Assemblies

The ability of the Senate to pursue its goals and to put into practical effect its ability to make recommendations based on its authority ( auctoritas) was essentially dependent on the degree of solidarity that it was able to develop. As is well known, however, in the last decades of the Republic there was a series of conflicts which could not be resolved within the Senate, with the result that the opportunities for popular action necessarily became correspondingly larger. John North sees here a stimulus for the democratization of the Republic.78 However, even if the phenomenon as such is undisputed, it is still not at all clear how extensive this democratization was.79 That substantially depends on our reconstruction and evaluation of the Roman popular assemblies, which have been the subject of vigorous discussion in recent years. In Rome there were various types of popular voting assemblies, all of which were divided into voting units. The relevant ones for our purposes are the ‘‘Centuriate’’ assembly ( comitia centuriata), which was articulated according to wealth and was responsible above all for the election of the higher offices, and the ‘‘Tribal’’ assembly (comitia tributa) and Plebeian assembly (concilium plebis) - in both cases divided according to ‘‘tribes’’ (tribus), that is, according to regional districts - in which the remaining officials were chosen and almost all laws passed (see Chapter 12).

The openly timocratic structure of the Centuriate assembly in which the consuls were elected has furnished the obvious counter-argument against accepting the idea that the democratic elements were wide-ranging; but this has now been moderated by Alexander Yakobson, who argues that the first class of voters, which was given special weight by the structure of the Centuriate assembly, did not at all consist of the wealthy, but rather of people of quite modest means; and that elections were frequently decided only in the ‘‘lower’’ centuries - that is, that although ordinary people did not possess a vote of equal weight to that of the wealthy they nevertheless were important and correspondingly courted, and also profited from bribery as a result.8 Even if there are objections against some parts of this astute construction,82 one can still hardly deny that candidates fought electoral campaigns intensively and committed all their resources, especially their financial means; that the vote of the People was ultimately decisive; and that the result of the elections at least during the Ciceronian era was regarded as highly unpredictable.83 The question however is: to what sort of disposition among the voting population did the candidates direct this intensive commitment of resources?

For adherents of the thesis that the Roman Republic had pronounced democratic features it is precisely the enormous expenditure with which Roman candidates pursued their campaigns and in general conducted themselves in public that proves the decisive importance of ordinary people in politics and thereby the democratic character of the system.84 However, an alternative model has been proposed in opposition to this which softens the force of this inference. Research into political culture has developed the distinction between content and expression in politics, with the help of which we are able to adopt an approach that takes better account of the symbolic dimensions of communicative and material exchange.85 Many activities of the political class in Rome can be understood as acts of euergetism (see above) and of public self-representation. They naturally promoted an individual’s prestige and helped him in the elections, and an extraordinary monetary outlay was also more or less standard in campaigns; yet such investments were made not only in pursuit of an thoroughly pragmatic end, as, for example, the election to a particular office, but they were also part of the ethos of Roman politicians. They were a necessary aspect of his role as a member of the political class, who in specific communicative contexts had to show respect to the People as formally the final arbiters, and who in addition had to demonstrate his generosity and concern for their welfare.8

Millar dismissed the overt, thoroughly conscious and fully intended inequality of votes in the Centuriate assembly (cf. Cic. Rep. 2.39ff.), which hardly manifests a democratic element, with this comment: ‘‘The significance of the graduated voting, in descending sequence by groups belonging to different property levels, as found in the ‘assembly of centuries’ has been absurdly exaggerated.’’87 Despite his stated agreement with Yakobson’s conclusions,88 he nevertheless did not wish to concern himself closely with the elections but instead went on in his search for democratic features to the votes on legislation, that is in particular to the popular assemblies organized by ‘‘tribes,’’ which had become in practice the chief legislative organ, and to the preparatory and informational meetings called contiones whose audience was not formally organized into groups. Millar’s repeated emphasis upon the fact that all legislative proposals required popular approval and his derivation of the influence of the popular assembly directly from this principle show that in his model the formal rights of political institutions play an essential role; thus, to a certain degree, he stands in the legal-historical tradition represented above all by Mommsen’s Staatsrecht (see above).89 However, the development of historical anthropology has long since drawn the attention of scholars to the social norms of human behavior that are not based on formal law, and from this perspective we have come to recognize that if formal rights are regularly not pursued to their full limit, this customary restraint is a part of the system and not an epiphenomenon irrelevant to the system.90 So Egon Flaig subsequently drew attention to the fact that the popular assemblies almost always agreed with the bill proposed before it, on the basis of which he went so far as to deny that the popular assemblies were decision-making bodies, defining them instead as ‘‘consensus-producing bodies,’’ i. e., as institutions in which upper and lower classes essentially announce their consensus publicly and thereby consolidate it.91 Scholarly discussion thus shifted to the contiones, the non-voting assemblies, which were comprehensively studied by Francisco Pina Polo.92 Flaig also accepted that in the contiones there was a possibility for discussion of competing alternatives and thus conceded to them the power to influence decisions to a relevant degree,93 while Millar saw in the contiones the place where ambitious politicians employed persuasion to prepare the ground for the later voting.94

Among the advances brought by Millar’s reinterpretation of republican politics was certainly an emphasis upon speech as a medium in which political content was communicated. But here the fact that Roman politicians gave speeches in the popular assemblies before legislative decisions also admits of various interpretations. As Holkeskamp has emphasized, these speeches do not necessarily imply a situation of open decision-making; rather, there are more or less fixed roles to which orators, who - as Pina Polo has documented - belong almost completely to the upper classes, and the assembled people must accommodate themselves: senators spoke and asserted what needed to be done, the People listened and followed their advice.95 Senators in the popular assemblies adopted a fairly standardized mode of behavior, emphasizing the competence of the People to make decisions and their own dedication to the interests of the general public. This mode can be described as “joviality,” that is, as a specific attitude of interaction among associates of different social status in a well-defined communicative situation, in which the higher-status agents ritually level the differences in status between them and those below them, without awareness of those differences being thereby forgotten.96

The symbolic dimension of political communication in Rome has meanwhile been explored in a variety of ways - for example in representational art or as an aspect of the maintenance of order in a city without appreciable policing.97 It is therefore not absurd to suppose that in the popular assemblies the symbolic reinforcement of social solidarity may have been considerably more important than the specific content of the matter to be decided. Indeed a few years ago Henrik Mouritsen undertook a critical reevaluation of Millar’s basic assumptions about those who actually gathered in Roman assemblies and partly cut the ground out from under them. Although Millar had repeatedly acknowledged that personal presence as the basic principle of Roman participation made participation practically impossible for an increasing number of citizens during the course of the Republic, he left it at that.98 Mouritsen, however, attempted to determine the actual level of participation, at least in broad outline. By calculating the available space for the assembly and the duration of voting he came to the conclusion that at most 3 percent of registered male citizens could be physically present at elections in the late Republic, and he collected strong evidence for substantially lower actual participation in the contionesin particular.99 The mere fact that in an age without microphones the distance over which a speaker could project his voice was limited sets limits upon the size of the group. 0 Furthermore, Mouritsen points out that for this reason alone orators may have been less likely to be able to express themselves successfully - or even to wish to speak - before a hostile audience, for the crowd by its noise could very easily make it impossible for a speaker to be heard. Consequently, he argues, an orator would normally have gathered about himself a group of men who were already committed, which would also explain why we occasionally hear that both a popular tribune and his senatorial opponents were each fully supported by the audiences of two consecutive contiones: different audiences were actually present. Mouritsen concludes that ‘‘in general the character of a contio appears to have been closer to a partisan political manifestation than to a public debate.’’ 1 As Mouritsen rightly observes, Meier’s idea that participants in contiones and especially in legislative votes would more or less have represented the spectrum of the Roman population is also a groundless hope.1 2 Moreover, Mouritsen argues that the ordinary city population, which is often supposed to have been the chief constituent of contiones, would have lacked the free time to attend these meetings, since after all they would have needed to work hard for their livelihood and their families, and besides (on his view), it is hard to imagine that such people had any real interest in listening to long speeches on matters that for the most part did not affect them at all while neglecting their own daily necessities. Consequently Mouritsen believes that the audiences of contiones would have been members of the leisured class who could afford to spend their time in the assemblies and who readily supported their allies in the senatorial order.1 Only in the last decades of the Republic, according to Mouritsen, did popular tribunes partly succeed in drawing broader segments of the population into their contiones by distinct appeals to their interests; but this also meant that henceforth the contiones were increasingly orchestrated partisan rallies.104

Mouritsen’s arguments, taken as a whole, have considerable weight, even if he is unpersuasive in his claim that economic pressures and a lack of interest in the issues under discussion would as a rule have kept the poorer plebeians away from the assemblies.105 His criticism of Millar’s thesis that the contiones and legislative assemblies embodied a democratic element, and that this element was central, has however itself been scrutinized in turn and modified in part by Robert Morstein-Marx in a nuanced analysis of the contiones. This study focuses on public speeches, above all those of the contiones, a form of political publicity that Morstein-Marx considers to be an essential mark of the system. On his analysis, orators were obliged to appeal continually to the plebs and to respond to their feelings and reactions, so that in practice only in exceptional cases could a magistrate make full use of the formal right to impose a tribunician veto or to lay before the voters a contested bill if this was against the clearly expressed will of the People.1 With judicious argumentation Morstein-Marx substantiates some fundamental elements of Millar’s model, above all with his stress upon regular interaction between elite and mass, seen as the central buttress of the political system, and with his recognition that the expression of the popular will in contiones was normally decisive. But Morstein-Marx is skeptical about how far one can describe these characteristics of the system as democratic, since he considers too weakly developed a central factor that for him is essential for democracy: debate between alternative views of a problem and more fundamentally the dissemination of information to the general public.107 On this view, the content of communication was overall so one-sidedly dominated by the members of the upper class that the interests of wider sectors of the population were addressed in politics only in a rudimentary fashion.108