CHAPTER TWO Presentation: Oratory and Law Drafts

in January of 63, M. Tullius Cicero seized the opportunity of his inaugu­ral speech as consul, a formal occasion shared with other newly elected offi­cials, to denounce a recent land bill sponsored by the tribune P.

Sitting at the heart of the lawmaking process in the public meeting (con­tio), Cicero's orations against Rullus's proposed land scheme furnish the rich­est source we have for exploring the presentation of law to the Roman people by their political leaders, our focus in this chapter. De Lege Agraria 2 and 3, together with the Pro Lege Manilia of 66, form the longest and most complete set of public speeches addressing the merits of public law proposals among the many small fragments of such speeches by Roman orators preserved by ancient recorders.² Furthermore, they are the only extant speeches that address a long and complex law draft.³ Cicero's public denunciation of the rogatio Servilia serves to remind us of the degree to which tradition, power, social position, per­sonal characteristics, and oratorical skills underlay the functioning of the law­making process as late as 63, nearly the end of our period of interest. It underscores also the singularly complex understanding of the various facets of lawmaking common among the participants on all levels and articulated by political lead­ers in their presentation of the law.

Throughout the entire lawmaking process—from generating and drafting a proposal to displaying the draft to going before the people to support or under­mine the proposal and finally to convening the people in the appropriate assem­bly to vote—all political leaders tried to do the same thing: get the approval of the Roman people as measured in the majority vote of the assembled tribes. Oratory like Cicero's public speeches on the Rullan land proposal focused intently on the crucial role of the Roman voter and indeed on the role of every­one present on the particular occasion of the speech. Some in the audience came as prospective voters, others as vitally interested listeners; some hoped for guidance from the speaker, others hoped to influence the eventual outcome by the weight of their collective desires. Clearly, as conveyed in public orations and law drafts, the presentation of law required not only a high level of knowl­edge and involvement from Rome's political leaders but an ability to stir the hearts and minds of the Roman people.

ROGATIO SERVILIA AGRARIA

At the end of 64, the tribune P. Servilius Rullus and several colleagues pro­mulgated a proposal of law instituting a colonization scheme involving land purchase and distribution in Italy and the provinces. The prospective colonists, numbering in the many thousands (five thousand in the colony at Capua alone), would be drawn initially from citizens without land and later from the discharged soldiers of the legions under Pompey's command, still under arms in Syria in late 64.

The motivations of the bill's sponsors as presented by contemporaries were complex. As often presented by modern historians, the bill reflects the antag­onisms and imbalance between Rome's powerful men in the mid-6os: Pom­pey on the one hand, Caesar and Crassus on the other.⁵ Purportedly Caesar, not Rullus, was the real draftsman, and his aim, in the careful formulation of a complex piece of legal drafting, was to diplomatically restore the political balance between himself and Pompey, shattered by Pompey's victories in the East, through a program of land distribution. Land grants would undoubtedly win for Caesar the gratitude of the city population, the primary beneficiaries of the bill, scholars believe.⁶ However, the rogatio Servilia agraria also addressed critical tensions in Roman society whose antecedents lay in events of a gen­eration before, long before the immediate political situation in Rome in late 64. Economic and social crisis had been building since the Italian War of 91-89 and the civil war of 83-81. At the end of that war, as part of his “restoration” of the Roman state, L. Cornelius Sulla had confiscated and redistributed many hectares of arable land in Italy. Roughly 120,000 men, mostly veterans of Sulla's legions, benefited from the distribution, nearly one in ten of the male citizen population.⁷ The number of men who lost their property is unrecorded, but it includes the 4,700 or more men who had been proscribed by Sulla and whose holdings were seized, as well as private landowners or landholders of land belong­ing to rebellious communities in Italy, whose territory was taken by way of repa­rations.⁸ Nearly twenty years later men throughout the regions affected were still embittered.

With hindsight, Rullus's bill offered real hope for resolving severe economic and social crisis, whose causes went beyond the circumstances of 83-81. In par­ticular, the bill addressed the problem of access to land resources facing rural Italians in an innovative way. Rather than repossess and redistribute existing holdings on ager publicus in Italy, little of which was left anyway, the meas­ure ordained the purchase of land not only in Italy but in the provinces from people willing to sell. The measure also ordained the redistribution of provin­cial ager publicus. Providing for an expeditious and effective implementation, the bill created a much larger commission of men (ten in number) than the usual IIIviri agris dandis adsignatis, who since 133 ordinarily had iurisdictio, and gave them praetorian rank, which carried with it both imperium and iurisdic- tio so the commissioners could do their work effectively in Italy and the provinces. Underscoring the widespread popular appeal of the directness of this scheme was the swift resistance the bill met from leading senators, particularly from Rome's newly elected consul, Cicero.

DE LEGE AGRARIA 2

Cicero's contribution to the public debate on the rogatio Servilia agraria pro­vides a rare opportunity to evaluate the broad scope of lawmaking sessions in creating and maintaining community agreement in a world of increasingly diverse peoples.⁹ Oratory, as an essential aspect of the much larger and com­plex process of public lawmaking, involved far more than rhetorical conven­tions, although these to be sure were important. We can imagine that the crowd facing Cicero that day in January clearly anticipated the occasion of his speech with no small amount of excitement.

Regardless of the motives drawing such an audience, Cicero's initial public oration, De Lege Agraria 2, is many things. It is one side of a dialogue between a high Roman official and the Roman people. It is an exercise in the persua­sion of those among them who would cast a vote. The speech also suggests those features of a public law proposal that would render the law appealing to the Roman people.¹⁰ The arguments used by Cicero to persuade voters to reject the bill obviously attempt to play on the interests of the crowd assembled to listen to what he had to say. The arguments suggest, too, the traditional proce­dures for handling a valid law and so provide a valuable index of the beliefs that informed Roman behavior in their effort to regulate their society. Hence the oration belongs to the specific occasion of a meeting used by Cicero to address the recent proposal of the tribunes and cannot be separated from the circum­stances in which that proposal was formulated, promulgated, and debated.¹¹ De Lege Agraria 2 is also a literary text intended for an audience of elite Roman readers. The oration was published after the fact by Cicero in a collection of his consular speeches intended to broadcast the achievements of his year in Rome's highest office.¹² Hence the speech conveys the shared understandings of elite Romans about the expected tone and content of the interaction between political leaders and the Roman people.

Among the many arguments, one theme predominates: the sovereign power of the Roman people. A commonplace theme in Roman oratory, popular sov­ereignty figures prominently in Cicero's characterization of the Roman people, specifically in the language he uses in talking about the people. Language is politicized. The adjective “your” (vester) firmly attaches the recurrent words honos, beneficium, otium, libertas, vectigalia, commodum, and imperium to the Roman people.¹³ Vestra libertas and vestra vectigalia occur most frequently.¹⁴ Vester is an important signpost to the kind of image of the Roman people Cicero wanted to convey in his speech. Most of the abstract nouns so modified are sig­nificant words in the political vocabulary of the Romans, as identified by mod­ern scholars on the basis of usage in speeches and political monographs: “freedom” (libertas), “leisure” (otium), “authority” (auctoritas), and “empire” (imperium).¹⁵ The others are made so in the context of the speech. That the consul, one of Rome's most compelling speakers, spoke to them repeatedly from the Rostra about “their authority, their empire, their revenues, their money, their gain” suggests that the crowd reacted intently and favorably.

All of these terms emphasize the Roman people's dominion over a large por­tion of the known world. But one term emerges as a particularly compelling theme, namely, “revenues” (vectigalia). The law, Cicero charges, will dimin­ish the revenues of the Roman state if not lose them altogether. At issue especially are lands that generated revenue: the ager Campanus, an exception­ally fertile plain to the south of Rome in Italy; public property of the Roman people (ager publicus), whose possessors paid rent to the state treasury; and con­quered or inherited lands in the provinces. Cicero's concern with the loss in revenues that would result from Rullus's land redistribution scheme is emphatic. Indeed, for dramatic effect, no passage in De Lege Agraria 2 surpasses the moment when Cicero called on the herald to read aloud the list of lands to be sold from the text of the draft:

Now read to me in order the list of the property of the Roman people to be sold at auction according to the text of the law; and by Hercules! I think that the announcement of it will bring grief and bitterness to the [herald] himself. You have gone through the property in Italy; go on into Sicily. There is nothing in this province, of all that our ancestors left us as our own... which Rullus does not order to be sold.

(Leg. Agr. 2.18.47-48; Loeb trans.)

Skillfully here Cicero created an emotional context for the herald's per­formance, leading up to the moment by talking about other sales that would be detrimental to the interests of the Roman people and describing how the herald himself would respond to hearing the list he was about to read. The herald's voice, reading aloud from the draft, is not preserved in the literary ver­sion of the speech; his performance is instead an interruption in Cicero's flow of words as he instructs the herald to read (after “herald himself” and “go on into Sicily”). We can see in Cicero's technique a logical progression from the sale of private and foreign lands to the public land of the Roman people, whose sale would enjoin the loss of the people's birthright, their revenues (vectigalia), snatched away by Rullus. The list must have been delivered with great effect. In this way, Cicero aimed to influence the Roman people in their capacity as voters.

I draw attention to the theme of revenues lost because it rests on the assump­tion that the people share in what I shall loosely call the profits of empire. Why not? They are, in Cicero's words, the masters of the world (domini omnium gentium). The theme is worth noting also because it appears to hide another, deeper premise, namely, that the people want access to resources, in particu­lar land. The premise surfaces in several arguments. Cicero condemns the pur­chase arrangements for privately owned land, or land held in good title as though it were privately owned, because these arrangements would make avail­able only lands that were poor quality for farming. He observes that men would emigrate to Egypt in droves because of the fertility of the land and the bounty of the region.¹⁶ Some arguments reveal a senator's reading of what the Roman people value, for instance, Cicero's comparison of the division of the ager Cam­panus into allotments with a similar division of the Field of Mars (Campus Martius) or his exhortation to the city plebs not to give up the valued perquisites that accrue with city life in exchange for land allotments: their influence, their votes, their dignity, and the city itself with its Forum, games, and festivals. These are red herrings. Much more concrete is the universal desire to have land and more generally to have access to the resources of empire. These argu­ments form the basis of Cicero's appeal to the voters in De Lege Agraria 2, and in a dramatic way they reveal Cicero's assumptions about the interests and aspirations of the Roman people.

RHETORIC

Cicero used conventions of public speaking that reveal something of the shared presumptions of magistrates and people about the business of preliminary lawmaking meetings and the skills political leaders needed to articulate the will of the Roman people. Let me begin with the conventions of rhetoric, shaped by the exigencies of argument and persuasion and drawn from the rhetorical craft of the Greeks.

The conventions of rhetoric are obvious in De Lege Agraria 2, where argu­ments combine to produce a flurry of charges against the tribunes and their pro­posed bill. The bill benefits opprobrious men, it makes kings of the commissioners, it attacks Pompey, it serves the interests of the lawmakers, and it is not in the interests of the Roman people, which as all Romans knew were paramount. Cicero presents his case skillfully. Much of the detail included in the speech and its presentation follows Cicero's charge that the law would give some men unlimited and arbitrary power. Even though the Roman people thought that the land scheme would bring them something beneficial, namely, access to land, they were mistaken.¹⁷ Instead, as Cicero carefully explains, the law was designed to bring Rullus and the other ten commissioners (decemviri), who were men motivated by greed and lust for power, the means to do what they wanted to do without hindrance:

[T]here has never been an instance of royal power which was not restrained, if not by some law, at least by certain limits. But in this case there are no limits; all the kingdoms, all your dominion in its widest extent, all the countries some of which are free from your rule and others with which you are not yet even acquainted, are included by permission of the law.

(Leg. Agr. 2.14.35; Loeb trans.)

Cicero's insistent gloom about the future commissioners' aims informs his analy­sis of the draft statute again and again.

Thus, on the heels of the passage quoted previously, Cicero directs the peo­ple's attention to a clause that allowed the commissioners to sell “anything” whose sale was authorized in Senate decrees from 87 or later.¹⁸ Criticizing the obscure language, Cicero charges that the drafters of the law were deliber­ately obscure, anticipating that imprecision of statement would enable the com­missioners to do what they liked. Cicero takes the same approach to the next clause as well. He analyzes it, focusing again on vague wording, which he explains as follows:

He thought it was a lengthy list and was afraid of passing over any­thing; and so he added “or anything else,” that is, as you see, saying briefly that nothing is excepted. By this article I assert that all nations, peoples, provinces and kingdoms are handed over and made a free gift of to the sway, jurisdiction, and authority of the decemvirs.

(Leg. Agr. 2.15.38-39; Loeb trans.)

Again Cicero centers his discussion of the clause on the commissioners' self­interest. He comments cynically on phrases from the proposal, showing how far “or anything else” (aliudve quid), instead of a more precise phrase, could be taken in its interpretation. In all fairness to the drafters of this bill, it should be stressed that Cicero's analysis of such clauses aimed to present them in a certain way.

Without a doubt, Cicero was always very deliberate. He carefully selected features of the proposal for discussion. He created an effect, he made a point, and he aimed to seduce his audience to his point of view. In the example just given, he presented this clause as dangerous, because the commissioners would be allowed to sell anything they pleased. To demonstrate the self-interest of the bill's sponsors and the potentially arbitrary authority of the decemviri under the law, Cicero used details from the proposal that could support the point. In service of persuasive ends, he was selective in the proofs he constructed to support his arguments. Cicero's skill at selecting detail for effect can best be seen at the moment, roughly midway through the speech, when he calls on the herald to proclaim the list of lands to be sold (2.18.47-48). Careful selection for the sake of effect was the design of deliberative speaking, whose ends are reflected in the very terms the Romans used for orating about public law pro­posals: suasio (speaking for) and dissuasio (speaking against).

The personal dimension of Cicero's attack is also clear. Before embark­ing on his analysis of the law, Cicero carefully built up a model of the good lawmaker, which incorporates all the lawmaker’s responsibilities and how he should carry them out (2.1.1-3.6). In brief, the good lawmaker should enact statutes in the people’s interest, he should be knowledgeable about Rome’s laws, and he should be direct and conscientious in bringing his knowledge and expert­ise to the public argument about law. The model set, Cicero then systemati­cally attacked Rullus in his capacity as lawmaker. Rullus had deviated from the accepted procedures for formulating and promulgating a proposal of law, Cicero claimed, and had compounded his failure by an inarticulate public delivery at the opening session announcing the proposal. At that meeting Rullus had ignored the conventions of language used on such important occasions. Thus he was not forthright in communicating his proposal of law to the people. Instead he promulgated the proposal furtively. Characteristically he acted out of self­interest and not in the best interests of the Roman people. He maneuvered to keep the Roman people ill-informed. He was hostile to the Roman people. Moreover, he dissimulated. Demonstrating the point, Cicero tells the people that Rullus, out of their hearing, made slighting remarks about them—he refers to Rullus’s speech to the Senate on 1 January—and he tells them what he said, evidently paraphrasing (at 2.26.70 and 2.29.79) what Rullus did say to the Sen­ate. Basically Rullus was a bad magistrate.

Cicero sets up a contrast between elected officials who belong to an elite among such officials and others who do not. What distinguishes them is their command of the conventions of lawmaking, derived from knowledge and expe­rience and dependent on family standing. Cicero uses the theme of nobilitas as a base. The tradition of consuls is recounted, men who were nobiles, whose fam­ilies kept the death masks of their ancestors. Cicero emphasizes his own place in this tradition although he entered office as a new man (2.1.1-3). The elite group naturally has the people’s interests at heart. Its members in office act on behalf of the people, as Cicero says he will in his consulship (2.4.9). Naming a few other members of the elite group at various points in his speech, among them Ti. and C. Gracchus, clarissimi (2.5.10), Cicero emphasizes their nobilitas.

And then there was P Servilius Rullus. “See the difference,” exclaims Cicero in his first public speech, “between Gnaeus Domitius, tribune of the people, a noble of nobles, and Publius Rullus, who in my opinion wanted to test your patience by calling himself noble” (2.7.19). Elsewhere Cn. Domitius is pointedly described as vir clarissimus (2.7.18), a “noble” member of Cicero’s elite group, unlike Rullus. In fact, Rullus was probably not from an illustrious branch of the Servilii. His father is thought to be one of the tresviri who super­vised the mint in 100; no other office is known for him.¹⁹ Twice Cicero alludes to the father as an auctioneer (2.20.53 and 2.25.67), a description arising in the context of the speech from the provisions in the land law concerned with selling land. The Roman people, for whom Cicero was building up his portrayal, would certainly have known what Rullus's background was; and remarks of this nature are probably versions of the truth. The truth was that Rullus was not a nobilis. He did not, therefore, belong to Cicero's elite group.

In a passage that portrays vividly this maladroit officer of the Roman plebs, Cicero makes plain the meaning of Rullus's exclusion from this hypothetical group:

[W]hen I was informed... that the [tribunes] were drawing up a land law, I felt a desire to learn their intentions.... I was kept in the dark.... I accordingly withdrew my offers of assistance In the meantime they

continued to assemble privately,... to summon darkness and solitude to their aid in their secret meetings.... At last the tribunes enter upon office; the speech of Rullus in particular is expected I waited for the man's expected law and speech. At first no law is posted. He orders a meeting for December 12. A crowd gathers round on tiptoe of expecta­tion. He unrolls a very long speech in very fine language. The only fault I could find was that... [no one] could be found who was able to understand what he said At last, however, as soon as I was elected,

the law was publicly posted. By my instructions, a number of copyists came running up all together, and bring an exact transcript of it to me.

(Leg. Agr. 2.5.12-13; Loeb trans.)

The elite group observed certain conventions about lawmaking. There was a free exchange of information among them. So Cicero scores a point by charging Rullus with not consulting Cicero, the consul-elect, about the law he was drafting or even making the text available to him. Cicero offered his help to the tribunes in drafting the agrarian law; they turned him down. They met in secret, at night. In the end, Cicero did not even see the text of their pro­posed law until Rullus had promulgated it and posted the written notice. He was forced to the extreme step of making his own copy of the proposal before he could come to the people with his opinion of it. Cicero contrasts this implic­itly with the accepted state of affairs in which, by the time the law was pro­mulgated, he would have known what the law said. Cicero presents these facts as proof of Rullus's exclusion from the elite group. This is more apparent to us in the light of the circumstantial information Cicero gives elsewhere about the exchange of information among political leaders and their peers and associates about laws in draft that were freely and regularly circulated before promulga­tion. The widely held convention of a free exchange of information is emphasized by the charges of secrecy Cicero raises against Rullus and his fellow tribunes.

Elected officials were also expected to know their job. A tribune who did not know the order of vote of the thirty-five tribes was an affront to the Roman people. In more ways than this, though, Cicero claims in De Lege Agraria 2, Rullus was ignorant of the laws and customs of Rome. Specifically, Cicero crit­icized Rullus indirectly for not knowing, or not taking proper account of, the arrangements of several existing laws: the provisions in Ti. Gracchus's agrarian law for electing commissioners (2.6.16-7.17); those on priests in Domitius's law of 104 (2.7.18-8.20); and provisions from the Aebutian and Licinian laws. Cicero makes a significant point about expected knowledge: “But how is that lawful? For old laws are in existence—not consular laws, if you think this of any importance—but laws made by tribunes, which were very acceptable to you and your ancestors” (2.8.21). Rullus's efforts to win election as decemvir under his own law contravened the two laws here named, Cicero tells his audience, which made explicit provision against such a possibility. In delivering this detail Cicero stresses that both laws were tribunician laws, not consular laws. Con­ceivably a tribune might be forgiven for proposing a law that would annul the latter; but it was something remarkable (or Cicero makes it so) not to be aware of laws of his own predecessors in office. It was left for the consul to bring them to public notice.

Again, Cicero makes the charge directly, saying that Rullus has forgotten in one clause the arrangements made in the previous one: “And is such a man to fetter the world with new laws [leges novae], a man who in the third article forgets what has been laid down in the second?” (2.10.26). A lex nova, which made a new arrangement, still had to take account of existing laws. Here Cicero charges Rullus with not even knowing what was in his own law. Bringing the details of previous laws into his discussion in the way he does, Cicero subtly makes the point that Rullus does not know what Cicero and others of the elite group know and builds up the impression that Rullus lacks the right knowledge of Rome's laws. We can see here how important Roman senators thought it was for a magistrate who sponsored laws to know the laws of Rome. And it was not always the case that he did.

With such ad hominem criticisms Cicero was undermining Rullus's credi­bility as a lawmaker and at the same time reinforcing his own credibility. Cicero presents himself, compared to Rullus, as a magistrate of a completely oppo­site caliber. He emphasizes his own haste in sending his copyists (librarii) to transcribe a copy of the draft statute, so that he could study it and bring the people his expert analysis (2.6.14). Cicero, unlike Rullus, held the people's interests uppermost and fulfilled his responsibilities toward them. We can imag­ine the occasion of Cicero's speech and how unfavorably Rullus, the undepend­able tribune, contrasted with Cicero, whose forthright account of his own remarks to the Senate in which he declared he was going to be the people's con­sul prefaced his subtle attack on Rullus: “I declared in the Senate that, as long as I held this office, I would be the people's consul [popularem consulem]” (2.4.9). The contrast between Rullus and Cicero forms the foundation that Cicero publicly lays for his profound objection to Rullus's draft statute. The previous passage portrays vividly this maladroit officer of the Roman plebs.

From the venom of the attack scholars have been justified in wondering how accurately De Lege Agraria 2 conveys the substance of Rullus's proposed law. Calling the speech “perverse,” some scholars believe that Cicero deliberately misrepresented the law and that we must be wary of any detail Cicero provides about the bill because it is most likely tendentious. While exaggeration is a common feature of public oratory, and notwithstanding the obvious merits of the proposal, there is nonetheless an underlying reality to Cicero's criticisms as well. A conspicuous example is Cicero's charge that Rullus's proposed man­ner of electing the ten-man commission was a dangerous innovation. Of course, such commissions are common throughout the period of the Republic: among the public law proposals across our period of interest many involved the appointment or election of extraordinary commissions for purposes ranging from land distribution, as here, to the repair of city walls. And, beginning with the land law of Ti. Gracchus, some land commissions were given the power of adjudication by vote of the people. Rarely, however, did commissions have the authority of praetor. More important, Rullus veered from common Roman prac­tice when he proposed that the vote of seventeen rather than eighteen tribes would determine the membership of the commission, as was done in the elec­tion of pontifex maximus. Thus Cicero properly, from the perspective of his own day, censures P. Servilius Rullus for undermining the unencumbered expres­sion of the Roman will through the collective voice of a majority of the tribes. Why Rullus would deviate from custom in this way is unknown to us: Cicero offers no explanation other than the one he gives. But why should he? The explanation Cicero gives allows him to give vent to outrage that a tribune would commit such a flagrant blunder.

Rullus's shortcomings as a lawmaker constitute such a prominent line of argument in De Lege Agraria 2 that we may reasonably extrapolate from the immediate to the broader context. If he is to persuade his audience, a speaker must be attentive to the concerns that move them, and Cicero was an expert in the art of persuasion. In this case we may be sure he gauged what the people wanted and expected from their political leaders: the people did notice how elected officeholders carried out their responsibilities, and they did value the effective and proper communication of information of concern to them. With­out the full disclosure of information in public meetings, a community consen­sus regarding public law was impossible in Rome. In his chronicle of Rullus's failings, then, Cicero gives us a unique glimpse of the people's expectations about lawmakers and political leaders on lawmaking occasions and indirectly about their own involvement in the process. In the case of P. Servilius Rullus, the particular flaws that Cicero identified in his bill were multiple, ranging from imprecision of language to dangerous innovation. But the most devastating charge that Cicero leveled publicly against him was his inability as a lawmaker to discern the will of the Roman people.

In the picture he draws of Rullus as an incompetent tribune, Cicero also hints at the complexities of the relationship between Roman political leaders and the people. He tacitly recognizes that what he has to say about the rogatio Servilia agraria will be weighed against what Rullus and other political leaders have to say. To a large extent the success or failure of any bill therefore depended on the effectiveness of a law sponsor's ability when interacting with the crowd assembled at a public lawmaking session to articulately and aptly reflect the will of the Roman people.

To the reader of the published speech, it is evident that Cicero went to the meeting knowing the proposal had popular support; for he disparages the basis of this support, describing the proposal as a bill that gave the people a handout (largitio), using the common term for the perquisites dispensed to tribes­men by tribal leaders or to soldiers by commanders. Subsequently Cicero intro­duced his disapproval of this popular bill carefully and adroitly, subordinating it to the expression of his gratitude and debt to the voters for giving him their highest office and their favor and of his intention to be the people's consul. He threw in a few words, too, on what the Roman people treasured most, namely, their peace, their liberty, and their leisure. This initial rhetoric aimed to win the crowd. Only then, abruptly, did the consul introduce his attack on the pro­posal. Given the skillful and understated way Cicero shifts from his gratitude, his merits, his program, and the people's wishes to the tribunes and their pro­posal, it is doubtful if the severity of his disapprobation was known in advance to the crowd. At the end of his speech with a rhetorical flourish Cicero notes the approbation with which the crowd received his dissuasio, and at the begin­ning of his next public speech, De Lege Agraria 3, he notes their hostile attitude. His public acknowledgment of the change in attitude, probably because his position surprised and disappointed them, points to the importance of the orator's skill in sensing the mood of his audience at such events and, in turn, in using that recognition to manage their emotions.

When orating to a crowd played such an important part in a magistrate's political career, possessing the means of organizing thought and speech in order to successfully move a crowd and persuade voters was crucial. The emotional content of a moving oration is largely intuitive and personal. Yet there were techniques that made the exercise easier. The study of rhetoric provided these. All surviving speeches and fragments of speeches about law were persuasive in character, delivered by elected officeholders and senators in the hopes of influ­encing one section or another of the Roman people to cast their votes in a par­ticular way. Their persuasive arguments used the commonplace themes of a developed rhetorical discipline, which by the first century was fully a part of the intellectual baggage of members of the Roman elite. Interest, self-inter­est, gain, and favor were common themes, attested in rhetorical handbooks like the Rhetorica ad Herennium, published in the 80s. It was part of the rhetorical training of members of the political elite to know how to construct a deliber­ative speech around them. Predictably, the charges of De Lege Agraria 2 reflect commonplace tactics and themes of the art of rhetoric. But the argument was based solidly on political realities as Cicero saw them.

CONVENTIONS OF THE PUBLIC DEBATE

Rhetoric did not provide the only tool Cicero had at his disposal in constructing De Lege Agraria 2. Another convention, involving the proper way to debate the pros and cons of a public law proposal, is also evident. Throughout the speech Cicero is remarkably organized and precise in his criticisms of the public law proposal. He tells his audience that to form those criticisms, occupying most of both De Lege Agraria 2 and 3, he focused closely on the draft statute. Cicero claims he studied the statute carefully from first clause (caput) to last (2.6.15) in order to present his findings to the Roman people. In delivering these findings, Cicero pro­ceeds as the order of ideas and clauses in the text of the draft dictated, dealing with concrete issues of substance. By way of preliminary organization, he first situates each point precisely within the text of the law by clause; thereafter he takes up individual points in order. So at 2.7.17 he starts on the first clause (primum caput est legis agrariae), and at 2.7.18 he moves on to the second (item, inquit, eodemque modo capite altero). While Cicero does not tackle every clause in his critique— since there were at least forty, we might expect that would have been a rather long task—we nonetheless have the strong impression that he preserves the sequence of chapters he does tackle. This is one kind of sale, he comments at one point, “but listen to those which follow” (sed attendite animos ad ea quae consecuntur, 2.14.38). Similar signposts are visible elsewhere: hoc capite (2.15.39) and sequitur enim caput quo capite (2.18.47).

Cicero's discussion of the proposal of law is also remarkably detailed. He prefaces his individual arguments with direct and indirect quotes from the text, and during the elaboration of his arguments he appears to quote freely from, or paraphrase, the draft. One passage previously quoted will illustrate (2.14.35-36); there are others (e.g., 3.2.6-7 and 2.18.47-48). While much of the detail Cicero includes is derived from the draft statute, much also comes from other sources, mainly legal documents. In his analysis of the arrangements instituted in Rul- lus's draft statute Cicero frequently introduces information about arrangements already instituted in other statutes or Senate decrees. The pattern in his method of producing extraneous detail is simple: he informs the people about a par­ticular statute or Senate decree and he tells them what it says.

These are the Licinian and second Aebutian laws which not only pro­hibit anyone who has proposed a law concerning any commission or power from being appointed to any such commission or power but even excludes his colleagues, kinsfolk, and relatives by marriage.

(Leg. Agr. 2.8.21; Loeb trans.)

In this instance, Cicero delivers precise detail, not generalities, to confirm that Rullus's intention to become a commissioner under the terms of his own statute was contrary to law.

Two features of a style of speaking about law emerge from the organization and detail of Cicero's speech. First, the draft statute was analyzed in consider­able detail. Cicero looks at features of the style and language of the draft; he discusses lack of precision in drafting or simply the choice of words. Second, Cicero did not presume prior knowledge about the draft statute. Instead, he himself supplied any relevant details the people might need to follow his objec­tions: he tells the Roman people about legal precedents; he paraphrases, quotes, or reads large sections of clauses from the law (e.g., 2.8.21; 2.18.47-48). So, the formation of the argument did not depend on what the people could be expected to know already. The combination of fairly complex material and careful artic­ulation is striking and suggests that the composition of speeches supporting and opposing proposed law reflects distinctly Roman conventions of talking about law. Rhetoric was not the only body of technique and learning drawn on by Roman speakers.

Since such a convention is nowhere articulated by the Romans, it might be objected that the conclusion is unsound. Indeed, the De Lege Agraria 2 and 3 are atypical among the mostly minute fragments of public orations addressing public law proposals. Moreover, Cicero's own manner of handling a public sua­sio, in the pro lege Manilia, is quite different. Instead of systematically analyz­ing the draft statute Cicero concerns himself with the nature of command. Instead of focusing on precise issues raised by the text he sweeps through the current political situation in Rome. But the rogatio Manilia was much more limited in scope than the rogatio Servilia—it extended the extraordinary com­mand against the pirates given to Pompey by the lex Gabinia to include Syria and the War with Mithridates—and this probably explains the difference. Since the lex Manilia dealt with a specific appointment to command and was not nearly as complex as Rullus's proposed law on land distribution, Cicero reason­ably tailored his argument and its presentation to fit. Not all decisions made by the Roman people involved drafts the length of Rullus's proposed law.

But when political leaders critiqued drafts as long and detailed as this, their suasiones and dissuasiones probably were crafted around a close review of the substance and language of the draft. We find some corroboration in circum­stantial descriptions of the public debate about law. Cassius Dio's reports of meetings in 59 and 55, for instance (discussed later), show magistrates who are expected to or who do in fact pick through the draft of a proposed law. Presum­ably, when they did so, they proceeded through the clauses consecutively, from beginning to end of the draft, in much the same way that Cicero worked through Rullus's proposal in 63. That a conventional way of structuring and organizing a speech was at work seems clear. Undoubtedly, an orator of Cicero's talents would show himself to be a master of all conventions, legal as well as rhetori­cal, in constructing his speech opposing Rullus's public law proposal. In turn the most devastating of the criticisms Cicero leveled against Rullus was that he was master of none.

ORATORY AND POLITICAL SUCCESS

In 43, M. Antonius nailed the severed head and hand of Cicero to the speaker's platform in the Forum, trophies of his murder of Rome's most famous orator. The violence and location of the display, recalling Cicero's vehement orations denouncing Antonius the previous year, provide an emphatic measure of the importance of public speaking in an oral society. From the speaker's platform Cicero and other political leaders harangued, cajoled, and roused Roman vot­ers; they praised and reviled their colleagues and their colleagues' proposals of law; they condemned and exonerated Rome's policies, her plans, her friends, and her enemies. All matters of concern to the entire Roman community were aired in full view of the Roman people in such oratorical sessions. But Roman oratory in public lawmaking sessions involved far more than the presence of a Roman leader haranguing a crowd. At all times public speaking was a lively exchange between the speaker and his crowd of listeners. The crowd shouted approval, or it heckled, or it might even prevent a man from speaking alto­gether. The crowd demanded substance, skill, and presence from public speak­ers. Appearing before a crowd therefore could be a daunting experience; the celebrated military man, C. Marius, was famous also for his fear of addressing the crowd in the Forum. But those political leaders who had the courage to face the crowd found themselves engaged in an intimate dialogue with their listen­ers, the Roman people.

Public oratory was vitally important to the political leaders of Rome. When orating to a crowd, an officeholder, or would-be officeholder, or senator made direct contact with the Roman people. On display were not only his powers of marshaling words and arguments but his emotional connection to the people and their needs. In public lawmaking sessions the urgency of the issues that com­pelled a certain group to form the crowd gave the orator's delivery for or against a proposal a commensurate urgency, if the speaker had talent enough and a sense of drama. Orating was a physical exercise employing the speaker's entire body in addition to his emotions and intellect. Cicero's severed hand was nailed to the Rostra alongside his head in 43 because the orator's hands, in particular his right hand, contributed to his powers of swaying a crowd. But there was give- and-take in the exercise, as Cicero acknowledged in his speeches De Lege Agraria twenty years before his murder. The mutual interaction between political leaders and people on the occasions of lawmaking is revealed in efforts, on the part of both groups, to sway one another. Formally, orating for or against a pro­posal served this purpose for political leaders while voting yes or no served a sim­ilar purpose for the Roman people. There was more leeway in public oratory. Oratory was essential in maintaining the personal dimension of leadership.

In order to garner support effectively, a political leader had to participate in the public debate. Participation was not always guaranteed, however, in the highly competitive atmosphere of late Republican Rome. The opportunity of speaking, which by convention all officeholders and senators had, came over time to be subject to restriction. At least one extortion law deprived the sen­ator duly convicted of his right to orate before the people in a meeting: infamia was incompatible with public oratory and with political leadership.²⁰ Lawmak­ers also began to refuse some men permission to speak on some occasions. The consul Caesar's well-known refusal to let his colleague Bibulus address a meet­ing in 59 prompted the latter to stay home for the remainder of his year in office, periodically dispatching ominous notices from behind the closed doors of his house aimed at disrupting all public business. Others were less direct than Cae­sar. In order to avoid refusing a senator the opportunity to speak, magistrates employed various ruses: physically barring a man from the speaker's platform or the Forum itself was usually effective. The final meeting before the assem­bly convened to vote on a proposal of the tribune C. Trebonius, in 55, regard­ing the assignment of commands, is instructive. One senator, M. Porcius Cato, was allotted two hours to speak but devoted the time to political matters periph­eral to the proposal without once addressing himself directly to the proposal. Yet at the end of two hours Cato would not stop speaking because he wanted an excuse to charge that Trebonius had not allowed him to discuss the pro- posal.²¹ In the end Trebonius had him pulled from the tribunal, and when Cato climbed back up he finally had him hauled off to prison. When the meeting was resumed on the following day, Trebonius prevented another senator, Gal­lus, from speaking against the proposal by locking him in the Senate House, where Gallus had spent the night in order to avoid being kept forcibly from the Forum in the morning.²² More extreme (and employed only twice according to the record, by Ti. Gracchus in 133 and that same C. Trebonius in 55) was the threat to remove a man from office. Gracchus not only threatened his col­league Octavius but carried out his threat, successfully. Senators later regarded his move as an uncustomary restriction on participation in a public debate. One senator objected that Tiberius might let him speak but would penalize him for it later.²³ Thus, refusals were at one and the same time common occurrences, in the last century of the Republic, and occurrences contrary to convention. In incidents of this kind we can see the value magistrates and senators attached to the opportunity of speaking. Oratory enabled them to sway their peers as well as the people.²⁴ The importance of oratory in Roman political life is clear in such lawmaking episodes.

In view of the gradual increase in the membership of their class over the third and second centuries, Rome's leaders not surprisingly developed a strong sense of the right kind of oratory that allowed full scope to the common though unspoken markers of membership in Rome's entrenched elite. The right kind of oratory was characterized by a certain style, wit, and pronunciation that identified the orator as the “right sort” of man—urbane, that is Rome-bred, a man whose family was of long-time standing. The qualities of urbanitas dis­tinguished the right kind of oratory. Newer members of the Roman elite from Italian towns mostly lacked these “unspoken social markers.”²⁵ Instead, when such men began to orate to the people in Rome, following election to the office of tribune and the opportunity to address public law courts (iudicia publica), granted in the late second century, their oratory characteristically relied on directness and emotion.

Such differences in the style of public orating favored by members of the city elite on the one hand and by Italian aspirants to Rome's leadership on the other point to some of the different resources utilized by old and new members of the political leadership.²⁶ Their approach to elected office was through military service and law courts. Unlike Roman nobility, they must rely on patronage or on their own merits—and the limitations of patronage are obvious in the expe­riences of C. Marius, small-town protege of the Metelli, whose patron not only discouraged Marius's political ambitions but publicly humiliated him in the process. In the circumstances, oratory became essential for political newcom­ers in breaching the ranks of Rome's political leadership. Equally important was the development of a style of their own, known as eloquentia popularis. We can imagine that the directness and emotional content of their style of public oratory mirrored the face-to-face camaraderie of the military environment where most may well have had their start, serving as military tribunes in the legions. The exigencies of operating in an arena dominated by the great clans of Rome made it imperative for such men to make the most of their own personalities and strengths. Good oratory gave a man an advantage.

LAW DRAFTS

Some Roman statutes were remarkably long and complicated legal documents. The Rullan proposal of 63, the object of Cicero's public speeches De Lege Agraria, contained at least forty provisions, all lost. But we may instructively compare this ghost bill with the fragments of another, the lex Agraria of 111, whose fifty­eight surviving clauses, amounting to one-third of the original, require eleven modern pages in very small print (RS 1 No. 2). This statute is not only long, it is also meticulously precise in its language, its definition of categories, and its attention to detail. Consider the passage opening the first five clauses:

Quei ager poplicus populi Romani in terram Italiam P. Muucio L. Calpurnio cos. fuit, extra eum agrum... exceptum cavitumve est nei divideretur...

[Whatever public land of the Roman people there was in the land of Italy during the consulship of P. Mucius and L. Calpurnius, apart from that land, whose division was excluded or forbidden...]

(RS 1 No. 2, trans.)

The stage set precisely not once but five times, each clause then continues to define specifically a category or condition of land, once public, which is here­after to be private. That the land shall be private is not finally stated until the beginning of the sixth clause:

ager locus aedificium omnis quei supra scriptus est extra eum agrum... locum de quo supra exceptum cavitum est... nei divideretur, privatus esto...

[Let all the land, place and building which is written above... be pri­vate, except for the land and place concerning which an exception and stipulation is made above.]

(RS i No. 2, trans.)

Fifty-two more clauses follow of similar complexity. There would be at least 150 if the law survived in full.

As we can see clearly in such surviving texts of law, the issues presented at public lawmaking sessions could be highly technical, demanding considerable resources of knowledge. The lex Agraria required knowledge of the status of land in Italy as determined by statute and custom, likewise the status of con­quered land in Africa and Corinth, the kinds of lease, and conditions of tenure. Even beyond their content, the composition of law texts themselves was quite a production, in an age that relied on papyrus rolls and wax-covered wooden tablets for such tasks.

It is hard to imagine the hours-long performance of the lex Agraria by the herald in a public lawmaking session, after an even longer public debate about the measure, without thinking of a restive crowd of dry-throated Romans wish­ing they were anywhere else but there. It is hard, too, to imagine how the imme­diacy of a public lawmaking meeting served Roman public law sponsors in the production of such long-winded texts. But this is projection: in the mod­ern Western world, legalese is the jargon of legal specialists and the production of legal documents is remote from the decision-making process itself, a job for specialists in compartments surrounded by codes, precedents, and legal deci­sions. In Republican Rome, the production of law unfolded in an environment barely touched by a nascent bureaucracy of professional clerks (scribae). Hence, we must look first for the men who drafted documents of such technical com­plexity in the ranks of Rome's political leaders, among the same men who directed the public argument about law.²⁷ Who among these men drafted law and their method of producing law drafts form our subject here.

Senate and public discussions about law, exhibiting a level of technical detail as striking as the complexity of the laws themselves, indicate where to begin look­ing for the drafters of public law. In a revealing letter Cicero wrote to Atticus on 15 March in 60, three years after condemning the Rullan proposal, we read about his contributions to the public debate on a similar measure, the rogatio Flavia agraria:

With the approval of [the people in a meeting] I advocated the dele­tion from the bill all provisions detrimental to private interest. I was for releasing from its operation such land as was in state ownership in the Consulship of P. Mucius and L. Calpurnius, for confirming the Sullan set­tlers in their holdings, and for leaving the people of Volaterrae and Arretium, whose land Sulla confiscated but did not distribute, in posses­sion. One proposal I did not reject, that land should be purchased out of the additional funds accruing during a period of five years from the new tributary revenues.

(Att. 1.19.4; Shackleton Bailey trans.)

Here we see an ex-consul attending closely to the content of a proposed bill, arguing that some provisions should be taken out and others left alone, while the crowd roared its approval (secunda contionis voluntate). The conclu­sion that senators were deeply involved in the production of law on a very basic level and in a very public setting is unavoidable. More can be added to this simple idea.

Writing anxiously to Atticus during his exile in late 58 and 57 or orating with grand self-assurance in the Senate and Forum on his safe return in 56, Cicero charted the uncertain waters of legal drafting for modern historians.²⁸ His subject, in some detail, was the flurry of draft statutes generated in the attempt of friends and associates to bring him back from the Greek desola­tion of Thessaloniki. Six were actually promulgated and two more might have been by tribunes, a praetor, and a consul; another two were drafted but never proposed.²⁹ Thus, ten proposals at least were mooted formally or infor­mally, making the episode to exile and recall Cicero the most intensively dis­puted lawmaking effort in Roman history, a strong measure of the importance of the issues in 63 as well as of Cicero's charisma as a mesmerizing orator and a successful new man. As we shall see, too, in part 3, the episode also is indica­tive of changes in public lawmaking. In any event, the interest Cicero displayed in his own recall produced a remarkably detailed picture of the earlier stages in the production of law.

A plaintive commentary to Atticus (Att. 3.23) about three of the drafts pro­duced in these earlier stages is worth quoting at some length:

The bill of the [tribunes of 58] had three clauses, the first concerning my return. This was carelessly drafted, for it restores nothing except my cit­izenship and rank... The second clause... is common form As for

the third clause... do ask yourself why it was put in and by whom.............

[It] makes one all the more suspicious of some malicious intention when one finds them including a provision which did not affect themselves but was contrary to my interest Nor did that escape Clodius. At a

meeting on 3 November he remarked that this clause laid down for the Tribunes-Designate how far they might go. And yet you must be aware that no law contains such a clause I should be grateful if you would

inquire how it was that Ninnius and others failed to see this, and who brought the clause in.... But if there is anything left to hope for, take a look at the law which Visellius drafted for T. Fadius. It seems admirable to me. Sestius's draft which you say you approve of, I don't like.

(Att. 3.23.4; Shackleton Bailey trans.)

The letter, dated 29 November, in response to several letters from Atticus concerning the status of legal efforts in Rome to recall Cicero, addresses specif­ically a proposal that the tribunes of 58 promulgated on 29 October, the antic­ipated proposal from the tribunes of 57 and two drafts of this.³⁰ It is obvious from the letter that promulgation swayed public opinion even if the proposal was not expected to pass muster: What the proposal said mattered. Informally here (compared to his comments about other laws cited earlier) but far more insistently because his own future was at stake, Cicero again picks unhesitat­ingly and deftly at the technical knots of draft statutes.

Incidentally he provides concrete information about the men directly involved in their production—the tribunes, first of all, as Cicero's comments on the third clause of the first proposal make clear. Cicero was afraid that the tribunes of 57 would be influenced by the third clause from the proposal promulgated on 29 October in drafting theirs. It had the potential to make future laws null and void. In the statute exiling Cicero, Clodius had included a sanction that set heavy penalties on anyone who even so much as brought up for discussion the subject of Cicero's return. He had posted it at the Curia. The other tri­bunes of the same year then drafted a clause in their proposal not to avoid making themselves liable under Clodius's statute, because they would not be anyway, but to hamper future proposals. Whether the tribunes of 57 did adopt the clause in their proposal is not known. As Rotondi pieced the details together, the tribunes of 57 promulgated two proposals. The first was proposed by C. Messius alone. The second was proposed by other tribunes. What happened to either is not known: Were they perhaps never promulgated? Were they with­drawn or did they fail to pass the assembly? In any event the texts of these two proposals were not the drafts of Sestius and Fadius. It appears that the proposal promulgated by most of the college jointly was a collaborative draft that drew on the proposal drafted by the previous college of tribunes and so may also have incorporated individual contributions. Clearly, Cicero held the tribunes jointly responsible for the contents of their promulgated statutes.

But men who did not hold office were also involved. Cicero in exile, a sen­ator of consular rank, obviously took a deep interest in the language of the statute: his property and political future were at stake. Atticus, a wealthy equestrian and Cicero's intimate friend, was also obviously interested—he to some extent acted as Cicero's go-between. The involvement of others was more direct. Two drafts intended for the tribunes of 57 were drafted by men who neither would sponsor their proposals nor indeed were even elected officeholders. One was written by Sestius, tribune-elect for 57, and the other by Visellius, a senator who held no office (privatus), for T. Fadius, another tribune-elect.³¹ Cicero referred to Sestius's draft in an earlier letter, written on 5 October (Att. 3.20), criticiz­ing its wording. Thus Sestius had drafted his proposal before entering office and before the tribunes of 58 promulgated their proposal on 29 October.

It should be stressed that copies of these drafts produced by Sestius and Visel- lius had not been promulgated but were in circulation. Cicero in faraway Greece had copies; Atticus could get them. Drafts were circulated freely before pro­mulgation. During Cicero's exile in 57, it is evident that the men working on the mechanics of recalling him to Rome sent him copies to keep him informed and also to allow him to have a say in the drafting processes. It is not imme­diately clear how Cicero got the copies, but presumably from friends. Elite Romans had a highly personal style of interaction. In the case of the statute promulgated on 29 October, Cicero knew the date of promulgation from other sources than Atticus; Atticus had written Cicero on the day the statute was posted.³² The tenor of Cicero's response does not suggest that Atticus had sent him a copy of that proposal then. Cicero already knew what it contained, and by the time he answered Atticus's letter he already knew it had been rejected by the assembly.³³ Nor could Atticus have sent Fadius's draft, because Cicero wrote him to “have a look at it.” In another letter, in January of 45, Cicero wrote Q. Lepta that he had contacted Balbus to ask for details about the con­tent of a statute.³⁴ It cannot be determined whether it was a statute already approved by a voting assembly, a proposal still in the advertising stage, or a pro­posal not yet promulgated. What matters is that Cicero found the information Lepta wanted about a particular detail in the statute not from a public source— that is, a written notice that advertised the proposal, or a copy deposited in the Aerarium, or the engraved bronze tablet—but from a private source: Balbus. Similarly, in 58, Cicero does not appear to have received a copy of the tribunes' proposal from the written notice of it. It is clear that political leaders and other elite Romans circulated the drafts of proposals among themselves, in an informal and private way. In a society that drew a blurred line between state and private initiative, such informality is hardly surprising.

Cicero's comments on these drafts show how closely elite Romans were involved in piecing together a statute. On one side we see tribunes collaborat­ing on a proposal. On the other we see contributions on a different level in the shape of criticism and suggestion by the senator, Cicero, and the Roman eques­trian, Atticus. Some of the texts were drafted by the tribunes themselves, some by tribunes-elect, and one by a low-ranking senator who did not hold any office at the time. He might be the kind of specialist Cicero elsewhere calls a scrip­tor legum. But there was a definite method of procedure involving members of Rome's political leadership directly: elected officeholders consulted with other officeholders and senators, and even equestrians, about the laws they intended to bring to the people.

Contributors to the public debate give us further insights into the formula­tion and drafting of law.³⁵ Meetings were convened by the proposal's sponsor or by other magistrates, and at these meetings the magistrate alone or a crowd of speakers harangued the people. By long-standing convention, a law's spon­sor gave other officeholders and senators without office every opportunity to voice their support. Thus, in 58, P. Clodius convened several meetings in order to enable the consular senators Pompey, Crassus, Caesar, and Piso and the prae­torian Gabinius to lend their support to his proposal to send Cicero into exile. He even called one meeting in the Campus Martius so that Caesar, who had already taken up a military command at the time, could speak.³⁶ Anyone who wanted to should have been allowed to speak, opponents as well as sup­porters of a proposed statute. Indeed, the initiative to speak sometimes came from the speakers themselves, who by convention could not be refused. Loudly condemning the tribunes for their failure to invite him to speak about the Rul- lan land bill in an earlier meeting of their own, Cicero publicly voiced his oppo­sition to that proposal in his own inaugural meeting as consul, in January of 63.³⁷ But sponsors understandably tended to call on men who would speak in support of their law and to ignore men who would not. Needless to say, there are many examples of sponsors who even refused permission to speak on some occasions to some men, depending on their point of view, their rank, and con­sequently their experience and expertise, and their influence. Refusals of this sort were at one and the same time common occurrences in the first century and occurrences contrary to convention. This tension makes them useful to the modern historian in recovering the meaning of the choreography of the public debate.

Whether one speaker alone or a crowd of speakers harangued the people in their public meetings about proposed law, the lineup of contributors to this pub­lic debate was by no means haphazard. The rank and reputation of individual elected officeholders and senators loomed large in the public debate about law.³⁸ Each speaker wielded his influence (auctoritas) in aid of, in defense of, or in oppo­sition to the lawmaker and his proposal. The role of influence began even before a sponsor promulgated a proposal of law, when he sought the advice of other political leaders in drafting it. After promulgation, the formal announcement, and presentation of the proposal, he sought their approval publicly. Specifically, a sponsor sought the public support of influential men, inviting elected office­holders and senators to contribute to the public discussion precisely because they were influential. The tribune Clodius in 58, as noted earlier, ensured that the people heard what all the leading men of the day had to say about his proposal to banish Roman leaders responsible for the deaths of Romans without trial in 63. When Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus, the three most influential men in Rome by virtue of their individual auctoritas, failed to support Cicero publicly, he left Rome even before the people made their decision.³⁹ When orating to a Roman crowd, even more important than what a man said was the influence he carried in saying it.

To understand the basis of this influence as well as its import for the draft­ing process, it is worth examining the involvement of senators without office (privati) in the public debate.⁴⁰ While ancient explanations for their involve­ment are sometimes misleading, writers nonetheless provide the framework of attitudes and conventions underpinning the events they describe. Writing at a time when the Roman people still met in lawmaking assemblies, Livy com­ments on the involvement of privati in the public debate when describing an unprecedented incident during a lawmaking event. In 167, the praetor pere­grinus, M'. Iuventius Thalna, promulgated a proposal to declare war on Rhodes.⁴¹ Two tribunes vetoed his proposal, even pulling the praetor from his tribunal.⁴² The actions of all three officeholders were unprecedented according to Livy. It was irregular for a praetor to propose a war declaration without first consulting the Senate and consuls. Similarly, tribunes did not veto proposals before senators without office had spoken about them, because, Livy writes, it was customary to let senators have their say about proposals before any vetoes were brought in order to give any magistrate who had not stated his intention to veto the chance to change his mind on hearing the faults of the statute pointed out.⁴³ Moreover, any who had come with the intention of vetoing might be influ­enced by the authority of those who spoke in support of it.⁴⁴

The key elements in this account are the phrases “the faults of the statute” (vitia legis) and the “influence of a man of status and experience” (auctoritas). The faults of the law were evidently better known to experienced senators, men with auctoritas, than to junior magistrates, in particular tribunes. Vitia in the context of a public lawmaking session usually meant irregularities such as religious obstructions, recognizable to men who have experience with omens. Thunder, birds in wrong places, and other ominous sights and sounds all could potentially vitiate the proceedings. Their announcement by a political leader qualified to obstruct the proceedings, called obnuntiatio, was regulated by statute beginning in the second century, because the gods' disposition on lawmaking events was such a vital element in the legitimate decision reached by an assem­bly. Significantly, as Pina Polo has pointed out, most privati invited to address the people in a contio were also members of priestly colleges.⁴⁵

But does the term “faults” have reference only to religious obstruction? Livy presupposes that senators without office would bring more knowledge and exper­tise to lawmaking than magistrates, in any area. Accordingly, the faults of the statute should include any objection to a proposal raised in the public discus­sion or in the Senate discussion, consisting in technical or general points. Cicero's criticisms of Rullus's public law proposal provide a cogent example. About 40 years earlier, the Senate issued a blanket condemnation when it decreed in 100 that Saturninus's proposed grain law was not in the people's best interests. Saturninus had not taken his statute to the Senate first; it was dis­cussed there nonetheless on the motion of Servilius Caepio.⁴⁶ A proposal could be flawed in various ways: the draft statute could be clumsily drafted, it could be inaccurate in its reference to existing statute, or it could be simply out of sync with existing law, with Roman custom, or with the accepted values and intent of the Roman community.⁴⁷ All of these issues were raised at one time or another in the speeches about laws or in reported debates. There were always reasons for vetoing laws, because it was expected that reasons should be given. When in 122 the tribune Livius Drusus vetoed C. Gracchus's proposal, Appian notes that the Senate advised him not to give a reason.⁴⁸

Influence (auctoritas) also enters into Livy's explanation. He juxtaposes it against the preceding faults of the law. Like the other, this, too, causes magistrates to change their minds. He is talking specifically of the influence of senators on tribunes and not necessarily on praetors and consuls. Even so, in this inciden­tal remark, Livy tells us that senators brought two contributions to the discus­sion: their ability to spot faults of the law, that is, technical exper-tise, and their influence or authority. In this mid-second-century episode, as recounted by a late-first-century historian, the contributions of privati to the public debate were clearly significant.

In like manner the imperial historian Cassius Dio saw them. Commenting on the public meeting convened by the tribune Trebonius in 55, Dio reasons that citizens in a private capacity spoke before magistrates so that their views would not be influenced by the authority of the latter and their comments there­fore less freely contributed.⁴⁹ The explanation oversimplifies the more com­plex reality underlying the interactions among senators and elected officials of different ranks. Writing some two hundred years after the end of the Republic, Dio could hardly be expected to understand Republican conventions.

The same historian comes closer to late Republican realities when describ­ing the public meeting called in 59 by the consul Julius Caesar, in which Caesar invited the senators Pompey and Crassus to discuss his proposed land law. The invitation was odd, observed Dio, because neither man held office in that year—they were privati. Dio goes on to explain Caesar's choice of inter­locutors by noting that although they held no office they were the leading men in Rome and, where the people were concerned, the most influential.⁵⁰ Here we see, from the perspective of an imperial historian, the network of influence linking political leaders and people. More important, Dio has grasped the native power of both Pompey and Crassus in 59, surpassing even the collective voice of the Roman Senate.

At this time the maverick potential of individual senators was firmly in place if not willingly recognized by the “right people,” still absorbed in the traditional importance of their collective front. In this regard Caesar's meet­ing in 59 was in one very important respect exceptional: it was convened for the explicit purpose of circumventing the Senate's refusal to give their affir­mation to Caesar's proposal.⁵¹ Caesar promulgated his proposal of law with­out it. But then he sought the affirmation of individual, high-ranking senators. In his colleague Bibulus, as noted, Caesar met with another refusal. It was then, in the public meeting, that he asked Pompey and Crassus for their pub­lic support. Pointedly, Caesar replaced the recommendations of the Senate and of his colleague in the consulate with that of his foremost political associates, two privati. Power usually always prevails. Yet in this incident there is no question of the abuse of power or indeed of the subversion of convention. Caesar followed the rules: if the Senate could not articulate the will of the people, Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus would. Cassius Dio's misunderstanding of Caesar's invitation emphasizes the new political reality in the late Repub­lic, namely, that the personal authority and consequently the influence of a Roman senator in a private capacity supersedes both the authority of the Sen­ate and the authority of an elected officeholder in matters of public law.⁵²

In any event, commentators were always elected officeholders and senators and typically were officeholders beyond the office of quaestor, namely tribunes, praetors, and consuls, or senators who had held these offices. When Cicero spoke against the Rullan proposal in 63 he was consul; his first public deliv­ery on a proposed statute—in support of the tribune Manilius's proposal to give a military command to Pompey (pro lege Manilia)—was delivered only four years before, in 66, when he was praetor. M. Porcius Cato, in contrast, was praetor­elect when he spoke against the proposed statute of C. Trebonius in 55—he had been quaestor in 64, perhaps, and tribune in 62. Caius Gracchus was quaestor when in 126 he spoke against the proposal of the tribune M. Junius Pennus to prohibit non-Romans from residing in Roman towns.⁵³ Personal style and secu­rity of position may explain the difference: diffidence was typical for Cicero, a new man unready to make waves. Men with noble antecedents or self-assur­ance tried the waters sooner. Gracchus was addressing an issue he was patently absorbed in throughout his career. Cato had exercised a command pro praetore in Cyprus and Byzantium between 58 and 56. It was a man's standing and author­ity that counted in the public debate, and these normally accrued with office. A law sponsor regularly sought the support of authoritative men for his pro­posal, inviting consuls and praetors to join in the public debate and high-rank­ing senators as well, regardless of whether they held office, precisely because their words carried weight. The public debate pitted members of the political leadership against one another in a contest of public reputation and authority. Understandably, when these depended to a large extent on rank derived from office, the men of highest rank, consulars and praetorians, had the edge.

The kind of edge some men had over others offers an explanation for the depth of the discussion and debate about law. For rank was no empty measure in Rome, but a mark of experience. Senators who had held one or two or espe­cially all three of the lawmaking magistracies, the offices of tribune, praetor, and consul, were likely experts in the production of law. Not only did they have experience. They had, or should have had, knowledge and expertise, too, which in the best of circumstances are acquired by experience. But there were gradations in their expertise and wide ranges of knowledge: consuls and prae­tors and consular and praetorian senators of high rank were bound to be more experienced in lawmaking than tribunes or quaestorian or aedilician senators. Thus, high-ranking senators and officeholders were regarded as sources of knowledge and expertise. Men of experience who had themselves sponsored law contributed their knowledge and expertise to the discussion about law. In sum, the varying levels of knowledge found among the political leaders con­ditioned their contributions to the public debate.

A system in the production of law rises to view from this elaborate chore­ography. Statutes were formulated in a process of collaboration, consultation, and discussion. The participants in the process depended in part on the spon­sor. If a college of tribunes sponsored a statute, all or some were routinely involved in the process, working together in the fashion shown by Cicero's report of the laws drafted by the tribunes of 57. But they did not rely on their own efforts alone. Instead they consulted higher magistrates and senators. When drawing up his agrarian law in 133, Ti. Gracchus had, as advisors, P. Crassus, the pon­tifex maximus, a leading lawyer and ex-praetor (he was consul in 131); his brother, P. Mucius Scaevola, consul in 133 and also an eminent jurist; Ap. Claudius Pulcher, ex-consul and princeps senatus; and others (Plutarch, Ti. Gracch. 9.1). In 63 Cicero claimed to have offered advice, as consul-elect, to Rullus and his fellow tribunes on the land law they were drafting. They turned him down. The hierarchic tendency of consultation during the earliest stages of drafting was pronounced: junior officeholders consulted senior officeholders and senators. It never went the other way. Similarly, in the public debate, spon­sors availed themselves of the expertise of other men.

Accordingly, elected officials and senators directly addressed the language, phrasing, antecedents, and implications of proposed law on many occasions and in widely different arenas. Before promulgation a proposal was mooted among colleagues and advisors in a magistrate's circle (consilium), in personal discussions, and in correspondence. Still before promulgation, the lawmaker typically took his draft proposal to the Senate for discussion, as Rullus did in 63. After promulgation, proposals were mooted in public lawmaking meetings. On all these occasions the nature of the discussions, whenever attested, appears similar, but it is worthwhile to examine the possible outcome of debate in the various arenas.

Chronologically, in the career of a proposal the Senate discussion usually came first. The nature of the discussion in the Senate on a law before it was promul­gated is illustrated by few direct examples. But where we have reports of prolonged discussion, it was directed to technical details of drafting and content as well as to general points of law.⁵⁴ Dio gives us a description of the points covered in the Senate's discussion of a statute in connection with that same law of Caesar's in 59 described earlier.⁵⁵ Criticism of the text, leading to changes or deletion, was one point of discussion. The value or legality of the proposed statute was another. During this meeting, Cato urged the senators not to give their approval to any new laws; likewise Caesar's colleague Bibulus had said, when Caesar asked him for his opinion, that he would not agree to any new laws in his consulship. The point at issue is the proposed law's relation to, or contribution to, the body of existing statute law. Thus Senate discussions of proposals addressed the tech­nical, legal, and procedural features of law. The language of statutes, their con­tent, and purport, as well as the procedures of legislative assemblies and the whole lawmaking process, came under scrutiny.

These matters also came under scrutiny in the public debate about law. Com­parison of Cicero's public speeches De Lege Agraria 2 and 3 with the speech De Lege Agraria 1, delivered in the closed session of the Roman Senate, reveals that the level of discussion about law in public meetings was no less technical than the level of discussion in the Senate. The arrangements of the proposal were examined; legal precedent, language, as well as legal and political consequences entered into the commentary. In the matter of substance there is no difference between De Lege Agraria 1 on the one hand and 2 and 3 on the other. On a super­ficial level the Roman voters' knowledge about the technicalities of lawmaking ranged over the same ground as that of commentators.⁵⁶ The level of detail and the nature of the arguments employed are another matter. Nonetheless, the exis­tence of a shared universe of knowledge about public law is obvious in public lawmaking sessions like the one Cicero conducted in January of 63.

But while discussions in the Senate and in public lawmaking meetings ranged over similar issues, they differed in their impact on the law draft. In either venue, discussions aimed to correct, delete, or uphold clauses in proposals or the entire proposal. We can see this most clearly in the case of Senate discussions before proposals were promulgated. While the same aim emerges from descriptions of public meetings, the law draft at this point had already been promulgated. Any changes in the draft hereafter required the sponsor to withdraw the proposal, change it, and advertise the draft again for a period of three Roman weeks. Con­sider again the public career of the rogatio Flavia agraria, in 60, where in at least one public meeting a consular senator proposed changes in the bill, obvi­ously viewing the meeting with its public debate as a viable occasion for sug­gesting changes and the people's support as affirmation of the changes.⁵⁷ And, since the proposal was formally mooted for well over the minimum advertising interval of three market days (nundinae)—Cicero first mentions it in a letter to Atticus dated 2 January and in the letter of 15 March cited previously— scholars have assumed it must have been withdrawn and amended.⁵⁸ There­after Flavius promulgated the bill anew in accordance with the lex Licinia Iunia of 62, scholars believe, which prohibited the alteration of proposals already promulgated. In any case, one difference between discussions in the Senate and in public lawmaking meetings was precisely the impact the discussion could have, before and after promulgation, on a proposal of law. How the contribu­tions of privati affected the production of a draft statute directly is uncertain in some respects. In the case of the praetor's proposal for war in 167, Livy pre­sents the achievements of the public discussion in terms of the veto and noth­ing more. But influence in relation to a possible veto enters into the forefront of Livy's comments because that was the point on which he introduced this explanation. He is giving here only one side of the reception, given the con­tributions of senators: how it is received by magistrates in relation to their deci­sion, already made, to veto or not to veto. He was not saying that what the senators had to say was directed only to, or heard only by, magistrates who intended (or not) to veto. Sponsors of law, especially tribunes, sought or avoided their opinions publicly for this reason: what high-ranking senators had to say about proposed laws conveyed information about various technical points that the drafters were unaware of or did not want known.

Let me return to the involvement of political leaders and other elite Romans in the production of law and the significance of their contributions. Several purposes were served in the collaborative system of formulating and drafting law described earlier. Personal interest and attachment were clearly served in the contributions of experienced senators in the earliest stages of drafting, as Cicero's involvement in the laws to recall him shows. Contributions brought a consensus of opinion to the statute that was finally drafted. Even more, they brought consistency, regulating as it were the standard of laws. The col­laborative method imposed the quality control that accounts for the continu­ity of style and legal usage that shows through in the surviving statutes, notwithstanding frequent awkwardness. There were in effect two points at which the standard of proposals was controlled. While a statute was in process of formulation, the sponsor or sponsors, if it was a college of tribunes, sought the technical expertise and experience of senior elected officials, senators or others. We see something of this in Cicero's correspondence with Atticus about the laws being drafted and proposed to end his exile in 57. There are no exam­ples of a law sponsor with his advisors, holding a discussion over the text in process of formulation. Cicero suggests in his speech on the tribunes' agrarian proposal in 63 that consuls looked into laws in the works; it was part of their job. Consultation with more experienced elected officeholders and senators, dis­cussion by the Senate of the drafted text, and discussion in public meetings both provided the technical advisors tribunes needed in order to formulate and draft bills and served as checks on the technical quality of laws brought to the people.

The hierarchic tendency in this system of collaboration and consultation reveals its purposes. In part the tendency was a natural reflection of the essen­tially hierarchic character of the Roman leadership. In part, too, it was a reflec­tion of the hierarchy of experience: Consuls and praetors knew more than tribunes. But arguably inexperience was only relative: a tribune after all was still a mem­ber of the political leadership, a very narrow band. On examination men who became tribunes were successful because they had several qualifications: they were equestrians and they had reputations as military men, legal experts, or speak­ers. Our evidence is imprecise, but we have the strong impression that these qualifications were always expected on the part of other elite Romans and Roman voters. So, relative to other Romans in the top ranks, tribunes were experienced. Yet even among men of the same rank, some were considered experts. M. Marcellus was elected consul for 51 because of his knowledge of Rome's statutes (nomoi), knowledge that he then directed toward efforts to remove Cae­sar from his command.⁵⁹ Why the wide range of abilities? The hierarchic ten­dency in the system arises in part, too, from the increasingly complex social reality of the late Republic.⁶⁰ Inexperience was not a matter of ability but famil­iarity with the traditional resources of legal knowledge and traditional training of elite Romans. Rank and status remained real qualifications, carrying with them the baggage of required performance even in the absence of hard knowl­edge.

Cicero was aware of this. Cicero indeed was a well-placed witness both to the presumptions shared by members of his class about a traditional standard of knowledge and expertise held by an elite group and to the growing detach­ment of those presumptions from the realities of the group as it had then become. From his public speeches against the Rullan proposal, for instance, we form a strong impression of the conventions of lawmaking observed by political lead­ers that rested on two foundations: the free exchange of information among elected officeholders and senators and knowledge of Rome's laws and customs. But Cicero himself insisted that some magistrates—specifically Rullus—were unfamiliar with the conventions. For Cicero the breakdown occurred because some magistrates—specifically Rullus—came from obscure backgrounds; for Cicero nobility made a man reliably privy to the conventions. Yet as modern historians have demonstrated, mobility and obscure background were the norm rather than the exception, especially among tribunes in Cicero's day, a phe­nomenon to which we shall return in later chapters.⁶¹ Cicero's insistence on a long-entrenched inner circle of more elite members among Rome's rulers res­onated with self-image, not reality.

However, where Rullus is concerned, we are left after reading Cicero's public denunciation with the image of a man whose secrecy, in the way he pro­mulgated his proposal, and whose lack of knowledge about the laws of Rome were at variance with an accepted standard. Whether the image is accurate or not, we can see the importance that Rome's political leaders attached to a process in which sponsors consulted and collaborated with other (higher) elected officeholders and senators in the production of law and came equipped with a certain standard of legal and procedural knowledge. Yet it was not always the case that they did. Paradoxically, we are also left with the sense that the suc­cess or failure of a lawmaker depended on more than the merits of a particular public law proposal. In spite of wide support, Rullus apparently withdrew his bill in the wake of Cicero's blistering attack rather than face the veto threat­ened by one of his colleagues.⁶² Rullus and his advisors may indeed have drafted a flawed public law. But Rullus's failure of will and Cicero's success in present­ing Rullus as a lawmaker who failed to discern the will of the people are owed at least in part to Cicero's recognized powers as a public speaker.

CONCLUSION

Visible in the details Cicero records of Rullus's proposal is the template that guided Roman legal draftsmen in the last two centuries in dealing with one of the principle issues exercised in Rome's public assemblies—namely, access to land resources. The speeches De Lege Agraria also tell us how such laws should be processed: they should not be privately developed; they should be written so that they are understandable; and they should be explained by the right people, namely, the informed elite. In the arguments of De Lege Agraria, we have an example of the public endorsements of a bill and of the assump­tions and expectations that formed them. Given that we know the events of 63 relatively well, in Cicero's public orations we can see clearly how an officeholder interacted with the people about a proposed law during the pub­lic stages in the production of law, transpiring in public meetings. The recip­rocal bond between the Roman people and their political leaders can be seen in Cicero's complicated oratorical choreography, a sequence expected and understood by his audience, and by the extent to which he is accepted as an authority by Romans on the details of the proposed law. The reliance by the Roman people on their leaders to publicly convey proposed laws to them gave enormous power to those with effective speaking skills.

The entire career and literary output of M. Tullius Cicero underscore the political importance of public oratory in Rome. A new man who attained the office of consul in 63, Cicero built his reputation and his attachments through his performances in the law courts. But as Cicero's public oration De Lege Agraria 2 makes clear, public meetings convened by officeholders to discuss the mer­its of public law proposals provided Roman leaders with one of the most criti­cal opportunities for public orating in which they tested their leadership to the fullest. When orating to a crowd, an officeholder, a would-be officeholder, or a senator made direct contact with the Roman people. On display were not only his powers of marshaling words and arguments but also his emotional con­nection to the people and their needs. In public lawmaking meetings the urgency of the issues that compelled various groups to flock to the session gave the ora­tor's delivery for or against a proposal a commensurate urgency—if the speaker had talent enough and a sense of drama. That there was give-and-take in the exercise, a mutual interaction between leaders and people, is revealed in efforts on the part of both groups to sway one another. Oratory was vitally important to the political leaders of Rome.

Since only a small fraction of all elected Roman officeholders who had the authority to convene lawmaking assemblies actually exercised the privilege, it appears that for most political leaders the mere occupation of an office and the exercising of whatever authority came with it seem to have satisfied the desire to engage in public service. Others, however, went beyond such a lim­ited view of their situation and took it on themselves to interact with the Roman people in order to discern their sovereign will, to publicly define issues of law, and to risk the rewards or penalties that came with pursuing such a course. A proposer of public law thus took a calculated risk. Could he sell his public law proposal, carefully drafted to appeal to at least eighteen of the thirty-five tribes? Had he discerned the will of the majority of Roman tribes correctly in his presentation of the issues?

The general sophisticated political acumen suggested by the exchange between a political leader and the Roman people on such occasions underscores the depth of the bond that united all Romans. While the extent to which these same Romans depended on Cicero and other elected officeholders and sena­tors to convey the precise details of the law to them suggests a wide gap in lev­els of knowledge between citizens on different levels of the social structure, attention nonetheless also had to be paid to issues of form and substance. How well a public law proposal was drafted mattered as much as the public argument about it. Accordingly, a certain high level of knowledge about the issues and their presentation was required from the law sponsor and every other orator involved in the public debate about law. In particular, political leaders who pro­posed law were expected to have the right tools for the job. The customary process of drafting laws rested on the wide base of knowledge found among elite Romans who worked together with their clerical assistants to produce the texts of laws presented to the people. The diligent involvement of elected office­holders and senators in the task of lawmaking reinforces the central importance of lawmaking in maintaining unity in the Roman community across the period.

Hence Cicero's opposition to P. Servilius Rullus's popular attempt to draft a land law called forth all of his considerable oratorical skills. Proceeding in the formal manner customary on such occasions, Cicero became engaged in an intense dialogue with his audience, thus providing us with an unprecedented opportunity to uncover the most fundamental assumptions held by the Roman people. “Masters of the world,” the Romans deserve the resources of empire, Cicero tells them, thus allowing us to gauge the arguments that moved Romans in 63 as well as the conventions of speaking to which they were attuned. Cicero's selection of themes to attack the proposal alerts us to the common sense of how their society ought to be ordered, shared by political leaders and the Roman people. Cicero's concern for substance and process shows that the masses of voters still displayed the traditional respect for public lawmaking that gave the process its universal authority, even at a period of acute disruption, in 63, when the event took place.

Cicero's skillful attack on Rullus in De Lege Agraria 2 serves to remind us of the degree to which social position, personal characteristics, oratorical skills, and tradition underlay the functioning of the lawmaking process as late as 63, nearly the end of our period of interest. It underscores also the singularly com­plex understanding of the various facets of lawmaking common among the par­ticipants on all levels and articulated by political leaders in their presentation of the law. The whole project for the leaders was to garner support by reflect­ing most accurately the desires of the Roman people in Rome's institutions and by confirming shared attitudes on the uses of power in Roman society. But for the people, the project was to confer public sanction on a proposed course of action through the collective, assenting voice of the Roman people. The guid­ing if unspoken principle of the public debate as shown in De Lege Agraria 2 was clearly understood by all participants in public lawmaking, namely, the sovereign power of the Roman people and the importance of their opinions when expressed as a group while observing the proper procedures in a public lawmaking assembly. We shall see next the extent to which these notions of reciprocity and the central role of the Roman people underlie the process by which the Romans agree to the legitimacy of public law.

Notes

I am grateful to the University of Chicago Press for permission to reprint the sections of this chapter that first appeared in their journal Classical Philology as “The Roman Aris­tocracy and Positive Law,” CP 85 (1990): 266-76. © 1990 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

1. Cicero delivered three speeches publicly about Rullus's proposal (Att. 2.1.3) and one to a closed session of the Senate.

2. The fragments of speeches are collected in H. Malcovati, Oratorum romanorum fragmenta, 3d ed. (Turin, 1967).

3. The Rullan proposal had at least forty clauses. Since we know of the proposal only through Cicero's speeches, the text in its entirety and the arrangement of all its clauses are lost.

4. Ager publicus in Italy: E. G. Hardy, “The agrarian proposal of Rullus in 63,” in Some problems in Roman history: Ten essays bearing on the administrations and legisla­tive work of Julius Caesar (Oxford, 1924), 72; D. Rathbone, “The development of agri­culture in the ‘ager Cosanus' during the Roman republic: Problems of evidence and interpretation,” JRS 71 (1981): 10-23. Provincial land (perhaps Egypt, Bithynia, Cyprus, Achaia, and Macedonia): Hardy 1924, 74-77.

5. For an analysis of the political and social context of the proposal see espe­cially T. P Wiseman, “The senate and the populares, 69-60,” CAH 9, 2d ed. (1994), 327-67; see also E. Gruen, The last generation of the Roman republic (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1974), 389-96; C. Meier, Res publica amissa, 2d ed. (Wiesbaden, 1980), 267-80. Useful for its focus on resources and expenses is H. Schneider, Wirtschaft und Politik: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der späten romischen Republik (Erlangen, ¹974⁾, 3^28-44.

6. Wiseman 1994, 349-51.

7. Chapter 8, note 28.

8. Chapter 8, note 26.

9. For a different kind of evaluation see A. J. E. Bell, “Cicero and the Spectacle of Power,” JRS 87 (1997): 1-22.

10. J.-L. Ferrary, “Rogatio Servilia agraria,” Ath. 66 (1988): 141-64, provides an analysis of actual words and phrases in the statute (ipsissima verba) preserved in Cicero's speech. Cf. Hardy 1924, 68-98.

11. On the easy redaction and dissemination of public orations see F. Pina Polo, Contra arma verbis: Der redner vor dem Volk in der späten romischen Republik (Stuttgart, 1996), 26-29. Some believe Cicero's public speeches probably do not represent the speech as delivered, because they were heavily edited before publication, e.g., F. G. B. Millar, The crowd in Rome in the late republic (Ann Arbor, MI, 1998), 9-10, who nonethe­less uses them as evidence of what was spoken in public meetings.

12. Publication: W. C. McDermott, “Cicero's publication of his consular orations,” Philol. 116 (1972): 277-84; see also previous note.

13. The same emphasis on “your empire,” etc., appears in Cicero, pro lege Manilia, on which see Wiseman 1994, 339.

14. Terms appearing once modified by vester are auctoritas, ius, potestas, fructus, dili­gentia, pecunia, and vis.

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

16. Leg. Agr. 2.16.42.

17. Leg. Agr. 2.4.10.

18. Leg. Agr. 2.14.35-36.

19. On the elder Rullus and his remote connection with nobilitas see M. H. Craw­ford, Roman republican coinage (Cambridge, 1974), 1. 329; R. Syme, “The Historian Servilius Nonianus,” Hermes 92 (1964): 410.

20. See chapter 7; cf. Rhet. Her. 1.12.20.

21. Cass. Dio 39.34.3.

22. E.g., Cass. Dio 39.35.

23. Plut., Ti. Gracch. 14.5-6.

24. The point is made again and again in the ancient testimony. This was the sig­nificance, too, of the consul Bibulus's refusal to comment on Caesar's agrarian proposal in 59. Like the Senate he did not lend his influence; his only remark was that he would approve no new legislation that year (Cass. Dio 38.4.3).

25. J.-M. David, “Les orateurs des municipes a Rome,” in Les “bourgeoisies” Municipales italiennes aux He et ler siecles av. J.C. (Paris and Naples, 1983), 309-23.

26. See J.-M. David, Le patronat judiciare au dernier siecle de la republique romaine (Rome, 1992); and Pina Polo 1996, 65-93.

27. C. Williamson, “Lawmaking in the comitia of republican Rome: The processes of drafting and disseminating, recording and retrieving laws and plebiscites” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1984), 81-102; cf. RS 1.7.

28. Att. 3 and Dom. in particular.

29. LPPR, 400-402.

30. The law draft of the eight tribunes is now RS 2 No. 57. See P. Moreau, “La roga­tio des huit tribuns de 58 av. J.C. et les clauses de sanctio reglementant l'abrogation des lois,” Ath. 77 (n.s. 67) (1989): 151-78.

31. Visellius's career: MRR 2.635 and MRR 3.222. A tribuneship in 69 is proposed, because a Republican inscription attests to a lex Visellia (CIL 1².2.744). If the sugges­tion is correct, he would have had lawmaking experience. See MRR 2.132. G. V. Sumner, The orators in Cicero’s Brutus (Toronto, 1973), 139, disagrees with Shackle­ton Bailey's identification on the grounds that C. Visellius Varro was dead in 58. Instead, he suggests that the Visellius of Cicero's letter was someone else, “perhaps the real author of the lex Visellia,” i.e., another member of the ruling elite.

32. Att. 3.23.1.

33. Att. 3.23.3.

34. Fam. 6.18.1.

35. Pina Polo 1996, 178-92, provides lists of the known political leaders, privati and elected officials, who orated in public meetings of all kinds, including lawmaking meetings.

36. Cass. Dio 38.16.5-17.3.

37. Leg. Agf. 3.1.1

38. Significance of rank: Williamson 1984, 30, 38-45, 91-96; Pina Polo 1996, 34-65.

39. Cass. Dio 38.16.5-17.3.

40. This is covered in detail by Pina Polo 1996, 34-38; cf. Williamson 1984, 41-45.

41. Livy 45.21.6-7.

42. Livy 30.4.6.

43. Livy 45.21.4-6.

44. ^Livy 45.²i.5^-7.

45. Pina Polo 1996, 35.

46. Rhet. Her. 1.12.21.

47. Called Formfehlern in Mommsen, R.St. 3.364.

48. Appian, B.C. 1.23. Appian goes on to say that tribunes were not required to give a reason for their vetoes, but the implication is that it was customary for them to do so.

49. Cass. Dio 39.35.1-2.

50. Cass. Dio 38.4.5-6.

51. On the lawmaking of 59 see chapter 9.

52. Cass. Dio 38.2.1-3.

53. Sources in MRR 1.508.

54. Cass. Dio 39, 1 ff. (Caesar's land law in 59); Cic., Sest. 34.73-74 (Clodius's law exiling Cicero in 58); Cic., Leg. Agr. 1 passim.

55. Cass. Dio 38.2.1-3.3.

56. Cf. Pina Polo i996, i23.

57. It is not certain that Cicero's suggestion was actually implemented or that Flavius even took note of it. At some point before the day of the assembly, Flavius altered the text of the statute himself, adding a provision making land grants to all citizens, not only to Pompey's soldiers (Cass. Dio 37.50.1).

58. Att. 1.18 and 1.19.4. On the latter see D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Cicero’s letters to Atticus (Cambridge, 1965), 1.336. He must have promulgated it and called the final meeting before the voting assembly, because of the events of the meeting Cass. Dio describes: the consul, Metellus, criticized each clause in the law and prevented Flavius from going ahead with it; Flavius threw the consul in prison, threatening to keep him there until the law could be presented to the people.

59. Cass. Dio 40.58.3-59.1.

60. See further part 3.

61. See in particular P. J. J. Vanderbroeck, Popular leadership and collective behavior in late Roman republic, ca. 80-50 BC (Amsterdam, 1987), 23-66.

62. Cicero claims a tribune had promised to veto the bill; much later Pliny reported that the tribes rejected it: Pliny, N.H. 7.117.