Momentarily banish thoughts of policemen on duty at the House of Commons, and picture a Roman pleb. You will probably visualise a toothless peasant howling for ‘bread and circuses’ (i.e. chariot races), and rioting if refused. But if you were then told that the Roman statesman Cicero and Caesar’s rival Pompey the Great were both plebs, you might reconsider; even more so if you were to discover that the plebs were involved in shaping some of the most dramatic events in the ancient world.

For Romans, the term ‘plebeian’ took them right back to the foundation of Rome in, as they calculated, 753 bc. Rome was an agricultural society. Wealth was expressed in the size of one’s land holdings and in the number of people who owed their livelihood to you, from family retainers to farm-workers and slaves. It was from the wealthiest of such families that the first king Romulus drew his circle of 100 advisers. These advisers were called patres (‘fathers’), and their families given the title of ‘patrician’. All other families were called ‘plebeian’, from the Latin plebs, ‘people’.

In 509 bc, Livy explains, the last king was ejected, to be replaced by a republican system, in which the patres eventually became the Senate, Rome’s de facto legislature. But trouble was in store, because patrician families claimed the right to all the top positions. Further, it was a time of considerable economic difficulty. Debt was rife among the plebeian poor, and their treatment at the hands of their creditors unsympathetic. The army was the heart of Rome’s power, but its pleb soldiers ran the risk of losing everything if, while serving the state, their own land was pillaged or, because the family went into debt, seized by a creditor. Wealthy Romans would promptly take this opportunity to extend their estates.

The resulting tensions led to what has been called the ‘Conflict of the Orders’ (ordo, a grouping). For elite plebeians, it was a matter of winning the right to share power with patricians; for the poor, of getting a fair social deal. The extraordinary initiative that changed the game came from a concerted effort, not of the wealthy, but of the poor.

The Roman historian Livy tells the story. In 494 bc, the plebs in the army, tired of the Senate’s indifference to their problems, withdrew to the Sacred Mountain three miles from the city. This made Rome vulnerable to attack, and the Senate immediately sent Menenius Agrippa, an elite plebeian, to negotiate. He addressed them with the famous ‘body’ parable, arguing that every part of the body (politic) must work together for the whole body to flourish. Menenius’ speech won the day, and the subsequent negotiations ended the strike by creating two ‘tribunes of the plebs’, sacrosanct, inviolate figures representing plebeian interests before the Senate, and a plebeian assembly, whose ‘plebiscites’ were binding on the plebs.

The result was quite unique in ancient history: the formation of a plebeian ‘state within a state’, with its own assembly, executive officials and defences against patrician abuse. Further, such a body enabled elite plebeians to assume positions of political power and authority. By the 3rd century bc, a rapprochement had been achieved. All plebiscites became binding on the whole Roman people, without undermining general Senatorial control; and plebeian elites now had access to the top jobs. Thanks to this plebeian initiative, the old distinctions slowly disappeared, creating a unity that was seen by Roman historians as a key factor in Rome’s defeat of Hannibal (218–202 bc), its finest hour.

It was also the beginning of Rome’s blackest. The defeat of Hannibal ushered in a period of Roman imperial expansion, vastly increasing Rome’s wealth and that of its elites. This enabled them to buy up even more land, and farm it not with citizens but with slaves, greatly increasing production. The old problem was back: a huge and growing divide between the rich elites and the rest. In 107 bc, Marius, an ambitious general, invited anyone, however poor, to join Rome’s army, and promised them land on retirement. The germ of a dangerous concept was born: an army loyal primarily to its general, rather than to the state. Powerful dynasts surfaced — Sulla, Pompey, Caesar — with personal armies at their back. It imploded in bloody civil war, out of which in 31 bc emerged the winner who, single-handed, turned the old oligarchic republic into a one-man state: Augustus, first of the long line of Roman emperors. Hence ‘bread and circuses’. Experience told the emperor that the plebs had to be kept on side — and the plebs knew it.