Let this be our determination: ... not to be found wanting if anyone wishes to employ us – not only as architects, but even as builders – to construct the republic; and, rather, to come running gladly. Even if no one employs our labor, nevertheless, let us both write and read “republics,” and ... serve the state wholeheartedly, if not in the senate and Forum, then in literature and books, pursuing our inquiries into customs and laws.
In the quote above, Cicero responds to his political marginalization in the years after Pharsalus by announcing his intention of serving the state through studying and writing political philosophy. In the few years between 46 and his death in 43 the orator produced an astonishing number of philosophical works, including the De Officiis, which, together with the De republica and De legibus of the 50s, constituted his most sustained theoretical analysis of the Roman republic. Some fifteen years or so after Cicero wrote these lines, Livy, too, contemplated a Roman state in crisis, torn by yet another period of violent internal conflicts; and as Cicero envisioned his writing as benefiting a state in desperate need of moral and civic reconstruction, so Livy announces his intention of doing his “manly part” (praef. 3: pro virile parte) to address the ills of his own time.
What were these ills? Since the earliest books probably took shape around the time of the victory at Actium and were most likely published immediately upon completion, neither Livy nor his readers could then have foreseen that Octavian’s concentration of formal power and informal authority under the aegis of a nominally restored republic would soon make most political analyses based on the recent past largely irrelevant. As Thomas Wiedemann remarks:
Augustus had suppressed civil conflict. He had also removed from the agenda of public politics most of its traditional components – “war and peace, income and legislation, and the other things that constitute Roman affairs,” as Tacitus has Thrasea Paetus complain in the Senate (Ann. XIII.49.2). What was now central to Roman political thought was the personal behaviour of the emperor, in particular the way he exercised his power toward the Senate.2
In the first pentad, unlike in subsequent books, the problems for which Livy envisioned his history as providing a remedium were not those of the Augustan future but of the recent republican past, and therefore similar to those with which Cicero had wrestled in his political treatises not so many years before.3 Even if they might have differed as to the solutions to those problems, Cicero’s treatises and Livy’s earliest books both proceeded from the premise that the fundamental crisis facing Rome was the corruption of the system they identified with the possession of civic freedom for its citizens and worldwide imperium for the state. The challenge to which each brought his unique gifts was thus the revival of the republic as a republic, by which I mean a system whose libertas was embodied in a form of the traditional power and status exercised by the Roman senate and people in the generations that preceded the civic breakdown of the Gracchan period.
If there was anywhere in the history that Livy could exercise a relatively “free hand” in manipulating the narrative of the past to address current problems it was surely in the earliest books.4 The richly elaborated tradition inherited from previous historians, epicists, and dramatists covering the most distant period, which included numerous variants and was generally acknowledged, at least by the more sophisticated, to include incredible and unverifiable events, provided the material that the historian could freely compress, manipulate, and dispose so as to advance one of his didactic aims: that is, to use early Rome as a model, in some ways similar to a historiographical archaeology, through which “the dilemmas of the present [might be] worked out.”5 And a series of events long seen as seminal to the development of the early state – the founding of Rome by its first king and the overthrow of its last (Book 1); the rise and fall of the decemvirate (Book 3); and the capture of Veii, followed by the sack and liberation of Rome (Book 5) – suggested an architecture by which Livy would structure both individual books and the pentad as a whole. As the historian moved on to more fully historical periods, the press of events would soon overwhelm his ability to employ such elaborate structuring techniques. While the history covering the later extant books (21–35) betrays an overall separation into groups of five, ten, and fifteen books by subject matter, nowhere in these books does one find the complex structures Livy creates in the first pentad.6
It should be realized, however, that the separability of the first from the second pentad of the AUC was an artificial construct. When Livy proclaims at the beginning of Book 6 that the succeeding books of the history will be fundamentally different from what follows, he is making an aesthetic choice to present the first five books as a coherent and separable whole, since in terms of content the second pentad is very like the first. In the former we find the same alternation of internal faction and external wars marking the yearly record, and the same gentes (often playing stereotypical roles) reappear, as do many of the same individuals (such as M. Manlius Capitolinus, M. Furius Camillus, and Appius Claudius Crassus). The story of Manlius Capitolinus, for instance, who heroically saves the remnant of citizens defending the Capitoline during the Gallic invasion but is subsequently executed for his attempt to overthrow the republic, bridges Books 5 and 6. Furthermore, the author admits in the course of these books that he confronts the same difficulties in judging the reliability of the sources that transmitted such distant and, at times, incredible events.7
If, then, Livy saw the earliest books of the AUC as a special opportunity to use structure and content to comment on political issues raised by recent events, a comparison of Cicero’s handling of such issues with Livy’s should be helpful in considering some of the exemplary lessons contained in the first pentad. After all, in the last decade of his life Cicero had become the foremost Roman political writer of his age, and the works in which he articulated his reaction to what he saw as the most crucial matters facing the republic were written not long before Livy began his history. Cicero’s contemplation of the rise of autocratic military leaders such as Caesar, the lawlessness of the city mobs, the manipulation of the latter by popular demagogues such as Clodius, and the disappearance of any sense of civic cohesiveness must have seemed all too relevant to Livy, who had lived through comparable circumstances in his own life.
Certain caveats, however, are in order before embarking on this comparison. First of all, Cicero’s treatises do not provide unitary answers to the questions raised within them. Even when he casts himself as a speaker in a work – as in the prefaces to Books 1, 3, and (presumably) 5 of the De republica, or in the De legibus and the De officiis – a one-to-one correspondence between the views of Cicero as author and Cicero as literary character cannot be assumed. One assumes a distinction between the author and any character in a mimetic work, but this is especially to be expected in the political-philosophical works of one who identified himself as an Academic Skeptic. As such, Cicero regularly employed a dialogic method that involved assigning contrasting viewpoints to different speakers (including to “Marcus Cicero”) with the object of testing their validity through arguments in utramque partem. Even within the books of a single work ambiguities, reversals, and inconsistencies appear, sometimes in the positions of the same character.8 If, then, I refer in this discussion to political ideas expressed within a particular Ciceronian treatise, I do so with the understanding that this does not represent Cicero’s single or final position on any subject.
Caution is also called for in drawing conclusions about Livy’s political thought in the first pentad. Livy was a historian, not a fabulist, creator of parables, or author of historical fiction, even if the material he dealt with in the earliest books appeared to him like the stuff of poetry. As I have noted at several points in this work, his evident commitment to the process of accurately transmitting the record of the past as he had inherited it placed real constraints on the degree to which he was willing to add to or subtract from his sources. This means that even when we can discern a clear line of notional development in the pentad, we should not be surprised to encounter traditional aspects of the narrative that sometimes contradict these ideas.
Moreover, there are limits to the complexity of the political ideas that Livy communicates through the process of historiographical exemplarity. As Daniel Kapust remarks, “If we do not find among Sallust, Livy, or Tacitus a systematic analysis of Rome’s constitution along the line of Book VI of Polybius’ Histories, we do find these historians wrestling in different ways with problems involving liberty, rhetoric, conflict[,] community, and their relationship to each other, problems that are of interest today.”9 The subtlety and depth of abstract political thought conveyed by a historian who, like Livy, drew on traditional source material and, at the same time, largely eschewed extensive editorial comment in his own voice, are not comparable to that found in Cicero’s philosophical treatises, even if the latter often make use of their own forms of exemplarity as an alternative to purely abstract speculation.
Finally, we should remember that Livy’s goals – at least those that can be inferred from the text itself – were clearly not limited to political didacticism. Despite the humility expressed in the preface, where Livy resigns himself to being cast in the shade by the distinction of his predecessors in “the art of writing” (praef. 2: scribendi arte), the historian produced a stylistically elevated work that created powerful and complex narratives, often peopled by vivid and multifaceted characters, engaging the mind and emotions of his readers and winning him fame throughout the Roman world. Even the didactic element on which we have focused throughout this work operates on various levels. In the preface, after the historian asks his reader to pay close attention to “what sort of lives, what customs, through what men and by what skills” (9) their ancestors were able to win imperium, he goes on to announce his intention of supplying positive and negative exempla both for the individual and for the state as a whole (10). In a sense, all the exempla directed toward the moral edification of the individual constituted an essential piece of his political remedium for the state. Since the latter depended partly on the revival of the mores that once characterized the Roman polity, paradigmatic stories that inspired the individual reader to pursue virtue and reject vice were politically salutary. It should be realized, however, that only in certain cases does the description of the actions and character of individuals or groups also convey specific ideas about the intersection of temperament and political power, and thereby create a much closer integration of moral and political didacticism.
With these caveats in mind, I wish in the remainder of this chapter to discuss briefly three of the most important political issues that have arisen in my analysis of the first pentad in the light of certain formulations found in Cicero’s political treatises (among which I include De oratore): the threat of tyranny to the res publica; ideal models of public oratory by political leaders; and the creation of concordia among citizens.
The Threat of Tyranny
Cicero’s engagement with the issue of tyranny ranged from efforts in his speeches to paint various opponents (such as Verres, Catiline, Clodius, and Antony) as potential or actual tyrants, to his attempts in his correspondence to characterize and respond to Caesar’s exercise of power in the years after Pharsalus, to his treatment of the subject in the political-philosophical treatises of the 50s and 40s. While it has been asserted that “all [Cicero’s] late philosophica are implicated in [the] project” of dealing philosophically with Caesar’s autocratic power, the issue looms particularly large in the De officiis, written shortly after Caesar’s death.10 In the De republica Cicero’s Scipio had characterized all unjust dominations – whether of the one, the few, or the many – as tyrannical (therefore not deserving of the name res publica at all) and had gone on to argue that the almost inevitable degeneration of kingship into tyranny plunged the state into the worst of all governments, where power was in the hands of a cruel and savage creature closer to a beast than a man (Rep. 2.47–49).11 In the De officiis, however, as he looked back on the rise and fall of Caesar’s autocracy, Cicero painted the tyrant with a more human face. Although the dialogue is deeply critical of Caesar, nevertheless the dictator’s “savagery” (2.24: saevitia) is illustrated only by his mistreatment of the Roman allied city of Massilia (2.28) rather than by the personal vices that are the stock characteristics of the rhetorical and historiographical tyrant.
The real problem that Cicero confronted in Caesar was not the latter’s inherent cruelty, sexual depravity, or pleasure-seeking, but rather his ambition for power, which led him to overturn the ancestral constitution. Cicero asserts in the work that Caesar had frequently repeated a line from Euripides that implied that it was only in his (Caesar’s) pursuit of autocracy that he had allowed himself to depart from virtue. (To which Cicero responds, “He made an exception of the one thing that is the most criminal [sceleratissimum] of all!”)12 Earlier in the treatise, Cicero notes that “often the desire for honor, rule, power, and glory exists in the greatest minds and the most brilliant characters [1.26: in maximis animis splendidissimisque ingeniis], for which reason we must beware of making any mistakes in this matter.”13 Cicero, then, recognized not only the general problem plaguing the state arising from competition, ambition, and the striving for ever more grandiose political rewards, but he also saw that it was precisely those men of the greatest talent and virtus (in the traditional sense) who were most vulnerable to such outsize ambition.
A.A. Long describes Cicero’s remedy in the De officiis for the potential harm to the state arising from competitive ambition for glory such as Caesar’s – which Long identifies as a fundamental aspect of the traditional Roman “honor code” – as resting on a moral reeducation that involved redefining this code.14 In the second book of the dialogue, devoted to delineating the advantageous, Cicero contradicts the attitude that he attributes to Caesar – namely, that the unjust pursuit of absolute power benefits the individual. Here, and throughout Book 3, Cicero argues that any conflict between what is advantageous (utile) and what is just (honestum) is only apparent, since the individual is never truly benefited by acting unjustly.15 All those who commit injustice in pursuit of their own advantage act contrary to the laws of Nature, which fosters the sociability that unites communities and allows us to live a life that is human rather than bestial. Those who, like the tyrant, undermine this sociability in a misguided belief that they are benefiting themselves may be compared to a part of the body attempting to nurture itself at the expense of the rest, thereby resulting in the sickness and death of the whole person (3.22). The tyrant’s unjust acquisition of power and wealth, therefore, inevitably does him harm: he destroys the community of which he is a part while living in constant fear of those he oppresses (2.23–6) and laboring under the consciousness of his own guilt (3.85). Thus Cicero’s solution in the De officiis to the violent competition for power and honor that had set the stage for Caesar’s tyranny and the death of the res publica libera was the acceptance by Rome’s leaders of the philosophical conviction that self-interest is ultimately rooted in justice and service to the community as a whole.
Livy, too, might be said to address the problem of the tyrant by supporting the moral regeneration of the (elite) citizen, with the historian inculcating virtue and discouraging vice by means of positive and negative historical exempla rather than through philosophical argument. Through his handling of the Appii Claudii discussed in Chapter 4, however, he conveys the idea that individuals possessing a potentially tyrannical temperament arise naturally and inevitably among Rome’s great men and did so even in the supposedly more virtuous society of early Rome, making clear that the danger represented by such men can hardly be addressed simply by a return to the mores of the past. One of the issues addressed through Livy’s account of the rise of Appius Claudius the decemvir, therefore, is not how to prevent the appearance of the potential tyrant, but how the state is to protect itself against such individuals when they do appear.
The constitution instituted after the fall of the monarchy meant that autocratic power would be much more difficult to achieve under the republic, and in Livy’s description of how these laws were overridden in the case of the decemvirate, political lessons about the rise of tyranny are taught. Whatever the historical reality might have been, Livy presents the magistracy itself as dangerous to civic freedom. First of all, the chronological limits of the office are ambiguous. It appears to be up to the members of the second board of decemvirs themselves to determine when the remaining tables of the law code were to be submitted to popular vote, and much of the debate in the senate about decemviral power revolves around the issue of when this power was meant to expire. Thus Livy (no doubt alluding to Caesar’s assumption of the position of dictator perpetuo) portrays Verginius as accusing Appius of having attempted to become a “decemvir for life” (3.57.2: decemvir ille perpetuus). Secondly, under the decemvirate the tribuneship and the right of appeal were suspended. The plebeians are said to regard the former as “a bulwark of freedom” (3.37.5: munimentum libertati), and Livy as narrator terms the latter the “unique protection of liberty” (3.55.4: unicum praesidium libertatis), noting that the legislation passed under Horatius and Valerius after the fall of the decemvirs outlawed any future magistracy from which there was no right of appeal (3.55.5). Both sentiments figure in Icilius’ defiant speech to Appius, in which he calls the tribuneship and the right of appeal “the twin citadels for defending freedom” (3.45.8: duas arces libertatis tuendae). Thus Livy, waiting – like the rest of Rome – to see who would triumph in the civil wars of the 30s and what form the government of the victor would take, warns of the creation of an office of ambiguous duration that removed effective restraints on the exercise of power, for the eventual, even inevitable, wedding of such an office to one with a temperament like that of an Appius Claudius appears to be a recipe for tyranny.
A second political issue raised by the narrative concerns culpability for the decision that puts Appius in power. Livy places much of the blame for both the creation of the office of decemvir and the election of Appius as its chief occupant on the Roman people rather than on the elite. It was the plebeian demand for the establishment and prolongation of the decemvirate that created a tool that could be used to overturn the constitution. More telling, it is through the inability of the plebeians to detect Appius’ real character that a man of potentially despotic temperament was united to an office of potentially despotic power. Once it had become apparent that the second board had become tyrannical, Livy states that “the plebeians studied the faces of the patricians, hoping to see some hint of the recovery of liberty; yet it had been their fear of being enslaved to these men that had brought the republic to that very condition” (3.37.1).16 In the same section, a similar sentiment is expressed more harshly by the patricians, who accuse the people of “falling into slavery by their greedy rush to freedom” (3.37.2: avide ruendo ad libertatem in servitutem elapsos). Livy’s indictment of the political prudence of the masses in this episode, then, is an integral aspect of his treatment of tyranny. It is complemented in Book 5 by his handling of the exile of Camillus, wherein the decision of the people to drive from the state the one man who might have saved it from the Gallic attack is as disastrous to the preservation of libertas as had been their elevation of Appius to a position of extraordinary power. Through these narratives Livy suggests that if the freedom of the Roman state is to be preserved it must either do away with the power of the masses to make decisions critical to the welfare of all – a solution Livy ultimately rejects – or else it must produce outstanding leaders capable of countering the influence of pernicious demagogues by guiding the people to make wise choices.
Mass Oratory and Political Leadership
Cicero’s image of the optimus dux overlaps to a great extent with that of the optimus orator. As Elaine Fantham has written of the De oratore, “The agenda behind Cicero’s impersonation of Crassus is to fuse the concept of orator with that of statesman.”17 Thus Cicero’s Crassus suggests that the perfect orator should possess an extraordinary breadth of knowledge, including philosophy (especially politics and ethics) and law.18 Although Antonius, the other chief discussant in the dialogue, objects to the study of (Greek) philosophy by countering Crassus’ emphasis on formal acquisition of learning with his own focus on natural talent, experience, and apprenticeship as a path to oratorical excellence, he, too, asserts that the ideal orator must possess knowledge extending into all areas of life, including “everything that has to do with the practice of citizens, the customs of human beings, or what concerns everyday life, politics, civil society, common human perceptions, nature, and morals” (2.68). This extensive knowledge and experience, in turn, prepares the orator to become, like Antonius or Crassus (or Cicero), not a narrow practitioner of the art, but an outstanding political leader who actively uses his command of eloquence to influence the senate, the public assemblies, and the law courts (3.63), since – in Antonius’ words – verbal persuasion “exercises dominion [2.34: dominator] in every peaceful and free state.”
This ideal orator is encouraged in the dialogue to exploit all types of appeals in employing his ability, including and especially the appeal to the emotions, which the discussants regard as the sine qua non of effective persuasion. A strong ethical defense of the technique is mounted by Cicero, based on the notion that the entire panoply of rhetorical weapons should be brought to bear in order to effect the orator’s laudable aims; otherwise evil is allowed to triumph over good.19 But if it is assumed that the ideal orator uses all aspects of the extraordinary power of oratory “to take possession of men’s assemblies, to win over their minds, to direct their inclinations where he wishes, and also to lead them away from whatever he wishes” (1.30), will he of necessity use this capacity for good? A number of the passages in the dialogue make clear that there is no necessary connection between the possession of eloquence and wisdom.20 An individual is not eloquent simply because he is good, since eloquence is born of natural talent, learning, and experience, not virtue. Conversely, an individual is not good simply because he is an effective speaker, as shown by the destructive but eloquentissimi Gracchi.21 Neither Crassus nor Antonius suggests that any aspect of rhetorical education, even philosophical education, in itself leads an orator to use his power for good ends. Rather, the discussants – much like Plato’s Gorgias – simply express the desire that an unjust person not acquire this facility in the first place. Thus Crasus asserts that the greater the power of the orator to manipulate the minds of his listeners, the more important it is that this power be joined with the greatest integrity and prudence, for otherwise it would be as if one were giving “weapons to madmen” (3.55: furentibus quaedam arma).
Like Cicero, Livy also recognizes the danger represented by the divorce of eloquence from virtue. The pentad is filled with the voices of those passionate but self-interested orators whose goal, as Quinctius Capitolinus says, is to promote discord in order to extend their own political power (3.68.10–11). Although it is true, then, that the demagogue dedicated to destructive policies is often a powerful and effective orator, it does not follow that in Livy the vir bonus lacks any special persuasive ability. Such a man, first of all (like Cicero’s ideal statesman in De republica and De legibus), feels honor-bound to serve the state, whatever his personal circumstances and whatever the cost. Camillus, for example, despite having been unfairly exiled, considers it his duty “to fight for the fatherland” (5.51.2: pro patria dimicatio) – first, by liberating Rome from the Gauls, and second, by means of his verbal engagement with those who would abandon the site of Rome. He tells his fellow citizens that if he were to consult his personal wishes, nothing would have induced him to return from exile, but for him to abandon his country in its present hour of need would be impious (5.51.3: nefas). His great speech at the end of the pentad is thus presented as a duty owed to the state comparable to his accomplishments on the battlefield.
While the motivation for the ideal leader to engage in public discourse appears similar in Cicero and Livy, the sources of his rhetorical effectiveness are not. In De oratore mastery of the art of oratory requires the ability to adapt a speech to an audience. The best of orators – that is, one who combines eloquence with virtue – understands the correct political direction in which to lead an audience and controls the techniques required to do so, playing on the emotions of a particular group of hearers in order to manipulate them in whatever way he has determined will be beneficial to the common good. Livy’s Quinctius Capitolinus, on the other hand – who, along with Camillus, is the most fully realized portrait in the pentad of the ideal patrician orator – excoriates the manipulative persuasive methods of the demagogic tribunes in addition to their self-interested goals. While Capitolinus’ own speech is stylistically elevated, logically compelling, and emotionally potent, the heart of its persuasiveness depends on the speaker’s willingness to speak the truth, whatever the reaction of the crowd. The speech’s ethical appeal, therefore, is not presented as stemming from the adaptation of Capitolinus’ persona to a particular audience on a particular occasion but as arising naturally from the transparent reflection within the speech of the speaker’s own virtue and auctoritas. The fact that the speaker is a vir bonus, then, when combined with the particular circumstances that motivate him, lies at the heart of the rhetorical power of the ideal Livian orator-statesman. Such a view of persuasion helps to explain the effectiveness in Livy even of those non-elite soldier-leaders discussed in Chapter 6, who were able to move and convince their audiences despite their admitted lack of formal eloquence.
The success in the pentad of the uncompromising form of persuasion practiced by Livy’s ideal statesmen, in turn, bespeaks a different conception of the dynamic between speaker and audience from that suggested in the De oratore. In that dialogue Cicero frequently alludes to the ability of the master orator to control the opinions of his listeners by means of verbal persuasion.22 According to such passages Cicero’s ideal orator commands the same powers as those exercised by Gorgias in the Platonic dialogue: he is adept at manipulating his audience to do as he wishes, but he cannot claim to teach or improve them in the process. Livy’s most admirable orators, on the other hand, persuade through their ability to touch what the historian would have us see as the most virtuous impulses in their audiences. Camillus’ speech against the proposed move to Veii, for instance, depends almost entirely on appeals to the religious sensibilities, pride, and patriotism of his popular audience, summoning to their consciousness their own powerful feelings of connection to the very soil of Rome (cf. 2.1.5: caritas ipsius soli; 5.54.2: solum patriae ... haec terra ... caritas nobis patriae). That the masses are “moved” by the dictator’s speech (5.55.1: movisse), as they were by the earlier admonitory harangues of Cincinnatus and Capitolinus, bears witness not only to the virtue of the speaker but also to the way in which his embodied and articulated character is able to call forth the virtuous impulses of his audience. Thus, despite the fact that the character of Livy’s ideal statesman (especially Quinctius Capitolinus) suggests aspects of Cicero’s representation of the rector rei publicae and despite the fact that the oratorical appeals of Capitolinus recall Cicero’s own rhetorical self-presentation, the model Livy holds up for his elite readers is at heart Catonian (whether we think of the plain speaking, severitas, and moral rigor associated with Cato the Censor or Cato Uticensis) rather than Ciceronian.
The populus Romanus and Civic Harmony
In Cicero’s image in the De republica of the ideally mixed constitution the role of the people is defined in relationship to that of the two other elements of the state, the senate and magistrates. Scipio cautions that “unless a state contains an equitable balancing of laws, duties, and offices [aequabilis ... compensatio et iuris et officii et muneris] so as to have enough power [potestatis] in the magistracies, enough authority [auctoritatis] in the deliberations of the elite [principum consilio], and enough freedom [libertatis] in the people, this form of state cannot remain stable.” (2.57). But what is “enough freedom” to constitute a just balance? As the ancestral Roman constitution is held up in the dialogue as an ideal, the people’s role in that constitution – chiefly electing magistrates and passing laws – must form part of this just balance, including their possession of the tribunate, since Scipio presents the office as a required, even inevitable, alteration of a previously unjustly balanced constitution. Participation by the common people in senatorial decision making or their tenure of the highest magisterial positions, on the other hand, play no role in Scipio’s ideal constitution, as they played no role in the historical Roman constitution that constitutes his model.
The question arises, however, whether such freedoms as the Roman people do possess in Scipio’s best-of-all-possible states is meant to be real or only apparent. In the argument he constructs on behalf of democracy, Scipio asks how an (aristocratic) state is to be called free in which people vote for magistrates and pass laws but have no part in “rule, public deliberations, or the choice of judges” (1.47: expertes imperii, consilii publici, iudicii delectorum iudicum). The democrats’ objection here, however, is purposely overstated, for if the stability of Cicero’s mixed constitution depends on preventing any of the three elements in the state from growing tyrannical, it must do so by counterbalancing power with power, and this is only possible if the people exercise a real rather than apparent share in ruling the state. Unlike in Polybius’ description of the checks and balances of the mixed constitution, however, in Cicero’s dialogue the share of power wielded by the people in no way is envisioned as equal to that of the senate and magistrates; rather, Cicero presents the role of the people in the ideally mixed constitution as making up an essential but distinctly less powerful and – for that very reason – equitable part of the “harmony” of counterbalancing forces within the state.23 As Scipio remarks of the constitutional innovations of Servius Tullius, “He introduced a principle that should always be adhered to in a republic: that the greatest number should not hold the greatest power” (2.39: ne plurimum valeant plurimi).
Cicero’s conception of the ideal role of the people takes a distinctly different turn in the De legibus. In the De republica the need to prevent abuse by any of the three parts of the constitution dominates the discussion of Book 1 and therefore sets the stage for the argument that the people have a legitimate role to play in guaranteeing the stability of the mixed constitution through their exercise of political power. It is true that in the De legibus Cicero refers to the tribunate as a counterbalance to the powers of the consuls, which would otherwise “seem too arrogant and violent to the people” (3.17: superbius populo et violentius videri). Moreover, Cicero and his brother also agree in the later dialogue that the laws he is setting forth create the same “balanced” state – that is, one with a mixed constitution – as that set forth by Scipio in De republica (Leg. 3.12). Nevertheless, in the De legibus the chief justification for the most important power allotted to the people, the tribuneship, resides in its effectiveness in restraining the people themselves rather than in restraining the senate and magistrates.24
In answer to Quintus’ tirade (written, we should keep in mind, by the author himself) against the ruinous and evil consequences of the tribunate from its inception to its use by Clodius (Leg. 3.19–22), Cicero argues that the concentration of popular power in this office actually mitigated the destructive force of the masses, as was the case at the time when it was first created. Further, he points out that it is always possible, even when the majority of the tribunes are seditious, for at least one to use his power (i.e., the veto) for good (3.24). Cicero then goes on to note that the tribuneship lessened the unpopularity of the senate and averted the common people from dangerous agitation for other rights, and he closes his theoretical defense with the statement that “either the kings should not have been driven out or else freedom had to be given to the plebs, not in word but in fact. This freedom, however, has been given in such a way that [the people] have been led by many outstanding <provisions> [instituta] to yield to the authority of the chief men” (3.24–26).25 Cicero’s conclusion, which – it should be noted – convinces neither Quintus nor Atticus of the necessity for the office in its current form, is that the tribuneship might be a regrettable expression of popular power, but was justified in that it restrained potentially even more dangerous political activity by the people.
Livy likewise communicates a deep fear of the people’s potential to undermine the stability of the republican state. In the annalistic structure adopted in Books 2–5 to recount the first 120 years of the republic, each year seems to bring endless crises, interrupted only briefly by periods of peace and stability. Although Rome is continually threatened by its external enemies, it is internal threats that seem to matter most, since Roman success or failure in arms is portrayed as turning on the moral virtue and civic cohesion of its citizens and leaders.26 The dangers that threaten to destroy the state from within include episodes of ambition, cruelty, and selfishness on the part of the elite, as well as the full-blown tyranny of Appius Claudius and his fellow decemvirs, the chronological midpoint of the period covered by these books and the central narrative of the central book of the pentad. Despite the vivid illustrations of a conspicuous threat to freedom from above, however, the constant repetition throughout these four books of incidents showing the danger from below leaves an indelible impression on the reader, who is led to see a great and constant threat to the republic in the undermining of domestic peace by the volatile masses when whipped on by demagogues of both classes, and particularly by those plebeian tribunes who act out of a desire for self-aggrandizement. Standing opposed to such rabble-rousers are the great patrician leaders of the early years who cow the demagogues, instill discipline in the masses, treat both classes with justice, and restore concordia.
Like Cicero, Livy also raises the question of whether the tribunate might better have been abolished. In the famine of 492–491 following the first secession of the people, the senate imports grain from Sicily. Cn. Marcius Coriolanus proposes that the patres use the food supply to extort back from the starving people the concessions the senate had granted during the secession, especially the tribunate. Livy comments: “It’s difficult to say whether or not this should have been done; I think it is clear that the patricians could have gotten rid of both the tribunician power and all the laws that had been foisted on them against their will by making arrangements for lowering the price of grain” (2.34.12). The senate ultimately judges the proposal “too harsh” (2.35.1: nimis atrox), and the hostility against Coriolanus – whom the plebeians term a “new executioner” (carnificem novum) leaving them with the choice of death or slavery – results in his arraignment, conviction in absentia, and exile among the Volsci, whom he leads in a military campaign against Rome. Livy’s ambiguous editorial comment here is surprising, given his usual condemnation in the pentad of extreme and harsh proposals by members of the governing class, and it clearly points to his misgivings concerning the potentially destructive power of the tribunate at the very beginning of its history.
Livy, then, views discord and mass action with deep distress, since popular upheavals were dangerous in themselves and had led to the institutionalization of mechanisms of division, such as the plebeian assembly and the tribunate, which carried with them the very real threat of stasis, violence, and anarchy. The paradox that underlay Rome’s much-praised mixed constitution was that it practically guaranteed such discord, since its strength – the possession of sufficient power by senate, magistrates, and people so as to help prevent any part from growing overly powerful and abusive – was also its weakness, allowing each constituent group to obstruct the ability of the others to act effectively. In Livy’s portrait of the republic, these countervailing forces, envisioned in the bipartite form of the patrician senate and the plebeian masses, rarely achieve harmony, even during periods of external threat. In fact, the state seems condemned to continual cycles of unrest, both before and after the crucial changes Livy associates with the Valerio-Horatian laws of 449.
Livy comments on this problem in the aftermath of the fall of the decemvirs. The historian describes the salutary policies of the consuls Geganius and Iulius, who “calmed” (3.65.5: sedavere) the strife between nobles and plebs, producing “internal harmony” (3.65.7: concordiae intestinae). “Nevertheless,” Livy writes, “one order was always doing injury to the restraint of the other; injustices began to arise against the peaceful plebeians on the part of the younger patricians” (3.65.7: sed alter semper ordo gravis alterius modestiae erat; quiescenti plebi ab iunioribus patrum iniuriae fieri coeptae). Livy then comments on this new period of unrest in one of his rare extended editorial asides:
So difficult is moderation in the defense of freedom, since everyone, while pretending to wish for equality, raises himself up in such a way as to oppress another; in making sure that they are not in fear, men bring it about that they themselves must be feared; and, having defended ourselves from injury, we inflict injury on others – as though it were necessary either to do injury or to have it done to us.27
Livy’s solution to the fracturing of the state along class lines, however, is not to be sought in intimidation and violence by the principes – whether overtly, as under the decemvirs, or covertly, as when the patres appear to have murdered one of the tribunes, which is labeled by Livy pessimum exemplum (2.55.1).28 Nor does Livy advocate radical constitutional change to resolve this disunity, such as the abolition of the tribunate, since he more than once demonstrates that, without such institutional safeguards, the lower classes inevitably suffer from the injustice of the ruling class.29 The exemplum of which Livy approves and which he depicts again and again in the first pentad is provided by the achievement of unity through an act of will by the individuals and groups that make up the Roman state to put the welfare of the collective before narrow self-interest – those transient but repeated moments of concordia in which the principes demonstrate their fitness to rule by generosity and justice and the masses reward them by their loyalty, forbearance, and discipline.
Furthermore, as an act of will, the achievement of concordia depends on an underlying freedom to choose: order over chaos, justice over injustice, patriotism and civic peace over narrow self-interest. A distinct irony illustrated by Livy’s early narratives resides in the fact that it is often plebeian discordia that restores the freedom of choice out of which true concordia may arise. Thus Livy portrays two quite different forms of civic unrest: one, “the poison in the body politic,” is the regrettable result of the selfish pursuit of power by patricians such as the second decemviral board or by plebeians such as the demagogic tribunes; the other arises from the admirable struggles carried on by such figures as Icilius or Valerius or even Canuleius to free the people from a degree of injustice that amounts to enslavement, thereby creating the conditions for a true harmony between classes to emerge.
The dramatization by Livy of the free choice by both classes at critical moments in the life of the state to retreat from their most extreme demands and, ultimately, to step back from the precipice of intransigence and violence constitutes one of the most crucial political lessons of the first pentad. As Livy remarks ruefully in his description of the army mutiny of 342, this behavior is not true of his own age: “Men [in the past] were not yet so bold [tam fortes] in shedding the blood of their fellow citizens, nor did they know wars except against foreign enemies, and the height of rage [ultima rabies] was considered secession from one’s own people” (7.40.2). In Livy’s account of the early years of the republic the flourishing of the state does not depend alone on the acquisition of an ideal share of power by each of the competing forces operating within the republican system, since without the willingness to cooperate, the possession of those powers simply makes the state ungovernable and vulnerable to dissolution within and attack from without. The ideal that Livy apparently hoped his contemporaries might emulate concerned the moderatio demonstrated by Rome’s early citizens, whereby the elite and the masses were able – at key moments, if not continuously – to put the interests of the collective over their own individual interests, as well as over those of their social class or political faction.
As Tacitus set out to write the history of the emperor Tiberius, he might well have thought Livy prescient in his dramatization of how the creation of an office without restraints on power might lead to tyranny when held by one with the stereotypical temperament associated with the Claudian gens. Other political lessons conveyed by Livy’s early books, however – revolving around such issues as the dangers and benefits of public oratory, the management of factional discord, or the proper balance of power between elite and mass – would have had scant relevance to the citizens of the early empire. Like Maternus in Tacitus’ Dialogus, many would have rejoiced in the peace and prosperity of their own era and pitied a “freedom” that had brought so much chaos, violence, and injustice at home and abroad. The reception of Livy’s early books, in fact, could be compared to what Emilio Gabba has to say about another text that stood on the cusp between one political world and the entirely different one that would soon replace it. Gabba writes:
The history of Thucydides, like the comedy of Aristophanes, is a product of the civilization of the polis of the late fifth century b.c. and its raison d’etre disappeared with that civilization. With few exceptions, the methodological lessons of Thucydides were ignored in antiquity, to be picked up only in the modern world. ... [T]he decline and collapse of the political and cultural world of the polis in the course of the fourth century finally made it impossible, or almost impossible, to understand the political significance of the work – precisely the aspect to which Thucydides attached most importance. A marvelous piece of committed history writing soon became a simple example of historical narrative, more difficult than earlier or later examples, but not different in kind.30
The general thrust of this statement might actually be applied with a good deal less controversy to Livy’s early books than to Thucydides. Livy’s powerfully imagined stories of the distant past would live on as an enshrinement of the events and people that had made Rome great, but the political lessons concerning the exercise of power and citizenship conveyed by these early stories were mostly ignored by those to whom they had first been addressed. They were taken up, however, many centuries later by Nicolò Machiavelli, a man who had experienced firsthand the challenges of forging a free republic.
For all the brilliance of the Discourses, it has generally been thought that Machiavelli regularly misread Livy’s history.31 For instance, his observation that “the disunion of the plebs and the Roman senate made that republic free and powerful” (D 1.4) is often seen as a particularly egregious instance of such misreading. The present study, however, suggests that the Florentine was a more perceptive interpreter of Livy than previously thought. As we have seen in Chapter 6, Livy demonstrates that, without restraint, the elite will abuse the lower classes, and that discordia, and even seditio and tumultus, are at times necessary to restore the freedom of choice and action that are necessary to achieving true concordia.32 This is not to say that important differences do not exist between the political lessons we have identified in the first pentad and Machiavelli’s readings. For instance, Machiavelli writes that the lower classes struggle only for freedom from abuse rather than for an enlargement of their power (D 1.5.2; D 1.16.5), and thus the restraint exerted on the elite by the power of the masses in itself creates a stable state.33 For the Roman historian, the potential for abuse of power exists in both classes, and the viability of the state cannot depend on mutual checks and balances alone, since it is only the willingness of both elite and commoners to moderate their political behavior that overcomes the ever-present potential for stasis in a free republic. While Machiavelli’s republic is imagined to prosper despite the “natural malignity” of human beings and their willingness to exercise that malignity whenever they have the opportunity (D 1.3.1–2), for Livy the republic is doomed unless it can depend to some extent on the moral virtue of its citizens. Despite such divergences in interpretation, however, what makes the Discourses an inspiration for this study and for any political reading of Livy’s early books is not only Machiavelli’s acute observations but his willingness to take seriously the political lessons embodied in the AUC – an attitude that for the most part has been absent from the work of modern historians of ideas until the relatively recent past.
