Roman Political Assemblies, by Tim Cornell
Compliant, passive, personalistic, met needs for interaction, ritualised participation in hierarchical communities
Tim Cornell wrote:
CHAPTER 16
Roman Political Assemblies
16.1 Introduction
Political assemblies were the focus of Roman political life and also lie at the centre of recent debates about the nature of Roman political culture. These debates began with a reaction against the prosopographic school, which had dominated the historiography of republican Rome in the middle years of the last century. The principal aim of prosopography had been to analyse the individuals and groups within the Roman ruling class that supposedly controlled the state by means of vertical ties of social obligation (clientela). The role of the people’s assemblies, which Polybius had identified as the democratic arm of a tripartite ‘mixed’ constitution, was dismissed as a sham; the prosopographers reduced politics to a game in which competing aristocratic factions kept the people in subjection and manipulated the assemblies to their own advantage.
For their part, the revisionists claimed that Roman politics was about more than the interplay of individual and group interests within the ruling class, that stable factions based on aristocratic family groups are a scholarly figment, and above all that the Roman people belong in the centre of the picture. This last assertion found expression particularly in the work of Fergus Millar, who argued that the people played a decisive role in political events, and that the assemblies were the scene of real contests and debates. His aim, in short, was to show ‘that Polybius was right and his modern critics are wrong’ (Millar). But before considering these big questions, we need to examine the assemblies themselves – their competence, organisation and procedures.
16.2 Different Types of Assembly
In the Roman Republic there were many different kinds of assembly, performing a variety of different functions. A basic distinction must be drawn between assemblies known as contiones, at which speakers addressed the crowd but no votes were cast, and formally constituted meetings (comitia) where there were no speeches and no debate, but where outcomes were decided by voting.
16.2.1 Contiones
A contio (a contracted form of conuentio, a ‘coming together’) was a public gathering summoned by a magistrate or tribune, which could take place anywhere; a military commander in the field who wished to address his troops would summon them to a contio. At Rome, the magistrates could call similar ad hoc meetings so that they, and others invited by them, could address the people. Such contiones could be held anywhere, but most took place either in the Comitium, an enclosed space in the northwest of the Forum, from which speakers addressed the crowd from the rostra, or in the Forum itself, with the podium of the temple of Castor acting as a speakers’ platform. Tribunes of the plebs could also hold contiones in the Circus Flaminius, in the south-western part of the Campus Martius.
A more formal type of contio took place as a necessary preliminary to a meeting of the comitia. When the comitia met to hold an election, the preceding contio was a brief affair consisting of prayers to the gods and instructions to voters. There were no speeches, by candidates or anyone else, and nothing resembling hustings at a modern election.
Legislative comitia, by contrast, could take place only after a series of preliminary stages. The bill (rogatio) had to be published at least 17 days before the comitial vote, and during the interval contiones were called by the person promoting the bill, who would speak in its favour and then invite others to speak for and against. Other magistrates could hold their own contiones to express their views of a bill .… Finally, on the day of the vote itself, a contio was held in which final arguments were presented for and against the proposal (suasio and dissuasio), after which the presiding magistrate would instruct the people to disperse and proceed to the comitia. Judicial proceedings before the people followed a similar pattern. The case was first presented at a series of three contiones which constituted the investigation (anquisitio); then, after an interval of at least 17 days, a final contio, known as the quarta accusatio, heard speeches for the prosecution and the defence before the people adjourned to vote.
16.2.2 Comitia
The Latin term for a voting assembly was comitia, a plural word meaning ‘comings together’ or ‘gatherings’. This grammatical peculiarity, which makes discussion in a modern language rather awkward, arises from the fact that Roman voting assemblies were invariably divided into constituent groups that formed voting units.
Consequently, no decision by the Roman people, whether electoral, legislative or judicial, was ever decided by a popular vote – that is to say, by a majority of all those present and voting. Rather, a Roman citizen voted in his unit and a simple majority of votes within the unit determined its vote. An absolute majority of unit-votes would then decide the overall outcome.
It is worth saying that this is a truly remarkable way of doing things and one that is unparalleled, as far as we know, in any other ancient state; and since the constituent units did not elect representatives to a parliament and were not in any way made to reflect the numbers of voters in the different units (as in an electoral college), the system seems to have no parallel in the modern world either. Its origins are obscure. It may go back to a time when sections of a large gathering, most obviously the military units of an army, took turns to approve a leader’s decisions or appointments by acclamation. This is suggested by the fact that the Latin word for a vote – suffragium – is derived from the same root as fragor (‘din’, from frangere, ‘break’), although in a military context fragor more commonly signifies a clash of weapons than shouting or applause; but in any case, assent was expressed audibly.
As we have seen, the plural word comitia reflects the fact that at Rome a meeting of the people entailed not one but many assemblies: each constituent unit had its own assembly (comitium) and the majority vote of its members determined its suffragium. That suffragium referred not to an individual vote but to the collective vote of a unit is indicated by the fact that the original six cavalry centuries in the comitia centuriata were known as the sex suffragia and by Cicero’s proud assertion that he had been elected to a succession of offices by all the suffragia – that is, not by a unanimous popular vote (!), but by a majority in each of the units of the assembly.
16.3 Voting Assemblies in Practice
There were three different kinds of comitia in the Roman Republic, distinguished by the voting units into which they were divided and each possessing its own functions, organisation and procedure. The three types were the comitia curiata, comprising the 30 curiae, groups into which the Roman people were divided in the earliest times; the comitia centuriata, originally a military assembly in which the citizens were organised in centuries; and the comitia tributa, based on the local tribes, to which the citizens belonged by virtue of residence.
16.3.1 The Comitia Curiata
This was the oldest type of Roman assembly and dates back to the time of the kings. The voting units, the curiae, were the earliest divisions of the people, numbering 10 from each of the three tribes traditionally founded by Romulus. Their character is uncertain, but membership seems to have depended on kinship; they also had a local basis, which probably means that they comprised the families resident in particular localities. For the present purpose, what matters is that at some point the curiae ceased to have any meaningful function and that the comitia curiata persisted only as an archaic survival in the classical Republic. It was probably already an anachronism in the fifth century. In the later Republic, its only tasks were to witness wills and adoptions, and to pass a ‘curiate law’ to confer powers on the chief magistrates (a practice that perhaps originated as a ceremony to approve the choice of a new king). These residual functions were reduced to a pure formality in the historical period, when at meetings of the assembly the 30 curiae were each represented by a single lictor (official attendant). Even so, the formalities continued to be observed and serious constitutional questions were raised if they were unable to be performed.…
… A further point to arise in this connection has recently been highlighted by Henrik Mouritsen. The votes of the 30 lictors in the comitia curiata gave formal expression to a decision of the Roman people and thus represent in extreme form a symbolic element that was present in all types of Roman voting assemblies. The possibility that Roman assemblies, and in particular the group-voting system that was employed at the comitia, are best explained as a symbolic performance or ritual, will be discussed in Section 16.4
16.3.2 The Comitia Centuriata
The main functions of the comitia centuriata were to elect the senior magistrates, the consuls, praetors and censors; the centuriate assembly also acted as a court to try capital cases and as a legislative assembly on occasion, particularly, as befitted a military organisation, in matters of war and peace. But these latter functions were gradually taken over by other institutions in the course of the Republic, as permanent jury courts were set up in the later second century and legislation became the exclusive prerogative of the comitia tributa, a process that is difficult to document in detail, but seems to have been firmly established by the second century.
The organisation of the comitia centuriata is complex and difficult. We have historical accounts that claim to describe the assembly in its original form, as established in the sixth century BCE by Servius Tullius, Rome’s sixth king. Servius is said to have reformed the army, dividing men into centuries, which then became the voting units of a political assembly. It is not impossible that a military assembly of some kind existed under the monarchy, but it is most unlikely that the detailed organisation of the assembly we find in our sources actually dates back to the time of the kings. The key feature of the later assembly was that it was divided into classes based on wealth and this may reflect an early form of army organisation in which men provided their own armament. The well-to-do citizens would have been brigaded in centuries of cavalry and heavily armed infantry, and the less well-off in centuries of light-armed skirmishers. Such a system would resemble the military organisations that existed in the cities of archaic Greece and that we know were copied by other city-state societies in contemporary Italy, including the Etruscans. A political assembly based on this type of military organisation would give power to the better-off citizens and exclude the poorest.
What we find outlined in our sources is a structure that was designed to do precisely that, but in a contrived and distorted way that must represent a later development. Its basic features are as follows: property-owning citizens were divided into five classes based on wealth, the men in each class being grouped in ‘centuries’. But the distorting effect was produced by the fact that the richer classes contained more centuries than the poorer ones. They were also divided by age, with each class containing equal numbers of centuries of seniores (men aged over 45) and iuniores (men aged 17 to 45). On any reasonable reconstruction of the age profile of a pre-industrial population, this would mean that the junior centuries were around three times the size of the senior ones. The wealth division had an even more distorting effect. The first (richest) class comprised 80 centuries, 40 of seniors and 40 of juniors. The second, third and fourth classes each contained 20 (10 each of seniors and juniors) and the fifth (the least well-off) had 30 (15 each of juniors and seniors). The poorest citizens, who fell beneath the minimum property qualification for membership of the fifth class, were confined to a single century. They were known as proletarii, from proles (offspring) – their only asset. Outside this structure were the equites, the aristocracy, whose name reflects the fact that they served as cavalry in the old military organisation, but later retained their elite status for life. They were grouped in 18 centuries. There were also four supernumerary centuries, two each of engineers (fabri) and musicians (cornicines tubicinesque), whose name reflects a military origin, but whose membership had presumably become a matter of status. The total number of centuries in this extraordinary set-up was therefore 193…
It is immediately evident that this scheme could not represent a real army and that the centuries cannot have been of equal size – certainly not units of 100 men. In fact, the size of the centuries in the various classes must have been in inverse proportion to the actual numbers of citizens: in any unequal society the rich are outnumbered by the poor, but in early Republican Rome the centuries of the first (richest) class were much more numerous than those of the poorer classes. It follows that the latter were far larger than the former. The same must be true, as we have seen, of the division within each class between equal numbers of senior and junior centuries. As for the single century of property less citizens (proletarii), Cicero tells us that in his time it outnumbered all the centuries of the first class put together. On the arithmetic alone the vote of a proletarian would have counted for very little; but what completed his virtual disfranchisement was the voting procedure followed in the comitia centuriata, in which the classes voted in succession, following a hierarchical order.
Under the Servian system that has just been described, the equestrian centuries voted first, after which their votes were counted and the results announced. The same procedure was then followed by the centuries of the first class, and then by the second, third, fourth and fifth classes in turn. A peculiarity of the procedure in the election of consuls was that as soon as a candidate achieved a majority of votes – that is, the votes of 97 of the 193 centuries – he was declared elected; and that when a second candidate reached the same target the procedure ended and the assembly was dismissed. Since the equites and the first class between them comprised 98 centuries, a unanimous vote would mean that the lower classes were not called upon to vote at all; and even in the event of a competitive battle between several candidates, the likelihood is that two candidates would record a majority before the lowest classes were called. In other words, their votes were worthless: they literally did not count.
Whether the organisation of this assembly is called anti-democratic, or oligarchic, there can be no doubt that its effect was to distort the voting arithmetic in favour of the few and to the disadvantage of the many – and this, let us not forget, in an assembly in which the chance to vote at all was dependent on a minimum property qualification. Its purpose, as Livy says, was that no one should appear to be excluded from the vote, but that all the power should be held by the leading citizens (1.43.10).
The initial justification for such a system, known in antiquity as ‘timocracy’(which we may perhaps translate as ‘the rule of the deserving’), was that political power should be wielded by citizens in proportion to their military and fiscal contribution to the state; but by the middle Republic this had become an anachronism, as soldiers were recruited indiscriminately from those who could meet the minimum property qualification, and the state’s finances came to depend less and less on property taxes paid by citizens (they ceased altogether in 167 BCE). By this date the comitia centuriata had the exclusively political function of ensuring that power rested in the the hands of the well-to-do – which Cicero says was the whole point.
This remained true even after a reform in the later third century, the details of which are poorly documented and remain controversial. It is certain, however, that the voting units were now linked to the local tribes, which reached their definitive number of 35 in 241 BCE (which means that the reform must be dated after this). In the reformed assembly the first class numbered 70 centuries, two from each tribe (one each of seniors and juniors), but the total number of centuries remained 193. This meant that the first class, together with the equites who continued to furnish 18 centuries, no longer had a majority and that voting would have to go down at least to the second class before a decision could be reached. It is perhaps for this reason that Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing under Augustus, described the centuriate assembly in his time as ‘more democratic’ (δημοτικώτερον) than it had been under Servius (Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 4.21.3).
In another change, the cavalry no longer voted first. That privilege was now given to one of the first-class infantry centuries, chosen by lot. The vote of this ‘prerogative century’ (centuria praerogativa) was counted and announced before the other centuries voted and had a significant influence on the end result. Other aspects of the reform are very uncertain. In particular, it is not known if the centuries of classes two to five were also coordinated with the 35 tribes and, if so, how the total number of centuries in the assembly could still have been 193. The first class (70 centuries), the equites (18) and the ‘non-combatants’ (5), would together have numbered 93, leaving exactly 100 for the four lower property classes. The most ingenious explanation was offered by Mommsen, who suggested that each class now contained 70 centuries (35 each of juniors and seniors), but that the 280 centuries of the four lower classes were grouped together by a complex process to form 100 artificial centuries for voting purposes (Mommsen 1887: 275–279). This seemingly unlikely suggestion was shown to be not only plausible, but actually the most likely solution, by the discovery, in 1947, of the so-called Tabula Hebana.
What remains uncertain is the purpose of the reform and its political effects, if any. Some have suggested that it was intended to give the lower classes more of a say, others that it was merely an administrative reform of no great political significance in purpose or result. But a powerful argument has been advanced to suggest that its purpose was to increase the power of the ruling class through its control of the tribes. More will be said about this when we come to examine the tribal assembly in Section 16.3.3, but for the present we need only note that the urban population was confined to four of the 35 tribes and that country-dwellers enjoyed a considerable advantage which the third-century reform now extended to the comitia centuriata. The deeply conservative character of the reformed assembly is indicated by the fact that the rich could still outvote the poor, the old could still outvote the young and now the country could outvote the town. It is difficult to avoid the clear implications of this. The ‘flagrant inequity’ of the centuriate assembly (to borrow Rathbone’s phrase) is there for all to see. …
… Elections in the comitia centuriata were unpredictable and no one could control the outcome, least of all the ruling class, whose members were competing for the people’s votes. Their attempts to influence the results frequently included bribery, which itself confirms the point; and those who were targeted must have been persons of modest means who would be attracted by the kinds of bribes on offer (quite small amounts when broken down individually). Voting was not necessarily confined to the top two classes, and the relatively humble citizens in the lower classes, certainly those of classes three and four, could sometimes have a crucial part to play.
As for the question of whether members of the first class should be described as rich, one can only note that these things are relative. The property qualification may have been modest – perhaps upwards of 40,000 sesterces, but maybe even as low as 25,000 – although a detailed reassessment … has made a strong case for a figure of 100,000 in the late Republic. The actual difficulty is to determine what these figures mean in real terms. But it would be reasonable to assume that to qualify for the first class one had to be a relatively prosperous small farmer, and we should not underestimate the capacity of millionaire aristocrats like Cicero to denigrate such people as belonging to the ‘ignorant mob’. We have been well-advised not ‘to classify as rich all those … who were better off than the poor’ (Yakobson); but equally we must beware of the opposite trap of regarding as poor all those who were worse off than the super-rich.
It may be conceded that the decisions of the centuriate assembly should not be identified as the voice of the ruling class and that it did not completely exclude the poorer citizens, whose votes could sometimes be crucial. Even so there can be no denying its inherently conservative character and its system of weighting the votes heavily in favour of well-to-do property owners – a bias that has been described as ‘savage’ (John North).
16.3.3 The Comitia Tributa”
The tribal assembly was less complex in its organisation and less cumbersome in its procedures than the comitia centuriata, which no doubt partly explains why it took over some of the latter’s functions and eventually became the most common type of assembly in the Republic. It was also more equitable, at least in principle, because every citizen who attended had an equal vote.
The voting units of the assembly were the local tribes, which were believed to have been instituted by Servius Tullius to replace the original three Romulean tribes. The city comprised four tribes, and others (the ‘rustic’ tribes) divided up the surrounding countryside. By 495 BCE the number of tribes had reached 21, 4 urban and 17 rustic, a figure that remained for the next century. As Rome expanded in the fourth and third centuries, further tribes were created in a series of stages to incorporate newly conquered territory, down to 241 BCE when the total reached 35. After this it was decided not to increase the total, but to include any subsequent additions of territory in one or another of the existing rustic tribes, with the result that some came to cover separate areas of territory, down to 241 BCE when the total reached 35. After this it was decided not to increase the total, but to include any subsequent additions of territory in one or another of the existing rustic tribes, with the result that some came to cover separate areas of territory in different parts of Italy. In spite of the growth of the city and its population, the number of urban tribes stayed at four (on the history of the tribes, see Taylor 1960).
The tribes were first adopted as voting units by the plebeians, who had formed their own assembly, the concilium plebis, at the legendary ‘First Secession’ in 494 BCE. This plebeian assembly elected its own officials, the plebeian tribunes and aediles, and passed resolutions, or ‘plebiscites’ (plebei scita), which as yet did not have the force of law. In later times it also acted as a court to hear non-capital cases and imposed fines. During the fifth century (traditionally in 471) the concilium plebis adopted the group-voting system using the local tribes, and it was probably not much later that a tribal assembly of the whole people (comitia populi tributa) was created in imitation of its plebeian counterpart.
The distinction between the two types of tribal assembly is difficult to define (and some have argued that no such distinction existed). In any case, in the later Republic it was a mere technicality, after plebeians had obtained equal political rights, tribunes of the plebs and plebeian aediles had become regular officials (akin to magistrates) and plebiscites had obtained the full force of law following the lex Hortensia (c. 287 BCE).
In what follows, reference will be made to the comitia tributa or tribal assembly, without regard to the nice distinction between the comitia populi tributa and the concilium plebis.
The functions of the tribal assembly were to elect junior magistrates and other officials, to pass laws and to hear cases punishable by fines. In the late Republic, its particular function determined the place of assembly. Elections were held in the Campus Martius, but for legislative and judicial purposes the assembly met either in the Forum, having moved from the Comitium in 145 BCE (Cic. Amic. 96; Varro, Rust. 1.2.9, with Taylor 1966: 23–25), or on the Capitol.
The same distinction applies to procedures. That is to say, in the electoral assemblies the tribes all voted together, whereas in legislative and judicial assemblies they did so successively, one after another in an order decided by lot. As each one voted, its result was declared, thus providing a guide to those that were to follow. The first tribe to vote was known as the principium and had the same function as the centuria praerogatiua in the centuriate assembly. There are good grounds for thinking that successive voting was originally practised in all meetings of the comitia tributa and perhaps also in the comitia centuriata – that is to say, the centuries of each class voted, and had their results declared, in succession; but that in the late Republic the tribes in electoral assemblies and the centuries in each class in the centuriate assembly (whose functions were now almost exclusively electoral) voted simultaneously. The change is thought to have coincided with, and probably to have been caused by, the introduction of voting by secret ballot.
On the face of it, the tribal assembly seems to have been a more equitable institution than its centuriate counterpart. The votes within the tribal units were of equal weight, as were the units themselves; the order of voting was determined by lot and there was no property qualification or classification by wealth. Nevertheless, there are grounds for thinking that certain people were advantaged, and others disadvantaged, by the practical effects of group voting based on residence. Most obviously, the fact that the landless city-dwellers were confined to just four tribes artificially favoured the well-to-do landowners who lived in the city but owned country estates, and discriminated against both the urban proletariat and the peasant smallholders who lived too far away from Rome to attend the assemblies. This systemic bias was aggravated by the fact that the great majority of these rural citizens were registered in the later rustic tribes that were created in the fourth and third centuries and occupied extensive territories in far-flung regions of the ager Romanus.
The older rural tribes, however, were situated in the immediately surrounding area of the city of Rome, which in the course of the third and second centuries became gradually depopulated, particularly of its free citizen population, because of migration to the city and the replacement of smallholdings by large slave-run estates … The gross disparity in numbers of voters between the tribes, and the unequal capacity of inhabitants of different parts of Italy to attend the comitia, would have given the well-to-do a built-in majority in assemblies organised by tribal units. The same argument would also suggest that the third-century reform of the comitia centuriata served the interests of the governing class.
On the other hand, the large-scale migration of citizens from the country to the city over the same period may have redressed the balance, if the migrants retained their membership of the rural tribes from which they came. This is a difficult question on which our sources provide little secure information. It is likely that changes of residence ought to have been noted by the censors and that immigrants from the country districts should have been re-registered in the urban tribes. But it is not certain that this was done systematically at every census, least of all in the last decades of the Republic between 70 and 28 BCE when no censors were able to complete their task. As a result, the tribal votes came to be dominated by the urban population.
By this date, however, the electorate had been transformed, and more than doubled in size, by the grant of citizenship to all free inhabitants of Italy as a result of the Social War (91–88 BCE). The new citizens were eventually distributed among the existing 31 rural tribes, so that almost all the tribes now included separate enclaves in different parts of Italy and at least some of the smaller tribes were considerably enlarged. But the result, a confused patchwork of tribal districts covering the whole peninsula, is hard to reconstruct in detail on the basis of the surviving evidence. We cannot really tell whether any systematic attempt was made to equalise the size of the tribes, or if so, how successful it was. It is possible that great inequalities remained, as Lily Ross Taylor argued in her ground-breaking investigation of the issue; she was also inclined to detect political gerrymandering on the part of those who carried out the distribution.
16.4 GENERAL ISSUES AND CONCLUSIONS
The enfranchisement of Italy after the Social War transformed the Roman state and its institutions. As far as the assemblies are concerned, it accentuated in an extreme way something that had in fact been evident before, namely that Rome was not really a city-state. A city-state community, with a compact territory and a single urban centre where all the citizens could participate directly in politics, was no longer a practical reality by the time of the First Punic War (264–241 BCE). By then Rome’s territory measured over 26,500 square kilometres and extended north-eastwards to the Adriatic and south as far as Campania. The number of adult male citizens was approaching 300,000. By continuing to operate with the political institutions of a city-state Rome already constituted a ‘living anachronism’. What this means is that in the classical Republic, and even more in the period after the Social War, the citizens attending a political assembly in Rome cannot and should not be thought of as ‘the Roman people’ in any meaningful sense.
Numbers matter. The crucial question of how many people attended the assemblies is impossible to answer with any precision, but even the calculation of the maximum number of people who could have been accommodated in the various places of assembly is telling. A capacity crowd in the Forum, or on the Capitol, or even in the voting space on the Campus Martius, would have numbered no more than 20–25,000. This is just a calculation of maximum capacity; the real numbers attending on any given occasion were probably much smaller and are unlikely ever to have exceeded 1% of the total number of voters. The most remarkable thing about this is that there is no hint in our sources of any concern about the numbers attending the assemblies, of any effort to encourage or increase participation, or of any challenge to the legitimacy of decisions on the grounds of poor attendance.
Evidently, in Republican Rome, numbers did not matter. The significance of this should not be underestimated by those asking whether Roman political culture was in any sense ‘democratic’. In the words of Martin Jehne, ‘these facts … seem to me to provide the death blow for Fergus Millar’s theory from [sic] Roman democracy’.
An even more intractable problem is the question of who did turn up at assembly meetings and what their motives were for doing so. For elections there is evidence that candidates and their associates would try to mobilise influential supporters not only in the city but also in the towns of Italy, and targeted their efforts on the tribes. Election results mattered, not only to the aristocrats who were competing for office, but also to their friends and supporters whose personal loyalties and networks of obligation were at stake; and although it is no longer fashionable to believe that patron–client ties allowed powerful individuals and groups to control the outcome, it would be wrong to deny that ties of friendship and social obligation were powerful influences, especially on wealthy and well-connected voters. This is clearly implied by the many references to electoral contests in the works of Cicero, especially in such texts as the Pro Murena, and in the Commentariolum petitionis attributed to Quintus Cicero. One might even conjecture that the electoral comitia were attended, mainly if not exclusively, by persons who were personally connected to one or more of the candidates, even if the connection was indirect or remote – through ‘friends of friends’ (to adopt the title of a classic study of political patronage: Boissevain).
It is much more difficult to imagine who attended legislative assemblies and contiones. The latter, in particular, were often called at short notice and could not in that case have been attended by people from the countryside, let alone from more distant parts of Italy. It has been suggested that there was a group of politically active artisans, traders and shopkeepers who lived and worked near the Forum and that it was they who attended political assemblies. This suggestion derives some support from the fact that people of this kind are sometimes mentioned as taking part, but the existence of a semi-permanent plebs contionalis, as it has been called, is hard to document more precisely; in particular we cannot know how large a pool we are dealing with, so even if such people (who are extremely vaguely defined in any case) predominated in public meetings, the concept of a plebs contionalis would only be useful if we could be sure that a substantial proportion were regular attenders; in other words that the same people were present at every assembly.
It might be conceded that there were some regular attenders and some degree of overlap between the crowds attending any two meetings; but equally we should remember that the urban population was enormous (perhaps nearing one million people in the late Republic) and that the potential pool of persons able to attend a contio was correspondingly large. In criticising the idea of a plebs contionalis, Henrik Mouritsen points out that the reactions of the crowds at contiones appear to have changed radically from one meeting to the next, depending on who had summoned the meeting. This suggests that they can hardly have been the same people, even if they were the same kinds of people (i.e. persons with sufficient leisure to spare the time). Noting that the audience would have had to be reasonably receptive to the voices of the speakers (because a hostile crowd could make it impossible for them to be heard), Mouritsen argues that the person who summoned a contio would have taken care to mobilise his support in advance. So far from being a democratic forum at which opinions could be freely exchanged and debated, the Roman contio was more like a partisan rally of committed supporters.
Turning to legislation, one would imagine that both supporters and opponents of a bill would have reasons to attend the comitia, just as they attended preceding contiones organised by advocates of their respective points of view, and that they settled their differences by voting. Strangely enough, however, this does not seem to have happened. The evidence suggests, rather, that the outcome of a legislative vote was rarely in doubt. Apart from a small number of exceptional cases, the result was always affirmative. That is to say, the tribes always voted in favour of bills presented to them [evidence is referenced]. This pattern is remarkable, especially as it applies not only to conservative bills that served the interests of the boni, but also to radical proposals that were fiercely opposed by the Senate. These last were numerous and frequent, as Morstein-Marx points out in an important paper modifying some of his earlier views, and must serve to undermine the idea that the compliant behaviour of the comitia resulted from the people’s deference to the ruling class.
A more likely explanation is that it reflects the intimate relationship between the people and the individual orators who addressed them (we have noted that contiones were like party rallies) and between the voters in the comitia and the individual proposers of a bill. These persons (the orators as well as the proposers) were, in the great majority of cases, tribunes of the plebs, holders of an office that had an unusual position in relation to the rest of the system. If there is one thing that has been given insufficient attention in all the recent discussion of Roman political culture, it is the extraordinary nature of this unique office, as Amy Russell rightly points out. Our sources insist that the tribunes’ task was to protect the people and to enforce its will (Polyb. 6.16.5). As Tiberius Gracchus argued, a tribune who acted against the people was no longer a tribune of the plebs; he was a contradiction in terms, just as a Vestal virgin who broke her vow of chastity was no longer, by definition, a Vestal virgin (Plut. Ti. Gracch.). The corollary of this idea, I would suggest, is that the people would follow the guidance of the tribunes and carry out their wishes whenever asked. Once a tribune succeeded in putting a proposal to the comitia, the voters saw it as their duty to support it and invariably did so.
One possibility is that the real political contest took place before the comitia met and that opposition to legislative proposals was expressed at contiones and perhaps in discussions between the tribunes; overwhelming opposition, perhaps supported by the threat of a veto, might then cause a tribune to withdraw a bill in advance – as Servilius Rullus did in 63. But once a bill reached the comitia, the political battle was over and the vote was a formality. Modern scholars have drawn comparisons with the Annual General Meeting of a learned society, or of the shareholders of a public company, or with a University Council, where resolutions that have been thrashed out in advance are simply nodded through.
The compliant attitude of Roman assemblies can be seen as an aspect of their essentially passive nature. They could only meet if summoned by a magistrate or tribune and were denied any right of initiative or freedom of speech. The role of the citizens at contiones was to listen and at legislative meetings of the comitia to rubber-stamp proposals that they had no right or opportunity to discuss or amend, still less to initiate. Partly for this reason some historians have been led to describe the whole performance as a ritualised formality designed to create an atmosphere of consensus. Another reason is the symbolic function of the assemblies and the accepted fiction that the small number of citizens who attended on any given occasion constituted the Roman people. The only proviso was that they should include citizens from every tribe. In the event of a tribe having no voters at all (the fact that this could happen is very revealing), some men would be transferred to it from other tribes (Cic. Sest. 109). The same idea must lie behind the strange fact that voting in the comitia tributa had to continue until all the tribes had voted, even when a majority had already been achieved and the remaining votes would make no difference. The implication is that the will of the people could only be expressed if all the tribes had spoken. It is true, as we have seen, that in the comitia centuriata the proceedings stopped as soon as a majority was achieved, but this could only happen after the whole of the first class, which contained centuries from all the 35 tribes, had voted. The idea that an assembly embodied the populus Romanus if every tribe was represented, even by a handful of token voters, inevitably recalls the fact that in the comitia curiata the Roman people was impersonated by 30 lictors, one for each of the old curiae.
Electoral assemblies were different, in that they exercised a genuine power of decision in serious and often hard-fought contests; it is also possible, as has been suggested, that they attracted a larger and more diverse body of voters from further afield. But even so their task was passive and consisted of choosing between aristocratic candidates presented to them. They had no active right either to stand for office themselves or to put forward candidates of their own choosing. The electoral assemblies also had a ritualised aspect in reinforcing the existing power structure. Roman political life was dominated by individual nobles who were obliged to court public opinion in their repeated quest for office in competitive elections and then to show themselves worthy of the people’s trust during their tenure of successive offices.
The Roman elite was an aristocracy of office, not an aristocracy of birth. In the competition for office, noble ancestry was a huge advantage, but it was not absolutely necessary and it was certainly not sufficient. A political career depended on electoral success, which was achieved on merit – or at least on what the people could be persuaded to evaluate as such. Karl Hölkeskamp does not hesitate to use the term ‘meritocracy’ when speaking of the Roman nobility, and he is right to do so. He also argues that the constant need for members of the ruling class to interact with the people gave Roman political culture its distinctive character.
Day-to-day political life was punctuated by a continual series of theatrical civic rituals in which members of the ruling elite engaged in dialogue with the citizen body. These occasions might include public funerals, triumphs, games and theatrical performances; but for the most part these interactions involved assemblies, both the formally organised comitia and the less formal but more common contiones, which Hölkeskamp describes as ‘the most important stages of politics and performance, communication and interaction’. As far as the people were concerned, the key feature of these occasions was participation. Their motives for attending assemblies, in which their role was passive and the procedures were often little more than a ritualised formality, are not easy to fathom; but their right to take part at all was a key element of their civic identity and it is not unreasonable to suggest that they turned up because it made them feel important. However that may be, the character of the assemblies illustrated the unequal relationship between the citizens and their leaders and reinforced the hierarchical structure of the community. The participation of the Roman people in political assemblies served to reaffirm their subjection.
Further Reading [MGH’s abbreviation of longer list]
General interpretations of the role of the assemblies can be found in almost every publication on Roman political culture, on which the bibliography is immense. Recent discussions fall broadly into two camps: those who see the assemblies as important instruments of popular power: above all Millar, Yakobson, [and] qualified support from [John] North; and on the other hand those who regard them as consensus-enhancing rituals that reaffirmed the domination of the aristocracy: Hölkeskamp, Jehne, Mouritsen … For strong reactions to this school, see … Clemente [heated] 2018.
The Source:
Tim Cornell, ‘Roman Political Assemblies’, in A Companion to Roman Political Culture, edited by Valentina Arena, Jonathan Prag, Andrew Stiles, Blackwell 2022
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.