The Roman Republic

A problem of a different kind arises in connection with the account in Livy of the Second Punic War and the early second century BC. For this period Livy used Polybius for affairs in the Greek world and for other matters earlier Roman historians, who themselves depended ultimately on official records and on contemporary authors. The result is a detailed chronological narrative of a particularly measured kind, which does not exist for any later period; the narrative breathes a confidence and a degree of normality which is necessarily lacking from the sources for the late Republic and it is desirable at least to ask how far the obvious contrast which exists between the middle and the late Republic results from the different nature of the source material.

Four lesser figures pose problems similar to those posed by Dionysius and Livy and require brief mention. Diodorus of Sicily, writing in the late first century BC, is the author of a universal history from the earliest times down to his own day. His work survives only in excerpts for the period in which we are interested, but possesses one great merit: he was disinclined to do more than copy or paraphrase one source at a time and therefore preserves much good material. The other three historians who concern us all belong to the period of the renaissance of Greek literature in the second and early third centuries AD. Appian, a native of Alexandria in Egypt, wrote a series of monographs (for the most part surviving) on the wars which Rome fought during the Republic; like Diodorus, Appian faithfully reflects his source of the moment; his own comments are of a degree of naivety which sheds an interesting light on the nature of the Roman imperial administration, of which he was a member. By deciding, however, to write not only on Rome’s foreign wars, but also on her civil wars, Appian came in effect to write a continuous history of the last century of the Roman Republic, from 133 to 35; moreover the first book of the Civil Wars contains the only serious surviving account of the agrarian history of Italy.

Plutarch of Chaeronea in Boeotia was a member of the upper class of his community, a wide reader and a prolific writer; among his writings is a series of paired biographies of eminent Greeks and Romans, covering with equal verve half-legendary figures like Romulus and historical figures like Julius Caesar; they are as reliable as their sources and Plutarch’s memory permit. Finally, there is Dio of Nicaea in Asia Minor, an easterner in the Roman senate at the turn of the second and third centuries AD ; an acute and original historian of his own times, his account of the middle Republic survives only in the version of a Byzantine abbreviator and in excerpts; it represents, however, in some cases a tradition not otherwise preserved. Dio’s account of the last generation of the Roman Republic, from 69 onwards, survives nearly intact and is of enormous value.

Fortunately there is other evidence outside the main historical tradition. In the first place, there is a great deal of evidence from contemporary sources of one kind or another which is in a sense free from contamination or distortion, the evidence of public and private inscriptions, of non-historical literature and of archaeology and coins. Outside early Roman history, archaeological evidence is particularly important in allowing us to know far more of non-Roman Italy than the literary sources reveal. At the same time, the development of Roman art under the patronage of the Roman aristocracy is one of the threads of Republican history. The production of the coinage of the Republic was entrusted to young men at the start of their political careers and the types which they chose often reflected the pretensions of their families and their own ambitions. Moreover, as time passed, the coinage of Rome circulated ever more widely, becoming eventually the coinage of a world state. That too is one of the threads of Republican history.

We also possess, for instance, twenty plays of Plautus, produced at the turn of the third and second centuries BC, which provide an extraordinarily vivid picture of Roman society and institutions. The poems of Lucilius, even in the fragmentary form in which they survive, present us with a succession of often savagely satirical vignettes of the aristocracy of the late second century BC.

Finally, Rome’s involvement with the Greek world on a massive scale from 200 onwards resulted in the promulgation there of numerous decrees of the Senate and letters of Roman officials, meticulously inscribed on stone by the communities to which they were addressed; laws of the people and decrees of officials along with treaties are preserved on stone or bronze in increasing quantities as we approach the end of the Republic.

The Romans were also in some respects a highly conservative people, often preserving as fossils, especially in a religious context, institutions which no longer fulfilled any useful function; much interest was shown in them in the first century BC and antiquarians such as Varro were responsible both for recording valuable evidence of this kind about early Roman history and for attempting to elucidate it. Antiquarian evidence of this kind plays a major part for instance in any attempt to reconstruct the development of the Roman assemblies. The evidence of language may also sometimes illuminate the earlier stages of Roman history.

For the last hundred years of the Republic, the amount and the nature of the information available change radically. The voluminous writings of Cicero not only document many aspects of the period of his maturity—roughly from the 80s onwards—but also contain much information on the two generations which precede his own. Sallust, a budding politician of the late Republic, writing in retirement after the death of Caesar, composed two monographs, which survive, on a past which was to him relatively recent and for which good information was still available; they are on the Catilinarian Conspiracy and the Jugurthine War. He also wrote a history of the period from Sulla to 70, which survives only in fragments. Finally, the first book of Appian’s Civil Wars draws on a late Republican source, sometimes identified with Augustus’ acquaintance C. Asinius Pollio; this source in any case paid a degree of attention, remarkable for antiquity, to social and economic factors.

A last word. The history of the middle Republic, as presented to us in the Roman tradition, is despite its diverse origins extraordinarily monolithic; the literary material only occasionally preserves variants, such as the assertion that Remus was not killed by Romulus, or that Rome surrendered to Lars Porsenna of Clusium, or that the Capitol was taken by the Gauls; on the other hand, the epitaph of Scipio Barbatus, inscribed in the late third century BC, preserves a record of campaigns which differs from that in the literary tradition; a tomb-painting from the Esquiline Hill of the same general period records an incident unattested in the literary tradition; coin-types sometimes display an item of family history which did not manage to enter the collective tradition.

In one case, literary and archaeological evidence combine, a version of early Roman history rediscovered by the emperor Claudius from Etruscan sources being confirmed by the paintings of the François tomb at Vulci; the account known to Claudius and the paintings both deal with the adventures of Mastarna, the Etruscan name for Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome. This case serves to draw attention to what is perhaps the most serious loss for the historiography of the Roman Republic, the disappearance of the non-Roman tradition. Stray references enable us to perceive that apart from Etruscan, there were once Campanian, even Mamertine (see here) histories and numerous local traditions on which Cato (see here), when he wrote his history in the second century BC, was still able to draw. But that history has perished apart from fragments, and the view which our sources present us is almost wholly Romanocentric. It was not always so, and in writing the history of the Roman Republic one must remember that it is the history of Italy as well as of Rome.

II Italy and Rome

BY THE TIME HANNIBAL invaded Italy in 218, the whole of the peninsula was under Roman control with the exception of the Po valley, inhabited by Gauls and known to the Romans as Cisalpine Gaul. Much of the process was already complete by 280, when Pyrrhus invaded Italy from Epirus; many of the crucial steps were taken in the years immediately following 338, the end of the last war between Rome and her immediate neighbours, the other cities which were like Rome of Latin race and language.

Before turning, however, to consider the process of the unification of Italy and the nature of Roman institutions (Ch. 3), it is important to have some understanding of the diverse elements which comprise the mixture which we call Roman Italy; this not only because these various elements each influenced Rome in the period when Rome was still a small city state, but also because all of them directly affected the nature of the eventual mixture.

It is for these reasons as well as because of the distinctive nature of certain Roman institutions that if any other power had united Italy the result would have been different; though, it must be said, the view that if the Samnites, for instance, had united Italy the result would have been federation rather than domination is merely the transposition to the ancient world of modern wishful thinking.

The three main groups involved are the people of the central Italian highlands, culturally on a level with or inferior to the Romans, but ethnically related and using a variety of Italic languages related to Latin; the Greeks of the south Italian colonies; and the Etruscans. These two were both culturally more advanced than Rome, but in varying degrees alien in race and language. The Gauls of the Po valley, culturally no more advanced than the Romans and of alien race and language were in due course in effect exterminated and their culture destroyed.

There is a further reason for spending some time on the non-Roman peoples of Italy. The Etruscans, to a certain extent, and the Greeks of the south to a much greater extent, both of them in contact with other areas of the Mediterranean world, provided for the expanding Republic avenues leading to involvement with that world.

The peoples of the central Italian highlands survive in the literary record chiefly as bitter and often successful opponents of the extension of Roman control; the most prominent group, the Samnites, provided in the Romanocentric eyes of Florus (1, 11, 8) material for twenty-four Roman triumphs. The Samnites lived, as recent archaeological work shows, in settled farmsteads, cultivating cereals as well as olives and vines; for despite their height and relative inaccessibility the Appennines include numerous pockets of agricultural land; the Samnites had few cattle, but many pigs and large flocks of sheep and goats, which were no doubt moved over short distances between summer pastures and winter pastures close to the farmsteads (a technique known as transhumance); both sheep and goats provided milk for cheese, wool, and whey for pig-food, as well as meat when killed at a ripe old age. The symbiotic relationship between plain and hill which transhumance involved was clearly widespread in Appennine Italy and no doubt supported a basically similar economy throughout.

Spreading outwards from the hills, partly by way of raids, but eventually with more serious intent, the peoples of the central Italian highlands were attracted by the fertile plains of Campania, just as the Volscians farther north were attracted by the plains of Latium; the Etruscan city of Capua (see below) fell in 423, the Greek city of Cumae in 421, a Greek element in the population surviving in the case of the latter. Neapolis (Naples) remained the only Greek city in Campania, though even there infiltration took place; the Greek cities of the south came similarly under pressure from the tribes of the hinterland. In the end, the hills were conquered by the plains, but at the turn of the fifth and fourth centuries BC it was by no means an obvious outcome.

Of the three groups of people whom I wish to discuss, the Greeks are on the whole the most straightforward. A variety of Greek cities had planted a string of self-governing foundations along the coasts of Italy and Sicily, beginning with Pithecusae (Ischia) about 775; the earliest of these colonies, as they are rather inappropriately described, was almost certainly intended to act as an entrepot for trade with Etruria; but its own foundation on the mainland opposite, Cumae, was an agricultural community, as were the vast majority of Greek colonies both in the west and elsewhere.

Greek colonization, invariably the venture of an organized community, involved the transfer of a developed society and culture, of its political organization, religious organization, language, monetary system; the colonial experience and contact with indigenous populations might eventually lead of course to considerable transformations.

But Magna Graecia, the collective name for the Greek cities in Italy and Sicily, was very much part of the Greek world, despite alleged Athenian ignorance of Sicily prior to the mounting of the great expedition of 415; men from the west participated in the great Greek festivals and their successes were celebrated by the Greek poet Pindar in the fifth century BC. In the fourth century Timoleon of Corinth set out to rescue Sicily from Carthage and, as we shall see, a succession of Greek condottieri attempted to help Tarentum (Taranto) in her wars with the tribes of the hinterland. The last of them Pyrrhus of Epirus, fought a full-scale war against Rome, by then the major threat.

The position of a Greek city overwhelmed by its barbarian neighbours is poignantly described in the case of Poseidonia (Paestum) by the near-contemporary Aristoxenus of Tarentum:

We act like the people of Poseidonia, who dwell on the Tyrrhenian Gulf. It so happened that although they had originally been Greeks, they were completely barbarized, becoming Tuscans; they changed their speech and their other practices, but they still celebrate one festival that is Greek to this day, wherein they gather together and recall those ancient words and institutions, and after bewailing them and weeping over them in one another’s presence they depart home (quoted by Athenaeus, XIV, 632a).

For most of the cities of Italy the effective choice lay between the barbarian tribes and Rome; it is not surprising that many of them chose Rome, a civilized community and in the eyes of some contemporary Greeks a Greek city; the process began with the survivors of the original population at Capua in 343 (see here), followed by the Greeks of Neapolis (Naples) in 326.

The Etruscans are sui generis and were so regarded in classical antiquity; it was a unique characteristic of their religion that it was centred on sacred writings that had supposedly emanated from supernatural sources, and they also claimed a special ability to discover the will of the gods by a variety of processes of divination. Furthermore, Etruscan society was characterized, at any rate in its upper echelons, by the relatively high status of its female members and, as a whole, by a deep division between the governing class and a serf population.

Etruscan culture evolved from the Villanovan culture of central Italy and was from the eighth century BC onwards both extraordinarily receptive of foreign influences and extraordinarily adept at integrating them in a local framework. The Etruscans borrowed most perhaps from the Greeks, from whom they imported on an enormous scale fine pottery in exchange for metal; the origin of their language is mysterious.

By the end of the eighth century BC they occupied the area bounded by the River Arno, the Appennines, the Tiber and the sea; during the sixth and fifth centuries they established an empire in Campania, probably beginning at the coast and in due course occupying Capua, according to Cato in 470; during the fifth and fourth centuries they created another empire in the Po valley; as a by-product of this process of expansion, Rome was ruled for a time by kings who were in effect Etruscan condottieri. The process of expansion was not a single national effort, but reflected the disunity of Etruria and its division into independent city units.

The Etruscans provided Rome with early access to at any rate a form of Greek culture; they also probably provided Rome with some of her insignia of office:

The ambassadors, having received this answer, departed, and after a few days returned, not merely with words alone, but bringing the insignia of sovereignty with which they used to decorate their own kings. These were a crown of gold, an ivory throne, a sceptre with an eagle perched on its head, a purple tunic decorated with gold, and an embroidered purple robe like those the kings of Lydia and Persia used to wear, except that it was not rectangular in shape like theirs, but semicircular. This kind of robe is called toga by the Romans and tebenna by the Greeks; but I do not know where the Greeks learned the name, for it does not seem to me to be a Greek word. And according to some historians they also brought (back to Rome) the twelve axes, taking one from each city. For it seems to have been a Tyrrhenian custom for each king of the several cities to be preceded by a lictor bearing an axe together with the bundle of rods (the fasces), and, whenever the twelves cities undertook any joint military expedition, for the twelve axes to be handed over to the one man who held supreme command (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, III, 61, using the results of Roman antiquarian research;).

More fundamentally, the Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva is of Etruscan origin; the Roman system of nomenclature, however, personal name (as Marcus), name of gens, or large family group (as Tullius) and cognomen, or family name (as Cicero), is Italic rather than Etruscan in origin.

The Etruscan empire in Campania was destroyed by the Samnites (see above), the empire in the Po valley by the Gauls. Etruria itself was progressively subjugated by Rome, much aided by the fragility of Etruscan social structures; the lower orders are described by Dionysius in connection with a campaign of 480 as penestai, the word used to describe the serf population of Thessaly in Greece. In return for support against the lower orders, the governing classes were only too happy to accept Roman overlordship, as at Arretium in 302 and Volsinii in 264. It was a technique that Rome never forgot.

III The Roman Governing Classes

DOWN TO 510, Rome was ruled by kings. The monarchy was in some sense elective, though the descent of a candidate from an earlier king was not an irrelevant consideration; the office of interrex, the man who presided over an interregnum and the emergence of a successor, survived the end of the monarchy with its name unchanged and its function essentially the same, to preside over a hiatus between duly elected officials of the community.

The essence of the transition from kings to pairs of officials (called by the Romans magistratus, magistrates) holding office for a year is encapsulated by Livy (11, 1, 7–8), following the common opinion of his day; the truth, if different, is irrecoverable:

One can regard the cause of freedom as lying rather in the fact that consular imperium was made annual than in any diminution in the regal power (inherited by the consuls); the first consuls retained all the rights and insignia (of the king); the only precaution taken was that they should not both hold the fasces simultaneously and thereby create a double impression of fearfulness. Brutus was the first to hold the fasces (for the first month), with the agreement of his colleague.

Two consuls instead of a king now stood each year at the head of the community; the assembly of adult males which elected them remaind the same,1 as did the body of elders who advised them; this was the senate, composed in practice of former magistrates. Time and circumstance produced various modifications in the three elements whose interplay was the Roman political system, including notably the creation of a large number of lesser magistrates (see here and here); nothing altered the central fact of Republican government, that it was the collective rule of an aristocracy, in principle and to a varying extent in practice dependent on the will of a popular assembly. This aristocracy was in one sense self-perpetuating, but it was of course one from which many families disappeared over the centuries and to which new families were admitted, while an inner core of great families persisted (see Pl.8).

It was a form of government to which modern notions of being in or out of power are almost wholly inappropriate; a particular individual held office only at rare intervals and with one unimportant exception (for the dictatorship, see here and here) always as a member of a college of magistrates whose powers were equal. But increasing age, if coupled with a growing reputation for practical wisdom, brought with it increasing influence in the deliberations of the ruling elite. The voice of a few powerful men was often decisive.

At the same time, competition within this elite was fierce, for a consulship or other magistracy and for the recognition of primacy in practical wisdom; given the succession of wars in which Rome was involved, it is not surprising that success as a consul regularly involved victory in battle, rewarded with a triumph (see here); primacy in practical wisdom was rewarded with the title of princeps senatus, leader of the deliberative body of the Roman state.

Aristocratic attitudes to the political process emerge not only from the inscriptions on the tombs of the Scipios (see here), but also from the record of the victory of C. Duilius over the Carthaginians in 260:

As consul he relieved the Segestans, allies of the Roman people, from the Carthaginian siege and nine days later drove the Carthaginian troops and their commanders from their camp in broad daylight and took the town of Macela by assault. And in the same magistracy as consul he for the first time had success with a fleet at sea and for the first time prepared and equipped naval forces and a fleet and with these ships defeated in battle on the high sea all the Punic fleet, including large Carthaginian forces in the presence of Hannibal their commander, and took by force with his allies 1 septireme and 30 quinqueremes and triremes. (A list of booty follows). At his naval triumph he presented the people with the booty and led many free Carthaginians (captives in the triumph) before his chariot … (ILLRP 319)

The history of Republican government is to a large extent the history of competition within a group of men formally peers, always within the framework of the overriding decisions of the group; the ideology of collective rule in the middle and late Republic was powerfully reinforced by stories, improving whether true or false, of the fate suffered by men who in the early Republic stepped out of line:

(Sp. Maelius had distributed corn from his own resources; emergency measures were taken to deal with the threat posed by his ambition; these measures involved the appointment of a dictator and a master of horse as his deputy, in office for six months with supreme power overriding that of the consuls.) C. Servilius Ahala as master of horse was sent by the dictator to Maelius and said ‘The dictator summons you.’ When Maelius fearfully asked what he wanted, and Servilius replied that he had to stand trial and disprove before the senate the charge laid by L. Minucius, Maelius began to retreat into his band of followers … Servilius followed him and cut him down; covered with the blood of the dead man and surrounded by a band of young patricians, he announced to the dictator that Maelius had been summoned to him, but had fought off the attendant (who had tried to arrest him) and had incited the mob, and had received his deserts. The dictator replied ‘Bravely done, C. Servilius, for freeing the res publica (from the threat of a tyrant)’ (Livy IV, 13–14).