Epilogue

From 350 to 44, hundreds of public lawmaking assemblies—whether deal­ing with issues urgently important or to modern observers seemingly unimpor­tant, communitywide in scope or narrowly focused on an individual or group—were held in Rome on an apparently infrequent and irregular basis.

Common to the resolution of the most crucial issues that developed out of the stresses and strains of Roman expansion was the promulgation of public law. When hard-pressed during the Second Punic War of 218 to 201, the first serious threat to Roman survival in Italy, the Romans convened public law­making assemblies to decide critical issues in the development of agreement on the direction of Rome's campaign and thus to focus a united effort against Han­nibal. Again, when the survival of the Roman state seemed in doubt between 91 and 81, the Romans promulgated a flurry of laws to resolve the differences that had brought an unprecedented level of war to the Italian peninsula.

An understanding of the factors associated with the resort to public lawmak­ing assemblies involves an explanation of the most deep-seated elements of Roman culture and as such will probably always be “intrinsically incomplete.”¹ Yet plainly crucial to any understanding of public lawmaking is the recognition that the Roman community was never a seamless whole but a fine mesh of sundry groups experiencing, especially in the period of our study, rapid changes in membership and relationship to the larger community. While the Roman tribe and property class embraced all Romans in a fundamental community organization, these basic groupings incorporated citizens in ever changing num­bers and description and were themselves intersected by smaller groupings. The great clans of Roman society set the horizons of a privileged few who formed the pinnacle of the descending hierarchy of patrons and clients that penetrated the society. In towns and cities across Italy the various associations called col­legia provided smaller-scale shelter and a focus of identity for the landless labor­ers and artisans who swelled the tribes of Rome. In towns and cities the systematic links to community life were found at the neighborhood level, where neigh­borhood officials (vicomagistri) managed affairs of local order and performance such as the neighborhood cult or enumerations of city residents.

When an issue emerged whose solution required a statewide consensus, par­ticularly when the well-being of the Roman state was threatened, any one of a number of leaders occupying the elected offices that permitted them to con­vene the people, chiefly tribunes or consuls, could propose a legal remedy to be adjudicated by groups representing the entire society in a public lawmaking assembly. Such men, however, had to be able to formulate a proposal of merit not only to their own group but to leaders and members of other groups. Each political leader gave voice to the views of a core group of individuals of differ­ent statuses related to him in a variety of ways, as fellow tribesmen, clans­men, clients, tenants, friends, or political or business associates.

Public lawmaking, however, offered an arena for the various constituent members of core clusters to play a role in adjudicating the various options in the most important societywide decision-making process in Rome. In public lawmaking assemblies Rome's political leaders legitimized the people's will directly in a process that required the people's presence and participation. In public lawmaking assemblies Roman citizens voted as members of various groups led by men who occupied key positions within their group. In public lawmak­ing assemblies political leaders validated their position within the society at the same time as they validated the values and beliefs underlying the Roman system, at the same time as they sought to resolve troublesome issues. The process of public lawmaking therefore was as important as the substance of the proposal of law. Significantly, even when the number of citizens and groups in Roman society vastly expanded, we can still see the imprint of the public lawmaking process. The structure and operation of public lawmaking assem­blies reflect the structure and operation of the larger Roman society.

During the last years of the Republic, the proceedings in public lawmaking sessions reveal the degree to which all inhabitants of Italy, now Romans, shared not only this common orientation to Rome but a complex set of interests and assumptions about how Roman society ought to be ordered. Cicero's public ora­tions De Lege Agraria, delivered in 63, the longest and most complete set of speeches addressing the merits of a complicated public law proposal in existence, provide the template that guided Roman legal draftsmen of the day. The speeches tell us how laws should be processed: they should not be privately developed, and they should be explained by the proper people, that is, the elite, in an under­standable way.

Roman respect for legal conventions was also on full display on these occasions as debaters paid careful attention to the substance and presentation of a public law draft. Political leaders who proposed law acquired the prerequi­site knowledge of Rome's laws and essential drafting skills in a customary but evolving process involving service in a number of legal and administrative posi­tions that underwent significant changes over time. Between the third and the first centuries the number of these low-ranking political offices dramatically increased. In this period also the apparatus of justice underwent significant revi­sion and expansion, culminating in the establishment of permanent courts, quaestiones, to try individual, newly defined state crimes. Paradoxically after 100 changes in the membership of the Roman aristocracy meant that fewer junior magistrates, in particular tribunes, were privy to the customary train­ing in legal matters.

Public lawmaking assemblies reflected many of the most fundamental fea­tures of Roman life. The necessity for divine approval on the times for their per­formance, the forms of the rituals, and many of the formal acts that took place during each stage mirrored the intensity of Rome's religious spirit. The elected officeholders who proposed the law and guided the discussion were the same group of aristocrats who managed the society. The elaborate debates and the complicated voting procedures required to discern “the will of the people” rested on the authority and importance of the majority Roman citizen population. To engage in the elaborate rituals and procedures involved in the public law­making process, all the participants had to possess time, energy, and an intuitive knowledge of rites, rules, principles, and traditions. The observation of these features is constant across the period. In 81, 63, and 46, no less than in 218, Romans of all stations clearly insisted upon the import of proper procedures on public lawmaking occasions. The striking recognition and general observa­tion of the complicated choreography required at public lawmaking assemblies, the widescale involvement of all elements of the population, the public display, and the religious observances, constant across our entire period of study, under­score the extent to which public lawmaking succeeded in reflecting the values and assumptions of Roman society at large.

The knowledge and assumptions displayed by a rapidly changing Roman citizenry on lawmaking occasions, some of whose members settled away from Rome and others who were newly added from conquered Italian peoples, emerged out of the long-term process of interaction between Romans and other residents of the Italian peninsula that began in the days of earliest settlement. Long before the Romans moved beyond the boundaries of their city to con­quer their neighbors the unique geography of Italy had created a reciprocal relationship between mountain and plain dweller that facilitated the emer­gence of somewhat common patterns of interaction between peoples. Part of the common pattern of life in Italy was that continual give-and-take enjoined by the perennial movement of people and herds across a shared environment, reflected in a complicated and extensive network of trails and roads. From an early date the Romans, like other peoples of Italy, experienced a high level of personal mobility because of the exigencies of geography and environment throughout the peninsula. Family members who made the seasonal trek away from their permanent settlements were constantly required to negotiate the terms of passage, pasturage, cultivation, and access to basic resources with others who occupied the regions they traversed or who like them were travel­ing in search of pasture or arable land. Sustaining this mobility was a high degree of give-and-take in the interactions among distinct groups that permit­ted all, on the level of everyday life, to resolve potentially disruptive encoun­ters with other inhabitants. These patterns of interaction persisted despite the emergence and expansion of intensive polyculture and urban market centers in Italy. This process produced a veneer of common understandings among the diverse peoples of the Italian peninsula that provided the cornerstone on which the Romans built their remarkable imperial state during the initial and most critical course of their expansion. Common understandings proved vital dur­ing the Roman expansion across Italy in the absence of the resources to con­quer surrounding peoples solely through force. The success of the Roman expansion across Italy rested on far more than military might or unique polit­ical institutions.

Augmenting the common understandings at each step of the advance across Italy was a unique Roman genius for redirecting indigenous ways to their own advantage. Most obvious is the ability to forestall tensions arising over land resources by providing recognizable alternatives to dispossessed Italians. Equally important was the decisive implementation of Roman ways of conflict resolu­tion, ranging from the decisions of on-the-spot Roman commanders and pre­fects to the decisions of senatorial commissions, instituted by the Senate or assemblies in Rome, and finally the societywide directives of public lawmak­ing assemblies. At each stage further advance was possible only with support from newly conquered lands and the use of troops from previously conquered allied Italians who fought alongside the Romans. By 91, when the Italian War began, Italians made up half the troops in the Roman army and conquered peoples had been absorbed to the point where they shared the Roman recog­nition of the central importance of public lawmaking assemblies. In the Roman public lawmaking process, different groups came together to negotiate issues of concern whose resolution, expressed through the vote of the assembled tribes, represented a consensus that was understood to be the formal expression of the will of the Roman people. The core assumptions that allowed the Romans, unlike other ancient peoples, to expand territorially, absorb newcomers, and still retain the stability of the smaller, face-to-face community provide the basis for public lawmaking assemblies.

But if the logic of public lawmaking grew out of a common Italian experi­ence of mobility and accommodation, we must ask how it was that the Romans succeeded in elevating their singularly Roman public lawmaking process to an Italy-wide instrument of negotiation? Arguably the uniquely Roman contribu­tion to the process of expansion and accommodation that disseminated Roman decision-making ways throughout Italy was the permeability and resiliency of Roman institutions, in particular the Roman tribes and property classes. As they expanded across Italy the Romans gradually adjusted to a changing pop­ulation by continually situating individuals, through registration in tribes and property classes at the quinquennial census, in appropriate positions in the exist­ing Roman status structure. Between the fourth and the second centuries the Romans awarded citizenship to selected Italians and Latins in a changing pattern corresponding to the intuitive feel the Romans developed for peoples most likely to become good Romans. By divorcing citizenship from location in a manner unlike any other Mediterranean people, the Romans gave new citi­zens full access to voting privileges as members of the Roman tribes and prop­erty classes. In this way the Romans provided the institutional means to focus and channel the political energy of newcomers so that they strengthened rather than weakened the Roman system. Similarly as more and more Roman citizens faced changed circumstances through economic adversity and were removed from the military lists, the Romans modified effective citizen property qualifi­cations in order to readmit such individuals at a level that permitted them to fight in the infantry. For Italians, service in the Roman army promoted assim­ilation to Roman ways as Roman discipline helped break down indigenous norms of behavior and custom. The benefits of service emphasized the impor­tance of Roman citizenship for the single most significant group in Italy, men of fighting age. Over hundreds of years, the more enterprising Italians—men who rose to the rank of centurion or even military tribune and retired from mil­itary service to enter local positions of office and honor, which by the second century carried the potential for Roman citizenship and registration in the high­est Roman property classes—expanded the number of citizens throughout the conquered territories. Thus the Roman genius in bringing selected newcomers into the system was matched by the loyalty of the newcomers to the Roman state as they moved into key positions within their group.

The Roman resiliency in dealing with the results of expansion across Italy and the absorption of newcomers into their system is obvious also in the means devised for the recovery of their own citizens, who experienced significant dis­ruption in their lives. Over the years between 264 and 91, as the Romans expanded across Italy and the Mediterranean basin, frequent wars drawing steadily on Roman men as well as other inhabitants of Italy resulted in disrupted family lives and community ties as men died or remained under arms away from Italy on longer and longer campaigns. Through economic adversity, some fell out of the Roman system: Men whose property lost value, the basis for registration in the infantry classes, Classes i through 5, were registered at the next census “below the classes” (infra classem), as proletarii. In the second century, when overseas conquests were most extensive and most successful it became obvious even to Roman aristocrats that the military manpower pool of Italy was depleted because the men of Italy could not sustain their customary positions in the eco­nomic life of Italy as small property owners capable of arming themselves for war.

What is striking in the circumstances is the avenue to recovery chosen by the Romans: the reform of the main supports of citizen involvement, tribes and prop­erty classes, and even of Roman citizenship itself. Clearly under way were efforts to place everyone into a configuration understandable to Romans. The reduction of property qualifications for registration in Classes 1 through 5 increased the num­bers available for service as infantrymen. Romans in changed circumstances as a result reentered the Roman state not at a reduced level, as proletarii, but at a func­tioning level, as members of one of the lower infantry classes, Classes 3 through 5. But even Romans who had fallen out of the property-holding classes altogether were presented with an avenue to recovery by the latter part of the second cen­tury, when proletarii were more and more regularly conscripted. The return on military service during successful campaigns included cash or land, perquisites that vaulted soldiers again into the propertied classes. Thus military service provided entry to higher citizen status groups as determined by the property ratings, permit­ting (even if it did not guarantee) civic participation by Romans who had fallen out of the system through adverse circumstances. For such individuals reentry, not permanent exclusion, was an assumed condition of being Roman. Reinforcing the implicit permeability of such restorative options for Romans themselves was the expansion of the Roman citizen population through the entry of new citizens who fortified Rome by helping maintain her manpower at a steady level. The slow but regular admission of outsiders into the Roman state and the readmission of citi­zens down on their luck, in such a way as to strengthen the system, explain the remarkable cohesion throughout the period of expansion and growth.

The Roman tribe provided the key corporate base for the Roman system. The tribes, providing the civic identity of Roman citizens, embraced or were themselves embraced by many overlapping group identifications—the Roman plebs and patricians; property classes; the great clans or gentes; patrons and clients; on other levels colonists or municipales; soldiers; and membership in the social and professional sodalitates, ordines, decuria, and collegia—that Romans claimed. In the tribes, as in all Roman corporate institutions, the rela­tionships of individual members to others were predetermined. Although indi­vidual members changed, the niches they occupied remained. The groups into and out of which individuals moved were stable in regard to the persistence of status levels within them and the prescribed relationships between different status levels. Thus, as we might expect, the membership of groups in Roman society was in constant flux, given the high level of geographic and social mobil­ity and the high rate of absorption of newcomers.

As the symbolic cornerstone of the awesome power of the Roman people, the city of Rome became the focal point in Italy for activities encompassing the most important spheres of community life: economic, political, and reli­gious. Here the collective voice of the Roman people resounded in the deci­sions of public lawmaking assemblies. As the Romans expanded across Italy between the fourth and the second centuries, the duties and rights of citizen­ship were permanently centered on Rome, the focus of privileges and resources. To fully engage in the rituals and events that accompanied citizenship Romans had to be on hand in the city of Rome periodically throughout the year. The voting assemblies, held only in Rome, in which citizens played a part in devel­oping a Roman consensus on decisions involving their ways of life numbered among the most meaningful of these events. Citizens from distant Roman lands converged on Rome throughout the year for various reasons and for varying lengths of stay. This movement was intensified by an expanding influx of poten­tially permanent newcomers, among them former military men discharged in Rome, ex-slaves, and members of the growing surplus of citizens from the expand­ing population. By 50, Rome had emerged as a city of phenomenal size and remarkable stability, holding as many as one million inhabitants, whose rapid movement in and out of the city provides an index of the extent to which the Romans had succeeded in using their customary ways to redirect traditional patterns of life throughout Italy to center on Rome.

Even throughout the first century, when public lawmaking was under assault from a number of directions, all Romans shared the view that public laws were legitimate when the assembled voters gave their approval to the will of the Roman people in the procedurally prescribed manner. When Sulla, named dic­tator by a public law, Julius Caesar, named dictator by another public law, and Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus, named triumviri by yet another, changed (how­ever temporarily) the governmental structure of Roman society, they did it through the agency of the public lawmaking assembly. Despite the failure at times of some of the resolutions agreed upon in public lawmaking assemblies, it is impossible to imagine Roman society without the process.

But in the strengths of this traditional process of public lawmaking lay the weakness, as colliding interests at the level of the Roman leadership made it increasingly difficult to uphold the decisions of public lawmaking assemblies. On occasion the resolution of a problem through public lawmaking created a larger problem, for example, the solution to the Italian War, namely, the series of public laws granting citizenship to all Italians passed between 91 and 89. The resolution of war by public law was very much in line with the traditional uses of public law for hundreds of years. But the failure of the Romans to agree on the implementation of these laws until 70 intensified the tendency for different groups to use the public lawmaking process to further competing interests. The influx of new aristocrats clamoring for inclusion in Rome's aristocracy joined by the influx of new citizens who descended on Rome as a result of the new laws created a situation that could not be resolved through public lawmaking—despite Sulla's turn to new remedies, again through the medium of lawmaking assem­blies. Indeed the failure of the Romans to abide by the decisions of Roman assem­blies in 90 and 89 in regard to absorbing the influx of new citizens signaled the beginning of an unprecedented shift in the social and political foundations of the Roman Republic, which continued to run its course until the demise of the Republic and the public lawmaking process as we knew it in 44.

Throughout most of Roman history to date the fundamental unity of the uppermost levels of Roman and Italian society had been critical to the cohe­sion of the state. Tying the system together was an enduring hierarchy of sta­tus led in descending order by Roman senators, equites equo publico, that is, the 1,800-2,400 members of the first eighteen centuries of the centuriate assem­bly, and other men of equestrian rating formally registered in Class 1, the tri­buni aerarii. The relative ease with which members entered and left the uppermost Roman ranks—dependent on property qualifications and censorial review in the case of equestrians and equites equo publico and upon review and/or office in the case of senators—is notable. Local decurions from the towns of Italy and their sons, whose property holdings made them members of the Roman eques­trian class, stood in line for registration in the equites equo publico, for selec­tion or election to the posts of military tribune, and for election to the junior offices of Rome. As the first of their people to become Roman citizens, their tribal registration determined the registration of the entire community when the citizenship grants of 90 and 89 were eventually implemented in 70. This placed them in positions of considerable importance as they became the key links between Roman political leaders and the voting population. At elections and in legislative assemblies, these men commanded a new body of loyalties among the voting population.

Yet the resolution of the Italian War through the extension of Roman citi­zenship created problems at all levels. At the highest levels elected officehold­ers from old Roman families were being joined by new men of very recent citizen status, often less well versed in Roman ways because they came from towns remote from Rome and had not had the customary training requiring residence from boyhood in Rome. On the lower levels, periodic efforts to absorb even limited numbers of newcomers involved placing these individuals into the pre­vious Roman configuration without disrupting existing networks. When the number of new citizens to be absorbed more than doubled the size of the exist­ing citizen population, the dimensions of the problem swelled commensurably. In either case both the leaders and the led reacted adversely to the threat that the changes presented to the traditional leaders of the tribes and their con­stituent groups. The expansion of the Roman leadership in particular weak­ened the traditional attachments between local political leaders and the majority population. Ultimately traditional local attachments between the leaders and the led—at the outset sundered by defeat in war, change in citizen status, or economic disaster—were eventually replaced by the more fluid attachments between unit and legion commander and soldiers fostered by long military ser­vice, more fluid because the selection process of the groups involved transcended regional and local considerations. While the commanders of all stations were the same men who occupied positions of local leadership in Rome and in the local communities of Italy, the military environment provided a more focused, stable arena for creating long-term attachments of considerable political sig­nificance for both commanders and men. Here as in all other Roman arenas relationships were reciprocal and transmissible only under certain conditions. The attachment of Caesar's veterans to Caesar, and after his death to his cho­sen heir, Octavian, provides a well-known example. In 44, the soldiers to whom land had been given were quartered in temples in Rome, waiting to depart for their allotments. In preparation they had sold their possessions and had cho­sen group leaders from their number to lead each group to the colonies. When Caesar was assassinated in March their consternation was great lest the Senate would annul the grant.² At the end of the Republic it is significant that only among Rome's military forces did smaller units of men, numbered among them key men of recognized merit, still operate in the traditional Roman way. The overall result was visible at public lawmaking assemblies even before the Ital­ian War. Not only were proper procedures flaunted or ignored, but violence disrupted the proceedings, duly enacted laws were annulled, and lawmaking reflected the dissonant commands of a fragmenting society. For hundreds of years various elected officeholders presented public laws in ultimately failed attempts to develop a community consensus for limited efforts to restore the old cohesion; these efforts intensified in the last decades of the Republic. Ulti­mately the attenuation of the effective links among various Roman groups weak­ened the essential modulating functions of assemblies.

The emergence of an emperor represented not an abandonment of Roman val­ues and assumptions but a redirection calculated to restore a rapidly developing cohesion and thus to ensure the survival of the system. And it did. After the Battle of Actium in 31, the Romans embarked on what appears to the modern eye as a new course of political organization under their first emperor, Augustus. To the Romans, however, it represented another interpretation of the Roman way: they often resolved issues local and otherwise after a certain amount of trial and error involving previous solutions. The triumviri rei publicae constituendae Octa­vian, Antony, and Lepidus appear to have drawn on Sulla's and Caesar's office of dictator as a model in the lawmaking capacity they enjoyed. Finally, the first emperor of Rome, Augustus, sponsored laws at times as a tribune, on the basis of his tribunician powers, and at times as a consul, on the basis of his consular pow­ers. With the emergence of these offices, modern scholars believe, the public law­making capacity of the Roman people was drastically reduced, if not destroyed. Yet these extraordinary offices reveal the significance that Roman leaders attached to the lawmaking potential of certain offices—the office of tribune in particular. In turn they reveal the importance attached to public lawmaking as a way of legit­imizing political position, decision making, and social change.

L. Cornelius Sulla, C. Julius Caesar, and Augustus, first emperor of Rome, intuitively understood the legitimizing functions of the Roman public law­making assembly. In 81, Sulla as dictator carried a series of public laws intended to return the Roman aristocracy and the Roman state to a heading dictated by a traditional understanding of order and authority. That his laws did so pri­marily by regulating the behavior of Roman aristocrats, in particular restrict­ing the lawmaking capacity of tribunes, the chief officers of the Roman people, is a measure of the troubling changes in Roman society that inspired the civil wars of the period. Julius Caesar carried many more bills between 49 and 44, some like Sulla's intended to redirect an unrestrained aristocracy and others to ameliorate long-term economic ills. Differing from both Sulla and Caesar, Augustus used public lawmaking assemblies to regulate for the first time in Roman history basic social relations and social institutions at the level of the Roman senatorial and equestrian aristocracy—a sure sign that they were seen to be threatened.

Significantly, the overall move from public lawmaking assemblies of the old kind to the new system took several generations, and it is doubtful if those passing the laws, especially in early times, realized what the outcome would be. It is unlikely that C. Gracchus and his fellow tribunes in 123 and 122 under­stood the ramifications of their “competitive” lawmaking efforts. Public law­making had continued during the civil war years of 43 to 31, and it continued also under Augustus and his immediate successors, though on an ever dimin­ishing scale. During Augustus’s reign at least twenty-four bills were pre­sented to the Roman people for their decision. Between Augustus’s death in CE 14 and the short reign of the emperor Nerva, from CE 96 to 98, a mere twenty bills are reported. After that we hear nothing more about public law enacted by the Roman people. While the end point of the Roman public law­making process under the emperors is indeterminate, the emergence of an emperor had clear implications for the meaning of public lawmaking. Most important, the Roman emperor spoke for the Roman people as the primary agent in maintaining the remarkable social cohesion of Roman society. The Roman emperor, the key man in all Roman groups, now embodied the sov­ereign power of Roman citizens, and through him, the chief lawmaker of Rome, was channeled the “will of the Roman people.”

Even under the emperors, public lawmaking remained in a uniquely Roman sense what it had traditionally been, a channel for societywide agreement. The Romans understood the instrumental role of tradition in Roman history, one of the strongest bases of their persistence:

The Romans as a people were possessed by an especial veneration for authority, precedent and tradition, by a rooted distaste of change unless change could be shown to be in harmony with ancestral custom, “mos maiorum”—which in practice meant the sentiments of the oldest living senators. Lacking any perception of the dogma of progress—for it had not yet been invented—the Romans regarded novelty with distrust and aver­sion. The word “novus” had an evil ring. Yet the memory of the past reminded the Romans that change had come, though slow and combated.³

So writes Sir Ronald Syme, identifying the Roman viewpoint reflected in the efforts of Augustus to construct a legitimate base for his position as emperor. In the present study we have explored the importance of tradition to the structures and performances of public lawmaking assemblies in all periods, includ­ing the most recent. Still, to view Roman development as “continuous and har­monious,” as Augustus maintained, belies the extraordinary complexity of the changes underlying the Roman experience over time. Roman history to date had been a halting and haphazard development as the Romans encountered each situation afresh with no program to guide them except the fluid, collective memories of the deeds of their forebears held by sundry Roman groups. As Syme goes on to say, paraphrasing Cicero: “Rome's peculiar greatness was due not to one man's genius or to one age, but to many men and the long process of time.”⁴

To what extent was Rome's greatness in fact peculiar? Within the ancient Mediterranean region no other peoples expanded so rapidly across so vast an area or created a cohesive society on a comparable scale embracing so many diverse groups. Nor did any other society boast an urban center of a similar size and diversity as Rome—a magnet for a highly mobile population. Nor again did any other Mediterranean society undergo such massive social changes with so little disruption to the overall cohesion of Roman society. Rome had no rev­olutions. And physical remains of the Roman achievement have endured: Not until the nineteenth century were Roman highways replaced in many parts of Europe. Less well known is the apparent persistence into nineteenth-century Europe of political patterns reminiscent of Rome. Comparison between Rome and nineteenth-century England seems particularly apt with respect to the common size and diversity of Rome and London, the mobility of the rural and urban population, and the degree of social and economic change in progress, generated by similar forces of expansion and social change.⁵ The efforts of the Romans and the English to deal with change in similar circumstances are also eerily similar. Significantly, in England as in Rome, a similar resort was made to customary ways to restore order to a rapidly expanding society by reordering local boundaries to reflect a rapidly disappearing sense of local order.

In The Politics of Deference (1976), one of the few historical studies to join actions to assumptions on the level of the fundamental groups of voters in the society, as well as in several earlier articles, the historian D. C. Moore describes a situation in nineteenth-century England in which Parliament instituted wide- reaching political changes through the Reform Acts of the 1830s in an effort to maintain the traditional influence of “legitimate leaders” in determining the voting pattern of the community whose loyalties they commanded. The logic of the reforms in England, according to Moore, flowed from an involved set of assumptions. English voters behaved primarily as members of “face-to-face com- munit[ies]... composed of those men who lived in close contact with one another, who had the same occupations or were joined by the same ‘interest,' and—most important of all—who recognized the same individual as their social, economic and ideological leader.”⁶ Moore describes these communities as “def­erence communities.” In turn, the ideal voter was the “man who recognized him­self as a member of a community and whose behavior might thus be affected by the legitimate influences of the established leaders of the community,” who might be local landowners or industrialists.⁷ By the First Reform Act of 1832 parliamentary seats were redistributed, the boundaries of constituencies were redrawn, and the vote was extended to more (but not all) city dwellers. In this way the ministers in England tried to “prevent those factors which they could not control”—namely, the effects on society of “accelerating industrialization, accelerating population movement, and growing intellectual ferment”—from “destroying the existing balance of power and the traditional forms of social power.”⁸ They sought to reestablish the “cohesion of social groups” by reconsti­tuting voting units to “provide each member of Parliament with the constituents necessary to legitimize his behavior.”⁹

That is, they did so by reorganizing existing borough boundaries and voting potential to conform to an idea of social communities whose members' behav­ior at the polls was conditioned by the assumption that the expressed interests of key members were also their interests. The underlying assumptions giving rise to the English Reform Act of 1832 furnish the key for understanding the purposes of the county poll books, on whose evidence Moore's arguments rest, in which for each election the ballots cast by individual voters were recorded, until the institution of the secret ballot in 1872. Poll books were “muster lists of electoral platoons, companies and battalions. They were mirrors of influence in a highly stratified society.”¹⁰ Moore's interpretation of political reform in nineteenth-century England provides an illuminating comparative case for understanding the efforts made in Republican Rome to preserve the bases of social and political order during the period of great changes accompanying Roman expansion across Italy.

Even more, the restorative effects of the First Reform Act, in which upper­class political leaders tried to restore the traditional balance of their society through “legal tools” that could be manipulated through parliamentary deci­sion making, have very much in common with the action of leading Romans in public lawmaking assemblies. More modern, that is, twentieth-century, expec­tations about law and politics do little to explain the functions of Roman pub­lic lawmaking assemblies. In Republican Rome we are clearly in a different world with no comprehensive policies for dealing with any area of life: no systematic agenda of expansion, no systematic agenda for the regularization of social or political order, no systematic agenda of law enforcement. Rome had not made the imaginative leap to a society where a body of rules, legal and bureaucratic, played a pivotal role in regulation. The vast majority of decisions made in Republican Rome were made in the local arena by principal family members and community leaders, as well as by men of local standing (who might include Roman senators) acting in a private capacity as patrons or landlords.

Enforcement of law and order was primarily a local responsibility borne by the community, whose members recognized wrongful behavior and knew the proper agency, at the appropriate level, to amend it.¹¹ On higher levels, decisions were made by Roman senators as members of the Romans' highest collective body, the Senate, or as elected officeholders, commanders, or specially selected inves­tigators. Roman officeholders and commanders had wide latitude to make imme­diate decisions in response to local conditions, even to the point of initiating war.¹² Within this diffused structure of order, public lawmaking assemblies alone served as a mechanism of regulation on a Roman statewide basis with the poten­tial for involving the widest variety of individuals and number of groups in Roman society in community decisions.

Like the English Parliament in the early nineteenth century, public law­making assemblies provided an institutional way for the Romans to engage in restorative events on a continuing basis. While the public lawmaking process was significantly much more focused on immediate disruptive events, a similarly involved set of Roman assumptions operated. Roman voters behaved primarily as members of small, overlapping social communities sharing com­mon loyalties and interests. Primary among these was the tribe, holding mem­bers sometimes from the same locale in Italy, sometimes from two or more widely separated regions. After 70, when all Italians were finally registered as citizens, the towns of Italy, each with a tribal assignment, became the local centers of tribal administration. The property classes constituted an overlap­ping group dependent on common status and interests, as determined by wealth. But here too the tribes provided the framework inasmuch as the mem­bership of the property classes after the mid-third century was organized by tribe. Of increasing importance in the later Republic were the secondary groups defined by occupation and interest, especially the collegia, whose mem­bers often shared a common occupation, and the sodalitates, political clubs for aristocrats sharing the same tribal affiliations. As in nineteenth-century England, the behavior of voters, members of these overlapping Roman groups, followed the lead set by key men in the group. Unlike English voters, whose ballots were recorded in poll books, Roman voters were individually hidden. Only the name (but not the ballot) was recorded, whether of the first voter of the first tribe to vote in tribal assemblies or the first century to vote in centuriate assemblies, the centuria praerogativa. But these men were key members of their groups, in particular the tribe. To the Roman mind it was unnecessary to keep track of more intricate groupings. Clearly the Roman impulse to harmonize with a legitimate leader was taken for granted. Not all men were legitimate leaders, however, as M. Tullius Cicero's arguments in De Lege Agraria about the shortcomings of P Servilius Rullus reveal. A legit­imate leader in 63 was identifiable by his firm loyalty to the collective author­ity of the Senate as well as his ability to put into words and action the desires of propertied Romans, key men in their social communities. Roman voters, as Cicero knew, intuitively recognized their true leaders. Equally, the voters and Cicero recognized that the tribes were the fundamental social commu­nities with which political action must mesh. Accordingly, both the adjust­ment of property ratings, to reincorporate citizens as viable members of the Roman community, and the absorption of new citizens hinged on maintain­ing the social cohesion of tribes. The extent to which the Romans believed they were successful after 70 is revealed in the electioneering handbook believed written by Quintus Tullius Cicero for his brother Marcus when cam­paigning for office of consul in 65-64: learn the locations of the tribes as well as the identities and interests of their key members, the tribal leaders, he advised him. Traditionally the tribes were the focus of social cohesion in Roman society. And throughout the social and political changes of the Repub­lican period, restoring the social and political balances of the tribes appeared crucial in maintaining the cohesion of society. At times by Senate decree or magistrate’s edict, at moments of statewide crisis, restoration was achieved in lawmaking assemblies.

While the Romans consistently sought to restore the operations of their society in customary ways between 350 and 44, the expanding number of groups and leaders in the changing citizen body in fact made this extremely difficult. Like D. C. Moore’s Englishmen, Romans assumed that individuals put in the proper environment, through placement in their proper place in the social structure, would do the right thing. But as time passed, and particularly in pres­sured times, the customary relationships between tribal leaders and tribal mem­bers took second place to the relationships between military leaders and troops. Eventually the scale of Roman society, with the largest citizen population ever seen in the ancient Mediterranean but more important with a vastly expand­ing leadership marked by competing interests, began to overwhelm the pub­lic lawmaking process and the political system as a whole. It is significant, however, that symptoms of the “decline” of the Republic, such as public laws on bribery or extortion intended to regulate aristocrats, make their appear­ance long before the “century of revolution,” throughout which the institu­tions and constitution of Republican Rome are believed to be coming apart. For their appearance much earlier helps make the point that the Roman state was in a constant state of flux. Potentially disruptive events were the order of the day at all stages. We are not witnessing a progression from an ideal state in the Middle Republic to a state of anarchy in the Late Republic (except per­haps in the minds of the Romans). The Romans consistently worked at resolv­ing tensions in understood ways, under constantly expanding conditions. What is to be wondered at is the Romans' success in keeping the system effective for so long. I have argued in this book that public laws and the process of public lawmaking played a key role in that achievement.

Notwithstanding increasing discord after 89, public lawmaking proved a remarkably resilient mechanism for reaching decisions about the direction of the Roman state throughout the period from 350 to 44. Lawmaking diffused power throughout the society by providing a process for mobilizing societywide support for the resolution of controversial and potentially disruptive issues. As a mechanism for legitimizing the assembled authority of the Roman people, the process itself was as momentous as the substance of the public law that suc­ceeded or failed to pass muster. Indeed, the process was often more meaningful than its end products. Like other forms of Roman decision making, public law addressed immediate situations in a direct and immediate way. There was no conscious planning to produce a coherent body of public law over time in predetermined areas of Roman community life. Instead the Romans managed by accretion and adjustment: as the Roman community expanded the Romans provided necessary leadership, for instance, by expanding the number of exist­ing offices or creating extraordinary commissions. If existing law interfered with a desired and immediate aim, the Romans often enacted more laws to sus­pend or circumvent existing law in order to accommodate the unique cir­cumstances. In turn, Roman statutes do not fall into easily defined categories. There may have been many measures addressing a single subject—about elected officials, about commanders, about land, and so on—but each one addressed a singular set of circumstances in a singular way. Covering a wide range of issues and topics, these decisions share one overarching feature: a remarkable convic­tion in the legitimacy of group decision in maintaining the essential balance of the larger community.

From the very earliest days the Romans had begun generating a sophisticated body of decisions in public lawmaking assemblies, shaping and adjusting the bases of their social and political order. Always lawmaking started from the generally shared understanding by Romans about the members of Roman society and their relationships and activities that that order traditionally served. In a world whose order was continually shifting as the relationships within and among different groups in Italy were altered, the public laws enacted by the Roman people came to be one of the chief means of creating, recreating, and somehow fixing order along the lines of a perceived ideal and unchanging order mirrored in the Roman reverence for the “customs of their ancestors” (mos maiorum). The Roman impulse to maintain their changing social environment in some changeless form is evident in the technique the Romans devised to accommodate awkwardly fitting situations within the fixed boundaries of custom. In 212 for instance it was necessary to conscript boys under the age of seventeen, contrary to custom. To palliate the necessity, caused by heavy losses in the war with Hannibal, the Romans enacted that boys under seventeen who swore the military oath should serve “as though they were seventeen or older.” The fiction is typically Roman.¹³ In effect such fictions preserve customary rules. At the same time the fictions per­mit the Romans to respond to new circumstances without deviating from cus­tom. In turn, the Romans are somewhat skeptical of “new law” (lex nova). What the Romans called “new law” was an enactment without precedent, without some grounding in a previous enactment or response to some legal situation. “New law” to the mind of an aristocrat like Cicero was highly questionable unless properly handled and presented by the right aristocrats. On becoming Emperor in 31 Augustus prided himself in presenting “new laws” to the Roman people, which revived and institutionalized ancient customs.¹⁴ Reflected here is a desire for maintaining a customary, predictable world and a sense that the public law­making arena was the right one for the task. Within the public lawmaking arena are exhibited the essential sources of cohesion in Roman society. Convened in lawmaking assemblies, Romans approved laws that resolved conflicts dissipating the energies that made possible the growth and prosperity of Rome. For hundreds of years, public lawmaking was paramount among the instruments allowing the Romans to move far beyond the limits of other imperial Mediterranean powers. Through the inclusion of citizens on all levels, public lawmaking assemblies were a unique and enduring Roman mechanism for the resolution of issues on a soci­etywide basis and as such provided the pivotal event in allowing the cohesion essential to the expansion and endurance of the Roman world.

Notes

1. C. Geertz, “Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture,” in The interpretation of cultures (New York, 1973), 29.

2. Appian, B.C. 2.120.

3. Symei939, 315-16.

4. Cic., Re Pub. 2.2

5. See the classic studies of A. Redford, Labour migration in England, 1800-1850 (Manchester, 1964 [1926]); P Laslett, The world we have lost (London, 1965); and D. V.

Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, eds., Population in history: Essays in historical demography (London, 1965).

6. D. C. Moore, “Concession or cure: The sociological premises of the first reform act,” Historical Journal 9 (1966): 56.

7. Moore 1966, 56.

8. Moore 1966, 43.

9. Moore 1966, 44.

10. Moore 1966, 55.

11. Nippel 1995, 113.

12. This was also true under the emperors: Isaac 1992, 379.

13. The classic expression of legal fictions in the ancient legal context is by H. Maine, Ancient law: Its connection with the early history of society and its relation to mod­ern ideas (Gloucester, MA, 1970 [1861]), 20-41.

14. Res Gestae 8.5