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The traditional view of the Republic (prior to the challenge in the 1980s), exemplified and to a significant extent shaped by Syme, thus defined it unambiguously as an oligarchy, and employed appropriately oligarchic-aristocratic language in describing it and its powerful elite. At the same time it conceded, and in fact sometimes emphasised with regard to important specific points, that certain features of the system could hardly be described as ‘oligarchic’ – at any rate, not in an unqualified way. None of these points was, however, allowed to affect the general picture.

When the challenge to the traditional view, denying the validity of the oligarchic label altogether and stressing the importance of the popular aspect of Roman politics, was launched by Fergus Millar in the 1980s, sparking a wide-ranging debate, it would be repeatedly argued that Millar had exaggerated the oligarchic consensus which he sought to refute – both its pervasiveness and the degree of ‘narrowness’ that it ascribed to the Roman oligarchy. Many of Millar’s points, it is argued, were not exactly new; some had been made before him and some had in fact never been disputed.

Thus, according to Martin Jehne, ‘Millar’s objection that [the Roman nobility] was not an hereditary aristocracy is not especially consequential, since on the one hand this is evident and undisputed, but on the other, the conception of aristocracy as a prominent and privileged group is not in fact tied to formal heritability’ (Jehne 2006: 16; see Hölkeskamp 2010: 76–77). However, if the mechanism that ensures ‘informal heritability’ in a given political system is that of competitive popular elections, in which a major asset of the nobility is the conservatism of the voter, then it must always be borne in mind that the aristocracy in question is of a very peculiar nature. This peculiarity had clearly not been given its due within the traditional oligarchic discourse; though ‘undisputed’ indeed, since nobody disputed it, it was (and sometimes still is) largely overlooked, and was thus not always ‘evident’. A wholesale direct attack on the aristocratic model itself, challenging, inter alia, the routine and often unqualified use of the term aristocracy as applied to the Republican elite, was, in such circumstances, a welcome and important development. This is so even if in the end one chooses (very reasonably, in my view), to retain this term – hopefully to be used with greater circumspection and without assuming that the significance of popular participation is automatically negated thereby.

Hölkeskamp points out that important scholars had presented a much more nuanced picture than that drawn by Syme and Münzer ‘long before Millar started the current discussion’ (Hölkeskamp 2010: 7). This is certainly correct; but, as we have seen, more nuanced descriptions make their appearance already in Syme’s own classical ‘oligarchic’ account – without affecting his overall assessment of the system. The same can be said, at least partly, about much of the scholarship that followed Syme: its findings repeatedly contradicted the aristocratic/oligarchic model on important specific points, without problematising it as a whole.

Hölkeskamp’s star witness is Christian Meier and his Res Publica Amissa, first published in 1966. Meier’s detailed analysis of the ‘political grammar’ of the Republic undermined a crucially important element of the old orthodoxy: the assumption that aristocratic ‘parties’ – clusters of family alliances – of the kind postulated by Münzer, could remain stable for long periods of time and thus dominate Roman politics. Instead, he shows that such combinations, in a highly competitive environment, were typically short-lived, fluid, often ad hoc, with multiple and often contradictory connections and commitments of the parties involved. And since only such clusters could have conceivably produced blocs of client-voters large enough to sway the assemblies, this conclusion also contradicts the notion that the political dominance of the nobility was ensured largely with the help of such blocs (Meier 1966: 15, 163, 174–177, 182–190). Nevertheless, Meier’s ‘lost republic’ is, unquestionably, an aristocratic republic. The collective ethos common, as he stresses, to the lower as well as the higher orders is an ethos that conferred popular legitimacy on an essentially aristocratic system – so much so that no alternative to this system was conceivable, even after it had become clearly dysfunctional (see Chapter 28). ‘For Meier, this explains the “readiness”, indeed willingness, of the people at large to obey the aristocratic regime as a matter of course and comply with its omnipresent hierarchies and command-structures’ (Hölkeskamp 2010: 45).

If Meier, to put it somewhat crudely and schematically, undermined Münzer as regards aristocratic ‘parties’, Peter Brunt not only rejected the notion of durable aristocratic coteries, but can be said to have undermined Gelzer – or at any rate the popular and somewhat simplified version of Gelzer’s views on the crucial importance of ‘personal ties’. Certainly, very little was left, after his thorough critical examination, of the old view according to which patron–client relations dominated Roman society and politics, including the voters’ behaviour (see Brunt 1988: 382–442, on clientela). This finding undermines what is probably the main pillar of the traditional oligarchic paradigm, ‘radically dispos[ing] of this basic axiom of the ‘old orthodoxy’ (Hölkeskamp 2010: 36). Nevertheless, it is hardly given its full weight in the way Brunt characterises the system as a whole. Brunt holds, indeed, that ‘the “mixed” constitution of the Republic [was] not purely oligarchical’ (Brunt 1988: 1). His own overall verdict on it is very largely oligarchic nonetheless,³ inter alia on the grounds that ‘most aristocrats were always at one in desiring to keep real power in their own circles’ whereas ‘the people […] was bound to commit the exercise of government to persons within a limited class qualified by property, education, training and tradition’ (Brunt 1988: 349). But this, arguably, underestimates the leverage which a highly competitive political system inevitably bestowed on the voting populace that had the power to choose between individual members of the elite, once it is accepted that the voters were not trapped in the net of patronage (and, moreover, in the later Republic, could vote in secret). Under such conditions, even a small minority of ‘aristocrats’ (office-holders and office-seekers, including the more genuinely aristocratic inner core of nobiles) who were willing, from time to time, to break ranks with their class, could make a lot of difference (see Chapter 19; Chapter 20; Chapter 21). Moreover, the vital need to compete for popular favour must have influenced in many ways, and not necessarily apropos major political controversies, the behaviour of many other ‘aristocrats’, and affected the whole atmosphere of public and social life.

In his Fall of the Roman Republic published in 1988, Brunt was still right to note, with reference to Sallust’s description of the Republic as dominated by the pauci (Sall. Iug. 41.6–42) (see Chapter 10),⁴ that ‘modern writers usually accept his conception of the system as oligarchical’ (Brunt 1988: 14; there were occasional exceptions – see Hölkeskamp 2010: 14 n.8). Though Brunt himself does not fully subscribe to this definition, he offers only a limited qualification to it – not one that could trigger a general reopening of the question. At any rate, this was, indeed, the status quaestionis in the 1980s, before Millar had launched his challenge, and Brunt’s findings were not about to change the general picture. Similarly, Andrew Lintott, in a 1987 paper entitled ‘Democracy in the Middle Republic’, spoke of Millar’s ‘determined challenge to current orthodoxy’ (Lintott 1987: 36); the orthodoxy that he described, and sought to qualify, was definitely the one Millar had recently started challenging.