The Roman Republic. Michael Crawford

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

       IV The Conquest of Italy

      I HAVE SO FAR emphasized certain structural and permanent features of aristocratic society and government in the Roman Republic; but in many respects Rome of the early and middle Republic was astonishingly innovative.

      An early stage of Roman history had probably seen the admission to political rights and duties of men who were domiciled in Rome, but were not full members of the community; the struggle between the patricians and the plebeians had seen the eventual admission of the latter to secular and religious office. One may hypothesize that these bendings of the rules were the result of the interest of the Roman governing class in the display of military virtus which made its members peculiarly amenable to pressure from those followers on whom they depended for success in battle.

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