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Comment by uxp8u61q | Hacker News Reader

I always find it hilarious when people look at past societies and simply assume they'd have been born in the upper classes. It is overwhelmingly more likely that you'd have been born a plebeian. This isn't "how to roman republic", this is "how to roman republic's aristocracy". It's like larping as a billionaire today. It's fun, but it's a life you'll never have.

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Of this author's many excellent series, one is about Sparta (https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/), and it makes this point practically word for word. He is vehement in deconstructing the idea that Sparta is represented by the Spartiates, repeatedly emphasising that the majority were helot slaves who are invisible to history but whose lot we'd be far more likely to share.

Your observation stands as a generality but it's somewhat ironic still, making this complaint about a post by a historian who is very very aware of what you're saying.

As Part I of the same series explains, the patrician/plebeian distinction was basically irrelevant by the mid-third century:

https://acoup.blog/2023/07/21/collections-how-to-roman-repub...

Of course, you would still need to be born a wealthy plebeian if you wanted to climb the ranks of Roman politics.

This is the tyranny of documentation. We really have little insight into the plebian life. Most direct information comes from funerary inscriptions and graffiti.

We do know quite a bit about Cicero (possibly more than about any other Roman) and he was a plebian (just like Gaius Marius, Pompey, Cato (both) etc.)

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