Methods, Models, and Historiography, by Martin Jehne
Why ‘it is impossible to classify the Roman Republic as a democracy’
Martin Jehne wrote:
CHAPTER 1
Methods, Models, and Historiography
THE HEROES OF THE PAST
… Any attempt to come to grips with the concepts employed in describing and analyzing the Roman Republic must begin with the great nineteenth-century scholar Theodor Mommsen, who described the rise and fall of the Roman Republic in three substantial volumes of his History of Rome. Mommsen’s history of the Republic is written in a gripping style, interspersed with colorful character-descriptions of the protagonists such as Cato, Cicero, and Pompey, and driven by the firm conviction that there are historical missions before which nations and individuals can fail or prove their mettle, and necessary historical processes which it is the job of the historian to discover. The work was a worldwide literary triumph, to such an extent that the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902. This was naturally due to the stylistic and intellectual brilliance of the account, but also to a considerable degree to Mommsen’s relentlessly modernizing judgments adduced with great self-confidence, which made for exciting reading among the educated public to whom the work was directed (and still does among readers of today). For Mommsen, politics in the Roman Republic was the concern and creation of a dominant aristocracy based on office holding rather than blood which devoted itself for many years entirely to the service of the community and presided over its rise to empire, but then in the late Republic foundered in chaos and egoism as well as mediocrity. Thus came the historical moment for the genius of Caesar to found a popularly oriented monarchy and thereby to lead the empire to the only form of government that remained viable.
For many decades the study of the Roman Republic as a whole remained under the spell of Mommsen’s History of Rome, but even more of his Römisches Staatsrecht (“Roman Constitutional Law”), in which he systematically laid out the institutions of the Roman state along with their rules and competences as well as their coordination, supported by a careful marshalling and assessment of all available sources. Mommsen’s extraordinary achievement of systematization makes this work an enormously impressive juridical edifice that has put its stamp on our conceptions of the Roman state to this day. However, at the root of the success of Römisches Staatsrecht lay an appeal not unlike the way in which the History of Rome had drawn its narrative pace and its cogency from the compelling premises that the author had made the foundations of his work.
The nineteenth-century study of legal concepts was dominated by the idea that a state’s legal system was founded on inborn and timeless principles of law whose discovery was the noblest task of the legal historian; and Mommsen, a jurist by training, proceeded from this basic conviction which he then applied to the Roman state. Core elements of Mommsen’s construction, such as the all-embracing power to command (imperium) possessed by the king which was supposed never to have been substantially limited in the Republic, the idea that the citizen’s right to appeal against the penal authority of the magistrates (provocatio) was a basic law of the newly founded Republic, and in general the concept of the sovereignty of the People, are consequences of the fiction of immutability with which he approached the subject.
All of these ideas have since been thrown into doubt or proven to be improbable by scholars without, however, abandoning Mommsen’s edifice completely. This is indeed probably quite unnecessary, for, even if hardly anyone today still accepts Mommsen’s conception of an underlying, immutable legal system, nevertheless his immensely learned and intelligent reconstructions of the antiquarian details are indispensable for scholars as well as for students interested in how the Roman Republic functioned.
Against this strong emphasis on legal structure, which in Mommsen’s construction seemed to determine the nature of Roman politics, a contrary interpretation was published already in 1912 whose influence is likewise still felt in the present: the sociohistorical account of Matthias Gelzer. The basis of his argument was a new definition of the political governing class, the nobility, to which, according to Gelzer, only the descendants of a consul could belong, while in Mommsen’s view some lower offices – specifically the curule aedileship and the praetorship – also sufficed. Building on this premise, in the second part of his work Gelzer identified relationships based on personal ties and reciprocal obligation as a defining element of politics and of the pursuit and exercise of power. Gelzer was Swiss, and his experience with the political conditions of small communities certainly helped him to develop a new perspective, as did also his outsider’s stance with regard to the thought of the great Mommsen, a perspective he could more easily adopt than his German colleagues.
But the core of his new approach, which was more widely accepted only some years later, lay in a clear emphasis upon the idea that the content of politics as well as the effectiveness of political action was essentially dependant on personal connections within upper-class families and between these and their clients – that is, citizens lower down in the social hierarchy who were tied to them by patronage. Gelzer, who described himself as a social historian and thus explicitly distanced himself from Mommsen’s legal-historical perspective, thereby made it possible to recognize the primacy of personal relations over policy in Roman politics. This was seen as a place in which alliances based on the direct exchange of services dominated the struggles for power in the public sphere, which were almost exclusively about personal advancement and prestige. Friedrich Münzer, starting from Gelzer’s new conception of Roman politics, later exaggerated the principle of personal alliance and developed his theory of enduring family “parties” forged by means of marriage connections; in so doing he surely gave too much weight to kinship.
Building on the views of Gelzer and Münzer, but with a wholly distinct stamp, Ronald Syme then investigated the transition from Republic to Empire. Clearly inspired by Hitler’s rise in Germany and even more by that of Mussolini in Italy, as well as by the establishment of a formally liberal constitution by the despot Stalin, Syme adopted the style of Tacitus to describe the path to sole rule taken by Octavian, the young adopted son and heir of Caesar, and simultaneously practiced the prosopographic method with unsurpassed virtuosity. Prosopography (from the Greek prosopon: “person”) refers to the scholarly method whereby as much biographical data as possible are gathered about people of a given social class in order to glean evidence primarily about social mobility, but also regional mobility. Prosopographic research, if it is to be taken seriously as a scholarly approach, is therefore social history and not biography for its own sake. In any case, Syme was able to make use of Münzer’s research and described in great depth the complex web of personal relationships connecting the members of the narrower ruling groups and also the wider upper class. In this research the central theme, which he presented with great force, was the connection between Octavian’s rise to power with the entry of the leading men of the Italian cities into the senatorial aristocracy. Syme summarized the political credo that underlay all his research in the famous dictum: “In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the facade; and Roman history, Republican or Imperial, is the history of the governing class.” Accordingly, whoever wishes to comprehend a form of government or its transformation should not concentrate too exclusively on the personalities of the leading men but must analyze the party that is grouped about its figurehead. …
PERSONAL RELATIONS IN ROMAN POLITICS
… Only with Syme did the view laid out in Gelzer’s work of 1912 – that the core of the organizational and power structure of the Roman Republic was to be found in the institution of patronage and in the friendships and enmities of the nobles (nobiles) – reach its triumphant culmination, from which it was to dominate scholarship after World War II. Personal relationships were now seen as Rome’s fundamental social glue and the essential basis of power in the Republic to which martial success, wealth, rhetoric, communicative skill, and public representation certainly contributed, but essentially as means of broadening and consolidating bands of personal adherents. Prosopographic works collected evidence about the Republican elites and examined their relationships …
New Concepts
Christian Meier – in his attempt to improve our understanding of why and how the Republic broke down – focused on the practice of politics and its deficiencies. He was able to establish that the limited substance of politics and the great concentration on persons encouraged rather than hindered the mutability of coalitions, and therefore that the scholarly approach that concerned itself with long-standing family alliances and explained decisions as the successes of one or another party was inconsistent with the evidence of our sources, which furnished evidence for swiftly changing relationships. Yet if politics was not characterized by stable factions, this does not mean that the study of personal connections was pointless; rather (according to Meier) such connections were so multifarious and overlapping already in the middle Republic that the capacity to mobilize them in any specific case was not to be taken for granted, nor in any case could they suffice to attain the intended goal: specifically, to win an election. …
… Meier makes use of a conception of crisis as a stage in which massive problems that are also perceived by contemporaries force either the decisive restoration or collapse of a system; this is considerably better suited than “revolution” to illuminating the conditions of the late Republic.
For the fall of the Republic, Meier coined the phrase “crisis without alternative”. He meant by this that at this time many political actors, if not necessarily all, were conscious that some things were not working as they should in the Republic, but that nobody knew how to repair the damage, and those who might have wielded political power in the system still felt sufficiently secure that no one had the idea of forming an entirely new political structure. Contemporaries were therefore aware of a crisis and also sensed that the crisis was fundamental and could not be made to go away with a few small reforms, but there was neither a plan nor even a kind of vague longing for the removal of the system. … [His] analysis of how politics functioned amounted to a new theory of political association based on the idea of extreme flexibility in forging alliances, and therefore that all remaining assumptions of similarity to modern political parties had finally to be abandoned. Moreover, Meier enriched the understanding of political developments in the Roman Republic by means of his conceptualization of “historical process” … differentiating between primary and secondary effects of actions: primary effects are the intended consequences of actions; secondary effects, the unintended results. Processual developments are marked by the predominance of secondary over primary effects, that is to say that the results of agents’ actions slip out of their control. Meier argued that this was the case in the late Republic, the last phase of which indeed he characterized as an “autonomous process,” that is, a development in a distinct course that could no longer be changed by the actions of any of the participants. Every attempt to halt or turn back this development only promoted its further advance through its secondary effects. The direction of the historical process had become fully independent of agency.
New Methods
[A]ccording to Meier the Republic fell into the “crisis without alternative” precisely because the potentially powerful group of the equites [“knights” essentially the vast majority of the wealthy who were not senators] could safeguard their vital interests without changing the system and the ordinary people could not really attain power despite – or because of – their partial integration into the state by means of the popular assemblies.
Several works now elucidated the harsh living conditions of the Roman plebs and described the sometimes violent ways in which they responded; others emphasized the deep fracturing of Roman society owing to social conflicts. That the broad mass of the rural citizen population, which had been largely deprived of their rights, played a decisive role as soldiers in dissolving the aristocratic Republic was seen as an ironic consequence of the relative indifference of the upper class toward the interests of the poor. But in order to understand better the situation of the lower classes it was necessary to investigate issues such as life expectancy, family size, the division between city and hinterland, migration, the burdens of military service and taxes, and the threat of plagues and failed harvests… so it was an epochal innovation when Keith Hopkins in the 1960s introduced the methods of historical demography into ancient history. Scholarship at this time became generally somewhat more open to the theoretical stimulus of the social sciences … quantitative methods of social analysis, which had been considered inapplicable to antiquity because of the very limited and unrepresentative nature of the sources, were now applied to Roman history.
The central problem, however, was a methodological one from the start. As everyone was aware, the usual documentary basis for demographic statistics did not exist for Rome, and even today debate continues as to whether the observations in our sources – for example, concerning population decline – reveal some aspect of actual developments or only about the perceptual patterns and obsessions of the educated classes from whom these statements originate. Statistics based on inscriptions are largely a dead end. Analyses of bones from individual graveyards do not permit as exact a determination of age as one would like, and do not yield precise dates of the time of burial; furthermore, there is always the question of whether or not they are representative. So there was some basis for Hopkins’s radical skepticism in excluding all data that were not entirely reliable …
Much is in flux [in various strands of empirical research] and I cannot trace here the wealth of suggestions, hypotheses, and rebuttals … For land tenure an unusual body of sources is available in the writings of the Roman land surveyors, which had already prompted Max Weber to undertake a seminal investigation. … These highly controversial investigations into the size and development of the population have established an important branch of research into the history of the Republic. There is potential here to make a very considerable contribution to social history. …
“COMMUNICATIVE TURN”
Building on a better understanding of the plebs and the equites and their political significance in the capital, we were able to see the power networks and competitive struggles of the ruling class in a new light. The criteria for membership in the nobility were now newly reinvestigated, and in so doing the question of the openness of the elite was posed afresh; the scope and practical consequences of the patronage system were also subjected to critical reexamination … Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp has emphasized the meritocratic character of the nobility, that is that individual accomplishment, above all in political office, always played an essential role, so that descent alone was never enough, and inertia was incongruous with this status.
[There have been various challenges to] the theory that relations between Rome and the communities and states both within and without the empire were to be seen as patron – client relationships; as for the networks of “foreign clientelae” that on an earlier view had held the empire together …
No one disputes that the patronage system of the Roman Republic was important, since many resources were allocated through the operation of patronage with complete legality and in full conformity with custom. But the view that political decisions both in the popular assemblies and in the Senate would have been largely determined by patronage relations should now be abandoned at last. This would clear the horizon for studying the remarkable intensity and multifarious forms of communication between upper and lower classes in Rome. …
[Since the 1970s various authors] documented the great material and even greater communicative investment that the Roman upper classes made on behalf of the plebs at Rome, and showed that this behavior cannot simply be put down to social policy or bribery. Our modern inclination to interpret the motives of political agents essentially in terms of the calculation of material interests falls short here. The liberality of Roman senators was an unquestioned part of their self-representation and an essential factor in the integration of the citizenry … today, in hindsight, we can discern a paradigm shift [to] the “communicative turn” under whose influence scholarship remains to this day.
DEMOCRACY?
The communicative turn and the shaking of the certainty that an all-embracing system of clientage made Rome into an oligarchy of patrons gathered in the Senate whose innermost circle, the nobility, largely dominated politics, gave considerable impetus for the radically new position taken by Fergus Millar. In a series of articles and books published since 1984 Millar has fought against underestimating the role of the People and the popular assemblies, and has increasingly attributed democratic features to the political system. According to Millar, past research had greatly exaggerated the role of the Senate; the Senate was after all not a parliamentary body with legislative powers; in his view, the idea that the Senate played a governing role in the Republic was a fiction, and the nobility had never formed a dominant group. Millar emphasized the basic facts that the Roman popular assemblies chose the magistrates and above all legislated, which was the accepted manner of validating the fundamental modifications and decisions of the community, at least from the second century.
If then the assembled People were not bound by clientage to the members of the ruling class in such a way that they mechanically voted as their patrons commanded, other criteria must have predominated. Millar regarded the great scope of public communication, especially the countless speeches before the assembled People, as proof that the People and their opinions were important, and indeed that orators had to devote a great deal of effort to persuading this People, if they wished to make their mark as politicians and to pursue a successful career despite heavy competition.
Fergus Millar’s view that the Roman Republic possessed conspicuously democratic features (and perhaps should even be classified as a democracy) met with a mixed reception, but it is indisputable that Millar’s model has, since the mid-1980s, provided the strongest stimulus to the debate about the political system of the Roman Republic. Discussion revolves principally around three points:
the influence of senators and the Senate, the relative openness or exclusiveness of the political elite, and its collective character;
the importance of the popular assemblies and their votes in the political system;
and more generally, about the significance of publicity in Roman politics.
… [It] is possible to draw differing conclusions from the finding (which in principle had long been known already) that many consuls of the Republic, but not all, originated from the nobility (however defined) – that is, that there was obvious continuity of the elite but no complete closure of the office-holding aristocracy, and there were certainly chances of entry for outsiders. … The question to what extent noble descent gave increased prospects for success is in no way secondary …
… Millar attacked the widely held views that the Roman Republic was a kind of aristocracy or oligarchy, that it had been governed in some unusual way by a small elite, and that there had been something like a political group of nobles. In fact, however, it is far from self-evident that there would be solidarity among noble families directed against ambitious outsiders, or in pursuit of collective dominance and the preservation or expansion of their competitive advantages, since after all the nobiles were engaged in intense competition with each other. … Nathan Rosenstein formulated the illuminating hypothesis that since all the members of the political class were exposed to the risk of military defeat, they cultivated a code of conduct that forbade using such defeats as a political weapon against unsuccessful generals – as long as these had conducted themselves bravely, in accordance with the rule. … The essential point however is that here we come upon a restriction upon competition that was self-regulating and evidently functioned well – which proves that senators and young politicians striving to enter the Senate were in a position to establish and respect such rules.
Ultimately it is not of great importance whether one describes the nobility, the most esteemed families of the senatorial political class, as an aristocracy. Millar’s objection that it was not a hereditary aristocracy is not especially consequential, since on the one hand this is evident and undisputed, but on the other, the conception of aristocracy as a prominent and privileged group is not in fact tied to formal heritability.
But above all the element of achievement, which is often seen as a central distinction between the modern meritocracy and the class-based concept of aristocracy, is of course not in itself a decisive criterion, since at the root of every aristocracy lies a claim to achievement, as the name “rule of the best” itself shows, except that one did not give evidence of one’s capacity for achievement as one does today by such feeble means as grades on examinations at the top universities for aspiring leaders in the economic realm, or among scientists, by the size of their grants, and so on, but by one’s ancestry and the accomplishments of one’s ancestors. The fact therefore that Roman politicians regularly needed to be successful in popular elections and that “new men” could also succeed in them, although the members of the ancient noble families statistically … had considerably better chances, justifies completely our continued use of the term “aristocracy” for the core of the leadership class, without thereby necessarily making the claim that the entire political system was aristocratic through and through.
In the end one can make the idea of rule by the nobility concrete only through a two-step investigation of the Senate, first by demonstrating that it was predominant in the Republic, then by making a persuasive case that within the Senate the nobility … determined policy. It is now generally recognized that neither of these propositions held true in uninterrupted and absolute fashion. However it is undeniable that often it was the Senate that set the political course, and that if a threat arose to the system that gave them a privileged position the leading senators might close ranks against it.
On the whole, therefore, it is beyond dispute that the continuity of the elite was considerable and that senators and Senate exerted wide-ranging influence over political decisions and the form that politics took; on the other hand, however, it is equally clear that members of the elite were obliged regularly to communicate with the People and needed to win popular votes for the advancement of their own career and their other objectives. To assess the significance of the democratic features of the Roman Republic the essential questions are therefore those concerning political representation of the People and the scope of decision-making in the popular assemblies.
Assemblies
The ability of the Senate to pursue its goals and to put into practical effect its ability to make recommendations based on its authority (auctoritas) was essentially dependent on the degree of solidarity that it was able to develop. As is well known, however, in the last decades of the Republic there was a series of conflicts which could not be resolved within the Senate, with the result that the opportunities for popular action necessarily became correspondingly larger. John North sees here a stimulus for the democratization of the Republic. However, even if the phenomenon as such is undisputed, it is still not at all clear how extensive this democratization was. That substantially depends on our reconstruction and evaluation of the Roman popular assemblies, which have been the subject of vigorous discussion in recent years.
In Rome there were various types of popular voting assemblies, all of which were divided into voting units. The relevant ones for our purposes are the “Centuriate” assembly (comitia centuriata), which was articulated according to wealth and was responsible above all for the election of the higher offices, and the “Tribal” assembly (comitia tributa) and Plebeian assembly (concilium plebis) – in both cases divided according to “tribes” (tribus), that is, according to regional districts – in which the remaining officials were chosen and almost all laws passed.
[MGH: There follows a detailed comparison of arguments about the ‘democratic’ significance of assemblies. Jehne highlights pre-2006 contributions, but we have more settled conclusions available in 2022, which I will exhibit in due course, e.g. Politics in the Roman Republic (2017) by Henrik Mouritsen. For now we skip to the conclusions.]
PUBLIC POLITICS
[MGH: If not democracy, then ritual?]
Despite differences [among authors] reflections upon the structures of Republican politics give a sobering picture of the chances ordinary people had to shape the issues and outcomes of Roman politics in a way that reflected their own interests. Thereby they raise the fundamental question: What, then, does the indisputable intensity and frequency of public action and communication by Roman politicians actually mean for the system? If, as appears probable, the specific content of politics was often less important in the forms of public communication than the expressive aspect – if, that is, the view of an assembly was normally not formed in open discussion but laid forth in splendid rhetoric – then the ritual dimension inherent in these assemblies gains a special significance. Keith Hopkins has argued that the numerous rituals in which citizens participated were an important aspect of public life in Rome.
Rituals can be defined as standardized sequences of action, designed for repetition and heavy with symbolism, by means of which participants become integrated as members of a group. [Self-reference to Jehne in 2003] If one views the Roman popular assemblies as rituals, then differing integrative functions may be attributed to their different organizational principles: meetings of the Centuriate assembly would then be considered rituals of hierarchy, those of the “Tribal” assembly as rituals of equality. The integrative experience may have given the essential impetus to attend the assemblies even when one’s own interests were not at issue in the vote. In addition, the popular assemblies may have attracted a number of ordinary citizens because they could feel important there and enjoy being treated respectfully by the great magnates. …
… What emerges [in new literature] is a great array of rituals that hold society together by defining roles and by their integrative power, and which as a whole demand an enormous communicative effort from the political class … the Roman aristocracy won the plebs’ wide-ranging obedience by constant hard effort.
The modern concepts to which we should relate the individual elements of the political system of the Roman Republic take into account therefore the ritual dimension of public life, and especially need to account for the great communicative engagement of the political class as well as the simultaneously deep-rooted tendency of the People to comply. One can develop a model that will make these phenomena clearly understandable from a broad conception of institutions. By this definition, institutions are not restricted to what we for the most part understand by the term in ordinary usage, namely formalized organizations … but instead patterns of social organization are characterized quite broadly as institutional when they are made enduring by means of symbolic expression of their basic principles and claims to validity. … The great advantage of such a widened concept of institutions is that it does not unduly privilege legal rules over traditional social norms: both forms are equally effective for the perpetuation and stabilization of behavior and expectations and are more or less symbolically laden, so that so far as their character as institutions is concerned it is impossible to rank one above the other. In the case of the Roman popular assemblies this means, therefore, that rules of procedure are not given more importance than the behavioral pattern that induces citizens to comply with the recommendations of the presiding magistrate. It would be inconsistent with this conception to accept any argument based on the premise that the formally secured rights of the People are a more relevant expression of the system than the fact that regularly these rights are not claimed. …
… [Let] us have another look at the legislative assemblies: on the one hand laws are passed there and on the other, community is emphasized, status dramatized, and significance experienced in carefully choreographed procedures. A model oriented in this way toward “institutionality” always keeps in view the effects of symbolic action that go along with the production of decisions about issues – effects that are for the most part much more important for the community, its longevity, and continuity (which is always something constructed) than the decisions as such. In my opinion, this approach is able to do justice to the Roman Republic precisely because it avoids the short-circuit caused by supposing that rituals that are performed frequently and at great cost (material and otherwise) ultimately demonstrate the importance of the immediate end (that is, the instrumental dimensions of ritual). An institutional analysis permits us to discern behind many speeches and fine phrases about the People’s freedom and its decision-making competence a process of allocating status and binding citizens into a hierarchical community that has nothing to do with democracy. …
… [It] remains among Fergus Millar’s lasting contributions to have pushed the publicity of politics into the center of analysis of the Roman Republic …
… In my view, the decisive reason why it is impossible to classify the Roman Republic as a democracy, or even to attribute wide-reaching democratic features to it, is the small opportunity for political participation. The fixation upon personal participation in the popular assemblies in Rome as the sole possibility for exercising one’s right to vote excluded at least three-quarters of eligible citizens even during the late Republic, when, according to Millar, the balance had shifted to the advantage of the People. The decisive point here is not that only a few actively participated, which is also a constant problem in modern democracies (even if not one so acute). But the spirit of the political system is revealed by the fact that the vast majority could not participate at all, and that those empowered to make decisions never gave so much as a thought to discovering a remedy by means of a representative system: no one in Rome was interested in creating fairness of participatory opportunity for ordinary citizens who lived outside of Rome. It seems to me that this kind of regard for citizens’ opportunity of participation at a rudimentary level at least is a necessary (but certainly not sufficient) condition for every democracy.
The Source:
Martin Jehne, ‘Methods, Models, and Historiography’, in A Companion to the Roman Republic, edited by Nathan Rosenstein and Robert Morstein-Marx, Blackwell 2006
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.