In Rome itself, the decades following the Second Punic War marked the high point of the power and influence of the Senate and of the leading families of the ruling elite. Roman government rested on a relatively small number of men who filled Rome’s elective offices each year and on assemblies of citizens that, by their votes, authorized laws and filled offices. In assemblies, it should be noted, officeholders had a central role, for assemblies met and voted under the presidency of a consul, praetor, or tribune of the plebs, and they only voted on measures or candidates that the presiding official had put before them. Without a magistrate or a candidate to give voice to their grievances, in other words, the citizenry was left with primarily symbolic forms with which they could express their desires and their grievances (see also Chapters 1 and 18).24 Yet the Senate, if only informally, occupied a central position in the state: as a body, it gave advice in the form of a decree or senatus consultum when consulted by an officeholder, identified magisterial provinciae, chose the magistrates who would continue to serve as promagistrates, set the funds that magistrates would receive for their operations, ruled on the acceptability of treaties that magistrates had negotiated, dispatched teams of senatorial legati, and determined the validity of rulings by various priestly colleges on matters of ritual and of sacred law.
The Senate’s leadership depended on the willingness of officeholders to submit in important matters to the senatorial consensus and on the readiness of more junior senators to follow those who were more senior. Here, there were significant and continuous sources of tension. Individuals competed, sometimes intensely, for office, and the most successful members of the senatorial elite strove to stand out above their peers. In the competition for office, members of prominent families had a pronounced advantage. Indeed, Roman elite culture provided numerous opportunities for the fortunate to proclaim their ancestry and their connections, perhaps most notably in the display of ancestral masks, or imagines, in funerals and in the atria of their houses and also in the ceremonial circuits of the Forum, their ambitiones, in which candidates were accompanied by prominent senators.25 There were long-standing efforts to keep competition for popularity, honors, and offices within bounds and to prevent the highly successful from standing out too much above their ostensible equals. From the late fourth century, laws had attempted to limit or prevent iteration of offices. In the first half of the second century, a series of laws attempted to force senatorial careers into more regular patterns, either by requiring candidates for the office of consul to have earlier served as praetors, or by fixing minimum ages at which the offices of consul or praetor could be held, or by requiring a ten-year interval before holding the same office again, or by placing restrictions on the ways in which candidates were permitted to seek office, leges de ambitu (see also Chapter 12).26
Despite the Senate’s preeminence, ambitious individuals did sometimes challenge a senatorial consensus, and here warfare sometimes provided opportunities for individual advancement in ways that could prove disruptive of the established order. Some commanders, unwilling to let slip their opportunity for fame, glory, or profit, ignored senatorial advice or restraints in their provinciae. For example, C. Cassius Longinus (cos. 171) left his province against the Gauls in northern Italy on his own authority and tried to attack Macedon through Illyria, an act that reportedly outraged the Senate (Livy 43.1.4-12). By the middle of the century, the distribution of land in colonies and viritane assignments had largely ceased and some wars, especially those in Spain, had proven to be unprofitable for the participants, possibly weakening the willingness to serve that had long bound citizens to magistrates and Senate.27 Perhaps in an attempt to increase their own popularity, some tribunes of the plebs attempted to block officials from conducting the levy in unpopular wars.
Prosecutions of individuals after they had left office provided one of the few formal restraints on magisterial activity. During the war against Perseus, the Senate rebuked L. Hortensius (pr. 170) for sacking Abdera and selling its people into slavery, while a tribune of the plebs successfully prosecuted C. Lucretius Gallus (pr. 171) before a popular assembly for plundering friendly states. At about the same time, envoys from a number of Iberian communities complained to the Senate about the rapacious conduct of Roman officials, and the Senate instructed a praetor to choose judges, or recuperatores, to hear the case. In 149, a permanent court, or quaestio, with senatorial judges was established specifically to hear disputes de rebus repetundis - suits for recovery of property stolen by officials in their provinciae.2
The career of Scipio Africanus may illustrate some of the dangers that awaited any individual who did stand out too much. Africanus had emerged from the Second Punic War as the most successful Roman commander and he soon went on to hold further offices: censor and princeps senatus, first on the roster of senators, in 199 and consul for the second time in 194. He may have sought to establish his position on grounds that went beyond magistracies and successful commands. Roman authors later claimed that he imitated Alexander the Great or that he was a regular visitor to the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitol, where the god gave signs of special favor, and similar claims were made in the second century, where they clearly derived from his family and quite possibly ultimately from Scipio himself.29 Polybius (10.2.12;, 10.4.6), who had close connections with the family, claimed that Africanus wished that his soldiers believe that his efforts were divinely inspired and that he encouraged the belief that he communed with the gods in dreams and while awake. Other senators, however, clearly did not accept the preeminence that Scipio or his family claimed. In the 180s, he came under steady attack, especially in the form of the political prosecutions that were coming to be a pronounced feature of Roman political life. With his influence undermined, he withdrew from the city, and he soon died.3
Two generations later, the conduct of wars again provided the opportunity for ambitious individuals to acquire an especially prominent place in the city. An unsuccessful campaign against the Celtiberians in Nearer Spain may have resulted in M. Claudius Marcellus’ (cos. 166, 155, 152) third consulship, without recent precedent and against laws requiring a ten-year interval between terms in the same office. A few years, later Scipio Aemilianus took advantage of popular discontent over the course of the war against Carthage to switch his candidacy from the aedilician elections to the consular. Scipio was younger than the minimum age for the office and he had not yet served as praetor, another requirement for the post, but he had the reputation for valor, gained in service in Spain and in Africa, and he was highly popular, perhaps as a result of this. Attempts to bar his candidacy failed in the face of popular protests and the threat of a tribune of the plebs to block any vote unless Aemilianus was permitted to seek the office. After the election, a tribune again intervened, placing before an assembly the motion to give Aemilianus the command against Carthage, instead of distributing consular assignments by lot, the more usual practice.
In the years that followed his victory, Aemilianus continued to press his position among senators outside the customary limits and procedures. In 142, he successfully sought election as censor against a rival who had the support of the Senate. Again, Aemilianus proved to be more popular. In his formal walks through the Forum, his ambitiones, Aemilianus was accompanied, not by senators as was customary, but allegedly by men of low birth, some of them freedmen, who were able to gather a crowd and force issues by shouting and stirring up passions (Plut. Aem. 38). In 135, Aemilianus again was elected consul for the following year, this time to command against Numantia in Spain, where a series of Roman commanders had earlier failed. Once again, he was chosen in defiance of the law: after M. Claudius Marcellus had held the office of consul for the third time in 152, a new law prohibited holding the office of consul more than once. His campaign against Numantia was successful, increasing still more his prestige.
Aemilianus’ career reveals weaknesses in the senatorial regime that would have great import in the following decades. Restrictions on eligibility for office, one of the means by which senators had sought to protect themselves against their more popular peers, worked only when no one mobilized crowds and no plebeian tribune asserted citizens’ right to vote as they wished. Aemilianus’ career provoked sharp responses among senators, but in the more turbulent years that would follow, Aemilianus came to be seen as a more conventional figure than he may have appeared to many of his contemporaries.
World History
