by Mary Beard
It is easy enough to paint a picture of Republican political processes as completely dominated by the wealthy minority. The upshot of the Conflict of the Orders was not popular revolution but the creation of a new governing class, comprising rich plebeians and patricians. The first qualification for most political offices was wealth on a substantial scale. No one could stand for election without passing a financial test that excluded most citizens; the exact amount needed to qualify is not known, but the implications are that it was set at the very top level of the census hierarchy, the so-called cavalry or equestrian rating. When the people came together to vote, the system of voting was stacked in favour of the wealthy. We have already seen how that worked in the Centuriate Assembly, which elected senior officials: if the rich centuries were united, they could determine the result without the poorer centuries even having the chance to vote. The other main assembly based on geographical ‘tribal’ divisions was more equitable in theory – but, as time went by, not necessarily so in practice. Of the thirty-five geographical divisions which were finally defined in 241 BCE (up to that point the number of tribes had increased as citizenship was extended through Italy), only four covered the city itself. The remaining thirty-one covered Rome’s now far-flung rural territory. As votes could be cast only in person in the city, the influence of those who could afford the time and the transport to make the journey was overwhelming; the votes of the resident city population had an impact on only that tiny minority of urban tribes. Besides, strictly speaking, the assemblies were simply for voting, on a list of candidates or on a proposal put by a senior official. There was no general discussion; no proposals or even amendments could come from the floor; in the case of almost every piece of proposed legislation we know of, the people voted in favour of what was put before them. This was not popular power as we understand it.
Yet there was another side to it. As well as the formal prerogatives of the people that Polybius stresses, there are clear traces of a wider political culture in which the popular voice was a key element. The votes of the poor mattered and were eagerly canvassed. The rich were not usually united, and elections were competitive. Those holding, or seeking, political office set great store on persuading the people to vote for them or for their proposed laws and devoted enormous attention to honing the techniques of rhetoric that would allow them to do that. They ignored or humiliated the poor at their peril. One of the distinctive features of the Republican political scene were the semi-formal meetings (or contiones), often held immediately before the voting assemblies, in which rival officials tried to win over the people to their point of view (Cicero delivered his second and fourth speeches against Catiline, for example, at contiones). Quite how frequent or well attended they usually were, we do not know for sure. But there are several hints that they involved political passion, vociferous enthusiasm, and very loud noise. On one occasion, in the first century BCE, it was said that the shouting was so thunderous that a crow, which had the bad luck to be flying past, fell to the ground, stunned.
There are also all kinds of anecdotes about the importance and intensity of canvassing, and how the vote of the people could be won or lost. Polybius tells a curious story about the Syrian king Antiochus IV (Epiphanes, ‘famous’ or even ‘manifest god’), the son of Antiochus the Great, who had been ‘crushed’ by Scipio Asiaticus. As a young man he had lived more than a decade as a hostage in Rome before being swapped for a younger relative, the one whom Polybius later advised on his escape plans. On his return to the East, he took with him a variety of Roman habits that he had picked up during his stay. These mostly came down to displaying a popular touch: talking with anyone he met, giving presents to ordinary people and making the rounds of craftsmen’s shops. But most striking of all, he would dress up in a toga and go around the marketplace as if he were a candidate for election, shaking people by the hand and asking for their vote. This baffled the people in his showy capital city of Antioch, who were not used to this kind of thing from a monarch and nicknamed him Epimanes (‘bonkers’ or, to preserve the pun, ‘fatuous’). But it is clear that one lesson that Antiochus had drawn from Rome was that the common people and their votes were important.
Equally revealing is an anecdote about another member of the Scipio family in the second century BCE, Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica. He was out canvassing one day in a bid to be elected to the office of aedile and was busy shaking the hands of voters (standard procedure, then as now) when he came across one whose hands were hardened by work in the fields. ‘My goodness,’ the young aristocrat joked, ‘do you walk on them?’ He was overheard, and the common people concluded that he had been taunting their poverty and their labour. The upshot, needless to say, was that he lost the election.
So what kind of political system was this? The balance between the different interests was certainly not as equitable as Polybius makes it seem. The poor could never rise to the top of Roman politics; the common people could never seize the political initiative; and it was axiomatic that the richer an individual citizen was, the more political weight he should have. But this form of disequilibrium is familiar in many modern so-called democracies: at Rome too the wealthy and privileged competed for political office and political power that could only be granted by popular election and by the favour of ordinary people who would never have the financial means to stand themselves. As young Scipio Nasica found to his cost, the success of the rich was a gift bestowed by the poor. The rich had to learn the lesson that they depended on the people as a whole.
An empire of obedience
Polybius was in no doubt that Rome’s stable ‘constitution’ provided an important foundation for its success abroad. But he had experienced the sharp end of Roman warfare, and he also saw Rome as an aggressive power, with imperialist aims to take over the whole world. ‘They made a daring bid,’ he insists at the end of his account of the First Punic War, ‘for universal domination and control – and they succeeded in their purpose.’ Not everyone agreed. There were even some Greeks, he acknowledged, who suggested that Rome’s conquests came about ‘by chance or unintentionally’. Many Romans insisted that their overseas expansion resulted from a series of just wars, in the sense of wars undertaken with the necessary support of the gods, in self-defence or in the defence of allies, who had often solicited Rome’s help. It was not aggression at all.
If Polybius had lived to see, less than a hundred years after his death, the larger-than-life-sized statues of Roman generals holding a globe in their hands, he would no doubt have felt vindicated. A vision of world mastery certainly lay behind many expressions of Roman power in the first century BCE and later (‘an empire without limit’, as Jupiter is made to prophesy in Virgil’s Aeneid). But Polybius was wrong, as his own narrative of events clearly shows, to imagine that at this earlier period the Romans were driven by that kind of acquisitive imperialist ideology or some sense of manifest destiny. There was thirst for glory, desire for conquest, and sheer greed for the economic profits of victory at all levels of Roman society. It was not for nothing that the prospect of rich booty was dangled before the people when they were asked to vote on entering the First Punic War. But whatever fantasies might have been exchanged at the Scipios’ parties, none of this adds up to a plan for world domination.
Much like the extension of Roman control within Italy, this expansion overseas in the third and second centuries BCE was more complicated than the familiar myth of the Roman legions marching in, conquering and taking over foreign territory. First, the Romans were not the only agents in the process. They did not invade a world of peace-loving peoples, who were just minding their own business until these voracious thugs came along. However cynical we might rightly be about Roman claims that they went to war only in response to requests for assistance from friends and allies (that has been the excuse for some of the most aggressive wars in history), part of the pressure for Rome to intervene did come from outside.
The world of the eastern Mediterranean, from G
reece to modern Turkey and beyond, was the context for most of Rome’s military activity at this period. It was a world of political conflict, shifting alliances and continuous, brutal interstate violence, not unlike early Italy, but on a much vaster scale. This was the legacy of the smash-and-grab conquests of Alexander the Great, who died in 323 BCE, before he had to face what to do with those he had defeated. His successors formed rival dynasties, which became involved in a more or less unbroken series of wars and disputes with one another and with the smaller states and coalitions on their margins. Pyrrhus was one of these dynasts. Antiochus Epiphanes was another: after his detention at Rome and attempts at popular politics at home, he managed in his ten-year reign between 175 and 164 BCE to invade Egypt (twice), Cyprus, Judaea (also provoking the Maccabean Revolt), Parthia and Armenia.
The more powerful Rome was perceived to be, the more these warring parties looked on the Romans as useful allies in local power struggles and courted their influence. Representatives from the East repeatedly came to Rome in the hope of winning moral support or military intervention. That is a running theme in the historical accounts of the period: there are plenty of envoys reported, for example, in the run-up to Aemilius Paullus’ campaign against Perseus, trying to persuade the Romans to do something about the ambitions of Macedon. But the most vivid picture of how this ‘courting’ worked in practice comes from Teos, a town on the western coast of modern Turkey. It is a mid-second-century BCE inscription recording the attempts made to draw the Romans into a minor dispute, about which nothing else is known, over some land rights between the city of Abdera in northern Greece and a local king, Kotys.
The text is a ‘thank-you letter’ carved on stone, addressed to the town of Teos by the people of Abdera. For the Teans had apparently agreed to send two men to Rome, almost lobbyists in a modern sense, to drum up Roman support for Abdera’s case against the king. The Abderans describe exactly how this pair operated, right down to their regular house calls on key members of the senate. The delegates apparently worked so hard that ‘they wore themselves out physically and mentally, and they met the leading Romans and won them over by paying obeisance to them every day’; and when some of the people they visited appeared to be on Kotys’ side (for he had also sent envoys to Rome), ‘they won their friendship by laying out the facts and paying daily calls at their atria’, that is at the main central hall of their Roman houses.
The silence of our text on the outcome of these approaches hints that things did not go the Abderans’ way. But the snapshot here of rival representatives not merely beating a path to the senate but pressing their case daily on individual senators gives an idea of just how actively and persistently Roman assistance could be sought. And the literally hundreds of statues of individual Romans – as ‘saviours and benefactors’ – put up in the cities of the Greek world show how that intervention, if successful, could be celebrated. We cannot now identify every piece of doublethink behind such words: there was no doubt as much fear and flattery involved as sincere gratitude. But they are a useful reminder that the simple shorthand ‘Roman conquest’ can obscure a wide range of perspectives, motivations and aspirations on every side of the encounter.
Besides, the Romans did not attempt to annex overseas territory systematically or to impose standard mechanisms of control. That partly explains why the process of expansion could be so quick: they were not establishing any infrastructure of government. They certainly extracted material rewards from those they defeated, but in different, ad hoc ways. They imposed vast cash indemnities on some states, a total of more than 600 tonnes of silver bullion in the first half of the second century BCE alone. Elsewhere they took over the ready-made regular taxation regimes set up by earlier rulers. Occasionally they devised new ways of raking off rich revenues. The Spanish silver mines, for example, once part of Hannibal’s domain, were soon producing so much more ore that the environmental pollution from its processing can still be detected in datable samples extracted from deep in the Greenland ice cap. And Polybius, who visited Spain in the mid second century BCE, wrote of 40,000 miners, mostly slaves no doubt, working just one region of mining territory alone (not literally, perhaps: ‘40,000’ was a common ancient shorthand for ‘a very large number’, like our ‘millions’). The Romans’ forms of political control were equally varied, ranging from hands-off treaties of ‘friendship’, through the taking of hostages as a guarantee of good behaviour, to the more or less permanent presence of Roman troops and Roman officials. What happened after Aemilius Paullus defeated King Perseus is just one example of how such a package of arrangements might look. Macedon was broken up into four independent, self-governing states; they paid tax to Rome, at half the rate that Perseus had levied it; and, in this case, the Macedonian mines were shut down, to prevent their resources from being used to build up a new power base in the region.
It was a coercive empire in the sense that the Romans took the profits and tried to ensure that they got their own way when they wanted, with the threat of force always in the background. It was not an empire of annexation in the sense that later Romans would understand it. There was no detailed legal framework of control, rules or regulations – or, for that matter, visionary aspirations. At this period, even the Latin word imperium, which by the end of the first century BCE could mean ‘empire’, in the sense of the whole area under direct Roman government, meant something much closer to ‘the power to issue orders that are obeyed’. And provincia (or ‘province’), which became the standard term for a carefully defined subdivision of empire under the control of a governor, was not a geographical term but meant a responsibility assigned to Roman officials. That could be, and often was, an assignment of military activity or administration in a particular place. From the later third century BCE, Sicily and Sardinia were regularly designated as provinciae, and from the early second century BCE two military provinciae in Spain were a standard fixture, though their boundaries were fluid. But it could equally well be a responsibility for, say, the Roman treasury – and, around the turn of the third and second centuries BCE, Plautus in his comedies uses the word provincia as a joke to refer to the duties of slaves. At this point, no Roman was sent out to be the ‘governor of a province’, as they later were.
What was at stake for the Romans was whether they could win in battle and then whether – by persuasion, bullying or force – they could impose their will where, when and if they chose. The style of this imperium is vividly summed up in the story of the last encounter between Antiochus Epiphanes and the Romans. The king was invading Egypt for the second time, and the Egyptians had asked the Romans for help. A Roman envoy, Gaius Popilius Laenas, was dispatched and met Antiochus outside Alexandria. After his long familiarity with the Romans, the king no doubt expected a rather civil meeting. Instead, Laenas handed him a decree of the senate instructing him to withdraw from Egypt immediately. When Antiochus asked for time to consult his advisors, Laenas picked up a stick and drew a circle in the dust around him. There was to be no stepping out of that circle before he had given his answer. Stunned, Antiochus meekly agreed to the senate’s demands. This was an empire of obedience.
The impact of empire
It was also an empire of communication, mobility, misunderstanding and changing perspectives, as a closer look at that story of the delegation from Teos vividly reveals. It is easy enough to sympathise with the predicament of the underdog. The two men had sailed across half the Mediterranean on a journey that would have taken anything between two and five weeks, depending on the season of the year, the quality of the ship and whether they were prepared to sail after dark (night sailing could take a week off the journey but was fraught with added danger). When they arrived in Rome, they would have been faced with a city that was larger, but considerably less elegant, than some they had passed through on the journey. One unfortunate Greek ambassador at about the same time is known to have fallen into an open Roman sewer and broken his leg – and made the most of his convalescence by givi
ng introductory lectures on literary theory to a curious audience.
Rome had strange, foreign customs too. Interestingly, whoever at Abdera composed the text on the stone did not even try to translate some distinctively Roman terms (such as atria and patronus, ‘patron’) but merely transcribed them in Greek script. When they did venture a translation, it could be decidedly odd. The envoys were said, for example, to have offered daily ‘obeisance’ to the Romans. The Greek word here, proskynesis, literally means ‘bowing and scraping’ or ‘kissing the feet’. This presumably refers to the Roman practice of salutatio, which involved clients and dependants paying a morning call on their patrons but no kissing of feet at all – though maybe these foreign visitors saw the practice for the humiliation it was. We can only guess how they made contacts or put their case. Many wealthy Romans spoke some Greek, better than the Teans would have known Latin, but not always very well. Real Greeks were known to have made wicked fun of the terrible Roman accent.
Yet when this pair of Teans turned up in the city, some Romans may have felt unease too. For even if the attention and the recognition of Roman power was flattering, this was a new world, maybe almost as perplexing for them as for their visitors. What must it have felt like to be confronted with a stream of foreigners from as far away as it was possible to imagine, speaking too quickly in a language you only just understood, apparently extremely bothered about a small piece of land of which you knew nothing, and dangerously liable to bow down and kiss your feet? If, as Polybius put it, the Romans had conquered almost the whole of the known world in the fifty-three years up to 168 BCE, then over that same period Rome, and Roman culture, had been transformed too by those vastly expanded horizons.
This transformation involved movements of people, into and out of Rome, on a scale never before seen in the ancient world. When slaves from all over the Mediterranean poured into Italy and into Rome itself, it was certainly a story of exploitation; but it was also one of massive forced migration. The figures that ancient writers give for the captives taken by Romans in particular wars may well be exaggerations (100,000 in the First Punic War, for example, or 150,000 taken by Aemilius Paullus from just one part of Perseus’ territory), and anyway many of them would not have been transported directly back to Rome but would have been sold to middlemen much closer to the point of capture. But it is a fair estimate that in the early second century BCE the numbers of new slaves arriving in the peninsula as a direct result of victories overseas averaged out at more than 8,000 per year, at a time when the total number of adult male Roman citizens, inside and outside the city, was in the order of 300,000. In due course, a significant proportion of these would have been freed and become new Roman citizens. The impact not only on the Roman economy but also on the cultural and ethnic diversity of the citizen body was enormous; the division between Romans and outsiders was increasingly blurred.