A Companion to the Roman Republic

Nathan Rosenstein, Robert Morstein-Marx, Nathan Rosenstein, Robert Morstein-Marx

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444357202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua romana

This Companion provides an authoritative and up-to-date overview of Roman Republican history as it is currently practiced.

• Highlights recent developments, including archaeological discoveries, fresh approaches to textual sources, and the opening up of new areas of historical study
• Retains the drama of the Republic's rise and fall
• Emphasizes not just the evidence of texts and physical remains, but also the models and assumptions that scholars bring to these artefacts
• Looks at the role played by the physical geography and environment of Italy
• Offers a compact but detailed narrative of military and political developments from the birth of the Roman Republic through to the death of Julius Caesar
• Discusses current controversies in the field

PART I

Introductory

CHAPTER 1

Methods, Models, and Historiography

Martin Jehne Translated by Robert Morstein-Marx and Benjamin Wolkow

Posterity has always been fascinated with the Roman Republic. The main reason is doubtless the enormous expansion by which the small city-state gradually created a great empire which – at least in its longevity – remains unsurpassed in the Western world to this day among large-scale political organizations that attracted quite broad allegiance. But the complex internal organization of the Roman community has also drawn the attention of later generations. Among the senatorial elite of the Roman Empire the Republic was looked upon as the good old days in which freedom still ruled (see, e.g., Tac. Agr. 2.2–3, Hist. 1.1.1, Ann. 1.1.1); even to the Christian world of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages it appeared as a period of exemplary accom-plishments;¹ to the political thinkers of the Renaissance and early modern age it offered inspiration for the development of models of moderate participatory government;² in the nineteenth century Theodor Mommsen reconstructed it as a political system based on immutable principles of law;³ in the first half of the twentieth century Matthias Gelzer and Ronald Syme emphasized personal relationships as the central structural characteristic of Republican politics;⁴ in the second half of the twentieth century the interest in social conflict intensified⁵ and a “crisis without alternative” was diagnosed for its last phase;⁶ at the end of the twentieth century the Roman Republic was even portrayed as an ancestor of modern democracy.⁷ It is in the nature of historiography that such differing approaches and interpretations are all an expression of issues and interests specific to the eras in which they arose, for historical study necessarily draws its questions and concepts from its own time. Nevertheless, this colorful spectrum of reception demonstrates how rich a source of intellectual stimulation the Roman Republic can be, and will certainly remain.

In order to benefit fully from these perspectives and indeed merely to understand the Republic itself, it is absolutely necessary to develop models. In broad terms, a model is the ordering of a series of specific pieces of information by means of a hypothesis about their relationship, ignoring details that may be seen as irrelevant from a given perspective.⁸ Such assumptions about relationships are unavoidable if one wishes to give an account that does not consist simply of isolated details. This means that every account is based on models of this type; yet even the author is not always aware of them, and even less often does an interpreter make them explicit for the reader. In the sketch that follows of the major interpretations in modern historiography of the political system of the Roman Republic (for this will be my focus, for the most part) I shall particularly emphasize the analytical models that underlie these interpretations, for only by means of models of this kind can scholars’ claims to an understanding of the fundamental characteristics of the Roman Republic take shape. At the same time, models may be judged by their capacity to integrate as comprehensively as possible the basic data that can be gleaned from the sources for the Republic. Finally, one should keep in mind that a model is always selective, since it is based on decisions regarding the importance or unimportance of data that will be seen differently from differing perspectives, or indeed often also from differing historical experiences, with the result that new models will be developed. It is in the nature of the matter that no model is permanent.

The Heroes of the Past: Mommsen, Gelzer, Syme

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.⁹ 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.¹⁰ Momm-sen’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.¹¹ This is indeed probably quite unnecessary, for, even if hardly anyone today still accepts Mommsen’s conception of an underlying, immutable legal system,¹² 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.¹³ 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,¹⁴ 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.¹⁵

Building on the views of Gelzer and Münzer, but with a wholly distinct stamp, Ronald Syme then investigated the transition from Republic to Empire.¹⁶ 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 fac¸ade; and Roman history, Republican or Imperial, is the history of the governing class.”¹⁷ 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.

Prosopographical Method and the Importance of 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.¹⁸ Penetrating case studies illuminated the background of political machinations by relating the ties and obligations of the agents and bringing into focus what was at stake for them at any one time in the relentless pursuit of power. Against a background so dominated by personal ambition and so little shaped by political substance, scholars were inclined to see in popular initiatives – that is, the policies of certain tribunes of the People since the time of Tiberius Gracchus in 133, who pushed laws through the popular assemblies contrary to the will of the senatorial majority – only a method of increasing one’s personal prominence, and no deeper sociopolitical concerns.¹⁹

Among those who advanced the prosopographic study of personal associations, Ernst Badian merits special distinction for his numerous important contributions since the 1950s, which unfortunately have not yet been assembled in a single volume.²⁰ A further high point of this line of research is Erich Gruen’s copious investigation of The Last Generation of the Roman Republic.²¹ Gruen comprehensively reevaluated the unusually rich source material of the post-Sullan Republic in order to reconstruct the conflicts and struggles for power of that crucial period. His emphasis falls clearly on the political class, whose personal ties and machinations he meticulously laid open to view without, however, neglecting the broader upper class and the plebs. The eruption of civil war in 49 is the culmination of this multifaceted study; the central thesis is that the Roman Republic was intact at its core, or at any rate not at all at the point of collapse, but that it was brought to ruin by the historical accident that an individual by the name of Caesar, as talented as he was unscrupulous, began and won a civil war. Even if the main thesis has not won general acceptance, Gruen’s book nevertheless remains indubitably a standard work on Roman politics in the last decades of the Republic (see also Chapter 29).²²

To Badian also goes the credit for fully applying to Roman foreign policy the idea that personal connections were the main determinant of action. In his classic Foreign Clientelae he traced the development of obligations of loyalty which bound Rome with other communities, and which generally began asymmetrically as a result of Roman victories but at any rate increasingly manifested a clear imbalance of power in the course of Rome’s rise to empire.²³ These relationships were based on the reciprocity of services rendered and consequent obligations of gratitude that were similar to the connections between patrons and clients at the heart of Roman society. In addition Badian also worked out the connections between Roman politicians and communities and individuals in the empire, which could also be described following the patron – client model. Badian thereby placed emphasis on an enormous network of personal relations which partially replaced governmental administration.

New Concepts: “Crisis” and “Historical Process”

Much of what I have outlined, necessarily sketchily and very selectively, still counts today as part of our basic fund of historical knowledge about the Roman Republic. The works mentioned above mark unmistakable advances; nobody would wish to return to the state of the subject before the investigation of the Roman elite launched by Gelzer and Syme and carried forward to such a high level by Badian, Gruen, and others. Building on this solid foundation of knowledge about the political class, 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.²⁴ 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 decisi...