A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic. Группа авторов

not just with examples of patriotic fortitude and valour, but with a language which could evoke such Roman virtues even without explicit mention of Rome (on rhetoric, see Chapter 32; on ancient accounts, see Part II). This belief in a distinctively Roman matrix of virtue and valour was widespread enough to be found in texts or speeches which fell well outside the bounds of republican discourse. But for republicans, the cultural pervasiveness of these notions, along with their association with the greatest of the ancient republics, meant that the language of Roman valour and virtue was enormously useful. Against royalists emphasising the virtues of monarchy and of obedience to it, republicans could invoke a different model of virtue, but one with enormous cultural clout. Republicans could thus redescribe behaviour that royalists saw as unruly or rebellious as Roman valour in the cause of liberty. Thus John Milton, on the eve of the restoration of the monarchy, mourned the fact that the English people were apparently about to squander their early republican achievements, which had displayed ‘a spirit in this nation no less noble and well fitted to the liberty of a Comonwealth, then in the ancient Greeks or Romans’ (Milton 1980: 356). In Milton’s works the language of Roman virtue was pushed in a distinctively Ciceronian direction, not erasing its martial character, but emphasising that even the virtue of fortitudo, or courage, was not always martial, and that it was not war itself, but the certamen virtutis gloriosissimum atque pulcherrimum (the trial of virtue most fair and most glorious) and studium libertatis (zeal for liberty) which motivated the Greeks and Romans to expel their tyrants (Milton 1933: 6–7; Dzelzainis 1995). Even where Rome was not mentioned by name, in Milton’s Latin writings the use of the terms found in Ciceronian and other encomia of the Roman Republic and its defenders gave a Roman flavour to his republicanism. At the start of the Second Defence Milton credited the civium virtus eximia, magnitudo animi and constantia of the English (the effulgent virtue of its citizens…their magnanimity and steadfastness) with liberating the res publica (Commonwealth): it is hard to read these Latin phrases without Roman exempla in mind (Milton 1933: 2–3).

      3.4 The Constitutional Discussion

      Republicans analysed the constitution of the Roman Republic as well as invoking its spirit. Constitutional thought was often not at the forefront of English republicanism in this period, whether because existing constitutional arrangements could not easily be challenged (especially by those writing in support of the government), or because for some republican authors the spirit of republicanism was more important and urgent than its precise form. Nonetheless, Rome offered guidance on the principles which should animate a successful republic, starting with the location of sovereignty itself.

The English republicans were far from united (and sometimes far from consistent) in their approach to republican government: who should directly exercise power and through what institutions. Some were far more willing to trust the people to participate in government or elect governors than others. However, their comments on Rome reveal that even the less populist republicans were largely united by a fundamental belief in the ultimate sovereignty of the people. Milton’s First Defence made the case that the people’s majesty justified the English in punishing their tyrannical king, whose creator they were in any case. In support of his case he turned to Cicero’s speeches and to words Cicero credited to Lucius Crassus in De Oratore, which Milton used to argue that ‘though the Senate governed the People, yet it was the People that had given over that very power to regulate and govern themselves unto the Senate’. Milton then imagined his opponent, Salmasius, objecting that this might be true in populari statu – in a democracy or popular government – but that it would not have been true after the (supposed) lex regia transferred the people’s power to the emperors, perhaps a more appropriate parallel for monarchical England. Milton replied that even under the empire, Tiberius and other emperors went through the motions of acknowledging the people as their superiors (Milton 1932: 182–185). In spite of this wider claim about sovereignty, what is most significant is Milton’s judgement that the Roman Republic was a ‘popular state’, a frequent synonym for the Greek term ‘democracy’. Early modern opinion was somewhat divided about this, with some following Polybius’s lead in describing Republican Rome as a mixed polity (see Chapter 8), but as Richard Tuck (2006) has pointed out, the claim that Rome was fundamentally a democracy was supported by Jean Bodin among others.

      James Harrington, too, argued that the people at Rome were sovereign – ‘as appears by the ancient style of their covenants or laws: censuere patres, iussit populus [the fathers resolved, the people commanded]’ (Harrington 1977: 166) – and took that as grounds for describing Rome as a popular state. Rome was one of the founts of ancient prudence which guided his imagining of an ideal ‘equal commonwealth’. However, ancient prudence was not a neutral term in Harrington’s vocabulary; it essentially meant the politics of commonwealths rather than monarchies – even mixed monarchies such as England with its two Houses of Parliament. Harrington did not simply reject the ancient ideal of mixed constitutions outright. Indeed, he appealed to it in justifying his own complex balanced constitution and suggested – following Polybius – that Rome was one example of a mixed government. Ridiculing Hobbes’s denial of the existence of mixed governments, Harrington asked which of the simple forms of government could have been senatus populusque Romanus (the Senate and people of Rome) (Harrington 1977: 163). However, in spite of this early defence of mixed government, Harrington rested his theory on foundations which ultimately led him in a rather different direction. Harrington classified his ideal commonwealth of Oceana and the ancient commonwealths – as far as he could – as popular governments or democracies. Popular government was the only viable form for a polity when the balance of landholding was popular; to ensure that the commonwealth was viable in perpetuity, it had to be equal, preserving the balance of land through an agrarian law and ensuring that a system of rotation prevented an oligarchy of the powerful from forming. The Roman Republic was a popular government, but it fell short of being equal in both these senses, and that led to its downfall.

Harrington aligned himself with the Roman authors he saw as supporters of the popular interest and was sensitive to anti-populist sentiment. The popular or democratic nature of the Roman Republic ultimately depended on the assemblies (comitia), and particularly the comitia tributa, ‘being a council where the people in exigencies made laws without the senate, which laws were called plebiscita. This council is that in regard whereof Cicero and other great wits so frequently inveigh against the people, and sometimes even Livy’ (see Chapter 16; Chapter 9; Chapter 11). But in Harrington’s own ideal polity, popular government was carefully channelled: popular sovereignty was expressed through election of the representatives who legislated. Harrington thus defended popular power on two fronts: both against detractors who saw Rome as a terrible warning of what would happen if the people were given too much power, and against those who – perhaps following Machiavelli with his enthusiasm for tumults between the orders at Rome – were in danger of being too careless in the powers they gave to the people. At Rome, a cardinal error had been made when the comitia tributa were set up: the people had been allowed to debate (in Harrington’s republic, the popular house approved or rejected the senate’s proposals without debate) (see Chapter 16). Thus, in spite of his barbed comment about Cicero’s attitude, Harrington swiftly conceded that ‘To say truth, it [either referring to the comitia tributa, or to the struggle reported by Livy 2.56–60 for plebeian magistrates to be chosen by the comitia tributa] was a kind of anarchy, whereof the people could not be excusable, if there had not, through the course taken by the senate, been otherwise a necessity that they must have seen the commonwealth run into oligarchy’ (Harrington 1977: 211–212). The Roman Republic was flawed, because the people had had to struggle, against the continued monopolisation of power by the senate, to achieve a share in power which reflected the popular property balance which prevailed in the earlier part of the Republic’s history. In a sense