Millar’s challenge to the old paradigm transformed the nature of the debate. In the past, the usual procedure was to take the definition of the system as oligarchic, tout court, for granted; this was problematic enough, but even more so were the various avowed or tacit assumptions that naturally come with such a definition. Now, on the other hand, both those who wish to retain this definition and those who have discarded it, have to come up with new and better explanations, instead of the largely discredited old ones, as to how the indisputable might and influence of the Roman elite could coexist with the now much less disputed powers of the people.
7.5 The Ongoing Debate
Out of the numerous objections raised against Millar’s thesis, most can be subsumed under two main lines of argument – one that refers to the limited scope of actual popular participation, challenging the very notion of ‘the people’ as applied to Republican politics (e.g. Mouritsen 2001: 16), and one that emphasises the aristocratic, strongly hierarchical character of the prevailing political culture, that conditioned ‘the people’ to acquiesce in a (largely) oligarchic political system (e.g. Hölkeskamp 2010, passim). Jehne combines both points: the Roman voting system made it practically impossible for the great majority of citizens to vote, and Roman political culture was such that this fact does not seem to have bothered anyone.
In my view, the decisive reason why it is impossible to classify the Roman Republic as a democracy, or even to attribute wide-ranging democratic features to it, is the small opportunity for political participation. The decisive point is not that only a few actually participated, which is also a constant problem in modern democracies (even if not so acute). Rather, the spirit of the political system is revealed by the fact that the vast majority could not participate at all, and that those empowered to make decisions never gave so much as a thought to discovering a remedy by means of a representative system: no one in Rome was interested in creating fairness of participatory opportunity for ordinary citizens who lived outside Rome. It seems to me that this kind of regard for the opportunity for citizens to participate, at a rudimentary level at least, is a necessary (but certainly not sufficient) condition for every democracy. (Jehne 2006: 22–23)
However, classifying the Roman Republic as a democracy and attributing wide-ranging democratic features to it are two very different things; this, at any rate, was the view of Polybius, who did the latter but not the former (see Chapter 8). I would argue that Jehne’s objection is stronger against the former view than against the latter. If a system is to be defined as a democracy, even with qualifications, this does indeed invite the question whether this should not be conditional on it allowing, or at least seeking to allow, as large a part of the citizen body as possible to vote. But defining the Roman Republic as a democracy is in any case, in my view, something better avoided. It tends to make the debate too semantic and too normative – too focused on whether the Republic deserves this title or not. It is true that perhaps no modern debate involving the term democracy can be wholly divorced from the participants’ contemporary concerns and normative preferences.7 This applies also to discussing a system’s democratic features (which is why ‘popular’ is preferable in this context – not that it wholly solves the problem), but much more so to any attempt to determine whether a given system passes muster as a democracy.
Designating a political system as an imperfect or flawed democracy might be a good idea when this system defines itself as a democracy and someone wishes to draw attention to the gravity of its flaws in this respect, without denying that it is a democracy after all. But the Roman Republic never defined itself in terms that can be translated as a democracy. This fact is, of course, not merely a matter of semantics. The famous traditional formula ‘Senate and People’ seems to imply an idea of partnership between two powerful forces (distinct functionally and socially, though not separate and independent).8 If so, it is easy to see how Cicero could have accepted Polybius’s ‘mixed constitution’ without too much difficulty. The term civitas popularis used by Cicero in De Re Publica (1.41) to designate democracy sounds quite un-Roman; it was obviously not meant to apply to Rome – by Cicero or anybody else, for all we know (see Chapter 9).
On the other hand, a political system may reasonably be said to have included a significant democratic or popular element if its powerful officials were chosen, in competitive elections, by an electorate that was at any rate much wider (more ‘popular’) than the social class from which those officials sprang, creating what Jeffrey Tatum has aptly called ‘the paradox of an aristocracy selected by its inferiors’ (Tatum 2013: 133). Moreover, this can be claimed when these officials might have to depend on the votes of their ‘inferiors’ politically in legislative assemblies, and sometimes for their very safety, in judicial ones. This applies even if the voting populace in question constituted only a small minority of the entire citizen body, and despite the important debates on the social composition of the various assemblies, that are obviously relevant to assessing the system.9 For members of the Roman elite, the popular aspect of Republican politics was very real – much too real, sometimes. The kind of secure and undisturbed dominance of the oligarchy that is necessarily implied, when one rejects the notion that the system had significant popular features, was not the lot of Rome’s ‘oligarchs’.
Moreover, it should be borne in mind that we are talking, after all, about a city-state, though a peculiar one. The Republic’s political system always remained that of a city-state and the scope of popular participation (as well as the scope of conceivable reforms) remained within the bounds of this type of polity, while the territory of the Republic and the number of its citizens had grown far beyond those limits. Once all of Italy south of the Po received Roman citizenship in the 80s BCE, the percentage of voters among the citizens grew still much smaller; this does not mean that the popular aspect of Republican politics, such as it was, thereby became less significant.10 The late-Republican ruling class, as Cicero’s writings repeatedly attest (e.g. Rep. 1.31, 2.59), could only envy its predecessors in the ‘good old days’ before the Gracchi, when the assemblies (while being more ‘democratic’ in the sense of representing a larger proportion of the citizens) were more likely to be guided by a consensus of their betters.
Nevertheless, the Republic’s political culture, the spirit of the system reflected also in certain important institutional arrangements, does provide weighty arguments for emphasising the power of the elite rather than that of the people (though not, I would argue, for dismissing the latter altogether). These elitist features of the system are well-known and undisputed. They all present significant limits of the people’s power in the Republic – though the exact degree to which they neutralised it is a matter for dispute. Rome had a powerful governing (office-holding) class – at once a social and a political elite, with the nobility as its inner circle. Only members of the office-holding class could legally summon popular assemblies, preside over them and put questions to the vote; in contiones, where public debates took place, they not only controlled the proceedings but enjoyed a near monopoly on addressing the populace (speakers who were privati appear to have been usually senators; see Chapter 16; Chapter 32). Thus, any legitimate political initiative had to come, legally, from above; in this sense, ‘the popular will of the Roman people found expression in the context, and only in the context, of divisions within the oligarchy.’11 The Roman elite exercised powerful control not only over public debate, through its hold on the contiones and the ‘steeply hierarchical communication-situation’ (Morstein-Marx 2013: 30) obtaining there, but more broadly over the numerous public ceremonies, rituals and celebrations of the Republic (see Chapter 1;