Clientela, indeed, remained for a long time at the heart of the oligarchic model of Roman politics as a key to explaining the power of the nobles, based upon the assumption that coalitions of nobles and noble families could pool their resources and thus control the electorate (see Chapter 29). Gelzer had famously claimed that ‘the most powerful man was he who by virtue of his clients and friends could mobilize the greatest number of votes’ (Gelzer 1969: 139); this emphatic phrase was to exercise great influence on scholarship, though the actual detailed picture drawn by Gelzer in his book is in fact more nuanced than this summary.1 Münzer placed long-term (as he envisaged them) factions or ‘parties’ of nobles families at the heart of Republican politics. This view left no real room for meaningful popular participation and, indeed, little room for politics as such. According to Syme, the political life of the Republic was characterised ‘not by the ostensible opposition between Senate and People, optimates and populares’, but by ‘strife for power, wealth and glory’ among the nobles (Syme 1939: 11). Syme’s prosopographical method – reconstructing the intricate web of personal and family connections within the Roman ruling class, and analysing Roman politics in light of these findings – is naturally in tune with this view of the Republican political system. Of course, prosopography is a vitally important tool in any attempt to understand the Republic, but it becomes even more vital if one accepts Syme’s broad picture of how this society and political system worked.
The ostensible res publica populi Romani was thus, according to Syme, essentially none of the people’s business. However, in describing this ‘strife for power, wealth and glory’ among the oligarchs, Syme also stresses, in the same chapter, that at the heart of the Republican political system lay fierce competition between nobles – individuals, families and cliques – for the elected offices of state, and hence for the votes of the people in popular assemblies (see Chapter 16). Thus, the oligarchs’ very strife for power made them dependent on the people’s votes; once in office, they might expect to face the voters again, in future electoral contests; they might need their votes, on various important occasions, in legislative assemblies, and might have to fear them in judicial ones (see Chapter 31).
Of course, voting might be merely a formality, a confirmation of a preordained choice or decision. But Syme, for all his ‘feudal’ and ‘oligarchic’ language, makes no such claim with respect to Roman voting. This voting, it should be remembered, could not have been purely formal even if one assumes (very dubiously, as we shall see) that most voters were obedient clients of nobiles: at any rate when it came to elections, the people’s votes could not, by definition, be fully controlled by any noble or group of nobles – precisely because, in competitive elections, their aristocratic rivals would have similar aristocratic resources at their disposal, including those of clientela.
In fact, the people’s freedom of choice is duly noted by Syme: ‘The sovran people of the free Republic conferred its favours on whom it pleased. Popularity with the plebs was therefore essential’ (Syme 1939: 13). ‘Sovran people’ and ‘free Republic’ are probably meant to sound (half-)ironical; but popularity with the plebs was indeed essential and it is clear from the context that this is said in earnest. Of course, when powerful men vie for popularity and votes, they might use methods that are rather unsavoury from the viewpoint of democratic theory (if not wholly unknown to democratic practice) such as ‘clientela among the plebs’, ‘bribery’ and even ‘intimidation’ (see Chapter 29), all mentioned by Syme in this context. But even so, how useful is it to describe such a political order as ‘feudal’? Is the language of feudalism useful even as a metaphor in describing a system in which popularity with the common people is essential for realising the ambitions of the ‘magnates’, and their power depends on winning fiercely contested popular (if not exactly ‘democratic’) elections?
Moreover, when Syme explains why the great majority of consuls (see Chapter 18) were nobles, he points out that the ‘nobiles did not, it is true, stand like a solid rampart to bar all intruders. No need for that – the conservative Roman voter could seldom be induced to elect a man whose name had not been known for centuries as a part of the history of the Republic’ (Syme 1939: 11). The chief reason why nobles were usually elected thus turns out to have been the conservatism of the Roman voter. ‘Standing like a solid rampart’ against an upstart intruder would have meant, for the nobles, suspending their competition and pooling their resources – of patronage, bribery and, occasionally, of intimidation. But, according to Syme, there was usually no need for that. The conservatism of the voters would usually carry the day – not clientela, bribery, intimidation and the power of noble family alliances (the factors on which Syme lays stress). Nor is the ‘blame’ said to attach to other ‘non-democratic’ factors often mentioned in this context, such as the timocratic structure of the centuriate assembly (see Chapter 16) that chose the higher magistrates, the wide powers of the higher magistrates who presided over the assemblies (most of them nobiles themselves), or the limitations of physical access that made it impractical for most citizens to exercise their right to vote. All of these factors, variously assessed, surely played their role in limiting the full potential impact of popular participation in Rome. However, the main reason for the dominance of the nobiles at the polls (the indispensable foundation of their whole power in the state) was, at least according to Syme in this passage, the inner attitude of the voting populace – of those whose support was ‘essential’ for the career of every individual noble and senator.
Now, of course it can be argued, very reasonably, that Roman voters were conditioned from above, in various ways, to be conservative, and this is surely relevant to assessing the political character of the Republic (see Chapter 30). Indeed, much of the present debate on the Republic’s political culture can be characterised as an attempt to understand what exactly made the Roman voter conservative; and many of the suggested answers put great emphasis on the power of the ruling class. But again, ‘feudal’ is hardly the right definition if one wishes to describe such a system.
In a certain sense, the term ‘nobility’ itself – obviously unavoidable in, and central to, any discussion of the Republic – should be ‘blamed’ for its tendency to imply more than every scholar has known (but not always borne in mind) that it signified in the Roman Republican context (see Hopkins and Burton 1983: 109). Everybody has always known that Republican nobilitas was not a hereditary aristocracy in the medieval or early-modern European style, with formal belonging, status and privileges, and (often) a formal monopoly on various offices. Rather, it was a social category consisting of descendants of consuls and, according to some, of other higher magistrates (see Chapter 25). It was thus closely connected with the principle of popular election and open to outsiders through competitive annual polls.
The option of ennobling an outsider (and his descendants) by electing him to high office was exercised by the people rarely enough to preserve the aristocratic exclusiveness