egalitarian lines, but subsequently reverted to the older arrangement. However, the Roman Republic never claimed to be a democracy, and the consuls, praetors, and censors were always chosen from the ranks of senators, regardless of the arrangement of the assembly. Besides these assemblies, there was the Concilium Plebis, which appears to have had the same arrangement and membership as the Comitia Tributa, with the exclusion of patricians.
Dictator: The only exception to the rule of shared power was the appointment of a dictator in an emergency, which was strictly limited to a tenure of six months. The Senate had to pass a decree (senatus consultum) instructing the consuls to nominate a dictator. The dictator would then appoint a magister equitum (master of the horse) to assist him and act as his deputy when necessary. Once appointed, the dictator had absolute power over the Roman state, superseding that of the consuls. The most admired type of Republican hero was someone like Cincinnatus, who, after resolving the immediate emergency in a fortnight, at once gave up his dictatorship and returned to his plough and to obscurity. The reason that Cincinnatus was fêted as an ideal Republican was that he had no interest in gaining personal power. After 202 BCE, the Senate would issue an emergency decree, labeled by modern historians senatus consultum ultimum, instead of appointing a dictator. The dictatorship was only revived much later on, in 82 BCE, first for L. Cornelius Sulla and then again for Julius Caesar in 46 BCE but, so far from preventing one-man rule, it was now used as a vehicle to achieve just that: bringing down the Republic.
“In the Consulship of Julius and Caesar”
A visceral fear of one-man rule is characteristic of oligarchies and aristocracies, not least in the case of the Roman Republic, where, as mentioned above, this fear was stemmed by collegiality and rotation of office. However, a less than persuasive argument is put forward against this view by Lintott, who opines that, “We would be wrong…to see collegiality in principle as a form of constitutional check: the multiplicity of magistrates was perhaps in origin intended rather as cover for a multiplicity of functions and insurance against the sudden death or disability of a magistrate.” (Lintott, loc 1250.) The key word here is “perhaps.” The only evidence for this view is that “…we find the praetors and quaestors generally each having separate functions, although the treasury came to be entrusted to a pair of quaestors, and the aediles, curule and plebeian, worked in pairs in the administration of the games” (Ibid.). A key fact is that the consuls, who did not have “separate functions,” had a veto power over each other. And, besides the power of the holder of a higher magistracy to forbid a lower magistrate from acting in a certain way, a magistrate could use the power of intercessio, as it was called, to cancel a colleague’s action after it had occurred by acting in a contrary sense. But Lintott is anxious to wave this aside as well: “Where we find magistrates, other than tribunes, actually obstructing their colleagues in the late Republic, it is by exploiting their power of consulting the auspices in order to detect unfavourable religious omens” (Ibid.). This use of the auspices to block a colleague’s actions was a well-known political ploy which only confirms its function as an attempt to prevent an individual from becoming too powerful. An extreme example of this (not mentioned by Lintott) was the attempt in 59 BCE by Julius Caesar’s conservative co-consul, Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus, to block Caesar’s populist legislation by closeting himself at home and issuing proclamations announcing bad omens, of which no proof was required. (Suetonius, Julius, 20.1.) As a result, Bibulus was sidelined, and some jokers signed mock-formal documents dated “Done in the consulship of Julius and Caesar” instead of “Bibulus and Caesar.” (Ibid. 20.2.)
In sum, Bibulus’s religiosity, whether genuine or feigned, is just an extreme example of a magistrate’s armory to check and balance a colleague’s actions—quite in keeping with the republican ethos of elite group power designed to prevent any one individual from becoming too powerful. Because of Caesar’s popularity among the masses, Bibulus’s attempts to block him backfired. When he opposed Caesar’s land redistribution bill, he found himself attacked by an irate mob, which broke his fasces (the bundle of rods and an axe that symbolized his authority as a consul) and pelted him with feces. (Plutarch, Cato the Younger, 32.2.)
Violent conflicts like this foreshadowed the impending demise of the republic, with three civil wars in quick succession, first between Caesar and Pompey, then, after Caesar’s murder, between the Caesarians and Caesar’s assassins (the latter fighting for the continuance of the old oligarchical order), and, finally, between the two leading Ceasarians, Marcus Antonius and Caesar’s heir, the future Augustus, who emerged as sole ruler of the Roman world after his victory over Antony at Actium in 31 BCE. But, before discussing the repercussions of this momentous event, let us take a step backward.
The Fall of the Republic
The last century of the Roman Republic was marked by confrontations between two groupings within the ruling oligarchy, one of which championed the cause, and depended on the support, of the lower classes, and the other, of a more “conservative” mindset, bent on the continued dominance of the senatorial elite. The terms “Populares” and “Optimates”, used by Cicero in Pro Sestio in 56 BCE to describe these two groups, tend now to be rejected by historians. However, here I agree with Lintott that, “As for optimates and populares, even though they came from the same social class with its framework of individual and family connexions, this is no reason to deny the divergence of ideology highlighted by Cicero,” with programs and leaders going back generations. Even if popularis politicians “…pursued their own interests more than those of the men they claimed to represent,….the mere possession of personal ambition does not disqualify a man from advancing the interests of others.” (Lintott, A., p. 52 f.)
The long-smouldering antagonism between the plebs urbana (the urban masses, not to be confused with the original plebeians involved in the so-called Conflict of the Orders) and the dominant elements in the Roman oligarchy eventually burst into flames over the radical agrarian reforms proposed by Tiberius Gracchus with popular support.
The Gracchi Brothers
In 133 BCE, Tiberius Gracchus, a member of the patricio-plebeian aristocracy, plebeian on his father’s side and patrician on his mother’s, was elected tribune of the plebs and immediately introduced an ambitious program of land reform entailing redistribution of land from wealthy nobiles to the urban poor. Tiberius Gracchus’s attempt to run for re-election was opposed by conservative senators, and violence erupted resulting in the clubbing to death of Gracchus and some 300 of his supporters.
Ten years later, in 123 BCE, Tiberius Gracchus’s brother Gaius Gracchus was also elected tribune of the plebs and attempted to revive his late brother’s program plus further measures to curb the power of the senatorial oligarchy. He had a broad base of support, made up not only of the urban poor but also of the agrarian poor and even some equites (equestrians, the wealthy class just below that of senator). However, his bid to extend Roman citizenship to non-Roman Italians cost him the support of a substantial number of the Roman urban poor, who were unwilling to share the privilege of Roman citizenship with outsiders. When Gaius Gracchus was defeated for re-election to the tribunate, there was a mass rally of his supporters on the Aventine Hill. The Senate declared a state of emergency by passing what is now termed a senatus consultum ultimum, and the pro-senatorial consul Lucius Opimius at the head of a force of armed supporters defeated Gaius Gracchus and his followers in a pitched battle. Gracchus committed suicide, and approximately 3,000 of his supporters were put to death in the proscriptions that followed.
Gaius Marius
The next popular leader was rather more successful. This was the great military reformer, a novus homo (new man) of equestrian origin, Gaius Marius, who was elected consul an unprecedented seven times between 107 and 86 BCE. Until the Marian reforms, only property owners were eligible to serve in the Roman army. What Marius did was to turn the Roman army into a professional standing army open to all citizens, no matter how poor. Soldiers were now recruited for an enlistment term of sixteen years. Marius’s reforms offered the landless masses the