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Singing Away the Harvest in the Twelve Tables
03/30/10
The idea of progress—the constant expansion of wealth and knowledge and supposedly therefore human happiness and well being—is so embedded in Western culture, especially American culture, that it can simply seem a truism, but it is an idea created by the Industrial Revolution. The sudden increase in human productivity brought about by industrialization changed the fundamental conditions of living and the fundamental way people experienced and hence thought about the world. For the first time food, possessions, shelter, and everything necessary for life was available in abundance. The view of the world held in classical antiquity was quite different.
For the Greeks and Romans, progress in our modern sense was impossible, or at most it could be had by going backward. The world had been perfect when it was created and had been declining ever since. If a Roman Emperor wanted to advertise the Great Society he was creating, he did not offer a New Deal but rather “claimed he was Restoring the Golden Age”. Learning was likewise not thought to be something that advanced. All of the knowledge in the world had been revealed to mankind by the gods at the beginning of history and had declined ever since as more and more of it was lost. Research did not mean the creation of new knowledge but ferreting out hidden secrets in some forgotten library.
Antiquity was a time of chronic poverty in which the world was constantly on the edge of starvation. The idea that society could become more productive and new wealth be created hardly existed even as a fantasy. This is why envy was among the greatest sins in antiquity: you could not want to get more for yourself without taking it away from someone else. Your getting ahead had to mean your neighbor falling behind. The superstition of the evil eye was an expression of the fear that the envious glance of your neighbors directed at the health of your child or the productivity of your farm might take away what little you had.
The impossibility of “progress” is embedded in many ways in the oldest document of Roman law, the Twelve Tables. These texts were supposedly set as public inscriptions about the year 450 BCE at the insistence of the Roman Plebian class so that they might at last know the laws that governed them, which had before then been jealously guarded secrets of the Patricians. No doubt much of what we know about their origin (mostly from the historian Livy) is legendary, but they were nevertheless certainly the first written Roman law code. The original tablets were destroyed when the Gauls sacked the city of Rome in 390 BCE, but they are frequently referred to by later Roman authors allowing something like their original form to be reconstructed, if somewhat speculatively, in the details of the order and arrangement of the text. They are written in the peculiar sing-song Saturnine verse form. Clearly they were meant to be memorized by the mostly illiterate masses of the city’s population. Of course, since they were so old, they never lost the force of law.
The eighth law of the eighth tablet is preserved in two fragments: “Whoever sings away crops [i.e. with a spell]” and “neither shall anyone drive away another’s harvest.” These little broken lines can lead to some fanciful reconstructions, with a wizard leading a parade of haystacks from one farmer’s field to another’s like something from a Disney cartoon, but really this law illustrates a basic idea of ancient thought as characteristic of the Graeco-Roman mind as progress is of the modern, the idea that if my neighbor has more than I do, he has stolen what is rightfully mine. The “singing away crops” means that someone makes a curse (magical spells in antiquity were sung rather than spoken) to destroy my crops. Why would someone do that? The second fragment supplies the answer: to take the harvest that ought to have been in my field and lead it to his. It also illustrates one of the best ways to think about magic in antiquity: If I am wronged or just unlucky, it is unjust, and some power must be responsible for that injustice, and that power is magic.
We happen to know about a prosecution that was carried out of a violator of this law. The story came from the first surviving encyclopedia, the Natural History of Pliny the Elder. This monumental work we owe to the fanatical scholarly industry of its author, who spent every waking moment either reading or dictating his own writing to a secretary. Its preservation gives us insight into a whole underworld of ancient technical literature in every field, otherwise lacking from the 1 percent or so of the greatest literary gems that otherwise survive from ancient literature. In a way typical of ancient thought, Pliny conceived of his work as an “act of worship to a divine world”, and he concluded with this prayer: “Hail to thee, Nature, thou parent of all things! and do thou deign to show thy favour unto me, who, alone of all the citizens of Rome, have, in thy every department, thus made known thy praise.”
In his 18th book on agriculture, Pliny recounts the trial of Gaius Furius Chresimus just after the Third Punic War, during the ascendency of Roman power (ca. 148 BCE). Chresimus was a freed slave whose farm was prospering just a little too much to suit his less fortunate neighbors. A lawsuit was brought against the more prosperous farmer on the grounds of stealing away the crops to the less prosperous farmer’s fields through magic under the old law of the Twelve Tables. When he made his defense speech against the charge, Chresimus brought into court all of his well-used but well-sharpened plows and other farm implements, together with his healthy oxen and his own well kept slaves. He then addressed the jury: “Here, Roman citizens,…are my implements of magic; but it is impossible for me to exhibit to your view, or to bring into this Forum, those midnight toils of mine, those early watchings, those sweats, and those fatigues.”
After this dramatic display, Chresimus was acquitted on the unanimous vote of the jury. He had saved himself by an appeal to the ancient stereotype of the industrious peasant against the ancient fear of envy. The jury recognized who was envious of whom.
Bradley Skeen is an independent scholar whose focus is on classical antiquity.