Reform Unwillingness and the Death of the Roman Republic

Past and Future, 2024

This critical analysis explores the transition of the late Roman Republic into the autocratic Principate, eventually creating the imperial dynasties of the Julio-Claudian and the Flavians. The reality of autocratic leadership after the civil wars of the first century BCE had to be cloaked within the terminologies of Republican institutions and through the co-option and control of other leading families and individuals. The crucial test for this new ‘settlement’ was the peaceful succession of political and military power from one leader to the next, preferably within the ruling family, i.e. how a dynasty could be established without triggering political revolts or another round of civil wars. However, the Republic itself had not been forgotten. Indeed, patterns of opposition to the Julio-Claudians were sometimes motivated by Republican sentiments, or at least cloaked in its terminology and with some effort to revive power to the Senate. On four occasions during this period there was either a call for a return to ‘Republican government’, or in invocation of republican political terms as a regulator of public life. The issues involved were raised as early as the succession of Tiberius in 14 CE, where the continuing institutional power of the Principate was clearly demonstrated. The events immediately following the assassination of Caligula (41 CE) and the decline in Nero’s government after the Pisonian conspiracy show that a return to Republican government was highly unlikely. Likewise, the events of 69 CE, where military commanders vie for control of the empire in a new cycle of civil wars, illustrates the institutional forces in operation against any return to a republican form of government. Instead, we have a shift of emphasis towards a re-interpretation of libertas in relation to the auctoritas of emperors during this period. By this time republican slogans were mobilized as symbolic propaganda for an empowered imperial administration that had already sidestepped the popular Assemblies and the Senate as sources of authority.

The history of the Roman res publica did not end with that of the Roman Republic. It spanned the entire imperial period, in the sense that the monarchical regime founded by Augustus presented itself, and was presented as, a res publica. This notion must therefore be studied in its historical depth, which justifies my incursion into the imperial period in the context of a book largely devoted to the Roman Republic. The long lifespan of the Roman res publica-nearly a millennium-is a wellestablished fact, one that has been analyzed anew and expanded upon in Claudia Moatti's recent study of the Roman history of the commonwealth, 1 which demonstrates that the continuity of the res publica emerged as a subject during the first century BC. It was a genuine obsession for Romans, thus explaining its permanence during the imperial period, as well as its culmination in the idea that Augustus himself invented a tradition to which he constantly conformed 2 . Another contribution of Claudia Moatti's book is to definitively move beyond the debate on the nature of the Roman Republic (aristocracy or democracy?), by showing that this was an 'ideological formalization' that appeared during the second century BC, one that brought the notion of forma to the forefront. This approach was born under the influence of Greek political philosophy and was systematized by Polybius through the notion of a 'mixed constitution', which emphasized certain institutions (the consuls, the Senate, the comitia) while neglecting others, and inevitably raises the question of which of these three institutions dominated the two others. The same analysis, mutatis mutandis, has applied and continues to apply to the Augustan 'Principate', whose nature has been explored by modern historians going back at least to Mommsen, sometimes underscoring the regime's monarchical dimension, and sometimes its republican packaging. This explains the success enjoyed by analyses of the Augustan regime that stress continuity (the phenomenon of restoring the res publica) or rupture (the monarchical and dynastic character of Augustus' powers). The problem with such analyses is that, despite any attempt at formalization, the Roman res publica was always something 'uncertain and imprecise, fluctuating and open'. 3 This was without a doubt its primary characteristic and the reason 1 Moatti 2018. 2 See Blösel 2000, 85-91. 3 Moatti 2018, 412; see also p. 56: 'la nature ouverte et imprécise de la « chose publique »'.

2014

Emergency powers are widely held to have contributed in important ways to the Roman Republic's demise and to the erection of the Principate. The debate waged during the late Republic over such powers is certainly one of the most prominent features in late Republican political thought and controversy, and it would be hard to overlook the fact that it was a debate over constitutional principle. Taking seriously the constitutional character of that debate, this article seeks to answer the question of whether it makes sense to attribute to the Roman Republic something like the concept of a constitution in the first place. It is argued that on the level of political thought the term 'constitution' can indeed profitably and accurately be applied to a set of rules that were thought both to be more entrenched and to be more important than other rules. Thus it makes perfect sense to speak of a Roman Republican constitution, without scare quotes, at least in the realm of political thought. Furthermore it is suggested that it makes sense to speak of a Roman republican constitution in the realm of institutional reality as well since political and more specifically constitutional thought informed and influenced some of the republican institutions and their functioning to a considerable extent.

Heródoto, 1969

One of the recurrent themes in contemporary historiography on political and social organization of roman state resides on the participation or not of the population in decisions made in the different assemblies of roman citizens. Some of the discrepancies arise from the Roman citizens' sovereignty in these elections and the role of aristocracy in controlling these decisions, either through patronage system or by the assemblies' modus operandi themselves. The answer to these questions involves analyzing the place of aristocracy and plebs in this system, as well as the knowledge on the traditions system that ruled the res publica. This article aims at reflecting about the participation of the different social groups in Roman political process, by analyzing the political process and its traditions.

Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte. Romanistische Abteilung

1999

This paper presents an overview of the discussion about the three allegories in Books VI-VII and an abstract of the papers published in the volume the "Ascent to the Good"

The Collapse of Democracies and the Need for a New Aristocracy , 2024

The abridged, re-edited, and completed version. The first parts are very scholarly, but somewhat boring. However, 2.1. and 2.2., while I hope scholarly, should not be boring. The world is intellectually, and not just intellectually, on the verge of collapsing. Do me the favour to read the last two brief sections. They are the summary of my life's work. -- Added on Dec. 8, 2024: As to democracy in Switzerland: the correct date is actually 1971, since that was the year when at the federal level women were granted the right to vote. I am obliged to Barbara Tversky for having alerted me to this fact.

Leadership and Initiative in Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome, 2022

Agency is a useful concept for exploring elite ideas about, and experiences of, politics in the period from the death of Julius Caesar to the Battle of Actium. The issue of exerting agency had become particularly acute during the dictatorship of Caesar, and remained so in the following years as the Roman elite struggled with Caesar’s legacy. The first part of this chapter deals with the problems of defining and “locating” agency, focusing in particular on how claiming or disclaiming agency became an important aspect of the contemporary rhetoric of self-justification. The central part of the chapter examines different limitations on agency, such as the triumviral powers, proscription, violence, and alliances, and how these were negotiated by elite individuals. This is offset in the final section by an examination of the new or enlarged opportunities for agency which the civil war situation created, such as the negotiation of treaties and the possibility of changing sides. Focusing on the ways in which agency was debated and deployed gives us a multifaceted and dynamic view of the elite experience in this period, which takes us beyond the dominant binary of obedience or opposition to political leaders.

The Classical Review , 2002

Antichthon, 2017

Whether the result of internal revolution or external factors, in the late sixth century BC Rome underwent regime change. A king, or at least a sole ruler of some sort, was replaced by a governmental system in which power was distributed amongst a wider aristocratic group. Just what that elite group comprised at that point in time remains open to question, and the institutional reality is certainly more complicated than the simple shift from monarchy to consulship portrayed in the later literary sources;1but as part of that change, according to Roman tradition, a priesthood was instituted to perform the deposed king’s sacred duties. This priesthood provides us with an opportunity to reappraise the role of religion in the development of the Roman state, and a useful locus from which to assess changes in religious and political power in the transition from monarchy to Republic at Rome.

This essay offers an alternative to influential interpretations of elites, peoples and senates in Niccolò Machiavelli’s theory of mixed republics. It analyzes in greater depth both Machiavelli’s ascription of the morally objectionable and politically dangerous trait of insolenzia to the nobles as a social class; and his justifications for the establishment of senates as institutions that partially remedy the problem of aristocratic insolence—justifications that depart from traditional Ciceronian and Polybian standards. Machiavelli demonstrates in The Prince, the Discourses and the Florentine Histories that republics with senates, such as ancient Rome, manage to mollify aristocratic insolence, while those lacking them, like modern Florence, permit such insolence to proliferate unchecked. Moreover, Machiavelli intimates, republics that collectively gather nobles within senate chambers are afforded the opportunity to entirely eliminate aristocratic insolence. The essay concludes with an analysis of senatorial institutions in Machiavelli’s “Discursus on Florentine Matters.”