, would have acclaimed Sejanus as emperor within the hour. From whence now we sell our votes to no one, it [the People] long since gave up oversight: for those who once gave command, high office, legions, everything, now it restrains itself and wishes anxiously for two things: bread and circuses.
So I think there is one reading we can rule out pretty quickly, the notion that Juvenal thinks panem et circenses are a good thing, something necessary to manage the people of Rome effectively. Instead, this is a scathing, withering rebuke of the Roman people, who have fecklessly surrendered their prerogative to judge crimes and oversee the function of the state. Its presented in the context of blithe indifference to momentous and bloody events – ones that, at the time of Juvenal’s writing, were not so long ago. The passage is immediately followed by descriptions of men anxious to be seen reviling Sejanus – who, note above, they would have hailed as emperor just as eagerly if he won – so that they won’t risk being caught up in the purges to come.
When I said Juvenal could be (and generally is) scathing, this is actually a pretty damn good example!
Juvenal wraps up this portion of the poem by asking the listener if they wish to be “greeted like Sejanus” (Visne salutari sicut seianus, 10.90) and arguing that Sejanus’ mistake was to keep demanding more honors and wealth, all of which only guaranteed that his fall would be from a fatal, ruinous height. He further compares the fates of Crassus and Pompey – both killed violently – before closing this section with “few kings go to Ceres’ son-in-law [Pluto, God of the Underworld] without slaughter and blood and few tyrants [get] a bloodless death.” (Juv. 10.112-3).
So the surface reading seems clear: he is putting the Roman people on blast for letting their authority over public affairs be taken away, usurped by emperors who promise them bread and circuses (we’ll come to if this is an accurate representation of the history in a moment). They used to have all of this power, the power to bestow offices and armies, but now they cower fecklessly in the wake of imperial slaughter and arbitrary rule.
Except, of course – wait a minute – isn’t the theme of this passage that power is an unwise thing to ask for? The theme of the whole poem is that you shouldn’t be asking the gods for these sorts of things! Juvenal’s very next example is school boys wishing for the eloquence of Demosthenes and Cicero, two men who, Juvenal notes, were killed for their eloquence – but note: killed for their eloquence defending consensual governments (the Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic, respectively) from rising tyrants (Philip II and the Second Triumvite – including Octavian/Augustus – respectively).
Once again, I’d argue the broader passage playfully resists straight readings! It is bad that the Roman people gave up their votes in exchange for ‘petty’ things like bread and circuses says Juvenal’s implied speaker, but it was also very foolish for Cicero and Demosthenes to fight for those very prerogatives using their eloquence. But equally, while it is bad that the Roman people gave up their ability to bestow powers and honors, also, receiving powers and honors is bad and self-destructive too. Remember, this is a poem about how wishing or praying for things is in and of itself vain and self-destructive and that one ought focus only one the things you can give yourself (that sound mine in a sound body), hardly a cry for the People to throw off their bread and circuses and demand the Republic back.
One thing, however, that I will note that Juvenal does not say is that the panem et circenses are either how the Roman people lost their power or how they are held under the control of emperors. Instead first the people lose their votes (no longer ‘selling’ them), then give up their cares and as a result only wish for panem et circenses, no longer taking an interest in public affairs. If the listener (or reader) is left in any doubt as to how Juvenal imagined that process to proceed, he clarifies thirty lines later: “What was it that overthrew Crassus and Pompey and he [illum] who having broken the Romans subjected them to his whip?” Leaving ‘he’ without an antecedent is a bit of careful obfuscation, as naming either Caesar or Augustus in this space might be taken as a veiled critique of the sitting emperor. Nevertheless, this is a heck of way to put it, the Romans are ‘broken in’ (domitare, ‘to domesticate, tame, break in’) and just to emphasize the violence of that they are ‘subjected to his whip.’
So while I think Juvenal has some contempt for the People who have given up their oversight of the state and ceased to be rightly concerned over public affairs, I don’t think we get the sense – as is often how the phrase is used today – of the people being bribed to give up their votes. Indeed, that’s the thing: the people stopped being able to sell their votes and so could only wish for bread and circuses (rather than buy them with their votes). Instead, the People weren’t bribed from their freedoms but broken and subjected to the lash by men like Crassus and Pompey and this one fellow we’re not going to name because Juvenal is a giant hypocrite who doesn’t want to get in trouble with the emperor either. They were thus reduced by violence to merely wishing for panem et circenses (which Juvenal, in appropriately Roman fashion, views as a cowardly abdication of duty).
It’s hard not for me to conclude that what has happened here, with many of the interpretations of panem et circenses is that a great many readers for a great long time have taken a text which resists a single, straight reading (by design) and instead read in their own assumptions. Juvenal’s angry moralizing, after all, made many of his satires precisely the sort of texts that elite young men might have had their Latin sharpened on in the 1700s and 1800s and so the phrase was a ready made way to indicate either contempt for the emerging voting public and their ‘base’ concerns (like not starving instead of ‘the glory of empire’ and such) or else to lambast radical programs (like not letting the poor starve) as corrosive to civic-mindedness. Juvenal certainly shares that contempt for a public merely wishing anxiously for its panem et circenses, but the reader is importing some causal links (that panem et circenses caused this state, either bottom-up or top-down) that Juvenal does not supply.
And the reason I suspect Juvenal doesn’t supply those causal links is, well…
Bread and Circuses and the Fall of…Something?
Because even a cursory understanding of the collapse of the Roman Republic reduces them to nonsense.
And here we come back to the other way this phrase gets read, as a marker of ‘decadence’ and generally indicating the fall of something. That something is usually fairly vague precisely because a lot of these ‘decadence brings collapse’ arguments work by carelessly conflating very different periods of Roman history, smashing together perennial complaints about luxuria in Roman literature that start from the very moment we have literature to see and continue unabated to and past the collapse of the empire in the West seven centuries later. ‘Bread and Circuses’ can become just a neat phrase to smudge those ideas together over a vague thing called ‘Rome’ (without distinction between the Republic, Principate and Dominate) over a vast sweep of centuries.
So what were panem et circenses? We’ve actually just discussed the circenses just last week: these are a wide range of public entertainments (ludi and munera), most of which were tied to religious festival or observances. While in modern popular memory, these tend to be tied to gladiatorial games, Juvenal’s selection of circenses is apt: it was the races in the Circus Maximus which were generally the most popular and likely also the most frequent. Ludi circensis, which is to say chariot races (and other events held in the Circus Maximus or one of Rome’s other circenses) were an old tradition that reached back through the Republic into the regal period prior to 509, at least so far as the Romans know (Livy 1.35.8). Certainly these events seem to have gotten more frequent and more elaborate as Rome’s empire expanded – quite a number are established in the late third or early second century BC, as the Roman Republic is winning its wars overseas – but it’s impossible to make a clear chronological connection to the decline of the Republic (much less the collapse of the empire in the West five centuries later) without intentionally smudging together the back two centuries of the Republic’s history.
The panem is more complex. This refers to the Annona, a word meaning the year’s production of a farm but in practice came to mean ‘the food necessary for subsistence’ and thus could mean ‘supplies’ in a military context or just generally ‘grain;’ here the right translation is probably ‘food supply,’ but the word has a sense of basic food supply, not luxuries. The office that handled that was the cura annonae, which we might translate as the ‘office of grain oversight,’ keeping in mind the meaning of cura above. There was a thing called the annona militaris, which was a late Roman (third century and later) term for the military food supply system and that often leads to the annona in Rome being termed the annona civica or annona civilis or annona publica for clarity, but the sources almost always just say annona.
We generally start the history of this institution with the Gracchi, but it is worth noting that the idea of having a public official supervising the grain supply of the city of Rome itself was hardly a new one. The main problem here is that harvests were extremely variable in antiquity and so the food supply and thus food prices for non-farmers varied a lot based on harvest conditions and the availability of trade; almost any large community had to contend with this reality. Livy notes efforts by the state to ‘even out’ grain prices beginning in 508 B.C. – one year after the start of the Republic – and repeatedly afterwards (e.g. Livy 2.9.6, 2.34.2-7, 4.13-16). By the third century, the Republic has officials who are regularly engaged in regulating grain trade and trying to ensure its ready supply in the city of Rome (the task eventually settled with the Curule Aediles, Livy 10.11.9). Systematic importation of grain for Rome from Sicily and Sardinia had already begun by the end of the third century.
The impression that Gaius Gracchus’ law in 123 was thus a wholly new innovation is largely the product of the fact that introductory-level surveys aren’t going to get into the details of what, exactly, the curule aediles are doing in the Middle Republic (indeed, one suspects few survey courses mention the existence of two kinds of aediles (curule and plebeian) at all).
But what Gaius Gracchus is doing in 123 with the lex Sempronia frumentaria is not inventing a Roman state policy of trying to ensure a stable food supply in Rome, but systematizing it, using the substantial revenues Rome was now raising in its overseas provinces on ‘generous’ (we’ll come back to this) terms, admittedly to curry political favor. In any case, Gracchus’ law sets the distribution of grain, probably 5 modii (a modius is a Roman dry volume measure, equal to 8.73 liters) a month; it’s unclear if this would have been per person or per household, but I strongly suspect the latter. The grain was not free, but it did have its price fixed at a relatively low price.
Over the next several decades, at a degree of granularity we need not get into here, the program was expanded and shrunk, curtailed and reshaped. The low price eventually became free and the number of eligible individuals was fixed: it peaks in the 50s BC at over 300,000 citizens, Julius Caesar prunes it to 150,000 and Augustus finally expands it back to 200,000 at which it becomes effectively fixed permanently. So the notion that the Romans were somehow bribed out of their republic is already pretty tricky here: the guy who effectively destroys the republic (Julius Caesar) actually massively trims the size of the annona and its maximum reach was in the mid-first century, before the final cataclysmic collapse. Augustus’ implementation of the annona was effectively a moderate compromise in terms of scale.
Likewise, we need to be clear about what, exactly, the annona included. For the first two centuries AD, the distribution of the annona seems to have been constant: a couple hundred thousand recipients getting 5 modii of grain a month. Note how I keep saying grain and not bread: distributions were in unmilled grain. Recipients would have to then take that grain to be milled and baked, or do it themselves by hand; combined mill-and-bakeries were common in Rome and would take a percentage of the grain to prepare the rest. No other foodstuffs are included before the third century AD; this is just grain.
Five modii per month (so 60 modii per year) as a distribution amount is also notable, because it’s not terribly generous. A normal Roman household – at least two adults, probably quite a few children – might need something on the order of 100 to 200 modii of grain to meet basic caloric needs annually. Which mattes, because distribution was probably on a by-household basis, rather than individuals: you probably had to be sui iuris (legally independent) to qualify, which explains why the number if eligible recipients never gets much above 320,000, even when Rome is probably approaching a population of nearly a million in the late first century BC.
Instead, even for a household that is receiving free grain, the distribution isn’t enough; it has to be supplemented with some other source of food (probably wage labor). Of course it wouldn’t be enough anyway: humans cannot, nutritionally speaking, survive forever on bread alone. Instead, the annona was always a supplement to the existing food supply in Rome. The vast majority, probably around 80% or so, of Rome’s grain supply remained ‘free market'(ish) and all of the other staple parts of the Mediterranean diet did. The annona through the end of the second century AD only ever supplied the most basic foodstuff in its most basic, unprocessed form, and only as a supplement for other sources of income.
So what was this program even doing? It’s a price-stabilizing mechanism designed to hold down the price of grain without making the state responsible for the whole of the city’s food supply. In doing so, it partly stabilizes the wild variations in prices, because there’s a bedrock of supply at a fixed price, which in turn undermines a lot of the speculation-and-hoarding cycles which could produce severe food shortages. And that’s important because it mostly averts bread riots. Not entirely, but mostly.
And that’s important because bread riots are politically destabilizing, regardless of if your polity is a monarchy, democracy or republic of some form. Indeed, a casual look through urban communities across the Mediterranean will reveal that most cities of any significant size had some sort of system to stabilize grain prices. Classical Athens had state-run grain imports, restrictions on grain exports and on grain hoarding, for instance.
Consequently, the framing of the annona as some sort of decadent luxury really only works within the moral frame of pre-three-spirits Scrooge, “then they’d better do it [that is, die], and decrease the surplus population.” The population receiving the annona was probably underemployed – wage labor in antiquity was irregular, usually functioning as day-labor, so the poor couldn’t be sure they’d have a paying job on a day-to-day basis – but not unemployed and certainly not wholly idle. Whatever one may think of a generous welfare state, the annona wasn’t it: this price stabilizer wasn’t even enough to keep a family from eventually starving if someone didn’t develop an additional source of income. This was not a luxury.
So I think it is fair to say that:
- The distribution of cheap or free grain did not allow politicians to buy their way to tyranny. Indeed, Julius Caesar and Augustus, the fellows who actually establish monarchic rule in Rome limit the scale of the annona, rather than expanding it.
- The annona was also hardly some great luxury eroding Roman civic virtue: it was, by modern standards, a remarkably austere program of price stabilization that aimed mostly to avoid sudden instability from food shortages.
- Nor was the annona an overwhelming burden on state finances. I once estimated its total cost to the treasury at around 60m HS a year whereas under Augustus the army probably cost probably well in excess of 400m HS annually, more than six times as much.
So if the Roman people didn’t give up their votes for the sake of bread (which they voted to themselves already) or circuses…why did they? After all, they don’t stop Augustus from eventually moving nearly all of the power of the popular assemblies either to the Senate or himself. Why give that power up? If they weren’t bribed, what were they?
Exhausted. They were exhausted.
By the killing. All of the killing. Just, so, so much killing.
Again, this is a point that can easily blur in a survey course where a class may fly over many decades of Roman history in just a lecture or two (much less a World History course, where the whole Roman Republic may get…a day or two). But the period of the Roman civil wars lasted a long time, from 91 to 31 BC (with some pauses in that). That means no one alive when Octavian seizes durable sole power had lived during a period when the Republic actually functioned well.
But it also means that the Romans had been kept at a level of military activity for a really long time. Back when I wrote my Master’s Thesis, I worked out an estimate of the year-to-year mobilizations of the Roman state; it was sloppy and I’d do it differently today, but for a basic sense of scale my estimated that on average between 91 and 31BC, Italy was furnishing something on the order of 170,000 soldiers each year. The real number must be lower (like I said, sloppy), but not much lower. What that means is that from 91 to 31BC, the Romans – post-88 this includes all of the Italians, as the Romans have extended citizenship over all of Italy – are averaging military activity on the level of the worst years of the Second Punic War. It is “Hannibal is in Italy” levels of bad for six consecutive decades. The Battle of Philippi (42 BC) alone practically matches peak Roman mobilizations from the Punic Wars and not every Roman army in the whole Mediterranean was even at that battle.
As an aside, there’s a tendency to read these civil wars as if they were conducted by a handful of professional soldiers gliding over the countryside, but you can’t pull these kinds of numbers out of ancient Italy without fairly broad mobilization and there’s a lot of evidence that the professionalization of the Roman army really only happens with Augustus after the civil wars are over. It’s not entirely clear to what degree Roman armies in this period were conscript forces or volunteer forces, but it is clear that the Romans were still mass-mobilizing in Italy in the first century.
And since those were Roman armies clashing with other Roman armies, all of the casualties were Roman and casualties were frequently high. Add to that the repeated proscriptions (that is, mass killing of political enemies, in 82 and again in 43), economic disruptions (Caesar’s march on Rome triggers a land-and-liquidity crisis, Sextus Pompey’s fleet in Sicily disrupts regular grain shipments to Rome, etc), large-scale confiscations of property and the general seizing uncertainty and you have a long period of miserable years, one after another. One of these days, we might do a ‘walk through’ of the Roman civil wars of the First Century, but I think it really must be stressed that they were awful. By 31, it’s clear the Romans would give anything to make the fighting and the killing stop, and Augustus made it stop.
They didn’t give up their votes for panem et circenses, but for pax – peace. Something Augustus knew well enough that he built an altar on the Campus Martius (the field of Mars), the Ara Pacis Augustae, “the Altar of Augustan Peace” to commemorate the idea that he was the peace-bringer. I think we can – and should – be deeply cynical about Augustus’ claims to have ‘restored the Republic‘ but the idea that he had at least made the killings, confiscations, shortages and uncertainty stop was both a powerful one and largely true, albeit with the caveat that before the killings stopped, Octavian had been the fellow doing a lot of the killing.
Nevertheless, it was for peace, not bread, that the Romans sold their votes. We can disapprove of that choice, perhaps, but we shouldn’t reduce it to a simple moral story ‘bread and circuses.’ And indeed, Juvenal’s panem et circenses is not a statement of how Rome fell, or how it was controlled, or how the republic died, but rather a statement – for us, a warning – of how sharply the loss of political liberty constrained the dreams of the Roman people: where once they had made generals and governors and statesmen with their votes, the Roman people were reduced to passively waiting, hoping anxiously for their needs to be met, in a world they no longer meaningfully controlled.
