The purpose of this paper is to present a particular model of how Roman politics worked, and of what Roman politics before the Social War was ‘about’. In essence I want to place in the centre of our conception the picture of an orator addressing a crowd in the Forum; a picture of someone using the arts of rhetoric to persuade an anonymous crowd about something. The most important subject of oratory, and the most important fundamental right exercised by whoever came to vote, was legislation. Yet the greatest of all the extraordinary distortions which have been imposed on our conception of Republican politics in the twentieth century is that the process of legislation, and the content of the legislation passed by the people, have both ceased to be central to it. With that we have ceased to listen sufficiently to the actual content of oratory addressed to the people, to the arguments from rights, from the necessities of the preservation of the res publica, from historical precedents, both Roman and non-Roman, and from social attitudes and prejudices. In the second century above all, we can see how the prestige which the office-holding class derived from family descent and personal standing on the one hand was matched on the other by popular demands for appropriate conduct, and by popular suspicions of private luxury, of profiteering from the conduct of public affairs, and of improper collaboration with wrong-doers both at home and abroad.
[1]
P. Garnsey,et al.
The Background to the Grain Law of Gaius Gracchus
,
1985,
Journal of Roman Studies.
[2]
John C. Traupman,et al.
Rome in the Late Republic
,
1985
.
[3]
E. Badian.
The Death of Saturninus
,
1984
.
[4]
Robert K. Sherk.
Rome and the Greek East to the death of Augustus
,
1984
.
[5]
M. Finley.
Politics in the Ancient World
,
1983
.
[6]
Keith W. Hopkins.
Death and Renewal
,
1983
.
[7]
A. N. Sherwin-White,et al.
The Lex Repetundarum and the Political Ideas of Gaius Gracchus
,
1982,
Journal of Roman Studies.
[8]
L. Perelli.
Il movimento popolare nell'ultimo secolo della Repubblica
,
1982
.
[9]
H. Schneider.
Die politische Rolle der "plebs urbana" während der Tribunate des L. Appuleius Saturninus.
,
1982
.
[10]
Thomas N. Mitchell,et al.
Cicero, the ascending years
,
1979
.
[11]
J. Reynolds,et al.
Rome and the Eastern Provinces at the end of the Second Century B.C.
,
1974,
Journal of Roman Studies.
[12]
P. Brunt,et al.
Social conflicts in the Roman Republic
,
1971
.
[13]
Matthias Gelzer.
The Roman Nobility
,
1969
.
[14]
Z. Yavetz.
Plebs and princeps
,
1969
.
[15]
E. Badian.
Roman imperialism in the late republic
,
1968
.
[16]
L. R. Taylor.
Party Politics in the Age of Caesar
,
1949
.