Читать книгу The Roman Republic - Michael Crawford - Страница 9

DOWN TO 510, Rome was ruled by kings. The monarchy was in some sense elective, though the descent of a candidate from an earlier king was not an irrelevant consideration; the office of interrex, the man who presided over an interregnum and the emergence of a successor, survived the end of the monarchy with its name unchanged and its function essentially the same, to preside over a hiatus between duly elected officials of the community.

The essence of the transition from kings to pairs of officials (called by the Romans magistratus, magistrates) holding office for a year is encapsulated by Livy (11, 1, 7–8), following the common opinion of his day; the truth, if different, is irrecoverable:

One can regard the cause of freedom as lying rather in the fact that consular imperium was made annual than in any diminution in the regal power (inherited by the consuls); the first consuls retained all the rights and insignia (of the king); the only precaution taken was that they should not both hold the fasces simultaneously and thereby create a double impression of fearfulness. Brutus was the first to hold the fasces (for the first month), with the agreement of his colleague.

Two consuls instead of a king now stood each year at the head of the community; the assembly of adult males which elected them remaind the same,¹ as did the body of elders who advised them; this was the senate, composed in practice of former magistrates. Time and circumstance produced various modifications in the three elements whose interplay was the Roman political system, including notably the creation of a large number of lesser magistrates (see here and here); nothing altered the central fact of Republican government, that it was the collective rule of an aristocracy, in principle and to a varying extent in practice dependent on the will of a popular assembly. This aristocracy was in one sense self-perpetuating, but it was of course one from which many families disappeared over the centuries and to which new families were admitted, while an inner core of great families persisted (see Pl.8).

It was a form of government to which modern notions of being in or out of power are almost wholly inappropriate; a particular individual held office only at rare intervals and with one unimportant exception (for the dictatorship, see here and here) always as a member of a college of magistrates whose powers were equal. But increasing age, if coupled with a growing reputation for practical wisdom, brought with it increasing influence in the deliberations of the ruling elite. The voice of a few powerful men was often decisive.

At the same time, competition within this elite was fierce, for a consulship or other magistracy and for the recognition of primacy in practical wisdom; given the succession of wars in which Rome was involved, it is not surprising that success as a consul regularly involved victory in battle, rewarded with a triumph (see here); primacy in practical wisdom was rewarded with the title of princeps senatus, leader of the deliberative body of the Roman state.

Aristocratic attitudes to the political process emerge not only from the inscriptions on the tombs of the Scipios (see here), but also from the record of the victory of C. Duilius over the Carthaginians in 260:

As consul he relieved the Segestans, allies of the Roman people, from the Carthaginian siege and nine days later drove the Carthaginian troops and their commanders from their camp in broad daylight and took the town of Macela by assault. And in the same magistracy as consul he for the first time had success with a fleet at sea and for the first time prepared and equipped naval forces and a fleet and with these ships defeated in battle on the high sea all the Punic fleet, including large Carthaginian forces in the presence of Hannibal their commander, and took by force with his allies 1 septireme and 30 quinqueremes and triremes. (A list of booty follows). At his naval triumph he presented the people with the booty and led many free Carthaginians (captives in the triumph) before his chariot … (ILLRP 319)

The history of Republican government is to a large extent the history of competition within a group of men formally peers, always within the framework of the overriding decisions of the group; the ideology of collective rule in the middle and late Republic was powerfully reinforced by stories, improving whether true or false, of the fate suffered by men who in the early Republic stepped out of line:

(Sp. Maelius had distributed corn from his own resources; emergency measures were taken to deal with the threat posed by his ambition; these measures involved the appointment of a dictator and a master of horse as his deputy, in office for six months with supreme power overriding that of the consuls.) C. Servilius Ahala as master of horse was sent by the dictator to Maelius and said ‘The dictator summons you.’ When Maelius fearfully asked what he wanted, and Servilius replied that he had to stand trial and disprove before the senate the charge laid by L. Minucius, Maelius began to retreat into his band of followers … Servilius followed him and cut him down; covered with the blood of the dead man and surrounded by a band of young patricians, he announced to the dictator that Maelius had been summoned to him, but had fought off the attendant (who had tried to arrest him) and had incited the mob, and had received his deserts. The dictator replied ‘Bravely done, C. Servilius, for freeing the res publica (from the threat of a tyrant)’ (Livy IV, 13–14).

Within the Roman community, a closed group of families, knows as patricians, had been defined already under the monarchy by a process which is now unknowable. The group succeeded after the overthrow of the monarchy in substantially monopolizing the tenure of magistracies and priesthoods alike; as a result patricians also largely filled the senate. Wealthy and ambitious families of plebeians mostly excluded from the processes of government were naturally anxious to be admitted; at the same time the poorer plebeians were anxious to reduce or eliminate the economic exploitation to which they were subjected. The two groups of dissidents combined to extort concessions, the breaking of the monopoly of office by the patricians and the alleviation of the harsh laws of debt (under these a peasant who could not pay off a loan, perhaps of seed corn from a wealthy neighbour, could be reduced to slavery). In the process, the plebs acquired its own assembly and legislative organ, the concilium plebis (Appendix 1), and its own officials, the tribunes, whose chief function was to protect citizens from arbitrary action by a magistrate. At some time they acquired the important right to veto any action by a magistrate or the senate. They were sacrosanct, protected by an oath of the plebs to kill anyone who killed a tribune.

By 342 the battle was essentially won, with the admission of plebeians to the consulate; the most important consequence was the creation of a mixed patrician-plebeian nobility, defined by the tenure of the consulship – a man who held this ennobled his direct descendants in perpetuity – and less exclusive than the patriciate (it must be remembered that in the Roman tradition even the patriciate had once admitted a new family to its membership, the Claudii). This mixed nobility established its right to supremacy by its leadership in the conquest of Italy through the second half of the fourth century BC, the rewards of which, in the form of land, were in large measure distributed to the poorer plebeians, reconciling them to the political status quo. The problem of debt was in fact probably circumvented rather than solved.

Aristotle observed that an oligarchy which remained united could not be overthrown; the collective rule of the mature Republican aristocracy only eventually dissolved in the last century BC when it failed to attend to the increasingly serious grievances of the poor and when individual members of the aristocracy appealed to these lower orders for support in their competition with each other, a competition whose scale and nature had meanwhile already been changed out of all recognition by the spread of Roman rule over the Mediterranean basin.

The most important feature of Roman government is the structure created by the traditional obligation on anyone responsible for taking action to consult a group of advisers. It is apparent everywhere in Roman society; the decision in the last resort might be that of one man alone, but the obligation to take advice was absolute. A paterfamilias might summon a family consilium, a politician might summon his family and his friends (the hapless Brutus in 44 after the murder of Caesar consulted his mother, his half-sister, his wife and his friends Favonius, Cassius and Cicero), a magistrate in his province had to consider the opinions of his entourage; the senate was the consilium of the two highest magistrates, the consuls, by the late Republic the consilium for the whole world (Cicero, Philippica IV, 14).

Political groupings in the late Republic may indeed be regarded as consisting of those men whom a leading politician habitually summoned to his consilium; discussion there prepared for sessions of the senate and meetings of the assembly. Such groupings of course sometimes followed a leader out of habit, sometimes from conviction (see here).

Possessed of certain fairly limited actual powers, the senate by monopolizing the role of advising magistrates during their terms of office in Rome and Italy effectively controlled the Roman state. The senate’s formal powers (Polybius VI, 13) were the control of finance (total, despite Polybius’ qualification) and security, the administration of Italy and the running of relations with foreign powers (except for the actual decision for war or peace which was taken by the people). The control of finance for campaigning was one of the things which slipped from the senate’s grasp in the late Republic (see here), with disastrous consequences.

The most crucial part of the senate’s advisory role lay in the field of legislation; any intending legislator was expected to consult it. The corollary of course was that the senate was also in a position to advise on the invalidation of legislation, a position of which it took advantage in the turbulent years of the late Republic. The grounds for invalidation, technical and ideological, are expounded by Cicero, in a passage highly revealing of the unyielding mentality of part of the Roman governing class:

Marcus Cicero: For many evil and disastrous decisions are taken by the people, which no more deserve to be regarded as laws than if some robbers had agreed to make them …

Quintus Cicero: I fully realize that, and indeed I think that there is nothing else (except a law as defined by Marcus) which can even be called a law, let alone be regarded as one.

Marcus Cicero: So you do not accept the laws of (Sex.) Titius or (L.) Appuleius (Saturninus)?

Quintus Cicero: I do not even accept those of (M.) Livius (Drusus).

Marcus Cicero: Quite right too, for they in particular were instantaneously invalidated by a single decree of the senate (de legibus II, 13–14, compare 31).

The domination of the Roman governing class found expression in the institution of clientela, clientship, an archaic form of personal dependence, which survived at Rome with undiminished relevance, in striking contrast to Athens and the Greek world in general. Cicero regarded the institution as created by Romulus (de re publico 11, 16); it placed the client in the position of being, in E. Badian’s words, an inferior entrusted, by custom or by himself, to the protection of a man more powerful than he, and rendering certain services and observances in return for this protection.

Among the services rendered was political support; a man might be helped to office by the votes of his clients and by those of his friends and associates; naturally they expected him in return to deliver the votes of his clients. The ingrained habits of dependence of clients in particular and the lower orders in general emerge with dramatic clarity from the reaction of one of the characters of Plautus to the notion of a marriage into a higher social class for his daughter:

Now if I married my daughter to you, it occurs to me that you would be like an ox and I should be like an ass; when I was linked to you and couldn’t pull my share of the load I, the donkey, should drop down in the mud, while you, the ox, would pay no more attention to me than if I wasn’t born; you would be above me and my own order would laugh at me, and I should have no fixed abode if we were separated. The asses would tear me with theirteeth, the oxen would run me through; it’s very dangerous to climb from the asses’ to the oxen’s set (Aulularia 228–35).

It is not surprising, given such subservient attitudes, that the Roman aristocracy was able to demand economic sacrifices from its clients:

Mucius Scaevola at any rate and Aelius Tubero and Rutilius Rufus … are three Romans who observed the Lex Fannia (limiting expenditure on food, see here) … Tubero for one bought game birds from those who worked on his own estates for a denarius each, while Rutilius bought fish from those of his slaves who were fisherman for half a denarius a mina … And Mucius fixed the value of things bought from those who were under an obligation to him in the same way (Athenaeus VI, 274 c – e; compare, e.g., Lucilius 159–60 W).

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, aristocrats depended on credit demanded from suppliers who belonged thereby to a kind of client economy; the resentment felt against the English aristocracy is well documented and it is likely that a similar resentment was eventually felt against the Roman aristocracy and for similar reasons. If this is right, force is added to the suggestion of P.A. Brunt that the Roman mob in the first century BC included like the mobs in France in the eighteenth century many people of the middling sort, and a further explanation of their readiness to turn to violence emerges.

One important consequence of the institution of clientship was that the struggle of the Orders, of the patricians and the plebeians, was in no sense whatever a class struggle; the plebeian leadership was rich and ambitious and part of its support came not only from those in whose interest it was to support it, but from its clients at every economic level; the patricians were similarly supported by all their clients, the humble amongst them perhaps acting against the economic interests of their class, but nonetheless bound to their patrons by real ties of shared sentiment and mutual advantage.

It is also important to remember that the process of Roman government was not simply a matter of deploying clients and friends and relations in the pursuit of an aristocrat’s turn in office and the prestige and influence which that brought. Political power, then as now, was sought for a purpose; support was directed to one man rather than to another not only because of the traditional obligations of clientship and so on, but also on a calculation of the likelihood of his achieving a desired end; his conduct had to be validated by reference to the ideas of what was desirable and the aspirations of his supporters. The general expectation of anyone on whom the Roman people conferred office was that he was capable rem publicam bene gerere – of managing affairs of state well. The reasons for holding this view – noble birth counted for much – may sometimes strike a modern reader as curious; but they were none the less real.

Elections were in any case serious contests; from Ap. Claudius Caecus (see here) onwards, the lower orders sometimes successfully supported one member of the nobility against the wishes of the majority of the nobility and even brought unwanted outsiders to the consulship; at the turn of the third and second centuries, T. Quinctius Flamininus, the man who defeated Philip V of Macedon (see here), came to the consulship after holding only very junior magistracies, but offices which in some cases involved him in the distribution of land to the lower orders and won him popularity thereby. P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio failed in an election because he asked a farmer whether his hands were so hard because he walked on them.

Farmers indeed in the early and middle Republic formed the vast majority of the Roman electorate. The earliest codification of Roman law, the Twelve Tables of the middle of the fifth century BC, already takes for granted the distinction between the assiduus, the self-supporting freeholder, and the proletarius; Cato in the second century BC, and other writers after him, painted a no doubt idealized position of an early Rome composed of yeomen ever ready to defend their country, but the fact that service as a legionary was before 107 in principle a right and a duty of the assiduus alone makes it clear that early Rome was indeed a community of freeholders, for whom military service was as central an element of the citizenship as voting in the assembly. It is no accident that the variety of Roman assembly which elected the consuls was the people organized as an army (Appendix 1).

The general acceptance—barring extreme circumstances—of a hierarchical ordering of society and of the importance of traditional patterns no doubt led to a conceptualization of the political process in predominantly moral terms; but the consequent imperatives were deeply felt, despite perhaps growing cynicism. P. Cornelius Rufinus, consul in 290 and 277, was expelled from the senate in 275 for possessing ten pounds weight of silver vessels and by this luxury breaking the moral code of the governing class; his family was submerged for four or five generations.

If I am right in arguing, however, that at all times the conduct of the Roman governing class had to be justified in terms of the Roman system of values, a fortiori nobles who advocated particular policies were under an even greater compulsion to validate them in terms of an existing complex of ideas; the pattern is relevant to the progress of the Roman revolution.

1. See Appendix 1 for the different varieties of Roman assembly.