The quantity and broad scope of political matters decided by the People in the form of legislation are indeed impressive, and give some substance to the argument that the Roman Republic was a form of democracy. But more revealing than any argument over definitions and labels would be an examination of how, in late-Republican Rome, the Popular Will came to be expressed – ultimately in the form of a vote, but as we have seen in the last chapter, originally in mass meetings whose strategic function was, as far as possible, to determine that vote in advance. There I began to work out a model of popular decision-making with, at its center, the conception of the contio as an instrument whereby the Popular Will was artificially (if not necessarily falsely) fashioned by political leaders and then given the symbolic weight and apparent legitimacy needed for it to be used in political controversy. The methods of audience creation and rhetorical “ventriloquism” that we have studied raise serious questions about the extent to which even members of the political élite who wished to capitalize on the power of the populus were constrained to “listen” to the autonomous opinions of the (urban) citizenry. What we have seen so far certainly favors a “top-down” model of public deliberation.

But this cannot be the whole story.

Mass Oratory and Political Action

At around sundown on January 18, 52 bc, the battered corpse of the popular hero P. Clodius Pulcher, murdered earlier that day on the Appian Way on the orders of T. Annius Milo, was carried through the Porta Capena into Rome, borne on the litter of a senator who had passed by the scene of the crime and, after giving instructions for the conveyance of the body, prudently retraced his steps. A huge crowd of the poorest inhabitants of the metropolis and slaves flocked in mourning and indignation to the impromptu cortège as it made its way to Clodius' house on the upper Sacred Way, on the lower slope of the northern Palatine (see maps 1 and 2, pp. 43–44); there his widow set the body on display in the great atrium of the house, poured forth bitter lamentations, pointed out his wounds to the angry multitude. The crowd kept vigil through the night in the Forum, and next morning reassembled at Clodius' house in vengeful mood, joined now by two tribunes of the plebs, T. Munatius Plancus and Q. Pompeius Rufus. The tribunes called upon the gathering multitude to carry the corpse on its bier down to the Forum and onto the Rostra, the speakers' platform, where the wounds inflicted by Milo's cutthroats and gladiators could be seen by all.

Fergus Millar has rightly lamented that modern students of Republican politics have been “deaf both to the voice of the orator and to the reactions of the crowd.” As everyone knew who climbed the Rostra and confronted the sea of faces across the Forum and around the surrounding temples, the Roman People itself had a voice – a loud and sometimes terrifying one. When a tribune who opposed A. Gabinius' law creating a special command against the pirates for Pompey was unable to speak above the noise of the multitude, and thus tried to indicate with his fingers that two commanders should be chosen instead of one, the crowd let loose a shout that – according to Plutarch and Dio – knocked a crow out of the sky “as if struck by lightning.” Falling crows are a topos in such narratives, but we may still conclude that a source common to both writers was trying to say that the roar was stunning. Sallust describes the reaction of a different crowd to an unpopular use of a tribunician veto: “the crowd that was present in the meeting was violently agitated and tried to intimidate him with its shouting, its expression, indeed with frequent rushes at him, and every other sort of action that anger tends to incite.” Communication in the contio, then, worked both ways, a point that has not hitherto been accorded its due significance.

Disillusioned by the failure of a flurry of progressive legislation in the United States to live up to its promise, the American political theorist Murray Edelman formulated a “symbolist” model of democratic politics, which he laid out in three thought-provoking, now classic works published between 1964 and 1977. Edelman sought to construct a model of modern democratic politics that would explain how formally democratic political regimes can survive, even flourish, despite the continual failure of their policies to produce real and lasting benefits for their voters. He took the perspective that functionally, if not in theory, modern “democratic” politics was best seen as a kind of symbolic manipulation whereby ruling élites engineer the acquiescence of the mass and thus perpetuate their power. They do so, in Edelman's view, not by actually solving problems but by staging dramas of problem-solving, to which the public responds with anxiety at the dangers confronted and acquiescence in the efforts of their leaders to assuage that anxiety. At the core of theory is the idea that

Our chief contemporary witnesses to the political life of the late Republic, Cicero and Sallust, are fond of analyzing the political struggles of the period in terms of a distinction between optimates and populares, often appearing with slight variations in terminology, such as Senate, nobility, or boni versus People or plebs. But what precisely is denoted and connoted by this polarity? Clear enough, one who is designated in these sources as popularis was at least at that moment acting as “the People's man,” that is, a politician – for all practical purposes, a senator – advocating the rights and privileges of the People, implicitly in opposition to the leadership of the Senate; an “optimate” (optimas), by contrast, was one upholding the special custodial and leadership role of the Senate, implicitly against the efforts of some popularis or other. The polarity obviously corresponds with the dual sources of institutional power in the Republic – Senate and People – and was realized in practice through contrasting political methods (i.e., striving to keep real decision-making power within the Senate, or, alternatively, using popular organs such as the contio and comitia to shake, or overrule, a senatorial consensus) and distinctive types of rhetorico-ideological appeals suited to tapping those alternative sources of power (i.e., the “optimate” construction of the populist “demagogue,” on one side, or the “popular” politician's concitatio invidiae on the other).

INTRODUCTION: THE PARADIGM OF PATRIARCHY

It is a truism that the family forms the basic unit of any society and, at the same time, reflects its ruling principles, values, and views, and this is certainly true of Rome. As in all societies, the structure of the basic family unit was made up of a complex compound of criteria and factors that, in their relative importance to the whole as well as individually, could and did differ considerably at any given period and were subject to change over time. Legal status, age and gender, wealth, social standing and rank, traditions and ideologies, attitudes and patterns of behaviour based on them determined the position of a Roman, male or female, in society as well as in his or her family. Republican society at large was characterized by the omnipresence of hierarchies and of overlapping power relations. Distinctions of status and rank abounded, not only between Roman citizens or provincials and the mass of slaves with no rights, but also between magistrates and ordinary citizens, between generals and soldiers, patrons and clients, senators and the plebs in the Roman street, and even within the privileged classes.

The image and idea of the Roman family was deeply influenced by a combination of hierarchy and power. At least in law and in ideology, all relations within the household centred on authority, obligation, and coercion. The aristocratic value system was defined by a number of traditional factors: superiority, rank, authority, talent, and achievement in the service to the state (res publica), on the one hand, balanced by subordination, acceptance, and deference, on the other.

At issue in a short survey of republican art is the lack of many longer ones, as if there were no art to be discussed. The opposite is true: for nearly half a millennium, the Latin cities, Rome preeminent among them, expressed themselves both intensely and fluently, with art, architecture, and landscape architecture, private and public, in coins and engraved gems, metal and stone images, mosaic and painting, in the brilliantly modeled terracottas of houses and public buildings. Later Roman ages cherished, recorded, and imitated that patrimony and held in respect the memory of the leaders who put art into their cities - even the memory of those who created it, including that interesting generation of early republican nobles who made monumental paintings. But how was that art “Roman”? This chapter offers one concise but nuanced partial response to this question. What follows is an attempt to explore some of the distinctive variety and characteristics of republican art, stressing its public functions for Roman society. (For help in understanding the discussion of Rome's monuments and architecture, consult Fig. 19, which consists of a map of the entire city and a detailed view of the center of the city.)

Republican Rome had no written constitution. It did, however, have an array of remarkably tenacious continuing institutions (in the broadest sense of the term), some of which were or at least seemed virtually primeval. And at all times it had men who were willing to make confident assertions - as senators, magistrates, priests, or specialists in jurisprudence, or in more than one of these roles at once - about what was legally possible under an often fuzzy and ever evolving political and administrative system. A few went a bit further than ad hoc pronouncements. Certainly by c. 200 B.C. the Roman elite was taking an academic interest in the city-state's legal history. In the developed Republic, at any rate, some important colleges of priests maintained books of precedents; the senate's past decrees could be consulted in written form. Cicero's On Laws, to single out just one of his contributions to political philosophy, actually contains a short (idealizing) constitution, a theoretical piece that treats Rome's magistracies and some aspects of the state religion. One must add that a well-connected outsider, the Greek Polybius, writing in the mid second century B.C., left us an invaluable, though frustratingly selective and overschematic, sketch of the Roman state as he saw it.

The history of republican Italy is one of conquest and Roman expansion but also one of many different peoples and communities and the strategies they used both to integrate with and to resist the influence of Rome. What it is emphatically not is a linear process of Roman expansion and the disappearance of local cultures and identities. Ancient Italy was not an ethnic or political unit but a region of extreme diversity. It contained many different ethnic groups, each with its own language, culture, economy, and forms of social and political organisation (Fig. 8), and as Roman power began to expand, complex systems for controlling conquered areas and mediating relations with other states evolved piecemeal. As a result, Roman Italy, even after it became a politically unified entity in 90 B.C., had a high level of cultural diversity and strong regional identities that coexisted with central control and Roman influence.

One of the most central — but also one of the most problematic — concepts with which the historian of Roman Italy has to grapple is that of Romanisation. The process of cultural, as opposed to political, integration with Rome is notoriously difficult to define in theory and to identify in action. Roman culture itself was neither unified nor static but rather disparate and constantly changing. It also operated in different ways at different levels of society. Roman cultural influence may have meant something very different to different social groups.

The half millennium that runs from the revolution of 509 to the beginning of the principate saw the transformation of the Roman state from a regional power into a world empire. Thus, to speak of the Roman economy in the singular is misleading, as there is little justification, other than the common denominator of the political institutions referred to as “republican,” to consider in one and the same chapter an economic system that underwent the most drastic changes, while showing endless diversity with regard to times and places, structures and scales, or actors and goods. Clearly, however, a family of small farmers settled in the vicinity of Rome throughout the period would have seen much less change than their counterparts in the more rapidly developing area surrounding Paris from the Renaissance until our time. Although a substantial part of the population in Antiquity remained involved in agricultural production at all times, the Roman people of the republican period went through a series of social and economic revolutions of global historical significance. Roman imperialism in Italy and around the Mediterranean Sea was accompanied or followed by economic and fiscal exploitation of newly formed overseas provinces. It resulted in uneven demographic growth, the enrichment of the upper classes, some degree of urbanization linked with colonization, and the development of municipal institutions.

TIBERIUS GRACCHUS AND THE CONFLICT OVER LAND REFORM

When Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus took office as tribune of the plebs on 10 December 134 B.C., everything in the Roman Republic seemed to be in fine working order. Rome's dangerous rival Carthage had been destroyed; the kingdom of Macedonia had become a province; the whole world of the Hellenistic states was now under Roman control. Rome faced the annoyance of a slave revolt in Sicily and a guerilla war around the town of Numantia in Spain, but neither conflict posed a serious threat, and both were already in the process of being brought to a successful conclusion. In the city of Rome itself, the leading men of the most prominent political families, the nobility of office (nobilitas), dominated political life from their seats in the senate. They knew how to bring one or the other recalcitrant magistrate to heel, and the same applied to the occasional tribune of the plebs who might prove too independent. They were flexible enough to integrate talented and ambitious social climbers into their ranks and clever enough to include all the citizens in the making of political decisions in the various types of assemblies - and particularly to entrust to them the choice between the rival candidates in the competition for political office.

Less than a year later, everything had fundamentally changed, according to Appian of Alexandria, writing in the preface to his history of the Roman civil wars. A political clash had ended in assassination and death; further fighting would follow, first in the city and then for the city, eventually culminating in the short-lived domination of Caesar and finally in the establishment of the principate by Augustus.