life of the Roman Republic. Its first interpreters were indeed its ancient contemporaries, who described what they experienced and observed and, in the process, created it for us. This political culture was not only forged by the socioeconomic dynamics of the time, or by the power relations at play then, and not even solely by the actions and intentions of the historical agents, but also by the relationship forged between Roman political life and those who encountered it and interpreted it in their writing (which extends, in turn, to our own reading and (re)writing). Our first encounter with the political culture of the Republic is mediated by the works of those who wrote about it in antiquity and it is to them that the chapters in this section are dedicated.
These authors, who range from the second century BCE (Polybius, see Chapter 8, Carsana) down to the beginning of the third century CE (Cassius Dio, see Chapter 13, Rich) and differ considerably in the literary genres they adopt, collectively share an interest in two salient and interrelated aspects of the political life of the Roman Republic: first, the reasons that led Rome to become a successful imperial power (for an introduction to Roman imperialism, see Champion 2004); second, the search for why a political system, characterised, in their opinion, by internal concordia for many years, descended in the late Republic into the destructive chaos of the bellum civile (on internal divisions and the notion of civil war, see Breed et al. 2000; Arena 2020).
Their readings, which, in the first place, are indeed these authors’ personal readings, were affected by three main factors, at least: first, the extent of these authors’ direct involvement in the political life of the Republic; second, the language in which they wrote and the conceptual categories at their disposal; third, the literary parameters of the genre with which they engaged and the literary means they adopted to conduct their political analysis.
As far as the direct experience of Roman political life is concerned, Carsana discusses the close collaboration into which Polybius entered with Scipio Aemilianus (Chapter 8). A prominent member of the Achaean League, Polybius had come to Rome as hostage and become closely attached to the Scipiones, learning from them and alongside them, about the nature of that political system to which his homeland had succumbed. His writing, whose starting point was the search for an explanation of Roman success, was in a sense, Carsana argues, an extension of his political activity. Cicero, on the other hand, was very much at the centre of the political life of the late Republic. A prominent architect of this culture, consul, priest, jurisconsult and orator, Cicero was deeply embroiled in the political life of his time (Chapter 9, Nicgorski). Only by virtue of philosophy, to which he dedicated the years after his return from exile, did he succeed, according Nicgorski, in elevating himself from its midst and propose the moral reforms that should have inverted its degeneration. Sallust too took an active role in politics, becoming praetor and then governor of the province of Africa Nova, but, contrary to Cicero, he began his writing solely when he stood down from public life. His works, dedicated to the conspiracy of Catiline, to the war against Jugurtha and to the years from 78 to 67 BCE, became Sallust’s means to act in the present (Chapter 10, Rosenblitt).
However, with the advent of the Augustan Principate, the relationship between the political culture of the Republic and its interpreters was transformed, requiring these authors to search for a (at times mythical) past, whose reconstruction could no longer rely on their direct experience. Writing at the end of the first century BCE, at the time of the transformation of the Republic into a Principate, Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus both wrote about a Republican past that they themselves had not experienced (Chapter 11, Gallia). Unlike Cicero and Sallust, they were both foreigners and had come to Rome to fulfil their literary, not political, ambitions. Plutarch (Chapter 12, M. Beck), Appian and Cassius Dio (Chapter 13, Rich), all writing in Greek during the Empire, looked back at the Roman Republic from different degrees of involvement with the government of Rome. Plutarch, who also became a Roman citizen, spent most of his life in Chaeronea, Greece, where he also became archon (Chapter 12, M. Beck); Appian, who was a Roman citizen from Alexandria, moved to Rome to practise law and later, it seems, he also became procurator, probably in Egypt; Cassius Dio, born and raised in Bithynia, was a Roman senator, who, amongst other honours, reached the consulship twice (Chapter 13, Rich).
As noted, some of these interpreters of Roman political culture wrote in Greek (on diglossia and language choice, see Adams 2003; on the relation between Greek and Latin, see Rochette 2010). The analysis of Polybius, Plutarch, Appian and Cassius Dio was, therefore, inevitably constrained by the ability of the existing Greek vocabulary to capture Roman political life and, crucially, by the conceptual framework inherent in the Greek language and discourse, which inescapably moulded the Roman political world into its own heuristic categories, familiar to their Greek-speaking public. Following Greek political thought of the fourth and third centuries BCE, Polybius was the first foreigner to describe the Roman political system as a tripartite, mixed and balanced constitution, rendering more cryptic his sociological analysis of the people (Chapter 8, Carsana). Plutarch, as Mark Beck shows (Chapter 12), forced the Roman political reality of the Republic into a binary reading of the interaction between the de¯mos and the oligoi and was unable to capture in his writing some peculiarly Roman phenomena, such as the institution of clientela (on which Chapter 29, Duplá-Ansuategui) or the nature of the equites (on which Chapter 25, Hans Beck). Appian and Cassius Dio described the Republican political system as a (not better qualified) de¯mokratia (Chapter 13, Rich), with the main intent to draw a stark contrast between the previous political system of the Republic and the new monarchy under which they lived and of which they approved.
Not all these writers, however, engaged with the same literary genre and adopted the same literary means to carry out their political analysis. If, on the one hand, Polybius composed a ‘pragmatic history’, as he calls it, intended to be of pedagogical and practical value for politicians, Cicero, on the other, worked with the widest variety of genres, ranging from speeches to poetry to philosophical treatises, while Sallust, beside his Histories, focused his intellectual endeavour on the literary form of monographs. Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus followed a chronological order in the unravelling of the events and their analysis, and so did Cassius Dio. Plutarch instead composed, amongst other things, biographies that compared Greek and Roman figures, while the work of Appian followed a geographical order. The literary means and wider framework these authors adopted is not only a matter of purely literary and aesthetic appreciation, albeit this was also an important dimension for these writers (Woodman 1988): the chosen genre yields significantly distinct results for the picture and interpretation of the political culture of the Roman Republic.
By identifying the Roman institutional arrangements as one of the main factors that, alongside the army and Republican values, brought Rome to the stage of world dominion in just over 50 years, Polybius was the first thinker to formulate in full that constitutional reading of Roman political life which was so influential in later periods (Chapters 6, Rebenich and 7, Yakobson). Although behind the tripartite structure of the constitution Polybius depicts a political culture characterised by the social dualism of the senate and the people and he emphasises that, alongside the army, the ideology and value system of