The Nameless Crowd: Using Quantitative Data and Digital Tools to Study the Ancient Vocabulary of the Crowd in Tacitus
Combining quantitative and qualitative information, this paper investigates from a lexicological and socio-historical perspective the vocabulary of the crowd in Tacitus, a Roman historian of the 1st century AD. Unlike most of Latin authors, Tacitus uses predominantly the word vulgus in comparison to turba, multitudo and the other nouns referring to urban and military crowds. This quantitative singularity of vulgus matches the qualitative analysis of the semantic nuances and the contexts of use of these words. Focusing one after the other in a contrastive way on the phenomenological, sociological and ethological dimensions of the crowds depicted by Tacitus, we show that, while turba and multitudo refer to strongly spatialized crowds, whose social composition does not seem to be a strong defining factor, usually without any own opinion or political autonomy, vulgus refers in Tacitus to a “popular” crowd, defined by its ability to vocalize its own feelings and opinion and to engage in dialogue, or even conflict, with the ruling elites. The vulgus thus seems to become, in Tacitus’ analysis, a new political actor of the imperial regime, an actor which, contrary to the institutional populus, does not express its opinion through the ordinary political institutions that were traditionally controlled by the Roman aristocracy (the comitia for instance), but proceeds to do so through vocalizations in non-institutional (albeit deeply political) contexts.