What do Pops Represent?: Gameplay Mechanics and Historical Simulation Discussion

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TwiddleFactor

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Great analysis! I only want to comment on the last paragraph - it seems levies will be defined according to individual cultures, not pop types.

I think it is both. From the Dev diary last week,

This means that levied troops will vary greatly depending on where in the world you are raising them, and dependent on what cultures you have integrated. An Etruscan levy is going to be different from a Roman one, and a Macedonian levy will be different from a Carthaginian one.
In addition to being dependent on culture, the unit type maps to different pop types. A cohort of Heavy cavalry is going to be raised from Citizens or Nobles, whereas an Archer cohort would be coming from Freemen or Tribesmen.

You suggest a further dissection of classes that IMHO only does better on describing the specific means of production. However, they are all proletariat, they do not own the means. Tribesmen do not believe in property and freeman do not own the land. The distinction is interesting but I do not see how it adds to the game play.

Finally, the clan chief's linked to provinces like governors in Monarchies and Republics. Isn't that the antithesis of a tribe? Tribes are well represented with the families (clan chiefs) power struggle inside the tribe. Although the game should limit the expansion beyond regional power and instead favor the defensive leagues between tribes of the same culture.

I think they can be considered to own the means of production. Small holders would own the land that they work, and pastoralists own the herds and flocks that they tend to.
 

Spazcat91

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I entertain the following Marxist idea:

Nobles: capitalists
Citizens: Urban Workers or Proletariat
Freeman: Rural Workers or Proletariat that migrate to cities and shall become Citizens over time
Tribesmen: class that shall decay and finally disappear in any system outside a Tribe
Slaves: class that shall decay and finally disappear in the face of time


Errr... Not to be a buzzkill, but with all due respect that's not the Marxist conception of class society in this time period... Even trying to make it analogous to modern social class strata's it's incorrect.
 
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Valentinius

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I always thought the game attempted the Athenian model, where Nobles are the aristocracy and political elite, citizens are (male) full members of the city state elegible to vote, freemen are foreigners, poor, freed slaves etc not allowed a vote and slaves are slaves. Tribesmen in this system would be those who (in "civilized" societies) reject prevailing social norms of stratification, government institutions, law enforcement etc.

I think all pop types except freemen are implemented well in the game come 2.0, as they shouldn't have political power and they shouldn't provide levies in say rome or greek city states that relied on citizen levy (and where armed service was seen as a privelege). But this hinges on citizens being rebranded as just that, citizens, and not some middle class. Roman citizens could both be destitute and hideously wealthy without being called freemen or nobles.
 
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NoUsernamesHere

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Proles: unskilled urban labourers, the middle section between slaves and citizens. Very easy for states to control... until they riot. Exclusively infantry.

Excellent write up and I agree with everything in it other than the proles. They shouldn’t levy into anything, since only landholders should be levied (perhaps with some exceptions, whether laws, traditions, or options in specific cases at a cost).
 
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master_kong

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I always thought the game attempted the Athenian model, where Nobles are the aristocracy and political elite, citizens are (male) full members of the city state elegible to vote, freemen are foreigners, poor, freed slaves etc not allowed a vote and slaves are slaves. Tribesmen in this system would be those who (in "civilized" societies) reject prevailing social norms of stratification, government institutions, law enforcement etc.

I think all pop types except freemen are implemented well in the game come 2.0, as they shouldn't have political power and they shouldn't provide levies in say rome or greek city states that relied on citizen levy (and where armed service was seen as a privelege). But this hinges on citizens being rebranded as just that, citizens, and not some middle class. Roman citizens could both be destitute and hideously wealthy without being called freemen or nobles.
This. Only problem for me with pop types is citizens-freemen distinction. Differentiating levy contribution between them would potentially solve that.
 

IsaacCAT

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This. Only problem for me with pop types is citizens-freemen distinction. Differentiating levy contribution between them would potentially solve that.

If we break with the Roman mindset, citizens shall be the owners and freemen the paid labor.

About levy contribution, citizens would have to appear in settlements as the landowners and contributors of levies.
 

Bovrick

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So what I'm going to propose is that tribesmen and freemen be reorganised into:
  • Farmers: present in both tribal and non-tribal societies, these are free smallholders, found everywhere farming can be supported- plains, forests where they can be clear cut, swamps when they are drained, fertile plateaus, upland river valleys, etc. Easy for states to control and extract from, but their outputs- returns to the treasury- scale with civilisation- how hierarchicalised society is. Levy typically as infantry, but can include some cavalry.
  • Proles: unskilled urban labourers, the middle section between slaves and citizens. Very easy for states to control... until they riot. Exclusively infantry.
  • Pastoralists: herders, typically found in plains, deserts and unforested uplands. They're in competition with farmers for tableland, though I think, in this part of the world and at this point in history, farmers have mostly chased them out of everywhere that can be farmed? Difficult to control, but have a strong cavalry bias- they have a lot of livestock.
  • Nomads: steppe normads, specific to the steppe; another group of pastoralists I'm breaking out because they should levy as horse archers specifically, and because they're even more external to states than other pastoralists were.
  • Hunter-gathers: found only in places that can't support farming or pasturing at all- forests and swamps, largely. Again, difficult to control, and only produce the lightest of infantry types- they're extremely poor, and their land is unsuitable for horses.
To be honest I'm quite comfortable seeing this view be represented with the current two Pop types, but with further distinctions for their behaviours/happiness/outputs applied based on where they are (and maybe their Culture).
Farmers - Freemen when they are in a Settlement territory. Relatively high Food outputs.
Proles - Freemen when they are in a City/Metro territroy. Relatively high Tax outputs.
Pastoralists/Nomads/HGs - Tribesmen in their respective biomes of plains/steppes/uncleared; or distinguished by the culture of the Pop, though I'm less comfortable with that approach. Differences between tribesmen output happiness distinguished by modifiers from the territory.
 
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IsaacCAT

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To be honest I'm quite comfortable seeing this view be represented with the current two Pop types, but with further distinctions for their behaviours/happiness/outputs applied based on where they are (and maybe their Culture).
Farmers - Freemen when they are in a Settlement territory. Relatively high Food outputs.
Proles - Freemen when they are in a City/Metro territroy. Relatively high Tax outputs.
Pastoralists/Nomads/HGs - Tribesmen in their respective biomes of plains/steppes/uncleared; or distinguished by the culture of the Pop, though I'm less comfortable with that approach. Differences between tribesmen output happiness distinguished by modifiers from the territory.

With this distinction we can build a social mobility proposal, as the POP's will progressively transform to one or another depending on their migration. Their output will be different as well. A game of POPs will be my next suggestion for the Senatus.
 
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TwiddleFactor

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I always thought the game attempted the Athenian model, where Nobles are the aristocracy and political elite, citizens are (male) full members of the city state elegible to vote, freemen are foreigners, poor, freed slaves etc not allowed a vote and slaves are slaves. Tribesmen in this system would be those who (in "civilized" societies) reject prevailing social norms of stratification, government institutions, law enforcement etc.

I also had this impression based on the naming convention, but it doesn't actually fit with how their mechanics work in game. The athenians had citizens that were farmers, citizens that were labourers and citizens that were merchants. With the cultural integration mechanics, I don't think we need to have a dedicated citizen pop, and instead a culture's level of integration can represent their citizenship status, and pops can be dedicated exclusively to socio/economic status.

I feel that the current way that pop types are representing both citizenship status and economic status is the root of the wonky mechanics.
 
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IsaacCAT

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I also had this impression based on the naming convention, but it doesn't actually fit with how their mechanics work in game. The athenians had citizens that were farmers, citizens that were labourers and citizens that were merchants. With the cultural integration mechanics, I don't think we need to have a dedicated citizen pop, and instead a culture's level of integration can represent their citizenship status, and pops can be dedicated exclusively to socio/economic status.

I feel that the current way that pop types are representing both citizenship status and economic status is the root of the wonky mechanics.

In modern times Citizen means an inhabitant of a city or town.

Because this game is not only about Athens or even Rome, I agree with you that citizenship shall be related to culture integration. Then, how will you call the owners of land/business that dwell in the cities that are not nobles? The petite bourgeoise?
 

TwiddleFactor

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In modern times Citizen means an inhabitant of a city or town.

Because this game is not only about Athens or even Rome, I agree with you that citizenship shall be related to culture integration. Then, how will you call the owners of land/business that dwell in the cities that are not nobles? The petite bourgeoise?

Good point. Bourgeoise or even Burghers would feel really out of place in a game about Antiquity, and I would rather keep Citizen than switch to those.
 

Bovrick

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I feel that the current way that pop types are representing both citizenship status and economic status is the root of the wonky mechanics.
With the Culture laws as they are, I think it has only become a nomenclature issue; I think the concept of Integrated vs non-Integrated Pops covers the idea of "Citizenship" that people default to in this thread, whereas the Citizen Pop type is covering a Class rather than a level of political rights. An Integrated Freeman would be what we'd call the citizen-farmer or poor urban citizen; whereas a non-Integrated Freeman would be the people of similar means, but without political rights.
 
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Mr. Wiggles

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I agree with the thread that citizens, freemen and particularly tribesmen are the problematic items.

On the tribesmen/freemen split, I think it might more useful to, rather than attempt to find some abstract theoretical category that we can match either to, or engaging with the game's flavour text, examine the mechanical differences between the two and determine what the semantics of the system are communicating with this distinction.

Tribesmen are:
  • Associated with tribes. By default, a tribal state is an undifferentiated mass of tribesmen; only if they have cities will their pops gravitate to other types. By default, a non-tribal state will have no tribesmen whatsoever; only while they are integrating tribal territory will they contain tribesmen.
  • Less valuable to the state than other pop types. They produce less.
  • Are slightly less participatory in the political process than freemen. Their political weight is 75%.
  • Are naturally happy. They are the only pop type with a positive base happiness.
  • Dislike "civilisation". Their happiness is negatively impacted as a territory's "civilisation value" increases. Whatever that means.
Freemen are:
  • Associated with cities and non-tribal states.
  • Represent some sort of intermediate position in a social hierarchy, between slaves and citizens. The game's primary coding for civic rights is which stratum a pop of a particular culture may advance to- envisaged as a linear progression from slave, to freeman, to citizen, to noble.
  • More valuable to the state than tribesmen. They produce more.
  • Are fully participatory in the political process. They have a political weight of 100%.
  • Are naturally unhappy, though not to the degree that citizens or nobles are.
  • Like "civilisation". Their happiness is positively affected by civilisation.
So, interpretation: what does this mean? Well, it's bound up in how we interpret two other closely-related systems: government type and civilisation.

With government type there's a three-way partition into "tribes", "monarchies" and "republics", but the major divide is between tribes and non-tribes. These are not exactly unfraught terms: there's a lot of historical baggage here and it's not clear that Paradox are handling the concepts with due care. Nevertheless, between things like tribal centralisation as a sort of tribe/non-tribe gradient and the existence of clan chiefs as alternate poles of power, I think we can be fairly safe in asserting that this is a distinction between strong and weak states. Not necessarily strong and weak executives- the republic/monarchic divide seems to be one of differing levels of autocracy, but both are presented as equally distinct from tribes- but how cohesive the state is as an actor.

Civilisation is stranger. There's a soft relationship between it and government type, but not as strong as the one with centralisation. The flavour text (breaking my own rules here for a second) claims it represents the level of "level of infrastructure and urbanization", but this is rather dubious. Two major pieces of infrastructure- roads, buildings- are broken out as separate systems, and urbanisation seems extremely strongly represented by the presence or absence of cities and metropoleis in a territory (civilisation predates that system, so this is somewhat a product of vestigiality, but the system's still hanging around so it's fair game imo). We're forced to assume that this is representing some unclear mix of whatever material conditions aren't already covered and the presence of social norms that are associated with strong states and strongly preferred by non-tribal pops, especially elites.

So, with that in mind:

The associations with the different forms of government is interesting. The fact that tribal states are, ceteris paribus, 100% tribesmen, is especially interesting. Imperator tells us that the founding of cities and the strengthening of states means, necessarily, the introduction of a social hierarchy. We move from an egalitarian society to a stratified one; tribesmen are replaced by slaves, freemen, citizens, nobles. That's almost profound! I'm not certain it would be unreservedly supported by the scholarship, but I don't think it would be entirely rejected, either- I see a lot of, just to name one name, James C. Scott in this analysis.

The lower outputs and the lower political weight seem to go hand in hand, to me. As @Samitte notes above, there's a sense that these are groups that are somewhat less bound to the state. There's a potential reading here where the lower outputs are a sort of mindless encoding of antiquated notions of "primitive" peoples and "barbarians"- that their returns to the treasury are less because they're just producing less. But slaves are also the largest producer of tax, while citizens and nobles produce non at all. If we are to read citizens as skilled labour, that seems to make little sense. In this context, in seems more reasonable to interpret a pop type's outputs as having less to do with their actual productive capacity and more with the state's ability to extract their product from them- how alienated they are from their labour value. Slaves are totally so, and so you reap the most tax from them. Political weight is straightforwardly a indication of tied into the state's workings a group is- though this time in the other direction. It's a measure of how able the state is to ignore the desires of those groups.

Also emerging here is a statement that states are motivated to create hierarchies because it produces social segments that the state is better able to extract resources from. Again this is a really interesting statement about the way states and societies work, and I think it makes Imperator interesting to think about as a text on this level.

The happiness transition is strongly tied to "civilisation", which, again, is poorly defined, so any interpretation we make is necessarily going to be weakly founded. What we can say for sure is that tribesmen are pretty happy just chilling, being themselves, while the non-tribal pop types seem to be kind of like hot house flowers- happy in the comfort of their natural environment, but highly sensitive to local conditions. That this is more extreme the more privileged a pop is is suggestive, but not conclusive. This could be purely a facile "pampered nobles can't hack in the wilds, but tribesmen are hard men" narrative. Again, though, there doesn't seem to be much else to support the idea that "civilisation" has much to do with material conditions. An alternative is that the social norms that civilisation encodes are hierarchical norms- the actual rather than theoretical strength of hierarchy prevailing in the region. That's attractive, given that it would seem to agree with the happiness gradient- the further up the tower of privilege you are, the more you benefit from hierarchy, and so the happier you are, and slaves don't benefit at all. But there are problems- would elites really be basally unhappy- tremendously so!- in weak hierarchies, if they have no memory of a strong hierarchy to compare it to? Contrariwise, are freemen far enough up the chain for their happiness to increase with increasing hierarchy? Something that may alleviate the latter is the thought that civilisation may encode not just the strength of hierarchy, but how naturalised hierarchy is in social narratives.

Ultimately, I think we have a moderately confident case that the tribesman/non-tribesman split encodes an division between egalitarian and hierarchical societies, and the tribesman/freeman split encodes a division between reconciled and unreconciled mid-stratum groups in hierarchies. This is weakly contraindicated in places- tribesmen actually produce more tax than freemen, though the difference is slight- but I think it's a workable as a reading.

So, that established, are these ideas worth encoding in system, and if they are, is the pop system an appropriate place for them?

To the former, I have to say yes. Like I said, I think this is one of the most interesting parts of Imperator as a text, and I think it's extremely valuable, both to that and to the gameplay, that it attempts to model this transition from weak to strong states as something other than some sort of transformation in abstract "government types" (alienated, somehow, from the actual legal and socioeconomic structures of the society??). I greatly like that it reaches all the way down to the fundament. I wish it was even more involved, even. Get rid of the pop type attraction on government types, push that all onto city status and civilisation, make civilisation dependent civilisation. Make founding cities the fundamental action of transforming society and strengthening the state. Have that feedback into government type. Maybe clan chiefs aren't just abstractly fundamental to "tribal" government types, maybe you've got a clan chief for every majority-tribal province. Dissolve the tribal/non-tribal government binary entirely. Put that on a gradient.

To the latter, I say kinda-sorta. This idea of the tribesman as the everyman pop, living in undifferentiated egalitarianism, functions as a relation between state and populace, but it's not, quite, an economic mode, which is a problem for various reasons that others have outlined above. The tribesman-freeman distinction is particularly problematic because, as noted above, in a lot of places the way of life is going to look very simple- free farmers, and the egalitarian-hierarchical split is already sufficiently encoded by the lack of elites into tribal societies: it does not require a new middle stratum. However, there are groups that are economically distinct from these farmers and which I think can be strongly matched to the "inner barbarians" concept that @Samitte raised previously; the unintegrated, politically inaccessible groups that cling on in peripheral areas even in strong states. These are non-farmers- pastoralists and hunter-gathers, mostly- groups that have historically proven difficult for states to grapple with, as their ways of life- less bound to immobile capital stock- make them more fluid and less vulnerable than city dwellers and sedentary farmers.

So what I'm going to propose is that tribesmen and freemen be reorganised into:
  • Farmers: present in both tribal and non-tribal societies, these are free smallholders, found everywhere farming can be supported- plains, forests where they can be clear cut, swamps when they are drained, fertile plateaus, upland river valleys, etc. Easy for states to control and extract from, but their outputs- returns to the treasury- scale with civilisation- how hierarchicalised society is. Levy typically as infantry, but can include some cavalry.
  • Proles: unskilled urban labourers, the middle section between slaves and citizens. Very easy for states to control... until they riot. Exclusively infantry.
  • Pastoralists: herders, typically found in plains, deserts and unforested uplands. They're in competition with farmers for tableland, though I think, in this part of the world and at this point in history, farmers have mostly chased them out of everywhere that can be farmed? Difficult to control, but have a strong cavalry bias- they have a lot of livestock.
  • Nomads: steppe normads, specific to the steppe; another group of pastoralists I'm breaking out because they should levy as horse archers specifically, and because they're even more external to states than other pastoralists were.
  • Hunter-gathers: found only in places that can't support farming or pasturing at all- forests and swamps, largely. Again, difficult to control, and only produce the lightest of infantry types- they're extremely poor, and their land is unsuitable for horses.
If we want to simplify that a bit- and five different types of pop is a lot, so we probably should- we could merge proles and citizens- if we've decided they're urban artisans and small merchants?- and pastoralists and nomads, though I really feel that "the horse archer pop" should be its own thing. You could also collapse pastorialists and hunter-gatherers into "marginals" but, again, there's a real distinction to be made in levy type there that I think we would miss.
Imo you are reading too much into it...
The assumption tribesmen represent a sort of egalitarian society is a very strong ipothesis, with no actual basis in reality.
Most "tribes" in this period had a stratified society.
I checked and the wiki says tribal nations have a standard 50% desired ratio for tribesmen. I guess it could be explained by saying there a bunch of major settlements which host freemen, nobles etc and a sizeable population living in smaller villages in the countryside.
I think the confusion comes to be because civilized nations have a 0% desired ratio for tribesmen...they are an outlier. What makes them special? What makes them different from a freemen or a slave? A tribesman could very well be a slave, a freeman, a citizen, or a noble...Who knows...we can make 1000 theories but occam's razor is telling me that they are just a poorly thought mechanic.

Maybe tieing tribesmen ratio to the civilization level of a province would make more sense from an immersion perspective? They would not be a special case anymore since civilized nations would have their share of tribesmen.
I dont know how heavy it would be on terms of calculation tho.

In short: imo the focal point is that irl tribesmen WERE slaves freemen and nobles and this creates confusion.
Why? Most probably because it is a subtle problem and devs did not think about it.
 
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Imo you are reading too much into it...
The assumption tribesmen represent a sort of egalitarian society is a very strong ipothesis, with no actual basis in reality.
Most "tribes" in this period had a stratified society.
I checked and the wiki says tribal nations have a standard 50% desired ratio for tribesmen. I guess it could be explained by saying there a bunch of major settlements which host freemen, nobles etc and a sizeable population living in smaller villages in the countryside.
I think the confusion comes to be because civilized nations have a 0% desired ratio for tribesmen...they are an outlier. What makes them special? What makes them different from a freemen or a slave? A tribesman could very well be a slave, a freeman, a citizen, or a noble...Who knows...we can make 1000 theories but occam's razor is telling me that they are just a poorly thought mechanic.

Maybe tieing tribesmen ratio to the civilization level of a province would make more sense from an immersion perspective? They would not be a special case anymore since civilized nations would have their share of tribesmen.
I dont know how heavy it would be on terms of calculation tho.

In short: imo the focal point is that irl tribesmen WERE slaves freemen and nobles and this creates confusion.
Why? Most probably because it is a subtle problem and devs did not think about it.
In tribal countries represented in the game, there is a majority of tribesmen but also slave, citizen and even noble pops, so tribesmen cant represent all of these, rather they do represent some commoner class in tribal societies akin to freemen in the mediterrannean.

Tribal countries can have citizens and nobles especially in ther capitals and these in my opinion represent the tribal elites akin to the role they play in meditterranean republics or monarchies. Now of course citizens in tribal countries are unhappy due to low civilisation value and there is less of them, but lets say that as part of a universal social class (regardless of which government type or civilisation stage they belong to) they aspire to be like the meditterranean elites and such are harder to please. Also slaves - dont forget there are slave pops in tribal countries.
 

tvotr7

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I entertain the following Marxist idea:

Nobles: capitalists
Citizens: Urban Workers or Proletariat
Freeman: Rural Workers or Proletariat that migrate to cities and shall become Citizens over time
Tribesmen: class that shall decay and finally disappear in any system outside a Tribe
Slaves: class that shall decay and finally disappear in the face of time

Problem is that antiquity doesn’t have the same classes as capitalism.
 
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Nobles: the rich of the rich basically senators in a republic and the ruling families in a monarchy. Basically the characters that fill the state.

citizens: a citizen of the state

freeman: non citizens subjected to the state. Unlike imperator this class was the bulk of production in this era.

tribesman: straightforward

slaves: straightforward.

the problem with the game is that historically, freemen were the majority of the population and did a majority of the production. However, In the game, a developed society is dominated by slaves.
 
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Problem is that antiquity doesn’t have the same classes as capitalism.

Marxism wants to explain history as a class struggle. It is an analysis born in the era of Capitalism but does not limit its conclusions to modern times. You can use The Communist Manifesto to explain classes in other times:

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles… Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.... The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” – Communist Manifesto
 
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Marxism wants to explain history as a class struggle. It is an analysis born in the era of Capitalism but does not limit its conclusions to modern times. You can use The Communist Manifesto to explain classes in other times:

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles… Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.... The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” – Communist Manifesto

yes, and it doesn't follow that you apply capitalistic classes to antiquity that is ahistorical and very much contra to marxism. for example the proletariat in antiquity had a different relations to the means of production and role within the political economy (superfluous bc of slave labor) than the proletariat in a capitalist system, making them qualitatively different classes despite both relying on labor to get a wage, this applies to the petit bougie and free peasant classes of antiquity.
 
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yes, and it doesn't follow that you apply capitalistic classes to antiquity that is ahistorical and very much contra to marxism. for example the proletariat in antiquity had a different relations to the means of production and role within the political economy (superfluous bc of slave labor) than the proletariat in a capitalist system, making them qualitatively different classes despite both relying on labor to get a wage, this applies to the petit bougie and free peasant classes of antiquity.

According to this article, patricians were the owners of the means of production while plebeians worked for the patricians without owning the land.

Slaves were not citizens, they were an asset, and liberti (freed men) were considered lower citizens and for most part, plebeians.

My "divertimento" was to analyze the antique classes with the Marx framework, I did not wish to apply capitalistic classes to antiquity.
 
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