Any attempt to come to grips with the concepts employed in describing and analyzing the Roman Republic must begin with the great nineteenth-century scholar Theodor Mommsen, who described the rise and fall of the Roman Republic in three substantial volumes of his History of Rome? Mommsen’s history of the Republic is written in a gripping style, interspersed with colorful character-descriptions of the protagonists such as Cato, Cicero, and Pompey, and driven by the firm conviction that there are historical missions before which nations and individuals can fail or prove their mettle, and necessary historical processes which it is the job of the historian to discover. The work was a worldwide literary triumph, to such an extent that the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902. This was naturally due to the stylistic and intellectual brilliance of the account, but also to a considerable degree to Mommsen’s relentlessly modernizing judgments adduced with great self-confidence, which made for exciting reading among the educated public to whom the work was directed (and still does among readers of today). For Mommsen, politics in the Roman Republic was the concern and creation of a dominant aristocracy based on office holding rather than blood which devoted itself for many years entirely to the service of the community and presided over its rise to empire, but then in the late Republic foundered in chaos and egoism as well as mediocrity. Thus came the historical moment for the genius of Caesar to found a popularly oriented monarchy and thereby to lead the empire to the only form of government that remained viable.
For many decades the study of the Roman Republic as a whole remained under the spell of Mommsen’s History of Rome, but even more of his Romisches Staatsrecht (‘‘Roman Constitutional Law’’), in which he systematically laid out the institutions of the Roman state along with their rules and competences as well as their coordination, supported by a careful marshalling and assessment of all available sources.10 Mommsen’s extraordinary achievement of systematization makes this work an enormously impressive juridical edifice that has put its stamp on our conceptions of the Roman state to this day. However, at the root of the success of Romisches Staatsrecht lay an appeal not unlike the way in which the History of Rome had drawn its narrative pace and its cogency from the compelling premises that the author had made the foundations of his work. The nineteenth-century study of legal concepts was dominated by the idea that a state’s legal system was founded on inborn and timeless principles of law whose discovery was the noblest task of the legal historian; and Mommsen, a jurist by training, proceeded from this basic conviction which he then applied to the Roman state. Core elements of Mommsen’s construction, such as the all-embracing power to command { imperium) possessed by the king which was supposed never to have been substantially limited in the Republic, the idea that the citizen’s right to appeal against the penal authority of the magistrates {provocatio) was a basic law of the newly founded Republic, and in general the concept of the sovereignty of the People, are consequences of the fiction of immutability with which he approached the subject. All of these ideas have since been thrown into doubt or proven to be improbable by scholars without, however, abandoning Mommsen’s edifice com-pletely.11 This is indeed probably quite unnecessary, for, even if hardly anyone today still accepts Mommsen’s conception of an underlying, immutable legal system,12 nevertheless his immensely learned and intelligent reconstructions of the antiquarian details are indispensable for scholars as well as for students interested in how the Roman Republic functioned.
Against this strong emphasis on legal structure, which in Mommsen’s construction seemed to determine the nature of Roman politics, a contrary interpretation was published already in 1912 whose influence is likewise still felt in the present: the sociohistorical account of Matthias Gelzer.13 The basis of his argument was a new definition of the political governing class, the nobility, to which, according to Gelzer, only the descendants of a consul could belong, while in Mommsen’s view some lower offices - specifically the curule aedileship and the praetorship - also sufficed. Building on this premise, in the second part of his work Gelzer identified relationships based on personal ties and reciprocal obligation as a defining element of politics and of the pursuit and exercise of power. Gelzer was Swiss, and his experience with the political conditions of small communities certainly helped him to develop a new perspective, as did also his outsider’s stance with regard to the thought of the great Mommsen, a perspective he could more easily adopt than his German colleagues. But the core of his new approach, which was more widely accepted only some years later, lay in a clear emphasis upon the idea that the content of politics as well as the effectiveness of political action was essentially dependant on personal connections within upper-class families and between these and their clients - that is, citizens lower down in the social hierarchy who were tied to them by patronage. Gelzer, who described himself as a social historian and thus explicitly distanced himself from Mommsen’s legal-historical perspective,14 thereby made it possible to recognize the primacy of personal relations over policy in Roman politics. This was seen as a place in which alliances based on the direct exchange of services dominated the struggles for power in the public sphere, which were almost exclusively about personal advancement and prestige. Friedrich Munzer, starting from Gelzer’s new conception of Roman politics, later exaggerated the principle of personal alliance and developed his theory of enduring family ‘‘parties’’ forged by means of marriage connections; in so doing he surely gave too much weight to kinship.15
Building on the views of Gelzer and Munzer, but with a wholly distinct stamp, Ronald Syme then investigated the transition from Republic to Empire.1 Clearly inspired by Hitler’s rise in Germany and even more by that of Mussolini in Italy, as well as by the establishment of a formally liberal constitution by the despot Stalin, Syme adopted the style of Tacitus to describe the path to sole rule taken by Octavian, the young adopted son and heir of Caesar, and simultaneously practiced the pros-opographic method with unsurpassed virtuosity. Prosopography (from the Greek prosopon: ‘‘person’’) refers to the scholarly method whereby as much biographical data as possible are gathered about people of a given social class in order to glean evidence primarily about social mobility, but also regional mobility. Prosopographic research, if it is to be taken seriously as a scholarly approach, is therefore social history and not biography for its own sake. In any case, Syme was able to make use of Munzer’s research and described in great depth the complex web of personal relationships connecting the members of the narrower ruling groups and also the wider upper class. In this research the central theme, which he presented with great force, was the connection between Octavian’s rise to power with the entry of the leading men of the Italian cities into the senatorial aristocracy. Syme summarized the political credo that underlay all his research in the famous dictum: ‘‘In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the facade; and Roman history, Republican or Imperial, is the history of the governing class.’’17 Accordingly, whoever wishes to comprehend a form of government or its transformation should not concentrate too exclusively on the personalities of the leading men but must analyze the party that is grouped about its figurehead.
World History
