Читать книгу A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic - Группа авторов - Страница 18

The complex interconnectivity of these dimensions is best illustrated, and indeed typically represented, by a central institution of the Roman republican political system, recently discussed in this new light: the specific ensemble of the contio, as formal procedure and ritual rhetoric, performance, public stage (in the immediate as well as metaphorical sense) and meaningful text, played a particularly important integral part in the Republican sociopolitical structure as a communicative system uniting the populus Romanus and its elite.³⁰ The various forms of comitia and the plebeian concilia, taking place on the Campus Martius, in the comitium or in the Forum, were of course among the most important spaces of direct political interaction between the elite and the people (see Chapter 16). The electoral, legislative or judicial assemblies – in their important expressive and symbolic function as rituals representing and affirming, on the one hand, sociopolitical hierarchies or, on the other, a kind of civic equality – were also instruments of communication, given that they provided the institutional as well as physical and spatial context of a regular and at times even frequent, if only implicit, (re-)negotiation of the relationship between the aristocracy and the people, and of their respective expectations and obligations to reaffirm each other’s position within the sociopolitical system of the Republic.³¹

As a matter of course, the contio as particular kind of assembly was also an integral part of the communicative system of this political culture of personal presence – and obviously a vital part. It was in this institutional context that the daily business of the populus Romanus, its empire (and therefore the business that its political class was permanently dealing with) was debated and, in a way, negotiated between persons and groups as parties involved in this business. It was also the institutional forum in which everyone who was, or wanted to become, a member of the political class regularly fulfilled his most important public function as an orator in public debate, arguing for (or against) motions or measures in controversies over urgent current issues on the political agenda, taking sides for (or against) other representatives of his class in the process, or acting as advocate in lawsuits, as prosecutor or defence counsel (see Chapter 32; Chapter 31).³² Every active member of this class was permanently obliged to fulfil this social role – young senators from old families as well as ambitious homines novi without an ancestral background, craving for the attention of the citizens (and potential electors) present, junior magistrates keen on rising into the higher ranks as well as established former consuls asserting (and sometimes defending) their dignitas. This role was pragmatically and structurally constitutive for membership in the elite and was no less important than the functions of senator and patron, magistrate and priest, or even military commander. After all, it was impossible to obtain any of the senior positions of the cursus honorum without being well known ([g]nobilis in the original sense of the word) through one’s public appearances, the resulting high profile and prominence as a public persona – this was an essential requirement for gaining promotion into higher honores with imperium and thus achieving or (re-)asserting one’s rank as nobilis (see Chapter 25). The role of the orator as a constituent part and prerequisite of social prominence, as well as the range of technical and expressive functions of oratory as medium and as an ‘instrument of personal self-fashioning and social apprenticeship’ (Connolly 2007: 131–132), was thus deeply embedded in the communicative system and thus in the political culture of this city-state, based as it was on permanent and intensive interaction between the political class and the people. This interaction manifested itself in two ways: as an appeal to, and negotiation with, the populus Romanus as the formal forum for decision-making and as the ultimate source of legitimacy; and as the reaffirmation, reproduction and renewal of the political class by the populus in elections and in other forms of asserting assent by acclamation.

In the institutions and procedures that permitted participation of the citizen body at large – such as the comitia and contiones, elections, legislation and popular jurisdiction – the ingrained publicity of politics, the perpetual presence and conspicuous visibility, audibility and activity of members of the political class in public and in all civic spaces are clearly evident, and it is clear that popular participation is therefore not restricted to a democratic political culture, as Fergus Millar would have it. We have seen that the media and forms of a hierarchical communication are structurally essential requirements of a specifically aristocratic political culture of a particular kind, with an institutionalised citizen body in a central position in the process of constituting and reproducing a particular variant of an aristocracy as a genuinely political class.