Is there any point to protests?

Street protests are all the rage at the moment. Among the crowds marching up and down in London, there are those holding up banners urging Palestinians to destroy Israel. When ancients protested, they did so to serve their own interests.

Athenians did not need street protests. They invented democracy (508 bc), and all male citizens, meeting in Assembly, debated their protests there. The Roman republic, founded in 509 bc, was initially run by ‘patricians’, men chosen from a few select tribes by Rome’s earlier kings to advise him. Over the next 250 years, the rest of the Roman population (‘plebeians’), vastly outnumbering patricians, periodically withdrew their labour (especially from military service: there were no standing armies) to win political equality. Ancient historians identified five such protests, the last in 287 bc when decrees made by plebeian assemblies became binding on all Romans.

The corn and sometimes the wine supply were equally major issues.