From all I've read of Rome if you weren't a citizen, and only a small minority of provincials were, you had few rights in law at all. Even citizens had little influence on what laws were passed or taxes imposed. Of course if you were a woman you would have no rights at all, simply your father's property until you were married when you became your husband's. So that's a 50% chance of being worse off under Roman law.
I think the appearance of arbitrariness in Brehon law is due to the wide range of different rulings in different places which were all gathered together by Christian monks who tried to consolidate it into a single code. The big plus of Celtic society was that the leader was local, he could be appealed to, influenced and even disposed of by the people he ruled.
>I'm also arguing that the image of ancient Celts as freedom-loving anarchic egalitarian hedonists is more a
>projection of our desires of the Celts-as-wished-for rather than the Celts-as-historical-entities.
ISTR a claim by some feminists that it was matriachal as well. Certainly some writers have gone way over the top in their interpretations but conversely the traditional reliance on Roman and subsequent English sources is also unreliable.
>>From Caesar's Gallic Wars (ok, not the most objective source), trans. S.A. Handford:
>
>"Everywhere in Gaul there are only two classes of men who are of any account or consideration. The common people are
>treated almost as slaves, never venture to act on their own initiative, and are not consulted on any subject. Most of
>them, crushed by debt or heavy taxation or the oppression of more powerful persons, bind themselves over to serve men
>of rank, who exercise over them all the rights that masters have over slaves. The two priviledged classes are the
>Druids and the Knights".
>
>So, pre-Roman Gallic society, from Caesar's account, seems to be close to the feudal society that filled the vacuum
>left after the collapse of Rome.
Not only is Caesar a biased source and would not have understood the society he was criticising but I'm very suspicious of a translation which uses the word "knights". The feudal system arose from the late Roman practice of large landlords and non-citizen tenants (serfs). It wasn't introduced to England until William I, when it was a major change from the Celtic, Germanic and Norse practices which had applied before.
>And needless to say, not a good model for the Orlanthi (although most of what we know about the Orlanthi is of course
>purposely misleading anti-Lunar propaganda. ;))
I sometimes get the feeling that Heortling society is an idealised mixture of Norse and Celtic cultures.
>> Truth is 90% of any
>> group of people will do what's expected of them by that group. 90%
>> of the rest will rebel in minor ways but follow the group line on
>> important matters. That leaves 1% who may challenge the core of a
>> society's behaviour. It's how society deals with that 1% that
>> determines whether its repressive and a lot depends on how easy it
>> is to opt out.
>
>I can't agree with you that the sole judge of how repressive a society is based on how it treats the 1% who rebel
>against its strictures the most. On that basis, given that the US incarcerates about 1% of its population (who by
>definition, are lawbreakers and the ones who rebel the most against expected behaviour), and has the second highest
>per capita incarceration rate, I could say that Saudi Arabia is a less repressive society than the US, as it has a
>lower incarceration rate. That would be absurd, obviously - how the other 99% of the population is treated has to be
>a factor in assessing the "repressiveness" of the society.
The US isn't a single social group, a high proportion of those it imprisons are acting within the expectations of their social group. Indeed many don't have the intelligence to challenge those expectations which conflict with the laws laid down by the state. It is the way in which the social group reacts to challenges within it's membership and how easy it is move away from that group. So the bible-belter who denounces creationism will be excluded and has a choice of living with that or moving somewhere more tolerant. The easier it is to make that choice the less he his repressed.
>> Ancient societies *had* to treat people who didn't
>> wish to be part of them harshly - you must be either in or out, if
>> you're out - goodbye. The modern concept of repression comes from
>> that same approach but nowhere for the outsider to go,
>
>So you wouldn't agree that slave, serfdom or thrall-holding were repressive? All of which predate the 19th century.
The celtic and norse practice of slavery was a lot less repressive than medieval serfdom and that less repressive than 19th Century absentee landlords and factory wage labour. The commercial slavery of the Roman empire and 16th-19th Century Europe and America is probably the only match for the most repressive modern states. Even then it was easier for a slave to escape than a dissident to find refuge in the modern world.
End of The Glorantha Digest V8 #173
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