The importance of understanding Roman social structures and interactions in order to properly grapple with Roman political history lies behind all three works under review, to varying degrees and at different levels. Peter Wiseman's concise biography of Julius Caesar is part of the ‘Pocket Giants’ series ‘about people who changed the world — and why they matter’ (128). For W., Caesar's status hinges on his military ability, his role in the creation of the Roman Empire, the fact that his name was given to a dynasty and, perhaps more questionably, that he freed Rome from a corrupt oligarchy.
As a figure still present in popular imagination, W. strives to fully contextualise Caesar within the socio-political issues of his day. With this in mind he eschews the well-worn anecdotes which one might expect to find in a trade book, preferring, he claims, ‘to stick to what is important’ (112). And what is important in W.’s view is to turn away from the rhetoric of the oligarchic components of the Roman political elites in favour of focusing on a democratic ideal of the res publica. This reading of the Roman state as inherently democratic shapes the narrative. The first chapter (‘The People's Thing’) opens by asking the reader to picture the Roman state as one of equality, prior to the rapid shifts in economic stability over little more than a generation that subverted such an ideal to private interests and social tensions, into which world Caesar was born. The story of Caesar then becomes, in W.’s telling, the story of a struggle to return to that ideal.
One benefit of W.’s approach is that a general audience gets a sense of the wider socio-political landscape and language of Caesar and his contemporaries. This is aided by an emphasis on the sources throughout, including the start of each chapter. Given its limited space, it is a lively narrative that should intrigue the general reader.
Championing Caesar as the hero of ‘The People's Thing’, W. is explicit about deconstructing the self-presentation of the oligarchy. In so doing he offers a picture which itself is open to attack. Nowhere is the res publica as a democratic ideal questioned as problematic to an understanding of this period of Roman history. Rather the populares are whitewashed as egalitarian and the people conceived as a coherent and fully conscious entity, striving to aid Caesar in crippling the oligarchic stranglehold.
In sharp contrast to W.’s ideal of ‘The People's Thing’, one of the striking and highly convincing arguments in Henrik Mouritsen's enquiry into the nature of Roman politics is that the populus Romanus was, in reality, little more than an abstraction. The book, written as part of the Key Themes in Ancient History series for Cambridge University Press, manages the tricky feat of being both highly accessible and thought-provoking in its questioning of commonly held assumptions about Roman political institutions. M. stresses that a key aim of the study is to illustrate ‘the direct reversal of Polybius’ thesis that the secret of Rome's success lay in her political system’ (166). He paints a vivid picture of an aristocratic system held together, not by its political institutions, but by an equilibrium of the ruling classes through social cohesion, a balanced distribution of influence, and a shared ideological framework.
A particular strength of the work is in highlighting the incongruity between theoretical frameworks and political practice. From the start, M. critically examines accepted models of the Roman Republic, such as the standard Polybian ‘constitution’. Polybius’ mechanical approach, in attempting to apply Greek theory to the Roman political system, mistakenly attributes a democratic character to the comitia. Cicero's De re publica, M. suggests, reveals a far more complex relationship between theoretical ideal and actual experience. Rather than accepting Polybius’ ‘normalisation’ of Roman institutions, we would do better to examine the elements that do not fit into such a model (15).
The problematic element is the populus. M. devotes much of chs 1 (‘Senatus Populusque Romanus: Institutions and Practices’) and 2 (‘Leaders and Masses in the Roman Republic’) to examining the role of the people in relation to ideas of legitimacy. Whilst legitimacy resided in the fact that the people was the res publica, the practicalities and organisation of the voting assemblies ‘separated the populus as a political concept from its physical reality’ (27). Block-voting created artificial units that represented the whole populus, but did not require the whole citizen body to actually participate. As M. stresses, the number of voters was irrelevant, and indeed mass participation was further restricted by the limited amount of space in both the Forum and Saepta (55–8). He elaborates on this truly undemocratic nature by noting the sharp contrast between modern permanent constitutional bodies and the ad hoc nature of the comitia, which could not exist independently from the magistrate who created them, and in which the populus’ power was reduced to a yes/no vote. M.’s analysis of the comitia reveals that whilst the populus was symbolically vital, it was a passive source of legitimacy. He goes on to reject the trend in modern scholarship which views the contiones as focal points of popular power. Having already stressed the abstract nature of the populus, he emphasises the problems inherent in reducing the complexities of Rome's social and political landscape to a simple dichotomy of ‘senate’ and ‘people’. The changeable make-up and attendance of the contiones meant that they never expressed a singular ‘popular opinion’, but were a symbolic expression of popular participation.
To further understand the dynamics and relations between the leaders and the masses, M. turns to the field of ‘political culture’, a prevalent area of study in German scholarship. M.’s discussion here, as with his considerations of the comitia and contiones, draws on the earlier work of several contributors to this field, namely Hölkeskamp, Flaig and Jehne, whose latest studies are in Haake and Harders (eds), reviewed below. M. explores the creation of nobilitas as a new expression of elite power. Since the concept of nobilitas was focused on the holding of office, the power of this group was derived from the Roman populus, which in turned provided for ‘a consensual construction of the state as identical with the populus and the élite as its dutiful guardian’ (96).
This ideological cohesion was the glue that held the state together. Nevertheless, M. argues in ch. 3 (‘Consensus and Competition’), aristocratic states were fundamentally unstable due to the ‘conflict between the collective and the individual’ (105). Given these inherent tensions, M., in a similar vein to E. S. Gruen's The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (1974), shifts the question from why the Republic collapsed, to how it managed to last so long. He first highlights the issues of periodisation, framing the concept of a ‘classic’ middle Republic as a creation of retrospective ‘post-rationalisation’, and grounds it, as a period of elite consensus and stability, within a construction of an idealised past. Much of the discussion explores the concept of ‘popularity’ in the late Republic, rejecting the binary model of populares/optimates, and instead emphasising the heterogeneous make-up of the elites and the socio-political divisions, as highlighted by the rise of the nobiles. As part of this argument, M. explores the position of the tribunate, arguing for a lack of democratic, definitive ideological character. From the third century onwards, the tribunes’ role as legislators and the ease with which legislation could be implemented constituted ‘[t]he fundamental problem facing the republic’ (142). The inability of the elite to control the tribunate may be answered by Sulla's reforms to the office, which both highlighted and attempted to correct the disparity between the ideology of the state and its practice, as regards the Senate's position.
The Roman system, then, lived and died by the internal cohesion of its aristocracy and elites. Whilst Gruen saw the ‘fall of the Republic’ as caused by the single event of civil war in 49, M. argues that the political violence of the late Republic was ‘a symptom of political instability as well as one of its causes, at the same time expressing and escalating underlying conflicts’ (169). Growing disparities amongst the elite broke aristocratic consensus. In the last few pages, he turns to fleetingly consider how the war between Rome and the allies in 91 might offer fertile ground for more fully exploring the collapse of aristocratic control. M., it seems, has deliberately been tantalisingly brief here, although this is perhaps not surprising given that such an exploration lies beyond the scope of the book. A short bibliographic essay helpfully provides concise overviews of the major contributions in scholarship regarding ‘The Political System’, ‘Leaders and Masses’ and ‘The Practice of Politics’. M.’s study is no doubt likely to become a staple in the study of republican politics.
The need to further explore the Social War in relation to the internal violence of the Roman state is similarly singled out by Erich Gruen in his paper in the edited volume of Matthias Haake and Ann-Cathrin Harders (‘The Last Generation of the Republic revisited’), in which he considers how he might write LGRR differently now. He also admits that a weakness of LGRR was that it did not consider the importance of Roman society and the ‘symbolic capital’ of the performative aspects (558–9). ‘Symbolic capital’ and the political culture of the Republic are the overarching themes behind the volume, which is the result of a colloquium in 2012, commemorating the seventieth anniversary of Friedrich Münzer's death. Münzer, through his prosopographical work for RE and his monograph, Adelsparteien und Adelsfamilien, followed Gelzer in turning away from the Mommsenesque legalistic and constitutional explanations of the Roman Republic, to a consideration of the social structures that regulated the political life of the elite.
Whilst Münzer's contribution to the field of social history is the point of departure, and almost all the papers acknowledge this, the limitations of his approach and research are sensibly stressed. Matthäus Heil's paper (91–110) provides an excellent assessment of both Münzer's work (and so forms a useful bridge to the first section, dedicated to his life and works) and the possible avenues for using prosopography as a research tool. The intention of the editors, to explore the various interactions between social relations and political action (17), is for the most part well managed, and structurally the volume is successful in articulating these aims. There is, of course, not space here to discuss every paper; some overall remarks will suffice.
Structurally, after a section on Münzer himself, the volume moves on to examine methods for engaging with ideas of social history, including a useful and (socially) wide-ranging paper by Heikki Solin on the Roman naming-system (125–53), although he takes the discussion right down to Christian antiquity, far beyond the framework of the volume. Reinhard Wolters’ paper highlights the numismatic evidence as a vehicle for expressing contemporary controversies, and less for family propaganda (155–83). The third section, ‘Soziale Strukturen in Rom’ is particularly successful for providing discussions of the broader social relations behind much of Roman political life. Social aspects of the Roman familia are tackled, and Jochen Martin's paper (187–95) goes some way to considering the role of women and issues of gender, otherwise lacking in this volume. A stand-out contribution here is Lisa Mignone's ‘Wohnintegration im republikanischen Rom’ (231–53), which highlights the high-levels of daily interactions between different social strata and the value of spatial studies to social history.
Section 4 considers the wider view of the empire, including Jonathan Prag's call for a more systematic evaluation of Roman imperialism away from the predominant focus in literary sources on the East (287–307), and Michael Jung's fascinating exploration of ethnic persecution during the Marian-Sullan civil war as a means to veil the domestic nature of the conflict (309–21). Sections 5 and 6 offer rich insights into the interaction between the social and political, in terms of aristocratic routes to political power and social prominence respectively. Christoph Lundgreen's paper on decision-making (334–60) and Marlis Arnhold and Jörg Rüpke's on religious practices (413–27) play with the idea of social expectations, and levels of flexibility. Henriette van der Blom provides a clear examination of the centrality of public oratory to a political career (325–34); this paper complements the broader discussions in Section 7, which examine the public interactions of the plebs and Senate, notably in contiones. As the culmination of the volume, ‘political culture’ as a discipline is, at last, explicitly addressed, beginning with Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp's engaging review and discussion of the theoretical framework (457–96). Alexander Yakobson offers insight into the complex hierarchies amongst Rome's elite (497–516), whilst Egon Flaig addresses the nature of communication between the aristocracy and populus, with the contiones acting as political filters enabling the comitia to function as arenas for consensus, not decision-making (517–34). Finally, Martin Jehne examines the populus Romanus both as an ‘institution’ and as a partner-in-discourse with the aristocracy to determine its role within Rome's power structures (535–49).
As a volume aiming to enhance our understanding of the Roman Republic through examining the interconnectivity of social structures and the symbolic capital of political communication, H. and H.’s collection of papers has much to offer. As with the other works reviewed here, it highlights the res publica Romana as an unavoidably aristocratic system, though there are glimpses too of the value of examining the wide array of social networks and interactions beyond the narrow confines of Münzer's nobility.
