The days when the plebs had agitated for political rights were gone, and no one in Rome’s slums greatly missed them. Why bother with elections, after all, when they never changed anything? This was why Caligula’s restoration to the Roman people of their right to vote had been greeted with such yawns of indifference that it had soon discreetly been abandoned. Realities had changed – and everybody knew it. What mattered most to the poor, in a city so vast that many had never even seen a cornfield, still less harvested one, was to banish the spectre of famine – and only Caesar could guarantee
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