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“The orator addressing the crowd”: Millar’s idea that the popular assemblies were deliberative assemblies open to persuasion by rhetoric is illusory. Even the citizens of “democratic” Athens, who might have been expected to turn out enthusiastically in great numbers in anticipation of participating in their far more powerful assembly, were lackadaisical and had to be corralled by the police into attending. (See Chapter 6.)

Henrik Mouritsen provides a welcome dose of realism as a corrective to Millar’s starry-eyed view: “The fact that political proceedings are public does not in itself make them ‘democratic.’” (Mouritsen, loc 586.) And again:

“The Roman ‘democracy’ is…founded on two—themselves indisputable—historical facts: the existence of a politically significant ‘public’ and the open access of all citizens to participate in this ‘public’. These two facts do not, however, add up to a Roman ‘democracy’. One crucial factor has been left out of the equation, which is the distinction between formal rights and their practical realisation.” Mouritsen concludes that Millar’s ‘democratic’ model “sits uneasily between, on the one hand, a very practical hands-on approach to politics and, on the other, an idealistic, almost naïve view of the relationship between constitutional principle and reality.” (Mouritsen, 2008, loc 1841.)

Egon Flaig has pointed out that the popular assemblies almost always agreed with the bills presented to them, on the basis of which he denied that the assemblies were decision-making bodies, labelling them instead as “consensus-producing bodies”. (Egon Flaig 1995, 77–91; 2003, 155–74; 184–93.)

What then about the contiones (informal non-voting public meetings), which Millar saw as the place where ambitious politicians employed persuasion to prepare the ground for later voting? (Millar 2002 6, 23, 136, 142, 158–61, 181–2.) As Hölkeskamp has stressed, these speeches do not necessarily imply a situation of open decision making. Rather, it was a situation where “…senators spoke and asserted what needed to be done, the People listened and followed their advice” (Hökeskamp 1995, 27–49; 2010 88 f).

Referring to the Senate, Millar remarked that, “The notion of that body as an ‘aristocracy’ in the modern sense has confused the study of the Republic for decades.” (Millar 2002, p. 86.) It is not clear whether this remark refers only to the “early-middle- Republic” of about 390 to 218 BCE, or to later times as well. (Ibid., p. 85 f.). After consigning the Conflict of the Orders to the realm of myth and also rejecting the historicity of the Conflict of the Orders and of the “patricio-plebeian elite” that has generally been accepted as emerging after the resolution of that conflict, Millar provides us with a table purporting to show “Political Power in Mid-Republican Rome”. (Ibid., p. 99.) However, the table, which covers the period 362 to 217 BCE, contains only ten items, most of which are examples of laws proposed by tribunes of the plebs. The purpose of this table is to illustrate “…that the constitutional structure of the state, the conditions of office-holding, and the duties of office are for determination by the People via the medium of leges [laws].” (Ibid., p. 98.) So what? Modern writers on ancient history tend to be dazzled by anything that smacks of democracy and especially of “direct democracy”. (I note the same tendency in regard to Athens in Chapter 6.) It would, however, be a serious mistake to assume that we are dealing here with a genuinely deliberative assembly.