Only with Syme did the view laid out in Gelzer’s work of 1912 - that the core of the organizational and power structure of the Roman Republic was to be found in the institution of patronage and in the friendships and enmities of the nobles ( nobiles) - reach its triumphant culmination, from which it was to dominate scholarship after World War II. Personal relationships were now seen as Rome’s fundamental social glue and the essential basis of power in the Republic to which martial success, wealth, rhetoric, communicative skill, and public representation certainly contributed, but essentially as means of broadening and consolidating bands of personal adherents. Prosopographic works collected evidence about the Republican elites and examined their relationships.18 Penetrating case studies illuminated the background of political machinations by relating the ties and obligations of the agents and bringing into focus what was at stake for them at any one time in the relentless pursuit of power. Against a background so dominated by personal ambition and so little shaped by political substance, scholars were inclined to see in popular initiatives - that is, the policies of certain tribunes of the People since the time of Tiberius Gracchus in 133, who pushed laws through the popular assemblies contrary to the will of the senatorial majority - only a method of increasing one’s personal prominence, and no deeper sociopolitical concerns.19
Among those who advanced the prosopographic study of personal associations, Ernst Badian merits special distinction for his numerous important contributions since the 1950s, which unfortunately have not yet been assembled in a single volume.20 A further high point of this line of research is Erich Gruen’s copious investigation of The Last Generation of the Roman Republic.2 Gruen comprehensively reevaluated the unusually rich source material of the post-Sullan Republic in order to reconstruct the conflicts and struggles for power of that crucial period. His emphasis falls clearly on the political class, whose personal ties and machinations he meticulously laid open to view without, however, neglecting the broader upper class and the plebs. The eruption of civil war in 49 is the culmination of this multifaceted study; the central thesis is that the Roman Republic was intact at its core, or at any rate not at all at the point of collapse, but that it was brought to ruin by the historical accident that an individual by the name of Caesar, as talented as he was unscrupulous, began and won a civil war. Even if the main thesis has not won general acceptance, Gruen’s book nevertheless remains indubitably a standard work on Roman politics in the last decades of the Republic (see also Chapter 29).
To Badian also goes the credit for fully applying to Roman foreign policy the idea that personal connections were the main determinant of action. In his classic Foreign Clientelae he traced the development of obligations of loyalty which bound Rome with other communities, and which generally began asymmetrically as a result of Roman victories but at any rate increasingly manifested a clear imbalance of power in the course of Rome’s rise to empire.23 These relationships were based on the reciprocity of services rendered and consequent obligations of gratitude that were similar to the connections between patrons and clients at the heart of Roman society. In addition Badian also worked out the connections between Roman politicians and communities and individuals in the empire, which could also be described following the patron - client model. Badian thereby placed emphasis on an enormous network of personal relations which partially replaced governmental administration.
World History
