A patron was a person who facilitated personal access to those who exercised power. Patronage can thus be considered as a structure of political communication. The interplay between private relationships and political behavior also made respect of cliental obligations into an important element in decision making. In the mechanisms of Roman power and in particular of political decision-making at the highest level, the role of personal relations can sometimes be discerned, as well as the influence exerted by respect for a private obligation upon the motivation for a political act. The ties that connected the leading men of the cities of Italy or the provinces with the members of the Roman ruling class provided the Romans with multiple sources of information and various means of action. At Rome, in contrast to our modern societies, there did not exist a bureaucracy that ensured contact between the citizens or subjects of Rome, in Italy and in the provinces, and the apparatus of government. Patronage could furnish this kind of mediation. Italian and provincial clients gave their patrons the means to obtain information quickly, despite long distances.
Patrons gave their Italian and provincial clients the opportunity to approach indirectly the men who wielded power at Rome, to communicate with those who exercised public duties as equals or even as friends, and to set in motion the most powerful parts of the Roman body politic. In the time of Sulla, one of the most notorious crimes of his freedman Chrysogonus was perpetrated upon Sextus Roscius, a local magnate of Ameria in Umbria, who was accused of parricide in order to appropriate his property. Roscius enjoyed an extraordinary network of guest-friends, since he had established relationships of hospitality with the Metelli, the Servilii, and the Scipios. However, in the particularly hostile political circumstances of the time, it fell to Cicero, a young, still little-known orator, to undertake his defense at the request of Roscius’ patrons, delivering a speech that still survives. Again, when the leading men of the province of Sicily were wronged by Verres they informed their patrons. Some even fled to Rome, where they were received in the homes of their guest-friends. A notable instance is the case of Sthenius of Thermae; his patrons were able to induce the tribunes of the plebs to intervene in his behalf, and indeed even the Senate, before whom the consuls spoke in his favor.25
The support of patrons could also have financial effects, in particular the securing of tax exemptions. For example, the names of the individuals mentioned as patrons on the honorific inscriptions at Oropus in Greece are those of senators who had reached the summit of their political career at the time of the dispute between the priests of the sanctuary of Amphiaraus at Oropus and the state contractors (pub-licani), a financial dispute that was resolved in 73 by a senatorial decree in favor of the sanctuary. On the basis of this fact F. Canali de Rossi argues plausibly that the three Roman senators honored at Oropus (C. Scribonius Curio, Cn. Cornelius Lentulus, Cn. Calpurnius Piso) had used their power in Rome to intervene on behalf of the sanctuary of Amphiaraus.26 Clients and patrons also generally made use of patronage as a medium of information. As was noted above, the city of Dyrrachium was a longstanding client of Cicero. Its residents were his main source of information on the actions of L. Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus as governor of Macedon between 57 and 55 (unpaid soldiers and financial irregularities) that Cicero reported to the Senate.27 The case of the Allobroges is also famous due to its implications for the successful suppression of Catiline’s conspiracy. In 63 the ambassadors of this tribe of Transalpine Gaul had come to Rome to complain about their governors. They were solicited by the friends of Catiline to foment disturbances in Gaul, but instead alerted their patron, Q. Fabius Sanga, who informed Cicero. Compromising letters then permitted the consul to uncover the threat facing the city and to act against it (Sall. Cat. 41.4, 46, 47). The usual view is that Fabius Sanga was the Allobroges’ patron because he was a descendant of Q. Fabius Maximus Allobrogicus, consul in 121, who had conquered the Allobroges in 120.28
The assistance given by clients was valued in all aspects of a patron’s public life. Clients even saw to the physical security of their patron in the absence of a permanent police force. The young men of the town of Reate constituted a bodyguard for Cicero during his consulship in 63 at the time of the Catilinarian conspiracy (Cic. Scaur. 27). During their tenure of the aedileship, patrons who needed to obtain the gratitude of the Roman People to lay the groundwork for future elections demanded a great deal from their clients. Thus the residents of Messina in Sicily lent statues to C. Claudius Pulcher, notably one of Cupid sculpted by Praxiteles, in order to give more pomp to the games that he organized during his aedileship in 99 (Cic. Verr. 2.4.3, 6). An extraordinarily munificent aedileship might be supported by clients’ gifts of grain for the city of Rome and wild animals for the games. In 196, during his aedileship, C. Flaminius distributed grain that the Sicilians had offered him in memory of his father, who had been praetor of Sicily in 227 (Livy 33.42.8). The Sicilians showed their gratitude also to Cicero after his success over Verres in 70. In his aedileship in 69 they sent him enough grain to lower the price in Rome during a time of great scarcity and high prices (Plut. Cic. 8.2).29 A recently discovered inscription has given evidence of an earlier example of such generosity. A decree from Larissa in Thessaly (Greece) tells us that the Thessalian League had made a contribution to Rome’s food supply in the form of a grant of wheat to an aedile, Q. Caecilius Metellus, in gratitude for his family’s actions in their behalf.30
When the Romans authorized the importation of African wild animals by a law passed in 170, a member of the family of the Scipios, P. Cornelius Scipio Nasica Corculum, aedile in 169, provided African animals (63 panthers, 40 elephants, 40 bears) for a public wild-beast hunt (venatio). He had indirectly inherited the patronage that his kinsman Scipio Africanus, the conqueror of Hannibal, had established over Massinissa, the king of Numidia (Livy 44.18. 8), and he subsequently had a brilliant career, becoming consul twice (in 162 and 155) and censor (159). Patronal relationships were typically such an important resource for the organization of the wild-beast spectacles that when Cicero became governor of Cilicia, he was forced to confront a remarkable request by his friend and protege, M. Caelius Rufus, aedile in 50, to organize hunts throughout the cities of his province in order to obtain panthers for the games Caelius was responsible for presenting.
The patronage of a Roman magistrate and his family over a region of Italy could open up access to other types of services. The patronage that the family of Pompey exercised over Picenum is well known. Pompey’s father, Cn. Pompeius Strabo, had invited officers of Picenum to join his staff at the time of the Social War (ILLRP 515). Some years later, the young Pompey raised three legions there which he put at Sulla’s disposal as he returned from the East to take back power in Rome. Again, in 56 Pompey was able to gather a large force from Picenum against Clodius. Finally, in 49, he recruited a large number of troops there for use against Caesar. Also in 49 L. Domitius Ahenobarbus recruited slaves, freedmen, and tenants in the region of Cosa where he held land in order to supply crews for the fleet he had created to support the Pompeians in Marseilles (Caes. B Civ. 1.34.2).
Toward the end of the Republic some cities had established multiple patron-client relationships with the generals or politicians who were their intermediaries with Roman power. It was at times difficult for them to make a choice between their multiple loyalties to patrons, the nature of whose protection varied depending on circumstances. The people of Marseilles, who owed loyalty to Pompey as much as to Caesar,32 finally decided to side with Pompey, who had exercised his patronage over them before Caesar. When they were defeated by Caesar he punished them harshly.
The times of Caesar’s consulship (59) and later of his dictatorship (46-44) were also marked by other conflicts of patronage. The settlement of thousands of veterans, clients of Caesar, on lands that had been allotted to them posed a threat to landownership in Italy and the communities of the provinces. Thus Caesar’s land-allotments prompted in response patronal intercessions, as attested by Cicero’s letters of recommendation. When, for example, the residents of Volaterrae (Volterra) in Italy (Cic. Fam. 13.4) and Buthrotum in Epirus (northwest Greece) were threatened with expropriation, Cicero’s intervention gave them the wherewithal to resist arbitrary confiscations (Cic. Att. 15.14; 16.16 A-F). Patronage allowed political decisions to be manipulated in favor of clients and clienteles. Cicero’s recommendations were moreover accompanied by new requests for patronage: he entrusted the people of Volaterrae to the fides of a legate of Caesar for their protection and those of Buthrotum to that of the consul, Dolabella.33
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