An aristocracy of elected office may still be reasonably defined as an aristocracy if various political, social and cultural factors ensure a high degree of exclusivity and continuity. As Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp has noted, aristocratic exclusivity does not have to be understood in a ‘rigid and formalistic way’ in order to make the term meaningful; Meier’s famous dictum ‘being involved in politics meant being part of the aristocracy, and being part of the aristocracy meant being involved in politics’ is ‘only apparently circular, and it is by no means merely a banal tautology’ (Hölkeskamp 2010: 89, referring to Meier 1966: 47 and Millar 1988: 4f.; cf. Hopkins and Burton 1983: 107–117). In fact, the formal traditional European aristocracies were also not wholly closed to outsiders. But the decisive difference between them and Rome’s Republican aristocracy was the way that one could join the latter and attain promotion within its ranks – competitive popular elections Appreciating the mixed nature of this double legitimacy, aristocratic and popular (whose potency and occasional subversive potential were well illustrated by the late-Republican popularis nobles, blue-blooded friends of the people), should not, by any means, lead one to belittle the strength of the Republican elite – quite the contrary. But it is obvious that analysing such an elite and its standing vis-à-vis the wider public in terms that are coloured, for any modern audience and for the scholars themselves, by the experience of later European aristocracies, is highly problematic.2
Of course, it is also largely inevitable, since it was the Roman Republican nobilitas that gave these later hereditary elites their very name. The terminology used in modern accounts of Republican politics – nobility, nobles and all the associated terms and metaphors such as aristocrats, dynasts, magnates, grandees, feudal lords – often proved stronger than any qualifications attached to them. A ‘government of nobles’ in a ‘feudal order’, in Syme’s words, inevitably conjured up the notion of Roman voters as loyal vassals or perhaps obedient serfs. This language has overshadowed, in subsequent scholarship (and in Syme’s own overall view of Republican society and politics), certain important caveats contained in the historian’s own account – such as the fact that ‘popularity with the plebs was essential’, or the weight he attaches to the conservatism of the Roman voters. The latter, however much it benefited the ruling class, is obviously a ‘non-feudal’ factor.
7.3 How Orthodox Was ‘The Old Orthodoxy’?
The traditional view of the Republic (prior to the challenge in the 1980s), exemplified and to a significant extent shaped by Syme, thus defined it unambiguously as an oligarchy, and employed appropriately oligarchic-aristocratic language in describing it and its powerful elite. At the same time it conceded, and in fact sometimes emphasised with regard to important specific points, that certain features of the system could hardly be described as ‘oligarchic’ – at any rate, not in an unqualified way. None of these points was, however, allowed to affect the general picture.
When the challenge to the traditional view, denying the validity of the oligarchic label altogether and stressing the importance of the popular aspect of Roman politics, was launched by Fergus Millar in the 1980s, sparking a wide-ranging debate, it would be repeatedly argued that Millar had exaggerated the oligarchic consensus which he sought to refute – both its pervasiveness and the degree of ‘narrowness’ that it ascribed to the Roman oligarchy. Many of Millar’s points, it is argued, were not exactly new; some had been made before him and some had in fact never been disputed.
Thus, according to Martin Jehne, ‘Millar’s objection that [the Roman nobility] was not an hereditary aristocracy is not especially consequential, since on the one hand this is evident and undisputed, but on the other, the conception of aristocracy as a prominent and privileged group is not in fact tied to formal heritability’ (Jehne 2006: 16; see Hölkeskamp 2010: 76–77). However, if the mechanism that ensures ‘informal heritability’ in a given political system is that of competitive popular elections, in which a major asset of the nobility is the conservatism of the voter, then it must always be borne in mind that the aristocracy in question is of a very peculiar nature. This peculiarity had clearly not been given its due within the traditional oligarchic discourse; though ‘undisputed’ indeed, since nobody disputed it, it was (and sometimes still is) largely overlooked, and was thus not always ‘evident’. A wholesale direct attack on the aristocratic model itself, challenging, inter alia, the routine and often unqualified use of the term aristocracy as applied to the Republican elite, was, in such circumstances, a welcome and important development. This is so even if in the end one chooses (very reasonably, in my view), to retain this term – hopefully to be used with greater circumspection and without assuming that the significance of popular participation is automatically negated thereby.
Hölkeskamp points out that important scholars had presented a much more nuanced picture than that drawn by Syme and Münzer ‘long before Millar started the current discussion’ (Hölkeskamp 2010: 7). This is certainly correct; but, as we have seen, more nuanced descriptions make their appearance already in Syme’s own classical ‘oligarchic’ account – without affecting his overall assessment of the system. The same can be said, at least partly, about much of the scholarship that followed Syme: its findings repeatedly contradicted the aristocratic/oligarchic model on important specific points, without problematising it as a whole.
Hölkeskamp’s star witness is Christian Meier and his Res Publica Amissa, first published in 1966. Meier’s detailed analysis of the ‘political grammar’ of the Republic undermined a crucially important element of the old orthodoxy: the assumption that aristocratic ‘parties’ – clusters of family alliances – of the kind postulated by Münzer, could remain stable for long periods of time and thus dominate Roman politics. Instead, he shows that such combinations, in a highly competitive environment, were typically short-lived, fluid, often ad hoc, with multiple and often contradictory connections and commitments of the parties involved. And since only such clusters could have conceivably produced blocs of client-voters large enough to sway the assemblies, this conclusion also contradicts the notion that the political dominance of the nobility was ensured largely with the help of such blocs (Meier 1966: 15, 163, 174–177, 182–190). Nevertheless, Meier’s ‘lost republic’ is, unquestionably, an aristocratic republic. The collective ethos common, as he stresses, to the lower as well as the higher orders is an ethos that conferred popular legitimacy on an essentially aristocratic system – so much so that no alternative to this system was conceivable, even after it had become clearly dysfunctional (see Chapter 28). ‘For Meier, this explains the “readiness”, indeed willingness, of the people at large to obey the aristocratic regime as a matter of course and comply with its omnipresent hierarchies and command-structures’ (Hölkeskamp 2010: 45).
If Meier, to put it somewhat crudely and schematically, undermined Münzer as regards aristocratic ‘parties’, Peter Brunt not only rejected the notion of durable aristocratic coteries, but can be said to have undermined Gelzer – or at any rate the popular and somewhat simplified version of Gelzer’s views on the crucial importance of ‘personal ties’. Certainly, very little was left, after his thorough critical examination, of the old view according to which patron–client relations dominated Roman society and politics, including the voters’ behaviour (see Brunt 1988: 382–442, on clientela). This finding undermines what is probably the main pillar of the traditional oligarchic paradigm, ‘radically dispos[ing] of this basic axiom of the ‘old orthodoxy’ (Hölkeskamp 2010: 36). Nevertheless, it is hardly given its full weight in the way Brunt characterises the system as a whole. Brunt holds, indeed, that ‘the “mixed” constitution of the Republic [was] not purely oligarchical’ (Brunt 1988: 1). His own overall verdict on it is very largely oligarchic nonetheless,3 inter alia on the grounds