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Out of the numerous objections raised against Millar’s thesis, most can be subsumed under two main lines of argument – one that refers to the limited scope of actual popular participation, challenging the very notion of ‘the people’ as applied to Republican politics (e.g. Mouritsen 2001: 16), and one that emphasises the aristocratic, strongly hierarchical character of the prevailing political culture, that conditioned ‘the people’ to acquiesce in a (largely) oligarchic political system (e.g. Hölkeskamp 2010, passim). Jehne combines both points: the Roman voting system made it practically impossible for the great majority of citizens to vote, and Roman political culture was such that this fact does not seem to have bothered anyone.

In my view, the decisive reason why it is impossible to classify the Roman Republic as a democracy, or even to attribute wide-ranging democratic features to it, is the small opportunity for political participation. The decisive point is not that only a few actually participated, which is also a constant problem in modern democracies (even if not so acute). Rather, the spirit of the political system is revealed by the fact that the vast majority could not participate at all, and that those empowered to make decisions never gave so much as a thought to discovering a remedy by means of a representative system: no one in Rome was interested in creating fairness of participatory opportunity for ordinary citizens who lived outside Rome. It seems to me that this kind of regard for the opportunity for citizens to participate, at a rudimentary level at least, is a necessary (but certainly not sufficient) condition for every democracy. (Jehne 2006: 22–23)

However, classifying the Roman Republic as a democracy and attributing wide-ranging democratic features to it are two very different things; this, at any rate, was the view of Polybius, who did the latter but not the former (see Chapter 8). I would argue that Jehne’s objection is stronger against the former view than against the latter. If a system is to be defined as a democracy, even with qualifications, this does indeed invite the question whether this should not be conditional on it allowing, or at least seeking to allow, as large a part of the citizen body as possible to vote. But defining the Roman Republic as a democracy is in any case, in my view, something better avoided. It tends to make the debate too semantic and too normative – too focused on whether the Republic deserves this title or not. It is true that perhaps no modern debate involving the term democracy can be wholly divorced from the participants’ contemporary concerns and normative preferences.⁷ This applies also to discussing a system’s democratic features (which is why ‘popular’ is preferable in this context – not that it wholly solves the problem), but much more so to any attempt to determine whether a given system passes muster as a democracy.

Designating a political system as an imperfect or flawed democracy might be a good idea when this system defines itself as a democracy and someone wishes to draw attention to the gravity of its flaws in this respect, without denying that it is a democracy after all. But the Roman Republic never defined itself in terms that can be translated as a democracy. This fact is, of course, not merely a matter of semantics. The famous traditional formula ‘Senate and People’ seems to imply an idea of partnership between two powerful forces (distinct functionally and socially, though not separate and independent).⁸ If so, it is easy to see how Cicero could have accepted Polybius’s ‘mixed constitution’ without too much difficulty. The term civitas popularis used by Cicero in De Re Publica (1.41) to designate democracy sounds quite un-Roman; it was obviously not meant to apply to Rome – by Cicero or anybody else, for all we know (see Chapter 9).

On the other hand, a political system may reasonably be said to have included a significant democratic or popular element if its powerful officials were chosen, in competitive elections, by an electorate that was at any rate much wider (more ‘popular’) than the social class from which those officials sprang, creating what Jeffrey Tatum has aptly called ‘the paradox of an aristocracy selected by its inferiors’ (Tatum 2013: 133). Moreover, this can be claimed when these officials might have to depend on the votes of their ‘inferiors’ politically in legislative assemblies, and sometimes for their very safety, in judicial ones. This applies even if the voting populace in question constituted only a small minority of the entire citizen body, and despite the important debates on the social composition of the various assemblies, that are obviously relevant to assessing the system.⁹ For members of the Roman elite, the popular aspect of Republican politics was very real – much too real, sometimes. The kind of secure and undisturbed dominance of the oligarchy that is necessarily implied, when one rejects the notion that the system had significant popular features, was not the lot of Rome’s ‘oligarchs’.

Moreover, it should be borne in mind that we are talking, after all, about a city-state, though a peculiar one. The Republic’s political system always remained that of a city-state and the scope of popular participation (as well as the scope of conceivable reforms) remained within the bounds of this type of polity, while the territory of the Republic and the number of its citizens had grown far beyond those limits. Once all of Italy south of the Po received Roman citizenship in the 80s BCE, the percentage of voters among the citizens grew still much smaller; this does not mean that the popular aspect of Republican politics, such as it was, thereby became less significant.¹⁰ The late-Republican ruling class, as Cicero’s writings repeatedly attest (e.g. Rep. 1.31, 2.59), could only envy its predecessors in the ‘good old days’ before the Gracchi, when the assemblies (while being more ‘democratic’ in the sense of representing a larger proportion of the citizens) were more likely to be guided by a consensus of their betters.

Nevertheless, the Republic’s political culture, the spirit of the system reflected also in certain important institutional arrangements, does provide weighty arguments for emphasising the power of the elite rather than that of the people (though not, I would argue, for dismissing the latter altogether). These elitist features of the system are well-known and undisputed. They all present significant limits of the people’s power in the Republic – though the exact degree to which they neutralised it is a matter for dispute. Rome had a powerful governing (office-holding) class – at once a social and a political elite, with the nobility as its inner circle. Only members of the office-holding class could legally summon popular assemblies, preside over them and put questions to the vote; in contiones, where public debates took place, they not only controlled the proceedings but enjoyed a near monopoly on addressing the populace (speakers who were privati appear to have been usually senators; see Chapter 16; Chapter 32). Thus, any legitimate political initiative had to come, legally, from above; in this sense, ‘the popular will of the Roman people found expression in the context, and only in the context, of divisions within the oligarchy.’¹¹ The Roman elite exercised powerful control not only over public debate, through its hold on the contiones and the ‘steeply hierarchical communication-situation’ (Morstein-Marx 2013: 30) obtaining there, but more broadly over the numerous public ceremonies, rituals and celebrations of the Republic (see Chapter 1; Chapter 33; Chapter 34; Chapter 35). The constant ‘publicity’ characteristic of the Republic, regarded by Millar as an important vehicle for the people’s power, can also be regarded – and is often presented, in current scholarship – as having the opposite effect. It gave ample opportunity for aristocratic self-glorification and regularly ‘educated’ the citizenry in the spirit of respect for tradition and acceptance of social and political hierarchy (see Chapter 1) This brings us back to the ‘conservative Roman voter’ whose conservatism, according to Syme (as we have seen), served the oligarchy better than its family alliances and its (alleged) hosts of clients. This conservatism was by no means (only) spontaneous – it was fostered and cultivated from above. Thus, the voting power of the people, and the public, open-air character of the political life (see Chapter 35), can be regarded as serving, in the final analysis, the fundamental interests of the system and of the ruling elite. This is so despite the accommodations that had to be made for the benefit of the people, and in a certain sense precisely because of them, since they enhanced the popular legitimacy of what can be regarded as an essentially aristocratic system.

But how aristocratic was it, in fact? There can probably be no full agreement on that. This is so both because of different interpretations of the system’s various aspects and because the debate touches on a question to which there is probably no objective, non-ideological answer: how far are elitism and social hierarchy compatible with genuinely free popular choice, and how far can popular acquiescence in an elitist and hierarchical system be considered free and voluntary? At any rate, although the Republican political culture was strongly influenced by the senatorial elite, it was not fully controlled by it. Popular liberty, which in principle (though certainly not always in practice) entailed popular supremacy, was a notion central to this political culture (see Chapter 28). This conferred considerable legitimacy on tribunes of the plebs, including turbulent ones, whose traditional function was to uphold this principle; when one says that legitimate political initiative had to come ‘from above’, they are included in this term (see Chapter 19). While the Republican elite was in a position to make manipulative use of the notion of popular liberty (and sometimes, indeed, of the tribunate itself), it might also be used, sometimes quite effectively, against it, and in defence of the rights and material interests of wider strata. The Roman people can be shown to have enjoyed a considerable measure of autonomy in interpreting the commonly shared civic code, with its stock of ideals, themes, catchwords and legitimate historical precedents (Morstein-Marx 2013). Some speak of a distinct popular ideology alongside the senatorial one, relying on its own version of the mos maiorum and a different interpretation of some of the basic values shared in principle by all – above all, libertas (Wiseman 2009; Arena 2012). Nobody doubts that the Republican ruling class was powerful, but the degree of its cultural and ideological power is much debated in scholarship.

Those who speak of the power of the ruling class vis-à-vis the people assume that the ruling class stood, in principle, united. In some broad and fundamental sense, it did, no doubt – at any rate, to a large degree. When it came to the fundamental interests of this class as a whole, common to all of its subdivisions, its collective power was huge; even a less than overwhelming consensus within it would probably often prove decisive. Real traitors to their class must have been extremely rare; it seems likely that even the more radical late-Republican populares were not fundamentally hostile to the system (though they were accused by their enemies of that) – except for Caesar, in the end. Hence, the fact that the people’s wishes could not translate themselves into public policy directly, but only as mediated, articulated and, thus, finally shaped by office-holders (Morstein-Marx 2004: 147, 283–284) surely narrowed, despite all the divisions within the elite, the range of what was politically practicable or even conceivable.

On the other hand, a Republican oligarch did not have to be a conscious enemy of the constitution in order to cause very considerable disruption when he chose to play the popular card; and a temptation to do so was built into the system (alongside the countervailing incentives to cultivate one’s reputation among fellow oligarchs). However, the leverage of the people in such a system should not be measured only, or even principally, by the major political controversies within the ruling class, played out before the people and encouraged by the people’s voting power, that characterised the late Republic but were not unknown in earlier times too. Competition between members of the elite and, thus, ‘divisions within the oligarchy’ that empowered the people were at the very heart of the system, precisely in its aristocratic aspect – which is why the popular and the aristocratic aspect of Republican politics cannot be analysed separately, or (solely) as a zero-sum game.

Elections – the crucial meeting-point between members of the elite and the people that could not be bypassed by any ambitious aristocrat – are the most obvious case in point. Divisions within the oligarchy, with the populus serving as the arbiter, were the very essence of Republican elections. While constant aristocratic victories at the polls reinforced the prestige not just of the individual winners, but that of the ruling class as a whole, constant aristocratic defeats, the natural other side of the coin of competitive elections,¹² ‘made it plain that the people had a choice that was real enough, which is why candidates had to beg for their honours, a demeaning exchange as repellent to aristocratic sensibilities as it was vital for electoral success’ (Tatum 2013: 133; see 2007). Similarly, controversial legislation (not necessarily invoking a popular/optimate divide in the late-Republican sense), trials before the people involving, as they often did, an element of rivalry within the elite and, generally, any public debate on policy or official conduct – all these things made a division within the oligarchy very much the rule rather than the exception.

Moreover, such terms as ‘the oligarchy’ or ‘the ruling class’, in a Roman Republican context, are sometimes allowed to suggest, in scholarly discussions, more than what they are known to have amounted to (just as is the case with ‘nobility’ and ‘aristocracy’). The ruling (i.e. office-holding) class of the Republic – a circular but socially and politically meaningful, and hence legitimate and useful, term – included such people as the tribunes of the plebs whom Quintus Cicero (himself of equestrian origin, looked down on by true aristocrats) would regard as ‘mean’ (presumably, low-born) and ‘sordid’: Aulus Gabinius (said to have been the grandson of a slave; Liv. Oxy. Per. 54.193) who had carried the first of the ballot laws in 139; and Gaius Curatius who, scandalously, ordered the two aristocratic consuls of 138 imprisoned because of a conflict over conscription (Cic. Leg. 3.33 ‘ab homine ignoto et sordido’; 3.20 ‘omnium infimus homo et sordidissimus’). Our grasp of the social and cultural realities of Roman society is not firm enough to judge just how low a low-born tribune of the plebs could have been. A grandson of a slave may well have been a rich man; he must have been respectable enough for the common people who elected him, and it is probably a good guess that he was loyal, even as a reformer, to the fundamentals of the system as he saw them. However, real aristocrats would hardly regard him, or men of his ilk, as fellow oligarchs; nor do such people naturally come to mind when we hear that Republican office-holders constituted a ‘plutocratic oligarchy’ (Eder 1991: 175).

It is true that the Roman Republic was not, after all, ruled by these lower echelons of the office-holding class. Indeed, the main threat to the status quo was not from a Gabinius or a Curatius but from a Gracchus, a Clodius or a Caesar. These radical nobles were more formidable precisely because the people’s respect for, and deference to, a noble name, enshrined in tradition and fostered by the prevailing political culture, benefited them too and empowered their followers among the general public.

Whether one chooses to emphasise the power of the Republican ruling class, or the constraints on this power resulting from the reality of popular participation, depends in large measure on whether one attaches greater weight to the fundamental common interests of the elite and its readiness and ability to defend them, or to differences and disagreements within it. Various assessments are possible as to how significant these differences and disagreements were, what political leverage they afforded to the wider public and how meaningful should the freedom of choice they provided to the people be considered. One’s overall assessment of the system also depends on the political significance that one attaches to the wide social and economic gaps between the elite and the common people. Finally, it depends on whether one regards the people’s acceptance of the social and political status quo (facilitated by ameliorative measures carried out from time to time by ambitious politicians in pursuit of popularity)¹³ as proof that the people had a real stake in the system, or as indicating the extent to which the social and ideological hegemony of the ruling class negated the people’s free will. While the debate cannot be reduced to ideological assumptions, expecting it to be wholly divorced from them is perhaps unrealistic. It does not seem likely that this debate will be over any time soon.