The Roman Republic

Within the Roman community, a closed group of families, knows as patricians, had been defined already under the monarchy by a process which is now unknowable. The group succeeded after the overthrow of the monarchy in substantially monopolizing the tenure of magistracies and priesthoods alike; as a result patricians also largely filled the senate. Wealthy and ambitious families of plebeians mostly excluded from the processes of government were naturally anxious to be admitted; at the same time the poorer plebeians were anxious to reduce or eliminate the economic exploitation to which they were subjected. The two groups of dissidents combined to extort concessions, the breaking of the monopoly of office by the patricians and the alleviation of the harsh laws of debt (under these a peasant who could not pay off a loan, perhaps of seed corn from a wealthy neighbour, could be reduced to slavery). In the process, the plebs acquired its own assembly and legislative organ, the concilium plebis (Appendix 1), and its own officials, the tribunes, whose chief function was to protect citizens from arbitrary action by a magistrate. At some time they acquired the important right to veto any action by a magistrate or the senate. They were sacrosanct, protected by an oath of the plebs to kill anyone who killed a tribune.

By 342 the battle was essentially won, with the admission of plebeians to the consulate; the most important consequence was the creation of a mixed patrician-plebeian nobility, defined by the tenure of the consulship – a man who held this ennobled his direct descendants in perpetuity – and less exclusive than the patriciate (it must be remembered that in the Roman tradition even the patriciate had once admitted a new family to its membership, the Claudii). This mixed nobility established its right to supremacy by its leadership in the conquest of Italy through the second half of the fourth century BC, the rewards of which, in the form of land, were in large measure distributed to the poorer plebeians, reconciling them to the political status quo. The problem of debt was in fact probably circumvented rather than solved.

Aristotle observed that an oligarchy which remained united could not be overthrown; the collective rule of the mature Republican aristocracy only eventually dissolved in the last century BC when it failed to attend to the increasingly serious grievances of the poor and when individual members of the aristocracy appealed to these lower orders for support in their competition with each other, a competition whose scale and nature had meanwhile already been changed out of all recognition by the spread of Roman rule over the Mediterranean basin.

The most important feature of Roman government is the structure created by the traditional obligation on anyone responsible for taking action to consult a group of advisers. It is apparent everywhere in Roman society; the decision in the last resort might be that of one man alone, but the obligation to take advice was absolute. A paterfamilias might summon a family consilium, a politician might summon his family and his friends (the hapless Brutus in 44 after the murder of Caesar consulted his mother, his half-sister, his wife and his friends Favonius, Cassius and Cicero), a magistrate in his province had to consider the opinions of his entourage; the senate was the consilium of the two highest magistrates, the consuls, by the late Republic the consilium for the whole world (Cicero, Philippica IV, 14).

Political groupings in the late Republic may indeed be regarded as consisting of those men whom a leading politician habitually summoned to his consilium; discussion there prepared for sessions of the senate and meetings of the assembly. Such groupings of course sometimes followed a leader out of habit, sometimes from conviction (see here).

Possessed of certain fairly limited actual powers, the senate by monopolizing the role of advising magistrates during their terms of office in Rome and Italy effectively controlled the Roman state. The senate’s formal powers (Polybius VI, 13) were the control of finance (total, despite Polybius’ qualification) and security, the administration of Italy and the running of relations with foreign powers (except for the actual decision for war or peace which was taken by the people). The control of finance for campaigning was one of the things which slipped from the senate’s grasp in the late Republic (see here), with disastrous consequences.

The most crucial part of the senate’s advisory role lay in the field of legislation; any intending legislator was expected to consult it. The corollary of course was that the senate was also in a position to advise on the invalidation of legislation, a position of which it took advantage in the turbulent years of the late Republic. The grounds for invalidation, technical and ideological, are expounded by Cicero, in a passage highly revealing of the unyielding mentality of part of the Roman governing class:

Marcus Cicero: For many evil and disastrous decisions are taken by the people, which no more deserve to be regarded as laws than if some robbers had agreed to make them …

Quintus Cicero: I fully realize that, and indeed I think that there is nothing else (except a law as defined by Marcus) which can even be called a law, let alone be regarded as one.

Marcus Cicero: So you do not accept the laws of (Sex.) Titius or (L.) Appuleius (Saturninus)?

Quintus Cicero: I do not even accept those of (M.) Livius (Drusus).

Marcus Cicero: Quite right too, for they in particular were instantaneously invalidated by a single decree of the senate (de legibus II, 13–14, compare 31).

The domination of the Roman governing class found expression in the institution of clientela, clientship, an archaic form of personal dependence, which survived at Rome with undiminished relevance, in striking contrast to Athens and the Greek world in general. Cicero regarded the institution as created by Romulus (de re publico 11, 16); it placed the client in the position of being, in E. Badian’s words, an inferior entrusted, by custom or by himself, to the protection of a man more powerful than he, and rendering certain services and observances in return for this protection.

Among the services rendered was political support; a man might be helped to office by the votes of his clients and by those of his friends and associates; naturally they expected him in return to deliver the votes of his clients. The ingrained habits of dependence of clients in particular and the lower orders in general emerge with dramatic clarity from the reaction of one of the characters of Plautus to the notion of a marriage into a higher social class for his daughter:

Now if I married my daughter to you, it occurs to me that you would be like an ox and I should be like an ass; when I was linked to you and couldn’t pull my share of the load I, the donkey, should drop down in the mud, while you, the ox, would pay no more attention to me than if I wasn’t born; you would be above me and my own order would laugh at me, and I should have no fixed abode if we were separated. The asses would tear me with theirteeth, the oxen would run me through; it’s very dangerous to climb from the asses’ to the oxen’s set (Aulularia 228–35).

It is not surprising, given such subservient attitudes, that the Roman aristocracy was able to demand economic sacrifices from its clients:

Mucius Scaevola at any rate and Aelius Tubero and Rutilius Rufus … are three Romans who observed the Lex Fannia (limiting expenditure on food, see here) … Tubero for one bought game birds from those who worked on his own estates for a denarius each, while Rutilius bought fish from those of his slaves who were fisherman for half a denarius a mina … And Mucius fixed the value of things bought from those who were under an obligation to him in the same way (Athenaeus VI, 274 c – e; compare, e.g., Lucilius 159–60 W).

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, aristocrats depended on credit demanded from suppliers who belonged thereby to a kind of client economy; the resentment felt against the English aristocracy is well documented and it is likely that a similar resentment was eventually felt against the Roman aristocracy and for similar reasons. If this is right, force is added to the suggestion of P.A. Brunt that the Roman mob in the first century BC included like the mobs in France in the eighteenth century many people of the middling sort, and a further explanation of their readiness to turn to violence emerges.

One important consequence of the institution of clientship was that the struggle of the Orders, of the patricians and the plebeians, was in no sense whatever a class struggle; the plebeian leadership was rich and ambitious and part of its support came not only from those in whose interest it was to support it, but from its clients at every economic level; the patricians were similarly supported by all their clients, the humble amongst them perhaps acting against the economic interests of their class, but nonetheless bound to their patrons by real ties of shared sentiment and mutual advantage.

It is also important to remember that the process of Roman government was not simply a matter of deploying clients and friends and relations in the pursuit of an aristocrat’s turn in office and the prestige and influence which that brought. Political power, then as now, was sought for a purpose; support was directed to one man rather than to another not only because of the traditional obligations of clientship and so on, but also on a calculation of the likelihood of his achieving a desired end; his conduct had to be validated by reference to the ideas of what was desirable and the aspirations of his supporters. The general expectation of anyone on whom the Roman people conferred office was that he was capable rem publicam bene gerere – of managing affairs of state well. The reasons for holding this view – noble birth counted for much – may sometimes strike a modern reader as curious; but they were none the less real.

Elections were in any case serious contests; from Ap. Claudius Caecus (see here) onwards, the lower orders sometimes successfully supported one member of the nobility against the wishes of the majority of the nobility and even brought unwanted outsiders to the consulship; at the turn of the third and second centuries, T. Quinctius Flamininus, the man who defeated Philip V of Macedon (see here), came to the consulship after holding only very junior magistracies, but offices which in some cases involved him in the distribution of land to the lower orders and won him popularity thereby. P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio failed in an election because he asked a farmer whether his hands were so hard because he walked on them.

Farmers indeed in the early and middle Republic formed the vast majority of the Roman electorate. The earliest codification of Roman law, the Twelve Tables of the middle of the fifth century BC, already takes for granted the distinction between the assiduus, the self-supporting freeholder, and the proletarius; Cato in the second century BC, and other writers after him, painted a no doubt idealized position of an early Rome composed of yeomen ever ready to defend their country, but the fact that service as a legionary was before 107 in principle a right and a duty of the assiduus alone makes it clear that early Rome was indeed a community of freeholders, for whom military service was as central an element of the citizenship as voting in the assembly. It is no accident that the variety of Roman assembly which elected the consuls was the people organized as an army (Appendix 1).

The general acceptance—barring extreme circumstances—of a hierarchical ordering of society and of the importance of traditional patterns no doubt led to a conceptualization of the political process in predominantly moral terms; but the consequent imperatives were deeply felt, despite perhaps growing cynicism. P. Cornelius Rufinus, consul in 290 and 277, was expelled from the senate in 275 for possessing ten pounds weight of silver vessels and by this luxury breaking the moral code of the governing class; his family was submerged for four or five generations.

If I am right in arguing, however, that at all times the conduct of the Roman governing class had to be justified in terms of the Roman system of values, a fortiori nobles who advocated particular policies were under an even greater compulsion to validate them in terms of an existing complex of ideas; the pattern is relevant to the progress of the Roman revolution.

1. See Appendix 1 for the different varieties of Roman assembly.

IV The Conquest of Italy

I HAVE SO FAR emphasized certain structural and permanent features of aristocratic society and government in the Roman Republic; but in many respects Rome of the early and middle Republic was astonishingly innovative.

An early stage of Roman history had probably seen the admission to political rights and duties of men who were domiciled in Rome, but were not full members of the community; the struggle between the patricians and the plebeians had seen the eventual admission of the latter to secular and religious office. One may hypothesize that these bendings of the rules were the result of the interest of the Roman governing class in the display of military virtus which made its members peculiarly amenable to pressure from those followers on whom they depended for success in battle.

In any case, just as non-exclusiveness was ultimately characteristic of privileged groups within Roman territory, so it was also of Rome in relation to Italy. It is also worth remarking that just as Rome throughout the early and middle Republic was anxious to add new members to her citizen body, so she was also open beneath a mask of religious conservatism to the import of foreign cults, as J. A. North has pointed out. The attitude was a general one.

And we shall see that after 200 the Roman aristocracy remained just as innovative, but devoted its energies increasingly to the enormous political problems posed by contact with the Greek world, to the acquisition of Greek culture and to the pursuit of the wealth available from the east.

Rome was originally simply one of a homogeneous group of Latin cities, sharing above all a number of common places of worship, although she possessed by reason of her position, controlling a route along and a route across the Tiber, certain peculiar strategic advantages. Unlike the other members of the Latin League, Rome also came under strong Etruscan influence and under her Etruscan kings expanded at the expense of her Latin neighbours.

Already by the fall of the monarchy, the four regional units of the city of Rome, tribus, tribes, instituted for census purposes and for the levying of men and taxation, had been joined by fifteen regional units in the countryside around Rome.1

With the overthrow of the monarchy there was a Latin reaction against Roman power, defeated by Rome at the battle of Lake Regillus; Roman relations with the Latin cities were then regulated by an agreement known as the foedus Cassianum, the terms of which were apparently still extant in the time of Cicero. (There were also treaties with some individual Latin cities.)

The next century was characterized by battles between Rome, the Latins and the associated tribe of the Hernici on the one hand and the Etruscans to the north, the Volsci to the south (see Map 1). Largely successful wars on all fronts culminated with the Roman capture of Veii in 396. There followed almost immediately the first Gallic raid into Italy, with the Roman defeat at the battle of the Allia River, the sack of the city, the near capture of the Capitol and the departure of the Gauls only on receipt of a large indemnity.

It might seem that all lay in ruins and the impression is confirmed by the obvious patriotic fictions which the Roman tradition offers for the years after the Gallic sack. But there is impeccable evidence for the fundamental irrelevance of the Gallic sack to Roman expansion and for its negligible effect on Roman power. A mere twelve years after the sack, in 378, Livy records the building of a wall round the city of Rome:

After a short breathing-space had been granted to those in debt, when everything was quiet as far as Rome’s enemies were concerned, jurisdiction (in matters of debt) was resumed and hope was so far abandoned of relieving the burden of existing debts, that new debts were contracted by reason of the taxation levied for the wall in squared blocks put out to contract by the censors (VI, 32, 1).

3 map of roman showing area enclosed by walls of 378

The wall is the so-called ‘Servian’ wall of which extensive tracts still survive; this massive construction shows the structures of the Roman state intact and functioning and able to deploy substantial resources for a communal undertaking. The area enclosed (Fig 3) is already large, and, as if to symbolize the conviction that the Gallic sack changed nothing, the wall is built with tufa from the territory of conquered Veii.

The Roman sphere of interest was also extending steadily southwards. A Roman treaty with the Samnites in 354 was followed by the first war of Rome against the Samnites. In 348 Rome made a treaty with Carthage, renewing the one made after the fall of the monarchy:

There is to be friendship on these conditions between the Romans and their allies and the Carthaginians and Uticans and their allies … And if the Carthaginians take any city in Latium which is not subject to the Romans, they may keep the property and the captives, but must surrender the city. And if a Carthaginian captures anyone (in the course of piracy, presumably) who is a member of a community with a written agreement with Rome, but not subject, he may not bring him into any Roman harbour; if he does, a Roman may touch him and free him … (Polybius III, 24, 3)

Rome emerges as possessing a subject zone, which by implication the Carthaginians may not touch, as having an interest in the whole of Latium and as having a wider protective rôle. This nascent empire was joined by Capua in 343.

An attempt by the Latin cities to throw off the growing de facto hegemony of Rome failed with their defeat in 338; despite the fact that the Volsci and Aurunci and some Campanians fought with the Latins, Rome was able momentarily to secure Samnite help and thereby keep at least the Sidicini occupied and the rest of the hostile coalition preoccupied.

The settlement of 338 is crucial in the development of the forms in which Rome came to express her relationship to the rest of Italy (see here); in the present context it is one more step on the road to hegemony.

In 328 Rome founded a colony at Fregellae; she thereby embroiled herself irrevocably with the Samnites and in the following year became involved even more closely than hitherto with the affairs of Campania. Neapolis (Naples) appealed to Rome in 327 (see here) and a treaty was concluded in 326. An attempt to win a decisive victory over the Samnites in 321 led to the disastrous defeat of the Caudine Forks. The scale of the disaster is again indicated by the patriotic fictions reported for the subsequent years in the Roman tradition; again the check was momentary, with the Via Appia linking Rome and Campania being built in 312 (it eventually reached Brundisium (Brindisi) where the pillars marking its end may be seen a few yards from the modern steamer terminal). When peace was made with the Samnites in 304, that was for them effectively the end. Roman control of Samnium was followed in due course by the foundation of colonies at Beneventum (268) and Aesernia (263). At the same time, the establishment of Roman control over Italy opened the way for the long-distance transhumance agriculture of the second century (see here).

A last attempt was made to resist the rise of Rome by a coalition of Samnites, Gauls, Etruscans and Umbrians, destroyed when the Samnites and Gauls were defeated at Sentinum in 295 (an event noticed by the Greek historian Duris of Samos); thereafter it was simply a question of mopping-up. The only wars Rome fought on Italian soil south of the Po valley down to the great Italian rebellion of 91 were wars against the invaders Pyrrhus and Hannibal and very minor wars, in response to the appeal of the governing class of Volsinii in 264, and to suppress the isolated revolts of Falerii and Fregellae in 241 and 125.

The reasons for Rome’s success in conquering and holding Italy are manifold. Supposed factors such as the absence of an attack on Italy by Alexander the Great are a red herring, nor does Rome’s geographical position provide much help in explaining anything after the very early stages. Clearly in some cases, such as that of Neapolis, the fact that Rome was a tolerably civilized power helped and in other cases, such as that of Volsinii, the fact of her being aristocratically governed opened the way for her to intervene (see here). Rome’s eventual neutralization of the Gallic invaders was also important, but the crucial factor is to be found in the generosity and flexibility of the ways in which she gradually bound the rest of Italy to herself and the manpower upon which she could call as a result. Furthermore, the gradual incorporation of Italy by Rome helps to explain the nature and logic of Roman imperialism. It is thereafter the success with which Rome expanded and her willingness to share the fruits of expansion which underpin her strength; this was built upon the consensus, both of the Roman political system and of the Italian confederacy, from the late fourth to the early second century.

The group of communities with which Rome was most intimately involved was, as we have seen, that composed of the Latin cities; she and each of them were in principle equal, possessed of certain reciprocal rights, commercium, or the right to conclude valid contracts, conubium, or the right to contract marriages of which the offspring were legitimate, migratio, or the right to change domicile and acquire the citizenship of the new domicile, and (after 471, see here) the right to vote in one regional voting unit chosen by lot in a community of temporary domicile.2 These rights were no doubt mostly traditional, regulated by the foedus Cassianum of 493 (see here).

Rome and the Latin cities divided up the booty and the land which they acquired as a result of joint military enterprises. Although there is no evidence for the Latin communities, we may presume that they like Rome assigned land so acquired individually, viritim, to members of their own citizen bodies. What also happened was that the Latin League as a body founded colonies which were additional Latin communities, self-governing and possessed of the same reciprocal rights as the old Latin cities.

With the end of the war against the Latins in 338, Rome incorporated many of the disaffected communities into her own citizen body; there remained separate, however, some of the original Latin cities and some colonies. In addition the status of civitas sine suffragio, citizenship without the vote, was conferred on the Campanians, and on the cities of Fundi and Formiae (Livy viii, 14, 10).

The Roman incorporation of some of the Latin communities into her own citizen body was an act which had precedents. Part of the process by which Rome achieved hegemony over Italy was the actual extension of Roman territory, ager Romanus, and some extension had already taken place before 338; there were two ways in which this happened and they help to explain the relative superiority of Rome over the Latins in 338.

Rome had fought the war against Veii largely on her own account, as she was later to fight her wars against the rest of Etruria and to become involved in Campania, although the Latins lay between; the consequent access of land, booty or mere influence accrued to Rome alone. Such land, distributed to Roman citizens, led to an increase in those possessed of enough land to equip themselves as heavily-armed soldiers (and to an increase in the number of regional voting units, tribus, tribes, into which the Roman people was divided).