Summoning /u/XenophontheAthenian !

So I had a big old answer to this written out last night and then my internet died and so did my computer. Fwoosh, gone. Doesn't help that I've been running up and down southern Italy for the past couple of days, so I'm many, many hours later on this than I'd like to be

So anyway, the question here is a lot more complicated than I think you realize, and definitely a lot more complicated than my joke implied. Popular violence in any society sort of defies neat compartmentalization, and riots and other disturbances of the late Republic are no exception. Popular violence might rise up spontaneously, and usually does, but it might be orchestrated and premeditated. It might even be near-constant, if mobs and other violent elements have some reason to or means of staying around permanently and public order is incapable of putting them to rest. The late Republic is no exception: incidents of popular violence should be taken more or less on a case-by-case basis, and while general trends maybe can be drawn individual riots and clashes are, well, individual. They arise from particular stresses and are not necessarily made up of the same people each time or after the same targets. While riots and other disturbances were of course mainly the action of the lowest levels of the urban and rural plebs, in the Republican state no social class was immune to the possibility of open popular violence, not even the senatorial class. For example, the mob that killed Tiberius Gracchus was senatorially-led, and composed mostly of senators and their hangers-on (no man of any importance walked around the city alone, they were constantly accompanied by a crowd of aides, slaves, and clients). The example of the Gracchi shows us as well that even within social classes there were divisions--among the senators and their attendants there were also apparently the poor, seemingly members of the urban plebs, who were angered by the Gracchi's legislation in favor of the rural plebs.

Sometimes mobs were organized: more usually they were not. The mob that killed Tiberius Gracchus was set in motion more or less moments before assaulting him. The mob that killed Gaius, while not really organized, was the result of several earlier clashes between Fulvius' supporters and Gaius'. The mobs that Cicero feared would break out in the city during the Catilinarian Conspiracy, which never actually materialized, would have been well-organized and led by members of the conspiracy--or so we're told, although Catiline's actual support among the urban plebs is a bit unclear. The example of late Republican popular violence is the Clodian gangs of the 50s, though. While most incidents of mob violence were more or less unplanned, starting in 58 organized gang violence became endemic in the city. How exactly Clodius' gangs were organized is not something I'm going to touch on (since we don't have much information and the orthodox explanation that operae=collegia doesn't seem to make sense or to be especially supported by our texts), but under Clodius and his contemporaries (Milo, mostly, but even Pompey raised gangs to combat Clodius) gang violence became more or less an organized political weapon. The degree to which these gangs actually believed in the issues that they were fighting for under their leaders, and the question of who these people were is more than a bit knotty--and of course Cicero's descriptions of Clodian operae as being literally armies is obviously an exaggeration--but one way or another under Clodius and his contemporaries popular violence in the 50s was totally unlike anything before. Somehow or another Clodius and his contemporaries maintained more or less permanent gangs that could patrol the streets and even besiege the houses of their political opponents (most notably Pompey, who remained in his house for most of 58). With gangs of this sort motivation is hard to pin down, whether actual belief in any of what they were doing had anything to do with it. Other incidents are clearer, but mobs could gather and turn violent very suddenly at even what seems to us like relatively slight triggers. Of no small importance is the role of oratory--the destructive riots that broke out after Clodius' death and at Caesar's funeral were stirred up by the demagogic rhetoric of public speakers, who then seem to have lost control of the mobs that they unleashed.

My particular joke was in reference specifically to what Plutarch says about the assault on Tiberius Gracchus. Plutarch specifically says that no one was killed by the sword, but that the mob armed itself with clubs and other instruments, even tearing apart benches to beat the Gracchans with. Weapons were prohibited in the city, and Cicero complained bitterly of the fortification of the Temple of Castor by Clodians as the establishment of a fortified armory in the forum to distribute weapons to Clodius' gangs (forgetting, apparently, that during the Catilinarian Conspiracy a crowd of equites armed with swords had surrounded the Temple of Concord, to Cicero's great satisfaction and approval). Even Clodius' gangs were probably poorly-equipped (even if he had weapons, they're difficult to conceal, and can't be carried all over the place) and poorly-disciplined. Both Clodius and Milo are known to have employed gladiators on several occasions, but usually their gangs could be dispersed relatively easily, though often with great bloodshed, by a determined counterattack. Cicero speaks even of Clodius' partisans as using, besides swords, clubs and rocks, and during the demonstration against Pompey's candidacy for oversight of the grain supply the Clodians spat on Pompey. The Clodians and Milonians are somewhat special cases, though--the average urban rioter cannot have been armed by anything but his fists and whatever he had at hand, which is borne out by the texts, which treat mobs armed with real weapons as unusual, though references to stones and clubs are relatively frequent. Certainly imagining mobs in the city as being armed with torches and pitchforks French-Revolution-style is wrong. The urban plebs would not have had agricultural implements, which would have been found only among the rural plebs--the urban plebs were mostly day-laborers, not farmhands, and as Ian Harrison points out much of the urban population would have been effectively migratory, moving through the city and changing lodgings to chase work.

Not really a very satisfactory (or detailed) answer, I know, but my joke from earlier makes it seem as though popular violence in the Republican city is a lot more straightforward than it really is, so that's sort of my bad