I. THE ROMAN CONSTITUTION

In what sense can one talk of ‘the Roman constitution’? Clearly, Rome had no written constitution of the type introduced into the modern world by the United States in 1787, but did Rome have a constitution in the weaker sense one uses in speaking of the British constitution? The answer must be both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Bolingbroke in 1734 (A Dissertation upon Parties, Letter 10 ad init.) offers a working definition: ‘By Constitution, We mean, whenever We speak with Propriety and Exactness, that Assemblage of Laws, Institutions and Customs, derived from certain fixed Principles of Reason directed to certain fixed Objects of Publick Good that compose the General System, according to which the Community hath agreed to be governed.’ Now it is striking how Cicero in dealing with issues which we would label ‘constitutional’ appeals to an ‘Assemblage’, to use Bolingbroke’s word, with which the latter, and his readers, would have felt immediately at home. For example, when in March 43 the orator wishes to argue that M. Lepidus, the future triumvir currently governing Gallia Narbonensis and Hispania Citerior, cannot do what he likes with his army, he says: ‘It is lawful for no man to lead an army against his country, if by lawful we mean (si licere id dicimus) that which is allowed by the laws (legibus) and by the custom and institutions of our ancestors (more maiorum institutisque.)’ Sometimes Cicero adds the notion of ius, roughly equivalent to ‘right’ or ‘justice’; for instance, he summarizes as follows an attack by L. Aurelius Cotta on the manner in which Clodius had engineered Cicero’s exile:

Another element introduced into what we would regard as constitutional discussions is precedent (exemplum): Cicero condemns Gabinius, governor of Syria, for occupying Alexandria although mos maiorum, exempla and the severest penalties of the law forbade it.

Thus far Cicero seems to be discussing constitutional issues in a thoroughly British manner.

I. SULLA, SULPICIUS AND MARIUS, 88 B.C.

As the year 89 drew to its close, the predominant feeling at Rome may well have been one of relief. The fall of Asculum meant that the Social War was to all intents and purposes won, though isolated pockets of resistance lingered. Yet even the most cursory essay in divination should have revealed grave causes for concern about the future. The war had been bitterly contested, and resentment was bound to simmer. Rome’s concessions had been churlish and grudging. It seems that not all the Italians had yet been enfranchised, and the confinement of those who had within a minority of tribes made it clear that the Romans were determined to limit to the best of their ability the value of the prize that their allies had wrested from them. Thus the Italian question had by no means been settled: the struggle for even the most nominal equality still had much of its course to run, though the Italians could take comfort from the knowledge that there were still men at Rome who, for whatever motive, were prepared to champion their interests.

Nor did the manner in which the outbreak of war had been exploited in pursuit of private enmities give any grounds for hope that in internal affairs a spirit of conciliation would now prevail. The murder of Livius Drusus had gone unpunished, and the contentious operations of the quaestio Variana had inflicted wounds that were still unhealed. The war had enforced a temporary lull in political infighting, but now that it was over revival of the feuds of 90 could only exacerbate an already delicate situation and diminish further the always remote likelihood of a unified and statesmanlike approach to the problems of Italy. It could be safely predicted that the times would continue interesting and that the new citizens would have a large part to play.

The consulship of 88, to which Sulla was elected in the last weeks of 89, together with his friend Q. Pompeius Rufus, might have seemed no more than the just, if not inevitable, reward for his military achievements during the foregoing year. Yet it seems that he encountered competition from an unusual source: C. Iulius Caesar Strabo, aedile in 90, who had not held the praetorship, but nevertheless wanted to stand for the consulship.

I. THE REVOLT OF LEPIDUS, 78–77 B.C.

Catulus and Lepidus quarrelled again as they left Sulla’s funeral, and Lepidus soon stepped up his agitation. He promised to rescind Sulla’s acts, to recall those who had been driven into exile and to restore their lands to those who had been dispossessed to make way for Sulla’s veterans. He may also have succeeded in passing a law reviving distributions of cheap corn. Another issue promptly raised and constantly debated in the years that followed was the tribunate. It seems, though the text of Licinianus is uncertain, that the tribunes of 78 asked the consuls to restore the tribunician power, but that Lepidus was the first to refuse and surprisingly convinced a majority of those present that such a measure would serve no useful purpose. If so, then he later changed his mind and championed the tribunate, allegedly in the interests of concord.

These squabbles may have been enough to inspire the consul Catulus to introduce his law against public violence, though it may equally have been a response to the more serious disturbances that soon arose. The simmering discontent created by Sulla’s expropriations in many parts of the Italian countryside boiled over in one of the worst-hit areas, Etruria. The Sullan colonists at Faesulae were attacked by men who had lost their land and in some cases their citizen rights as well. The Senate was sufficiently alarmed to send both consuls to suppress the rising. What happened next is obscure, but Lepidus seems to have put himself at the head of the insurgents and clashed with Catulus, who was prepared to use force to resist him. But instead of giving Catulus firm backing the Senate imposed an oath to keep the peace on both consuls and, to placate Lepidus and get him out of Italy, took the dangerous step of assigning him Transalpine Gaul, perhaps with Cisalpina too, since we find that the latter province was occupied in 77 by Lepidus’ legate M. Iunius Brutus. No doubt many senators could not face the prospect of another civil war that might culminate in another capture of Rome and the loss of their newly restored authority. But then, feeling that it had humoured Lepidus enough, the Senate summoned him to Rome to hold the consular elections.

The expansion of the power of the city of Rome through the whole of the Mediterranean world during the last three centuries B.C. led to the establishment of Rome as the predominant military and economic force in the region. It also made it necessary to develop ways of administering so large and diverse an area. The patterns which emerged are now usually referred to as the provincial administration of the empire, and there is no doubt that some such collective title is necessary to describe the various methods used by officials of the state to control the communities and individuals with whom they were in contact. It is important at the outset, however, to recognize that ‘provincial administration’ was not a Roman concept, at least during the period of the Republic, within which the empire took shape.

I. PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAE: THE ORIGINS OF THE SYSTEM

Although the English ‘province’ is obviously derived from the Latin provincia, the meaning of the two is by no means identical. A province, whether in a constitutional context, as for example the province of Ulster or of Ontario, or in an ecclesiastical, such as the provinces of Canterbury and York, is an area defined for administrative purposes. The provincia on the other hand seems originally to have been a task assigned to a specified Roman magistrate or promagistrate, in the fulfilment of which he would exercise the imperium granted to him in virtue of his election or appointment. Although his task might well consist of using that imperium, the executive power of the Roman people, in a military command within a particular geographical area, it need not do so. Livy several times describes an Italian tribe as a consul’s provincia, and during his account of the Second Punic War he refers to the provinciae of the fleet and the war against Hannibal in the same way. Similarly the treasury is called the provincia of a quaestor, and the urbana provincia marked the allocation of the civil jurisdiction within the city. When used by Plautus and Terence, writing comedies in the second century, and also in Cicero, the word seems to have a sense rather like the secondary meaning in modern English, of a concern or sphere of influence.

I

Law has several facets, none of which a historical account ought to ignore. It may be seen as a set of rules of behaviour backed by sanctions, an instrument of social engineering, a mechanism for dispute-settlement, or a mode of argument and a way of thinking. It may at a given time be consonant, or be dissonant, with the desires and habits of its society; and it cannot alone give a picture of all the boundaries of behaviour in a society, because there are always social and economic constraints at least as powerful as the law, and in relation to those alone can it be properly understood.

This chapter is about the private law. Conceptual puzzles can be raised about the boundary between that and other categories of law, but for present purposes the plain man’s concept of the modern difference between private (what English lawyers call ‘civil’) and criminal law suffices. The courts that people came into for private litigation were different from those described in the previous chapter, and that can serve as a pragmatic criterion; but there were overlaps and borderline cases. The end-point is, loosely, the death of Cicero; as for the starting-point, discussion will be limited to developments subsequent to the Twelve Tables, and in fact little positive will be said about anything before the end of the Hannibalic War.

Apart from extrapolation backwards from the ‘classical’ law of the Principate, a procedure which remains essential in spite of its obvious dangers, the evidence for private law in the Republic is mostly not that of technical writings: relatively few things said or written by the Republican jurists survive. One later work requires special mention:5 a long fragment, preserved in Justinian’s Digest, of the ‘One-Volume Handbook’ (liber singularis enchiridii) of the jurist Pomponius, written in the middle of the second century A.D. The passage has three sections, of which the first two are about the growth of what we should call the ‘sources of the law’ and the jurisdictional magistracies, for which we mostly possess much better evidence. The third, however, is a historical list of the great lawyers, and constitutes unique testimony. A few Republican inscriptions are of some importance; otherwise, one must turn to general literature.

I. THE CIVIL WAR

We do not know exactly where the Rubicon was; nor are we sure that it was on 10 January that Caesar crossed it (by the sun it was nearly two months earlier). But it is possible that on doing so he did say, quoting a Greek comedy by Menander, ‘let the die be cast’.

For the events of the next weeks, we have Caesar’s own account, which can occasionally be convicted by Cicero’s correspondence (which includes some letters from Caesar and Pompey themselves, as well as from others) of apologetic bias. Dividing his single legion into two parts he marched with five cohorts to Ariminum, and sent Antony, probably immediately, to Arretium to block the route from Rome by the Via Cassia. He himself, on reaching Ancona, held the head of the Via Flaminia. When news of this reached Rome on 17 January, Pompey insisted on abandoning the panic-stricken city, and retired with the consuls and many senators to Campania. Caesar’s other troops began to come up, and perhaps even while abortive negotiations were in progress he occupied all Picenum. Several small garrisons went over to him; L. Domitius Ahenobarbus used others, and troops he had raised himself – the equivalent of three legions – to make a stand at the strategic crossroads of Corfinium, refusing as the new proconsul of Gallia Transalpina to obey the pleas of Pompey, the proconsul of the Spains, to join him at Luceria in Apulia. But Domitius was surrounded and forced by his men to surrender. Caesar ostentatiously released all prisoners of senatorial or equestrian rank, not to mention the state funds in Domitius’ charge, and recruited the troops (many Domitius’ own tenants) whom he then despatched to Sicily.

Pompey withdrew to Brundisium, whither he had already sent some of his men. On 4 March the consuls put to sea from the town with part of the forces, only a few days before Caesar arrived, now with three veteran and three new legions, to find Pompey still present. But on 17 March, in spite of Caesar’s attempts to make the harbour unusable, he escaped the attempted blockade and crossed to Epirus.

Roman morality and political harmony were at their height, wrote Sallust, between the Second and Third Punic Wars. After this came the evils that accompany prosperity – strife, greed, ambition and the pursuit of ascendancy by powerful men. The inadequacies of this kind of explanation and of the precise dividing line drawn here by Sallust were discussed in chapter 1 (pp. 7–9). In spite of this there is no doubt that the razing of Carthage introduced an era of political crisis, whose antagonisms recalled the dimly remembered struggles of the early Republic and brought into question the stability of the constitution which Polybius admired.

Polybius thought that the common people were wronged through the greed of some men and given a false sense of importance through the ambitions of others. These exploited the truculence and recklessness of the poor in order to dominate the constitution and created what was in name democracy but was in fact mob-rule. Modern scholars are in general reluctant to recognize so dramatic a change, at least in Polybius’ lifetime. The present writer has argued in an earlier book that the violence of the late Republic should not be regarded as the result of a sudden reversal of Roman values but the re-emergence of long-standing attitudes and conflicts, which had been temporarily suppressed by political prudence and the profits from success abroad. On the other hand, it is not excessively superficial to look to the personalities of men like the Gracchi and see in their imagination and resolve the initial moment of a new political process. However, this can only be done when we have discerned how much of the late Republic was already present in that middle period renowned in Sallust’s eyes for its moderation.

I. THE ROMAN CONSTITUTION IN THE SECOND CENTURY B.C.

Aristotle would have treated the Roman constitution either as a mixture of the basic forms of constitution (monarchy, oligarchy and democracy), as Polybius did later, or else as one of the more moderate forms of democracy, close to the ill-defined border he drew between this and moderate oligarchy. The Roman body politic was not completely in the power of either rich or poor; all citizens to some extent participated in politics, but the law was sovereign, and the few offices were only available to those with a property qualification.

In considering the level and nature of intellectual activity in Roman society, we are bound to be discussing, in the main, the culture of the Roman and Italian upper classes. Our evidence is such that it is easier to gauge their knowledge of Greek than the general level of literacy. We can note that second-century Roman legislators already assumed that their laws would be read throughout the peninsula and required that they be publicly displayed in a place where they could be easily seen; we can point to the graffiti at Pompeii which show that, in the first century A.D., in a prosperous town, a substantial proportion of the population could read and possibly write, though not to a very high standard. But such evidence tells us little about the numbers and kinds of people who could and would read sophisticated Latin prose and verse. There the most important factor must be the availability of education. One point, however, is worth making at the outset: that is, the importance of oral culture. Not only was drama, one of the earliest forms of Latin literature, accessible without reading, but so was oratory, which was not only the key to understanding public life but an intellectual and artistic product that reached its peak of sophistication and polish in this period. Political and forensic speeches in the Forum were a form of popular entertainment like dramatic performances, and Cicero attests the sensitivity of an ordinary audience to the arrangement of words and the use of metre or prose rhythm. Other forms of literature too were regularly recited: indeed the serious study of Latin literature had started in the middle of the second century when scholars started to prepare the works of Naevius and Ennius for recitation.

I. EDUCATION

Cicero, making a contrast with Greek education, notes with approval that Roman education was not publicly regulated or uniform. After their establishment, perhaps in the middle of the third century, feepaying primary schools must have become a regular feature of life in Rome, though, apart from allusions in Plautine comedy, we have little direct evidence. Many continued to learn their letters and the rudiments of arithmetic at home or, with other children, at the home of a neighbour who had a suitably trained slave, such as Cato’s Chilo. Secondary education on the Greek model developed rapidly in the latter part of the second century.

If we define ‘economy’, un-theoretically, as the production, exchange and consumption of goods (not only material goods but also what are called ‘services’), a study of all these three elements throughout the whole Mediterranean world, even for the period covered in this volume, would vastly exceed the dimensions of the present chapter. Some limitations will therefore be applied. First, a spatial limitation: we shall look at the history mainly from the standpoint of Italy and its political centre, Rome. Secondly, a limitation in time: the economy of Roman Italy already had a long history behind it in 133 B.C., but we shall take for granted and only briefly allude to that earlier structure and development, and lay all the stress on the changes that occurred in our period, which were considerable and have become better known as a result of modern research. A third limit will be in terms of orientation. It is the most delicate point to explain, although the most interesting. One cannot study the ancient (or any other) economy without relating it to the kind of society and the political structure within which its developments took place. In ancient society men were not only producers or consumers, rentiers or wage-earners: they were also free or slave, Romans or ‘allies’; they had a social status derived not just from their place in the economy but, mostly, from the role, hereditary or otherwise, assigned to them by the way the community was organized. Strongly emphasized in law, with its privileges and its exclusions, status was more civic than economic (though naturally certain economic facts, such as property, might be part of its definition). But status, in turn, affected the economy, directly: the control by the state of access to real property is a good example, or the exclusion of certain status groups – the upper ‘orders’ from certain economic activities, or the way in which the availability of slave labour varied as a function of Rome’s conquests. So a particular effort will be made in this chapter, in describing and analysing the facts and changes of the Roman economy, to signal wherever appropriate the interaction between economy and status.

One further preliminary word is necessary, on a characteristic of our period.

By the end of the second century before Christ the Romans faced a crisis as a result of their mastery of the Mediterranean, which was made sharper by an increased political awareness resulting from their wider experience and the intellectual contacts made during the acquisition of empire. What Floras regarded as the robust maturity of Rome, which was doomed to collapse into the senility of the Principate, is made a more complex and more rewarding study by Roman self-consciousness. The most penetrating assessment of the Roman rise to power before 150 B.C. was made by Polybius — a Greek familiar with Rome but still an outsider. The Roman histories which had begun to be written from c. 200 B.C. onwards are lost to us but for a few citations and quotations, but, even if they were to be recovered, it is doubtful if we would find anything to compare with Polybius’ analysis. Before the second century had ended, however, not only had the sheer bulk of Roman historical writing increased but the material had become diversified. Sempronius Asellio, who lived in the period of the Gracchi, drew a distinction between writing mere annals, the traditional Roman narrative of events in a strict chronological framework, and histories, which interpreted by seeking causation and motive. In practice this meant that Romans no longer always wrote omnibus narratives stretching from Aeneas, or the wolf and twins, to their own day, but produced monographs on specific topics from the past or present, biographies and autobiographies. Moreover, the development of Roman intellectual life led to other forms of writing in prose – treatises, especially on oratory and law, and letters. Meanwhile, Greek interest in Rome did not cease, and one of the most influential sources for later writers whose native language was Greek was the Stoic philosopher Posidonius, who in addition to works on geography and ethnography wrote a full-scale Roman history which picked up the story where Polybius left it.

The works of the Roman annalists culminated under the emperor Augustus with the work of Livy, 120 of whose 142 books dealt with history down to the death of Cicero. However, the only products actually of the Republican period to survive are two monographs and some substantial fragments of a history by Sallust, one short biography by Cornelius Nepos and the military commentaries of Caesar.

At the beginning of this volume readers were offered a brief survey of opinions down the ages about the causes of the fall of the Republic; now, with the facts before them, they will have formed opinions of their own. However, they may still, reasonably, expect the editors of the volume to state theirs: how should this tumultuous period be summed up, and, especially, are there any integrating concepts to link the political and military narrative of the first part with the subsequent chapters about law and society, economics, religion and ideas?

Some parallel may here be perceived to the debates about the fall of the Roman Empire. In that case the simplistic question,’did it decline or was it assassinated?’, though requiring to be reformulated and answered with considerable subtlety, remains not a bad starting-point. So: did the political order that we know as the Roman Republic decline, or was it assassinated? Did it contain the dialectic of its own collapse, or could it, but for the ambitions of certain dynasts (above all, Pompey and Caesar, Antony and Octavian), have survived the changes taking place in Roman society?

Both the experience of another twenty centuries and the refinements of modern historical explanation make it out of the question for us to be content with the standard answer given by the Romans themselves, that the political order was destroyed by moral decline resulting from wealth, greed and luxury. Change was occurring in moral conceptions, as in everything else, but that is true of all periods and is not necessarily a symptom of morbidity in the body politic. Nor is it easily open to us now to say that what fell was in any case only a corrupt and unlamented oligarchy. Recent analyses of the Republican constitution have laid stress on its genuinely democratic aspects:3 it is nowadays insisted that Polybius drew a true picture after all, and that Rome did have a ‘mixed constitution’, and the governing class, being dependent in each generation upon the electorate, could not treat the res publica as their private game. In so far as such analyses are right, we cannot ascribe the fall of the Republic merely to the fortuitously disastrous outcome of a political poker-match amongst the principes viri, any more than to a downturn in some Dow-Jones index of morality, but must turn to the identification of structural faults.

I. THE LATER PTOLEMIES

In Egypt 146 B.C., the year of the destruction of Corinth and Carthage, was the last full year in the life of Ptolemy VI Philometor, who died righting in Syria in the following autumn. Apart from a brief period of joint reign (170–164 B.C.) when Egypt had been seriously threatened by Antiochus IV and when Rome, in July 168, first actively interfered in the affairs of the Ptolemies (Vol. VIII 342–4), the two sons of Epiphanes (Philometor and Euergetes II) had conspicuously failed to co-operate. Similar tensions within the ruling house with all the resultant conflict, upheaval and lack of direction were to be a feature of the last century of Ptolemaic rule.

In 145 the younger son of Epiphanes was summoned by the people home from Cyrene where he had ruled in semi-exile. Returning via Cyprus, whence a well-timed amnesty decree was aimed to strengthen his acceptability, Euergetes II now took his brother’s widow as his wife. Supported only by the Jews and perhaps the intellectuals of the city, Cleopatra II had earlier pressed the claims of her son Ptolemy VII Neos Philopator. The boy was speedily liquidated by his uncle, in her arms on his mother’s wedding-day according to one rhetorical account; Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II then claimed the succession and consummated his marriage. His traditional coronation at Memphis in 144 was timed to coincide with the birth of his new wife’s child, suitably named Memphites. Two years later, together with his wife, Euergetes II voyaged south and on 10 September 142 consecrated the great Horus temple at Edfu. The king who had earlier relied on the Alexandrian mob was apparently searching for wider support amongst the population of Egypt.

In looking beyond the Greek capital on the Mediterranean, in recognizing the importance of the ceremonial role of the king, and in presenting himself as traditional protector of the land of Egypt and its people, Euergetes II followed the examples of his father and of his elder brother. For the Egyptian population he sought the role of pharaoh. However, he was not respected by the Alexandrian Greeks or by visiting Romans who decried his monstrous paunch (he was disrespectfully known as Physcon, Pot-belly), his dress and lifestyle; his persecutions and his personal predilections resulted in a uniformly hostile reception by the classical commentators.

I. CAESAR AND CLODIUS

It was clear from the moment of their election that the two consuls of 5 9 B.C. would be at loggerheads. The immediate issue, already foreseen in December, was a land law; Caesar was aiming to do as consul what the tribunes had failed to do in 63 and 60. Bibulus, on the other hand, was determined to resist it on behalf of Cato and the senatorial establishment. The familiar ideology of plebs and patres – explicit in Cicero’s statement of his position on this occasion – was now to be played out not as a conflict of tribunes and consuls but as a trial of strength between the consuls themselves.

Caesar’s attitude to the populace was made clear as soon as he entered office. From now on the Senate’s debates (and the proceedings of the people) were to be officially recorded and published, its business made accessible to the general citizen body. Helped, no doubt, by this publicity, Caesar went out of his way to be conciliatory to his opponents in the Senate. He chose Crassus, not Pompey, as the first consularis to be asked his opinion (not that the optimates would like that much better); he announced that in the alternate months when his colleague held the fasces his own official escort would be merely an orderly (his lictors to follow behind); and he assured the patres that he would bring in no legislation that was against their interests.

In particular, they would find that the proposed land law did not contain any of the features they had found so objectionable in Rullus’ bill four years earlier. To prove it, he went through the text clause by clause, inviting criticism and offering to delete anything the Senate did not like. The Campanian land was not to be touched; the scheme would bring desolate areas of Italy back into cultivation, and put Roman citizens back on the land instead of encouraging them to riot in the city; the commission administering the distribution was to number twenty men, of whom Caesar as the proposer could not be one; it was to buy property only from willing sellers, and only at the value fixed in the censors’ registration; and the money was available, thanks to Pompey’s conquests and the heroism of his soldiers, who deserved the fight to share in what their labours had made possible.

Historical divisions are arbitrary, and beginnings and endings necessary but misleading. The present volume has for its main theme the process commonly known as the ‘Fall of the Roman Republic’, and there are good reasons for beginning the narrative of that process with the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 B.C. But the traumas of the Republic that then began had an intelligible background, and we have explored it, as was foreshadowed in the preface to Vol. vin, by beginning our analysis at 146 B.C., the year of the destruction of Carthage and Corinth, which the Romans regarded as the apogee of their fortunes. Indeed, especially in the chapter on Roman private law, which, beyond the Twelve Tables, has not been dealt with in any earlier volume, we have harked back unashamedly as far as seemed needful. As for an endpoint, the death of Cicero on 7 December 43 B.C. was chosen in preference to the Ides of March 44, partly because symbols are as important as events, and Cicero’s death symbolizes, now as it did then, the demise of the Republic, and partly because the greatest of all the pieces of luck that launched the young C. Iulius Caesar (’Octavian’) on his course to domination was the death of both the consuls of 43 B.C. in the action against Antony: Octavian’s usurping entry into the consulship on 19 August 43 is the second most symbolic date in the funeral annals of the Republic.

In accordance with a trend that it is now well-nigh banal to cite, somewhat less space and weight are devoted in this volume than in Vol. ix of the original CAH to close narrative of political and military events, and somewhat more to ‘synchronic’ analyses of society, institutions and ideas; but we have not banished ‘Phistoire evenementielle’, for it would have been absurd to do so. In the first place, narrative is an entirely valid historical genre in its own right, giving its own particular satisfaction to the reader, and, in the second, a work of this character will be expected to furnish a reliable account of public events.