The politics of Greece was based on reason, that of the Romans on love – love of country, love of Rome itself. The Romans thought of their city as a family, and of its founder Romulus as the ancestor of them all. This was quite different from the Greeks, for whom the family signified at the philosophical level merely those necessities in our animal nature which the freedom of politics transcended. It was the great Christian Saint Augustine who made much of patriotism as the guiding passion of the Romans, partly because he saw in it a prefiguring of the love which animated Christians. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – ‘Sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country’ – wrote the Roman poet Horace, in a line which long represented the noblest of political sentiments. But times change, and after the vast casualties of the First World War, this very line was often used ironically to signify the helplessness of individuals caught up in the aggressive schemes of politicians. How this change came about is an important part of our story.
The Greek cities were a dazzling episode in Western history, but Rome had the solidity of a single city which grew until it became an empire, and which out of its own decline created a church that sought to encompass nothing less than the globe itself. Whereas the Greeks were brilliant and innovative theorists, the Romans were sober and cautious farmer–warriors, less likely than their predecessors to be carried away by an idea. We inherit our ideas from the Greeks, but our practices from the Romans, and each has left a different imprint on the various nations of modern Europe. German infatuation with the Greeks, for example, has been notably greater than that of the British and the French, for whom Rome was the great exemplar. All Europeans, however, have benefited from the inheritance of two quite distinct vocabularies with which to explore political life: the political vocabulary of the Greeks – policy, police, politics itself – and the civic vocabulary of the Romans – civility, citizen, civilization. Both the architecture and the terminology of American politics, for example, are notably Roman.
The Roman vocabulary is in fact even more fundamental than the Greek because Latin was the language in which politics was understood not only when Rome ruled the Western world but also for a thousand years afterwards in Europe, until the emergence of the modern state in the sixteenth century. We talk of the fall of the Roman empire, but the collapse of Rome’s political power (in the Western empire) went hand in hand with the rise of the spiritual empire of the papacy. Indeed, the peoples of what we call the ‘Middle Ages’ (from about 400 to about AD 1500) long retained the conviction that they were still living amid the ruins of Rome. Sometimes they even tried to revive it. Charlemagne, king of the Franks, was crowned emperor in Rome in AD 800, and the Holy Roman Empire continued in a shadowy form until it was abolished in 1806 by Napoleon, who was setting his own dynasty up in its place, at the same time littering France with monuments in the Roman style. At the beginning of the modern period, Machiavelli presented Roman politics as a model for Europe in his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy (1518). There is much to be said for Marx’s view that the French Revolution was a charade played out in Roman dress.
The Rome that so bewitched Europeans provided a variety of models to explore. The Italian poet Dante in the late Middle Ages admired the empire which brought peace to the world, while Machiavelli presented the virtue of the early republic for admiration. Both responded to the story of Rome as the endlessly fascinating adventures of a people who thought of themselves as having a mission to civilize the world. Founded according to legend in 753 BC by Romulus, Rome was ruled by kings until 509 BC when Tarquin the Proud was expelled by Junius Brutus at the head of an aristocratic faction infuriated (so the story goes) by the rape of Lucretia. As a result, the Romans identified kingship with servitude, but in recasting their constitution, they exhibited their characteristic political creativity by a profound modification of their constitution which yet left most of the scaffolding standing. Even monarchy, which was replaced by two consuls jointly holding the imperium of the royal office, retained a vestigial presence in the form of a religious official called the rex sacrorum. The Senate, which held the auspicia (the symbols and instruments of rule), sustained the continuity of the Roman political tradition. Some place had always been found for the participation of the plebeians, the other main class of Romans, but in a state now ruled by patricians rather than by a king standing above both classes, it turned out to be insufficient. Oppressed, as they thought, by the patricians, the plebeians in a body walked out of Rome and set themselves up on a neighbouring hill. The Romans solved this problem in a typical way: by a foedus, or treaty, which allowed the plebeians to have office-holders of their own, called tribunes of the plebeians. The exemplary story of Roman politics consists partly in these constitutional responses to crisis, and partly in the heroic exploits in war which they made possible, as the Romans fought and defeated first their neighbours, then the Greek cities of southern Italy, and above all the Carthaginians against whom they fought three desperate wars before triumphing. Before long they had conquered Greece itself and were ruling the entire Mediterranean coastline, along with western Europe including England and part of Germany.
Roman history revolves around the dramatic events through which the republic gave way to the empire. Julius Caesar was assassinated by Marcus Brutus, Cassius, and their followers in 44 BC, but the assassins were defeated by Caesar’s nephew Octavian and his partner, Mark Antony. When these two fell out, Octavian defeated Antony at the battle of Actium in 31 BC and returned to Rome bent on recasting the constitution to fit the new circumstances. He did this with such success that what he ruled as an empire retained the forms of a republic for the next two hundred years.
Rome is the supreme example of politics as an activity conducted by men holding offices which clearly limit the exercise of power. When the Romans thought about power, they used two words in order to acknowledge an important distinction: potentia meant physical power, while potestas signified the legal right and power inhering in an office; in addition, all offices shared in the imperium, or the total quantum of power available to the Roman state.
Both these forms of power however were separate from another idea which constituted the most distinctive contribution of the Romans to politics: auctoritas. Significantly, this term represented the junction of politics with the Roman religion, which involved the worship of families, and hence of ancestors. An auctor or author was the founder or initiator of something – a city, a family, even a book or an idea. The reservoir of auctoritas lay in the Senate as the body closest to the ancestors. It has been characterized as more than advice but less than command, and the Romans’ respect for it was the real source of their political skill. It was in no sense a kind of political power, but those charged with the conduct of the res publica, or public business did not lightly ignore it.
Rome became fascinating to other peoples as its power expanded, and in the second century BC, when Rome conquered the Hellenic world, the Greek historian Polybius explained to his fellow Greeks what this new hegemon, or master of the world, was like. Skilled in the Greek science of the cyclical degeneration of governments, Polybius explained the success of Rome by the fact that one could not really describe her constitution as monarchical, or aristocratic, or democratic, for it contained elements of all three. The result of this combination of powers, he wrote, ‘is a union which is strong enough to withstand all emergencies, so that it is impossible to find a better form of constitution than this’. He admired above all the steadiness with which the Senate responded to the greatest disaster in its history: the defeat at Cannae by Hannibal the Carthaginian, in 218 BC. Hannibal sent to Rome a delegation of captured Romans who were pledged to return to their captors after negotiating the ransom of their fellow prisoners. The Romans refused to ransom their soldiers in spite of the gravity of the situation, but sent the delegation back to Hannibal as honour required.
Rome’s fame largely rested on a moral strength evident to all who had dealings with her. Bribery of officials was a capital crime, and Romans could be relied on to stand by their oaths. Polybius felt the need to justify this characteristic to his cynical fellow Greeks: the Romans had, he agreed, adopted superstitious beliefs about punishment in the afterlife, but only because this was the best way of making the people virtuous. The Jews, who encountered the Romans at about the same period, felt a similar admiration for so steady an ally: none of their generals, it was noted, ‘made any personal claim to greatness by wearing the crown or donning the purple’. In those earlier days, love of country predominated, but in time success and wealth began to corrupt the Romans, who then fell under the sway of despotic forms of order which they had previously found repugnant. Virtue and freedom declined together. It was the literature of Rome, especially the work of Cicero, that persuaded later Europeans that virtue was the condition of freedom.
Acute as he was, Polybius failed to recognize that most un-Greek feature on which so much of the distinctive character of Roman politics rested: auctoritas. This was the moral fluid in which was suspended the Roman conviction that the good of the patria must take precedence over merely private concerns (such as saving one’s life). This moral was conveyed in many famous stories of Roman heroes. Within this overarching concern for Rome itself, however, Romans were immensely competitive and indeed often quarrelsome. Later writers thought the antipathy between patrician and plebeian which runs through the early history of Rome was a weakness, but Machiavelli, in disagreeing with this judgement, put his finger on one of the central features of the whole Western political tradition. He argued that conflict within the state, so long as it was subordinated to the public interest, merely reflected the Roman concern for liberty and for the protection of civil rights. The policy of Rome, like that of the Greeks, issued not from some supposedly supreme wisdom but from a freely recognized competition between interests and arguments within a society. Western politics is distinguished from other forms of social order by its exploration of this theme: that beyond the harmony that results from everyone knowing his place is another harmony, in which conflict is resolved by the free discussion and free acceptance of whatever outcome emerges from constitutional procedure.