Six scenarios for a world without work

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Oddly enough [at least according to the infallible wiki] Spartacus was born only 10 years after the grain dole (the bread of "bread and circuses") was started, giving each Roman Citizen a fixed amount of grain (I don't think baking it was part of the deal, it was covered in a BBC "meet the Romans" documentary but my memory is fuzzy). A few generation after that, "voting" was mostly rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, and hoping for a good emperor without kids to adopt a potential good emperor (the one with a son broke the chain, and eventually the Empire).

When the City was small enough to remain a Republic, presumably the vote was enough. Once the Emperor took all the real power, they had to give the plebs bread and circuses. They also were in fear of the slaves realizing that they outnumbered everyone else (although obviously never quite as terrified as the Spartans).

This is slightly wrong. The crucial mistake in this is assuming that the Empire never existed without an Emperor. It simply isn't the case. The Roman Republic continued to be a Republic in name but became an Empire following the second Punic war. Rome's endless expansion had been ongoing, but without Carthage to counter Rome, Rome expansion ballooned. The deaths of most of the old lines in the various battles against Hannibal also meant that a new crop of politicians took over power, politicians that came to power through their amassed wealth, and who (pretty much immediately) turned the Republic into an oligopoly. At that point the patronage system became the only system: you had a patron, who gave you money to vote for what he wanted. Rome descended into practically rule of mob soon thereafter, which led to the rise of "populist" politicians, attempting to subvert the oligopoly via the Tribune of the Plebs veto (the only political position that still was voted primarily by the poor). The Gracae brothers being the most famous, but hardly the only ones.

In short: what killed the Roman Republic was expansion, yes, but the emperors (with a couple of minor exceptions) never expanded Rome. Because of this, emperors by and large were not scared of slaves, because without expansion, there weren't that many slaves (heck, the slaves run the Empire most of the time: ex-slaves formed the core of the bureaucracy under the more competent emperors). It was only the late Republic, the eternally expansionist one, that was awash with slaves from all the conquests and thus were the slave revolts happened (eventually forcing the Senate to pass laws to protect the slaves from abuse).

Grey Wolf