(Re)moving the Masses: Colonisation as Domestic Displacement in the Roman Republic

Abstract

Metaphors move—and displace—people. This paper starts from this premise, focusing on how elites have deployed metaphors of water and waste to form a rhetorical consensus around the displacement of non-elite citizens in ancient Roman contexts, with reference to similar discourses in the contemporary Global North and Brazil. The notion of ‘domestic displacement’—the forced movement of citizens within their own sovereign territory—elucidates how these metaphors were used by elite citizens, such as Cicero, to mark out non-elite citizens for removal from the city of Rome through colonisation programmes. In the elite discourse of the late Republican and early Augustan periods, physical proximity to and figurative equation with the refuse of the city repeatedly signals the low social and legal status of potential colonists, while a corresponding metaphor of ‘draining’ expresses the elite desire to displace these groups to colonial sites. The material outcome of these metaphors emerges in the non-elite demographic texture of Julius Caesar’s colonists, many of whom were drawn from the plebs urbana and freedmen. An elite rationale, detectable in the writings of Cicero, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and others, underpins the notion of Roman colonisation as a mechanism of displacement. On this view, the colony served to alleviate the founding city—Rome—of its surplus population, politically volatile elements, and socially marginalised citizens, and in so doing, populate the margins of its empire too. Romulus’ asylum, read anew as an Alban colony, serves as one prototype for this model of colonisation and offers a contrast to recent readings that have deployed the asylum as an ethical example for contemporary immigration and asylum seeker policy. The invocation of Romulus’ asylum in 19th century debates about the Australian penal colonies further illustrates the dangers of appropriating the asylum towards an ethics of virtue. At its core, this paper drills down into the question of Roman colonists’ volition, considering the evidence for their voluntary and involuntary movement to a colonial site and challenging the current understanding of this movement as a straightforward, series of voluntary ‘mass migrations’. In recognising the agency wielded by non-elite citizens as prospective colonists, this paper contends that Roman colonisation, when understood as a form of domestic displacement, opens up another avenue for coming to grips with the dynamics of ‘popular’ politics in the Republican period.

1. Introduction: Moving (the) Masses, Then and Now

The mainstream media, liberals and Hollywood are pitching a super-sized hissy fit over President Trump’s decision to protect the fruited plain from blood-thirsty jihadists. They seem to think we are under some sort of moral obligation to allow refugees to flood into the country without vetting and pray that nobody gets blown up … spare us your righteous indignation.1

(Todd Starnes, 30 January 2017, Fox News).

Those whom disgrace or crime had driven out of their homes, like wastewater, these men had flowed together at Rome.2

(Sallust, The War of Catiline 37.5)

And it is no wonder that this is what was said in the senate by this tribune of the plebs: that the urban plebeians are too powerful in the Republic; that they must be drained; indeed this is the word he used, as though he were speaking about some wastewater and not about a class of the best citizens.3

(Cicero, On the Agrarian Law 2.70)

Aquatic metaphors—‘flood,’ ‘flow,’ ‘influx,’ ‘tide,’ ‘tsunami,’ ‘waves’, among others—have predominated in the news media since the 1990s to express the ‘mass’ number of refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants (RASIM), attempting to enter the European Union and other states of the Global North.4 More recently in the USA, the negative stereotype of the ‘anchor baby’—a child born of non-citizens within USA borders—is itself predicated on the understanding of the child “as a tool to secure immigrant families so as not to be swept away by the ever-retreating waters of migrant movement.”5 Still, the aquatic metaphor appears in contexts as far removed from each other on the political spectrum as the highly pejorative usage by the conservative commentator Todd Starnes, in the epigraph above, to the title of a New York Times Magazine feature, Scenes from a Human Flood (Anderson 2015). Even in Ai WeiWei’s (2017) controversial, if lauded, documentary, the metaphorical title, Human Flow, while evoking a softer image than, say, ‘human flood’ or ‘human tsunami’, still attributes certain amorphous, inevitable, and inhuman qualities to its human subjects. In the documentary itself, the titular metaphor is frequently reinscribed by its visual corollary, as above-air drone shots offer us a bird’s eye view of displaced peoples ‘flowing’ across land and sea in long, winding and wending movements, analogous to a river.6

Some scholars have pointed out how these aquatic metaphors have not always been used in a pejorative sense, and that they do, in some cases, aim to heighten the call for action and humanitarian aid by conveying the enormity and urgency of the ‘crisis’.7 Yet as Lena Kainz has persuasively shown, these metaphors are also loaded with a sense of danger, carry “calamitous connotations” akin to natural disasters, and ultimately, “metaphorically dehumanise” people.8 This has had an impact on public sentiment, translated into political opinion about these displaced people, and subsequently has led to, or shored up, political policies that seek to ‘stem the flow’ or deport those who have already arrived.9 In the European Union (EU), where these metaphors have long proliferated, a recent shift in political opinion has led to the removal—the continued displacement—of displaced people from EU territory. On 18 March 2016, the EU entered into an agreement with Turkey, which essentially permitted the deportation, euphemistically termed a ‘return’, of displaced Syrians from various Greek islands back to Turkey, in exchange for EU funding and easier visa access for Turkish citizens, which has continued into 2018.10 Metaphors, then, can play one role in larger political debates, intentional or otherwise, by moving citizens toward political positions that would effect the removal—the displacement—of ‘Othered’ people.

The view from Republican Rome is no less subtle or complex when we begin to examine how a particular variety of aquatic metaphors were applied by Roman elites to a group of people marked out for political vilification, and ultimately, as a means to effect their displacement from the city of Rome. Their targets, terms of expression, and political ends differ markedly from those found in the contemporary context of the Global North and its frequent rejection of people seeking to enter their borders, including displaced persons. At Rome, the waters were tinged by a further figurative element—waste. These metaphors, like those voiced by Sallust and Cicero in the epigraph above, were drawn from the terminology applied to the refuse of the street, the dregs at the bottom of your cup, or the bilge water at the bottom of a ship. Instead of applying these images to a perceived external ‘threat’ of incoming foreigners or non-citizens, the Roman elite used these metaphors to circumscribe a broad swath of their fellow, non-elite citizens for removal from Rome as a threat to the political status quo. Yet as this study contends, despite their clear differences, the Roman and contemporary contexts bear some resemblance in their shared method of mobilising metaphors with a view to building support for political policies and elite actions of displacement.

If we look to the Catalyst pieces from Brazil in this Special Issue (Ribeiro et al. 2017; Nobre and Nakano 2017), we can fine-tune the parallels to contemporary contexts even more usefully through the lens of displacements occurring within a community. Here we encounter a less obvious, but more comparable form of displacement that we might term “domestic displacement”.11 Unlike the more common factors driving displacements of people beyond the borders of their (most recent) home country, such as inter-state warfare, the Dandara community in Belo Horizonte and the concrete slab constructions of São Paolo grew out of communities and individuals displaced within the borders of Brazil. Effected by the socio-economic and often, racial, discriminatory actions of Brazil’s elite, these same elites would seek to continue to displace these communities—pushing them into the expanding urban periphery—as the demand for prime real estate in these cities grows.12 Adjacent to the sphere of liquid waste in Roman contexts, metaphors of “dirt” (sujo) have long been used to mark out members of these communities for removal, both in terms of their blackness and their association with manual labour.13 So while metaphors of waste have also been applied to groups of non-citizen, displaced people seeking entry into the Global North, what Brazil and Rome share is the domestic context in which such metaphors operate—citizens configuring fellow citizens with inhuman materialities.

The particular Roman instantiation of “domestic displacement”, here treated, refers to the forced movement of one group of citizens by another, on the basis of certain criteria, to a locale outside of the urbs. Devoting most of its attention to the better-documented contexts of late Republican and early Augustan Rome, this study proposes to partially reinscribe the Roman phenomenon of colonisation as a domestic displacement of citizens by citizens. In this scenario, the Roman elite—understood primarily as senators and the wealthy, namely equites—viewed colonies (coloniae) as places to which they could displace their fellow citizens from the city. These citizens were marked out for ‘removal’ primarily on the basis of their socio-economic class and legal status, that is, the ‘poor’ and newly minted citizens—freedmen—all of whom often fell under the non-descript category of the ‘mass’. While Roman colonisation has received considerable scholarly attention for its impact on non-Roman populations, especially in the context of debates about the ‘Romanisation’ or mass deportation of these people, historians have shied away from asking how voluntary the decision to join a colony actually was. The seemingly benign terms of ‘migration’, ‘emigration’, or ‘resettlement’ applied by scholars to the movement of citizens caused by Rome’s colonial programmes has implicitly assumed that this movement was largely voluntary.14 The lens of displacement, however, prompts us to acknowledge a situation in which some colonists may not have willingly chosen to join a colony, but were forced by various factors beyond their own control.15 On this view, the terminology of ‘migration’ unnecessarily effaces the entire question of the colonists’ volition in the matter, collapsing the different types of movement arising from colonisation into a monolithic category of voluntary movement.

My recovery of the displacements masked by these ‘migrations’ moves through four distinct, yet interlocking sections that broadly correspond to the causal process of displacement in the contemporary world sketched above. The metaphors of waste that marked out certain groups for removal via colonisation (Section 2) form my starting point. Moving from this figurative means of displacement to its material implementation (Section 3), I consider the evidence for the demographic texture of some of the citizens sent out to Rome’s colonies, as attested in Julius Caesar’s colonies (59, 49–44 BCE), and whether this parallels the groups marked out by the metaphors examined in the previous section. At a more abstract, yet fundamental level, I then turn to the ancient political theory underpinning the elite rationale for colonisation as a method of domestic displacement (Section 4). Here the reception of Romulus’ asylum is considered in two instances—the political commentary on today’s asylum seeker ‘crisis’ and 19th century British justifications for the penal colonies in Australia. These case studies are then juxtaposed with my more emic reading of the asylum as a pragmatic model of Roman colonisation based on the principle of sending out marginalised people to populate the margins of empire. Finally, the historiographical accounts of early Roman colonisation in two Augustan era historians, Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Section 5), and one particular example, the foundation of Velitrae, open up opportunities to consider both how colonisation was focalised in ancient historiography as a form of displacement and the real mechanisms which could compel colonists to join a colony. From the legislative and magisterial powers used to send Latin colonists back to the colonies they had abandoned during the second century BCE to less formal ‘push’ factors, such as restrictions on the grain dole in Caesar’s Rome, this final section canvasses what we know about the volition of colonists and the forces mediating it.

Central, then, to what follows is the volition and political agency of the (potential) colonists. The deprivation of colonists’ volition implies their displacement, and in so doing, their inability to participate as citizens in the political life of the city—to join in the ‘mass’ politics of the urbs.16 This study therefore works at the crossroads of a number of current debates in Roman studies and offers new ways forward through the avenue of domestic displacement. On the one hand, I return to older views that focused on the domestic reasons for Roman colonisation, but shift away from approaches which, for instance, take the rationalising commentary in ancient historiography as real evidence for the intentions behind the founding of colonies in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.17 Instead, my study focuses on how the discourse in oratory and historiography discussing colonisation is a product of late Republican and Augustan intra-elite consensus about the function of colonisation, that is, as a powerful tool for the maintenance of their hegemony in popular politics.

In view of this, the role of non-elite citizen agency in colonisation offers us a new route into examining ‘popular’ politics in the late Republic. The fact that the elite of late Republican Rome were so intent upon displacing non-elite ‘mass’ agency through colonisation initiatives demonstrates the real agency of this group and the threat it posed to the political status quo. In this sense, my conclusions, although derived from a study of primarily elite texts, draw on what is at times referred to as the ‘democratic’ school of scholarship that has emphasised the political agency of the non-elite, as well as resonating with the Marxist approach of G.E.M. De Ste. Croix (1981).18 Still, when successfully enacted, colonisation as a displacement of non-elite political participation also speaks to more sceptical analyses of popular sovereignty in the Roman Republic. From this angle, colonisation can be read as one institution, alongside others, such as the comitia centuriata, utilised to curb the political agency of non-elite groups in the city.19 In short, the lens of displacement opens up new ways of seeing how Roman colonisation—and by extension, Roman imperialism—was deeply tethered to the domestic conflicts which unfolded in the urbs during the last century of the Republic. In methodological terms, it underscores how the seeds of such domestic displacements ultimately can be found both in the dehumanising metaphors and political theories of the elite which marked certain groups of people out for removal from the physical and political space of the Roman community.

2. ‘Drain the... Plebs!’: Metaphors for Moving the Masses in Late Republican Rome

Metaphors inspired by the gutters and sewers of Rome seem to have been staples of elite discourse when talking derogatively about the ‘masses’ of the city, in particular a subset of this group defined by their familial descent and spatial identity—the plebs urbana, or city-dwelling plebeians.20 The plebs urbana could also include former slaves, so that freedmen and freedwomen were subsumed into the ‘masses’—in fact they may have formed a significant majority of this group. In the late Republic, this combined group of freeborn and freed citizens was highly visible in the city and likely numbered in the hundreds of thousands.21 A brief tour of the semiotics of the sewer reveals a fertile source of social and political metaphor that collected a broad register of signifying terms designed to figuratively shore up these socio-economic and legal status divisions. Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s (2017, pp. 118–19) recent preface to a future study of the “semiotics of ordure” enjoins us to think similarly about its liquid cousins—wastewater, dregs, and the like; for “to do full justice to the forms of privilege and oppression that cluster around waste relief will entail pushing past the diagnostics of humor, given the range of strategies ancient and modern for plotting waste disposal and management along status, class, and gender lines.”22 The prejudices of our discipline have thus far stymied such a serious consideration of how waste metaphors can perform the work of oppression; this section makes one attempt to remedy this injustice.23

For lines of class and status are clearly inscribed in the vast majority of waste metaphors that connect the plebs to their ‘lowly’ social position vis-à-vis an implied relation to the ‘lowly’ elements of their urban environment. While the racist connotations of sujo are activated when applied to a person of colour in modern Brazil, caenum, also meaning “dirt”, could be applied to the entirety of plebeians in a political struggle over control of the consulship at Rome in 297 BCE; the targets and underlying ideologies may differ, but the metaphorical vehicle is unsurprisingly similar.24 The “dirtiness” of the plebs and their popular leaders was also marked with the adjective sordus or noun sordes, while their proximity to the ground is frequently marked with the adjectives infimus or imus, “lowest”.25 As the persistence of these metaphors into the imperial period and their currency in the literary genre of satire seems to attest (Gowers 1995; Gillies 2018), such late Republican mudslinging left a thorough stain upon a large swathe of the Roman citizenry in the realm of elite discourse. In the visual sphere, it is probably not a coincidence that sculptures of beggars and other non-elites (drunken women, fishermen, hunchbacks) from the Hellenistic and Roman worlds often represent their subjects in proximity to, or sitting directly on, the ground.26 Even as sculptures originally formulated in the Hellenistic period, the acts of conquest, copying, imitation, appropriation, and adaptation that brought them into distinctly Roman contexts could give visual expression to discourses already present in other forms, such as the metaphors assessed in this section. Take for instance this early first century CE Roman bronze figurine (Figure 1) depicting a girl begging that doubles as a coin bank (thesaurus).27 A playful example of form following function, she is not ‘emaciated’ or suffering from a disease, as some other representations of non-elites seem to suggest.28 Yet she is still positioned, with legs crossed, on the ground, hand outstretched, presumably adopting a pose not unfamiliar to the Roman street—amidst its dirt, dust, and liquid waste.

Moving from dirt into more aquatic territory, conluvio (or: colluviēs, colluvium) carries the sense of muck or filth that has washed up together—as though in a channel or gutter.29 Conluvio labels the crowd of people who followed around the tribune of the plebs in 91 BCE, Marcus Livius Drusus, but it also circumscribes the alleged low social origins of Cicero’s political enemy, Gabinius; in each case, it signals the figurative substance where seditious elements gather or originate.30 It is especially telling that in the generation after Cicero, the historian Livy would apply this metaphor to a group of 4000 men whom the consul of 214 BCE, Marcus Valerius Laevinus, deported from the Sicilian town of Agathyrnum across to Rhegium in Italy during the Second Punic War.31 These men, a “disorderly mob”, are explicitly framed as an indeterminate, but dangerous substance—the “stuff of revolution” (materiam novandis rebus):

[they were] mixed from every sort of bilge (ex omni conluvione), exiles, debtors, those convicted of a reckless crime, for the most part, when they had lived in their own communities and under their laws, and afterwards, due to various reasons, a similar fate had heaped them into a mass (conglobauerat) at Agathyrnum, eking out a life through robbery and rapine.32

Metaphorical putty in the hands of Livy, comparison with the Greek historian Polybius’ earlier (though fragmentary) account seems to suggest that Livy rendered these men far less favourably, in the socio-political imagery of his day.33 The pull of Livy’s political world is especially felt in the phrase, res novae—revolution.34

Yet in his use of such metaphors, Livy was merely following the lead of earlier Roman elites, namely Cicero and Sallust. In early June of 60 BCE Cicero famously wrote to Atticus about his senatorial colleague, Marcus Porcius Cato, opining that:

... I have as warm a regard for him as you. The fact remains that with all his patriotism and integrity he is sometimes a political liability. He speaks in the Senate as though he were living in Plato’s Republic instead of Romulus’ cesspool (faece).35

A potent catchphrase, the faex Romuli likely recalls a tradition about the asylum of Romulus, inasmuch as Livy and Plutarch, among others, describe the ‘undesirable’ men whom Romulus gathered together to increase the population of a still-nascent Rome.36 We will consider the tradition surrounding Romulus’ asylum later, below (see Section 4). For the moment, we must acknowledge that Cicero’s playful critique of Cato’s political naïveté turns on a powerful metaphor that exposes an elite perception and anxiety: that the faex of the city have outsized influence in the politics of the day.37 Even though the metaphor is here applied to describe jurors who mostly hailed from the elite, its field of reference can be understood more broadly. For the political agency of the ‘popular’ faex emerges at a number of moments in Cicero’s public and private political discourse and seems to speak to their staying power as a source of political anxiety for the elite, not least Cicero.38 The off-hand, almost mundane application of a metaphor like faex to the plebs and its collocation with other terms for filth, such as sordes and infimus, also underscores how the semiotics of liquid waste and dirt were neither mutually exclusive nor exceptional.39 Built into this metaphor and the others above, however, is the implication that such influence could be disposed of—or displaced—like refuse, washed down Rome’s great sewer, the Cloaca maxima.

Only one metaphor, though, both aligns its target with liquid waste and proposes its explicit removal in one and the same figuration. ‘Drain the dregs’, the combination of sentina and exhaurire, as quoted in the Ciceronian epigraph to this paper, appears to have been deployed in the service of rhetoric advocating for the creation of new colonies (via land distribution) that would remove non-elite groups, such as the plebs urbana, from the city. As we will see, the metaphor’s appearance in Sallust, Cicero, and later, Livy, suggests its specific role in the elite discourse of the late Republic and early Augustan period. More immediately, the political context of Cicero’s utterance is crucial to our understanding of the metaphor. Speaking before a public meeting of the people (contio) as consul in 63 BCE, Cicero made his case against the land distribution bill spear-headed by one of the tribunes of the plebs for that year, Publius Servilius Rullus. One of Cicero’s strategies in the speech relies on quoting Rullus’ own words back at him, twisting them to undercut his ideological credibility before a popular (mostly non-elite) audience.40 At one point, while asserting that Rullus’ legislation would buy up uninhabitable land for the plebs to colonise, Cicero connects this to what Rullus had allegedly said in his speech to the senate on the same bill:

And it is no wonder that this is what was said in the senate by this tribune of the plebs: that the urban plebeians are too powerful in the Republic; that they must be drained (exhauriendam); indeed this is the word he used, as though he were speaking about some bilge water (sentina) and not about a class of the best citizens.41

In a move that today recalls infamous incidents of politicians caught speaking derogatively about the ‘masses’—in the USA, Mitt Romney’s “47%” remark or Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” come to mind—it is clear that Cicero thought he could undermine the popular credentials of Rullus by parting the curtain between curia and contio, acting as the ‘hot mic’ for his contional audience.42 This was but one of the many rhetorical nails Cicero hammered into the coffin that eventually became Rullus’ failed land bill.43 Nevertheless, voiced in the senate among his peers, Rullus’ metaphor gives expression to a broader elite desire to displace the agency of the ‘mass’; it is no outlier in the elite discourse of this time.

Beyond Cicero’s selective quotation of Rullus’ speech to the senate, the sentina metaphor seems to have existed as a mainstay of elite discourse about how to deal with the problem of the plebs and their aspiring leaders.44 This discourse crystallised in the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BCE, the same year that Rullus proposed his land bill. In his breakdown of the groups who supported the consular aspirant, Lucius Sergius Catilina (hereafter, Catiline), Sallust asserts that the conspiracy, while led by members of the elite, drew the support of the “entirety of the plebeians” (cuncta plebes), who were “eager for revolution” (novarum rerum studio).45 A sentence later, when Sallust singles out the plebs urbana as the principal (praeceps) segment of these plebeians, we encounter the metaphorical sentina again—“those whom disgrace or crime had driven out of their homes, like wastewater (sentina), these men had flowed together to Rome.”46 The conspirators themselves were also branded as sentina in Cicero’s first Catilinarian oration, as he exhorted Catiline to leave Rome, since his followers, “the Republic’s great destructive slop (sentina) of your companions will be drained (exhaurietur) from the city.”47 The next day, after Cicero’s rhetoric and threats had successfully displaced Catiline from the city, he again would exclaim before the people in a contio:

O fortunate Republic, if it shall have thrown out this bilge (sentinam) of the city! By Hercules, with Catiline’s removal (exhausta) alone I think the Republic has been relieved of a burden and created anew.48

It cannot be a mere coincidence that Rullus’ choice of metaphorical language to describe the displacement of the plebs and their agency—exhaurire, with sentina added by Cicero49—happened in the same year as the Catilinarian conspiracy. The defeat of Rullus’ colonisation programme may have contributed to support for Catiline’s electoral platform and both clearly sought to address the ‘problem’ of the urban ‘mass’—in different ways, of course. Regardless of whether the two politicians coordinated their efforts, they point in the same direction: to elite anxieties about the growing power of this non-elite group in late Republican politics.50

Even with the defeat of Rullus’ land bill and Catiline’s movement in 63, land legislation arose again in 60 with a bill from another tribune, Flavius; this, too, would fail.51 But this time Cicero chose to support the bill. Crucial for our purposes, he reveals his intra-elite solidarity for the bill in a letter to Atticus on March 15, 60 BCE, when he himself deploys the metaphor of ‘draining the dregs’ to describe the potential effects of the legislation. There Cicero explains how Pompey is set on passing Flavius’ bill and that he has been assured that the private land holdings “of the wealthy” (locupletium) will not be threatened by the land distribution. Instead, Cicero claims that he is meeting Pompey and the populus halfway by allowing land to be purchased (through the revenues coming from Pompey’s eastern military campaigns)—precisely the method he had opposed in Rullus’ land bill. For present purposes, however, what Cicero views as the upshot and undergirding purpose behind the law is of greater interest:

As for the populace and Pompey, I am meeting them (as I also want to do) by way of purchase. If that is properly organised I believe the dregs of the city can be cleared out (sentinam urbis exhauriri) and Italy repeopled.52

To Cicero’s thinking at least, then, Flavius’ land programme, and the colonies that would result from it, could achieve a double objective—drain the city of the plebs urbana and repopulate Italy.53 The revelation that what Cicero said in public (against Rullus) does not reflect what he expressed in private (to Atticus) is no great revelation at all, but it does mean that we now have a clear rationale for late Republican colonisation twice expressed through the same pejorative metaphor.54 Moreover, when Cicero wrote to Atticus a few months later about the faex Romuli, it is not irrelevant that a discussion of Flavius’ lex agraria immediately precedes this image of the grubby political wheeling and dealing of the day.55 Evidently, Rome’s ‘waste problem’ was on the minds of the Roman elite at this critical time.

The fact that we also encounter the metaphor in Livy’s narration of the Second Punic War in Sicily suggests that ‘drain the dregs’ had acquired a special currency among elites when they spoke to each other about removing non-elites from the city and its politics. Like the conluvio at Agathyrnum, these men, a group of Roman deserters and auxiliaries, are cast as desirous of res novae and their departure from the city of Syracuse is described as a ‘draining’ of the ‘dregs’. 56 Yet this figurative language was not simply a facile catchphrase or a shorthand way of speaking about the plebs urbana and other marginalised groups in the city, as most scholars have supposed.57 This metaphor articulated one of the elite intentions driving colonisation programmes—programmes that, as we will see, would displace tens, even hundreds of thousands of Rome’s citizens. It is to the practical outcome of these metaphors—from figurative to physical displacement—that my analysis now turns.

3. Displacing the Plebs Urbana and Freedmen from Caesar’s Rome: The Creation of a ‘Gutter Empire’?

When the biographer Suetonius described the result of Julius Caesar’s colonial foundations across the Roman Empire, it seems deliberate that he chose the verb that was integral to the elite metaphor for colonisation from the very period he was describing—exhaurire, ‘to drain off’. For according to Suetonius’ brief account, Caesar’s colonisation plans as dictator (49–44 BC) had seen some 80,000 citizens sent to overseas colonies, leaving the crowd of the urbs “drained” (exhausta). Rome was apparently so depopulated that, quite ironically, this caused Caesar to engage in further social engineering, as he passed a law with measures ostensibly aimed at stabilising the male citizen population by preventing their departure from Italy.58 Caesar had apparently succeeded where other elites had failed—he had ‘drained’ Rome.

The intra-elite solidarity on display in the discourse we have examined above was therefore not simply a series of empty sentiments, voiced from time to time in the safe space of the senate or in the private correspondence of a few elite men. On the contrary, although this discourse painted a large group of Roman citizens with broad brushstrokes, leaving little room for the distinctions within the non-elite citizenry that scholars have sought to recover, it seems to have translated into real political actions directed toward removing that catch-all group.59 This section traces, then, how the intentions embedded in the elite discourse about ‘draining’ the plebs urbana came to be realised as demographic outcomes in the contemporaneous colonial foundations of Julius Caesar in 59 and 49–44 BCE. The evidence for the early life of these colonies is not always clear or consistent. But what information we can glean from our sources about the demographic character of their colonists indicates that, to some extent, they hailed from the lower socio-economic and legal strata of Roman society.

Beginning perhaps with the failure of a land distribution bill (the Lex Plotia) in 70 BCE, the 60s saw a distinct uptick in the proposal of agrarian programmes, ostensibly to satisfy both Rome’s landless citizens and the veterans returning from the campaigns of its latest ‘big man’ general, Pompey the Great.60 Success did not arrive on this political front, however, until Julius Caesar’s first laws (lex Iulia, lex Campana) on land distribution were passed during his consulship of 59 BCE. Writing three centuries after the fact, Cassius Dio framed Caesar’s initiatives in terms almost akin to those we have just seen Cicero use to describe Flavius’ land bill in 60:

Caesar wanted to ingratiate himself with the masses, so that he might make them his own all the more. ... The excessive multitude of the city, which was being riven by discord, would thus be turned toward labour and agriculture; and the majority of Italy, now desolate, would be colonised again, so that not only those who had endured hardship on the campaigns, but all the rest as well, would have sufficient subsistence.61

While Dio may be parroting back the rhetoric of his sources, we still gain the impression from his account and others that at least some of Caesar’s colonists came from the politically problematic slice of the ‘excessive’ urban population we have already encountered as the ‘dregs’. Indeed, Suetonius (Iul. 20.3) brings some clarity to this picture, reporting that Caesar settled 20,000 colonists who each had three or more children on land in Campania, as well as the Stellan plain. Later, in his Life of Augustus, and only in passing, Suetonius describes how the lex Iulia distributed land in Campania to the plebs; no other group is named, not even veterans.62 Even closer to the actual event, the Tiberian author, Velleius Paterculus, also reports the same details, although he specifies that all 20,000 of the plebs were settled at Capua.63 Appian’s later account even provides a rationale—the land distribution was designed not just for any of the plebs, but more specifically “for the relief of the poor” (ὑπὲρ τῶν πενήτων)—and adds that Capua, a particularly fertile district, was the centrepiece of the initiative.64 All of Plutarch’s mentions of Caesar’s land distributions explicitly link them to relief for the poorest citizens.65 The sum of these later accounts therefore fills out a relatively consistent picture of the socio-economic aim of Caesar’s colonies, whereby a large number of the urban poor were likely resettled in Campania.66

The person we would expect to be our best contemporary witness for Caesar’s colonisation program in 59, beyond Caesar himself, Cicero, has actually left us far less in the way of general information than some of the secondary accounts. Yet in two important letters he penned to Atticus in 60 and 59, Cicero reveals some of the aims and limits of Caesar’s proposal and the political calculations involved in ‘draining the dregs’ through such a plan. For in 60, as Cicero runs through his political options in the context of Caesar’s land bill, he explicitly links his potential support for the bill to “peace with the mass” (Cic. Att. 2.3.4 = SB 23: pax cum multitudine) for himself. Even from Cicero’s self-interested perspective then, we detect the power of the ‘mass’ as a driver for the political support behind Caesar’s initiative. In the following year, Cicero then argued that since the land allotted in Campania cannot support more than 5000 colonists, Caesar and his backers would lose the support of “all of the leftover masses” (reliqua omnis multitudo).67 For our purposes, Cicero’s pre-emptive critique of Caesar’s ambitious plans may in fact be the most significant piece of evidence that emerges from this episode. The more conventionally understood notion that colonisation was a powerful way of building bases of political and military support, or client-relationships, as Zvi Yavetz once argued, perhaps lies behind Cicero’s critique, and is an idea more explicitly expressed in Cassius Dio’s account—but this is only one facet.68 Even more noticeably, Cicero’s comment underlines the political agency of the ‘mass’ in Rome, both foregrounding the elites’ desire to displace this group to Campania, but also the threat which the disgruntled ‘leftovers’ could still pose to the political order.

The 20,000 urban poor, who were moved to Campania and the Stellan plain in 59 and the following years, have not left any of the distinctive material traces of their presence which we as historians would hope to find, nor do the literary sources take us beyond the generalities already canvassed.69 Yet we do possess much better, if still patchy, evidence for the colonists who were sent out to populate Rome’s growing empire overseas under the auspices of Caesar’s second colonisation programme. This programme saw Rome ‘drained’ of some 80,000 or more people beginning in 49–44 BCE, but primarily executed in the triumviral and early Augustan periods.70 We can say with confidence that some of the colonists sent out to at least three sites—Urso (Spain), Corinth (Greece), and Carthage (Tunisia)—were landless or low-status citizens, a mixture of the freeborn (ingenui) and freedmen (libertini).71

The evidence for ascribing a non-elite character to the founding colonists of these colonies mostly derives from a mixture of literary and epigraphic texts. At Urso, the name of the colony, Colonia Genetiva Urbanorum, as preserved by Pliny the Elder, seems to denote the origin of the founders of the colony, that is, the Urbanorum (“of the urbanites”), points to the plebs urbana.72 While scholars have also underlined the presence of veterans in the early life of the colony, this does not preclude a strong plebeian contingent, or for that matter, the presence of freedmen. Two clauses from the colony’s foundation charter (c. 45 BCE), the famous Lex Ursonensis, make important provisions for freedmen (libertini), allowing them to hold magistracies within the colonial government and, perhaps even more crucially, asserting that a decurion on the town council could not be impeached on the basis of his freed status.73 That such provisions are present in the constitutional document of the colony strongly suggests that freedmen formed a significant part of the first party of colonists.74

Looking to two cities which had seen utter destruction at the hands of the Romans, but were now given new life as Caesarian colonies, Carthage and Corinth, here too we find a mixture of plebeians and freedmen attested at both sites. Appian (Pun. 136) claims that Caesar sent colonists to both of these sites, drawing them from the ‘homeless’ since they were demanding land (τῶν ἀπόρων αὐτὸν ... περὶ γῆς παρακαλούντων), with 3000 being sent to Carthage, combined with recruits from the surrounding area. Taken alone, we might have reason to doubt the applicability of Appian’s account to Corinth, since the fates of these two cities were so often entwined in the Roman mind-set, but a bounty of evidence from other texts and the site itself suggests otherwise.75 It is notable that the Augustan era geographer, Strabo (8.6.23), went to the trouble of being so specific about Corinth’s colonists, reporting that Caesar restored the city due to its favourable situation, “sending colonists mostly from the class of freedmen” (ἐποίκους πέμψαντος τοῦ ἀπελευθερικοῦ γένους πλείστους).

A likely contemporary of Strabo’s, the Augustan era poet Crinagoras of Mytilene, whose epigrams survive in the Palatine Anthology, also singled out the servile roots of Corinth’s colonists. The pejorative character of the city’s new inhabitants forms the entire subject of one of his epigrams, in which he bemoans Corinth’s (and Greece’s) unlucky fate, since the site has been “given over wholesale to such good-for-nothing slaves” (τοίοις διὰ πᾶσα παλιμπρήτοισι δοθεῖσα).76 On the ground, we do find some corroboration in the biographical traces left behind by the first colonists in the material record. Anthony Spawforth (1996) has shown through his persuasive onomastic study of the 42 names attested for the city’s duoviri in their numismatic output and epigraphic texts that a large proportion of these magistrates—and therefore the colonial elite—hailed from servile heritage. These men were likely the freedmen of many of the leading families in Rome, including Mark Antony and Julius Caesar himself, as well as traders (negotiatores) who had long been operating in the region.77

The plebeian and freed character of (some of) the colonists who founded Urso, Carthage, and Corinth is uncontroversial among most scholars, and we could add several other colonies to their number, especially those which have freedmen attested as magistrates in the first few decades after their foundation.78 But as P.A. Brunt (1971, p. 256) once noted, we need not divide Caesar’s colonies into “veteran and proletarian settlements”; they were most likely mixed, especially in areas where no immediate military need had presented itself. Still, one other basic, yet rarely stated fact argues for viewing even Caesar’s veteran colonists as possessing a socio-economic character not dissimilar to the ‘proletarian’ colonists. If, by this point in its history, we accept that the Roman army was increasingly recruiting from the landless poor, the proletarii, then we must acknowledge that this was the very same group who could be said to correspond to the metaphorical ‘dregs’ which Cicero and company were all so eager to dispose of.79 To be sure, military service endowed these men (and their families) with another set of attributes, but we should not ignore their prior socio-economic identity and the potential for cross-association with their fellow proletarii—akin to a class-based intersectional identity—even as veterans who may have accumulated considerable wealth from the booty taken on campaign.80 What Caesar’s colonies achieved then, as the subtitle of this section suggests, was not simply the ‘draining’ of Rome’s ‘masses’, but their displacement across the Mediterranean to form what we might dub—to deliberately recall the derogatory metaphors of the elite—Caesar’s ‘Gutter Empire’.81

4. Towards an Elite Theory of Roman Colonisation: From Romulus’ Asylum to the Fatal Shores of Australia’s Penal Colonies

What is all the more remarkable about the elite metaphor of ‘drain the dregs’ and its implementation through Caesar’s colonisation programmes, is that all the while the Romans were telling themselves that their city had been founded out of the archaic equivalent of these same ‘dregs’—the faex Romuli. The blueprint for this scheme of forming colonies by displacing the urban faex lies at the core of Livy’s account of Romulus’ asylum, a number of whose elements correspond to the elite rationale behind colonisation in the late Republic. Most obviously, and as we have already briefly noted (in Section 2), Livy (1.8.6–7) tells us that “the entire crowd” (turba omnis) assembled by Romulus had fled from the neighbouring areas and that there was no discrimination on the basis of legal status—free or slave. The mob, the fugitive, the criminal—that Romulus’ asylum, and, ergo the urbs, grew in size because Rome’s founder took in these ‘undesirable’ people seems to have been a well-established tradition by the time of Livy’s generation (at the latest).82 This is clear enough from the fact that the disreputable character of Romulus’ ‘crowd’ is repeated with some abbreviation in another Augustan author outside of the genre of historiography—the geographer Strabo (5.3.2) describes them as “a mixed up mob” (ἀνθρώπους σύγκλυδας)—but is also disputed by Livy’s historiographical contemporary, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who instead sees the asylum seekers as a more noble group of political exiles from Greece.83

Most crucially, like the late Republican plebs urbana, in Livy’s version, Romulus’ asylum seekers were “eager for revolution” (avida novarum rerum).84 It is telling that some have read this key phrase without its usual negative connotations of political upheaval, but rather, recalling the modern ‘asylum seeker’, it has been rendered positively, almost in an aspirational light. In an academic context, we encounter the translation “eager for a new start”, while in a 2015 New York Times op-ed, another author, deploying Rome as an ancient example in advocating for an open asylum seeker policy, offers an excerpt from Livy where the phrase appears as “eager for new conditions”.85 Yet the pejorative tone of res novae cannot be ignored or effaced through some semantic sleight of hand. Before they had even put down roots in Romulus’ asylum, these marginalised and displaced people were characterised as latent revolutionaries in the political discourse of the late Republic.

It seems especially jarring, then, to invoke Romulus’ asylum as a way of thinking about Rome as “a culture with [asylum] as its founding mythology”, as Mary Beard has, in contrast to contemporary approaches (the EU’s “hostility to migrants”). This mythology actually reveals more about Rome’s domestic politics—that an unruly mass, “eager for revolution”, had always been the beating heart of the body politic—than its ‘open’ stance towards outsiders.86 Emma Dench’s (2005, pp. 10–11) warning should be heeded still more now:

... readings of aspects of Roman society ... might at first sight make Rome appear a worthy model for aspirational European ‘multiculturalism’ at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We need, however, to be very careful. ... It is also salutary in this context to note that Rome’s ‘openness’ or ‘race-mixture’ has been idealized in distinctly non-liberal contexts within recent history.

In point of fact, Livy’s account becomes all the more removed from an ideal notion of ‘asylum-as-open society’ if we consider the rationalisation he provides for Romulus assembling such a motley crew to fill Rome’s empty space:

Then, lest the vastness of the city be vacant, for the sake of increasing the mass of people Romulus resorted to an old plan of city founders, who by assembling together a shady and abject mass to themselves, they used to falsely claim that their children had been born of the earth.87

Putting aside Livy’s cutting allusion to the Athenian claim to autochthony, it is unclear precisely where Romulus’ “old plan” (vetus consilium) comes from.88 To be sure, in the Greek world, many cities, among them colonies (apoikia), claimed that they had been founded by exiles or refugees and this is usually understood as his source of inspiration.89 Further to the point, both Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus understand Rome as an Alban colony of sorts. Livy reports that when Romulus and Remus first conceived of founding Rome, it was founded out of the “mass” (multitudo), as well as the herdsmen of Alba and Lavinium.90 Unlike Livy, Dionysius does not ascribe agency to Romulus and Remus and instead explicitly frames Rome’s foundation as a colonial initiative on the part of the new king of Alba, Numitor, who wanted to both displace his political enemies and the city’s surplus population.91 He also notes that the largely “common stock” (δημοτικὸν γένος) of the foundation was typical for new city foundations, even if he is careful to include some Trojan aristocrats among the founders (Ant. Rom. 1.85.3). If, therefore, we understand that these writers conceived of Rome’s foundation as a colonial foundation, then Livy’s rationalisation of Romulus’ asylum seems to be an elaboration of this process.92 In particular, it speaks to two interconnected features of Roman colonisation: (1) the challenge of establishing a colony in a far-flung, hostile, or environmentally unappealing place—that is, the risk of it being abandoned and reverting to that “vacant” (vana) state in which Romulus’ asylum had begun; and (2) that the best solution to this problem is to rely on the marginalised in Roman society—the desperate, criminalised, and poor—to populate such an empty space and found a new city.93

Livy’s brief exposition of this interlocking theory behind city—or rather, colonial—foundation brings into sharper focus similar ideas that we have already seen at work in Cicero’s discourse about the colonisation proposals of his own day. When Cicero wrote to Atticus that Flavius’ land distribution plan in 60 BCE was a way to simultaneously “drain the dregs” of the city and “repopulate Italy”, he was giving voice to the same notion at the heart of the “old plan” guiding Romulus’ asylum.94 Again, in his contio against Rullus’ land bill, Cicero explicitly connected (et nemirum) Rullus’ rhetoric of ‘draining’ the plebs urbana to the fact that one of the two types of land available for Rullus’ purchase-plan was that deemed uninhabitable:

The other type of lands, uncultivated because of barrenness, vacant and deserted due to their pestilential environment, will be bought from those who, if they do not sell them, see that they must be abandoned by them. And it is no wonder (et nimirum) that this is what was said in the senate by this tribune of the plebs: that the urban plebeians are too powerful in the Republic; that they must be drained (exhauriendam).95

Cicero goes on to ask his audience whether they would prefer to stay in the urbs with all of its benefits (commoda), or leave everything behind, including the res publica, and with Rullus as their colonial founder (Rullo duce), settle “in the sands of Sipontum or the swamps of Salapia”.96 Along with another colony in a far-flung place, Buxentum, Sipontum was reported as abandoned in 186 BCE and a new group of colonists had to be sent out to repopulate the two sites (Livy, 39.23.3–4). In the case of Salapia, a Daunian city in Apulia, the inhabitants asked a certain Marcus Hostilius if they could move to a better location due to the pestilential nature of the original site.97 Cicero, then, appealed to extreme, but clearly well-known examples from the collective memory and knowledge of his audience, which likely did not figure in Rullus’ list of places to buy land.98 Yet what emerges from his rhetorical strategy of dissuasion is that same link between the ‘emptiness’ of the land and the ‘desperate’ type of people who could be induced to live there.99

Indeed, as we have seen, some parts of the senatorial elite clearly thought that the colonists of their day truly were the lowest members of the citizenry. So, while he may have castigated Rullus for his ‘draining’ metaphor, speaking to the senate on the same land bill, Cicero had also described Rullus’ followers and prospective colonists as a band of “hobos and criminals” (Leg. Agr. 1.12: egentium atque improborum). We have already seen in the previous section how Caesar’s colonists were sometimes indiscriminately classified both by Cicero and later authors not only as plebeians, but also as the urban ‘mass’, freed slaves, the homeless and the destitute. Some confirmation of the perceived criminal character of some colonists also comes to us from Cicero’s Pro Caecina in 69 BCE. A speech disconnected from Cicero’s later, more politicised rhetoric—it concerns a property dispute—we can rely on it for a less politically laden statement of opinion. What is most illuminating for our purposes arises when Cicero explains why Roman citizens sometimes join Latin colonies—despite losing their Roman citizenship as a result: they do so either due to “their own free will” or “legal penalties, which if they had wished to suffer [the penalty], then they could have remained in the community.”100 We will consider the plausibility of Cicero’s claim about the “free will” (voluntas) of Latin colonists in the following section, but with respect to the latter reason, in the realm of legal reasoning at least, then, this seems to have been an uncontroversial explanation for why some citizens forsook the urbs and joined a colony with reduced citizenship status (Latin, not Roman).

Still, we should note how this example pertains to Latin colonies. What of Roman colonies, or colonies more generally, regardless of their status? Livy’s contemporary, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, offers one striking answer. At a marked pause in Book 4 of his Archaeologia, Dionysius addresses the Roman practice of manumission and the risks of incorporating freedmen into the Roman citizen body. It is here that we abruptly encounter what is perhaps the most explicit statement of the theory behind the elite discourse we have been tracing thus far. For Dionysius asserts that the best way to monitor the quality of the citizen body is for the censors or consuls to make a detailed census of the freedmen, and then those deemed “worthy of being citizens” (ἀξίους τῆς πόλεως ὄντας) can be enrolled in the voting tribes, while the magistrates “should cast out the rogue and foul class [of the unworthy freedmen] from the city, making up a specious name (εὐπρεπὲς ὄνομα) for the act—a colony.”101 Such a bald statement about a theoretical function of the Roman colony should not be dismissed as the idle musing of Dionysius; taken seriously, his polemic makes explicit what we have already seen in the figurative discourse deployed by Livy and, in the generation prior, by Cicero, Rullus and Sallust.

Dionysius was acutely aware of being an outsider looking in—a Greek in Augustan Rome—but also clearly ran in elite Roman circles and observed Roman political life with keen interest. Dionysius may have even witnessed the implementation of the remainder of Caesar’s colonial foundations after his assassination and could offer such a statement, stripped to its most basic, literal status-based prejudice.102 But it is significant that Dionysius’ statement arises in a discussion of the risks of Roman manumission practices to the Roman citizen body in the city itself. In part, he may have been reacting to Augustus’ policy of limiting manumissions—what Suetonius describes in familiar figurative language as an attempt “to keep the citizen body clean and unsullied by all the muck (conluvione) of foreigners and servile blood”.103 It also recalls the special attention paid by his fellow Greeks, Strabo and Crinagoras, to the role of freedman colonists in Caesar’s re-foundation of Corinth. If we look back to the term which Crinagoras used to describe the servile nature of Corinth’s new inhabitants, that is, the type of slaves who were “sold time and again” (παλίμπρατος: LSJ s.v. A) due to their perceived uselessness, one can see how Caesar’s colonial recruits provided a ready-made rationale for Dionysius’ notion of sending ‘unworthy’ freedmen off to the colonies.104

In fact, the pejorative view of freedman colonists espoused by these Augustan era Greek intellectuals marks a striking shift from the view taken by another outsider, the Macedonian king, Philip V, in 214 BCE. At the time, the Larisans were attempting to rebuild and repopulate their city after the Social War of 220–217 BCE, but they had revoked the citizenship of Thessalians and other Greeks living there. In an inscribed letter to the Larisans, the king exhorted them to look to Rome’s example of freeing slaves as a positive model of civic growth, since it had allowed them to found almost 70 colonies (apoikia), presumably by sending out these freedmen as colonists.105 Attention usually centers on issues other than the fact that this inscription represents the earliest attestation of freedmen as (Roman? Latin?) colonists.106 Not only does this document call into question how exceptional Caesar’s colonies were by including freedmen as part of the colonists, but it also underscores how Dionysius’ line of thinking was not simply a hypothetical function of colonies—it had been observed by other outsiders since the third century BCE and posited as a key ingredient in the recipe for Rome’s successful imperial expansion.

From the explicit statements of Cicero and Rullus to the resemblances we see in Livy’s rationalisation of Romulus’ asylum and Dionysius’ own thoughts on the near-eugenic ends of colonies, it is now possible to approach the emic outlines of an elite colonial theory. This theory held that the colony functioned to displace the poor, the criminal, the freed, and more generally, the ‘masses’, and in so doing, their political agency as citizens from the urbs. Understood as an Alban colony, Romulus’ Rome was not particularly exceptional in its foundational form and the asylum was simply another tool in the process of its successful foundation—a prototype for future Roman and Latin colonies. So while we today may be immediately drawn to Romulus’ asylum as a quasi-model for, or remonstrance to, the modern nation state’s policies about asylum seeker intake, this approach ignores the fact that the ancient reasons behind the ‘openness’ of Romulus’ asylum were far more pragmatic—even sinister—and less ‘humanitarian’ than our own rendering of it.

As a counterpoint, it is even more telling that Romulus’ asylum served as a fertile source of colonial discourse for articulating another colonial project in our own not-too-distant past—the penal colonies of Australia.107 As early as the late 17th century, Roman colonisation had been idealised as a model for British colonialism, particularly colonial plantations, whereby they could serve, among other purposes, as a home for dissident citizens, religious non-conformists, and anyone who could not make a livelihood in England.108 A century later, England had undergone profound socio-economic change and London in particular was thought of as an overcrowded and crime-ridden city. In response, the Georgian elite embarked upon a campaign to criminalise the poor and displace them to the colonies as convicts.109 As Robert Hughes (1986, p. 25) so sharply summed up the longer historical process at work, “Georgian fear of the ‘mob’ led to the Victorian belief in a ‘criminal class’. Against both, the approved weapon [sc. the colonies] was a form of legal terrorism.”

It is perhaps not too surprising then that comparisons between Romulus’ asylum and the convict colonies of Australia transpired and, eventually, abounded in the 19th century as commentators sought to predict the promising future of the colony through the example of Rome’s successful past, born of its ‘criminal’ origins. We encounter one of the earliest analogies in 1803, when the British Lieutenant Tuckey, as a participant of the expedition to Port Phillip, wrote of the founding of the (ultimately failed) first convict settlement there—what would eventually become the city of Melbourne. After explicitly contrasting the “civilised man” (that is, the white British man) with “the savage[s] he came to dispossess”, Tuckey proclaimed of the foundation at Port Phillip: “I beheld a second Rome rising from a collection of banditti.”110 Towards the late 19th century, founders of colonial cities, such as John Batman and John Fawkner at Melbourne, were even directly compared to Romulus and Remus, while the first governor of New South Wales, Arthur Phillip, was hailed by the Reverend Sydney Smith in 1803 as “the Romulus of the Southern Pole ... a superintendent of pick-pockets”.111 Nineteenth century authors in journals and newspapers particularly capitalised on the comparative potential offered by the ‘criminal’ aspect of the men who gathered at Romulus’ asylum, as the following three excerpts loudly attest:

Rome was founded by a band of outlaws. English outlaws are every whit as good material for founding an empire as were the followers of Romulus.112.

(October 1872)

The primitive history of Australia, like the foundation of Rome, is a tale of intrepid and adventurous buccaneering. Its Romulus and Remus were nurtured at the dugs of Convictism, a fiercer wolf than the alma mater of the Tiber.113.

(January 1888)

Would he not class the whole thing [sc. Australia] as a fable, a latter-day imitation perhaps of the tale of Romulus’ Asylum? We ourselves are inclined to believe that Romulus must have been a kind of primordial Captain Arthur Phillip, and his Asylum as much a reality as the landing at Sydney Cove, just one hundred and sixty years ago.114.

(January 1894)

Not all commentators on the Australian colonies were necessarily sold on the validity of this comparison, however. In 1848 an advocate for the role of the railways in colonisation responded in The Railway Record to an editorial in the Times which had cited Livy’s account of Romulus’ asylum in support of Lord Ashley’s proposal that year to send 1000 “ragged” boys and girls to Australia.115 The author of the rebuttal acknowledged that “the Greeks and Romans set us the example of forming colonies by the systematic expatriation of crime” and, that “the foundation of Rome may have been laid by a horde of robbers”, but that these models should be entirely abjured in future colonies; the railroads and other industrial advances would, in his view, usher in a more dignified type of colony free of convict labour.116 Almost contemporary with this debate, another raged in the pages of the Colonial Gazette between a David Burn and the Editor, the former seeking to defend the honour of the colonies of New South Wales and Van Dieman’s Land (today, Tasmania), which he felt had been stigmatised for their convict origins in a recent speech by Archbishop Whatey of Dublin, and that they would therefore suffer from a lack of fresh emigration from Ireland.117 One of the key sticking points in this exchange was whether the fact that Rome was founded by “robber-shepherds” really offered a precedent whereby a penal colony could become “respectable”; in the Editor’s eyes it did not, since “in those days all men were robbers, more or less, ... consequently, the first inhabitants of Rome were not degraded in their own esteem, or in that of their neighbours.”118 Nevertheless, the fact that Romulus’ asylum featured in such public debates only further underscores the currency of the Roman model for those seeking to make the Australian penal colonies not only legible, but also justifiable in terms of the classical past.

The comparison even seeped into a more popular strain of literature of the time. A regular serial of The Monthly Mirror, entitled “History of Rome” by the pseudonymous “Punch a la Romaine” (sic), retold the story of Romulus’ asylum, followed by didactic comprehension questions, in its issue for 6 July 1844. The serial’s chosen word for Romulus’ followers? “Convicts”.119 Even more striking, in the same year, 41 years after Lieutenant Tuckey had set foot on the shores of Port Phillip, another Tuckey, this time the convict John Tuckey, penned a novel which followed the life of its eponymous convict character, Ralph Rashleigh. Uncannily, Tuckey echoed the Lieutenant’s prophecy in an epigraph to the chapter which heralds Rashleigh’s arrival in Australia as a convict:

The band of Romulus, it is most certain,

Were ruffian stabbers and vile cutpurse knaves;

Yet did this outcast scum of all the earth

Lay the foundations of the Eternal City.120

At least one convict, then, re-appropriated the elite discourse on Romulus’ asylum, originally deployed to justify his own displacement, and turned it to his own aspirational ends. His language—“it is most certain”—even echoes the language of certainty invoked in the contemporary debates about the suitability of ancient Rome as a model for the British penal colony.121

In some ways, the exercise of comparing nascent Rome and the Australian penal colonies, as well as the discourse that arose from it, may have had more merits to it then than the tendency to invoke Romulus’ asylum in entirely different political commentary today. It certainly coincided with other discourses which drew on Rome’s foundational story to chart their own emerging narratives as new nations, such as post-revolutionary Haiti.122 To be sure, we have seen how both the Roman and British elite shared the same desire to displace the non-elites of their respective cities and characterised these people with a similar set of pejorative terms; and Cicero’s Pro Caecina does speak to the ‘criminal’ colonist in a Roman context. Yet the latter example throws into sharp relief a stark point of contrast between the Roman criminal-cum-colonist and the Australian convict: the convicted Roman criminal could choose to leave Rome and his citizenship behind for a new start in a Latin colony, whereas the Australian convict had no such choice.123 If anything, the British elite took the Roman example to a new extreme with the invention of the penal colony—the wholesale displacement of a class of people through their systematic criminalisation.

The exercise of moving from the ancient theory of colonisation to its reception in the more recent colonial project thus aptly demonstrates the limits and dangers of comparison. It prompts us to return to the anchor of the ancient context; the contrasts offered by contemporary asylum policies and 19th century penal colonies only further force us to recognise what was particularly Roman about Romulus’ asylum and Roman colonisation more generally. In line with this approach, in the final section we now turn to the ancient historiographical accounts of Roman colonisation and the window this opens onto both the issue of colonists’ volition in the colonial endeavour and its ramifications for their political agency in the community.

5. Displacing Plebeian Agency: Volition in the Historiography of Roman Colonisation

Colonisation as the physical removal of Roman citizens to land that they may not want to live upon—due to environmental, geographic, or security reasons—appears as an aspect of the historiographical commentary on many of the earliest colonial foundations. Reading Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus we can catalogue the early history of Roman colonisation down to the early third century BCE as a series of attempted and successful displacements of plebeians and their political agency (see

Table 1. Plebeian displacement as a historiographical rationale for early Roman colonization.

Colony	Date (BCE)	Characterisation of Displacement	Focaliser	Source
Circeii and Signia	Regal period	Unburdening (oneri)	Elite (King Tarquinius Superbus)	Livy, 1.56.3.
Velitrae	494	Safety valve (against στασιάζον)	Elite (Senate)	Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 6.43.1
Antium	467	Banishment (πᾶσι τοῖς πολλοῖς καὶ πένησι ... ἀπελαυνομένοις τῆς πατρίδος)	Non-elite (Plebeian)	Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 9.59.2.
Unnamed (proposed site in Volscian territory)	395	Safety valve (multiplex seditio cuius leniendae causa coloniam) Banishment (relegari plebem; ἐκβολὴν)	Elite (Senate) Non-elite (Plebeian)	Livy, 5.24.4 Livy, 5.24.4; Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 7.14.4.
Satricum	385	Safety valve (haud procul seditione res erat ... leniendae causa)	Elite (Senate)	Livy, 6.16.6
Cales	334	Safety valve (ut beneficio praevenirent desiderium plebis)	Elite (Senate)	Livy, 8.16.13.
Luceria	314	Banishment (relegandis tam procul ab domo civibus)	Non-elite (Plebeian)	Livy, 9.26.4.
Sora and Alba Fucens	300	Unburdening (exonerata) Safety valve (plebs quieta)	Elite (Senate)	Livy, 10.6.2.
Sinuessa	296	Banishment (in stationem se prope perpetuam infestae regionis, non in agros mitti rebantur)	Non-elite (Plebeian)	Livy, 10.21.10

). This catalogue can be broken down into categories reflecting the focalisation of political struggles connected to colonial foundations from either elite (senatorial) or non-elite (plebeian) perspectives. From the perspective of the elite, early colonial foundations are rationalised in one of two ways: either as a means of ‘unburdening’ the city of its idle (and ergo, restless) masses, or, closely linked to this, by acting as a safety valve for defusing (potential) plebeian agitation (seditio, στάσις). When focalised through plebeian eyes, just as Cicero spoke to the sentiments of a popular audience in his contio against Rullus’ land bill, colonisation emerges as a form of “banishment” (relegare, ἀπελαύνειν)—due to the detrimental environment, military threats, or distance from Rome—either explicitly or implicitly through their resistance to the colonial proposal.

A number of scholars have noted a negative correlation between the absence of colonial foundations in the mid-fourth century BCE and the increase in reports of plebeian exploitation (debt, usury) during the same period.124 While this correlation may point to a historical pattern, Livy and Dionysius wrote their accounts not only in the language of the late Republic, but the rationalisations they provide for colonial foundations have been doubted frequently as later inventions.125 Comparison between Livy’s first and third to fourth decades, particularly their notices of colonisation, at least demonstrates how differently Livy himself treated the phenomenon as his work progressed; in the latter, the rationalising commentary, centering on domestic strife driving colonisation, is absent.126 We could simply put this down to the nature of Livy’s sources, in that, as scholars have argued for other aspects of his first decade, the more distant past allowed for greater historiographical license and anachronism than more recent and better documented history.127 Regardless of its historicity, as the following analysis of the fifth century BCE colonial foundation of Velitrae reveals, the rationalising commentary of these authors may reflect on-going debates—otherwise not present in our sources—about colonial recruitment down into the late Republic. Ultimately, the debate over Velitrae’s foundation in Dionysius’ narrative prompts us to consider the other, scattered, yet contemporary evidence for colonists’ volition and to focus on two moments of colonisation during the Republic where forces beyond the prospective colonists’ control may have deprived them of their volition.

“Specious Compulsion”: Velitrae and Other Forms of Forced Colonisation

Dionysius’ account (Ant. Rom. 7.13–14.) of the various reasons proposed for the (second) foundation of Velitrae128—likely in 494 according to Livy’s (2.34) comparatively quiet report—brings several of the ‘rationalising’ justifications catalogued above together. But it also quite uniquely forces us to tackle the problem of whether colonists were recruited willingly or not. For according to Dionysius the Volscian city of Velitrae fell into Roman hands due to a severe plague that the Volscians were experiencing, which compelled them to offer the city up to the Romans. In light of this offer, the Romans decided to found a colony there for a number of reasons (Ant. Rom. 7.13.2–4): (1) to “remove” (μετασταίη) part of the citizenry to alleviate the effects of a famine at Rome; (2) and in so doing, head off the “sedition rekindling” (ἡ στάσις ἀναρριπιζομένη) again; and (3) from the plebeian point of view, the colony promised them relief from the famine and fertile lands. Nevertheless, according to Dionysius (Ant. Rom. 7.13.4), the plebeians changed their minds once they realised that they were going to settle in a city which had been ravaged by a plague—that they might become its next victims. As a result, far fewer citizens than the required (unspecified) number signed up to found the colony, and even those who had already volunteered now wanted to back out of the venture. In response, the senate decreed that all Romans had to draw lots for enrolment in the colony and imposed harsh (unstated) penalties on those who refused to leave (Ant. Rom. 7.13.5), a detail which appears again in Plutarch’s later account (Coriol. 13.3). Recalling his own opinion about ridding Rome of its ‘unworthy’ freedman citizens through a “specious” (εὐπρεπεῖ) colony (Ant. Rom. 4.24.8), Dionysius closes off the story of Velitrae’s colonial foundation by rather matter-of-factly stating that “this expedition, then, was dispatched to Velitrae, having been recruited by some specious force (εὐπρεπεῖ ἀνάγκῃ).”129

Dionysius clearly had no qualms about highlighting the dark side to Velitrae’s foundation and his account stands out as the only detailed evidence for the forced recruitment of colonists. Yet modern scholars have often ignored the question of volition in recruitment or made claims for which evidence simply does not exist.130 In one of the earliest attempts to explain colonial recruitment, Ernst Kornemann claimed that if volunteers were lacking, then the requisite number was “formally levied, and indeed, as for military service, by lot and according to the series of tribes, separated into equites and pedites.”131 However, Kornemann’s seemingly clear understanding of forced colonial recruitment soon falls apart upon closer inspection of his evidence, since it relies entirely on the example of Velitrae for the notion of a quasi-form of colonial conscription.132 So too, E.T. Salmon (1969, p. 24) supposed that colonisation functioned much like the military draft, but offered no evidence to support such a crucial claim. While Claude Moatti follows this general notion of colonial recruitment resembling military conscription, he ultimately admits that, on the point of compulsion, “we do not know”.133 Daniel Gargola, on the other hand, tentatively posits that prospective colonists were volunteers, since Cicero, Livy, and later sources describe the process by which a list of potential colonists was drawn up with reference to a formulaic phrase—“to give a name” (nomen dare). In his view, the formula implies that citizens usually had a choice as to whether they wanted to “give their name” and join a colony, though only Cicero in the Pro Caecina and Seneca qualify the act as one undertaken willingly.134 Still, Gargola concedes that since the nomen dare phrase is also used of military conscription, the voluntary nature of the recruitment “may not have always been the case”.135 On one reading then, the senate’s decision to compel by senatus consultum enrolment in a colony at Velitrae may be the exception that proves the rule.

We do have evidence, however, for forced colonisation that is not shrouded in the uncertainties of the fifth century BCE, but rather arises in the comparatively more reliable annalistic narrative for the first quarter of the second century BCE. For over a period of some 30 years in the late third to early second century, colonists were abandoning Roman and Latin colonies in droves. As we have seen, abandonment was reported at the Roman colonies of Buxentum and Sipontum in 186 BCE.136 From 206 to 177 BCE at least four Latin colonies reported depopulation and requested supplementary colonists from Rome (Broadhead 2008, p. 461); the problem of land lying uncultivated and returning to a ‘vacant’ state became a clear concern.137 Most notably, in 187, the Latins sent a joint deputation to Rome to complain that too many of their Latin citizens had emigrated (commigrasse) to Rome and enrolled in the census there (Livy 39.3.4–6). Twelve thousand were subsequently compelled to return (ut redire eo cogeret) to their Latin homes and Livy (39.3.6) specifically comments that “the city was weighed down by the mass of immigrants” (multitudine alienigenarum urbem onerante)—the same language he uses to describe the ‘burden’ imposed by the plebs in the context of proposing early colonies.138 Ten years later, another Latin delegation made the same complaint, and Rome responded with yet another edict of return, but even by 173, another such edict indicates that Latins were still residing in the city.139 We are even reminded of Dionysius’ fears about freedmen becoming citizens and the role of colonies in displacing the ‘unworthy’, since Livy (41.8) reports that some Latins even resorted to selling their own sons into slavery on the condition that they be manumitted and thus made Roman citizens.140 Perhaps it is in this context that we should read the jurist Gaius who, although much later than most of our sources, refers to an older time (olim) when colonies were set up in Latin territory (in latinas regiones) and seems to imply that parents could order (iussu) their in potestate children to join a colony.141 While these issues of colonial retention primarily concern Latin colonies, it should be borne in mind that a good number of colonists who joined these foundations probably had been Roman citizens when they signed up.

In these cases, then, clearly thousands of Latin colonists—perhaps many originally Roman citizens—were the victims of colonial displacement effected through magisterial edicta, senatus consulta, and leges.142 Thus when Cicero claimed in the Pro Caecina that Roman citizens joined a Latin colony either to escape a criminal punishment or did so “of their own free will” (sua voluntate), this and other statements about ‘willing’ colonists mask the possibility that many may not have felt displaced until they arrived at the colonial site and experienced its disadvantages first-hand. Colonists may have been ‘willing’ in Rome at the time of enrolment, but their perception of being displaced might not have occurred until well after they had settled at the colonial site. Like Velitrae, Salapia, or Cicero’s rhetorical portrait of Rullus’ proposed colonial sites, one of the reasons why Placentia and Cremona claimed in 190 that their number of colonists had been severely depleted was partly due to an unforeseen factor—disease (Livy 37.46.10: aliis morbo absumptis). We may also wonder, however, whether Dionysius’ account of a fifth century colonial foundation draws on his (or his sources’) contemporary understanding of the legislative avenues and magisterial prerogatives available to the senatorial elite when recruitment for a colony fell short.

At least in the near contemporary case of Caesar’s colonies, it seems that less direct mechanisms may have been sufficient to force Rome’s non-elite ‘masses’ to join his colonies. Whatever the precise number of colonists, the order of magnitude for Caesar’s colonial programme suggested by Suetonius’ number of 80,000 colonists implies an enormous feat of political persuasion on Caesar’s and his supporters’ part. A key question about Caesar’s colonies therefore remains: Were all of Caesar’s colonists truly willing participants? Or was their voluntas influenced or coerced? What factors could induce so many citizens to join in the first major transmarine, Roman colonial project? Unlike the vague proxy afforded by a failure, such as Rullus’ land bill and what we can deduce from Cicero’s oratory about it, we cannot as easily point to the probable reasons or means behind Caesar’s success. That Caesar had to prevent further departures from Italy with legal restrictions on the movement of males aged 20–40 years might actually speak to a certain overenthusiasm among Roman citizens for his overseas colonies and, most obviously, the allure of land.143 Freedmen, for their part, may have been enticed by the access afforded to magistracies in the colonies.144 Caesar was also fairly popular among the plebs and soldiery and thus, combined with his dictatorial powers, convincing so many citizens to leave Rome might seem more achievable in light of these more idiosyncratic factors.145 Unlike the situation at Velitrae or the Latin colonies, we certainly do not possess any reports of resistance to the colonisation programme or the forced enrolment of colonists through legislative or magisterial powers. Yet nor do we hear much about the colonists’ acquiescence to or zeal for their new transmarine fate.146

The success of Caesar’s project may have depended upon economic desperation, rather than any formal compulsion, pushing many of the poorest citizens to abandon Rome by removing one of their main sources of subsistence. For Caesar had reduced the number of citizens eligible for the grain dole down from 320,000 to 150,000 and the resulting 170,000-person deficit may in fact be the true crux of the matter.147 Furthermore, freedmen were apparently entirely excluded from congiaria (handouts, often monetary) under Augustus, and perhaps even under Caesar.148 The deprivation of a source of food that these policies imply could have become a real push factor for the permanently ‘poor’ (‘structural poverty’) to join Caesar’s colonies—the tipping point between ‘poverty’ and ‘destitution’. Even for those who could, usually, but not always make ends meet (‘conjunctural poverty’), the pull of a land grant may have loomed large in their decision making process.149 Hence, in considering the relation of one Caesarian policy to another, we need to be open to an inverse scenario of causality, whereby cutting the grain dole made the colonisation programme possible, rather than vice versa.150

While we must also acknowledge that Caesar’s colonies from 49–44 BCE were of necessity transmarine colonies, since so little land remained in Italy for distribution or sale (Roselaar 2010, p. 288; De Ligt 2012, p. 187), they still placed a body of water between the colonists and Rome. Even though the Mediterranean was a highly connected space and its inhabitants’ mobility was facilitated by its well-developed sea routes, the distance, risks, and costs of sea travel may have discouraged (but not precluded) some colonists from returning to the urbs and cemented their displacement all the more.151 This assumption seems to be at play in a letter from July of 44 BCE that Cicero penned to his friend Lucius Munatius Plancus, who was charged with leading colonists from Rome to Caesar’s new colony at Buthrotum in Epirus. Caesar, he says, did not want to upset the pre-existing landholders at Buthrotum, including Cicero’s close friend, Atticus, and so he promised them “that once they [sc. the colonists] had gone overseas he would see to it that they were settled on some other land.”152 The cum-clause here betrays Caesar’s not-so-benevolent intentions. Across the sea—this, it would seem, was a critical goal of Caesar’s colonies.

The preceding survey of the issue of colonists’ volition has thus revealed a complex, multi-layered historical problem. At one level, the ancient historiography portrays the issue as a very old one and articulates colonisation as a form of displacement from both elite and non-elite perspectives. Whether this resembled historical reality is less of a concern here than that this historiographical discourse overlaps with themes encountered in Cicero’s rhetoric against Rullus’ proposed colonies, but also in the more reliable annalistic narrative describing the problems facing colonies in the second century BCE. At another level, the contrasting examples of the Latin colonies and Caesar’s colonies present two different ways to assess the question of compelled colonisation: directly, through legislative and magisterial powers (senatus consulta, edicta, leges), or indirectly, through socio-economic policy.

6. Conclusions: Towards a More Complex View of Colonisation in the Roman Republic

The foregoing discussion has sought to articulate the domestic phenomenon of displacement—citizens displacing citizens—within a Roman context, but place it in conversation with the mechanics of displacement observed in contemporary contexts. Distinct differences do separate the Roman and contemporary phenomena, not least that potential Roman colonists had different factors mediating their agency, especially in comparison to, say, contemporary Syrians who have been deported from the EU to Turkey. Still, the causal chain of an elite metaphor, political theory, and programme of Roman colonisation is not so alien to the links between metaphor, political opinion, and the policy decision to remove a group of people to alleviate pressure on domestic politics or serve the certain socio-economic agendas, as represented in the EU–Turkey deal or the struggle for real estate in contemporary Brazil. As a result, this paper has taken a decidedly domestic turn in its analysis of Roman colonisation with a view to shifting the way we think about one of its overlooked historical agents—the colonists themselves. Placed within this revised understanding of colonial recruitment qua displacement, Walter Scheidel’s (2004, p. 12) benignly termed “four migrations”, corresponding to four periods of intensive Roman colonisation, likely conceal many episodes of displacement driven by an elite with less than benign intentions. According to his tally, the numbers involved in these four periods of colonisation “may well have exceeded one million migrants”, highlighting how the terms we impose on the complex ‘mass’ movement of people and its causes have the potential to efface a history of colonists’ agency and its deprivation.153 This is not to say that all colonists were ‘displaced’, or that none were ‘migrants’; just as such categories are fraught today, many probably fell into other categories, or, beyond clear-cut taxonomies, fell somewhere on a spectrum between varying degrees of ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ movement (cf. Gettel 2018, pp. 4–5, 7 in this volume). While this study has aimed to propose ‘displacement’ as a viable lens for thinking about colonisation, it only represents a starting point for this endeavour. A number of critical questions still remain.

Since the ostensible beginning of this story of domestic displacement—entrenched economic inequality, class warfare, and status-based discrimination in Roman society—has been told frequently, I have refrained from rehearsing it again here. Still, we should underscore that Roman elites, such as Cicero, created, or at the very least, perpetuated the existence of the very ‘sentina’ they sought to displace. Writing to his friend Atticus, Cicero could be just as nonchalant about ‘draining the dregs’ as he could about his own exploitative activities that contributed to the precariousness of life in the city for its more humble inhabitants. Thus in 44 BCE, Cicero claimed to be unfazed by the sudden collapse of two of his poorly constructed tabernae, such that “not only the tenants, but even the mice have moved away (migraverunt)”.154 It was once thought that the wealthy elite separated themselves from those ‘below’ by living on the hills of Rome, much like the Palestinian elite at Rawabi highlighted by Mufreh (2017) in this volume, or that certain neighbourhoods became ‘plebeian’ strongholds, similar to the Dandara community in Brazil. More recent work on the archaeological record of mixed housing at Rome in the Subura and on the Aventine Hill has begun to dispel these commonplace views as oversimplifications and ideological constructions.155 In the probable reality, the elite could not always avoid the various segments of the ‘poor’, whether they chose to self-segregate by living apart in ostentatious domus or escape to their secluded suburban Horti and countryside villae. From this perspective, we begin to realise how the elite metaphors of ‘draining’ liquid waste applied to the non-elite ‘mass’ that inhabited the city not only reflected a profound disgust for and discomfort about their fellow citizens, but that the very living conditions of these citizens likely inspired the metaphors used to dehumanise them.156

Beyond discourse, the precarious realities of non-elite life also have a critical role to play in our understanding of the extent to which Roman colonisation can be characterised as a domestic ‘displacement’ of citizens, rather than a ‘migration’. Cicero’s tenants “moved away” (migraverunt) after the collapse of their rented homes, presumably to a similarly exploitative situation in the city. Yet, considering that this happened in 44 BCE, they also might have decided to forsake the city and its hazards for a new life and land in the Caesarian colonies. Hence, at different points in this paper, I have repeatedly returned to the question of volition—voluntas: Did Roman citizens willingly join a colony? We can and should take this further to solicit a materialist reading: If Cicero’s tenants had a choice, what material factors might have influenced their decision to leave Rome for the colonies?

Future studies would do well to consider this question and here I can but sketch a few of the factors at hand in what could be a comprehensive checklist.157 While we do not (currently) possess the evidence to speak beyond a few individual instances with any great authority, what has emerged from the patchwork of evidence is that a combination of push and pull factors were probably in play during the decision making process for any prospective colonist—at least when that decision was nominally available to them.158 On the balance, the push factors appear to outweigh, or to inform, the pull factors (e.g., a desire for land could be tied to the calculated desire for a livelihood perceived as better than existing conditions in the city). In specific cases, such as Caesar’s colonies, the sudden disappearance of a key source of daily subsistence (e.g., the grain dole) may have given prospective colonists no other choice but “to give [their] names” (dare nomina).

The hidden costs to different colonists and their personal circumstances should also be considered. Were the citizen ‘dregs’ who joined a colony ever given any start-up capital, or logistical support for their sometimes long and dangerous journey? How much capital did they need to make a new colonial life viable? At least one group of people was given money and transportation by the state to facilitate their own deportation. The 40,000–100,000 non-citizen Apuani who in 180 BCE were explicitly deported from their homes in Liguria, 450 miles away to the Ager Taurasinus in southern central Italy, stand out for the detail Livy offers about the money and transportation they received.159 Livy also notably frames the Apuanian resettlement in terms akin to a colonial foundation or viritane land assignment.160 By contrast, we are in the dark as to whether such state support existed for the colonists at Luna and Lucca who would colonise the land that the Apuani had been displaced from.161 Perhaps we only know of the Apuanian example because it was just so exceptional for non-citizen groups. But any sustained practice of the state supporting colonists beyond military means is currently unattested.162

Nothing in our literary sources suggests how well- or ill-equipped non-veteran colonists were to make the journey to a colonial site and construct their new home. We know that even as late as the colonial foundation at Buthrotum in 44 BCE the colonists encountered local resistance and engaged in some sort of skirmish; yet, again, we hear nothing of their material means or access to the capital required to just up-and-leave from one’s home in Rome.163 No doubt some of Cicero’s rhetoric in his contio against Rullus’ colonial proposal relied precisely on this sticking point. Certainly, not all colonists were created equal upon signing up: Livy’s fourth decade reveals that, at least by the end of the Second Punic War, in Latin colonies the size of an individual land grant was relative to the military class of the colonist.164 In this regard, taking into account differences in the capital, liquidity, and credit available to colonists, as well as their pre-existing skillset, some of the structural inequalities of the urbs were likely replicated in her colonies. Did some colonists face financial ruin, give up, and return to Rome—displaced again by the adversity of their circumstances? As we have seen, at least in the second century BCE, many colonists were clearly unsatisfied with their lives outside of Rome and attempted to return.

Yet other colonists also displayed resilience and found new agency in their displacement. This story should be given equal ink, too. We can point to the example of one freedman, Marcus Caelius Phileros, who was likely a colonist at Caesarian Carthage, where he became aedile (c. 30/29 BCE) and tax prefect, then went on to become duovir at Clupea (also in Africa), and finally, Augustalis at Formiae in Italy; he may have even brokered an agreement between the colonists and citizens of the Marian colony of Uchi.165 Evidently, the transmarine strategy of Caesar’s colonies did not inhibit his mobility—he, at least, made it back to Italy. His career, and not least his physical and political mobility across the Mediterranean, thus speak to his resourcefulness, despite the challenges of forging a new life in a colony that we have considered above. Other freedmen at Corinth, for instance, came from some of the leading households of Rome, and hence they may have been better equipped for the colonial venture—in terms of skills, sources of capital, financial and social networks—than some members of the plebs urbana. The archaeological remains of early colonial foundations also tell another story about the prosperity, hardships, and dynamism of such colonists.166 Colonists therefore likely had the potential either to remain displaced or to emerge from their displacement and find a new sense of ‘place’ in their colony—a new emplacement. Along with the local, non-Roman people whom colonial foundations frequently displaced, the lives of colonists, post-arrival, when understood as displaced persons with their own agency, thus represent another part of this story that remains to be told in future histories.167

Within its deliberately constrained scope, this paper has trained its focus on the earliest stages of the colonisation process—at the interstices of prospective colonists’ agency and the forces influencing, coercing, and negating it—to foreground the opportunities for domestic displacement to occur through this process. Aside from legislative measures, magisterial powers, and socio-economic factors, the best way to assess non-elites’ awareness of their own displacement is, perhaps, through the proxy of the elite discourse itself—the metaphors with which this paper began. That Cicero could report Rullus’ use of the ‘draining’ metaphor in the senate to rile up the contional crowd and invoke memories of failed colonies, while Livy and Dionysius could report plebeian resistance to early colonial initiatives with noticeable regularity, all suggests that in the late Republican and Augustan periods colonisation held the potential to be construed as a form of elites displacing non-elites. At the same time, the very same elite texts attest to the fact that an elite desire to remove the ‘masses’ and their political agency from the urbs appears to have been a pillar of intra-elite solidarity. This is the flipside to the more familiar elite discourse about the tyrannical dangers of land distribution. As we continue to recalibrate our understanding of ‘popular’ politics and sovereignty in the Roman Republic, the history of colonisation as a practice of displacement, and not simply ‘migration’, has much to teach us. The consensus of elite fears about popular sovereignty that ultimately translated into colonial proposals and foundations should be taken as another, and hardly insignificant, proxy for the perceived, if not real, latent power of the ‘masses’ at Rome.