This book has been built round the four Wiles Lectures that I had the honour to give at the Queen's University, Belfast, in May 1980. Four of the chapters are revised versions of those lectures, whereas chapters 2 and 6 were written afterwards and were first made public in a shorter form as a J. C. Jacobsen Memorial Lecture of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters (and published in early 1982 in the Academy's Meddelelser).

The English word ‘polities’ has a semantic range that differs somewhat from that of its synonyms in other western languages. On the one hand, ‘politics’ is not normally employed in the sense of ‘policy’; on the other hand, it has more of the implication of the ways, informal as much as formal, in which government is conducted and governmental decisions are arrived at, and of the accompanying ideology. Politics in that sense are essentially my theme.

I am unaware of any previous book-length account of my subject, with which I have been concerned and on which I have published a few articles over the past twenty-odd years. I have found the subject not an easy one, especially once I took the decision to discuss Greece and Rome comparatively, and I have not hesitated to draw on the knowledge and the thinking of friends and colleagues. My warm thanks go to them all, although I name only those who read and commented on the typescript of this book: Tony Andrewes, Peter Brunt, John Dunn, Peter Garnsey, Wilfried Nippel and Dick Whittaker.

Neither police action against individual miscreants nor crisis measures against large-scale ‘subversion’ tells us how a Greek city-state or Rome was normally able to enforce governmental decisions through the whole gamut from foreign policy to taxation and civil law, when they evidently lacked the means with which, in Laski's vigorous language, ‘to coerce the opponents of the government, to break their wills, to compel them to submission’. And we are considering states that were politically stable for centuries. Not all were, to be sure, but the critical fact is that the three we have to concentrate on because of the evidence, Athens, Sparta and Rome, were characterized by a continuous acceptance of their political institutions and of the men and classes who operated them. There were many political changes within our time-limits, many sharp political conflicts, many dissatisfied and disgruntled citizens, but the states remained politically stable. For Athens it is enough to recall the rapid reestablishment of the system after the shattering defeat in the Peloponnesian War and the two brief oligarchic coups that the war engendered; for Rome, sufficient proof is provided by the continued willingness of its citizens to serve en masse during centuries of unceasing warfare.

The unavoidable conclusion is that, at least in the stable states, acceptance of the institutions and of the system as a whole was existential: their legitimacy rested on their continual and successful existence.

That quotation from Judith Shklar, chosen almost at random, represents a common evaluation of contemporary democracy, though with the overtones of what its critics have come to call the élitist school. I began with it not because I am here concerned either with its descriptive accuracy or with the élitist arguments approving public apathy – I have discussed that elsewhere – but because a preliminary warning seems essential. The equation, democracy = electoral regime, is so strongly entrenched in our culture that a conscious effort to put it wholly aside is required in the study of ancient politics. ‘Electoral regime’ is a completely wrong label for Greece, an inadequate one for Rome. There were elections, and they had their element of ritual, their pretensions and conventions, their apathetic voters. But there were also assemblies with the (at least formal) power of final decision on issues. There was, in short, a measure of genuine popular participation.

In the third book of the Politics (1279b6–40) Aristotle wrote: ‘Tyranny is the rule of one man to the advantage of the ruler, oligarchy to the advantage of the rich, democracy to the advantage of the poor’. He then went on to gloss this definition: ‘whether the few or the many rule is accidental to oligarchy and democracy – the rich are few everywhere, the poor many … The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth.’

Late in the nineteenth century, in his great commentary on the Politics, W. L. Newman observed that Aristotle was here giving ‘explicit recognition to an important truth’, for the prevailing modern social-contract theory of the state ‘obscures our recognition of the fact which Aristotle had long ago pointed out, that the constitution of a State has its roots in what moderns term its social system’. More precisely, Aristotle gave systematic formulation to a common but still rather loose notion that was widely (perhaps universally) shared by the classical Greeks. It pervades their literature, among poets, historians and pamphleteers as well as political philosophers – from Hesiod's bitter complaint against the ‘gift devouring’ princes and their crooked judgments, through the reformer Solon's boast, ‘I stood covering both [rich and poor] with a strong shield, permitting neither to triumph unjustly over the other’, to Plato's lengthy insistence that even before the degenerate present, the great Athenian leaders of the good old days, Miltiades, Themistocles, Cimon and Pericles, were no better than pastry cooks, stuffing the common people (demos) with material goods.

In 415 b.c. the Athenians mounted a full-scale invasion of Sicily in a bold and imaginative effort to force a successful conclusion to the war against Sparta that had commenced more than fifteen years earlier. Not long after the landing in Sicily, Alcibiades, a moving spirit of the invasion scheme and one of the three generals in command, was summoned home to face charges of plotting to overthrow the democratic regime. He went into exile instead, was sentenced to death in absentia, and quickly made his way to Sparta. There he participated publicly in strategic discussions regarding the conduct of the war, excusing his turncoat behaviour in these words (according to Thucydides 6.92.4):

The shabby, self-serving argument of a traitor? Certainly Alcibiades is one of the first names mentioned today whenever a politician or journalist wishes to display a bit of learning on the subject of treason, and historians, too, are usually satisfied with that quick dismissal.

In an oft repeated story Plutarch tells how, on one occasion in Athens while the voting was under way for an ostracism, an illiterate rustic approached a man and asked him to inscribe his potsherd (ostrakon) for him with the name Aristides. The man asked what harm Aristides had done him, and received the reply, ‘None whatever. I don't even know the man, but I am fed up with hearing him called “The Just” everywhere.’ Whereupon Aristides, for the man was he of course, duly entered his own name as requested (Aristides 7.6). An edifying tale, but my interest is in the willingness of historians to accept it as true and to draw from it wide-ranging conclusions about Aristides, about ostracism, and about Athenian democracy. Some had doubts about the image of Athenian political leaders as noble gentlemen who would not sully themselves with such low forms of behaviour as canvassing peasants and shopkeepers (only good political leaders, I need hardly add, not demagogues like Cleon). The sceptics have now scored an unexpected triumph. Excavations since the last war have uncovered, chiefly in the potters' quarter, more than eleven thousand ostraca with names inscribed on them. Most were obviously dumped in quantity following the completion of one or another ostracism. However, one batch of 190 found on the west slope of the Acropolis all bore the name of Themistocles, written in a small number of hands, clearly prepared beforehand for distribution among potential voters but in the end not used.

Argument and methods

This book is about death and social renewal. It is about the social institutions which regulated the transfer of power and property in the Roman political elite. Every death created a vacancy, a gap in the social order, a place to be filled. One of the book's central problems is the degree to which the Roman senatorial aristocracy reproduced itself biologically and socially between the third century bc and the third century ad. One of our main findings is that the senatorial aristocracy achieved a surprisingly low rate of social reproduction; surprising, that is, relative to Roman ideals of hereditary succession and modern scholarly views; and low, relative to aristocracies in other societies.

The late Republic

Explanation is elusive. But several factors seem important. In the Republic (before 31 bc), a highly competitive political culture stressed not merely high birth, but also success in military leadership, wealth, ostentatious consumption, rhetorical skills and victory in successive popular elections. Capacity to succeed in most of these did not necessarily follow biological lines, or not in each generation. The inheritance of property, split equally between all surviving sons and daughters, diffused wealth away from agnates to relatives by marriage, and away from narrow lines of political succession. High death-rates left some aristocrats with no direct descendant, while others had more surviving heirs than they could afford. The fall in the birth-rate among aristocrats, which occurred probably from the last century bc onwards, increased the proportion without a single surviving son.

INTRODUCTION

When Julius Caeser was thinking of setting himself up as king of Rome, or so rumour had it, Brutus was repeatedly reminded by graffiti scrawled on his tribunal: ‘Brutus are you asleep?’ and ‘You are no true Brutus.’ These slogans recalled the deeds of his distant ancestor, who over four hundred years previously had killed the last king of Rome. In ad 22, Brutus' sister Junia, the widow of Cassius (the other leading assassin of Caesar), finally died; the busts of twenty leading families, to whom she was related by blood or marriage, were paraded in her funeral procession, though out of political tact to the emperor Tiberius Caesar the busts of both Cassius and Brutus were omitted (Tacitus, Annals 3.76). The public display of noble ancestry was ‘a matter of pride among the ancients, and was considered a mark of status and success’. Noble descent enhanced a man's status and political prospects. Cicero, for example, once taunted an opponent, Piso:

INTRODUCTION

When a Roman noble died, his funeral cortège comprised relatives and friends, hired actors wearing waxen masks of the dead man's famous ancestors, professional mourners wailing loudly and shouting out his exploits, and by contrast troupes of boisterous satyr dancers, all accompanied by flutes and horns (Dionysius Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 7.72). The corpse was carried to the forum, and was placed, usually upright but sometimes reclining, on the raised platform (rostra) from which public orations were delivered. The dead man's eldest son then gave a funeral speech, in which he praised his father's exploits and those of his ancestors. The historian Polybius, who lived in the second century bc, has given us a detailed description.

These actors wore the robes and insignia of the highest office which each ancestor had gained, purple stripes for consul or praetor, full purple for a censor, gold embroidery for a general who had been awarded a triumph (cf. Diodorus 31.25).