Ahala as master of horse was sent by the dictator to Maelius and said ‘The dictator summons you.’ When Maelius fearfully asked what he wanted, and Servilius replied that he had to stand trial and disprove before the senate the charge laid by L. Minucius, Maelius began to retreat into his band of followers … Servilius followed him and cut him down; covered with the blood of the dead man and surrounded by a band of young patricians, he announced to the dictator that Maelius had been summoned to him, but had fought off the attendant (who had tried to arrest him) and had incited the mob, and had received his deserts. The dictator replied ‘Bravely done, C. Servilius, for freeing the res publica (from the threat of a tyrant)’ (Livy IV, 13–14).
Within the Roman community, a closed group of families, knows as patricians, had been defined already under the monarchy by a process which is now unknowable. The group succeeded after the overthrow of the monarchy in substantially monopolizing the tenure of magistracies and priesthoods alike; as a result patricians also largely filled the senate. Wealthy and ambitious families of plebeians mostly excluded from the processes of government were naturally anxious to be admitted; at the same time the poorer plebeians were anxious to reduce or eliminate the economic exploitation to which they were subjected. The two groups of dissidents combined to extort concessions, the breaking of the monopoly of office by the patricians and the alleviation of the harsh laws of debt (under these a peasant who could not pay off a loan, perhaps of seed corn from a wealthy neighbour, could be reduced to slavery). In the process, the plebs acquired its own assembly and legislative organ, the concilium plebis (Appendix 1), and its own officials, the tribunes, whose chief function was to protect citizens from arbitrary action by a magistrate. At some time they acquired the important right to veto any action by a magistrate or the senate. They were sacrosanct, protected by an oath of the plebs to kill anyone who killed a tribune.
By 342 the battle was essentially won, with the admission of plebeians to the consulate; the most important consequence was the creation of a mixed patrician-plebeian nobility, defined by the tenure of the consulship – a man who held this ennobled his direct descendants in perpetuity – and less exclusive than the patriciate (it must be remembered that in the Roman tradition even the patriciate had once admitted a new family to its membership, the Claudii). This mixed nobility established its right to supremacy by its leadership in the conquest of Italy through the second half of the fourth century BC, the rewards of which, in the form of land, were in large measure distributed to the poorer plebeians, reconciling them to the political status quo. The problem of debt was in fact probably circumvented rather than solved.
Aristotle observed that an oligarchy which remained united could not be overthrown; the collective rule of the mature Republican aristocracy only eventually dissolved in the last century BC when it failed to attend to the increasingly serious grievances of the poor and when individual members of the aristocracy appealed to these lower orders for support in their competition with each other, a competition whose scale and nature had meanwhile already been changed out of all recognition by the spread of Roman rule over the Mediterranean basin.
The most important feature of Roman government is the structure created by the traditional obligation on anyone responsible for taking action to consult a group of advisers. It is apparent everywhere in Roman society; the decision in the last resort might be that of one man alone, but the obligation to take advice was absolute. A paterfamilias might summon a family consilium, a politician might summon his family and his friends (the hapless Brutus in 44 after the murder of Caesar consulted his mother, his half-sister, his wife and his friends Favonius, Cassius and Cicero), a magistrate in his province had to consider the opinions of his entourage; the senate was the consilium of the two highest magistrates, the consuls, by the late Republic the consilium for the whole world (Cicero, Philippica IV, 14).
Political groupings in the late Republic may indeed be regarded as consisting of those men whom a leading politician habitually summoned to his consilium; discussion there prepared for sessions of the senate and meetings of the assembly. Such groupings of course sometimes followed a leader out of habit, sometimes from conviction (see here).
Possessed of certain fairly limited actual powers, the senate by monopolizing the role of advising magistrates during their terms of office in Rome and Italy effectively controlled the Roman state. The senate’s formal powers (Polybius VI, 13) were the control of finance (total, despite Polybius’ qualification) and security, the administration of Italy and the running of relations with foreign powers (except for the actual decision for war or peace which was taken by the people). The control of finance for campaigning was one of the things which slipped from the senate’s grasp in the late Republic (see here), with disastrous consequences.
The most crucial part of the senate’s advisory role lay in the field of legislation; any intending legislator was expected to consult it. The corollary of course was that the senate was also in a position to advise on the invalidation of legislation, a position of which it took advantage in the turbulent years of the late Republic. The grounds for invalidation, technical and ideological, are expounded by Cicero, in a passage highly revealing of the unyielding mentality of part of the Roman governing class:
Marcus Cicero: For many evil and disastrous decisions are taken by the people, which no more deserve to be regarded as laws than if some robbers had agreed to make them …
Quintus Cicero: I fully realize that, and indeed I think that there is nothing else (except a law as defined by Marcus) which can even be called a law, let alone be regarded as one.
Marcus Cicero: So you do not accept the laws of (Sex.) Titius or (L.) Appuleius (Saturninus)?
Quintus Cicero: I do not even accept those of (M.) Livius (Drusus).
Marcus Cicero: Quite right too, for they in particular were instantaneously invalidated by a single decree of the senate (de legibus II, 13–14, compare 31).
The domination of the Roman governing class found expression in the institution of clientela, clientship, an archaic form of personal dependence, which survived at Rome with undiminished relevance, in striking contrast to Athens and the Greek world in general. Cicero regarded the institution as created by Romulus (de re publico 11, 16); it placed the client in the position of being, in E. Badian’s words, an inferior entrusted, by custom or by himself, to the protection of a man more powerful than he, and rendering certain services and observances in return for this protection.
Among the services rendered was political support; a man might be helped to office by the votes of his clients and by those of his friends and associates; naturally they expected him in return to deliver the votes of his clients. The ingrained habits of dependence of clients in particular and the lower orders in general emerge with dramatic clarity from the reaction of one of the characters of Plautus to the notion of a marriage into a higher social class for his daughter:
Now if I married my daughter to you, it occurs to me that you would be like an ox and I should be like an ass; when I was linked to you and couldn’t pull my share of the load I, the donkey, should drop down in the mud, while you, the ox, would pay no more attention to me than if I wasn’t born; you would be above me and my own order would laugh at me, and I should have no fixed abode if we were separated. The asses would tear me with theirteeth, the oxen would run me through; it’s very dangerous to climb from the asses’ to the oxen’s set (Aulularia 228–35).
It is not surprising, given such subservient attitudes, that the Roman aristocracy was able to demand economic sacrifices from its clients:
Mucius Scaevola at any rate and Aelius Tubero and Rutilius Rufus … are three Romans who observed the Lex Fannia (limiting expenditure on food, see here) … Tubero for one bought game birds from those who worked on his own estates for a denarius each, while Rutilius bought fish from those of his slaves who were fisherman for half a denarius a mina … And Mucius fixed the value of things bought from those who were under an obligation to him in the same way (Athenaeus VI, 274 c – e; compare, e.g., Lucilius 159–60 W).
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