seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, aristocrats depended on credit demanded from suppliers who belonged thereby to a kind of client economy; the resentment felt against the English aristocracy is well documented and it is likely that a similar resentment was eventually felt against the Roman aristocracy and for similar reasons. If this is right, force is added to the suggestion of P.A. Brunt that the Roman mob in the first century BC included like the mobs in France in the eighteenth century many people of the middling sort, and a further explanation of their readiness to turn to violence emerges.
One important consequence of the institution of clientship was that the struggle of the Orders, of the patricians and the plebeians, was in no sense whatever a class struggle; the plebeian leadership was rich and ambitious and part of its support came not only from those in whose interest it was to support it, but from its clients at every economic level; the patricians were similarly supported by all their clients, the humble amongst them perhaps acting against the economic interests of their class, but nonetheless bound to their patrons by real ties of shared sentiment and mutual advantage.
It is also important to remember that the process of Roman government was not simply a matter of deploying clients and friends and relations in the pursuit of an aristocrat’s turn in office and the prestige and influence which that brought. Political power, then as now, was sought for a purpose; support was directed to one man rather than to another not only because of the traditional obligations of clientship and so on, but also on a calculation of the likelihood of his achieving a desired end; his conduct had to be validated by reference to the ideas of what was desirable and the aspirations of his supporters. The general expectation of anyone on whom the Roman people conferred office was that he was capable rem publicam bene gerere – of managing affairs of state well. The reasons for holding this view – noble birth counted for much – may sometimes strike a modern reader as curious; but they were none the less real.
Elections were in any case serious contests; from Ap. Claudius Caecus (see here) onwards, the lower orders sometimes successfully supported one member of the nobility against the wishes of the majority of the nobility and even brought unwanted outsiders to the consulship; at the turn of the third and second centuries, T. Quinctius Flamininus, the man who defeated Philip V of Macedon (see here), came to the consulship after holding only very junior magistracies, but offices which in some cases involved him in the distribution of land to the lower orders and won him popularity thereby. P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio failed in an election because he asked a farmer whether his hands were so hard because he walked on them.
Farmers indeed in the early and middle Republic formed the vast majority of the Roman electorate. The earliest codification of Roman law, the Twelve Tables of the middle of the fifth century BC, already takes for granted the distinction between the assiduus, the self-supporting freeholder, and the proletarius; Cato in the second century BC, and other writers after him, painted a no doubt idealized position of an early Rome composed of yeomen ever ready to defend their country, but the fact that service as a legionary was before 107 in principle a right and a duty of the assiduus alone makes it clear that early Rome was indeed a community of freeholders, for whom military service was as central an element of the citizenship as voting in the assembly. It is no accident that the variety of Roman assembly which elected the consuls was the people organized as an army (Appendix 1).
The general acceptance—barring extreme circumstances—of a hierarchical ordering of society and of the importance of traditional patterns no doubt led to a conceptualization of the political process in predominantly moral terms; but the consequent imperatives were deeply felt, despite perhaps growing cynicism. P. Cornelius Rufinus, consul in 290 and 277, was expelled from the senate in 275 for possessing ten pounds weight of silver vessels and by this luxury breaking the moral code of the governing class; his family was submerged for four or five generations.
If I am right in arguing, however, that at all times the conduct of the Roman governing class had to be justified in terms of the Roman system of values, a fortiori nobles who advocated particular policies were under an even greater compulsion to validate them in terms of an existing complex of ideas; the pattern is relevant to the progress of the Roman revolution.
1. See Appendix 1 for the different varieties of Roman assembly.
I HAVE SO FAR emphasized certain structural and permanent features of aristocratic society and government in the Roman Republic; but in many respects Rome of the early and middle Republic was astonishingly innovative.
An early stage of Roman history had probably seen the admission to political rights and duties of men who were domiciled in Rome, but were not full members of the community; the struggle between the patricians and the plebeians had seen the eventual admission of the latter to secular and religious office. One may hypothesize that these bendings of the rules were the result of the interest of the Roman governing class in the display of military virtus which made its members peculiarly amenable to pressure from those followers on whom they depended for success in battle.
In any case, just as non-exclusiveness was ultimately characteristic of privileged groups within Roman territory, so it was also of Rome in relation to Italy. It is also worth remarking that just as Rome throughout the early and middle Republic was anxious to add new members to her citizen body, so she was also open beneath a mask of religious conservatism to the import of foreign cults, as J. A. North has pointed out. The attitude was a general one.
And we shall see that after 200 the Roman aristocracy remained just as innovative, but devoted its energies increasingly to the enormous political problems posed by contact with the Greek world, to the acquisition of Greek culture and to the pursuit of the wealth available from the east.
Rome was originally simply one of a homogeneous group of Latin cities, sharing above all a number of common places of worship, although she possessed by reason of her position, controlling a route along and a route across the Tiber, certain peculiar strategic advantages. Unlike the other members of the Latin League, Rome also came under strong Etruscan influence and under her Etruscan kings expanded at the expense of her Latin neighbours.
Already by the fall of the monarchy, the four regional units of the city of Rome, tribus, tribes, instituted for census purposes and for the levying of men and taxation, had been joined by fifteen regional units in the countryside around Rome.1
With the overthrow of the monarchy there was a Latin reaction against Roman power, defeated by Rome at the battle of Lake Regillus; Roman relations with the Latin cities were then regulated by an agreement known as the foedus Cassianum, the terms of which were apparently still extant in the time of Cicero. (There were also treaties with some individual Latin cities.)
The next century was characterized by battles between Rome, the Latins and the associated tribe of the Hernici on the one hand and the Etruscans to the north, the Volsci to the south (see Map 1). Largely successful wars on all fronts culminated with the Roman capture of Veii in 396. There followed almost immediately the first Gallic raid into Italy, with the Roman defeat at the battle of the Allia River, the sack of the city, the near capture of the Capitol and the departure of the Gauls only on receipt of a large indemnity.
It might seem that all lay in ruins and the impression is confirmed by the obvious patriotic fictions which the Roman tradition offers for the years after the Gallic sack. But there is impeccable evidence for the fundamental irrelevance of the Gallic sack to Roman expansion and for its negligible effect on Roman power. A mere twelve years after the sack, in 378, Livy records the building of a wall round the city of Rome:
After a short breathing-space had been granted to those in debt, when everything was quiet as far as Rome’s enemies were concerned, jurisdiction