Читать книгу A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic - Группа авторов - Страница 79

Syme’s description of the Republic was – together with an earlier account by Matthias Gelzer in his Roman Nobility and Friedrich Münzer’s theory of aristocratic ‘parties’ – hugely influential in shaping the oligarchic model of Roman politics in scholarship after the Second World War (Syme 1939; Gelzer 1969 – English trans. of a book first published in 1912; Münzer 1920). Syme starts by applying to Rome the universal ‘iron law of oligarchy’: ‘In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the façade; and Roman history, Republican or Imperial, is the history of the governing class’ (Syme 1939: 7). But the Roman Republic, according to Syme, was oligarchic not just in this universal sense – something that would have made it, in principle, no more oligarchic than the (ostensibly) democratic regimes, ancient and modern. It was an oligarchy par excellence, as he repeatedly points out in Chapter 2 of his book, appropriately entitled ‘The Roman Oligarchy’.

‘As in its beginning, so in its last generation, the Roman commonwealth, “res publica populi Romani”, was a name: a feudal order of society still survived in a city-state and governed the empire. Noble families determined the history of the Republic, giving their names to its epochs’ (Syme 1939: 11–12). Syme’s emphasis is on the power of the nobilis ‘feudal’ magnates, the inner circle of the senatorial ruling class. This inner circle consisted, ‘in any age of the history of Republican Rome’, of ‘about twenty or thirty men’ who held ‘a monopoly of office and power’ (Syme 1939: 18). The point is not just that the Roman state had a powerful ruling elite; it is that this elite was the only thing that really mattered in Roman politics, despite any ‘constitutional’ rights enjoyed by the wider public. ‘The Roman constitution was a screen and a sham. Of the forces that lay behind and beyond it, next to the noble families the knights were the most important’ (Syme 1939: 15). In practice, beyond the façade, the Republican system was a ‘harsh and hopeless rule’ by a ‘government of nobiles, supported by a sacred union of the possessing classes, by the influence of their clientela among the plebs and by due subservience towards the financial interests’ (Syme 1939: 17).

Clientela, indeed, remained for a long time at the heart of the oligarchic model of Roman politics as a key to explaining the power of the nobles, based upon the assumption that coalitions of nobles and noble families could pool their resources and thus control the electorate (see Chapter 29). Gelzer had famously claimed that ‘the most powerful man was he who by virtue of his clients and friends could mobilize the greatest number of votes’ (Gelzer 1969: 139); this emphatic phrase was to exercise great influence on scholarship, though the actual detailed picture drawn by Gelzer in his book is in fact more nuanced than this summary.¹ Münzer placed long-term (as he envisaged them) factions or ‘parties’ of nobles families at the heart of Republican politics. This view left no real room for meaningful popular participation and, indeed, little room for politics as such. According to Syme, the political life of the Republic was characterised ‘not by the ostensible opposition between Senate and People, optimates and populares’, but by ‘strife for power, wealth and glory’ among the nobles (Syme 1939: 11). Syme’s prosopographical method – reconstructing the intricate web of personal and family connections within the Roman ruling class, and analysing Roman politics in light of these findings – is naturally in tune with this view of the Republican political system. Of course, prosopography is a vitally important tool in any attempt to understand the Republic, but it becomes even more vital if one accepts Syme’s broad picture of how this society and political system worked.

The ostensible res publica populi Romani was thus, according to Syme, essentially none of the people’s business. However, in describing this ‘strife for power, wealth and glory’ among the oligarchs, Syme also stresses, in the same chapter, that at the heart of the Republican political system lay fierce competition between nobles – individuals, families and cliques – for the elected offices of state, and hence for the votes of the people in popular assemblies (see Chapter 16). Thus, the oligarchs’ very strife for power made them dependent on the people’s votes; once in office, they might expect to face the voters again, in future electoral contests; they might need their votes, on various important occasions, in legislative assemblies, and might have to fear them in judicial ones (see Chapter 31).

Of course, voting might be merely a formality, a confirmation of a preordained choice or decision. But Syme, for all his ‘feudal’ and ‘oligarchic’ language, makes no such claim with respect to Roman voting. This voting, it should be remembered, could not have been purely formal even if one assumes (very dubiously, as we shall see) that most voters were obedient clients of nobiles: at any rate when it came to elections, the people’s votes could not, by definition, be fully controlled by any noble or group of nobles – precisely because, in competitive elections, their aristocratic rivals would have similar aristocratic resources at their disposal, including those of clientela.

In fact, the people’s freedom of choice is duly noted by Syme: ‘The sovran people of the free Republic conferred its favours on whom it pleased. Popularity with the plebs was therefore essential’ (Syme 1939: 13). ‘Sovran people’ and ‘free Republic’ are probably meant to sound (half-)ironical; but popularity with the plebs was indeed essential and it is clear from the context that this is said in earnest. Of course, when powerful men vie for popularity and votes, they might use methods that are rather unsavoury from the viewpoint of democratic theory (if not wholly unknown to democratic practice) such as ‘clientela among the plebs’, ‘bribery’ and even ‘intimidation’ (see Chapter 29), all mentioned by Syme in this context. But even so, how useful is it to describe such a political order as ‘feudal’? Is the language of feudalism useful even as a metaphor in describing a system in which popularity with the common people is essential for realising the ambitions of the ‘magnates’, and their power depends on winning fiercely contested popular (if not exactly ‘democratic’) elections?

Moreover, when Syme explains why the great majority of consuls (see Chapter 18) were nobles, he points out that the ‘nobiles did not, it is true, stand like a solid rampart to bar all intruders. No need for that – the conservative Roman voter could seldom be induced to elect a man whose name had not been known for centuries as a part of the history of the Republic’ (Syme 1939: 11). The chief reason why nobles were usually elected thus turns out to have been the conservatism of the Roman voter. ‘Standing like a solid rampart’ against an upstart intruder would have meant, for the nobles, suspending their competition and pooling their resources – of patronage, bribery and, occasionally, of intimidation. But, according to Syme, there was usually no need for that. The conservatism of the voters would usually carry the day – not clientela, bribery, intimidation and the power of noble family alliances (the factors on which Syme lays stress). Nor is the ‘blame’ said to attach to other ‘non-democratic’ factors often mentioned in this context, such as the timocratic structure of the centuriate assembly (see Chapter 16) that chose the higher magistrates, the wide powers of the higher magistrates who presided over the assemblies (most of them nobiles themselves), or the limitations of physical access that made it impractical for most citizens to exercise their right to vote. All of these factors, variously assessed, surely played their role in limiting the full potential impact of popular participation in Rome. However, the main reason for the dominance of the nobiles at the polls (the indispensable foundation of their whole power in the state) was, at least according to Syme in this passage, the inner attitude of the voting populace – of those whose support was ‘essential’ for the career of every individual noble and senator.

Now, of course it can be argued, very reasonably, that Roman voters were conditioned from above, in various ways, to be conservative, and this is surely relevant to assessing the political character of the Republic (see Chapter 30). Indeed, much of the present debate on the Republic’s political culture can be characterised as an attempt to understand what exactly made the Roman voter conservative; and many of the suggested answers put great emphasis on the power of the ruling class. But again, ‘feudal’ is hardly the right definition if one wishes to describe such a system.

In a certain sense, the term ‘nobility’ itself – obviously unavoidable in, and central to, any discussion of the Republic – should be ‘blamed’ for its tendency to imply more than every scholar has known (but not always borne in mind) that it signified in the Roman Republican context (see Hopkins and Burton 1983: 109). Everybody has always known that Republican nobilitas was not a hereditary aristocracy in the medieval or early-modern European style, with formal belonging, status and privileges, and (often) a formal monopoly on various offices. Rather, it was a social category consisting of descendants of consuls and, according to some, of other higher magistrates (see Chapter 25). It was thus closely connected with the principle of popular election and open to outsiders through competitive annual polls.

The option of ennobling an outsider (and his descendants) by electing him to high office was exercised by the people rarely enough to preserve the aristocratic exclusiveness of the ‘club’, but frequently enough to maintain and enhance its popular legitimacy. The Roman nobility thus enjoyed both the prestige of ‘blue blood’, in a traditional and conservative society, and popular legitimacy conferred by the voters’ free choice – not wholly free, to be sure, but evidently free enough to confer legitimacy. In large measure, the same is true for the Senate as a whole – a council of ex-magistrates dominated by nobiles in its higher ranks, in which the rank of each senator was determined by the highest office to which he had been elected by the people (see Chapter 15).

An aristocracy of elected office may still be reasonably defined as an aristocracy if various political, social and cultural factors ensure a high degree of exclusivity and continuity. As Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp has noted, aristocratic exclusivity does not have to be understood in a ‘rigid and formalistic way’ in order to make the term meaningful; Meier’s famous dictum ‘being involved in politics meant being part of the aristocracy, and being part of the aristocracy meant being involved in politics’ is ‘only apparently circular, and it is by no means merely a banal tautology’ (Hölkeskamp 2010: 89, referring to Meier 1966: 47 and Millar 1988: 4f.; cf. Hopkins and Burton 1983: 107–117). In fact, the formal traditional European aristocracies were also not wholly closed to outsiders. But the decisive difference between them and Rome’s Republican aristocracy was the way that one could join the latter and attain promotion within its ranks – competitive popular elections Appreciating the mixed nature of this double legitimacy, aristocratic and popular (whose potency and occasional subversive potential were well illustrated by the late-Republican popularis nobles, blue-blooded friends of the people), should not, by any means, lead one to belittle the strength of the Republican elite – quite the contrary. But it is obvious that analysing such an elite and its standing vis-à-vis the wider public in terms that are coloured, for any modern audience and for the scholars themselves, by the experience of later European aristocracies, is highly problematic.²

Of course, it is also largely inevitable, since it was the Roman Republican nobilitas that gave these later hereditary elites their very name. The terminology used in modern accounts of Republican politics – nobility, nobles and all the associated terms and metaphors such as aristocrats, dynasts, magnates, grandees, feudal lords – often proved stronger than any qualifications attached to them. A ‘government of nobles’ in a ‘feudal order’, in Syme’s words, inevitably conjured up the notion of Roman voters as loyal vassals or perhaps obedient serfs. This language has overshadowed, in subsequent scholarship (and in Syme’s own overall view of Republican society and politics), certain important caveats contained in the historian’s own account – such as the fact that ‘popularity with the plebs was essential’, or the weight he attaches to the conservatism of the Roman voters. The latter, however much it benefited the ruling class, is obviously a ‘non-feudal’ factor.