be the form and name of government.” (Syme 1989, p. 13.)
This makes little sense. In a purely banal sense, it is of course true that no individual can single-handedly rule a state. The ruler will need the assistance and support of others in order to maintain power. But here we come to a crucial divide: between, on the one hand, those who serve a ruler in an inferior capacity and who are removable by the ruler at will, and, on the other hand, those who share his power. Where a ruler is surrounded by purely inferior minions who do his bidding, that is not an oligarchy because the minions have no independent power-base of their own. In that scenario, power is concentrated in the hands of the ruler, who exercises sole power. It is, therefore, a monarchy. By contrast, an “oligarchy” is a form of government where power is shared by the members of an elite group.
The essential difference between monarchy and oligarchy is the whereabouts of power. It is not always obvious whether the entourage surrounding a ruler is beholden to him, whether he is beholden to them, or possibly whether they are mutually dependent on each other.
The key question to ask is this: Who has the whip hand?
The existence of a ruling party, especially in a one-party state, may sometimes give a clue to the whereabouts of power but not always. So, for example, Adolf Hitler ruled Germany as “Führer” of the Nazi Party, but it would be a mistake to see power as vested in the Party, or any members of the Party, rather than in Hitler personally. The same applies to Communist Party leaders, such as Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) and Xi Jinping in China. As far as Rome is concerned, there was in fact no Augustan “party” although Syme seems to have thought there was; but even if there had been, that would not necessarily prove that the system was an oligarchy.
Augustus’s Consilium Principis, drawn from his amici, which is discussed above, did not constitute a party in any sense. Nor was it a council or cabinet, whose advice he was obliged to take. Indeed, certain important issues on which we might expect him to have taken advice do not appear to have been referred to the Consilium at all (Sherwin-White). Membership of the Consilium was not fixed, its meetings were irregular, and the emperor was not obliged to accept its advice in any event. Informal chats inter amicos (among friends), likewise, do not constitute any kind of oligarchy.
Like strong monarchs throughout history who understood the realities of power, Augustus clearly recognized that the old Republican aristocracy, and especially the nobiles, “descendants of consular houses, whether patrician or plebeian in origin” (Syme 1989, p. 10), were foes or potential foes to his regime, just as they had been to Julius Caesar. But he recognized that Julius Caesar’s blunt forthrightness was not the answer, so he developed much subtler tactics to neutralize potential enemies, which enabled him to establish one of the stablest and most durable regimes in history.
Syme recognized Augustus’s defeat of the old nobility: “Not a mere faction of the nobility had been defeated, but a whole class.” (Syme 1939, p. 490.) In addition, “Power receding, aristocrats looked to priesthoods for ‘dignitas’ and social eminence” (Syme 1989, p, 3 f), recognition of the fact that the defeated aristocrats understood the need to look outside government appointments to achieve or maintain a position in society.
Hostility to the nobiles was engrained in the Principate from its military and revolutionary origins. In the first decade of his constitutional rule, Augustus employed not a single nobilis among the legates who commanded the armies in his provincia, and only three men of consular standing. When his position becomes stronger, and a coalition government based largely on family ties has been built up, nobiles like Ahenobarbus, Piso and Paullus Fabius Maximus govern the military provinces, it is true. But a rational distrust persists, confirmed under his successors by certain disquieting incidents, and leads to the complete exclusion of the nobiles, the delayed but logical end of Revolution and Empire. (Syme 1939, p. 502.)
Except for the suggestion of a “coalition government”, of which there is no evidence whatsoever, Syme correctly highlights Augustus’s reluctance to give military commands to nobiles. And Syme also looks ahead, beyond Augustus, to “…the complete exclusion of the nobiles.” Yet Syme still failed to recognize that the regime established by Augustus was not an oligarchy at all but a different type or model of government altogether, a form of monarchy, in which power was concentrated in the hands of a single individual and that this form of government would continue long after Augustus.
Envoi: Augustus v. Alexander
ἀκούσας δὲ ὅτι Ἀλέξανδρος δύο καὶ τριάκοντα γεγονὼς ἔτη κατεστραμμένος τὰ πλεῖστα διηπόρει τί ποιήσει τὸν λοιπὸν χρόνον, ἐθαύμαζεν εἰ μὴ μεῖζον Ἀλέξανδρος ἔργον ἡγεῖτο τοῦ κτήσασθαι τὴν ἡγεμονίαν τὸ διατάξαι τὴν ὑπάρχουσαν. [p. 234]
“Hearing that, after accomplishing most of his conquests by the age of thirty-two, Alexander was at a loss what to do for the rest of his life, Augustus expressed surprise that Alexander did not regard it as a greater achievement to stabilize the empire which he had won than to win it.” (Plutarch, Regum et imperatorum apothegmata, Frank Cole Babbitt, 1931, p. 235, translated by M. Arnheim.)
The above passage comes from a collection of aphorisms or sayings of a variety of kings and emperors published by the prolific Greek biographer and essayist, Plutarch, probably in around 100, or about a century after the time of Augustus.
A neat contrast is drawn here between Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE), a military man obsessed with conquest, and Augustus, portrayed as a statesmanlike ruler, administrator and planner. Whether Augustus ever did comment on Alexander in this way is open to doubt. But, as they say in Italian, Se non è vero, è ben trovato (If it’s not true, it’s at least plausible). The contrast between the two men is certainly striking. By the age of 32, Alexander had conquered most of the known world, but he showed no interest in organizing his empire, and on his death soon after, it was split up among his generals. At 32, Augustus (63 BCE–14 CE) had just emerged as the victor of Actium and was about to embark on one of the most ambitious and enduring governmental or administrative feats ever achieved anywhere.
Nobody has ever accused Alexander of being a democrat (as far as I know, not yet, anyway!), and it is significant that, in Plutarch’s probably fictitious little vignette, Augustus speaks as a ruler in complete control of his empire. There is none of the propagandistic double-talk that we find in his masterly autobiography discussed above. Yet, it is to his acumen and thoroughgoing, unblinking analytical understanding of the true countervailing forces at work in the power structure of his dominions that his success is attributable, making him perhaps the most effective ruler of all time, who was able not only to consolidate a stable regime for his own lifetime across the whole Mediterranean basin, but also to guarantee its survival for another 300 years.
The Roman Republic as “Direct Democracy”
Until Augustus’s accession, the power structure of Roman history conformed to a general pattern shared by many other states, namely monarchy succeeded by oligarchy (minority rule) or aristocracy (hereditary minority rule), minority rule being the “default” form of government throughout history. Some modern writers on the Roman Republic, as we have seen, have managed to misunderstand this whole process, first, by dismissing much of the earlier evidence out of hand and then by going to the other extreme and uncritically accepting a passage of Polybius taken out of context as indicating that the Republic could possibly be regarded as a direct democracy, which is the exact opposite of the true situation.
Seeing the Roman Republic as at all democratic gives one a completely false impression of what it was like. But, as we have seen, modern writers who take this view of the Republic tend to compound their error by also adopting too uncritical