Gregory Golden introduces his study with a brief prologue describing the steps the Senate took in the winter of 44/43 b.c. to meet its growing conflict with Mark Antony before outlining the contents of the chapters that follow. The first of these defines a crisis as G. will use the term: an imminent threat that must be immediately addressed to a decision-maker (or makers) and/or something he (or they) value highly. So for G. the ‘crisis of the Republic’ was no such thing, if by the Republic one means the Roman people or even the institutions of government. Rather, the crisis involved a threat to the hold on power enjoyed by a small group of aristocrats and aristocratic families. The second chapter examines the dictatorship as a response to crises. G., while acknowledging that Cincinnatus is legendary, takes Livy's account of his appointment as paradigmatic for the steps taken when the decision was made to meet an external crisis by appointing a dictator. The Gallic Sack by contrast stands as an example of what happened when the Senate chose not to respond to a crisis in this way. Ch. 3 discusses the tumultus, a state of emergency that also involved a iustitium suspending all public business in order to focus on meeting the crisis. A tumultus was more serious than a normal war in G.'s view because it permitted no exemptions when the consuls levied an army. Also, the senators signalled a crisis existed by putting on the sagum, a military cloak. G. then proceeds to discuss the several different types of tumultus. The following chapter takes up those iustitia not connected with declarations of tumultus, of which only two are attested. He suggests these, too, were declared to further efforts to prepare for wars.
In ch. 5, G. argues that the senatus consultus ultimum simply indicated that a state of emergency existed. Unlike tumultus or iustitia, however, it did not suspend the normal operation of statute law. In particular, it did not provide a defence against prosecution for acts committed to meet the crisis, as the trial of Opimius and the threat to try Cicero demonstrate. G. concludes that the SCU was essentially superfluous since the Senate already had all the powers it needed to deal with a crisis in the tumultus and iustitium decrees. ‘The senate could not grant an executive official any further powers outside of those that were already sanctioned by statute law’ (148). All the SCU did was to signal that a ‘state of high alert’ (150) existed.
Ch. 6 surveys those crises in which the Senate did not resort to one of the measures G. identifies in the preceding chapters: for example, Saguntum; Hannibal's march on Rome; the Bacchanalian affair; the Cimbri and Teutones; Sulla's march on Rome. G. places these in three broad categories: crises that were not emergencies; emergencies that nonetheless did not call forth the usual measures; and crises in which the state proved incapable of a coherent response. In the seventh chapter, G. returns to the crisis of the winter of 44/43 and its sequel the following summer and discusses the steps the Senate took to meet it. The final chapter offers a survey of Roman crisis management over the course of the Republic. G. argues that with Ti. Gracchus, the locus of crisis management shifted from the Senate to the consuls, formalized in 121 b.c. with the introduction of the SCU. For G., the real problem that Rome confronted in the late Republic was its failure to find some impartial means of resolving political conflict short of violence. That solution would come only with the establishment of the monarchy. A brief ‘Final Thoughts’ develops this point by posing the question why the Romans never developed such an arbiter during the Republic. The answer for G. is that they did not need one, since ‘the true nature of the Roman Republic was really nothing more than a “gentleman's agreement”’ (223).
Knowledgeable readers will find this book slow going for having to plough repeatedly through lengthy narrative passages describing the background to the events that led to the crises and responses that G. examines. To assess how the Senate handled the emergency Hannibal's march on Rome created in 211 b.c. for example, G. offers an extended recapitulation of Livy's account of the war in Italy beginning with the revolts following Cannae (154–6) — yet here he strangely neglects entirely Polybius' quite different — and likely more accurate — account of Hannibal's route and the Roman response (9.3.1–7.10). That decision-makers at Rome could meet an emergency abroad or at home by appointing a dictator, declaring a tumultus and/or iustitium, or passing an SCU will come as news to few, and anyone familiar with the Republic's tumultuous final century will already understand that the lack of any means to resolve political conflicts short of violence posed a serious and continuing problem. And while G. is certainly right to stress the limitations of the SCU and the central rôle of magistrates in undertaking measures to meet crises, these points seem fairly obvious.
