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. In 67 bc, for example, when pirates threatened Rome’s food supplies, Romans protested at the senate’s failure to send Pompey the Great to deal with them. In 39 bc, furious crowds came out to demand the end of the civil war following Caesar’s assassination (44 bc), because the corn supply was being affected. If push came to shove, public grain stores would be attacked, and even the homes of any rich suspected of hoarding. The later emperors well understood where their duty lay. In 23 bc, Augustus bought grain with his own money. In ad 19, Tiberius imposed a maximum price, compensating merchants. In ad 51 Claudius, set upon by a crowd, sent for grain in the middle of a desperate winter shortage. Luckily, the weather held off.

Many pro-Palestinian protestors will be hoping to serve the cause of peace. But Hamas’s charter demands genocide, the death of every Jew; further (article 13), ‘Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement’.