Читать книгу A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic - Группа авторов - Страница 23

The study of the political culture of the Roman Republic not only entails the investigation of the Republic’s political institutions, its civic and religious rituals and its set of values and ideas (cf. Introduction to this volume). It is also a distinct form of historical enquiry, which acknowledges that the nature of Roman political culture has a changing history in itself. The parameters of this history, we argue, constitute the interpretative models that unavoidably act as the essential frame of reference in order to understand the object of our enquiry. Since the reception of the past is neither entirely passive (something akin to tradition), nor entirely active (something akin to appropriation), but rather interactive (Harloe 2010), it follows that the shifting interpretations of this political system are an integral part of the task of the historian who wishes to investigate its nature. As meaning is not only forged at the time of origin by the intentions of contemporary agents and the forces then in play, but also by the constant dialectical relation between that past and those who encounter it later, consequently the successive ways in which early modern and modern political thinkers and actors engaged with the Roman political culture of the Republic becomes an intrinsic part of its nature. As Catharine Edwards put it, discussing the ruins of the city: ‘In Rome more than anywhere else perhaps we are brought face to face with the fact that an unmediated encounter with antiquity can never be realized’ (2008: 359). The chapters in this section, therefore, explore the most salient adaptations and reinterpretations of those moments to which the Roman political system has been variously subjected at key historical junctures.

The first important moment was constituted by the work of Machiavelli, and especially his Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, which he wrote at the beginning of the sixteenth century in Renaissance Florence (see Chapter 2, Balot and Gilmore). In early modern Europe, alongside Plutarch, Livy was the main ancient source for Roman Republican history and this had important implications for contemporary and subsequent understanding of its political culture (Millar 2002). However, crucially, it was not so much the Rome of these ancient authors that later generations came to know, but rather, as Balot and Gilmore show, Machiavelli’s re-elaboration of Livy’s Republic, which exercised a great influence on the encounters with Rome of later generations.

The ‘Machiavellian moment’ (to use John Pocock’s notable title), centred on the notions of civic virtue, active citizenry and liberty, came to represent a coherent republican tradition, which looked back to ancient Rome as a source of inspiration. This found its expression not only in the civic humanism of Renaissance Italy, in cities such as Venice, Florence and Rome, but also in Switzerland, the Dutch Republic and Poland (van Gelderen 1993; 1955; Bailyn 1967; Fink 1962 [1945]; Wood 1969; Pocock 1975; Skinner 1978, 1998; for a different role for ancient Rome in early modern Spain, see Lupher 2006).

At a time when classical texts were not only at the core of elite education, but were also translated into the vernacular (Burke 1966; Jensen 2012; Peltonen 2013), Roman Republican culture provided contemporaries with the language in which to articulate their political claims and inform their political visions, as well as the exempla through which to negotiate their political and ethical stance in the contemporary world. At a time of political upheavals, fostered by a widespread sense of continuity with the past, it also provided a constitutional model, which, differently interpreted by different agents at different times, was either rejected or followed, a glorious past that had the power to legitimate even the most revolutionary acts (Chapters 3, 4 and 5; on Rome as a repository of errors, see Duffalo 2018).

However, particularly in the anglophone world, but also to various degrees in Europe, this Republican tradition of political thinking began gradually to be absorbed by the account of western liberal modernity, which heralded the notions of a liberalism based on social contract and individual rights (Laborde 2013). As the fundamental concept of Republican political liberty came to be subsumed by ideas of civilisation, nation and ultimately empire, the historical focus on Republican Rome came to be progressively displaced by a growing interest in a united Rome, the centre of an empire and custodian of national religion, tradition, language and constitution. In the revolution of 1848, Theodor Mommsen stood for a free and united Germany and, once forced into exile in Switzerland, in his The History of Rome he transferred the political conflicts and ideals of his time to the Roman Senate. ‘Rome became a place where the struggles of the Frankfurt national parliament were re-enacted and where people fought for the liberal demands of the German bourgeoisie’ (Chapter 6, p. 85, Rebenich). (For an interesting reading of the role of Republicanism in the political discourse of rosismo between 1828 and 1852 in Argentina, see Myers 1995.) In Italy, too, there was great political turmoil (Riall 2009) and, while in 1848 Rome became briefly a Republic, in 1871 it was selected as the capital of the kingdom of Italy, the latter united in 1861 (on the role of classical culture in the period, with an emphasis also on regional differences, the most stimulating contribution remains Treves 1962). A great programme of archaeological excavations centred on the Forum was launched to capture that sense of Italian pride and power through the ancient monuments (Edwards 2008). In 1911, in one of the exhibitions at the restored Baths of Diocletian to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification, plaster casts from each province of the Roman empire were exhibited to impress upon the visitor a clear sense of Rome’s imperial might (Dalla mostra al museo 1983; on the role of ancient Rome in this period, see Giardina and Vauchez 2016). Italy, however, with the conquest of Libya in the same year, was only the latest European country to implement an imperial expansion. In Britain, between the 1850s and 1920s, politicians, intellectuals and social reformers had been discussing the issues of empire and nation, central to the debates of the time, through the prism of ancient Rome, whose empire was conjured into echoing, in fact, the British empire and appealing to the nationalistic mode of the time (Bradley 2010; Butler 2012). In Germany, in the meantime, in response to Mommsen’s analysis of ancient Rome through the lens of law (Linderski 1990), Matthias Gelzer published Die Nobilität der römischen Republik (1912). A turning point in the study of Roman political culture (Ridley 1986), this work investigated the social structural dynamics of the Roman oligarchy and identified the nexus of personal obligations as the fundamental factor at the centre of the power dynamics in Roman Republican politics (see Chapter 7, Yakobson). A few years later, in 1920, Friedrich Münzer, who is often associated with Gelzer as the founder of a new interpretative framework of Roman politics, moved the debate further. In his Römische Adelsparteien und Adelsfamilien, he analysed Roman politics through the changing composition of the Senate, where the working of families and the personal connections of the Roman aristocracy replaced the working of the constitution and its legal arrangements. Developing this model for prosopographical studies, Ronald Syme wrote The Roman Revolution (1939), one of the landmarks of the twentieth century for the study of Roman politics (see Chapter 7, Yakobson; Linderski 1990). Composed in the tranquillity of Oxford, this work, however, was also a reaction to the political events of the 1920s and 1930s (Momigliano 1966: 729–737). A growing scholarly adulation for Augustus at the time was accompanied by an appropriation of Rome’s ancient past by the fascist regime in Italy, as the extravagant celebrations of the Bimillenario Augusteo in 1937 illustrate (Cagnetta 1976; Scriba 1995; Marcello 2011; Arthurs 2017; for an interesting comparison between Mussolini and Hitler in relation to classical antiquity see Roche 2019; for a different approach to ancient Rome in Spain at this time Wulff 2003). Firmly at the centre of Syme’s study was the governing class. In the rest of Chapter 7, Alexander Yakobson takes the story on, past the upheavals of World War II, to trace the subsequent readings of this political culture. In the 1980s, in response to contemporary concerns, as Yakobson discusses, Fergus Millar proposed a democratic reading of the Roman political system. His interpretation sparked a very lively debate, which gained momentum because, according to Hölkeskamp, ‘Two different scholarly traditions – a new approach to politics in political science on the one hand, and the new cultural history of politics in premodern political formations on the other – were combined and generated a fresh and innovative view on Roman Republican politics’ (abstract to Chapter 1).

Recent approaches to cultural history in the ancient world focus on the notion of symbolic capital and civic rituals (Hölkeskamp 2010), while neo-Republicanism has placed the political culture of the Republic at the centre of the history of political thought and contemporary analytical philosophy. By investigating the Roman Republican origins of a tradition of thought centred on the ideals of liberty, virtue and self-government, neo-Republicanism sets itself in deliberate opposition to liberalism and has now become one of its most powerful interlocutors, if not alternatives (Pettit 1998, 2013; Skinner 1998; van Gelderen and Skinner 2002–2005).

Despite repeated claims of the triumph of modernism and, conversely, of the decline of ancient studies, the political culture of the Roman Republic has regained central stage in contemporary studies of ancient Rome as well as in the intellectual world we currently inhabit.

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