Politics in the Roman Republic [1], by Henrik Mouritsen
[Part 1 of 2] Mixed Constitution ideals vs probable realities, Polybius & Cicero
Henrik Mouritsen wrote:
CHAPTER 1 Senatus Populusque Romanus
Institutions and Practices
In its essential features the Roman republic may seem deceptively familiar, broadly conforming to the ‘ standard ’ city-state structure found across the ancient Mediterranean. In most polities a tripartite structure can be reconstructed, composed of popular assembly(ies), council(s) and a variety of magistracies. Within this simple scheme the interrelations between the institutions and their internal structures and procedures may vary, creating different balances of power between rulers and ruled, elite and populace. The Roman version of these institutions, the comitia, the senate and the magistrates, thus fits into a known pattern, even if there were additional complications in the form of specifically plebeian institutions, which have no parallel in the ancient world. Despite its apparent familiarity the Roman system nevertheless presents questions as regards the distribution and exercise of power, especially in relation to the role of the people; for, while the popular assemblies had the final say in all matters of legislation and public appointments, they were at the same time subject to the authority of powerful magistrates. Similarly, the senate, although formally an advisory body, clearly wielded decisive influence over public policy and administration.
Until recently scholars resolved these contradictions by assuming that the elite effectively neutralised the powers of the assembly through clientelistic networks which acted as instruments of social control. This theory has since been challenged, and will be returned to later. Others have therefore proposed that in the absence of comprehensive patronage and bonds of obligation, the people did indeed act as a free and active political agent, exercising their constitutional powers in ways that almost made Rome comparable to classical Greek democracies . While most scholars have not gone that far, they still tend to identify the assemblies as a popular power base, which might be neutralised by external factors or – in their absence – function more or less as intended.
It is at this point that the conceptual models which we – consciously or not – employ to make sense of Roman institutions become important. Traditionally, historians have followed a systematic constitutional approach and analysed the formal distribution of powers in the Roman state. The legal approach reached its pinnacle in Mommsen’s Römisches Staatsrecht , but in recent years this line of inquiry has come under increasing criticism for its formalism and lack of consideration of extra-legal factors influencing the institutions. But to understand the roots of this conceptual model we have to go further back, to the earliest surviving attempt to analyse the Roman system which was produced by Polybius.
Polybius and the Roman Political System
No study of Roman politics can ignore Polybius (c . 200 – 120 BCE), not just because of his status as a contemporary source, but also because of the lasting impact his approach has had on subsequent – ancient and modern – analyses of the Roman constitution. A Greek statesman from Megalopolis, Polybius was exiled to Rome in 167, where he spent the following seventeen years, developing close ties with the leading men of the time. During his exile he began work on a monumental history of Rome that would trace her conquest of the Mediterranean world in forty books, the first five of which survive intact, the rest only in fragments of varying length. The work is remarkable for its ‘factual’ style of reporting, which makes it a prime example of pragmatic, ‘didactic’ historiography. The approach is analytical rather than rhetorical, always looking for general causes behind historical occurrences. Polybius’ discussion of the political system, presented in the fragmentary book six, offers the first, indeed only, original attempt to subject Roman institutions to theoretical analysis. Polybius ’ impact can hardly be overestimated and his legacy arguably lives on to the present day; many scholars still regard Polybius’ model as the best guide to understanding the Roman constitution.
The central tenets of Polybius ’ analysis are well known and need only be broadly outlined. Essentially, the Roman political system is presented as the embodiment of the ‘mixed constitution’, blending elements of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy into a single, well-balanced entity. The internal stability ensured by the mixed system allowed Rome to direct her energy outwards towards military expansion, thereby explaining her remarkable drive and success. According to Polybius, the purpose of his work was to explain Rome’s conquest of the civilised world to a Greek audience – although he may also have hoped to impress his Roman hosts. In antiquity constitutions were generally assumed to hold the key to the success or failure of states since they determined their degree of stability and upheaval, freedom and tyranny, and it was this linkage that provided the rationale for Polybius’ constitutional digression. Moreover, given the traditional Greek ideal of the golden mean, a ‘mixed’ constitution that blended different types of government and balanced opposing interests against each other was – in analogy to the doctrine of the bodily humours – naturally deemed the best, and the only guarantee of long-term stability. Therefore, since Rome’s military superiority was indisputable, it followed logically that it must have a matching superior constitution, which from a Greek perspective meant a mixed constitution.
This premise lends Polybius ’ analysis a certain aprioric aspect but, as importantly, the particular version of the ‘mixed constitution’ he presents is in many respects unusual, not just in its application of Greek theory to Roman institutions but also in the way he uses his theoretical models. Polybius’ basic framework was provided by the traditional tripartite division of constitutions into monarchy, democracy, and oligarchy that can be found already in Herodotus’ constitutional debate, and even earlier in Pindar. Later it became a standard fixture of Greek political thinking and theorists further refined the model by dividing each of them into good and bad forms. The terminology and categories varied, but in Polybius’ work the positive forms appear as monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and their negative versions as tyranny, oligarchy, and ochlocracy (mob rule). The constitutional archetypes were considered to be in a permanent state of flux, invariably degenerating into their negative forms and causing upheavals that would lead to their eventual replacement by another type of government. In Polybius ’ model the different types succeeded each other in a fixed cyclical movement, the anakyklosis, which represented a variant of the Platonic idea.
Faced with the problem of endemic political instability Greek theorists came up with a number of solutions. In Plato’s ideal constitution the state was ruled by an enlightened guardian, whose benevolent reign would overcome the conflict between rich and poor. Later he moved towards a mixed system which combined elements of the different constitutions. Aristotle, on the other hand, while in principle accepting Plato’s elevation of kingship, also developed a less utopian ideal, the so-called Politeia, which blended oligarchic and democratic features. Although presented as the perfect form of democracy, Aristotle’s ‘polity’ was in practice closer to a moderate oligarchy. This constitution was intended to bring an end to political upheaval and class conflict by offering a measured compromise between the interests of the elite and the populace. In Aristotle’s analysis the polis was naturally torn between the well-to-do (euporoi) and the indigent (aporoi). By focusing on the structural causes of political instability and stressing the significance of economic inequality, Aristotle’s solution thus remained firmly rooted in the social reality of contemporary Greek poleis. The conflict between rich and poor was to Aristotle the root cause of instability, and his solution involved a broad compromise between the two groups and the application of balanced, bipartisan policies that respected the concerns of both sides.
Polybius’ ‘mixed constitution’ is a very different creature from Aristotle’s ‘Polity’. To Polybius the anakyklosis did not reflect the instability caused by the competing interests of different social groups but was entirely ethical in nature. It was brought about by the moral corruption of the rulers which inevitably followed within ‘pure’ systems, leading to their overthrow and replacement. Thus, as Nippel observed, with Polybius Greek constitutional theory lost its sociological dimension, and it was this analytical shift which enabled Polybius to combine all three ‘positive’ archetypes, kingship as well as aristocracy and democracy. The inclusion of monarchy altered the character of his model, for while monarchy evidently existed as a constitutional type, it did not reflect the rule of any particular group in society in the same way that democracy and oligarchy did. Monarchy is in a sense the primitive default option that emerges when an open, participatory political process has broken down and power is left in the hands of a single individual. To Aristotle monarchy was therefore essentially tyranny, although he accepted that the enlightened rule of one man, defined as kingship, in theory represented an ideal and possibly supreme form of government. While elite and masses were the given constituents of any ancient society, whose – self-interested – rule was conceptualised as oligarchy and democracy, respectively, there could in the nature of things be no specific constituency behind a monarchy. Polybius’ notion that an effective ‘mixed constitution’ required a monarchical element is therefore based on a mechanistic construction of the problem. Kingship was included in order to create a correspondence between the perceived problem – the constitutional cycle – and the solution – the ‘mixed constitution’, which combined all the ‘pure’ forms and neutralised their individual weaknesses. Or, in other words, since monarchy was part of the problem – the anakyklosis – it must also be part of the solution, i.e. the ideal constitution. This schematic logic, however, remains divorced from socio-economic considerations of the causes of political instability.
In this context the example of Sparta, the classic Greek paradigm of a ‘mixed’ constitution to which Polybius explicitly – and favourably – compared Rome, becomes significant. Sparta’s unique combination of monarchy, democracy, and oligarchy meant that in order to carry that comparison through a monarchical element had to be found also in Rome. That was obviously difficult in a system founded on the explicit disavowal of all things regal, and Polybius’ attempt at identifying kingship in the role of the Roman consuls remains weak. It ignores a number of features: that there was more than one consul, that they held equal powers, were elected by the assembly for one year only, held no legislative powers, answered to the senate which could issue instructions, and might be held responsible for their actions after their time in office. Some Romans, as we shall see, may have interpreted the consuls as the inheritors of the king’s imperium , but that did not make their role monarchical, especially since they also saw the office as deliberately conceived in opposition to the ousted kings.
Polybius’ ‘monarchical’ consuls highlight the mechanical nature of his approach, which shows little direct engagement with the nuts and bolts of the Roman institutions and their practical functioning. Each element of the constitution is identified as the embodiment of one of the conventional Greek archetypes. Thus, while the consuls are made to represent kingship, the assembly is labelled the democratic element and the senate the oligarchic. That approach differs radically from that found in Aristotle, for whom the basic distinction in any society was that between the wealthy who had sufficient means to take active part in government and those without. Oligarchy was therefore defined as the rule of the well-to-do, while democracy existed when poorer people held power despite their lack of resources. Crucially, Aristotle did not operate with an either/or distinction, since each type represented a continuum of constitutional forms; Aristotle envisaged no fewer than four degrees of oligarchy. The character of a constitution depended on a number of variables, of which the most important were property assessments (timema) for citizenship and office holding, the level at which the thresholds were set, the provision of payment for officials and the degree of access to the assembly. In addition, Aristotle’s distinction between oligarchy and democracy took into account the general distribution of wealth in society, the rule of law, and the extent of inherited powers.
None of these factors are considered by Polybius, who simply attaches to each institution a constitutional label that sums up its political ‘value’ and defines it as the incarnation of a particular constitutional principle. According to Polybius their political character was so unequivocal that when each element was viewed in isolation, the constitution appeared either to be fully democratic, monarchic or aristocratic. Polybius therefore does not allow for the possibility that they might contain internal contradictions or compromises, thus ignoring what Nippel called ‘Intraorgankontrolle’, the internal control mechanisms that play such a prominent role in the models of Plato and Aristotle. There is no hint that assemblies, magistracies, and councils might themselves cover the full range from democratic to aristocratic. Thus, we search in vain for a discussion of the property qualifications which determined the structure of the assemblies, access to public office and membership of the senate. Polybius seems unaware of the fact that councils, assemblies and magistracies had no definite political character but could fall at any point within a broad continuum of popular and aristocratic politics.
We might therefore ask whether Polybius’ Roman constitution was not a ‘composite’ constitution rather than a ‘mixed’ one, combining elements of different political systems which remain essentially separate. However, this is precisely where Polybius makes his original contribution to ancient political theory.
Since each element was ‘pure’ , the stabilising ‘mixture’ lay entirely in the interrelation between individual institutions, whose powers were moderated through a system of ‘checks and balances’. The interdependency of the Roman institutions represents the central tenet of Polybius’ analysis, which argued that none of them could act independently but had to rely on the co-operation of the others, a co-operation that was forced upon each element and essentially was motivated by self-interest tempered by fear.
Demonstrating this interdependency in practice is not without difficulty, however, and many scholars have noted the problems Polybius faced when trying to apply his thesis to the specifics of the Roman political system. It is, for example, hard to accept the consuls as counter-balancing the senate , since consuls and senators all belonged to the same socio-economic class; indeed the consuls were themselves members of the senate and would remain so after their tenure. Some of the interdependencies claimed by Polybius also seem forced, not least the people’s reliance on the senate, which exaggerates the importance of public contracts and the proportion of citizens sharing in them.
Examples such as these cast doubt on the assumption that the analysis grew out of Polybius’ own personal observations of Roman politics and his close acquaintance with leading protagonists. Polybius’ constitutional digression should in this respect be treated as distinct from his ‘pragmatic’ historical reporting. It is perhaps better understood as an intellectual ‘tour-de-force’ which served to divert and impress his readership – and rival historians – with a dazzling display of political theorisation. Polybius embraces the challenge of making Roman institutions comprehensible to a foreign audience that would often have found them baffling, and he does so by fitting them into a conventional Greek theoretical framework. As a result the unfamiliar becomes familiar – to the Greeks as well as to us; Rome emerges as the perfect embodiment of the long-standing Greek ideal of the mixed constitution, able to take its rightful place alongside Sparta.
The question is where this leaves the study of the Roman political system. Polybius’ analysis is too schematic to be of much help in understanding the location of power in republican Rome, and despite recent attempts to ‘rehabilitate’ his model, most scholars have recognised its basic shortcomings. There is, however, a much wider legacy of Polybius’ work, and to grasp that we may shift our focus from the specifics of his analysis to his overall approach; for what was truly innovative in Polybius’ constitutional digression was his application of Greek concepts to Roman institutions. This example of ‘interpretatio Graeca’ has raised few eyebrows, probably because most modern scholars consider these analytical tools to be universally applicable. But as Ostwald noted, the classification of constitutions as the rule of one, few and many, is now so conventional, ‘that we tend to forget how uniquely Greek it is’. The concepts employed by Polybius – and indeed his entire analytical framework – were developed in a Greek context and shaped by experiences specific to the Greek polis. Given their cultural contingency, we may consider the possibility that they in fact impose an alien perspective that obscures what was uniquely Roman.
Polybius’ approach was basically a functional one that perceived Roman politics as a logical system, in which each element fulfilled a specific role in maintaining the all-important stability. As components of political machinery they were endowed with rational purpose as a means of negotiating power within the state, balancing the interests of different groups and upholding social peace. Polybius’ identification of a distinct political ‘value’ in each Roman institution has wide implications, for in the end it is this approach that has defined the comitia as essentially ‘democratic’ in their rationale.
Cicero’s Res Publica
Polybius’ analysis of the Roman state was that of an outsider, which raises the question how a Roman writer would apply the Greek models. This is where Cicero’s contribution becomes important, for in the De re publica and De legibus he offers a glimpse of a different conceptualisation of Roman institutions. Unlike Polybius, Cicero was not a detached foreign spectator, but a Roman aristocrat with long experience in dealing with the institutions he describes. Although he builds on the same Greek theoretical foundations as Polybius, whom he acknowledges as an authority, and uses identical models and categories, there are slight but significant shifts in emphasis and the addition of crucial new accents.
The De re publica, written between 54 and 51 during Cicero’s self-imposed withdrawal from the political scene, belongs to a period of upheaval and instability in Rome. The text has a clear remedial function, exploring possible solutions to the disunity and instability that currently threatened the republic. It therefore presents a positive and uplifting vision of the res publica, with particular stress on the importance of consensus, co-operation and unity of purpose as the original impulses that had first led to its creation.
Cicero’s description of the constitutional types and the advantages derived from a balanced mixture does not depart significantly from his Greek sources, but the overall conception of the constitution is nevertheless quite different. He abandons the idea of opposing constitutional elements locked in perpetual competition over power and resources and kept in equilibrium only through mutual fear. Strikingly, he uses a Platonic image of dissimilar sounds creating musical harmonies to illustrate the distinctly Roman consensus he envisages. Importantly, this is a harmony between social classes held together by common accord, not distinct constitutional forces or principles. The resulting concordia is therefore very different in nature from Polybius ’ checks and balances.
In line with conventional Roman thought and political practice, Cicero readily accepts the people’s right to libertas and stresses its overall centrality to the res publica, but it was also self-evident to him that the elite would provide leadership. He therefore introduces a concept absent from his Greek models, namely senatorial auctoritas, the pervasive influence that went far beyond what was formally enshrined in law. Essentially therefore, Cicero’s constitution is both aristocratic and bipartite, with the populus holding the power but exercising it on the advice of experienced councillors and delegating executive functions to appointed magistrates.
Thus, in contrast to Polybius the central virtue of the mixed system was to Cicero its ability to satisfy the people’s desire for libertas without compromising the power of the elite or the strong magistracy. But because the basic principle of the people’s libertas was beyond contention, its precise articulation became much more crucial. A key concept was aequabilitas – equity, equality or fairness – which represents the particular kind of equality that is proportional to merit and thus responds to the fundamental aristocratic objection against the egalitarian principle which is its failure to take into account naturally occurring differences in status or ability.
Cicero’s other constitutional treatise, the De legibus, goes into greater detail with regard to the practicalities of politics and here the discrepancies between his and Polybius’ approach become even more apparent. The popular tribunate is presented as a means of pacifying the people, a necessary concession which ensures that the common people make no desperate attempt to assert their rights. Cicero further outlines a procedure designed to give voting procedures the ‘appearance of liberty’, ‘libertatis species’, a point echoed in his praise for the republican hero Publicola, who by granting the people a moderate amount of liberty had entrenched the power of the elite. Thus, the popular institutions and their prerogatives emerge as institutionalised guarantors and symbolic representations of the people’s liberty, serving to integrate the people into an aristocratic regime – without conveying any real power. In Cicero’s version of the ‘mixed constitution’, institutions could exist to create a semblance of representation, being gestures of inclusion and shared citizenship rather than vehicles of actual popular influence.
Cicero’s model remains a negotiation between, on the one hand, the Greek conceptual framework he had adopted and, on the other hand, his personal vision and experience of the Roman state. As such it hints at a more complex and subtle understanding of institutions than Polybius’ model of formalised checks and balances. In particular, the suggestion that institutions could have symbolic functions may give us a clue as to how to resolve the paradoxes inherent in the Roman political system. Polybius’ functional approach has, as noted, encouraged a ‘normalisation’ of Roman institutions, but a better understanding of the Roman political system and the particular logic which governed it may be gained by focusing on those elements that do not fit easily into his model. In that context the ambiguous role of the populus attracts particular attention. …
Voting and Assemblies
In antiquity political participation was, in the absence of the modern concept of representation, by definition direct; people could be politically active only by turning up in person and casting their vote in the assembly. In Rome, however, popular participation was structured in a unique way, which minimised the role of the individual citizen. Whenever a vote was to be taken the citizens were organised into groups, which voted together as blocks casting a single set of votes each. Different assemblies were based on different units, curiae, centuriae or tribus, but the fundamental principle remained the same.
The Roman system of block voting had no direct parallel in the ancient world, and its origins remain obscure, although it has been linked to the structure of Roman society in pre-historic times. Thus, the oldest Roman assembly, the comitia curiata, divided people into curiae, and it has been suggested that these groups, ‘co-viria’, may have been the original units from which the Roman population had been formed. The traditional designation of the Roman citizens as Quirites goes back etymologically to the members of curiae, which Prugni argued were not artificial political constructs but autonomous units existing before the creation of the state. Supposedly, all Roman citizens were members of a curia, which retained some religious functions under the leadership of a curio.
In the late republic the comitia curiata had very limited functions, and its original responsibilities are largely a matter of speculation. However, the curiae were involved in granting imperium, executive powers, to the chief magistrates, as they had previously done to the kings in an act of formal acclamation. Perhaps the curiae had once met separately to acclaim the new king, and only at a later stage were turned into a single assembly in which each unit continued to deliver a separate vote of consent. The hypothesis would provide a historical explanation for this unique invention. Still, whatever its origins the real significance of the block vote in the comitia curiata lies in the pattern it came to provide for all political participation in the Roman republic. As other types of assemblies were created they invariably adopted the ancient practice of the block vote, which persisted long after the archaic structures that first inspired it had vanished.
There are wide implications of the block vote, since it meant that it was no longer the mass of assembled citizens who collectively gave their backing to a proposal or a candidate, but the largely artificial units to which each of them had been assigned. Constitutionally the vote cast by individual citizens did not count, only the vote of their units. The block vote thus introduced an element of abstraction into the people’s participation, which marked an important modification of the ‘direct’ principle that otherwise prevailed in the ancient world. Ultimately, it enabled the populus to convene and act constitutionally without large-scale participation. It separated the populus as a political concept from its physical reality by allowing the former to be formally present in all its constituent parts without the mass of Roman citizens actually being there.
The most startling illustration of this separation comes from the late republic when the comitia curiata had been reduced to pure ritual. At that time the highest state officials would still be granted their powers by a vote in the ancient assembly of the curiae. The traditional procedure would be followed as before, the magistrate would call the curiae, votes would be cast and counted, results declared, but with the important difference that each of the thirty curiae now was represented by a single lictor. The procedure was, of course, a formality and the outcome never in doubt, but constitutionally it still carried validity and was in some way deemed necessary for the formal exercise of power. This requirement could have serious practical implications …
‘Struggle of the Orders’
The Evolution of the Roman Political System
The basic principles of the Roman constitution … remained largely constant and were over time elevated to venerable ancestral custom. No constitution remains static, however, and also in Rome new institutions and offices were introduced and old ones modified, though rarely abolished. Since few strands of reliable information survive from the early republic and most of our knowledge has to be inferred from later institutions and practices, any attempt at tracing constitutional developments must in the nature of things have to remain tentative.
Our main, indeed only, contemporary evidence, the Twelve Tables (mid-fifth century), suggests a fairly ‘primitive’ rural society, which only very slowly developed centralised powers, laws and institutions.
Power appears to have been in the hands of great families whose position was based on land ownership. As noted, one group of families had early on established itself as a ruling class – the patricians, who claimed religious privileges and prerogatives that served to underpin their social and political ascendancy. Magistrates were appointed annually – how many and under what titles remains uncertain – and their powers were confirmed by popular acclamation. Alongside the magistrates a body of elders existed, drawn from the leading – mostly patrician – families who advised the magistrates and oversaw their actions. Collectively, the patrician senators claimed the right to annul any appointment or piece of legislation, presumably in order to check the magistrates rather than the assembly, which held no political initiative. Membership of the senate may not have been formalised until the late fourth century, but we should not overestimate the fluidity of the early Roman senate. It did after all hold substantial collective powers, and even an informally constituted senate represented the collective authority of the great families, whose senior members presumably could expect a seat on the magistrates ’ advisory council.
The aristocratic nature of early republican society is hardly open to doubt, and the political system appears to have been designed primarily to check the powers of individual members of the ruling class. This was achieved through short-term tenure of public office and the collegiality which also limited the scope for independent action.
Paradoxically, it could be argued that the elevated position of the magistrates and the immense powers invested in them suggest a considerable degree of cohesion and internal discipline within the early Roman elite, given that aristocratic systems normally delegate such authority only when there is a reasonable expectation that office holders will act in their collective interest.
We have no reliable information about the selection of magistrates in the early period. Presumably, it happened consensually through more or less formalised negotiations among the patrician elders – who already had the power to block unsuitable appointments. It would therefore appear that the early republic was ruled by a small hereditary class of families, which took turns to fill the magistracies and perform the largely military responsibilities that came with them. The populus, organised in its various subdivisions, was called upon to ratify proposals and declarations of war and approve their new leaders. Changes to the system happened mostly as a result of the challenge presented by the so-called plebeians, which has become known as the ‘Struggle of the Orders’. Reconstructing this conflict poses fundamental problems because of the almost complete lack of contemporary sources. It has come to us through the filter of later republican history, and whatever information was available to the writers of that period – and that was probably quite rudimentary – would inevitably have been coloured by more recent experiences of political conflict, casting fundamental doubts on most aspects of the traditional narrative. As Linderski noted, ‘the only thing not in contention is that it did take place’. And the most compelling evidence for its existence comes from the specifically plebeian institutions which grew out of the ‘Struggle’ and eventually became integral parts of the Roman constitution.
The plebeian institutions were created in opposition to the established political structures dominated by the patricians, and included plebeian officials, tribuni plebis and aediles plebis , and an assembly, the concilium plebis , which issued formal resolutions, known as plebiscita. The most striking aspect of these institutions is the fact that they represent a direct mirror image of the official institutions of the Roman state. Thus, the nature of the relationship between tribune and concilium appears to have been similar to that between magistrate and comitia. The concilium was called and controlled by the tribune and subject to limitations identical to those imposed on the comitia. We also find the same formalisation of popular attendance, using block votes rather than individual votes. In historical times the concilium was convened in tribus but there are indications that it may originally have been organised in curiae, further suggesting that the concilium was modelled directly on the comitia curiata.
The main difference between the two systems lay in the role of the tribunes and in the source of their powers. They had the right, perhaps even the obligation, to intervene on behalf of the plebeians and protect their interests against (patrician) magistrates, and their power to do so came from a lex sacrata, a formal oath taken by the plebeians to protect their tribunes, which conferred sacrosanctitas and made them inviolable.
The plebeian ‘movement’ has traditionally been seen as a genuinely popular reaction against patrician domination and exploitation. It is therefore often assumed that the ‘Struggle’ in the early stages was focused on the socio-economic issues concerning ordinary plebeians, and that only later, as a plebeian elite gradually emerged, did demands for full political equality and participation arise. The plebeian institutions, however, are difficult to reconcile to this model, since they appear to have been no more ‘democratic’ in their structure than those of the supposedly oppressive patrician state, which they replicate in almost every respect. Like the comitia the concilium plebis was entirely controlled by their leaders and allowed no independent initiative.
This puzzling situation opens up two lines of explanation: either the plebeians were unable to conceive of any other form of political organisation and believed that only this structure would command sufficient authority to enforce their demands; or, alternatively and perhaps more plausibly, the plebeian institutions reflected a social structure which was as hierarchical and unequal as that of Roman society as a whole. In other words, they point to the formation of a plebeian elite already during the early stages of the ‘Struggle’, an elite which used the institutions as vehicles for their claim to authority and legitimacy equal to that of the patricians. That interpretation would help explain why the leadership structure of the ‘popular’ concilium plebis was not qualitatively different from that found in the existing assemblies, presumably so unresponsive to the needs of the populus. The plebeians appear to have entertained the same basic notions of the state, legitimacy and power as other Romans at the time. The implication is that a truly ‘democratic’ movement may never have existed in Rome, the plebeian ‘state within the state’ being closer to a paternalistic aristocracy which embraced the interests of the masses, in part perhaps to its own advantage.
The plebeian resistance was, of course, rooted in discontent – with the rule of the patricians or perhaps just with specific social issues. In the early stages the sources suggest it was focused on alleviating particular problems: debt and bondage; access to public law, personal security, and land. But the late introduction of constitutional issues, including the demands for plebeian access to state offices, does not necessarily make it a popular movement ‘from below’. Initially, the religious monopoly of the patricians may have seemed so fundamental an obstacle that any attempt to gain full equality appeared futile. Moreover, the major disadvantage suffered by leading plebeians – their inability to hold military commands – may have become a pressing concern only as Rome began her Italian expansion in the fourth century.
The ‘Struggle of the Orders’ has often been seen as uniquely Roman in its origins, character, and articulation, probably because of the special status of the patrician elite, but comparative studies of city-states in medieval Italy have revealed interesting parallels. There we find similar patterns of social conflict with oligarchic monopolies challenged by il popolo, whose council, the consiglio del popolo, appointed its own leaders and protectors, the capitani del popolo, separate from the governing institutions. They would typically gain official recognition over time and become established parts of the government. Moreover, despite their popular rhetoric these leaders were generally of relatively high economic standing, i.e. members of an excluded class of property owners who championed the cause of the people in order to gain access to the inner circle of the ruling class. A similar scenario cannot be ruled out in early Rome. …
Popular Participation
… All the indications we have for the scale of political participation suggest that only a tiny proportion of the citizen population could ever be present on these occasions. In principle this tells us little about the political role of the populus, since in any participatory system there is bound to be a disparity between those entitled to vote and the ones making use of this right. Even in modern democracies, where voting is decentralised and easily accessible, not all citizens cast their vote – without the democratic nature of the process thereby being called into question.
There are fundamental differences, however; nowadays non-participation is 1) purely a matter of personal choice since all citizens can cast their vote in both theory and practice, and 2) generally considered unfortunate and at variance with prevailing democratic ideals. In Rome, on the other hand, the discrepancy between populus and voters appears to have been an integral and, it would seem, intended feature of the political system. There is no recorded attempt to allow the assemblies to become more representative – in fact the opposite rather seems to have been the case. Venues were not expanded to accommodate the growing electorate and the arcane and time-consuming procedures remained in place despite the huge increase in the number of citizens. No effort was made to encourage rustici to take part; decentralised voting was never considered and the market days, on which they might have visited the capital, were explicitly designated as non-comitial.
The limited turnout did not give rise to concerns about the validity of any given law or appointment, which may be explained by the particular Roman conceptualisation of popular legitimacy . … As we saw, the people’s involvement carried a unique element of abstraction, which subsumed individual votes into blocks and effectively eliminated conventional quantification of turnouts. In doing so it also removed any incentive to increase participation or promote popular representation. Since it was an abstract version of the populus Romanus that granted its consent on these occasions, mass participation was practically, as well as ideologically, irrelevant. For that reason the situation we encounter in the late republic should not be seen as a ‘degeneration’ of a system that had once aimed at greater representation or an inadvertent side-effect of expansion and population growth. There is no reason to believe that Roman assemblies were ever intended as political fora for the citizen body in a concrete physical sense. We must therefore distinguish between the populus as a constitutional concept and source of public legitimacy and the actual people who took part in voting. Indeed this separation seems fundamental to understanding Roman politics and may offer a basic structural framework for analysing the assemblies and their voting patterns. …
The Contio in the Late Republic
… The general polarisation of late republican politics affected the ability of the contio to fulfil its traditional role in the regulatory system that kept office holders in check. If, as it seems, organised – perhaps even paid – crowds often filled the meetings, from which opponents stayed away, the opportunity for real debates and communication must have been much reduced. As a result, the Roman elite, defined broadly as the propertied classes, in a sense lost the public space where ideas were tested, popularity measured – and troublemakers reined in. And as ‘public opinion’ (among those whose views carried weight with the political class) became more elusive and difficult to gauge, so it also became less politically effective.
As the public aspect of Roman politics became more distorted, the logistical context also changed profoundly. With Rome outgrowing the format of a city-state and reaching an unprecedented scale and degree of complexity, many of those who mattered politically became unable to attend public meetings, either because they resided outside the capital, for instance the municipal elites, or had temporarily retreated to country estates, served in the provinces or were away on business. In response to this increasingly diffuse elite, speeches delivered at contiones began to circulate in written form as a means of reaching those who had not been present – whether deliberately because of political opposition, or due to practical obstacles. The importance of the meeting itself was thereby relativised along with the traditional face-to-face character of Roman politics. In the end we are faced with yet another paradox; for as the contiones became more and more frequent and turbulent, they may also have become less efficient in terms of shaping political events. In fact, Cicero’s repeated comments about how one captures the views of ‘the people’ can be seen as symptomatic of the fundamental elusiveness of ‘public opinion’ in a large-scale society without print media, opinion polls or effective general elections. …
… The events of the late republic offer one important lesson: they vividly illustrate the ability of small, dedicated crowds to capture the political process and dominate the public stage. It was possible at any moment for a group of citizens to turn up and spontaneously make their views heard in front of members of the ruling class. What is striking therefore is the rarity with which that seems to have happened. … Riots may have been more frequent than often assumed, but importantly they never seem to have ‘spilled over’ into the world of official politics. Usually, they were triggered by specific complaints, often linked to material concerns, and at no point do we hear of crowds calling for substantive social and political change; the politics of the street – like Roman politics in general – appears to have been entirely issue related, which is perhaps less surprising when we consider the ideological context; how could demands for a more ‘democratic’ system be formulated when the ‘people’ formally already held the power? Still, the extent to which the official political process appears to have been divorced from any genuinely popular agenda is remarkable. …
… How do we explain the apparent consensus and general acquiescence displayed by the mass of the Roman population? Polybius, as we saw, was in no doubt that the secret of Rome’s stability lay in its ‘mixed constitution’, which offered the people a share of power and ensured that their interests were accommodated. However, given the general absence of the ‘populus’ from political proceedings and its inability to set – or even influence – the agenda, we might ask whether there were other channels through which the masses could feel represented. Alongside the popular assemblies, Polybius listed the tribunate as part of the ‘democratic’ foundations of the People’s power, thereby adding a ‘representational’ element to Rome’s political system, which was otherwise based on direct participation. In formal terms, however, tribunes were not defined as ‘representatives’ any more than other Roman magistrates were. They may historically have presented themselves as ‘defenders of the plebs’, but with the plebeio-patrician settlement this polarity became obsolete and thereafter the tribunes were no longer associated with any specific social group.
Still, we should not lose sight of the symbolic dimension of the tribunate, which endured long after the ‘Struggle’ had been settled and a new aristocracy had come to power; for while it hardly justifies Polybian notions of a ‘mixed constitution’, the tribunate, with its rich historical baggage, may still be significant as part of a particular Roman identity which encompassed rulers as well as ruled and shaped their mutual relations. Thus the remarkably stable political order we find especially during the so-called classic republic can only be properly understood if we broaden our perspective and go beyond the realm of conventional politics. …
[MGH: To be continued in a shorter Part 2]
The Source:
Henrik Mouritsen, Politics in the Roman Republic, Cambridge 2017 [pp. 6-15, 25-27, 31-35, 57-58, 90, 92-95]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.