Much of what I have outlined, necessarily sketchily and very selectively, still counts today as part of our basic fund of historical knowledge about the Roman Republic. The works mentioned above mark unmistakable advances; nobody would wish to return to the state of the subject before the investigation of the Roman elite launched by Gelzer and Syme and carried forward to such a high level by Badian, Gruen, and others. Building on this solid foundation of knowledge about the political class, Christian Meier - in his attempt to improve our understanding why and how the Republic broke down - focused on the practice of politics and its deficiencies.2 He was able to establish that the limited substance of politics and the great concentration on persons encouraged rather than hindered the mutability of coalitions, and therefore that the scholarly approach that concerned itself with long-standing family alliances and explained decisions as the successes of one or another party was inconsistent with the evidence of our sources, which furnished evidence for swiftly changing relationships.25 Yet if politics was not characterized by stable factions, this does not mean that the study of personal connections was pointless; rather (according to Meier) such connections were so multifarious and overlapping already in the middle Republic that the capacity to mobilize them in any specific case was not to be taken for granted, nor in any case could they suffice to attain the intended goal: specifically, to win an election.
For the period of upheaval in the late Republic Meier substituted the concept of ‘‘crisis’’ for the term ‘‘revolution,’’ which had been widely employed since Mommsen and Syme but was first given precision and theoretical depth by Alfred Heuss.26 Yet since in the late Republic there was no new social class seeking to drive out the old elite - and therefore no class struggle - and since the civil wars were not conducted even with the pretence of bringing a different type of political structure into existence, the concept of revolution can only be used in a diluted sense, as a process of fundamental change brought about by the considerable use of violence.27 Meier makes use of a conception of crisis as a stage in which massive problems that are also perceived by contemporaries force either the decisive restoration or collapse of a system; this is considerably better suited than ‘‘revolution’’ to illuminating the conditions of the late Republic.28
For the fall of the Republic, Meier coined the phrase ‘‘crisis without alternative’’ (see also Chapter 29).29 He meant by this that at this time many political actors, if not necessarily all, were conscious that some things were not working as they should in the Republic, but that nobody knew how to repair the damage, and those who might have wielded political power in the system still felt sufficiently secure that no one had the idea of forming an entirely new political structure. Contemporaries were therefore aware of a crisis and also sensed that the crisis was fundamental and could not be made to go away with a few small reforms, but there was neither a plan nor even a kind of vague longing for the removal of the system.
As Meier made clear in his introduction to the new (1980) edition of Respublica amissa, his analysis of how politics functioned amounted to a new theory of political association based on the idea of extreme flexibility in forging alliances, and therefore that all remaining assumptions of similarity to modern political parties had finally to be abandoned.3 Moreover, Meier enriched the understanding of political developments in the Roman Republic by means of his conceptualization of ‘‘historical process.’’ 1 This refers to a model of historical change in which a definite direction of change can be recognized which is produced by the actions of individuals and groups, the stimuli (‘‘impulses’’) of the ‘‘historical process.’’ The concept of historical process involves differentiating between primary and secondary effects of actions: primary effects are the intended consequences of actions; secondary effects, the unintended results. Processual developments are marked by the predominance of secondary over primary effects, that is to say that the results of agents’ actions slip out of their control. Meier argued that this was the case in the late Republic, the last phase of which indeed he characterized as an ‘‘autonomous process,’’ that is, a development in a distinct course that could no longer be changed by the actions of any of the participants.32 Every attempt to halt or turn back this development only promoted its further advance through its secondary effects. The direction of the historical process had become fully independent of agency.
World History
