A bestialized urban mob, whose enslavement to its appetites and desperate circumstances make it incapable of reason, is one of the stock characters of the Roman political drama scripted by ancient writers. The contempt in which the plebs was held even by one of its supposed former defenders, the ex-tribune, now historian Sallust, is illustrative: the plebeian masses, with nothing to lose, but much to gain from revolution and upheaval, are rash and treacherous, an enemy within, ready not just to sell their support to any power-seeker but even to plunder their fellow citizens. Cicero seems – at least in public – to take a less harsh view of the People's character as a political agent, though it is still often characterized by “rashness” (temeritas) and “fickleness” (levitas), and comparable to irrational forces of nature such as the sea or the winds, whose gusts give the populist politician his direction and power.

It is consistent with these conceptions of the multitude that the audiences of public meetings were frequently derided by Cicero, once out of earshot, as composed of imperiti, “ignoramuses,” an adjective that adheres to references to the plebs or multitudo virtually as a formula. The word imperitus, to be sure, refers in the first instance to ignorance and inexperience, not necessarily the lack of basic mental capacity; and in any case, Cicero on one occasion explicitly allows that even the imperitissimi who make up the audience at the contio are capable of distinguishing an ingratiating demagogue from a true friend of the People, and thus, with proper instruction, of apprehending the truth.