CHAPTER SEVEN A Roman Balance

a selection of extant enumerations of Roman males carried out by the Roman censors highlights the principal outcome of incorporating new citizens into the Roman state during the third through first centuries.

The degree to which the Romans were able to maintain a functioning, expanding society, during the fourth through first centuries, through the incor­poration of new members was unrivaled in world history. Equally striking was the degree to which the harmony and growth of the Roman state rested on deeply held assumptions shared by political leaders and people, chief among them the viability of the public lawmaking process as a flexible instrument for resolving social and political problems. Yet the stability that the Romans brought to their society in this fashion came at a cost to the small-scale world of Rome. Concurrent with the growing numbers of members in the highest and lowest classes, the original military basis of the classes slipped away, with con­sequences especially for Rome's leadership.

AN EXPANDING LEADERSHIP

The requirements of a larger and more complex Roman state placed heavy demands on the political families of Rome. Imperial expansion, as we saw in the previous chapter, was accompanied throughout the period by an increase both in the number of offices in Rome and in temporarily appointed or elected commissions.

This combination of circumstances ensured that the narrowly restricted political hierarchy of early-fourth-century Rome, resting on wealth, status, and exclusion, was gradually loosened. From here on out, Rome's governing classes were roughly equivalent to all families possessing the property rating of equestrians. Some men belonged to the elite equites equo publico; many more were wealthy tribuni aerarii, registered in Class i.⁵ From the late third century, the chances of equestrians with no previous personal or indeed family experi­ence entering leadership positions grew, sometimes rapidly. The Roman disas­ter at Cannae provides a case in point: Although we have no explicit testimony, the numbers lost from the Roman Senate were undoubtedly made up, and the source turned to at this time, as later, was the small group of equites equo publico. Moreover, an increasing number of these equestrians, and hence polit­ical leaders, were newer citizens from Latin colonies and Italian municipalites. For the equestrian class itself, as we have seen, was expanding.

Not only was the membership of this pool expanded by more and more men drawn from all communities of Italy with a Roman equestrian property rat­ing, but new members willingly entered the competitive race for political office in Rome—an indicator of the degree of assimilation achieved. New clans emerged in Roman political life, drawn from the newer Romans of the near and far munic­ipalities, to supply candidates for elected office and thus membership in the Roman Senate.⁶ After the Second Punic War, as after earlier wars, new fami­lies appear on the political scene.⁷ The pattern clearly follows the widening spiral of Roman citizenship grants: the first clans to penetrate Roman political elite ranks came from nearby Latin towns, some granted citizenship early in the fourth century.⁸ The elite families of Tusculum, for instance, the first Latin town to receive Roman citizenship in 381, had penetrated the rulers' innermost circle, the small group of nobiles, in Rome by 198, the year M. Porcius Cato attained the office of praetor. Others had reached lower office before then. In the case of Cato as well as others, it is apparent that such a rise was by no means rapid considering how long the local elites had been Roman citizens.⁹ In fact, throughout the period, the nobiles of Rome presented an impenetrable facade to political newcomers. The entree of these political newcomers into the society of Rome, and in some instances into the ranks of the higher lead­ership itself, for the most elevated among them, the new men, was gained before the Italian War mostly through the patronage of the leading clans in Rome.

In fact, the voters of Rome ensured their eventual entry, despite the reluc­tance of the Roman nobility to allow political newcomers into its own ranks before the Punic Wars. The Roman people were far more ecumenical toward political newcomers than were the nobility. Regardless of a tendency toward privileging members of the entrenched clans at the polls, because of tribal loy­alties and the local relationships between these clans and the communities where their lands were situated, voters looked also to competence, ability, and merit in the men they chose as leaders. Since these qualifications were demon­strated in a man's performance during military service and officeholding, the junior legal and administrative offices as well as the junior military rank of mil­itary tribune were crucial stages in a man's career. In all the junior offices, held by new men and sons of nobles, a man formed a reputation through perform­ance and public oratory, which he later expanded in the public arena in Rome.¹⁰ Within a noble clan, accordingly, there were winners and losers in the eyes of the voters. With the wider field of players introduced by the expanding num­bers of equestrians and simultaneously an expanded and dispersed majority pop­ulation, both winners and losers in the old noble clans—and also, it should be stressed, in the new families—faced considerable challenges.¹¹

Neither existing nor new political families among the Roman leadership faced these challenges lying down, however. Indeed the changes in the equestrian pool and thus in Rome's potential leadership, already long under way in the first half of the third century and intensified by the habitual com­petitiveness of elite Romans for authority and wealth, certainly motivated the enduring frictions that typify the Roman leadership. Friction between patri­cian and plebeian, noble and new families, goes back to the beginnings of the Republic in the Roman annalistic tradition about the “struggle of the orders.” It is likewise evident already in the fourth century, in the form of political ani­mosities between the informal groupings called factions by modern histori­ans.

These efforts begin with the leadership pool itself, where we see an effort to strike a balance between the growing number of men with an equestrian property rating and the elite character of the equestrian class. Membership in the equestrians with the public horse never exceeded (by much) the tradi­tional figure of eighteen hundred, even when the numbers of wealthy men had grown into the thousands, and probably in the late third century the property qualification of an equestrian was set at the astronomical sum of one million asses.¹² Evidently some Romans hoped to restrict entry into the group, which regularly contributed junior officials and new senators, in light of the growing number of men whose resources qualified them for registration. Senate purges reveal similar tensions within the Senate, where the striking of senators from the list reflects both the animosities generated by the different origins of new senators and an awareness that some senators fell short of the mark. Reported revisions of the Senate list between 200 and 91 usually note the expulsion of nine or, more commonly, fewer senators.¹³ In 115, the censors removed thirty-two senators from the list, a full 15 percent of the Senate mem­bership.¹⁴ To all appearances, a continuous effort was under way almost from the beginnings of Roman expansion in Italy to regulate qualifications for admis­sion to the group that furnished the future political, religious, and military leadership of the community.

While the Senate or officeholders, in particular the Roman censor, probably generated many of these reforms, the most assiduous engine of reform was the pub­lic lawmaking assembly. Table 7.1 collects all public laws creating new offices, expanding the number of officeholders, modifying the conditions of selection or qualification, and addressing Senate or equestrian class membership throughout the period. The seventeen public law proposals involving Rome's leadership between 218 and 201 are best understood in the context of the exigencies of wartime pres­sure. But the necessity of casting the net widely for the best possible military and political leaders is in some measure also a reflection of the growth in number of men eligible for leadership positions. Other items in our listing in table 7.1 sug­gest similar forces at work, in particular laws proposed or enacted making adjust­ments in the regular selection of commanders in times of war. Still more items—laws assigning new responsibilities and creating more offices—reflect the practical need for more administrators.

Other items indicate a growing pressure on offices and honors—and a reso­lution of the problem to the advantage of newer equestrian families in the broader-based leadership pool. Notably, the admission of plebeians to the offices of consul and censor was accomplished in the late fourth century through law­making assemblies. Other items include laws regulating the ages for holding office, laws admitting equestrians into the Senate or jury panels, laws regulat­ing equestrian honors, and laws regulating the conditions for holding triumphs: All provide confirmation of the competitive drive for office and position from a larger group of competitors (table 7.1). The bill of 129 removing the public horse from senators, in particular, reveals the pressures from an expanded equestrian class on positions of honor as well as the tensions created by sena­torial appropriation of those honors. Henceforth, the small group of equites equo publico would draw its membership only from men of equestrian rating outside the Senate. In turn a number of laws curtailing the authority of the cen­sors to remove men from the Senate confirms the depth of the concern among senators to police themselves. Efforts are also made through public lawmak­ing assemblies to control officeholders and other elite Romans, for instance, by prohibiting public law sponsors or their family members from holding positions created by a law they sponsored or by making senators on state business liable for prosecution in Rome (table 7.1).

The developing position of military tribune, which was both nonelective and elective and counted among the lesser offices of Rome, magistratus minores, is especially indicative of such pressures.¹⁵ This position was often though not always held before the quaestorship, the first rung in the cursus honorum and the office that after 81 provided entry into the Senate.¹⁶ Junior officers in the Roman army, the military tribunes' functions were exercised in a strictly military arena. The office was also a vital step in a man's political career because of the opportunities it offered him to reinforce the public support already demon­strated through his success at the polls in the first place by forging critical rela­tionships with Rome's fighting men. A significant index of the importance with which the positions were viewed is the attention paid in lawmaking assemblies to the manner of selection and qualifications of military tribunes. Initially selected by the consuls, eventually all of the tribunes came to be elected in the tribal assembly—a law in 362 enacted that the people would elect six initially; another law in 311 enacted that the people would elect sixteen; and finally, in 207, all twenty-four (of whom fourteen must be equestrians, testimony to the clout of equestrians). Between these dates other laws modified the selection (or election) process, usually in times of critical need.¹⁷ No fewer than six recorded statutes between the fourth and second centuries addressed the elective posi­tion of military tribune, a critically important office for ascendant Romans with political ambitions, including new citizens. Indeed, the military tribunate was instrumental in the elevation of municipal leaders to the rank of Roman eques­trian, before and after the Italian War.¹⁸ Other elective positions were also the subject of lawmaking assemblies. The number of statutes listed in table 7.1 reg­ulating the manner in which men were chosen to fill the lesser offices attests to the importance with which these offices, like the military tribunate, were viewed by elite Romans and the Roman people. The bigger issue was the grow­ing number of Romans competing for office. Significantly, the outcome of these laws was to broaden the avenue of access to elected office, enabling more eques­trians from different backgrounds to enter the political leadership.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PRODUCTION OF LAW

Considering the customary manner of formulating and drafting law before it entered into public view, it is worth asking how members of Rome's political leadership continued to become privy to public lawmaking conventions when officeholders were drawn from distant communities. Traditionally, imparting the arts of government to young aristocrats entailed an apprenticeship in which the youth followed an elder relative or family friend in order to observe and to learn. Senators' sons attended sessions of the Senate. Legal experts who sat at home or strolled through the Forum and delivered advice to Romans who sought advice were attended by aristocratic youths. Early military service for young aristocrats, which began at roughly age sixteen and was expected to last ten years, was a period of training on the same principle: in the field, adolescent boys served on the commander's staff, sharing a tent with an older man. Thus, after a process of learning by observation and participation, young aris­tocrats were familiar with the kinds and arenas of interaction expected of them when the time came to present themselves as candidates or nominees for the military tribunate and the junior offices in Rome.

For all types of training except military the venue was Rome. In Rome were to be found the best teachers of rhetoric, the art of public speaking, included among the essential equipment of aristocrats. Consequently, municipal aristocrats who entertained political aspirations for their sons sent them to Rome for the same kind of apprenticeship enjoyed by aristocratic Roman youths. Such was Cicero's experience, recorded by Cornelius Nepos in his biography of Atticus. Moreover, in Rome, and only in Rome, was found the primary gateway to political leader­ship: the electoral voting assemblies. The offices in the cursus honorum and the tribunate were the most elevated in a competitive political career whose peak was the consulate. But other elective offices, offices through which aspiring leaders advanced before they reached the topmost rungs of leadership, were sought and held by many men of equestrian rank. These include the military tribunes of the first four legions and, beginning in the late third and early second centuries, many of the positions in the Vigintisexvirate. The men who succeeded at the polls might not necessarily advance further in a significant political career, or they might advance only as far as the quaestorship, tribunate, or aedileship and no further, but they were nonetheless playing essential roles in the administration of Roman society. At the same time they were enhancing the present status and future potential of their families. Thus, elected office in Rome presupposed long­term exposure to a process of learning and selection that began at an early age. Moreover, an increasing number of individuals had to be exposed to this process for, in spite of our patchy impressions of Rome's administrative apparatus, we are clearly dealing with a structure that made extensive demands on the uppermost strata of Roman society from the third century onward.

Undoubtedly the entry of more and more new aristocrats into the system between the fourth and the second centuries brought some changes to a cus­tomary training process if not to the conventions of leadership themselves. But this is not yet in evidence in the second century, when leaders prepared for rule in a customary but evolving process involving a number of legal and adminis­trative positions that underwent significant changes over time. Where public law is concerned, law sponsors over time came from more varied backgrounds, confirmation of the widening access for political newcomers to the traditional training grounds of the Roman lawmaker: political office and judicial respon­sibilities. Interestingly there are no obvious signs of any significant breakdown in the conventions of rule during the second century, no complaints that these newer political leaders, some from newly incorporated communities, utterly lack the understandings and tools to be leaders of Rome.¹⁹ So successful had been the assimilation of new citizens at elite levels during the period down to roughly the mid-second century.

Perhaps we should not expect any breakdown at such a stage of Roman devel­opment, for the momentous repercussions of Mediterranean conquest are still a generation away. The extraordinary display of wealth and training in Greek

rhetoric, which set the political and social leadership of Rome apart from the rest, came to be common only during the second century. Until then, there was greater homogeneity among the senators, equites equo publico, and other men with an equestrian rating with respect to mode of life and outlook, as well as intellectual training and skills. More important, the scale and demands of rule were not yet as complex as they later became. In 218, Roman administration extended only as far as the Po River in Italy and the islands Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica. While the Romans made adjustments to their ruling apparatus in order to accommodate this expansion, the modification required was small com­pared to that required after 146. Of greater consequence, however, to the cus­tomary grasp of Roman ways was the devastation of senatorial families in the first century, to which we shall return in chapter 8. Suffice to say here that at that time the commitment to Roman ways appears to have changed. Nonethe­less the entry of more and more new elite families into the system between the fourth and the second centuries undoubtedly had significant consequences for the group's hold on the conventions of leadership. That such a development would also have repercussions in the workings of a traditional Roman system goes without saying. Of fundamental concern was an awareness that holding the loyalties of the majority population required new efforts. Let us turn then to the critical relationship between leaders and the Roman people.

ATTENUATING ATTACHMENTS

In a two-year period, between 123 and 121, C. Sempronius Gracchus and five other Roman tribunes presented at least twenty-seven public law propos­als to the Roman people, over half of them successfully, in rapid-fire succes- sion.²⁰ Not since the Second Punic War, and even then never on this scale, had Roman voters considered so many public law proposals in such a brief span of time. Gracchus himself presented an unrivaled sixteen proposals in 123 and 122, carrying all but four. No one lawmaker would again field so many public laws until L. Cornelius Sulla in the 80s. Another pioneering feature of this surge of lawmaking is the replication of issues addressed by different lawmakers. The tribunes M. Livius Drusus in 122 and M. Minucius Rufus in 121 in particular aired similar concerns as C. Sempronius Gracchus, between them presenting bills on rents, on the possession or redistribution of public property of the Roman people (ager publicus), on colony foundations, on subsidized grain distributions, and on citizen rights that reversed or nullified—in one case unsuccessfully, in the other not—laws carried by Gracchus. Given that lawmakers sought to develop public law proposals that would appeal to all thirty-five tribes, we must wonder at the expectations of Rome's leaders in regard to the Roman voters: How is it that M. Livius Drusus in 122 could think that the voters would endorse his proposals so soon after they had wholeheartedly embraced those of C. Sem­pronius Gracchus? How then could M. Minucius Rufus in late 122 or early 121 successfully carry measures similar in aim to M. Livius Drusus? The volatile record of the lawmaking over 123 to 121 highlights the changes in progress that forever changed the mechanisms of reciprocity between the growing number of groups potentially in attendance at lawmaking assemblies in Rome, to whom such a wide variety of public concerns appealed, and the growing number of officeholders who sought to garner their support.

Our point of departure in examining these changes is M. Porcius Cato's depiction of rural Italy in a handbook on estate farming, De Agricultura, the best available literary evidence for such an inquiry, written about 160.²¹ Twice consul, censor in 184, and wealthy landowner, Cato had official and personal familiarity with the socioeconomic interactions attendant on estate manage­ment, particularly in the area of west-central Italy, where he situates his guide­lines. Accordingly, the population and practices that Cato takes for granted tell us much about the world Rome had created here by 160, almost two cen­turies after Roman settlement.

De Agricultura is populated by estate owners, slaves, lesser landholders, and free laborers. Since slave labor was the preferred work force in most circum­stances on large, capital-generating estates in his day, Cato is concerned pri­marily with slaves and slave overseers. Nonetheless he touches on a wide range of landholdings and relationships among free individuals, which makes it very clear that cash crops and slaves existed in a much more complicated rural context. He takes for granted for instance the existence of some kind of local market, which involved exchange between the estate and its neighbors. Most likely these neighbors were villagers or poorer farmers on marginal lands rather than other wealthy landowners because Cato assumes that they will buy fire­wood and lime, two essentials for everyday existence during most of the year.

Hence, De Agricultura offers a contemporary perspective on everyday deal­ings between ordinary rural inhabitants and their social betters in Roman Italy. Of particular interest is Cato's coverage of the suggested labor agreements into which his estate owner might enter, characterized by a precision of language and phrasing that is probably owed to Cato's tenure as censor.²² (The Roman cen­sors customarily handled state contracts.) In De Agricultura, Cato identifies a variety of situations arising in the course of ordinary estate management that called for formal arrangements. If the construction of farm buildings necessitated the hire of a builder, the estate owner and builder should agree bilaterally to terms that Cato conveniently provides, which spell out in precise, legalistic lan­guage the respective promises of the estate owner and the builder. The pro­duction of lime also involved an agreement, again articulated by Cato: The estate owner is responsible for the materials, the burner is responsible for the kiln, and each takes a share of the lime for his efforts. The estate owner's share, as noted, sufficed for his own uses and for sale to neighbors in the region. Labor contracts for picking olives involved several parties, specifically the estate owner; a labor contractor, that is, an individual or group who acts as some kind of mid­dleman by assembling workers; and the olive pickers. The responsibilities of both middleman and workers are precisely detailed, up to and including a stipulation that the workers must swear not to steal the produce. Contracts for pressing olives are similar. Earning capital from the land itself involved the estate owner in other contracts, which Cato also provides. One stipulates the lease of land for winter pastures. To whom, we wonder? To smaller farmers, doubtless, and perhaps even to Apennine herdsmen. As described in chapter 4, a reciprocal relationship had emerged, in centuries past, between peoples dwelling in the summer and winter pasture areas. It is reasonable to speculate that such leases in De Agricultura indicate the continuation of these traditional transhumance patterns, by way of contractual agreement. We have seen already how the insti­tutionalization of traditional transhumance networks appears to be reflected in the arrangements of the lex Agraria and the Sententia Minuciorum.

The labor contracts preserved in De Agricultura suggest a much deeper trans­formation in society. Such formal arrangements move us far away from imag­ining a world in which wealthy, powerful estate owners are supported by a net of dependents who owe them certain work obligations. Conspicuously absent from Cato's depiction of the prosaic business of estate management, which at times depended on specialists or seasonal labor, is a sense that his estate owner could find building experts or extra hands among a ready group of his client­tenants. Indeed, labor contracts seem to rule out the operation of any such patron-client ties of dependency in a rural setting.²³ The high incidence of legally defined relationships in De Agricultura indicates that relations between big landowners and ordinary men in the mid-second century were not merely socially defined. Instead the laborers sought by estate owners for particular jobs appear to be unattached men. The absence of social attachments between the work force and the landowner explains why they are required to swear an oath that they will not steal the harvest. Oaths presuppose a certain level of autonomy and mutual independence. Oaths establish a relationship if not between equals at least between men who recognize the independent worth of each other's station and actions. They establish a relationship outside that determined by ties of family or village. Thus soldiers swear oaths of loyalty to their commander and Rome. Returning to the more prosaic situation of the olive pickers, surely we might imagine that an oath promising not to steal would be extrane­ous if the workers were clients in a traditional work relationship with the mid­dleman or the estate owner. In short, the requisite bilateral agreements and oaths, the defining features of legal relationships, suggest a society some of whose members for whatever reason tended to be rather loosely linked.

Why this was so in a society commonly termed “traditional” calls for some elab­oration. In fact, Cato reveals a world in which the traditional ties characteristic of preexpansion Rome have to some extent come undone for ordinary people, cre­ating a more fluid situation open to the formation of different bonds among men.²⁴ Increasing density of settlement in the region due to in-migration provides one explanation. In particular, Oscan-speaking migrants from the Apennines who had a tradition of independent family structure did not quickly develop the recipro­cal, vertical relationships believed characteristic of Roman and other sedentary farming and urban populations. More important is the high level of mobility and disruption accompanying Roman expansion over two centuries and the absence of young males in military service, returning to land grants in unfamiliar regions.

Roman military service tended to break down old loyalties and foster new ones in their stead. The process was far more dynamic after the Second Punic War, when Roman overseas expansion drew more men into long periods of serv­ice away from Italy. Over time military obligations imposed on Latins and Ital­ians transformed the foundations of traditional order and community loyalties in Latin and Italian communities. As soldiers fought longer and longer cam­paigns, usually outside Italy, the Roman army became the focus for the forma­tion of alternative social networks among men, as a result of both the duration and intensity of the attachments to comrades-in-arm forged in military service. The continuous and long wars of the first century in Italy and outside intensi­fied the tendency; even more so the long-time practice of settling discharged soldiers from the same unit together in a single colony or region. Commonly veterans from the same units were settled together in Roman and Latin colonies. The earliest large-scale grants occurred at the end of the Second Punic War, when forty thousand veterans of the campaign against Hannibal were given con­fiscated land in south Italy.²⁵ Most land distributions were smaller. In 123, three thousand troops who had served in Spain were settled in a Roman colony on the Balearic Island of Spain.²⁶ In 100, the discharged soldiers of Marius's cam­paigns against Jugurtha, and against the Cimbri and Teutoni, were settled together in North Africa. While the largest such settlements, in which soldiers of the same unit passed from camp to colony, were features of the first century, the point remains: for a long time the soldiers of Rome had formed self-identified groups with collective interests. For veterans, immediate loyalties were no longer deter­mined by region, town of origin, or ancestral ties of dependency, but by military units, ever subject to loss and replenishment, and commanders, whose duration in command might be fleeting. That these more fluid loyalties prevailed after soldiers crossed the perimeters of military camps and entered the civic arena is clear—and explains why Caesar, in 47, scattered the land allotments given to soldiers from a mutinous legion.²⁷ In a world of changing relationships, Roman military service had assumed great importance.

Moreover, an institutionalized reciprocity generally prevailed over any cus­tomary regional or family links between ordinary men and their social bet­ters. The civil rights and privileges of ordinary Roman citizens—in particular provocatio, but also the range of legal protections and opportunities of redress outlined in the Twelve Tables, enshrined in the praetor's annual edict and in countless public laws—transcended any reliance on the deference owed to Roman senator or elected official, for his own sake. This is not to say that Rome was becoming a society of individuals with an unmediated attachment to the state, as in modern Western democracies. Rather, the mesh of traditional relationships enwrapped a more fluid population, made up of more numerous and ramified groups. Not only reciprocity but merit and continuous realign­ment featured in the relationships that leaders forged with ordinary men.²⁸

These features explain the unsettled character of Roman patronage, whose conspicuous failings in late Republican Rome led Brunt to doubt that the insti­tution held any real significance in political life.²⁹ In the quintessential patron­client union (as projected in modern studies), the patron in Rome and elsewhere was protector, benefactor, and master of his client, who in turn owed him the respect and bidding of a son to his father. The client also performed cer­tain services, which from a modern perspective appear intangible at times. Clients of an aspiring or ascendant political leader, for example, would pres­ent themselves at his home in the morning and accompany him in a great throng on his daily rounds about the city of Rome, thus serving to publicize his status and importance. Clients of lesser patrons in lesser towns performed similar services. In return the patrons handed out daily allowances, new clothes, and other necessities of life. Hierarchically ranged, patrons and clients alike straddled the gamut of Roman status groups. All Roman senators, office­holders, and equestrians (equites equo publico and men assessed with an eques­trian rating) functioned in varying degrees as patrons to clients who were lower-ranking senators or equestrians, ordinary freeborn citizens, or ex-slaves. These reciprocal obligations and relations were in a manner of speaking fixed.

At the same time, however, the population involved in such relations was one whose members, under pressure of historical circumstances, began to enter and exit formal status positions in a highly volatile pattern. Nevertheless, the necessity of delineating relationships in a population comprising newer citi­zens, varied cultures and languages, as well as citizens in changed circumstances was met by drawing on prior, customary relations. Elite Romans took clients and patrons for granted; yet all Romans were not clients (or patrons). Town dwellers and former slaves were most often in the fides of a patron.³⁰ Or the relationship was rather fluid: veteran soldiers and their commanders come to mind. In brief, vertical ties in the Roman population were somewhat broken by the advent of a larger, more diverse population and a larger leadership.

Roman leaders were aware that long-established relationships were slipping. For in all periods we hear murmurs about the vital importance of maintaining a proper balance in the community through understood habits of interaction between the leadership and the people. Before the Italian War this balance was firmly held by men from politically known clans, nobiles, who carefully con­trolled the admission of political newcomers or new men (novi homines). Such a balance we might imagine was believed by some elite Roman to be threat­ened by the incorporation of outsiders, as they regarded Latins and especially allies, who were not privy to the understandings of Romans or whose loyalties were divided between Rome and their own local leaders. A passing comment of Cicero, in a speech delivered in 56, offers a glimpse of a firm Roman attitude to men of uncertain attachment. Commending himself as consul in 63 for upholding the statute of Sulla that barred the sons of proscribed Romans from standing for office, Cicero justifies his actions, which had been unpopu­lar with ordinary Romans but popular with the Roman Senate, on the grounds that those sons, “though brave and patriotic, had passed through experiences which would probably have led them to shatter the constitution, had they obtained office” (Pis. 4; Loeb trans.). These are men who had in a sense been tossed out of the system: What of men who had only recently entered? The capacity of established political leaders, in particular men belonging to the noble clans, to lead was doubtless diminished by the expansion of the Roman citizen population to include men of uncertain attachments at all levels. For the traditional dimension of leadership, as understood by the leaders, which depended on the personal dependency of individual families or defined groups— Roman or Latin colonies, municipia, or tribes—to a specific clan over time, was diluted when an expanded citizen population made such attachments harder to maintain. Now there were more potential leaders, each with a changeable crowd of friends, associates, and dependents.

One index of the uncertainties confronting the political leadership is the appearance and increasingly widespread prevalence of campaign bribes, ambitus.³¹ The common practice of giving gifts to tribal members had already become institutionalized in the creation of tribal officers called divisores, who were responsible for sharing out benefactions.³² But by the Middle Repub­lic the practice came to be redirected to facilitate the election of men to high office who could not count on the strength of the votes of their fellow tribes­men. Such bribes confirm some kind of breakdown in the loyalties mediated by tribal leaders and expressed by ordinary Romans for a customary leader­ship drawn from established and acceptable clans.³³ Gone, modern historians postulate, were the firm ties of clientage among tribal members that linked ordi­nary Romans with their high-status tribules and ensured the political elevation of men from select clans with the support of their fellow tribesmen. In their place now appears the lure of cash, reducing the rank order of tribal loyalties to a monetary transaction between voters and ambitious candidates. Such a scenario, however, tends to miss the complexities and conservatism of Roman social change.

For although hierarchy remains a constant feature of Roman social organi­zation throughout our period of interest, the vertical ties of hierarchy were con­siderably ramified as a result of the incorporation of new citizens and in particular the admission of new members into Rome's leadership pool. At the same time, if the increase in numbers of would-be leaders diminished or dispersed the strength of vertical ties, it had no observable effect on horizontal ties. Indeed, such ties were enhanced over the course of the Republic by the superimposed networks of the legions and colonies on the Roman tribes, characterized by reciprocal horizontal and vertical ties involving not only citizens but, before the Italian War, Italian and Latin allies. Arguably, it was the endurance of hor­izontal ties among tribesmen that encouraged Rome's political leaders to dis­burse more and more cash to voters before elections. They recognized the endurance of bonds among ordinary citizens as well as a growing divide between themselves and such citizens, even in their own tribes.

To restore a balance to the system, the Romans adjusted their most funda­mental institutions. We saw earlier (chapter 5) how the Romans lowered the property qualifications for Class 5, reabsorbing poorer Romans as effective cit­izens. Among similar reforms, now directed at the leadership, most important was the manipulation of voting units in the centuriate assembly, which reflected the property classes. This assembly, whose voters elected Rome's highest lead­ers and whose decisions therefore were of crucial importance to would-be con­suls, praetors, and curule aediles, first felt the impact of the newly incorporated citizens. The reform of the centuriate assembly, sometime in the mid-third cen­tury, through which the centuries were brought into closer alignment with the Roman tribes, was undoubtedly an effort to maintain the integrity of the system by restoring a customary Roman balance to the voting potential of the various centuries of each class.³⁴ Concurrently, Romans in Class i were given the priv­ilege of voting first, before the equites equo publico. This was not a demo­cratic reform, as some scholars believe, but a realistic acknowledgment of the growing numbers of men with an equestrian property rating, many of them new citizens, in Class i. As a result of the reform, new citizens who were generally registered in all the tribes were caught in the existing net of tribal loyalties that enmeshed tribesmen of different status groups.

Even before the reform of the centuriate assembly, and continuing long after, the tribal assignments of new citizens were also subject to adjustment.³⁵ For some citizens were deemed unassimilable by some Romans except perhaps as dedicated clients of powerful Roman leaders.³⁶ Witness the rigorous opposition of a group of noble senators in 312 to the decision of the censor, Ap. Claudius Caecus, to enroll former slaves and city of Rome shopkeepers throughout all the tribes.³⁷ Although the censors of 304 again restricted these citizens to the four city tribes, the assignment of freedmen continued to be an issue until the end of the Republic.³⁸ The incident reveals a divided mind about new citizens among Rome's leaders late in the fourth century, some of whom were deter­mined to control the voting power of these men through the regulation of tribal assignments. The basis for their hostility to these particular Romans bears thought.³⁹ After all, in 312, former slaves were likely to be victims of war in Italy—Etruscan, Latin, Samnite, or other Italian; Greek or possibly Gaul; perhaps even Romans who had the misfortune to fall into binding debt—hence, people who for the most part (except Gauls) in other circumstances might be perfectly acceptable citizens or allies. Assets were not an issue, since freed slaves were likely to be men of property, nor indeed were origins: the Roman people deemed sons of freedmen eligible for citizenship optimo iure, enacting a law to that effect in i89 and registering these new citizens throughout all the tribes.⁴⁰

The slave condition, however, was in itself suspect: like proscribed men in the first century, former slaves at all times were men of uncertain attachment. And their misfortunes were sometimes compounded by foreign origins. Could they be privy to the understandings that knit Roman society together at the top and elevated the best men to office, especially high office? Evidently not, for Livy credits them with the election of the clerk Cn. Flavius, son of a former slave, as aedile in 304—an outcome greeted with unambiguous animosity on the part of Roman nobles. By their opposition to enrolling former slaves through­out all the tribes, such leaders clearly sought to narrow the avenue to politi­cal participation by people whose ability to make the right decision as deter­mined by the better classes of Roman society was in a sense unknown. In the long run, however, the real danger to the Roman system came not from ordi­nary people but from men of highest status.⁴¹

SETTING LIMITS ON THE LEADERS

In 149, the tribune Calpurnius successfully proposed the first of Rome's cele­brated public laws addressing the crime of res repetundae, the unlawful seizure of property belonging to provincials by a Roman governor. For the first time the lex Calpurnia defined as criminal the habitual, somewhat rapa­cious behavior of Roman leaders abroad and established a procedure to inves­tigate charges of such behavior brought by aggrieved provincials before the praetor peregrinus in Rome. Over the next one hundred years, the Romans fur­ther developed the definitions of the crime, the range of individuals (initially Roman officeholders or senators and their sons, but expanding by the end of the Republic to include members of a governor's staff) liable to prosecution, the trial procedures, and most notably the Roman citizens who were to have the right of trial, judgment, and assessment of damages. At least sixty-four high- ranking Romans were brought to trial before the end of the Republic.⁴² Mas­ters of the world, the Romans astutely recognized the need to temper force with justice and provided a remedy for official abuse in the leges repetundarum.

Although Roman officeholders had always been liable for specific acts of misconduct or failure, no single category of official behavior was consistently defined as a crime against the state, with the exception of the long-standing capital offense of perduellio, adjudicated by the Roman people. Complaints about the behavior of individual officeholders or senators were spontaneous, and the Senate or people might create special commissions of investigation to adjudicate them on an ad hoc basis. Or an aedile or quaestor would convene the people as a judicial assembly to adjudicate complaints, again on an ad hoc basis. By the second century, however, the expanding number of potential Roman leaders and the increasing competition among such men invited efforts to control present and former officeholders through the identification of sus­tainable crimes against the state. These efforts always involved lawmaking assemblies. Ambitus, campaign bribery, was the earliest such crime, addressed in a series of laws beginning perhaps in the fourth century and certainly on record in the early second century (see table 7.2).⁴³ The only known feature of the first secure lex de ambitu, the lex Baebia of 181, is the penalty attached to the crime, disqualification from office for ten years.⁴⁴ The next sustainable crime, res repetundae, was defined by the lex Calpurnia, as seen previously. For the first time a permanent court of investigation, quaestio, was established, spe­cific to the crime. Thereafter, the identification of other state crimes would be accompanied by the establishment of a unique, permanent court of investiga­tion, staffed by jurors (iudices) drawn from an evolving list of eligible Romans: maiestas (103), falsa (81), sicarii and venefici (81), iniuria (81), peculatus (81), vis (70), sodalicia (55), and parricidium (ca. 50).⁴⁵ Over time, the Romans modified the definitions of some of these crimes, as they did the crimen repetun­darum, the range of individuals liable to prosecution, the trial procedures, and the Roman citizens who were to have the right of trial, judgment, and assessment of damages. These adjustments, engineered in lawmaking assem­blies, confirm a societywide concern to set limits on an irrepressible aristocracy. At the same time, the series of laws initiated by the lex Calpurnia reveals an even more delicate balancing act within the ranks of Rome's leaders and would- be leaders, senators, and equestrians.

Fortunately, we have a clear view of these tensions in the fine detail of the so- called lex Repetundarum of the Gracchan period, 133-121, which modified the procedure and jurors of the permanent court established by the lex Calpurnia in 149.⁴⁶ Best known of the extortion laws by virtue of its lacunose survival (it was engraved on the front of the tablet that also preserves the lex Agraria), the lex Repetundarum precisely renders an array of persons, relations, and conditions that come under the law. The sheer number of these, a striking feature of the law, attests a finely honed awareness of qualities that set Romans apart. Accused men belong to a group that exhibits overlapping characteristics. First and foremost they are elected officeholders (except quaestors), elected military tribunes, or elected or appointed commissioners with juridical powers; that is, dictator, con­sul, praetor, master of the horse, censor, aedile, tribune, one of the three men for night-time crime (tresvir capitalis), one of the three men for the granting and assigning of lands (tresvir agris dandis adsignatis), or military tribune of legions 1-4. Second they are senators, by family association if not in fact, for the son of any of the identified officers is liable under the law only as long as the father is a senator. Office then is critical.

Turning to the selection of jurors, patrons, and witnesses, office again is a primary criterion, though not the only one. The 450 men placed by the praetor on the annual list of jurors (album iudicum) may not be or have been any of the named officers liable under the law or a quaestor (in other words, officers not automatically identifiable as senators). Other conditions must also be met. Jurors may not be or have been in the Senate; they may not have received a payment or been condemned in a quaestio and iudicium publicum so that they cannot be enrolled in the Senate; they may not be under thirty or over sixty; they must legally reside in Rome or within one mile; they may not be or have been father, brother, or son to any of the previously mentioned mag­istrates or of a man in the Senate or overseas. The jurors must be published in a list, with each juror identified by name, father's name, and tribe. The lex Repetundarum instructed the praetor to group them by tribe, tributim, as well: “He shall have all these names written on a white-washed board in black ink, including their father, tribe and cognomen, and organized by tribe.”⁴⁷

Even more restrictions hedge the business of selecting jurors for an individ­ual trial. The jurors selected from this list may not be related to the accused as son-in-law, father-in-law, stepfather, stepson, cousin, or closer blood relation or be a sodalis to him or be in the same collegium.⁴⁸ Nor may they be related to the prosecutor, or he to them, as father-in-law, son-in-law, stepfather, step­son, cousin, or closer blood relation or be a sodalis to him; nor may jurors be or have been tribune, quaestor, tresvir capitalis, tresvir agris dandis adsignatis, or military tribune; nor be or have been in the Senate; nor have been elected tresviri for founding a colony under the lex Rubria; nor be absent on public business or be overseas; nor be more than one from a family; nor be a man con­demned under the lex Calpurnia or lex Iunia, earlier extortion laws, or because he has been prosecuted under this statute.

Likewise, the patronus, or representative assigned to a prosecutor, and the witnesses for the prosecutor are tightly defined. A patronus must be a freeborn Roman citizen. He cannot be related to the accused as son-in-law, father-in­law, stepfather, stepson, cousin, or closer blood relation; or be a sodalis to him or be in the same collegium; or be in his fides or have ancestors who were in his ancestors' fides; or have been condemned in a quaestio and iudicium pub­licum so that he cannot be enrolled in the Senate; or be a juror under this law or have been appointed patron already under this law. While there is only one patron, there may be up to forty-eight witnesses. The conditions a witness should meet are equally lengthy (although there is a lacuna in the text of the law here): A witness who gives evidence may not be someone in whose fides the accused is, nor can the accused's ancestors have been in the fides of the witness's ancestors; he may not be someone in the fides of the accused or someone whose ancestors were in the fides of ancestors of the accused or some­one who pleads his case, up to one, or someone who is the freedman or woman of him or his parent.

The entire display of particulars in the lex Repetundarum calls attention to the brittleness of Rome's governing classes or, more precisely, of the ties linking members and groups within those classes. The strongest ties are the immediately personal ones: ties of association, ties of clientage, and above all ties of family prevail. So important is the last of these that the panel of jurors may contain only one man from a given family. In defining degrees of permitted and forbidden relationships so closely, the draftsman must intuitively know, and the law sponsor and the Roman people know, that such bonds deter­mine the strongest attachments of Roman equestrians. The loyalties of sena­tors also are determined by family and patronage, as well as by membership in the Senate and priestly college. Equestrians or senators in any of these rela­tionships to the prosecutor or accused cannot be expected to judge impartially, to advise impartially, or to give testimony impartially, nor can Romans who are not in the prime of life or who have suffered infamia (with the result that they were removed from the Senate), that is, men of uncertain attach­ment. Like Cicero's sons of proscribed Romans, high-status Romans who had suffered infamia were unpredictable, their ability to make the right deci­sion suspect. Such men are excluded as jurors in the lex Repetundarum. Tribe is also important. With a glance at the album, prosecutors and accused sena­tors alike can know the tribe of each juror. Presumably this knowledge helped the accused man choose the jurors for his trial. These ties, however, are evi­dently not as fundamental as the prescribed degrees of relationship: never bound by the obligations of pietas or fides, tribesmen were somewhat loosely connected.

Conversely, an oath is required of every participant at practically every stage of the proceedings. The praetor peregrinus must swear openly that he has cho­sen the 450 jurors as the statute requires. The prosecutor, a non-Roman, must swear he is not making a false accusation. The accused, a senator or son of a senator, must swear in the presence of the prosecutor that he has identified among the jurors everyone related to him in the ways proscribed by the statute. The prosecutor must swear before the praetor in the presence of the people that the 100 jurors he has selected are not related to him in the ways described or are not the individuals listed. The jurors must swear before the proceedings begin that they will behave, listen to the witnesses, and make a judgment. The jurors must swear again before the deliberations begin. At every stage an oath: What of trust among men of repute? It would seem that the scale and diversity of Roman society at all levels made trust a tenuous commodity in the late second century. We are left with the strong sense that among themselves Roman aristocrats were rather loosely attached.

Ironically, the tensions within a like-minded leadership, reflected in the lex Repetundarum, belie a practical reality that some Romans recognized. The long and relatively well-documented struggle over jury composition on Rome's per­manent courts provides illustration. Often the struggle was played out in public lawmaking assemblies, as shown in table 7.2. On the establishment of the first permanent court in 149 (table 7.2), the Romans published a list of jurors (album iudicum) that for the next twenty-five years effectively replicated the current list of senators. The position of iudex was restricted to senators until the Grac- chan period, when jurors were drawn, with some exclusions, from the equestrian class. The furor in ancient Rome from this time onward over the men who should be included on the album iudicum calls attention to the inescapable realities fueling the expansion of the Roman leadership.⁴⁹

Setting aside the emotional and political arguments that centered around the control of the political leadership by the Roman Senate, the matter of jury composition addressed in the bills in table 7.2 came down very practically to numbers. In order to staff the thirty- to seventy-five-man juries of the perma­nent courts in process of formation after 149, the Romans had to move beyond the boundaries of the Roman Senate in its present configuration of three hun­dred men. Given that senators already served as individual judges and jurors, recuperatores, members of the centumviral court, members of extraordinary commissions and special commissions of investigation, minor and major mag­istrates, priests, augurs, and military leaders, they were doubtless hard-pressed to take on additional legal tasks. One resolution to the problem, perhaps intro­duced in an uncertain public law proposal by C. Sempronius Gracchus, involved augmenting the number of senators by adding new members from the eques­trian class. The men selected were presumably equestrians with a public horse, from whose numbers senators had been excluded by a law of 129. Whether this was achieved by the lex Sempronia iudiciaria of 122 is doubted by scholars.⁵⁰ Sulla, however, enlarged the Senate to six hundred members in 81 by adlect- ing equestrians (lex Cornelia iudiciaria; see table 8.2 in chapter 8) and insti­tuted jury panels of senators exclusively. Another resolution was simply to include equestrians directly on the slate of jurors. This was done by the lex Repetundarum, undone by other laws, then done and undone again. In 70, the lex Aurelia projected a list of jurors comprising men from three groups: Roman senators, equestrians with a public horse, and tribuni aerarii, who were consid­ered equestrians although they were formally registered in Class 1 (table 7.2).⁵¹ The lex Iulia in 46 again restricted jurors to senators and equestrians, the lat­ter now including both equites equo publico and tribuni aerarii. Throughout this decades-long struggle the need for more administrators was obvious. The crux for elite Romans, however, was who among their numbers could judge the highest ranking among them, the Roman senators. The permanent courts, as well as the selection or election process of decemviri and centumviri, and the composition of jury courts, all instituted by public law, are another feature of the efforts by Roman leaders to manage the extensive changes in Rome's high­est property class and political leadership.

RESTORING THE CONDITIONS

FOR A COMMUNITY CONSENSUS

The perceived gravity of the problems confronting Rome's leadership is high­lighted by the introduction of the written ballot. Between 139 and 130, three tribunes presented bills to the people introducing written ballots in electoral assemblies (139), then in most assemblies convened as popular law courts (137), and finally in lawmaking assemblies (130) (table 7.3).⁵² All three were enacted by Roman voters. As a result of these laws, voters cast their votes by dropping a ballot marked, in the case of lawmaking assemblies, antiquo (“no”) or uti rogas (“yes”), or simply “A” or “U,” in an urn watched by selected reputable men from each tribe, the custodes. Issued two ballots apiece when his voting unit was called forward, each voter returned his ballot of choice as he filed by the urn. No longer were votes given orally to the tribal or other official “asker of the question” (rogator) and recorded before the tally. Now the ballots were sim­ply collected and counted by other reputable men, the counters (diribitores). In this way writing made its appearance in another sphere of Roman civic life.⁵³ What purposes were served by written ballots?

Our main ancient informant, Cicero, suggests that all three ballot laws were the work of demagogues currying political favor with voters at lower levels. Written ballots made the vote secret, thus guaranteeing the independence of the voters.⁵⁴ Pursuant on Cicero's account, modern scholars (with some excep­tions) generally conclude that the ballot laws were the work of “democratic- minded” lawmakers and belong to “il movimento democratico” in Rome.⁵⁵ The fact that all three bills are reported to have wide support among voters seems to support the idea. Moreover, in the second century the Romans were emphat­ically proclaiming the importance of being Roman in terms of political power as exercised in the voting assemblies. The catchphrase “iussa populi,” popular sovereignty, derives from these years.⁵⁶

What is known about the circumstances of the three ballot laws, however— which is very little, except for the names of the sponsors—does not fully corrob­orate the mid-first-century interpretation. The sponsor of the first statute in 139 was the tribune A. Gabinius, a political newcomer, the first Gabinius known to hold any office in Rome. The family, which appears to have low-status origins in Cales (slave or ex-slave potters named Gabinii are attested here in the third century, and the tribune was reputed to be the grandson of an estate-born slave woman), owed its entry into the governing classes to the tribune's father, a successful officer named prefect of the Roman army at Scorda by the proprae­tor L. Anicius Gallus in 167.⁵⁷ The tribune also had a successful military career; he was one of a group of officers serving under Q. Caecilius Metellus Mace­donicus in Macedonia in 146 sent by the proconsul to talk the Achaean League out of war. Gabinius probably held no other offices after his tribunate, although his descendants advanced to the praetorship in the second century and the con­sulate in the first. The sponsor of the second ballot law in 137, L. Cassius Long­inus Ravilla, belonged to a plebeian clan ennobled in the previous generation.⁵⁸ Consul in 127 and censor in 125, he was a man of commanding reputation in the community. Although a fellow tribune and one of the consuls, Lepidus, opposed Cassius's proposal, it had the support of Scipio Aemilianus.⁵⁹ The spon­sor of the third ballot law in 130, the tribune Cn. Papirius Carbo, called a “rabble-rouser” by Cicero, demonstrated (as consul in 120) his commitment to the best men by successfully defending L. Opimius (cos. 121) against a charge of unlawfully executing Romans.⁶⁰ These then are the sponsors of Rome's first ballot laws. The lineup hardly suggests any uniformity of intent.

The absence of any common thread linking the sponsors—other than new citizens, in the case of Gabinius and Cassius—suggests that closer scrutiny is in order.⁶¹ As a practical measure the written ballot in electoral, judicial, and leg­islative assemblies achieved one clear end: it removed the rogator from the job of asking for and transcribing votes. In the competitive atmosphere of second- century Rome, when men with political aspirations would set themselves at an advantage in any way possible in those venues where citizens made critical deci­sions, namely, voting assemblies, when there was, as Astin writes, a “growing sense that those in the assemblies could be won over and that social pressures could be outweighed by personal appeal and emotive incitement,” the writ­ten ballot thus diminished the power of tribal leaders, who had previously recorded the oral votes of the voters.⁶² More precisely, in light of the circum­stances created by Rome's expanding leadership, the written ballot removed the tribal leader from determining the vote or impeding the vote.⁶³ How could the people express their will effectively when unknown or possibly corrupt tribal leaders pressured new and old tribal members? How could the Roman people express their will effectively when the influx of newcomers to a tribe could so vastly expand the power of tribal leaders that they had the capability of skewing any such expression? Like the laws on campaign bribery (ambitus), the ballot laws addressed Roman concerns, particularly concerns of elite Romans, on this score by ensuring that the process of voting unfolded properly to allow the voters to give unencumbered expression to the will of the Roman people. In effect the written ballot effectively restored the circumstances in which the voting could proceed as it should.

Like many similar adjustments the ballot laws restored a balance to the polit­ical arena. At stake were the collective interests of Roman leaders, who now comprised a larger and more fluid group. From the perspective of politically ambitious men, a written ballot leveled the playing field for all contenders, whether from leading clans or newer families, in small town municipalities no less than Rome. The written ballot was premised on the assumption that by accurately recording the votes of the Roman people, through a secret ballot previously defined by elite Romans, they would make the system work as it should, from the viewpoint of elite Romans. Hence the sponsors of ballot laws should be viewed as furthering the self-interest of their own group within the governing classes, not as “demagogues” currying political favor from the Roman people. The first such law was sponsored by a political newcomer. The second was sponsored and supported by nobiles with known attachments to the Ital­ian allies. Rather than reflecting a newly emerging popular dimension to Roman political life, the introduction of writing shows the conservative assumptions by which society (to the Roman mind) operated.

Contrariwise, Cicero at the end of the 50s saw the written ballot as a danger­ous step that eroded the authority of elite members of Roman society. Secret ballots encouraged the Roman people to make decisions independently from their rightful leaders. They restricted the traditional relationship between leader and ordinary citizen in the voting arena. In De Legibus, Cicero condemns such restrictions, disparaging the ballot laws and their sponsors and lauding his own grandfather for opposing the efforts by Marius Gratidianus to introduce the writ­ten ballot in Arpinum. But it is doubtful whether Cicero's perspective was pre­cisely that of elite Romans living two generations earlier.⁶⁴ In all periods Roman political leaders belonged to a privileged group in a society all of whose mem­bers recognized the hierarchy of status and prestige. Still, much had changed for the Roman elite between the 130s and the last decade of Cicero's political life. For instance, their own membership in Cicero's day was even larger and more fluid, the citizen population was three times larger, and Rome's leaders were more obviously out of control. Cicero's censure of the ballot laws in De Legibus reflects his sense of a changed political reality. It is a measure of his disappointment in the turn of events.⁶⁵ At some level the customary symbiotic passage of knowledge and information between leaders and people was not operating in the 40s, at least not in the way Cicero thought it should. Accordingly he included it as a provision in the ideal law presented in De Legibus: “presiding officers... shall instruct the people in regard to the matter in hand, and allow them to be instructed by other magistrates and private citizens” (qui agent... rem popu­lum docento, doceri a magistratibus privatisque patiunto).⁶⁶ For Cicero, the depend­ency of the Roman people on its proper magistrates for information and understanding of laws appeared to be slipping away. He did not consider that it might instead be the final failing on the part of the leadership.

The ballot laws of the 130s, however, were passed by a generation trying to restore their own notion of control to the realm of voting, now complicated by the emergence of leaders from newer families and voters from newly admit­ted communities. Under pressure, elite Romans utilized the tool of writing as a response to the need to accommodate a wider membership in the circle of elite Romans and the resulting changes in traditional relationships between leaders and the Roman people. Related adjustments made through lawmak­ing assemblies to balance competing leaders and groups, listed in table 7.3, focused on other aspects of voting. Although the laws, which span almost 250 years, address apparently different issues ranging from the conduct of assem­blies to participation by voters, most of those issues reveal a common concern with ensuring that the lawmaking process work the way it was supposed to, that is, in conformity with Roman understandings of the vital interaction between political leaders, tribal leaders, and the Roman people. Hence in the fourth century the Roman dictator Publilius Philo carried a bill prescribing the announcement of the Senate's opinion or sanction (auctoritas patrum), which probably amounted to confirmation that the proposed law had no reli­gious flaws, before a lawmaking assembly (table 7.3). Some fifty years later, the prescription was carried over to electoral assemblies. These measures were doubtless attempts to allow the unfettered expression of senatorial opinion to guide the decisions of the Roman voters.⁶⁷ The announcement of the col­lective opinion of the Senate prior to electing officials or enacting law was understood to have a tremendous influence on the outcome of the vote, because of the respect for the authority of the Senate. Similarly, the so-called leges Aelia et Fufia of ca. 153 (table 7.3) prescribed the appropriate response to the announcement of adverse omens (obnuntiatio), namely, an immediate end to the proceedings, and the appropriate days for assemblies. Directed primarily at the proper conduct of assemblies, the laws also suggest a perceived need to regularize business, ritual, and market days.⁶⁸ As table 7.3 indicates, the fre­quency of such measures increases noticeably around the mid-second century. Additionally, the issues that they now address provide a far more significant indicator of changes in Roman society.

From now on, all measures governing the production of law are aimed at seeming deviations from custom introduced by the elite managers and partic­ipants of the events. We have discussed already the significance of campaign bribery, ambitus, involving tribal leaders in the disbursement of cash handouts from individual candidates to tribal members in order to win the vote, as a reflection of a kind of breakdown in (or rearrangement of) traditional ties. In the case of bribery laws and ballot laws, as previously noted, the concern with a network of traditional relations among tribesmen and between citizens of dif­ferent classes and status groups, that is, the personal dimension of the lawmak­ing process, is also clear. Similar public laws address the voter's ability to cast his vote without hindrance—for example, Marius's public law, the lex Maria, narrowing the width of the voting bridge (pontes), whose aim we have dis­cussed, as well as the divine and legitimating conditions of lawmaking. In every case public laws relating to voting assemblies attempt to restore a situation so as to maintain an understood balance between the various elements involved in the process. Significantly, most of the laws in table 7.3 attempt to regulate elite behavior. But as with the auctoritas patrum and the written ballot, the focus of concern in correcting such deviations is the Roman voter—just as the voter is the focus of the Roman leader's concern in his efforts to adjust to the chang­ing scale of Roman society.

These laws, as well as the opposition to them, attest to the importance both the Romans and their eagerly created compatriots, the Latins, Italians, and ex­slaves, attached to voting, especially at public lawmaking assemblies, over two and a half centuries.⁶⁹ Furthermore, the accepted importance of public law­making as a mechanism for making societywide adjustment explains the neces­sity of imposing such rules to ensure that the event flowed as Romans believed it should. In the face of changes in the Roman leadership such a flow was increas­ingly difficult at the level of personal interaction between political or tribal leaders and the Roman people.

The same conservative impulses prompting the Romans to regulate voting procedures underlie concerns to preserve the open conditions deemed essen­tial for the production of legitimate law. Voting occurred only in Rome because the uncoerced expression of community consensus was possible only in Rome. Outside Rome, citizens under arms and convened by a commander with imperium, the only conditions under which an assembly had ever been convened outside Rome, in 357, were hardly in a position to voice the sovereign will of the Roman people.⁷⁰ Moreover, voting assemblies were perforce held in the full light of day, following prior announcement over a period of three Roman weeks, because the expression of a valid community consensus required open meetings, advertised in advance. Assemblies convened without the requisite advertising period were un-Roman, although some political leaders at the end of the second century ignored this. As a result the lex Caecilia Didia of 98 (table 7.3) regulated the customary observance of the three-market-day advertising period.⁷¹ Clandes­tine meetings and meetings held in the dark of night were viewed by the Romans as totally contrary to the spirit of community consensus. Cicero roundly con­demned the tribunes of 63 because, he claimed, they met in the dark of night to draft the rogatio Servilia agraria. In this context, Caesar's edict as consul in 59 to publish the proceedings of the Roman Senate provides an interesting contemporary perspective on the Roman Senate as a collective that no longer heeded, no longer in fact articulated, the sovereign will of the Roman people.⁷² Without disclosure of the transactions and debates of these closed meetings, the desires of the Roman people would be distorted.

The Romans had clearly become aware some generations earlier that a tra­ditional openness, no doubt related to the smaller dimensions of an earlier Rome, was vanishing. This is hardly surprising given the size and dispersal of the citizen population, which made it difficult for the Romans to conduct com­munity business in the presence of all citizens. Moreover, political leaders were not above manipulating the system. But there was clearly a concern on the part of some Romans to restore the open conditions believed essential to the expres­sion of community consensus on some matters. Often they resorted to public law. In the lex Repetundarum, for instance, open conditions in the matter of trials for res repetundae were closely regulated by the law. Where jury selection is concerned, the law instructs the praetor, in the current year and every year, to have names of jurors he has selected written on white-washed boards (alba). Likewise, the praetor must have the names announced in a meeting, and he must swear that the men he has chosen are suitable and chosen according to the statute. Then, the prosecutor must swear before the praetor in the presence of the people that the one hundred jurors he has selected are not related to him in any of the proscribed ways. The law further instructs the praetor to openly serve notice of trial to the person who has been accused, telling him what day it will be. Next, before the trial begins the jurors must swear before the praetor in the Forum in front of the rostra. The praetor must then have the names of the jurors who have sworn announced in a meeting, and he shall have them displayed openly in the Forum. The praetor must also declare his opinion regard­ing a juror whose selection has been questioned in a public meeting in the pres­ence of the jurors. The voting procedures instituted by the law also reveal a deep concern with openness. An urn is placed on the platform. The praetor gives a ballot openly to each juror. The juror marks his ballot and with a bare arm places it openly (with the letter covered) in the urn. The juror selected to count the votes takes each ballot out, shows it to the people so that they can see all of it, and declares the vote. He then hands the ballot to the nearest juror, who hands it to the praetor. If we needed reinforcement of our earlier impres­sion that the Roman aristocracy appears to bear close watching, the lex Repetun­darum provides it. More interesting, however, is the function of writing in determining open conditions.

While the utility of writing as a tool is obvious, its adaptability to the Roman sense of procedure is less so. Over the fourth and third centuries, the political leaders of Rome (and their assistants) had gradually introduced writing into the administration of Roman affairs in order to manage the rapidly expand­ing resources at their disposal and to control the rapidly changing circumstances accompanying the influx of new members into Roman society. By the second century, writing was used extensively in the management of the Romans' grow­ing world, and they continued to adapt its uses further, most noticeably in the political arena. Already we have seen that the written ballot, introduced in 139, allowed the uncoerced expression of community consensus. In effect, writ­ing offered a means to keep traditional Roman public processes operating in the customary way that Romans felt they should. Part and parcel of a larger turn toward the use of writing as well was the publication of public law propos­als on white-washed boards (alba), used for all forms of written public announce­ment in Rome.

In routine use from the second century onward, the written display of pro­posed laws probably belongs to the same period as written ballots and was most likely motivated by similar concerns.⁷³ Like the written ballot, too, writ­ten displays of law have been viewed as a democratic feature of Roman lawmak­ing, because they made the law accessible to anyone.⁷⁴ Certainly these notice boards were intended to be read, for routine publicizing instructions include the formulaic admonition to place the boards “where they could be read from ground level” (unde de plano recte legi possit). Whether they were, in fact, read by your average Roman is of little consequence. From a Roman perspective, the requi­site recital of the law draft was more critical in achieving the practical goal of publicizing information about law. Despite the pervasiveness of writing, Rome remained a predominately oral culture whose primary agents of publication were heralds and whose primary means of publicizing information were proclamation and debate. In 103, the tribune C. Servilius Glaucia advised the people to lis­ten for certain key phrases in a proposed law as the herald read it in order to determine whether the proposal affected them or not.⁷⁵ Such advice belongs to a world long accustomed to processing information received by proclamation and word of mouth. Nonetheless the formal requirements of lawmaking, insti­tuted by the Roman leadership, demanded the written display of law propos­als. What is to wonder at is not the curious combination of notice boards and recitals but the formal persistence of recitals. Even after the introduction of writ­ing in the lawmaking arena, public readings of the law continued as a require­ment of promulgation. In the lawmaking arena, as in all others, the Romans appear reluctant to discard customary practice after the introduction of new practices.

The contemporary importance of the posted texts lies rather in their mean­ing to the elite members of Roman society. Whether read or not, the vital pres­ence of posted texts of proposed law demonstrates the importance to the rulers of Rome of making information available to the Roman people in an open way. Information, as transmitted by rightful leaders, was essential for the uncoerced expression of community consensus. The public display of written law drafts limited the opportunities for political leaders to manipulate the people's vote by skewing the information because it ensured that the law presented to the assembly was the same law recited at the first lawmaking meeting. The public display of written information, like the written ballot, leveled the playing field for all contenders by allowing the process to unfold as it should.

Concurrently, the rulers of Rome appear to be making information available to the Roman people in a way that determined who those people ought to be. Complicated Latin law drafts required sophisticated Latin readers. Even hear­ing the draft recited would be useless without a spoken command of the lan­guage. Similarly, the written ballot discouraged non-Latin readers from voting. Its creators did not contemplate voters who did not speak Latin. Thus, in the 130s, written ballots were also an effort to determine who voted: men who were conversant with the language of power, Latin. As late as 92, when the cen­sors issued an edict banning instruction of rhetoric in the Latin language these considerations held force.⁷⁶ Although most local aristocracies spoke Latin by 90, they still wrote their mother languages. Only at the end of the century were local languages, whether written or spoken, for the most part completely replaced. But in the 90s, some Romans viewed Latin rhetorical training, which was tak­ing place in the roving schools set up in the Forum and other public places, as a deviation from the standards and areas of instruction established by tradition. Like the institution of the written ballot, such a prohibition made access to the techniques of public speaking, that is, to the tools of the right kind of oratory, harder to come by for all but the elite members of Roman and Italian society, for whom Greek education was common. In both cases, we are witnessing an intense effort on the part of Rome's political leaders to restrict access to a basic tool of leadership at a time when membership in their own ranks was expand­ing. Competition among elite Romans accompanied the expansion of the Roman state almost from the beginning.

CONCLUSION

As an expanding leadership confronted new conditions of rule, in particular a momentous increase in the number of ordinary Romans, the problems in Roman society mounted. Often fundamental corrections to the Roman system were introduced directly by an elected officeholder. A significant example is the low­ering of minimum property qualifications for membership in Class 5, imple­mented twice by decision of an unknown commander seeking recruits for infantry service, and the reform of the centuriate assembly, accomplished by the cen­sors. The issues in these instances were doubtless uncontroversial. But contro­versial issues could be brought to the attention of a public lawmaking assembly by an elected official of Rome. Many such issues involved the leaders them­selves. A sense of the privileges of status pervaded Roman society and is espe­cially visible in the Roman drive to limit political participation by new Romans at the level of the ruling elite, struggling to control the influx of new members.

The extent to which the Romans perceived a general need to set firm lim­its for an irrepressible aristocracy is obvious in the wide range of laws addressing the Roman leadership. An increasingly more rigorous definition of certain kinds of behavior as criminal, usually on the part of Romans of high status, was accom­panied by the institution of courts staffed by high-status Romans to judge that behavior. Matters that had been responsive to one-time special commissions of investigation or judicial assemblies were now so pervasive as to justify perma­nent courts and juries. Increasing numbers of elite Romans became involved in dispensing justice in matters involving elite Romans through service on jury panels. The use of popular assemblies as courts of justice in those same matters gradually disappeared, signaling an intensified effort on the part of elite Romans to maintain the traditional relationship between themselves and the wider pop­ulation, which had become weakened by the growth in citizen numbers. Limits were set on the opportunities for manipulating the system to personal, politi­cal advantage of oneself and one's group. Public laws introduced a number of reforms into the voting arena in particular, though other arenas were not ne­glected. The grain distribution laws, initiated in 122 by C. Gracchus, clearly belong in the constellation of laws that attempted to regulate the manipulation of a traditional system by an increasing number of ambitious Romans whose rela­tionship to the majority population, itself increasing in size, had become attenuated. It is no surprise that the preponderance of public laws address issues relating to political leaders and other elite Romans.

Concurrently the tensions surrounding Rome's expanding leadership helped ensure that public lawmaking came into its own as a mechanism of adjustment. A growing number of political leaders accompanied by the attenuation of tra­ditional relationships in Italian communities gave new importance to the resiliency of Roman public lawmaking. Lawmaking provided an arena where needs were met and concerns aired. A fluid political leadership was in place, comprising more men outside the shadow of Rome' great families, men with a foot in the military camps, of proven competence and merit, able to sway a crowd with words. There were more potential leaders, each with a crowd of friends, associates, and dependents. Voting decisions now depended on an even more complicated set of expectations, understandings, alignments, and other considerations on the part of the Roman people as well as their elected lead­ers. By the second half of the second century, the ramifications of these developments in the lawmaking arena were considerable.

Clearly the process itself was changing, as the lawmaking activity over the years of C. Gracchus's tribunate makes clear. From this time onward, the Roman people met ever more frequently to make decisions about more and more issues. Other wrinkles in the traditional lawmaking process were to follow. In 100, the tribune L. Appuleius Saturninus carried a bill to distribute lands in Transalpine Gaul annexed by C. Marius from the conquered Cimbri to the discharged sol­diers of Marius who had fought them. Among the provisions of the measure was one requiring all senators and elected officials to swear publicly within five days to uphold the law. Ten years later an epitaph of C. Livius Drusus, the mur­dered tribune of 91, states that he was a member of a ten-man land commis­sion in accordance with his own law and a member of a five-man land commission the same year in accordance with a lex Saufeia: Xvir a.d.a. lege sua et eodem anno Vvir a.d.a. lege Saufe[i]a.⁷⁷ That very year, the Roman Senate annulled all public laws carried by Drusus on the grounds that they were illegal.

Unmistakable in this varied set of efforts to undo enacted public law at the end of the second century are signs of shifts in the acceptance of public law, especially by elite Romans, which appear to reflect broad social change in Roman society. Equally apparent is the universal recognition that the end products of Roman lawmaking assemblies were the public expressions of com­mon agreement about issues of concern to the Roman people. On the occa­sions singled out in the previous paragraph, such expressions could be nullified in a variety of ways: through the voters' acceptance of a contrary public law, through nonobservance by senators, and through annulment on procedural

grounds. The lawmaking of 123-121 signals the onset of changes in public lawmaking, which became more and more frequent in the first century. Yet no matter what stratagems were employed, including the nullification of law, they all rest on the assumption that a statute was legitimate only when it was enacted with full publicity in the procedurally prescribed manner. And behind all the efforts to restore a balance to the system was the belief that if allowed to vote in an unencumbered way Roman citizens of all kinds would make the proper decisions. Only under these conditions did the resounding response of “uti rogas” by the assembled voters give unobstructed voice to the sovereign will of the Roman people. The persistence of this belief even while Roman society was undergoing its most rapid change is visible in the lawmaking activ­ity of the period from 91 to 44, the subject of chapters 8 and 9.

TABLE 7.1 Laws Adjusting Office and Position by Year and Subject, 350—92

Source: See appendixes A and C.

^aDates in parentheses are approximate. See appendix C.

TABLE 7.2 (continued)

Source: See appendixes A and C.

^aDates in parentheses are approximate. See appendix C.

TABLE 7.3 Laws Relating to Voting Assemblies by Year, Latin Name, and Subject, 350—92

Source: See appendixes A and C.

^aDates in parentheses are approximate. See appendix C.

Notes

1. Census figures: Brunt 1971, 13-14. Historians have contested the meaning of the figure of roughly four million returned in 28 BCE. I agree with E. Lo Cascio (fol­lowing Mommsen) that it represents men only: Lo Cascio 1994 and 1999, 161-164. Brunt (following Beloch) argues that the figure includes women and children as well as men: Brunt 1971, 113-20. The two positions are summarized in W. Scheidel, Measur­ing sex, age, and death in the Roman empire: Explorations in ancient demography. JRA Supp. 21 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1996), 167-68.

2. Population trends: Lo Cascio 1999, 166-71. Let me emphasize that it is almost impossible to distinguish the relative contributions of in-migration, in the shape of enfranchisement, and natural increase to the growth of the Roman citizen population until the first century BCE. For a very complicated and ultimately unsatisfactory effort to do so, with reference to previous efforts, see Brunt 1971,61-99. Similarly the effects of mortality and out-migration, in the shape of resettlement in Latin colonies, are dif­ficult to weigh. All these factors play a role in the pattern of growth revealed in Roman census enumerations.

3. Livy 22.49.15-17.

4. G. Burton and K. Hopkins, “Political succession in the late republic (249-50 B.C.),” in Death and renewal, ed. K. Hopkins (Cambridge, 1983), 31-119.

5. Tribuni aerarii considered equestrians: Brunt 1988, 146, 515-16 (endnote 1), and 210 with n. 40.

6. The progress and changing fortunes of these relative newcomers between the fourth and mid-second centuries have been traced in the important studies of Roman prosopography by Münzer, Scullard, and Badian. See also Holkeskamp 1987 and David 1996, esp. 99-136.

7. Scullard 1973, 11.

8. Münzer 1920, 46-78.

9. Münzer 1920, 47: Marius was the first consul from Arpinum; the first Paelig- nian entered the Roman Senate in the reign of Augustus.

10. David 1992.

11. References in chapter 1, note 57. See also T. P. Wiseman, “Domi nobiles and the Roman cultural elite,” in Les “bourgeoisies” municipales Italiennes (Paris and Naples, 1983), 299-308.

12. Equites equo publico and equestrian class: chapter 5. Equestrian property qual­ification: Nicolet 1966, 46-68; Brunt 1971, 700, and 1988, 146; Crawford 1974, 623; Wiseman 1971,66. Nicolet points to the rough equivalence between HS 400,000, known from the lex Roscia of 69, and the 1,000,000 asses of Livy 24.11.7, possession of which obliged a Roman to contribute the upkeep of seven ships' crews for a year in 214. Fol­lowing Nicolet, Brunt agrees the rating might already have been the equivalent of HS 400,000 at the time of the Second Punic War: Brunt 1988, 146; cf. Wiseman 1971, 66. Or the rating was increased in the second century, when the property qualification of Class 5 was lowered: Brunt 1971, 700. Crawford insists that the equestrian rating of HS 400,000, expressed only in sesterces, was set after the Romans retariffed their coinage around 141.

13. Lectiones senatus: Willems 1885, 1.381-95.

14. Revision of 115: Liv., Epit. 62; see Wiseman 1971, 5-6. Willems 1885, 1.231, attributes the high number to the presence in the Senate of tribunes, admitted by the lex Atinia, of unknown date but approved, Willems argues, before 115. Since they were not adlected by censors, the censors of this year threw them out.

15. Minor magistrates: Lintott 1999, 137-44.

16. Mommsen, R.St. 1.545.

17. A law of 172 restored the right of selection temporarily to the consuls. A lex Rutilia of uncertain date made similar arrangements.

18. S. Demougin, “Notables municipaux et ordre equestre,” in Les "bourgeoisies” municipales italiennes (Paris and Naples, 1983), 279-307.

19. The animosity to Cn. Flavius, elected aedile in 304, is a notable exception. But his status was at issue, never his competence or knowledge of routine administrative matters.

20. See appendix A.

21. Cato's handbook: E. Rawson, Intellectual life in the late Roman republic (Balti­more, 1985), 134-37; K. D. White, “Roman agricultural writers,” ANRW (1973): ¹.4.439^-97.

22. Cato's contracts: U. von Lubtow, “Catos leges venditiones et locationi dictae,” Eos 48.3 (1957): 227-441.

23. The distinctions between tenants and clients holding or using land at the dis­cretion of their patronus are addressed in de Neeve 1984, 13-15, 187-92, and in the recent commentary on de Neeve's work by P. Rosafio, “The emergence of tenancy and the Precarium,” in De agricultura: In memoriam P.W. de Neeve, ed. H. Sancisi-Weerden- burg et al. (Amsterdam, 1993), 164-76.

24. The “relaxation of ties” in the Middle Republic: Brunt 1988, 414-24.

25. By law and Senate decree: Livy 31.4.1-3, 31.49.5.

26. Strabo 3.5.1; Pliny, N.H. 3.77.

27. Plut. Caes. 51; Suet., Iul. 35.

28. Yakobsen 1999, 78-84.

29. Brunt 1988, 441-42; cf. Yakobsen 1999, 66-71, 78-84.

30. Peasants as clients: P. Garnsey and G. Woolf, “Patronage of the rural poor in the Roman world, “ in Wallace-Hadrill, ed., 1989, 153-70.

31. Ambitus generally: L. Fascione, Crimen e quaestio ambitus nell’età repubblicana (Milan, 1984); E. Bauerle, “Procuring an election: Ambitus in the Roman republic, 432-49 BC” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1990).

32. See briefly Taylor i960, 15; and A. Lintott, “Electoral bribery in the Roman republic,” JRS 80 (1990): 7-8. Divisores: Mommsen, R.St. 3.196.

33. The problem intensified in the first century when the divisores took money from candidates from other tribes. The best-known illustration derives from Cicero (Verr. 1. 23 ), who accused Verres of summoning the divisores of all the tribes to his house to enlist them to the cause of his candidacy. Most refused. See Taylor 1960, 122, 264.

34. Reform: A. Yakobsen, “Dionysius of Halicarnassus on a democratic change in the centuriate assembly,” Scripta Classica Israelita 12 (1993): 139-55; L. J. Grieve, “The reform of the comitia centuriata,” Hist. 34 ( 1985): 278-309; F. G. B. Millar, “The Con­stitution of the Roman republic,” JRS 74 ( 1984): 1-19; cf. Feig-Vishnia 1996, 159, on the tribal reform of 179 reported in Livy 40.51.9.

35. See chapter 8.

36. So Taylor on law removing citizenship from Tusculani: Taylor i960, 302.

37. Livy 9.46. On the composition of the groups benefitting from his action (foren­sis factio, humiles urbani, turba forensis) identified in the context of the election of Cn. Flavius as aedile in 304, see Taylor i960, 134-37.

38. Livy 9.46.

39. Taylor argues that Ap. Claudius was creating political support for himself, and this is what his fellow senators objected to: “A blatant attempt to obtain control of the entire tribal vote was made by the... censor... when he registered in all the rural tribes lowly men, and particularly freedmen.” Taylor i960, 299.

40. Plut., Flam. 18.1.

41. J.-M. David, La republique romaine de la deuxieme guerre punique ä la bataille d’Ac- tium (Paris, 2000).

42. Alexander 1998 s.v. Index of Procedures.

43. Livy 7.25.12-13 reports a lex Poetelia de ambitu in the fourth century, which some believe is genuine or at least not unlikely: Holkeskamp 1987, 28 with n. 133, accepted by Cornell 1995, 469 n. 33.

44. Livy 40.19.11. Penalty: Schol. Bob. 2.78 Stangl.

45. Most recently on the topic see A. Riggsby, Crime and community in Ciceronian Rome (Austin, TX, 1999).

46. Lex Repetundarum = RS 1 No. 1.

47. “Ea nomina omnia in tabula, in albo atramento scripts, patrem tribum cog­nomenque tributimque dscriptos hab[eto” RS 1 No. 1, l. 14.

48. On collegium as priestly college in this context see RS 1.98.

49. See Brunt i988, i94-239.

50. The rogatio Sempronia iudiciaria: Plutarch, C. Gracch. 5.2-3; Livy, Epit. 60. The law is uncertain (RS 1.98).

51. Other arrangements had been made by earlier laws, e.g., the lex Acilia and the lex Servilia Glaucia, but this was the first time the tribuni aerarii were included. See Brunt i988, 2i0-ii.

52. The voters accepted a fourth public law in 107, presented by the tribune C. Coelius Caldus, extending the written ballot to judicial assemblies deciding cases of perduellio or treason (table 7.3).

53. See chapter 5 on writing and military organization. On the significance of the written ballot in the context of Roman literacy see Harris 1989, 167-70.

54. Cic., Leg. 3.15-16, 34-35, is strongly negative; cf. Leg. 2.4; Sest. 103; and Planc. i6, which draw a connection between written ballots and libertas. Libertas in the polit­ical arena: C. Wirzubski, Libertas as a political idea at Rome (Cambridge, 1950).

55. J. A. O. Larsen, quoted by Taylor 1966, 35: the laws “represent a more general popular movement.” Serrao groups the laws with others indicative of “il movimento democratico.” F. Serrao, Classipartiti e legge nella.repubblicaromana (Pisa, 1974), 181-93, esp. 184. Harris credits a “democratic-minded legislator” with ensuring that the bal­lots required only a single letter, “V” or “A,” “A” or “C”: Harris 1998, 168.

56. J. Hellegouarc'h, Le vocabulaire latin des relations et des partis politiques sous le republique (Paris, 1963), 313-20.

57. Cic., Leg. 3.35; Lael. 41; Livy, Epit. 54. See E. Badian, “The early career of A. Gabinius (cos. 58 ),” Philol. 103 (1959): 87.

58. Münzer 1920, 219.

59. Cic., Brut. 97, 106; Leg. 3.35-37; Sest. 103; Asc. 216 Stangl.

60. Sources in MRR 1.523.

61. Cf. M. Jehne, “Geheime Abstimmung und Bindungswesen in der romischen Republik,” HZ 257 (1993): 593-613; Yakobsen 1999, 126-33.

62. A. E. Astin, “Roman government and politics, 200-134 BC,” CAH 8, 2d ed., ed. A. E. Astin (Cambridge, 1989), 193.

63. This is usually understood in terms of the control elite Romans exercised over their clients or other Romans in the voting arena: After the introduction of the writ­ten ballot, the citizen could vote as he liked, and his patron knew nothing about it. Tay­lor 1966, 35. Cf. Bleicken 1975, 278 ff: The ballot laws broke the link between social dependence and electoral behavior.

64. Cf. Yakobsen 1999, 127-29.

65. His criticism conflicts with his neutral assessment of the ballot laws in the speeches. See Millar 1998, 26-27.

66. Leg. 3.4.11; cf. 3.17.38-39 on the dangers of the written (and thus secret) ballot.

67. Cornell 1995, 341 (cf. 249) sees the effect of the law as curtailing the power of the patres but maintaining elite control of the process.

68. MRR 1.452-53 s.v. Tribunes.

69. Cf. Millar 1998, 204: “the thesis which is put forward in this study is precisely that the most important type of collective decision in Rome was not electoral, but the voting of leges.”

70. Livy 7.16.8.

71. Cic., Dom. 41; Sest. 135 with Schol. Bob. 140 Stangl; Phil. 5.3. The same or a second bill also prohibited the passage of laws addressing unrelated issues in the same assembly (per saturam): Cic., Dom. 53. The impetus for the bill was most immediately offered by the actions of the tribune Saturninus in presenting one (unadvertised) pro­posal to a voting assembly on the heels of another. As Taylor notes, nobiles were liable to do the same thing: Taylor 1949, 207 n. 61.

72. Suetonius, lul. 20.1.

73. The bare fact that these boards were put up, whether to advertise laws or any­thing else, is regularly and frequently attested in the phrase tabulam proponere. For dis­cussion see W. Riepl, Das Nachrichtenwesen des Altertums, mit besonderem Rucksicht auf die Romer (Leipzig and Berlin, 1913), 336 ff.

74. See chapter 3, note 73.

75. Cicero, Rab. Post. 6.14.

76. Edict of 92: Aul. Gell. 15.11.2 (from Suet., Rhet. 1.1); Cic., De Or. 3.93-95. In 166, the Senate decreed to expel all teachers of rhetoric and philosophy from the city. Greek learning was at that time a dubious commodity, despite the intensity with which Roman senators engaged in its study and, more significantly, its pursuit in the assem­blies and law courts of Rome.

77. I^LS 49.