in the provinces; and not only were the societies of Rome, Italy and the empire as a whole suffused by steeply asymmetrical power relations between the ruling and the lower classes.33 The principles of power and hierarchy also openly and even demonstratively structured all political institutions and procedures, assemblies and senate alike, and above all the relations between magistrates and citizens. Last but not least, the same principles were underpinned, affirmed and legitimised by political and social ideology, and even Roman myths and legends revolved around them (see Chapter 34). However, the fact as such does not provide the answer to the all-important question: how could the system have created and successfully upheld such a high degree of acceptance and assent, which was the necessary requirement for subordination and obedience and, in the final analysis, for the functioning of the system itself, so as to achieve this peculiar Roman kind of self-stabilising coherence?
One contributing cultural factor that we can pin down now with some confidence is that the coherence of this political system of the Republic was based upon, and continuously affirmed by, a deeply rooted consensus that was diligently, permanently and, as it were, polymorphically tended by a political class at the summit of all hierarchies, by means of an extraordinarily diversified range of discursive strategies. The identity of this class as a meritocracy was reproduced by a rich repertoire of performative practices, rituals, ceremonies and other symbolic forms of representation that made their culture-specific symbolic capital visible, which was thus used as social credit or creditability and thereby served the manifestation of order by hierarchy. Manifestation and visibility can certainly be taken literally, because all of these aforementioned performative modes and media of representation had to be situated in the public spaces of a city-state, with its ‘culture of personal physical presence’. These spaces were the forums (both meanings of the word apply) of an extraordinarily high degree of civic communication and direct interaction. As such, they were in turn indispensable and indeed constitutive parts of the characteristic political and sacral topography of city-statehood. The immediacy and actual visibility of all procedures and practices, rituals and ceremonies (even for passive spectators) were themselves an integral part of the repertoire of consensus-creating mechanisms in this – as Tonio Hölscher has aptly put it – ‘culture of immediate action’.34
NOTES
1 1 Ober 1989; Harris 1990; North 1990; 2004 [1990].
2 2 Münzer 1920: 133, 317, cf. 1–7, 427 and passim = Münzer 1999:127, 291, cf. 5–11, 362–363 and passim.
3 3 Syme 1939: 11; 1986: v, 13 (quotations); cf. 1939: vii, 405 and passim.
4 4 Syme 1939: 476, 459. Cf. Galsterer 1990 on Syme, his book and his method.
5 5 See Jehne 2006: 4–9; Morstein-Marx 2009: 102–108; Hölkeskamp 2001; 2017d [2012], on explicit as well as implicit assumptions of the traditional construction of Republican politics, on the long-term influence of this construct, and on the critique of this orthodoxy and its methodological approach.
6 6 Millar 2002a [1984]; 2002b [1986]; 2002c [1989]; 2002d [1995]; 2002e [1995]; 1998.
7 7 See the balanced comments by North 1990; North 2004 [1990]: 148–152, 157–158; and 2006: 274–275. See for critical discussions of Millar’s approach and results Jehne 2006: 14–20; Yakobson 2006; Hölkeskamp 2010: Chapter 1; and Hurlet 2012, with full bibliography.
8 8 Pye and Verba, eds. 1965 (esp. the Introduction by Pye and the Conclusion by Verba); Almond and Powell 1966; Pye 1968; Dittmer 1977. Cf. Chilton 1988; Rohe 1990; Fuchs 2007 and Schuppert 2008 (esp. Chapters 1 and 3), both with ample bibliography.
9 9 See the monumental collections on city-states and ‘city-state cultures’: Hansen ed. 2000, 2002; Parker 2004; Hölkeskamp 2010: 71–75.
10 10 See for modern discussions of the concept ‘political culture’, its meaning and epistemological status as a descriptive and/or analytical category in history e.g. Hunt 2004 [1984]: 10–16; see also Sharpe 1999: 853–854; Braddick 2005: 69–71, 81–82 and passim; Braddick and Walter 2005; Hölkeskamp 2009: 36–49; 2010: 53–57; and 2014: 363–367, with further references. On politics as a ‘cultural phenomenon, embedded in society’, Ober 1989: 35–42, and on ‘culture-based approaches’ to Roman history in general, Roller 2010. On monuments, works of (Greek) art etc. and their functions in Roman culture, civic life and ideological self-definition, Gruen 1992; Hölkeskamp 2001; 2004: 151–161; 2010: 61–63, with further references. See Hölscher 2014: 256–262 and passim, on the concept of ‘monu-mentality’.
11 11 On ‘public opinion’ of non-elite groups see Rosillo-López 2017a and the contributions in Rosillo-López ed. 2017b and ed. 2019.
12 12 See Rohe 1990; Stollberg-Rilinger 2000; 2005.
13 13 See Hölkeskamp 2017c [2009]: 322–323, on Meier 1980 [1966]: Chapter 4 and passim.
14 14 Berger and Luckmann 1966: Chapter 2; Giddens 1984: Chapter 6. Cf. Braddick 2005: 88; Hölkeskamp 2010: 67–70, with references. On (political as well as social) ‘structures’ and ‘institutional power’, see Beck 2009: 501–506.
15 15 Molho, Raaflaub, and Emlen eds. 1991; cf. Muir 1981 and 1997; Trexler 1980. See the editor’s introduction and conclusion in Hansen ed. 2000. For a comparative approach to aristocracies in antiquity and early modern Europe, see Beck, Scholz and Walter, eds. 2008; Fisher and van Wees, eds. 2015; and Stein-Hölkeskamp and Hölkeskamp 2018.
16 16 See Stollberg-Rilinger 2000; 2001; 2004; and 2005; Schlögl 2004, discussed by Hölkeskamp 2010: 55–57, 71–72; 2014: 359–369, with further references.
17 17 Hunt 2004 [1984]: 60–66; Ozouf 1988. See Hunt 2004 [1984]: chapters 1, 2 and passim, on the specific ‘poetics of power’ including the ‘rhetoric of revolution’, ‘imagery’, and ‘symbolic forms of political practice’, developed during the French Revolution; Hölkeskamp 2014: 363–364.
18 18 See the contributions in Haake and Harders, eds. 2017; Mouritsen 2017: 94–99 and passim; and now the surveys Hölkeskamp 2019a and 2019b, with full references. See on the lively Franco-German debate on the Republican ‘political culture’, David, Hurlet and Jehne, eds. 2020.