A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic

Valentina Arena, Jonathan R. W. Prag, Valentina Arena, Jonathan R. W. Prag

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119673590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

An insightful and original exploration of Roman Republic politics

In A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic, editors Valentina Arena and Jonathan Prag deliver an incisive and original collection of forty contributions from leading academics representing various intellectual and academic traditions. The collected works represent some of the best scholarship in recent decades and adopt a variety of approaches, each of which confronts major problems in the field and contributes to ongoing research.

The book represents a new, updated, and comprehensive view of the political world of Republican Rome and some of the included essays are available in English for the first time.

Divided into six parts, the discussions consider the institutionalized loci, political actors, and values, rituals, and discourse that characterized Republican Rome. The Companion also offers several case studies and sections on the history of the interpretation of political life in the Roman Republic. Key features include:

• A thorough introduction to the Roman political world as seen through the wider lenses of Roman political culture
• Comprehensive explorations of the fundamental components of Roman political culture, including ideas and values, civic and religious rituals, myths, and communicative strategies
• Practical discussions of Roman Republic institutions, both with reference to their formal rules and prescriptions, and as patterns of social organization
• In depth examinations of the 'afterlife' of the Roman Republic, both in ancient authors and in early modern and modern times

Perfect for students of all levels of the ancient world, A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic will also earn a place in the libraries of scholars and students of politics, political history, and the history of ideas.

CHAPTER 1
Political Culture: Career of a Concept

Karl-J. Hölkeskamp

1.1 Inspiration(s) and Definition(s)

It was in 1989 that Josiah Ober used the concept of ‘political culture’ for the first time in a book on a classical subject, as far as I know, in his seminal work on the typology, status and functions of orators and oratory, and on the rhetoric of democracy in the political culture of fourth-century Athens. At about the same time, William Harris chose the same concept in his rejoinder to John North’s critical review of what the latter had labelled a ‘frozen-waste theory’ of politics in middle- and late-Republican Rome,¹ in the style of Friedrich Münzer’s ‘aristocratic parties’ and their deliberately, if only thinly veiled arcana imperii, published in 1920.² Above all, however, this label was meant to denounce Sir Ronald Syme’s concept of politics as a never-ending ‘strife for power, wealth and glory’, within the narrow and exclusive closed circles of ‘an aristocracy unique in duration and predominance’ as a ‘governing class’. This sombre vision of the decline and fall of the libera res publica was elegantly as well as magisterially expounded in his highly influential masterpiece The Roman Revolution, published in 1939 (see Chapter 7). Decades later, Syme still imperiously defended his radically elitist view as a kind of metahistorical eternal truth in his last book of 1986: ‘Oligarchy is imposed as the guiding theme, the link from age to age whatever be the form and name of government.’³ The underlying concept of Republican politics was based on a set of interdependent assumptions: politics was conceived as a sort of zero-sum game between a relatively small number of dominant families, the aim of which was power in the shape of the consulship. In order to achieve this object of their ambitions, leading figures of these gentes formed alliances on the basis of kinship, dynastic marriages and other personal relationships. These long-term alliances were assumed to be very stable, they constantly rose to take over government when others fell from power, only to rise again after a generation or even later – this was the gist of politics. Other classes – the plebs as well as more affluent voters – ‘had no voice in government’ and even ‘no place in history’, but were (at best) ‘susceptible to auctoritas, taking their tone and tastes from above’.⁴ That was meant to imply that the whole populus Romanus was tied to these families by a pervasive network of steeply hierarchical links of patronage and clientship (see 29). Moreover, the system of group voting, particularly in the consular elections held in the equally hierarchical comitia centuriata, was supposed automatically to guarantee the overwhelming influence of the oligarchy as such on the outcome of these annual contests for the maximus honos (see Chapter 16).⁵

It was Fergus Millar who rejected this apparently well-established orthodoxy – and who finally admitted that his teacher Ronald Syme had been its most influential representative (Millar 2002: 12–13). However, he went beyond the systematic deconstruction of the received wisdom and offered a new, indeed iconoclastic reading of the political character of the Republic and its political culture as a whole – although he neither explicitly used this concept nor systematically explained his descriptive and analytical categories (see Chapter 7). Millar not only insisted on the overwhelming importance of mass oratory and the central role and function of the orator before the people assembled in the comitium or Forum. He also claimed that the libera res publica was to be conceived of as a variant of ancient democracy, which was much more akin to the direct democracy of classical Athens than modern scholarship had been prepared to admit.⁶ Interestingly enough, it was this specific form of direct, close and intense communication and interaction which, on the one hand, was the central theme of Ober’s reconstruction of Athenian political culture and which, on the other hand, also became an important theme of the international debate on the character of politics in the Roman Republic, which got off the ground with the aforementioned exchange between Harris and North.⁷ This debate has been very lively, and continues to the present day – and it has moved well beyond the less than fruitful question of whether or not we should think of the Republic as a (sort of) democracy.

However, the ‘career’ of the concept ‘political culture’ began considerably earlier and in a completely different scientific context. The general intellectual background has been inspired from two rather different sides (independently of each other, but to a certain extent converging in the process). On the one hand, there was the introduction of the term in political science by Gabriel Almond, Sidney Verba, Lucian Pye, Lowell Dittmer and others since the late 1950s and early 1960s – their conception of ‘political cultures’ of contemporary societies was focused on subjective attitudes, knowledge, opinions and beliefs, i.e. cognitive, affective and evaluative orientations toward politics and political action.⁸ Interestingly enough, they included in their systematic outline of political culture(s) as a disciplinary category and new matrix, a cursory look at the type of the secularised city-state, characterised by limited differentiation, but also by relatively complex social structures such as the Greek city-states, Republican Rome and some of the city-states of medieval Europe. Since the ‘city-state as a political form is now primarily of historical interest’, however, ‘there would be little purpose in exploring the various categories which might be employed to order the examples of this type’ (Almond-Powell 1966: 256–258). Against the backdrop of the aforementioned debate on Roman politics, however, this historical interest has gained a new lease of life, and not only for ancient historians.⁹

On the other hand, there were the debates on the linguistic and cultural turns, and their impact on the modern historiography of medieval as well as (early) modern history, followed by a series of other turns (or perhaps rather ‘subturns’ under the umbrella of the universal ‘cultural turn’) – namely the spatial, performative and communicative turns. In the view of the advocates of a new cultural history of politics, it is to be seen as an interactive process of communication between different parties involved – that is, between elites and addressees – and as a process of discursive negotiating not only of concrete decisions on politics and policies, but also of the general rules governing the procedures of decision-making and the wielding of power in general, the acceptance of these rules, as well as the legitimacy of the decision-makers, their recruitment, status and claims, and their public performance and self-fashioning.

It is against this general backdrop that I want to suggest a concept of political culture based on modern (social and cultural) history, as well as political science. Such a strategy could provide a strong link between the various perspectives and methodological approaches, ideas and interpretations, and finally place them in a new, differentiated and complex context. The nodal point here is formed by the two fundamental sides of politics – political systems and the ‘political’ as such. On the one hand, there is, as it were, the traditional side of politics, that is the content or matter of politics and policies, which includes not only the concrete themes and topics on the political agenda of a given society, but also the ratio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Political Culture: Career of a Concept
• Part I Modern Reading
• Part II Ancient Interpreters
• Part III Institutionalised Loci
• Part IV Political Actors
• Part V Values, Rituals and Political Discourse
• Part VI Politics in Action – Case Studies
• Index
• End User License Agreement