Public Politics

Despite their differences, Mouritsen’s and Morstein-Marx’s reflections upon the structures of Republican politics give a sobering picture of the chances ordinary people had to shape the issues and outcomes of Roman politics in a way that reflected their own interests. Thereby they raise the fundamental question: What, then, does the indisputable intensity and frequency of public action and communication by Roman politicians actually mean for the system? If, as appears probable, the specific content of politics was often less important in the forms of public communication than the expressive aspect - if, that is, the view of an assembly was normally not formed in open discussion but laid forth in splendid rhetoric - then the ritual dimension inherent in these assemblies gains a special significance. Keith Hopkins has argued that the numerous rituals in which citizens participated were an important aspect of public life in Rome.109 Rituals can be defined as standardized sequences of action, designed for repetition and heavy with symbolism, by means of which participants become integrated as members of a group.110 If one views the Roman popular assemblies as rituals, then differing integrative functions may be attributed to their different organizational principles: meetings of the Centuriate assembly would then be considered rituals of hierarchy, those of the ‘‘Tribal’’ assembly as rituals of equality. 1 The integrative experience may have given the essential impetus to attend the assemblies even when one’s own interests were not at issue in the vote. In addition, the popular assemblies may have attracted a number of ordinary citizens

Because they could feel important there and enjoy being treated respectfully by the 112

Great magnates.

In his latest book, Egon Flaig, building upon his previous research, thoroughly analyzes the ritual dimension of public communication in the Roman Republic and seeks to illuminate its cultural significance.113 He discusses triumphs, funeral processions, popular assemblies, and games as well as the peculiar gestures of exhibiting scars or tearful pleading. What emerges is a great array of rituals that hold society together by defining roles and by their integrative power, and which as a whole demand an enormous communicative effort from the political class. As Flaig impressively shows, the Roman aristocracy won the plebs’ wide-ranging obedience by constant hard effort.

The modern concepts to which we should relate the individual elements of the political system of the Roman Republic take into account therefore the ritual dimension of public life, and especially need to account for the great communicative engagement of the political class as well as the simultaneously deep-rooted tendency of the People to comply. One can develop a model that will make these phenomena clearly understandable from a broad conception of institutions.1 4 By this definition, institutions are not restricted to what we for the most part understand by the term in ordinary usage, namely formalized organizations like a Department of Inland Revenue or Parliament, but instead patterns of social organization are characterized quite broadly as institutional when they are made enduring by means of symbolic expression of their basic principles and claims to validity. In practice this means that romantic relationships, informal fishing groups, and television dramas are just as institutional as the Marines or Harvard University. The great advantage of such a widened concept of institutions is that it does not unduly privilege legal rules over traditional social norms: both forms are equally effective for the perpetuation and stabilization of behavior and expectations and are more or less symbolically laden, so that so far as their character as institutions is concerned it is impossible to rank one above the other. In the case of the Roman popular assemblies this means, therefore, that rules of procedure are not given more importance than the behavioral pattern that induces citizens to comply with the recommendations of the presiding magistrate. It would be inconsistent with this conception to accept any argument based on the premise that the formally secured rights of the People are a more relevant expression of the system than the fact that regularly these rights are not claimed.

Every ritual that can also be described as an institution in the sense sketched above has an instrumental and a symbolic dimension. To illustrate this, let us have another look at the legislative assemblies: on the one hand laws are passed there and on the other, community is emphasized, status dramatized, and significance experienced in carefully choreographed procedures. A model oriented in this way toward ‘‘institu-tionality’’ always keeps in view the effects of symbolic action that go along with the production of decisions about issues - effects that are for the most part much more important for the community, its longevity, and continuity (which is always something constructed) than the decisions as such. In my opinion, this approach is able to do justice to the Roman Republic precisely because it avoids the short-circuit caused by supposing that rituals that are performed frequently and at great cost (material and otherwise) ultimately demonstrate the importance of the immediate end (that is, the instrumental dimensions of ritual). An institutional analysis permits us to discern behind many speeches and fine phrases about the People’s freedom and its decisionmaking competence a process of allocating status and binding citizens into a hierarchical community that has nothing to do with democracy.

The publicity of Roman politics has been the focus of research into the Republican political system in recent years, and will probably remain so for some time. In this approach the modes and occasions of communication are an essential issue, but also its locations and their exact appearance, for all these subtly staged forms of public representation played out in specific spaces that by their shape and their symbolic content were multiply interwoven into the event. Senators produced their selfrepresentation (as did members of the other orders) not only with words and gestures but also with images, and modern archaeology has begun to analyze these images and their location from the communicative point of view. (See also chapters 23 and 24.) In general, the media of communication are an important field of this kind of investigation, which can be guided by the approaches taken by research into political culture, ritual, or cultural semantics.115 Among such matters the presence of the past in the Romans’ immediate physical environment is of particular interest.1

Even if this research moves in part in other directions and partly leads to other interpretations of Roman politics, nevertheless it remains among Fergus Millar’s lasting contributions to have pushed the publicity of politics into the center of analysis of the Roman Republic. That a Roman politician had to deliver speeches on political issues before citizens, that all important decisions had to be made binding in the form of a decree of the People, that every legislative proposal had to be published in a timely manner and made available117 - all of this had been insufficiently appreciated in earlier research. But Mouritsen hits the mark with his formulation that ‘‘the fact that political proceedings are public does not in itself make them ‘democratic.’ ’’

In my view, the decisive reason why it is impossible to classify the Roman Republic as a democracy, or even to attribute wide-reaching democratic features to it, is the small opportunity for political participation. The fixation upon personal participation in the popular assemblies in Rome as the sole possibility for exercising one’s right to vote excluded at least three-quarters of eligible citizens even during the late Republic, when, according to Millar, the balance had shifted to the advantage of the People.119 The decisive point here is not that only a few actively participated, which is also a constant problem in modern democracies (even if not one so acute). But the spirit of the political system is revealed by the fact that the vast majority could not participate at all, and that those empowered to make decisions never gave so much as a thought to discovering a remedy by means of a representative system: no one in Rome was interested in creating fairness of participatory opportunity for ordinary citizens who lived outside of Rome. It seems to me that this kind of regard for citizens’ opportunity of participation at a rudimentary level at least is a necessary (but certainly not sufficient) condition for every democracy.