Harriet I. Flower, Roman Republics
Res publica: its meanings then and now, and its periodisation..
In her book Roman Republics, published in 2010, Harriet I. Flower wrote:
Introduction
… Any study of republican Rome should really start from the realization that the traditional span of the Republic (509 to 49, or 43, or 27), covering 450 years or more, is ultimately unwieldy and uninformative when treated as a single time period. No one would deny that the city of Rome, together with its government and its presence abroad, changed beyond recognition within this period, much more so even than in the half-millennia that preceded and followed it. In this sense the “Republic,” whether as a time period or a form of government, created the Rome that we study as a subject in world history. Although most other towns in central Italy did not differ much from Rome around the year 500, they have become obscure and insignificant, subjects of interest only to local historians. …
… The monolithic republican chronology is especially misleading for beginners and other nonspecialists with an interest in the history of Rome. In English, “republic” can and does refer both to a political system and to the time period it occupies, in a way that can produce a somewhat circular argument and is inaccurate, given that several episodes within this period—such as the decemvirate in the fifth century, or Sulla’s dictatorship in the first—are distinctly “unrepublican” in tone and feel. A simplified chronology does not, in other words, make Rome a more accessible object for a history lesson in the modern world. A useful analogy is provided by the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431–404), which Thucydides strongly and persuasively argues was a single war lasting twenty-seven years. Most have accepted his reasoning, and this has led to standard essay questions on the causes of “the war.” The conflict, however, can just as usefully be seen as several shorter wars, and this is certainly how many Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries would have understood their political history.
But how can we assign a chronological span to the Roman Republic without first knowing how to describe it? In other words, which comes first, the political analysis or the time map? In fact, the Romans themselves did not really have a vocabulary of political terms to analyze their changing civic landscape: it is this situation that has shaped subsequent, modern ways of talking about Rome. The Latin term res publica, from which we derive our word “republic,” can mean both the political community (politeia) itself and its increasingly characteristic system of government.
[FOOTNOTE: The definitions of respublica offered by the OLD (1982) [Oxford Latin Dictionary] appear in the following order: 1. Activities affecting the whole people, affairs of state, an item of public business; 2. The welfare of the state, the public good, the national interest, the resources of the state; 3. The body politic, the or a constitution; 4. A free state in which all citizens participate. …]
On a basic level, res publica simply means “government with participation of the governed” rather than anarchy or tyranny, both understood as forms of lawlessness. With these words Romans who came after the end of the hereditary monarchy defined the new government as the “public matter”. In modern terms, the phrase may seem vague, but it does contain the seeds of the political ideas that developed in Rome after the expulsion of the kings.
Res publica makes perfect sense in terms of Roman political culture and the gradual evolution of a civic community that was based on the equality of adult male citizens within an established system of law and on the ability of each citizen to participate in person in the various voting units, whether the units were based on tribes or on army divisions. Closely related to the concept of this shared political space was the very Roman idea of the citizen’s stake in the community, represented by private land ownership guaranteed by the state and by the citizen landowner’s corresponding service in the community’s army.
Equally significant was the drafting of a written law code that was publicly displayed and available to every citizen, originally in the form of the Twelve Tables of the mid-fifth century. Hence res publica also implies transparency, openness, and due process, rather than secrecy and individual power used behind closed doors for personal goals.
[FOOTNOTE: Suetonius (Claud. 10.3) refers to communem libertatem (shared political freedom) in reference to a republican form of government in the context of a debate in the senate in AD 41. Walter (2004) gives an insightful description of how politics appeared to Cicero: (quote) “a constantly precarious system, which did not have any effective institutional safeguards against failures of institutions or of individuals; consequently a system without any real security created by constitutional means. Yet it was at the same time a system that always held out the promise of escape routes through new allegiances and balances between different interests” (end quote).]
The term res publica also suggests the unity of all citizens in a shared civic community that transcends the social divisions of class, neighborhood, or family. Such a community is fundamentally at odds with the whole concept of political parties that divide citizens into permanent factions or allegiance groups. In practice, however, the system that expressed these ideas developed slowly after the end of the monarchy. It is characteristic of Roman politics that it did not produce either individual lawgivers or prophets who implemented republican revolutions at specific times, as so often happened in Greek cities and other ancient Mediterranean communities.
Moreover, Rome’s founding fathers—such as Romulus, Numa, or Servius Tullius, to whom so much is attributed—all lived before a republican system was instituted. Political development tended to come slowly and as a result of complex, now mostly obscure, negotiations of power between different groups in society. All of the above considerations are vital to an understanding of Roman political life; they do not, however, help us with the immediate issue of delineating a time map. If it is a delicate matter to define the Roman Republic in precise political terms, its periodization is equally fraught with difficulty, and in closely related ways.
Thus chronological articulation is the first order of the day, and the only way toward a more accurate and less superficial way of talking about Rome after the end of the monarchy. In other words, even if the Romans did not have a generally accepted and detailed chronological scheme for these five hundred years, we need one for our own use. This issue is of a very different nature from the chronology of the “imperial” period, which is naturally articulated by the reigns of emperors and of their families or rivals. … Too often “the Republic” has been defined simply as “not a system of one-man rule”. This may have made some sense for Romans who could not predict how events would unfold, but it does not meet the criteria of modern historical research or political analysis. …
… What should be clear from the start is that any periodization that extends the Republic to the moment when a new system of government seems to emerge is a scheme more descriptive of what comes next rather than of what came before. A period of transition between a functioning republic and a new system with a single ruler is strongly suggested by the bulk of the ancient evidence and can be helpful in appreciating some of the difficulties of that transition for those who lived through it. Roman history has not been well served by a simplistic and sharply drawn dichotomy between “republic” and “empire” as chronological terms. …
… The parameters that we choose in our definition of republican failure inevitably determine which actors take part in the drama and under which varied historical conditions. The end of the Republic has cast a long shadow over what came before, and has encouraged various teleological ways of talking about earlier Roman politics. …
… Moreover, how can we write the history of a “republic”simply or principally in terms of the personal biographies of its leading men? This question becomes more urgent when those leading men are openly operating outside republican norms. Are we denying that res publica had any meaning in an “Age of Caesar”? … Yet the Republic must be more than an idea in Caesar’s or anyone else’s mind.
My study will set out to design a new and different periodization based specifically on the evolving political life of the Roman community.
[FOOTNOTE: Martin Jehne has recently suggested that any systematic discussion of the Roman Republic needs a model as its basis; one may equally claim that any analytical study needs a well-articulated time map. See Jehne 2006: (quote) “In broad terms a model is the ordering of a series of specific pieces of information by means of a hypothesis about their relationship, ignoring details that may seem as irrelevant from a given perspective” (end quote). By contrast, Peter Brunt writes (1988): (quote) “In practice no systematic theory can explain without remainder the complex interweaving of human activities, especially if the course of events can be altered by the apparently contingent influence of individuals. And on this premiss the historian can never provide any complete explanation of the past” (end quote).]
That is not to say that such a political scheme should necessarily take precedence in some absolute hierarchy of dating systems. Political chronology can and should be useful both in complement and in contrast to other dating schemes and eras. It must, however, address the essential question of how to study what is “republican” about Rome. In addition, the new time map described in this study is designed as an attempt to critique, articulate, and ultimately to dissolve the concept of a single, monolithic Republic in Rome, and hence of a long era that had a quasi-biological beginning, middle, and end, according to an Aristotelian pattern of natural growth, maturity, and decay. A republican system of government did come to a final end at Rome, but there is no reason for us to write about it now as if it were the effect of some inevitable fate, or an integral part of the destiny of a great leader, or a mechanical change in a pattern of successive ages. [END]
[You have now reached the end of this Social Science Files exhibit.]
The Source has been:
Harriet I. Flower, Roman Republics, Princeton University Press 2010
Harriet Flower has been a subscriber and reader of Social Science Files since January.
Social Science Files collects and displays multidisciplinary writings on a great variety of topics relating to evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.
‘The Heller Files’, quality tools for Social Science.