This volume is the latest ambitious outcome of a series of works published by R.-L. on the theme of political communication, popular culture and public opinion in the late Roman Republic. Although modern philosophers, such as J. Habermas, have argued that public opinion emerged only in the late seventeenth century and developed later with the rise of the press industry, R.-L. is keen to argue that it is not anachronistic to look for public opinion when approaching the study of Late Republican Roman politics. Indeed, this book aims to show the existence of ‘public opinion’ within a ‘Roman public sphere’ as a powerful communication tool between the elite and the plebs, which played a crucial role in everyday politics, to such an extent that it could affect political decision-making.
In Chapter 1 R.-L. gives a brief analysis of Latin terms related to the concept of public opinion and a summary statement of the political nature of the Roman Republic. She supports a dynamic model of the political system in which public opinion allowed some political participation. R.-L. identifies public opinion as an element of ‘informal politics’ (pp. 16–18): something that was not regulated by law but that contributed to the political practice of the Roman Republic. She moves on to illustrate the main modern theoretical models of public opinion that could be applied to describe this phenomenon in antiquity, especially those of Habermas and E. Noelle-Neumann (pp. 18–27). The chapter ends with some considerations on freedom of speech as a vital part of politics in the Roman Republic. (On R.-L.’s discussion of the praeco Granius as an example of dicacitas cf. also Cic. Quinct. 11; Mart. 1.85; 6.66; Apul. Met. 8, 23–4. Granius’ wit would seem to be part of a literary topos rather than a single case.)
Chapter 2 explores how physical settings and the movement of people might have affected the spreading of information and eventually the making of public opinion. By applying the most recent studies on the ‘spatial turn’ to politics, R.-L. surveys what she calls places of ‘sociability’, where people of different social background might have interacted together, such as the Forum and its surroundings, including bathhouses, crossroads, the theatre and so on. Special attention is given to the Roman domus as a privileged place of elite political communication. On the importance of auctions, which R.-L. mentions in regard to the macellum and compita (p. 59 n. 100; p. 66 n. 145), see M. García Morcillo, Las ventas por subasta en el mundo romano: la esfera privada (2005). This chapter is a rich compilation of data and anecdotes, but the lack of substantive evidence for political conversation between the elite and the lower classes in the streets makes the investigation on the actual formation of public opinion rather speculative.
Chapter 3 argues that rumour and gossip were the main means of communication through which public opinion was shaped and disseminated within and outside the city of Rome. Various activities and occasions would have favoured this process such as market days, censuses, political events and games. Again, it is difficult to gauge the ultimate impact of such events on politics. Market days would certainly have encouraged interaction between people from the city centre and the countryside, but were held on non-comitial days. On this point see, for example, H. Mouritsen, Politics in the Roman Republic (2017), pp. 57–8.
As an introductory discussion to Chapter 5, in Chapter 4 R.-L. broadly groups under the category of ‘political literature’ (pp. 98–102) any kind of written work that addresses public opinion by dealing with contemporary political issues, regardless of the genres and the physical media on which these texts were displayed. Chapter 5 is a descriptive account of the sub-genres of political literature in which R.-L. collects an impressive range of different materials. She starts by dealing with satura and popular verses, the latter treated as political literature although they were often expressed only orally. It follows a lengthy digression on political literature in prose: pamphlets, tracts, open letters, memoirs and historical writings, graffiti, placards and acta diurna. R.-L. has certainly created an accurate theoretical framework to classify political literature, but one may wonder to what extent this category is effective if most of these texts are lost or fragmentary and there is scattered evidence for their wide circulation, considering also the literacy rate of the time.
Chapter 6 turns to identify various groups and agents of public opinion. R.-L. draws a nuanced picture of leaders and movers of opinion in which both the elite and the people could be influenced by each other's thoughts. R.-L. accurately points out the difficulty of tracking down bottom-up opinions, which are often oversimplified by the sources and do not match the interest and the opinions of the elite. Indeed, most of the references collected refer generically to the thoughts of ‘the Roman people’, and perhaps it would have been interesting to investigate the rhetorical nature of this political concept. R.-L. then deals with those people who were ‘physical vehicles’ of information: shopkeepers, barbers, scurrae, circulatores, praecones, libertini, nomenclatores. The chapter ends with a section on the misreading of public opinion by Caesar's murderers.
Chapter 7 shows how rhetoricians taught students to address and use public opinion especially before trials. R.-L. analyses three speeches of Cicero (In Verrem, Pro Cluentio and Pro Rabirio Postumo) as case studies to prove that the outcome of such trials depended on the ability of the orator to appeal to different groups of public opinion.
In the conclusion (Chapter 8), R.-L. states that public opinion was an active part of Roman politics in terms of social control and political communication, whose features can be effectively described by two conceptual models of public opinion (Habermas and Noelle-Neumann). One may doubt whether R.-L. has succeeded in demonstrating how a public opinion similar to that of early modern Europe could have developed in Rome. This argument reflects R.-L.’s modernising view of Roman politics, and it is not the first recent attempt to apply modern categories to the study of ancient phenomena; among recent examples of this trend see E. Mayer, The Ancient Middle Classes: Urban Life and Aesthetics in the Roman Empire, 100 bce–250 ce (2012). Nevertheless, the ultimate danger in following this approach is that we create and discuss our own modern concepts of public opinion by misinterpreting the actual historical reality. Among her final remarks, R.-L. stresses that the study of public opinion shows that political participation was not limited to voting. This is certainly intriguing, but when we look at the counterpart of this study, the institutions of the Roman Republic, what R.-L. would term ‘formal politics’, there are no attested attempts to make assemblies more representative and in general to subsidise popular participation.
Undoubtedly, the book has the merit of raising a number of stimulating questions about the interest of the people in politics and in what they might have thought of the elite. I noted a few typographical mistakes, but in general the book is well produced (‘Lengua’ p. 1 n. 1; ‘eccesi’ p. 30 n. 161; ‘Teracina’ p. 90; ‘liberta’ p. 253; ‘eEpistola’ p. 259; ‘traduzione’ p. 259). R.-L. makes a number of valuable points, but the speculative nature of most of the arguments does not seem to make a convincing case for the existence of a public opinion, as understood by a modern reader, simply because public opinion in the Roman Republic never crystallised into something tangible, especially as regards the lower classes.
