How Rome’s Rulers Tried to Stamp Out the Right to Protest

After Rome’s founding by Romulus in 753 BCE, the city had six more kings. A popular coup led by a legendary man named Lucius Junius Brutus overthrew the last, Tarquinius Superbus. Rome then became a res publica — a Republic — in 509 BCE. But even without kings, social conflict endured.

Within fifteen years, there was already strife between the patricians and the plebeians. The former were a small order that comprised the early families of Rome. They monopolized the senate, consulship, and most other public and religious magistracies. Plebeians accounted for the majority of the population, made up of farmers, artisans, and the other non-senatorial classes of Rome.

In an expression of discontent over debt bondage and military service, the plebeians engaged in an act of collective protest. They left Rome and gathered at a place called the Sacred Mount a few miles from the city; this became known as the Secession of the Plebs. After bargaining with the patricians, the plebeians returned to the city and received increased representation and debt relief.

Yet dissatisfaction continued. In 451 BCE, a small board of patrician lawmakers came together to codify a set of rules later known as the Laws of the Twelve Tables, which were to be displayed publicly in the Roman Forum.  Unhappy with the board’s record and angered by the recent death of a plebeian named Virginia, the plebeians protested in the city and once again seceded, this time to Rome’s Aventine Hill.

The patricians of the board eventually produced twelve tables, which were fully published in 449 BCE. A later jurist name Gaius noted that on the eighth table, groups called collegia — collectives often created for religious, occupational, or political purposes — were allowed to form their own laws, if they did not violate the public law. Another source claims that people were prohibited from meeting at night.

The law hints at the distrust of the patricians over reports that the plebeians were engaged in nocturnal meetings to plan their secessions and military boycotts. There was also a general suspicion within Roman culture of people gathering to make plans under the cover of night. At least in part, the ban on nocturnal assemblies seems to have been inspired by a backlash against the plebeian protests that had roiled Rome for almost fifty years at that point.

During the middle Republic, Rome vastly increased its empire beyond the bounds of the Italic peninsula. Following the First (264–241 BCE) and Second Punic Wars (218–201 BCE), Rome annexed Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and Spain (Hispania Citerior and Hispania Ulterior) as provinces. It also acquired significant amounts of territory in North Africa as Carthage declined.

The growth of Rome’s reach brought an influx of immigrants to the city itself, many with differing religious beliefs and rituals. Xenophobia increased and hostility towards these new inhabitants came in many forms. In 186 BCE, elite senators and Roman magistrates accused adherents of the cult of Bacchus, originally brought to Southern Italy by a Greek priest, of being overly disruptive. They were said to be guilty of conspiring, meeting at night, and engaging in criminal behavior like poisonings and murder.

It seems likely that the portrayal of Bacchic worshippers as conspiring criminals was a rhetorical maneuver, rather like the depiction of English labor unions as seditious collectives in the Combination Acts of the late eighteenth century. It placed the worshippers of Bacchus in alleged opposition to the state’s interests, marginalized them, and later exposed them to anti-assembly legislation dubbed the senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus.

The senatorial ruling severely limited the ability of Bacchic groups to meet in temples, houses, or clubhouses, or to hold their nocturnal banquets. In the minds of the senate, this meant that traditional Roman culture and order had been preserved. But for the growing number of people living in Rome, Italy, and her colonies, there were tighter limits on their everyday religion.

Into the period of the late Republic, legal limits on freedom of assembly continued. In 64 BCE, the Roman senate limited the ability of the groups called collegia to meet at all, casting them as collectives in direct opposition to the res publica. Essential workers like construction groups and statue makers were still allowed to form collegia, but with increased political upheaval came further throttling of rights to assemble.

This rose to new heights after Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in January of 49 BCE. After numerous elections where the loyalty and support of various collegia had become important, Caesar was well aware of the danger of groups forming in protest or opposition. As dictator, he drew up legislation that outlawed all but the most ancient associations and those seen as contributing to the “public welfare.”

Caesar’s adopted son Octavian, later known as Augustus, would renew this ban after becoming emperor. Permits that were granted for groups permitted to meet bore the emperor’s rubber stamp. Although many associations appear to have continued to assemble, either by meeting in secrecy or by presenting themselves as simply ancient religious groups, the government retained the power to disband groups labelled as disruptive or seditious.

Restrictions on group formation and protest came in both direct and indirect ways, from the expulsion of groups of Jews and Isis worshippers from the city of Rome under Tiberius in 19 CE to the banning of collegia in Alexandria in 38 CE during tensions between Jews and Greeks. The authorities continued to issue permits for the creation of licit groups that were able to meet into the early empire, although later emperors like Trajan warned of the dangers of allowing the formation of groups like firefighters, who were said to become frequently unruly.

Although many ignored the restrictions, the Roman state reserved the right to disband what it viewed as illegal meetings, whether it was the political protests of charioteer factions in Constantinople or a group of followers of Christ in Pontus-Bithynia. Roman rulers continued to associate the ability of their citizens to come together, to organize, and to protest with treason.

More than fifteen hundred years have passed since the breakup of the Roman Empire in the West, yet we can still find similar patterns repeating themselves. Then as now, people have continued to protest in support of their demands, and then as now, the rhetoric of power presents such expressions of discontent as illicit or seditious.