SOSIA Me a portu praemisit domum ut haec nuntiem uxori suae,
Ut gesserit rem publicam ductu, imperio, auspicio suo.
From the harbour he has sent me before him to his house that I may bear these tidings to his wife, how he has managed the res publica by his generalship, command, and auspices.
Plautus, Amphitruo 195–6
Chapter 1 sketched the outlines of this study and established a working definition of res publica, which was not a straightforward task, since (and this point not only deserves repetition but will in fact be repeated throughout the book) res publica meant different things to different people at different times. At its simplest, res publica means either ‘the civic business to be administered’ or ‘the metaphorical arena in which the administration of the civic business is discussed/organized’. In ordinary circumstances, these definitions express complementary, in fact overlapping, perspectives, rather than contradictory ones; still, the perspective that individuals choose to foreground in addressing specific audiences can be revealing. This chapter foregrounds the most literal position on the spectrum of possibilities: res publica as res populi, the property of the populus Romanus. I begin by examining the intimate relationship between res publica and magistrates and the value of this relationship as a tool for individuals to establish personal dignitas within the res publica once their term in office was up. I then look at ways in which this was challenged, of which the most obvious was to attack the achievements for which individuals claimed credit, although we can trace at least two more subversive tactics: the elder Cato’s valorization of impeccable behaviour while engaged in re publica and the popularis focus not on the magistrates but on the populus, which elects the magistrates to manage its res.
The backbone of this chapter is the key position of magistrates in relation to the res publica of the populus Romanus. Magistrates carried out military duty as junior officers (military tribunes), financial administration (quaestors), the maintenance of public buildings and the organization of food and water supplies and public games (aediles), presided over trials (praetors), commanded armies (praetors and consuls), and governed provinces (propraetors and proconsuls, unelected private individuals, usually former praetors or consuls, who were invested with imperium and sent out to manage the empire at large). Additionally the plebeian tribunes had a range of powers intended to protect the plebs, including a veto over the actions of other magistrates and the ability to summon and preside over the concilium plebis, while the censors, two senior magistrates elected every five years (at least in theory; this broke down towards the end of the Republic), drew up the census and had oversight of public morality.1 I am most interested in those magistrates and promagistrates on whom imperium was conferred in the interests of expanding or governing the imperium Romanum. Their administrative role outside Rome was limited: ‘they were there to fight Rome’s wars, collect Rome’s taxes and exercise such supervision of the socii as was necessary for the security of Rome, Romans living in the provinces and the socii themselves’.2 Ideally they did this through existing civic structures, or encouraged the development of such structures where they did not already exist. Lintott notes that while ‘Roman governors were notorious in the Republic and even under the Principate for taking important decisions themselves’, as the Republic progressed ‘they were not only in theory answerable to the senate and Roman people but in fact increasingly subject to instructions from them’,3 although this did not constrict their freedom of movement while in their provinces so much as establish penalties for their bad behaviour once they returned to Rome and gave up their imperium. He identifies the lex Porcia of 101–100 bc as ‘the first general attempt to define the governor’s activities legally’, along with the leges de repetundis that to some extent ‘created general distinctions between legal and illegal activities’.4 This increased interest in central oversight may be read in tandem with a linguistic shift in the meaning of terms like provincia and imperium Romanum, both of which hardened over time from abstract concepts to geographically bounded concretes. Provincia, which originally meant a magistrate’s sphere of responsibility, became the geographical area a magistrate was responsible for governing, while imperium Romanum, which originally indicated the area where Rome had the capacity to issue orders, whether directly subject to Roman magistrates or not (as an extension of imperium, the right to command [imperare] armies), came to indicate an area subject to direct Roman government with clear geographical boundaries.5 This linguistic shift suggests that as the Romans consolidated their grip on their empire, they found themselves rethinking their relationship to subject territories. Meanwhile it became increasingly necessary to confront the results of leaving provincial governors to their own devices. It is this tension that surfaces in the popularis rhetoric examined in this chapter.
The Roman Republic is easily characterized as a political system pulled paradoxically between populus and senate. As Henrik Mouritsen puts it, ‘on the one hand, the Roman people wielded tremendous, almost unlimited powers. Their institutions controlled legislation, declarations of war and the appointment of all state officials; they were continuously consulted by their leaders and kept informed through public meetings. On the other hand, Rome was also an aristocratic society, where the elite controlled vast economic resources and monopolised public office, political, military and religious. The senate’s influence was overwhelming.’6 Without necessarily contesting this paradox, I would argue that folding Republican magistrates into an undifferentiated ‘senatorial elite’ (as, for example, Joy Connolly does7) downplays the ambiguity of their position between the populus (which elects private individuals to public office through its varied and hierarchically ranked assemblies) and the senate (which exerts auctoritas, especially through senatus consulta, to steer the exercise of the potestas and imperium magistrates acquired by way of their popular promotion). The brief time spent actually in office and the susceptibility to senatorial pressure kept most magistrates from complete independence of action, but in principle only another magistrate could prevent a magistrate from taking action within his area of responsibility and such interventions were very rare.8 It would be a mistake to assume that magistrates were simply tools of the senate: it was not uncommon for ambitious junior magistrates to start their careers on a popularis note9 and at higher levels of the cursus honorum we have examples of consuls falling out with the senate (as did Scipio Aemilianus over the Numantine War in 134, for example).10 Ultimately, it was the decisions of magistrates and promagistrates invested with imperium (Sulla in 88 and 83 and Caesar in 49) that elevated domestic violence to civil war. The trajectory of Caesar’s career should make us especially interested in those magistrates who vanish into the provincial long grass and thereby largely remove themselves from direct senatorial oversight. Moreover, magistrates were symbolically as well as practically powerful during the Roman Republic. In her study of the exemplarity of Roman magistracy, Ayelet Haimson Lushkov argues that in addition to the ‘bewildering range’ of institutional functions that cast the magistrates as the third pillar of the Roman state alongside senate and populus,11 the Roman historiographical focus on the deeds of great men ensured that ‘from a literary and cultural point of view, the magistrates hold a central role as both subject and organizing principle of Roman history’.12 Accounts of the ‘political life of the republic’ are necessarily also accounts of ‘the political life of the magistrates’, not least because ‘the magistrates further provided one of the fundamental organizational principles of Roman history, whose basic unit was the consular year, identified and labeled by the relevant consuls’ names’; meanwhile, since Roman constitutional development centred on changes to the nature, number, control of, and access to positions of power, magistrates were key players in ‘the constitutional changes which structure the familiar narrative of Roman history’.13 Republican magistracy consequently ‘possessed a double valence in Roman political thought: not only were the magistrates the actual, historical players who enabled political action by the Roman people, they were also the unit according to which Roman time was divided and Roman history narrativized’.14
This chapter therefore presents an account of Republican political activity that emphasizes Republican magistrates as independent, ambitious political players in their own right. Where Chapter 1 outlined the scope of my study and defined my approach, Chapter 2 examines areas of tension over res publica in everyday political business. It establishes parameters for ordinary political manoeuvring and demonstrates how the fundamental principle that res publica res populi est played into popularis politics (which also explains Cicero’s efforts to define populus rather than res). Finally, it sets the scene for the dramatic moments of violence on behalf of the res publica that punctuate the late Roman Republic and which form the topic of Chapter 3.
When Verres governed Sicily, ‘the res publica of no civitas could be administered’.15 Administrare (‘to administer’) and gerere (‘to conduct, engage in’) rem publicam are two of the most common terms for magistrates managing public business, whether that business is overseeing law courts, administering provinces, or waging war.16 Those who held office stood in the position of managers to the res publica, whereas the relationship of the senate to the res publica was more oblique (hence the usual term for senatorial activity, consulere rei publicae, ‘to look after the interests of the res publica’17). Whereas res publica perceived as political space implies horizontal relationships, because it concerns political insiders talking to each other about matters of shared interest within a metaphorical arena, res publica perceived as civic business implies vertical relationships, since it concerns property or affairs that must be directly managed by one or more managers. It is therefore also possible to describe this relationship in terms of direction: so, for example, as far as the consuls and other magistrates were concerned, their vertical perspective on the res publica was a top-down one, since they were the managers. All magistrates were responsible for administering aspects of the res publica, especially the consuls, who traditionally began their term in office by taking the auspices, dressing themselves in the magisterial toga praetexta in front of their penates, and holding a salutatio before making separate processions to the Capitol, where they would sacrifice an ox each to Jupiter and make vows ‘for the welfare (pro salute) of the res publica’.18 The actual words of the vow are not known, if there even was a standard formula,19 but Pina Polo argues that the vows should be seen as ‘public vows (vota publica)’ and that ‘the consuls did not act as individuals but as supreme magistrates, and, as a result, they did not plead in their vow for the success of a specific venture that they might have to undertake, but for the welfare and safety of the Roman state in general during their term of office’.20 Circumstantial evidence that such public vows invoked the salus rei publicae comes from Varro’s report, extracted from the censors’ records, of what the censor commanded the herald to tell the men after the censor had gone to the templum to take the auspices: ‘May this be good, fortunate, happy, and salutary (bonum fortunatum felix salutareque) to the Roman people—the Quirites—and to the res publica of the Roman people—the Quirites—and to me and my colleague, to our good faith (fides) and our office (magistratus).’21
Although a late source, Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum is valuable for the relationship that Republican magistrates enjoyed with Roman res publica and the ways in which they might draw on this relationship to legitimize their actions, since it preserves the sole extant, extensive account of a legally appointed senior Republican magistrate’s exploits abroad in office. Caesar was in Gaul as a proconsul, but prior to Sulla’s reforms most consuls would have spent most of their term of office commanding armies in the field;22 this, too, was ‘managing the res publica’. In Plautus’s Amphitruo, the slave Sosia has been sent by his master Amphitryon to tell Amphitryon’s wife, Alcmena, ‘how he had managed (ut gesserit) the res publica under his generalship, command, auspices’ by successfully waging war on the Telaboians;23 later in the play, Jupiter, masquerading as Amphitryon, tells Alcmena that he had stolen away from the legion in secret ‘so that first from me you might know the first news about how I managed (ut gessissem) the res publica’.24 Plautus’s characters are Greeks in a Greek setting and embroiled in a Greek mythological plot (the unlikely circumstances surrounding the conception of Hercules), but the language is Latin and the terms used are those appropriate to a Roman commander on campaign away from the city.25 To wage war for the Roman people was to manage their civic business. Those magistrates sent abroad kept the senate and people informed on how their affairs were being managed through letters and reports, commentarii,26 a genre for which the Caesarian corpus now forms our entire data set.
While the lack of literary ornament in all Caesar’s commentarii is notoriously misleading,27 the technique relies on creating an impression of artlessness and innocent fact. It would have been counterproductive to innovate too obviously on generally accepted topics, so it is noteworthy that Caesar, when invoking the res publica to justify his various actions as proconsul in Gaul, consistently depicts insults or injuries to the res publica as insults or injuries to himself, or vice versa. Reflecting on the sorry state of the Aedui in Book 1, for example, Caesar takes their condition personally:
Et secundum ea multae res eum hortabantur quare sibi eam rem cogitandam et suscipiendam putaret; in primis quod Aeduos, fratres consanguineosque saepe numero a senatu appellatos, in servitute atque in dicione videbat Germanorum teneri eorumque obsides esse apud Ariovistum ac Sequanos intellegebat; quod in tanto imperio populi Romani turpissimum sibi et rei publicae esse arbitrabatur.
And straightaway many considerations induced him to suppose that he must take thought and action in the matter. In the first place, he could see that the Aedui, often hailed by the senate as brethren and kinsmen, were fast bound in slavery and subjection to the Germans, and he was aware that their hostages were with Ariovistus and the Sequani. This, considering how great the rule of the Roman people was, he considered to be an utter disgrace to himself and to the res publica. (Caes. BG 1.33)28
The subjection of the pro-Roman Aedui to the Germans is a disgrace both to Caesar and to Roman interests, sibi et rei publicae, because of the greatness of the imperium of the populus Romanus. Since it is not obvious from the text how Caesar could be considered personally responsible for the degradation of the Aedui, he presumably shoulders the public responsibility as the local Roman magistrate, even though this is expressed as reflecting not just on the Roman res publica but also on Caesar himself in a distinctly personal way. As Raditsa notes, ‘there is no discrepancy, certainly no antagonism between his self-respect and the public interest’.29
This duality, responsibility of (or injury to) both the res publica and its local representative, makes the public personal and the personal public: we are concerned not just with the res publica, but with the specific individual(s) legitimately entrusted with the power to act in the res publica’s interests. An insult or injury to the holder of such power is an insult or injury to the Roman res publica, whose representative he is; he is obliged to respond to it as a public, not just a personal, insult or injury. Correspondingly, the interests of the res publica are cited to legitimize actions taken while acting on its behalf. This is interesting not so much because it is surprising (after all, it is obvious that any disaster incurred by Roman magistrates engaged on public business would be a disaster for the Roman res publica) but because it is spelt out, not just once but repeatedly, and because it invests the specific responsible individual with a prominence that makes him more than a mere spokesman for some kind of corporate Roman identity. A corresponding senatorial perspective surfaces in Livy, whose magistrates (especially consuls) are regularly issued instructions including the admonition to act e re publica or per commodum rei publica,30 which seems to be a standard clause whereby the senate recognizes the impossibility of drawing up instructions to cover all eventualities: ‘Go over there and if you can’t do what we want you to do, or if something unexpected happens, do what seems best for the general good.’ In practice, this allows the man on the ground considerable leeway to act on his own initiative while still remaining within the parameters laid down by the senate. Livy’s magistrates typically make use of their leeway to avoid doing things, especially performing routine duties such as returning to Rome to hold elections,31 although there are some interesting episodes that employ the same language, such as when the exemplary consul T. Manlius Imperiosus Torquatus expresses his feelings about being obliged to choose between his own interests and the interests of the res publica by his son’s heroics.32 In Livy, such language clearly belongs to the discourse of everyday civic business; the slant of Caesar’s commentarii, however, reveals how far a magistrate could take this discourse if it suited him to do so.
It is well within the bounds of probability that Caesar’s political aims in publishing this particular set of commentarii might have encouraged him to bring the specific individual magistrate concerned (himself) to the fore in the Bellum Gallicum. That said, while it may not be possible to compare Caesar’s approach to the commentarii of other magistrates, what do exist are letters written by Cicero from his proconsular province in Cilicia in 51–50 bc in which the same duality crops up. Writing to the magistrates and senate on 21 or 22 September 51, for example, Cicero explained that having arrived at his province on 31 July, ‘I considered that I should best conform to my duty and the public interest (officium meum resque publica) by making appropriate provisions for the army and for military security.’33 Like Caesar, Cicero had reasons eminently open to analysis to identify himself with the res publica whenever possible, but the banality of the references in Cicero’s letters, which are addressed to the senate and private individuals alike, suggests that self-promotion is not the only thing at work here. Moreover, a similar subtext appears in a fragment of the elder Cato’s Origines, where a brave military tribune volunteers himself and four hundred unlucky non-volunteers for certain death in order to save a reckless consul: ‘“If you find no one else,” said the tribune, “you may use me for that dangerous enterprise. I offer this life of mine to you and to the res publica.”’34 Either the unnamed consul or the res publica would have been sufficient; the hero of the hour, however, expresses his willingness to sacrifice himself for both.
Since it is hard to access discourse, political or otherwise, outside the golden decades of the late Republic, the Tabula Bembina, a fragmentary inscription with a lex repetundarum on the obverse and a lex agraria on the reverse, is a gift from antiquity.35 It preserves a formula that occurs at least once on a fragment of the lex agraria, which can be firmly dated to 111 bc:36 the injunction that in certain circumstances, ‘the consul, praetor, or censor, whoever [he shall be,] is to have jurisdiction [concerning that matter] and the right to grant trial and appoint a judge or recuperatores, just as shall seem to him [to be] according to the public interest (e re publica) and his own good faith (fides)’.37 Two Greek translations of Latin decrees provide supplementary epigraphic material: (1) the Senatus Consultum de Thisbensibus of 170 bc, which records the senate directing the Roman magistrate Q. Maenius to delegate five senators ‘who[se selection] seemed to him consistent with the interests of the republic and his personal integrity’; here Clackson and Horrocks detect a translation of ita utei/queie ei e re publica fideque sua videatur/videantur;38 and (2) the Lex de Provinciis Praetoriis,39 a law that may date to 100 bc on which there has been a substantial amount of scholarship and to which Crawford 1996a provides a substantial introduction;40 the editors propose to reconstruct a Latin original in which [ita uti e re publica] fideque sua [videbitur esse] consulito lurks behind the Greek of the Delphi copy.41 Prior to either Caesar or Cicero, and in purely abstract contexts—that is, absent any specific individual with an interest in self-promotion—the magistrate’s personal good faith was placed on a par with the good of the res publica.42 Furthermore, this is not just empty rhetoric. Senatus consulta are unlikely locations for such material and the lex agraria is a legal document; the duality was enshrined in Roman law.43 When he identified himself with the res publica in the Bellum Gallicum, Caesar was therefore exploiting an existing relationship rather than creating one. Roman magistrates were not faceless civil servants. It was understood and expected that a magistrate with something to justify could invoke either his fides or his special relationship with the res publica, or preferably (as enjoined by the lex agraria of the Tabula Bembina) both. During the magistrate’s term in office, especially when he was commanding in the field or governing a province and so separated from Rome and the political insider’s metaphorical res publica, the community of consulting political peers, his personal interests were bound up with the public affairs he managed. The consul was not just responsible for administering the local interests of the res publica; in some sense, thanks to his office, he embodied it.
Magistrates, then, enjoyed a particularly intimate relationship with the res publica. On the one hand, they managed (administrare, gerere) the res publica, a position that implies a top-down relationship of managers to the thing managed. On the other hand, this relationship did not subsume the individual into his office: rather, his individual character became all the more important, because he was entrusted with the conduct of public business. He could say, as Caesar and Cicero did, that a particular action was beneficial or detrimental to both himself and the res publica. This was of immediate political advantage to the magistrate while he was in office and could potentially benefit his political future too, since a magistrate’s management of the res publica, if carried out successfully and preferably including some significant achievement marked by a thanksgiving, ovation, or triumph, gave him a base for future activity as a privatus within the res publica of political space.
This is apparent from one relatively substantial source of surviving evidence for elite self-aggrandisement in the ‘classic’ Republic: the funerary context, attested principally by laudatio fragments and funerary inscriptions, in particular the Scipionic elogia.44 The ways in which elite families commemorated their deceased members were far from innocent, since, as Flower observes, ‘from the late third century bc onwards the laudationes which we know about are overtly political’.45 It is therefore significant that these fragments generally depict the great deeds of the individuals they commemorate as deeds of management, while foregrounding not activity within the res publica (that is, the political sphere) but rather primacy within the civitas (that is, the community of citizens). Consider, for example, this fragment of Q. Caecilius Metellus’s funeral laudatio for his father, L. Caecilius Metellus, given in 221 bc:
voluisse enim primarium bellatorem esse, optimum oratorem, fortissimum imperatorem, auspicio suo maximas res geri, maximo honore uti, summa sapientia esse, summum senatorem haberi, pecuniam magnam bono modo invenire, multos liberos relinquere et clarissimum in civitate esse. Haec contigisse ei nec ulli alii post Romam conditam.
for he wished to be a prime war-maker, an excellent orator, a very brave general, to manage the greatest affairs under his own auspices, to hold the greatest office, to be supremely wise, to be held the supreme senator, to acquire great wealth in a good way, to leave many children and to be outstanding in the civic community. This he achieved, unlike anyone else since the founding of Rome. (ORF 6.1.2 = Pliny NH 7.139–40)
If res publica can be recovered here, it must be seen as being subsumed into maximae res, the greatest (military) affairs. What is stressed is L. Metellus’s position in the civitas, achieved by ending this particular rendition of ‘what a Roman nobilis wants to be’ with it. Flower points out the significance of such a speech praising ‘the man who was in effect the founder of the family’s name and fortunes’: since there had been a dearth of office-holding Metelli prior to Lucius, apart from the consul of 284 who was defeated and killed at Arretium, Q. Metellus ‘worked to stress his father’s excellence in comparison with earlier Romans in general’.46 These are the ‘ten most important aristocratic virtues’ and L. Metellus is presented as having excelled in all of them, thereby winning a competition not only with his contemporaries but with past generations.47 Similarly, not one of the Scipionic elogia contains a res publica but all of them go to considerable lengths to place their subject apud vos, ‘among you’, where ‘you’ presumably refers to the massed ranks of ancestor-adoring Scipiones in the first place, but also functions generally as a way to locate a given Scipio within the civic body.48
Van Sickle highlights the themes shared by the Metellan fragment and the oldest two elogia;49 he also argues that the elogia should be read as epigrams, in which case (contra Zevi, who takes apud vos as indicating a real civic audience50) the imagined civic audience of apud vos need not be taken literally, but rather as a convention of the genre.51 The contentious issue of whether the elogia were viewed by anyone other than the Scipiones is not at stake, however; what matters is the message conveyed, which is similar to that of Q. Metellus’s laudatio. So the oldest elogium, that of L. Cornelius Scipio Barbatus (consul in 298, censor possibly in 280), runs:
Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus Gnaivod patre
prognatus fortis vir sapiensque—quoius forma virtutei parisuma
fuit—consol censor aidilis quei fuit apud vos—Taurasia Cisauna
Samnio cepit—subigit omne Loucanam opsidesque abdoucit.
Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus, born of his father Gnaeus, a brave and wise man—whose beauty was equal to his manliness—who was consul, censor, and aedile among you—he took Taurasia, Cisana, and Samnia—he subjected all Lucania and led off hostages. (CIL 1.ii.7)52
The date of composition for this elogium is debated, since it appears to have replaced an erased inscription,53 but it seems reasonable to take it as c.270–250 bc, rather than a later composition, despite the peculiarities of the sarcophagus.54 Flower suggests the erased inscription ‘must have been controversial or unsatisfactory from the family’s point of view’, possibly the claim to have been first of the family.55 The valorized properties in its replacement are: (1) lineage; (2) character-based; (3) physical; (4) offices held; (5) military achievements. What is not invoked is any explicit conception of the res publica or indeed any kind of public service clause, despite the common interpretation of the elogia as a group that ‘reflejado el ideal aristocratico romano de servicio simultaneo a su propia familia y al Estado’.56 Rather than talking about such texts in terms of simultaneity (or indeed service), it might be better to view this as a reflection of Roman nobiles taking it for granted that their public activities, which they report to honour themselves and their families report to add to the corporate family lustre, also served the common interest: instead of an equal duality, in other words, these funerary scripts betray a subordination of abstract public interests to concrete personal achievements.
All this testimony, both in the Scipionic elogia and Q. Metellus’s laudation of his father, is principally concerned with jockeying for position within the citizen body. These gentlemen are interested in themselves and their own achievements (or those of their family), which are measured against those of their fellow citizens. Their end-of-life resumés stress not that they have contributed to the shared public property, the res publica, in their magisterial roles but simply their achievements: holding office, outstanding reputations, position within the civitas (whether the microscopic version of Cicero’s societas iuris, the family, or the macroscopic version, the citizen body as a whole), military victories. This ultimately self-aggrandizing focus fleshes out the magistrate’s half of the res publica/magistrate duality: such decisions as a magistrate makes on behalf of the res publica he will eventually be able to claim (or obliged to disclaim) in his own right as a private individual. When L. Aemilius Paullus appropriated the Macedonian king Perseus’s monument at Delphi to advertise Perseus’s defeat at Pydna in 168, Rome was nowhere to be seen on the inscription; it was Paullus, the responsible imperator, whose victory over King Perseus and the Macedonians was commemorated.57 Likewise when L. Mummius Achaicus, the consul of 146 and conqueror of Corinth, dedicated a temple promised in the field to Hercules Victor in c.142, his inscription emphasized his personal responsibility for the victory:
L. Mummi(us). L.f. cos. duct(u)
auspicio imperioque
eius Achaia capt(a), Corinto
deleto, Romam redieit
triumphans. Ob hasce
res bene gestas quod
in bello voverat,
hanc aedem et signu(m)
Herculis Victoris
imperator dedicat.
Lucius Mummius, son of Lucius, consul, Achaia having been captured and Corinth destroyed under his leadership, auspices, and command, returned to triumph in Rome. Because these affairs were achieved successfully, the commander dedicates what he vowed during the war, this shrine and image of Hercules Victor. (CIL 1.ii.626 = CIL 6.331, Tabula Lapidis Tiburtini)
There is no suggestion of any broader public interest here: the inscription begins with the individual consul, L. Mummi(us) L.f. cos., and ends with him, imperator dedicat. This temple was erected during a flurry of temple building by self-promoting politicians; also significant is the temple dedicated to Jupiter Stator c.143 by Q. Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus (who defeated Andriscus and turned Macedon into a province as praetor in 146, then almost stole the war in Greece from Mummius), and the temple dedicated to Mars in Circo c.132 by D. Junius Brutus Callaicus. Ziolkowski points out that all three generals followed the outstanding P. Scipio Aemilianus Africanus by adopting new names based on their significant military achievements, indicating their competition with him in the military arena.58 Military achievements on behalf of the res publica were excellent material for individual self-aggrandizement; even if consuls began their year in office by praying to the gods on behalf of the res publica, any vows they might make on the battlefield established a personal contract between general and god. Similarly, public buildings constructed by the proceeds of manubiae won in foreign wars enabled the victor to carve his name on Rome’s civic landscape at no personal cost, assuming he did his sums correctly when dividing up the spoils. ‘The credit claimed by Augustus in the Res Gestae and by every other magistrate who financed public projects from manubiae testifies to the fact that Roman magistrates could, to this extent, have their cake and eat it, too: they were credited for the public benefit from projects funded from manubiae even though they did not own them.’59
This indicates one major reason why most politicians were unlikely to challenge the principle that actions performed by magistrates holding public office could afterwards be chalked up to individual credit: it was one that they all expected, or at least hoped, eventually to employ on their own behalf. Further, it gave their descendants a place to start their climb up the ladder to public office. What politicians could and did challenge, however, was whether such actions actually were in the common interest or demonstrated suitable virtus/fides on the individual magistrate’s part. This tension is prominent in the tradition concerning Fabius Maximus Cunctator, who earned his name for the delaying strategy he used against Hannibal in Italy and is the subject of a famous fragment of Ennius:
Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem.
Noenum rumores ponebat ante salutem.
Ergo postque magisque viri nunc gloria claret.
One man by his delays restored the res;
Hearsay he would not put before our safety;
Hence to this day the warrior’s glory shines—
In after time, and more than it shone once. (Enn. Ann. 363–5)
An article by Roller dissects the ‘unusual moral ambiguity’60 of the Fabian exemplum, for which the historiographical tradition preserves both praise and criticism. The criticisms cited by Ennius attacked Fabius on a personal level (because his failure to attack Hannibal when given the opportunity indicated a lack of the virtus appropriate to a Roman commander)61 and on a moral level (because leaving the colonies and Italian towns vulnerable to Hannibal’s slash and burn tactics was dishonourable).62 In response, Fabius argued that he held back in the interests of the res publica.63 Rather than defending his virtus or his fides (either rhetorically or materially, i.e. by attacking Hannibal), Fabius justified his apparent personal failings as the result of a deliberate strategy carried out in the public interest. Attacked on one count, he defended himself by way of the other.
Roller observes that the tradition allows Fabius’s critics only moral arguments ‘couched in terms of courage versus cowardice and honor versus dishonor’, while Fabius alone ‘is given a monopoly on the larger pro re publica argument’.64 Ultimately, it was Fabius whose claims were validated. Had Fabius’s tactics failed against Hannibal, however, he might have faced worse than criticism, since a general’s personal virtus could be the decisive factor when disaster loomed. In his study of imperatores victi, Rosenstein outlines how generals might get away with being defeated if they managed to display sufficient virtus in the process: ‘a general was expected to display courage and self-control when things were falling apart all around him—a willingness to fight hard, take risks, and, if necessary, meet death fighting bravely’.65 A defeat was in no way in the public interest, but the individual concerned might manage to shake off responsibility for it if he could convince everyone that he had behaved in every way as an exemplary Roman magistrate, getting defeated aside.66 It helped considerably if he got killed in the process: ‘to die resisting desperately was thus not only to avoid the shame of capture but possibly even to achieve a certain measure of gloria as well’,67 whereas emerging alive from a disaster invited awkward questions about how the general had survived amid the slaughter of his men.68 All of this indicates not only that the tension between virtus and res publica was genuinely two-sided but also that pushing for the good of the res publica as the pre-eminent criterion for judging an action, rather than prioritizing what said action expressed about the personal (the commander’s) and collective (the soldiers’) character of the actor(s), was actually a rather unusual tactic. Fabian caution, it seems, was generally remembered rather than imitated: he was viewed ‘as an exceptional man in exceptional circumstances’ and his model, ‘although enduring, does not seem to have played a major part in shaping the Roman aristocratic ideal of the proper behaviour for a general’, which was consistently aggressive.69
This is a good note on which to return to the supremely aggressive Caesar and his exploitation of his magisterial claim to administer and embody the res publica in Gaul. Above, I focused on the Bellum Gallicum as evidence for the formal relationship between magistrates and res publica,70 but (like the fragmentary laudationes and the Scipionic elogia) these commentarii are not innocent texts. It is generally accepted that the Bellum Gallicum is not just an artless account of Caesar’s campaigns but a highly artful work of ‘personal propaganda’,71 and furthermore that Caesar wanted to establish himself as a world-class general to rival the resident Roman Alexander, Cn. Pompeius Magnus.72 Caesar in Gaul was doing what Scipio Aemilianus, Mummius, and the elder Scipiones had done before him: using his time in office to construct a personal reputation to compete with current and historic Roman generals. The Bellum Gallicum was written and published at least partly to further this aim.73 In principle, there was nothing wrong or remarkable about accumulating personal political capital from exploits carried out in office; in practice, however, Caesar could expect to face opposition, firstly because his consulship had earned him enemies in Rome74 and secondly because the legality of conquering Gaul was highly dubious: Caesar ‘had no instruction to make conquests, no authority to do so. For there were laws—including his own lex repetundarum—that forbade a governor to make war on his own initiative’.75 At best, Caesar may have had the right to get involved in military operations beyond his borders if it was in the national interest, but only to sort out trouble spots, not take over whole countries. His aggression was particularly ugly because the villain of the first book of the Bellum Gallicum, Ariovistus, had been named rex et amicus during Caesar’s own consulship.
Caesar therefore exaggerates the danger and arrogance of the enemy,76 depicts his campaigns as stemming from a series of defensive acts on behalf of Rome’s local allies, and presents himself ‘in all innocence as a Roman governor who performs his multifarious tasks in a traditional fashion, conscientiously and circumspectly, as duty requires’.77 When Caesar represents himself as thinking that the sorry state of Rome’s regional allies is ‘most disgraceful for him and for the res publica’,78 he trots out a standard formula in order to justify starting a war that may or may not be good for the res publica but which he certainly expects will benefit him. Conversely, when his opponents in Rome attacked him in 55, it was not because his Gallic activities up until then had done any material damage to the res publica, but rather on the grounds (specious or otherwise) that Caesar had broken faith with his Germanic opponents. This breach of fides, the younger M. Porcius Cato argued, should be repaired in the traditional fashion: by handing the offender (Caesar) over to the Germans, thus averting from the soldiers and Rome itself any divine wrath Caesar might have incurred.79 In short, a magistrate or promagistrate’s claim to represent the res publica could be turned against him if he failed to demonstrate the virtus or uphold the fides appropriate to a Roman commander and, by extension, the Roman res publica as a whole. Given the rewards available to a magistrate who substantially outperformed his fellows, it was by no means guaranteed that such a magistrate’s claim to be acting pro re publica would be accepted uncritically.
What I outline above is straightforward: when those who had held office exploited their public achievements for personal self-aggrandizement, their peers generally retaliated by challenging whether those achievements had been appropriately conducted rather than their right to do so in the first place. Having said this, however, there were at least two ways to circumvent the link between public achievement and personal dignitas entirely. The first can be most securely identified with the famous forebear of Caesar’s Catonian opponent, the elder M. Porcius Cato, consul of 195, censor in 184, and the first writer of Latin historiography, for whom an unusually substantial collection of rhetorical and historiographical fragments survives.80 As a homo novus, Cato faced various well-examined challenges which he surmounted in various well-examined ways,81 thereby establishing himself in ‘the Roman historical memory’ as someone who built his political career ‘by challenging the notion that aristocratic authority was the exclusive possession of a few clans even while affirming the aristocratic commitment to the replication or reperformance of ancestral practices and behaviours’.82 Since Cato lacked the sort of family that accumulated in impressive tombs and produced inherently competitive epitaphs, in other words, he competed not with his own uninspiring family history but with the serried ranks of Rome’s collective past; and his principal strategy of self-promotion relied not so much on his individual achievements in office as on the construction of a public persona as one who devoted himself to the public sphere even when not holding any public office at all. On the one hand, Cato held that such offices were ‘duties to be performed in the interests of the res publica, with strict attention to the particular tasks and proper procedures, and with equally strict avoidance of all personal gain from the opportunities afforded by public offices and commands’, and on the other hand he thought prominent men were obliged to spend their time usefully in the public interest.83
Cato did promote his various individual achievements as well. Like most other consuls of the pre-Sullan period, he commanded an army abroad during his year in office;84 this was, however, his only active military command held under his own auspices, and although his activities in Spain earned him three days of public thanksgiving, a triumph, and an opportunity to promote himself as a military hero on his return, it is noteworthy that most of his preserved remarks to do with his Spanish campaign concern the propriety of his personal behaviour (what he ate and drank, that he did everything as cheaply as he could, that he behaved scrupulously in regard to public money).85 A few years later, he made as much political capital as possible out of a flanking mission performed against the Aetolians at Thermopylae in 191,86 but this mission, while successful and pleasingly dramatic, was carried out as a military tribune under the command and auspices of the consul, M’. Acilius Glabrio, to whom the credit for the victory properly belonged.87 Cato was not averse to self-promotion on military grounds; his problem was that his achievements could not compete with those of such genuinely outstanding contemporary generals as the elder P. Scipio Africanus and L. Scipio Asiaticus. He cemented his reputation as summus imperator for posterity by writing a handbook on military matters,88 but this was not what underpinned his political self-promotion. Rather, he downplayed the extraordinary occasional efforts of individuals and valorized instead extraordinary long-term devotion (especially his own) to the res publica in the sense both of civic affairs and of the communal arena within which he and his political peers moved.
This is reflected in the fragments of Cato’s historical work on the origins of the various Italian communities. Cato notoriously left generals (other than himself) unnamed in the Origines,89 thereby breaking the accepted public achievement/individual credit link (for other people). I cited the anecdote of the brave tribune and the escaping consul above;90 in the actual fragment from Cato, even the tribune (eventually unmasked by Gellius as Quintus Caedicius, although Gellius reports that Claudius Quadrigarius calls him Laberius) goes unnamed, and in the paraphrase of Cato’s anecdote that precedes the quotation neither the tribune nor the consul is named. While this spares the anonymous consul discredit for having led his army into a dangerous situation, the tale as preserved by Gellius imputes no explicit guilt but does transfer credit for escaping the Carthaginian trap from the consul to the self-sacrificing tribune. (Cato’s own stint as a heroic military tribune may be relevant to this point.) Gotter argues that the absence of names ‘is a matter of devaluing individual heroics as a whole’; it is not ‘a devaluation of norms’ (since the stressed norm remains virtus) but rather a matter of shifting those norms from the individual actor to the populus Romanus as a body.91 Cato’s refusal to name (other people’s) names brings the exemplum to the fore, as opposed to the person or their gens. Whereas wandering Greek heroes and the protagonists of foundation myths are named, ‘the entire aristocracy of the “classical” Republic’ coalesces into a collective mass.92 This marked absence may also be taken as ‘an application of Cato’s concept of duty: service for the state, not for personal glory’,93 albeit one not applied to Cato himself, who included two of his own speeches in the Origines and must have done so in a context that made his own role clear.94 To quote Gotter, ‘Catonian historiography is politics by other means.’95
To place the res publica above the individuals who managed or moved within it was to render anonymous those (other, extraordinary) individuals and open up opportunities for self-promotion on the grounds of ordinary political activities excellently conducted. Cato stressed fiscal propriety throughout his life, whether in opposing the repeal of the Oppian sumptuary law during his consulship or inveighing against extravagance and the misuse of public funds and going to extreme lengths to ensure profitable contracts for public works and vectigalia as censor.96 Furthermore, Cato’s treatment of past Romans like the military tribune (who are identified ‘through the political and military offices that provide the key to their place in Rome’s civic and social hierarchy, but which fail to individualize them’97) stands in contrast to his treatment of contemporaries, who are denounced and attacked individually (so, for example, Ser. Sulpicius Galba, praetor in 151 and consul in 144, is roughly treated).98 While praise is anonymous, criticism involves named names. Mehl takes this to indicate more than Cato making points against select contemporaries; rather, it is part of Cato’s crusade against the influences that he perceived as corrupting the mos maiorum during his own lifetime and should be read as ‘moral critique’.99 Appeal to the res publica is prominent in Cato’s oratorical fragments,100 of which the most relevant comes from the speech De Sumptu Suo of 164:
Iussi caudicem proferri, ubi mea oratio scripta erat de ea re, quod sponsionem feceram cum M. Cornelio. Tabulae prolatae: maiorum benefacta perlecta: deinde quae ego pro re p. fecissem leguntur. Ubi id utrumque perlectum est, deinde scriptum erat in oratione: ‘numquam ego pecuniam neque meam neque sociorum per ambitionem dilargitus sum’. Attat, noli, noli <s>cribere, inquam, istud: nolunt audire. Deinde recitavit: ‘numquam <ego> praefectos per sociorum vestrorum oppida imposivi, qui eorum bona liberos diriperent’. Istud quoque dele; nolunt audire: recita porro. ‘numquam ego praedam neque quod de hostibus captum esset neque manubias inter pauculos amicos meos divisi, ut illis eriperem qui cepissent’. Istuc quoque dele: nihil <e>o minus volunt dici; non opus est recitato. ‘Numquam ego evectionem datavi, quo amici mei per symbolos pecunias magnas caperent’. Perge istuc quoque uti cum maxime delere. ‘Numquam ego argentum pro vino congiario inter apparitores atque amicos meos disdidi, neque eos malo publico divites feci’. Enimvero usque istuc ad lignum dele. Vide sis quo loco re<s> p. siet, uti quod rei p. bene fecissem, unde gratiam capiebam, nunc idem illud memorare non audeo, ne invidiae siet. Ita inductum est male facere inpoene, bene facere non inpoene licere.
I ordered the book to be brought out in which had been written my speech on that matter concerning which I had made a judicial wager with Marcus Cornelius. The tablets were brought out; the services of my ancestors were read out; then those things which I had done for the res publica were read. When the reading out of both of these was finished, the speech went on as follows: ‘Never have I lavished my own money or that of the allies in order to win favour.’ ‘Oh no!’ I said, ‘Don’t, don’t write that.’ Then he read out, ‘Never have I imposed prefects on the towns of your allies, to plunder their property and children.’ ‘Delete that too; they don’t want to hear it. Read further.’ ‘Never have I divided booty taken from the enemy or prize money among the small circle of my friends and thus snatched it away from those who had captured it.’ ‘Erase as far as that as well: there is nothing they less want said than that. It is not needed; read on.’ ‘Never have I granted a travel order to enable my friends to gain large sums by means of the warrants.’ ‘Get on and delete there too, immediately.’ ‘The money intended for wine distribution I have never shared out among my attendants and friends nor have I made them rich to the detriment of the public.’ ‘Most certainly erase that, right down to the wood.’ See, if you please, what condition the res publica is in, when for fear it should be a cause of ill will I dare not recall the very services I performed for the res publica, from which I used to gain gratitude. Thus it has become normal practice to do ill with impunity, but not to be permitted to do well with impunity. (ORF 8.44.173 = Fronto, Ad A. Imp. 1.2.9; translation from Astin 1978: 135–6, slightly amended)
Unsurprisingly, the homo novus Cato does not linger on the maiorum benefacta, the services of his ancestors. At the same time, however, he passes just as fast over ‘what I had done for the res publica’, that is, his actual achievements in office. Rather, the stress is solely on the negative: what Cato had not done, from misusing his own or allied money to enriching his friends at public expense. Cato concludes that all these disreputable activities are now common practice and his audience will not thank him for reminding them of his own pristine career; it will only harm his cause to stress his exemplary past conduct. The implicit competitive claim involves not what Cato did (which plenty of consuls past and future could reasonably claim to have matched or surpassed) but how he did it (with a clean-handedness no one in these debased days will appreciate). For Cato, it is through this clean-handedness, rather than any specific office or act, that he served (bene fecissem) the res publica; and it is through such service to the res publica that one gains gratitude (gratia) and thus political capital. This tactic neatly circumvents the standard public office/personal credit political economy apparent in the funerary texts and might have produced a different outcome for the Roman Republic had more major politicians seen fit to stake their careers on it. Since it was a tactic available to anyone with a talent for literary self-promotion and did little to differentiate a given individual from his competitors (recall L. Caecilius Metellus’s wish to be clarissimus in civitate and the Scipionic stress on where a given Scipio stood apud vos), it is obvious why most of them did not.
Cato’s subversion of the aristocratic code remains just that, however: aristocratic. The promotion of one’s perfectly proper conduct in the administration of the res publica was a strategy available only to those who had been involved in administering the res publica, having undergone the aristocratic business of election to (preferably high) office. Furthermore, as subversions go, it is not particularly subversive; it politicizes the res publica only insofar as it lays stress on individual conduct within the res publica rather than individual achievement on behalf of the res publica, a shift of emphasis that is hardly inimical to the principle of elite administration. From an elite perspective, the other way in which the public office/individual credit link was circumvented was much more worrying: the popularis invocation of the supreme authority of the populus Romanus.
One anecdote sometimes cited as a locus classicus of elite/populus interaction is retailed by Valerius Maximus and concerns the consul of 138:
Qui enim licet hoc loci Nasicam praeterire, fidentis animi dictique clarissimum auctorem? Annonae caritate increscente C. Curiatius tr. pl. productos in contionem consules compellebat ut de frumento emendo adque id negotium explicandum mittendis legatis in curia referrent. Cuius instituti minime utilis interpellandi gratia Nasica contrariam actionem ordiri coepit. Obstrepente deinde plebe, ‘tacete, quaeso, Quirites,’ inquit: ‘plus ego enim quam vos quid rei publicae expediat intellego.’ Qua voce audita omnes pleno venerationis silentio maiorem auctoritatis eius quam suorum alimentorum respectum egerunt.
For how at this point can I pass over Nasica, the famous author of a saying that expressed his confident spirit? The price of corn was on the rise and the tribune of the plebs C. Curiatius brought the consuls before a contio and urged them to make a motion in the senate about buying corn and sending envoys to arrange the matter. Nasica began to speak in a contrary sense, in order to obstruct this highly inexpedient course of action. Then, when the people shouted in protest, ‘Be silent, I ask you, Quirites,’ he said, ‘for I more than you grasp what is expedient for the res publica.’ When they heard that, all fell reverently silent, paying more regard to his authority than to their own nourishment. (ORF 38.1.3 = Val. Max. 3.7.3)
There is room for doubt over the historicity of this anecdote, which was, after all, preserved as an exemplum by an imperial author. Still, it is worth considering the message the anecdote conveys, especially since P. Scipio Nasica plays a starring role in the breakdown of Republican political consensus; it seems suspiciously neat that the man who as a privatus five years later would invoke the welfare of the res publica to suppress with violence the tribune Tiberius Gracchus was on record as consul invoking the res publica to shut down the activities of an earlier tribune channelling popular discontent. Reading between the lines, Nasica’s comment indicates something to the effect of ‘You selfish plebs may think a grain law would be in your interests, but actually this is an expression of your narrow-minded self-interest; I can see the broader picture and therefore you should sit down and shut up when I tell you that a grain law would not be in the interests of that broader picture, that is to say: res publica.’ Nasica is shown exerting the consul’s claim to know what was best for the res publica (since the consul was, after all, responsible for its administration) when his audience proved unreceptive to more reasoned arguments.
This incident has occasionally been treated as representative of how the elite classes kept the populus under their thumb during the classic Republic (that is, through the exertion of sheer auctoritas),101 probably because of Valerius Maximus’s claim that Nasica’s audience dutifully shut up, but the broader historical context is actually one of general and increasing tension between the tribunes and their senior colleagues. Lily Ross Taylor’s 1962 study of tribunician conduct in the two decades prior to 133, which emphasizes the ‘revolutionary character’ of incidents like the imprisonment of the consuls in 151 and 138,102 has been expanded by Williams, who argues that such behaviour was normal tribunician activity; although some tribunes at any given point in Roman history may have acted as tools of the senate or individual politicians, the tribune body as a whole functioned to further the interests of the populus.103 The contio encounter Valerius Maximus describes is the antagonistic sort: the consul had been dragged before a presumably hostile contio by a definitely hostile tribune in an attempt to compel him to do something about the high price of grain. Nasica’s eventual response was not conciliatory, but rather a straightforward appeal to authority: to tell the contio to stop nagging because he knew best. Even if this particular contio did fall silent, as Valerius Maximus claims, 138 was a difficult year for all concerned; at some point the levies for the Spanish war became a hot issue and Nasica and his colleague, having refused to accede to the demand by two tribunes to release a number of men from the levy, were hauled off to prison by the same tribunes in a repeat of an incident in 151.104 In short, Nasica’s relationship with the tribunes and by inference any section of the populus for which such tribunes could claim to speak was antagonistic from the start. (Either this Nasica or his son is also the subject of another famous anecdote from Valerius Maximus in which an untimely witticism on a voter’s calloused hands won the wit a repulsa at the elections for the curule aedileship;105 the family was not known for its ingratiating approach to the electorate.) It seems unduly generous to take Nasica’s autocratic shortness as characteristic of elite dealings with the populus in general, since the year was not one of ‘politics as usual’ and Nasica had in fact begun by attempting to talk his way out of a sticky situation. On the other hand, it is comprehensible that Nasica, backed into a corner by a hostile audience, might have resorted to exploiting the consul’s responsibility for managing the res publica (more usually exhibited on the battlefield) to shut down popular discontent in a domestic political spat.
Valerius Maximus’s anecdote highlights two important issues: firstly the growth of political tensions surrounding popular interests and secondly the use of consular authority (rather than any auctoritas belonging to the political elite as a whole), derived especially from the consul’s privileged position in relation to the res publica, to silence discussion when argument fails. This nasty little nexus gave rise to the disastrous tribunate of Nasica’s eventual bête noire, Tiberius Gracchus. I will examine the events of 133 in more detail in Chapter 3, but it is pertinent that when Tiberius was attacked for arranging the deposition of a fellow tribune, Marcus Octavius, he defended himself on the grounds that whereas a tribune who engaged in something illegal like arson was a bad tribune, a tribune who annulled the power of the people was no tribune at all (and could therefore be removed from office, as Octavius had been).106 Tiberius and his turbulent successors in the tribunate represented themselves, as tribunes, as the instruments of the populus; whereas Cato had subverted the public achievement/personal credit link in the interests of co-opting more personal credit for himself, the populares generally aimed to break through elite opposition in order to pass whatever the controversial bill of the day happened to be. Their attitude to magisterial dignitas derived from the administration of the res publica was consequently considerably less respectful.
It is difficult to find examples of genuinely popularis rhetoric, let alone popularis rhetoric on any specific topic, but an illuminating fragment of Gaius Gracchus does survive:
Nam vos, Quirites, si velitis sapientia atque virtute uti, etsi quaeritis, neminem nostrum invenietis sine pretio huc prodire. Omnes nos, qui verba facimus, aliquid petimus, neque ullius rei causa quisquam ad vos prodit, nisi ut aliquid auferat. Ego ipse, qui aput vos verba facio, ut vectigalia vestra augeatis, quo facilius vestra commoda et rempublicam administrare possitis, non gratis prodeo; verum peto a vobis non pecuniam, sed bonam existimationem atque honorem. Qui prodeunt dissuasuri ne hanc legem accipiatis, petunt non honorem a vobis, verum a Nicomede pecuniam; qui suadent ut accipiatis, hi quoque petunt non a vobis bonam existimationem, verum a Mithridate rei familiari suae pretium et praemium; qui autem ex eodem loco atque ordine tacent, hi vel acerrimi sunt; nam ab omnibus pretium accipiunt et omnis fallunt. Vos, cum putatis eos ab his rebus remotos esse, inpertitis bonam existimationem; legationes autem a regibus, cum putant eos sua causa reticere, sumptus atque pecunias maximas praebent, item uti in terra Graecia, quo in tempore Graecus tragoedus gloriae sibi ducebat talentum magnum ob unam fabulam datum esse, homo eloquentissimus civitatis suae Demades ei respondisse dicitur: ‘mirum tibi videtur, si tu loquendo talentum quaesisti? Ego, ut tacerem, decem talenta a rege accepi’. Item nunc isti pretia maxima ob tacendum accipiunt.
For you, fellow citizens, if you wish to be wise and virtuous, and if you inquire into the matter, will find that none of us comes forward here without pay. All of us who address you are after something, and no one appears before you for any purpose except to carry something away. I myself, who am now recommending you to increase your taxes, in order that you may the more easily serve your own advantage and administer the res publica, do not come here for nothing; but I ask of you, not money, but honour and your good opinion. Those who come forward to persuade you not to accept this law, do not seek honour from you, but money from Nicomedes; those also who advise you to accept it are not seeking a good opinion from you, but from Mithridates a reward and an increase of their possessions; those, however, of the same rank and order who are silent are your very bitterest enemies, since they take money from all and are false to all. You, thinking that they are innocent of such conduct, give them your esteem; but the embassies from the kings, thinking it is for their sake that they are silent, give them great gifts and rewards. So in the land of Greece, when a Greek tragic actor boasted that he had received a whole talent for one play, Demades, the most eloquent man of his community, is said to have replied to him: ‘Does it seem wonderful to you that you have gained a talent by speaking? I was paid ten talents by the king for holding my tongue.’ Just so, these men now receive a very high price for holding their tongues. (ORF 48.12.44 = Gell. 11.10.1)
The fragment comes from Gaius’s speech against a proposed law of 123, the lex Aufeia, on a quarrel between Mithridates V of Pontus and Nicomedes II of Bithynia over the proposal to give Phrygia to Mithridates.107 Gaius makes a show of letting the populus in on the great political secret of the day: those who propose legislation, or attack proposed legislation, or are involved in politics in any way whatsoever, himself included, are motivated by self-interest. This enables him to set up a contrast between his own laudably self-interested motivation (bona existimatio, ‘good opinion’, and honor, which might be ‘honour’ or ‘office’) and the purely mercenary motives of those currently arguing against him or keeping quiet, who do so in the hope of monetary reward from one king or the other. What is interesting is how Gaius justifies his opinion that the vectigalia should be increased on the grounds that this will make it easier for ‘you’ (his audience, the populus), to administer to ‘your’ good (vestra commoda) and the res publica. By now administrare rem publicam should be familiar as a standard term for carrying out public business; in the majority of cases, however, it refers to the activities of magistrates and those who advise them (that is, the senate).108 It is easy to see Gaius’s logic, which rests on the familiar premise that the populus, comprising the civic body (civitas) to which the res publica ultimately belongs, elects magistrates to administer the res publica on its behalf.109 Gaius removes the middleman: his populus, by passing laws and electing magistrates, directly administers its res publica.110 Mackie argues that the populares ‘constructed ideological justifications for extending the rights and powers of the populace, justifications based on values which the proponents of senatorial power also shared’.111 This particular justification up-ends the magisterial perspective on the res publica; the perspective Gaius Gracchus provides here is that of a vertical relationship seen from the bottom, in which the focus is less on the administration of the res publica than on the selection of the administrators (and potentially also the removal of those who administer unsatisfactorily).
Gaius’s perspective both clarifies and may be clarified by a minor puzzle raised in Chapter 1: Cicero’s definition of a res publica as the res populi in the De Republica. Schofield, approaching De Republica from the angle of the Greek theoretical models Cicero employs, is struck by Cicero’s use of a property metaphor; he argues that the definition of res publica as res populi is ‘designed to furnish the grounds of a distinction between constitutions/politeiai/set-ups/“regimes” (in the Straussian parlance) that are legitimate and those that are not’, and furthermore that ‘this interest in discriminating between set-ups on grounds of legitimacy is a distinctly Roman and Ciceronian input into the theory of Rep’ (his italics).112 While this argument is broadly plausible, the novelty of Cicero’s metaphors is questionable, since much of my discussion so far leads to the conclusion that the res publica was precisely conceived of as the property (amorphous and undefined a property as it may be) of its constituent public, whether that be the citizens of Rome or the Gallic and Sicilian civitates of Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum and Cicero’s Verrines or the nationes Gaius Gracchus says have lost their res publicae through avarice and foolishness (ORF 48.3.22). If a res publica can be ‘handed down’ (tradere) by the maiores to the current generation, or by the current generation to future magistrates,113 it must be conceived of as property in some respect. Moreover, several fragments of Ennius follow the res maximae of the Scipionic elogium for L. Scipio Barbatus by compressing res publica into simply res;114 historically it was res that was the indispensable part of the formula, the ‘thing’, not publica, perhaps because such texts address a stratum of society that took for granted its unquestioned right/duty to administer said thing(s) and had no particular concern to stress that it did so on the public’s behalf. Conversely, the point may be that it is precisely not the public that is administered: the populus selects its stewards to manage matters of communal concern, not to manage itself. In any case, Cicero’s definition aligns perfectly well with existing traditions of Roman thought and practice, even if it causes problems for those who want to map his categories onto Greek theorizing. What does begin to look odd, however, is Cicero’s insistent stress on defining the publica (that is, the populus) to which the res belongs.
The Gracchan fragment indicates the more contentious political circumstances in play well before and during the time De Republica was written, and also suggests a reason why this concept of the res publica as the property of the populus might be obscured in what remains of ‘live’ Republican discourse. As the discussion of popular government at De Republica 1.47–50 shows, the claim that res publica res populi est lends itself very easily and very obviously to popularis political exploitation. This discussion disembowels the jingle in a way that lays out the political capital available for those inclined to take such a definition at face value:
Si vero ius suum populi teneant, negant quicquam esse praestantius, liberius, beatius, quippe qui domini sint legum, iudiciorum, belli, pacis, foederum, capitis unius cuiusque, pecuniae. hanc unam rite rem publicam, id est rem populi, appellari putant.
But if the people would maintain their rights, they [those arguing in favour of popular government] say that nothing would be more outstanding, more free or more happy, for they themselves would be masters of the laws and of the courts, of war and peace, of international agreements, and of everyone’s life and property. For this alone, they think, can rightly be called a res publica, that is, ‘the property of the people’. (Cic. Rep. 1.48)
For those inclined to popular politics, defining a res publica explicitly as the res populi supports the idea that the populus should exert direct control over all aspects of public affairs. All three ‘pure’ forms of government (monarchy, aristocracy, popular) come in for criticism in the De Republica, but it is harder to deny that a res publica controlled by the people does not count as a res populi: ‘there may seem to be logical difficulties’ (videbuntur fortasse angustiae), says Scipio, in denying that a res publica exists when everything is in the power of the populus.115 Of course his interlocutors are vehement that this is not the case (perhaps especially so because of the apparent paradox involved) and triumphantly declare that no res publica exists here either, mostly by way of rejecting the claims of a disorganized rabble (multitudo) to call itself a populus—and at this point the reasoning behind Cicero’s emphatic definition of a populus as a community held together by common bonds of justice (consensus iuris), rather than simply a civitas of fellow cives, becomes clear. Once again, it is not the definition of res that is attacked, but rather the publica/populus half of the equation. What exists in the classic popularly governed community, according to Laelius, is not the rule of the populus but rather a beast that imitates the name and appearance of the people.116 It is generally agreed that a popular government is the worst of the three possible ‘pure’ forms.117
While there is more to be said about what Cicero is doing with these arguments, especially in relation to his Greek models,118 my main point here is the way in which casting the res publica as property played into a certain theme of contemporary Roman politics. The populares insisted on the formal powers of the populus, which they used to break through senatorial and magisterial opposition;119 to make the point that the res publica belonged to the populus, rather than to the magistrates who administered it or the senators who advised them, was, at the very least, a way to ingratiate oneself with a popular audience. This political theme surfaces in a related tussle over maiestas populi Romani, which Bauman defines as ‘a technical legal concept, which was first formulated in the mid-third century bc, and which expressed the superior position which the Roman State conceived itself as occupying, as against all other peoples’. The significance of this concept is shown by its inclusion in treaties ‘in a form which bound the other contracting party to “respect and preserve” the maiestas of the Roman people’; importantly, ‘although Roman magistrates possessed maiestas, they did so only in a derivative sense, as the delegates of the Roman People, and when the protection of the crimen maiestas was extended to them it was quite clear in legal theory that the ultimate maiestas which was being protected was maiestas populi Romani’.120 The obvious parallel is the direction of (power) flow: as with res publica, power flows from the people to the magistrates by virtue of the former’s selection of the latter to act in various capacities on behalf of the populus Romanus. Up to a point, this is uncontroversial: that point is where magistrates and promagistrates start to overreach themselves, thereby provoking a popular backlash based on the point that their powers come from the populus. In the case of maiestas, a significant moment was the lex Appuleia maiestatis of the popularis tribune L. Appuleius Saturninus, passed in 103 or 101–100,121 which established the crime of maiestas populi Romani minuta, ‘diminishing the maiestas of the Roman people’. Although it is difficult to pin down the exact content of Saturninus’s law (and indeed quibbling over the definition of maiestas became a significant feature of maiestas trials122), the clear intention was to exert (popular) control over the conduct of provincial governors.123 The novelty of the lex Appuleia may not have been the maiestas minuta part of the clause (which may already have featured in the existing crime of perduellio124) but rather the establishment of a standing quaestio perpetua comprised (at the time) of equestrian iudices to try it.125 Later maiestas legislation was passed by Q. Varius in 91 or 90 and by Sulla in 81.126 Lintott is pessimistic on the actual success of maiestas legislation as a way either to protect Republican institutions or to bridle ‘over-mighty governors and commanders in the field’,127 and Seager points out that its vagueness meant it had broad scope but ‘could prove an unreliable weapon’,128 but its appearance at this time and from this particular quarter stands out as part of a broader trend of changing attitudes towards the empire and its administration. In this context, maiestas legislation looks like part of an ongoing attempt by popularis politicians to enforce a degree of professional behaviour on magistrates charged with the administration of the res populi: if provincial governors would not behave appropriately to their own fides of their own free will, there had to be mechanisms for prosecuting their breach of the fides appropriate to the populus Romanus (which diminished the maiestas populi Romani) on their return to Rome.
Although only fragments survive from the oratory of the most important figures in the popularis tradition, echoes of Gaius Gracchus may be heard in Cicero’s contio speech on the lex Manilia of 66, in particular the section setting the (pro-Pompeian) judgement of the populus against the (anti-Pompeian) judgement of the elite.129 Tan argues that prior to the events of the Catilinarian crisis Cicero ‘was actively, vehemently and successfully fostering a popularis image’,130 and the argument in the Pro Lege Manilia echoes the Gracchan line that the populus has, or at least should have, the final word on political affairs (assuming—an important caveat that does not appear in the fragment from Gaius Gracchus—that what the populus wants is indeed what is best for the res publica). At stake is Q. Catulus’s protest that the proposed command for Pompey is a novelty. ‘Let no innovation be made contrary to usage and the principles of our ancestors’,131 said Catulus, according to Cicero, who passes over (at considerable length) various historic novelties in order to focus on the novelties already committed by Pompey with Catulus’s approval.132 It would be unjust and not to be borne if, after the positive judgement of men such as Catulus upon Pompey had previously been confirmed by the populus, the current ‘judgement and authority of the Roman people’ (iudicium populique Romani auctoritatem) about Pompey (that is, that he should have the extraordinary command proposed by Manilius) were to be disapproved by Catulus and his supporters (Man. 63), especially after the populus had chosen Pompey (despite the outcry of the same elite gentlemen) to command the war against the pirates:
Hoc si vos temere fecistis et rei publicae parum consuluistis, recte isti studia vestra suis consiliis regere conantur. Sin autem vos plus tum in re publica vidistis, vos eis repugnantibus per vosmet ipsos dignitatem huic imperio, salutem orbi terrarum attulistis, aliquando isti principes et sibi et ceteris populi Romani universi auctoritati parendum esse fateantur.
If you [the Roman people] did this rashly and with too little care for the interests of the res publica, these men are right in trying to rule your enthusiasm by their counsel. But if it was you, rather, who at that time saw more clearly for the res publica, you who, in their despite and by yourselves alone, brought honour to this empire and safety to the world, these great ones should at last admit that they and all other men must bow to the authority of the Roman people. (Cic. Leg. Man. 64)
Strikingly, Cicero uses terms that would more usually be used in connection with the senate (consulo, consilium, auctoritas), but here applies them to the populus. He casts his audience, the populus Romanus, as a decision-making body capable of taking political action against the wishes of the elite. Steel points out how the exordium and peroration of the speech combine ‘unashamedly popularis language’ with ‘a conservative view of what the people can and ought to do’,133 and it is noteworthy that Cicero here talks not about senators generally but about isti principes; that is, he depicts the opposition, who wish to ‘rule’ (regere) the enthusiasm of the people, as overbearing individuals rather than the senate as a whole. This is still half a step away from talking explicitly about the populus as administering its res publica in its own right (rather than elected magistrates or senatorially appointed promagistrates administering the res publica on its behalf),134 even if the same implications lurk beneath the surface.
Just what Cicero’s echo of Gaius Gracchus tells us depends on whether we emphasize the differences or the similarities. Morstein-Marx makes a compelling case for emphasizing the similarities in his well-known thesis that contional oratory was dominated by an ‘ideological monotony’. He argues that ‘the most salient issue in late-Republican public deliberation was one of personal credibility rather than ideological preference’, a ‘competition for trust in which the decisive “evidence” for determining the merits of proposals was an evaluation of the persons involved, an evaluation based on externals such as accumulated authority (based, admittedly, on perceptions of prior service) rather than on the obscure and confusing details of legislation’.135 Two caveats should be noted here. Firstly, Morstein-Marx’s arguments apply only to what was said in contiones; his thesis addresses what politicians said in public to the public, rather than, for example, what was expressed before the senate or in a law court or written in political treatises and letters. Secondly, he may understate the ability of the populus to gain information from alternative sources. He rightly criticizes the factual content of Cicero’s speeches against Rullus’s agrarian bill, for example, but anyone who wanted to find out what was actually in the speech could presumably have read the notice that by law had to be nailed up in a public place three weeks in advance of the relevant vote to advise voters of the proposed legislation.136 Moreover, Laurence highlights the importance of word-of-mouth gossip, spread through locations and institutions like the Forum, the salutatio and collegia,137 and Tan points out that those most likely to vote (especially those whose votes had most weight) could access direct channels of communication such as conversation and correspondence that reduced their need to attend contiones.138 That said, it is true that such contional oratory as we have (and while ‘the quantity of material in this class of evidence is not small, at least by the standards of ancient history’,139 it also is not very diverse: nine speeches from Cicero might naturally convey a certain ideological sameness, even combined with the accounts of historians like Sallust, Livy, Cassius Dio, and Plutarch) does present a remarkably ‘monotonous’ appearance. In this instance, however, there is a good case to be made for emphasizing the differences between Cicero and Gaius Gracchus, because the evidence strongly indicates that until the final disintegration of the Republic popular ownership of the res was never a contested issue; what was contested was what this implied for political organization and legislation. In other words, contional discourse was monotonous on the topic not because politicians said one thing in public and another in private, or even just because contiones generally were the habitat of popularis politicians,140 but rather because it was generally accepted that the res publica was in fact the res populi, the possession of the populus Romanus, even if some politicians who had reached the apex of the cursus honorum and therefore no longer needed to worry about their electoral prospects did feel free to express a less than flattering opinion on who was best qualified to manage the res publica, as Scipio Nasica is alleged to have done. From this perspective, we can see Gaius Gracchus, Cicero, and even Scipio Nasica all operating at different points on the same ideological spectrum, which suggests that even if the language of contional discourse was monotonous, that language could nonetheless be inflected with distinct shades of ideological intonation. As Cicero’s careful handling of res and populus in De Republica shows, it was possible to extrapolate a range of quite different conclusions from the same principles—as long as you defined your terms appropriately.
The popularis focus on res publica as res populi therefore turns the insider’s perspective of res publica as the object of management upside down. For those who have entered in re publica, magistrates manage the res publica, those who have been magistrates profit from their achievements while in office, their rivals may challenge the value of their achievements, and moralists like Cato the Elder may criticize how those achievements have been carried out. For the populus Romanus, which stands outside res publica perceived as political space, the populus elects magistrates to administer the res populi and is concerned by their behaviour in office because it impacts on the maiestas populi Romani. Because power flows from the populus to the magistrates, the magistrates are (or at least should be) ultimately answerable to the populus. Popularis rhetoric rests on this principle, which foregrounds the perspective of res publica as property. The movement from the magistrate’s top-down relationship with res publica, through which the magistrate is empowered to take action, to the bottom-up res publica of the contio, where res publica features as the public property and institutions over which the populus exerts control, may be mirrored by the linguistic shifts in provincia and imperium Romanum touched on briefly at the start of this chapter, as well as the use of the crimen maiestas minuta by the popularis tribune Saturninus as a way to control the behaviour of provincial governors. Taken as one strand of a broader historical shift in conceptions of Rome’s relationship to its empire, it seems that as the concept of imperium Romanum solidified so too did the popular awareness of the res publica that they, the populus, possessed. If so, the contional arguments examined in this chapter may have taken on a particular prominence in light of a general shift of emphasis as the need for professionalism in the government of Rome’s expanding empire came to the fore. What is clear is that such ideas were in circulation and available for use by anyone pushing a popular cause on which elite politicians looked with disfavour, something that in itself explains why such ideas are relatively hard to recover from the rhetorical record. Cicero might have begun his career as a popularis, but he was never a popularis on the order of a Gracchus or a Saturninus and after his consulship he consistently identified himself and his policies with elite interests, if only because the execution of the ‘Catilinarian conspirators’ made him a target for popularis politicians. It is Cicero, however, who dominates the surviving material. Finally, emphasizing the role of the populus in administering the res publica de-emphasizes the role of individual magistrates and promagistrates, which is only one reason why it might have annoyed them but is nonetheless significant given how far the dignitas of politicians rested on their achievements in public office. For those who credited the Roman public with the administration of its own res, the claims of more senior magistrates and politicians to know better how to advance the res publica were not impressive: what mattered was whether the populus agreed.