Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland
Authors: Tom Holland
Ads: Link
like any electorate, they delighted in making candidates for their favours sweat. In the Republic ‘there was nothing more fickle than the masses, nothing more impenetrable than the people’s wishes, nothing more likely to baffle expectation than the entire system of voting’. 19 Yet if there was much that was unpredictable about Roman politics, there was more about it that was eminently predictable. Yes, the people had their votes, but only the rich had any hope of winning office, * and not even wealth on its own was necessarily sufficient to obtain success for a candidate. The Roman character had a strong streak of snobbery: effectively, citizens preferred to vote for families with strong brand recognition, electing son after father after grandfather to the great magistracies of state, indulging the nobility’s dynastic pretensions with a numbing regularity. Certainly, a Roman did not have to be a member of the ruling classes to share their prejudices. The aim of even the most poverty-stricken citizens was not to change society, but to do better out of it. Inequality was the price that citizens of the Republic willingly paid for their sense of community. The class-based agitation that had brought the plebeians their equality with the patricians was a thing of the long-vanished past – not merely impossible, but almost impossible to conceive.
That this was the case reflected an irony typical of the Republic. In the very hour of their triumph the plebeians had destroyed themselves as a revolutionary movement. In 367 BC , with the abolition of legal restrictions on their advancement, wealthy plebeianshad lost all incentive to side with the poor. High-achieving plebeian families had instead devoted themselves to more profitable activities, such as monopolising the consulship and buying up the Palatine. After two and a half centuries of power they had ended up like the pigs in
Animal Farm
, indistinguishable from their former oppressors. Indeed, in certain respects, they had come to hold the whiphand. Magistracies originally wrung from the patricians as fruits of the class war now served to boost the careers of ambitious plebeian noblemen. One office in particular, that of the tribunate, presented immense opportunities for grandstanding. Not only did tribunes have the celebrated ‘veto’ over bills they disliked, but they could convene public assemblies to pass bills of their own. Patricians, forbidden from running for plebeian offices, could only watch on in mingled resentment and distaste.
It could, of course, be dangerous for a tribune to overplay his hand. Like most magistracies in the Republic, his office presented him with pitfalls as well as opportunities. Even by the standards of Roman political life, however, the unwritten rules that helped to determine a tribune’s behaviour were strikingly paradoxical. An office that provided almost limitless opportunities for playing dirty was also hedged about by the sacred. As it had been since ancient times, the person of a tribune was inviolable, and anyone who ignored that sanction was considered to have laid his hands upon the gods themselves. In return for his sacrosanct status a tribune was obliged during his year of office never to leave Rome, and always to keep an open house. He had to pay close attention to the people’s hardships and complaints, to listen to them whenever they stopped him in the street, and to read the graffiti which they might scrawl on public monuments, encouraging him to pass or obstruct new measures. No matter how overweening his personal ambition, the aristocrat who chose to stand for election as a tribune could not afford to appear haughty. Sometimes he might even go so far as toaffect the accent of a plebeian from the slums. ‘
Populares
’, the Romans called such men: politicians who relied on the common touch.
Yet at the same time as he upheld the interests of the people, a
popularis
also had to respect the sensibilities of his own
That this was the case reflected an irony typical of the Republic. In the very hour of their triumph the plebeians had destroyed themselves as a revolutionary movement. In 367 BC , with the abolition of legal restrictions on their advancement, wealthy plebeianshad lost all incentive to side with the poor. High-achieving plebeian families had instead devoted themselves to more profitable activities, such as monopolising the consulship and buying up the Palatine. After two and a half centuries of power they had ended up like the pigs in
Animal Farm
, indistinguishable from their former oppressors. Indeed, in certain respects, they had come to hold the whiphand. Magistracies originally wrung from the patricians as fruits of the class war now served to boost the careers of ambitious plebeian noblemen. One office in particular, that of the tribunate, presented immense opportunities for grandstanding. Not only did tribunes have the celebrated ‘veto’ over bills they disliked, but they could convene public assemblies to pass bills of their own. Patricians, forbidden from running for plebeian offices, could only watch on in mingled resentment and distaste.
It could, of course, be dangerous for a tribune to overplay his hand. Like most magistracies in the Republic, his office presented him with pitfalls as well as opportunities. Even by the standards of Roman political life, however, the unwritten rules that helped to determine a tribune’s behaviour were strikingly paradoxical. An office that provided almost limitless opportunities for playing dirty was also hedged about by the sacred. As it had been since ancient times, the person of a tribune was inviolable, and anyone who ignored that sanction was considered to have laid his hands upon the gods themselves. In return for his sacrosanct status a tribune was obliged during his year of office never to leave Rome, and always to keep an open house. He had to pay close attention to the people’s hardships and complaints, to listen to them whenever they stopped him in the street, and to read the graffiti which they might scrawl on public monuments, encouraging him to pass or obstruct new measures. No matter how overweening his personal ambition, the aristocrat who chose to stand for election as a tribune could not afford to appear haughty. Sometimes he might even go so far as toaffect the accent of a plebeian from the slums. ‘
Populares
’, the Romans called such men: politicians who relied on the common touch.
Yet at the same time as he upheld the interests of the people, a
popularis
also had to respect the sensibilities of his own
Similar Books
