Here is Cicero:
“The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.”
All of course as excellent advice, in Rome as in the 21st century, but what does he refer to with “assistance to foreign lands”?
There is some doubt that Cicero ever said any such thing. The flow of money would normally be in the other direction.
Rome did occasionally pay off hostile tribes, when it was cheaper than going to war, but I don’t think this happened during the Republic period.
Just where did Cicero say that? I don’t recall seeing it before.
ETA: Snope’d again. Damn slow typing!
New rule: If a historical figure is reported as having said something appropriate to the modern day, chances are he never actually said it.
Did the Roman Empire have a public debt? The idea seems too modern for them.
Also, did the Romans have public assistance? I’ve never heard of it.
Yes: bread and circuses.
They famously had a grain-dole for citizens. Its the “Bread” part of “Bread and Circuses”. And Cicero was indeed critical of it, though as a guy who earned a lot of money off the labor of his slaves, his criticism of other people needing to do more work would be kinda rich.
Oh, right… :smack:
Was it an actual dole though (as in formal, bureaucratic, “fill out tablet 7B and go see Procius Manilius on the 3rd floor”) ? For whatever reason, I always assumed the bread part of “Bread & Circuses” was just people throwing loaves of bread into the crowd.
Erm, wasn’t the grain-dole supposed to supply only the people in the city of Rome? I have a hard time interpreting that as “assistance to foreign lands” - it seems more like the opposite, in fact.
I was responding to a poster asking about the “public assistance” part of the quote.
It meant different things at different times, but it was usually more systematic then just tossing bread to people at random. Sometimes it was just a subsidy for grain delivered to the city, sometimes qualifying citizens could go and pick up grain for free.
The “bread and circuses” phrase is from Juvenal:
From Bread and circuses - Wikipedia
From upthread:
Possible exception to new rule: Juvenal.
The kind of assistance lent by Rome usually finished with Rome ruling over the foreign land they were assisting (and paid for themselves in pillage and slaves in the process). In Cicero’s day the classic example of this was Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars which began when several Gallic tribes appealed for help from Rome in the face of invasion from the Helvetii.
And yeah, in common with other posters, I would want a reliable source for this quote before I attributed it to Cicero.
There is a fairly involved discussion of the dubious origin of this quote here
I was of the understanding that Roman “Social Security” was provided via form of Patronage- an impoverished Roman would go to the house of a wealthy Roman citizen (or Senator or whoever) to get food or small amounts of money, in return for pledging their support to the Patron.
The passage as rendered in the OP quote has some turns of phrase from modern politics such that it looks to me more like a paraphrase rather than a translation – done by someone who was interpreting Cicero from the POV of contemporary policy positions.
One important thing to note is that Cicero lived at the end of the Republic. As mentioned, “living on public assistance” would more likely have been “living on patronage and charity” - at the time, the panem was political patronage, doled out as the personal gift of some official or candidate. Not welfare as we know it, but folks knowing that if you were on Crassus’ good side he’d remember you if you needed a little something to tide you over 'til the calends, or that Pompey would finance a few galleys of grain to come in just as the market was getting tight.
“Assistance to foreign lands”? As mentioned, in Cicero’s lifetime, tribute would be flowing INTO Rome from many peripheral nations. Maye the ocassional bribe to a local king to keep him a loyal bootlicker, or support in the form of troops and trade to a peripheral realm against a common foe (and the local princeling had better be careful, or this would end up with the Romans deciding hey, why not just take over) but NOT “nation-building” funds. Heck, I may be wrong but at the time I believe that even in the provinces themselves, if you wanted to build an aqueduct or road, you had to pay it by levying a tax IN the province, not by getting an earmark from the Senate. Even Antony’s attempts to gain a power base with his own allies in Egypt and Asia Minor would not count as “aid” since those places were wealthy economies themselves.
Yes, many officials had by now decided the Republic was to be run for their own aggrandizement as the only true savior of the people (Marius,Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, etc.) but that was the least of their problems. The Republic HAD crashed and burned under the weight of its own sociopolitical failings into a state of on-again-off-again civil wars that had gone on for decades and would still go on for years after Cicero’s death. That can’t have been good for the national finances so it’s likely true that the budget was busted and the administration was a mess, but the quote is pretty thin on how the heck you fix that.
griffin1977’s link’s discussion seems to point to it being an attribution to Cicero in *fiction *rather than from his own works.
From Juvenal to Roddenberry: Bread and Circuses (episode) | Memory Alpha | Fandom
Alexander the Great had one much earlier, not just the personal debt of a king but a debt inherited from the reign of his father which he expanded to fund his military adventures. Probably paid it off after all that conquest, though.
I know you don’t say it was too modern for them, but I thought I’d point out that the Greeks had some of that too. Of course, not for slaves. Slaves just made it all possible with their tireless involuntary labour.