The Ideal Constitution

My name is Dr Ed Bispham,

I'm a teacher in Ancient History at Brasenose College, Oxford,

and this is going to be a series of six

short lectures on the question of politics in the late Roman

Republic.

So what I’m going to do, first of all,

is to try and give some sense of the ideal working of politics,

how politics should have worked.

And that's important because, when

one looks at the politics of the late Republic,

one is looking at the politics of dysfunction.

You're looking at a period of breakdown, crisis, failure,

but it's impossible to really appreciate

how significant that failure is and how it appears –

what its consequences are –

unless we can look first at what comes before.

So the Roman Republic, what was it, and how did it work?

The republic is a political organization.

perhaps ‘commonwealth’ is a better translation of the Latin res

publica, the ‘public thing’ –

what belongs to everybody.

And the Roman Republic is a political entity

in which the people are sovereign,

and that sovereignty is expressed

through the people voting to pass laws and the people voting

to elect magistrates.

The magistrates, in their various ranks and powers –

the consuls, praetors, tribunes –

are there to run the state, to take an executive decisions,

and undertake executive actions.

They provide leadership in war,

they oversee the judicial system,

they oversee the treasury,

they oversee infrastructure,

And they operate in what are called colleges, or groups.

So there are always pairs or multiple

pairs of magistrates:

two consuls, two praetors originally, then four,

then six, then eight,

ten tribunes, four aediles.

And that encodes something very important

about the Republican system, which is the diffusion of power

and the idea of checks and balances.

One consul on his own, as the supreme magistrate,

could do an awful lot of damage,

could act in an irresponsible way,

but because he has a second consul who's his colleague,

there is a check on his power, and this shared diffuse nature

of magisterial power is extremely important.

But those are the magistrates.

They constitute the elective.

They're advised by a body called the Senate,

and the Senate is made up of initially three-hundred,

and then, later, six hundred in the late Republic

– six hundred men – most of whom are former magistrates.

Now, they have what is technically an advisory role.

They're there to advise the magistrates on what to do.

They cannot issue orders.

They can issue decrees, the so-called senatus consulta,

the ‘decrees of the Senate’,

but those technically are just pieces of advice.

How, then, does the Senate become so powerful?

Because from the Hannibalic War, from the end

of the third century BC onwards, the Senate

holds a disproportionately powerful place

in the Republican system.

We said at the outset that the Roman people are sovereign.

The people elect magistrates.

the people pass laws,

the people declare war,

the people make peace.

Power essentially lies with the people.

But in the late Republic, you'd be

forgiven for thinking that it's actually the Senate which

has the whip hand, which is dominant and powerful

within the state.

And that is the situation that begins with the Hannibalic

Wars, and it derives from the fact that, in a time of crisis,

the popular assembly is grossly inefficient when it

comes to taking snap decisions.

It can't debate things.

It can't respond nimbly or effectively,

whereas the Senate

– three-hundred people – is much better at convening suddenly, digesting

information, debating, moving nimbly, formulating policy.

Policy that the Senate formulated

in the war with Hannibal was, of course, extremely important

because it was the key to Rome winning the conflict.

And the prestige, the political capital

which the Senate, as a body, gained from that

was extremely important.

It made the Senate, as an entity, extremely powerful.

The other reason why the Senate is

much more than the advisory body that it looks on paper

is that senators sit for life.

Once you are in the Senate, you'll remain in the Senate

until you die, except in very rare cases

if you're expelled for being a naughty boy.

But most senators will be there throughout.

They'll gain enormous prestige, accumulated experience.

And if I'm the consul and I want to pursue a particular policy,

I can if I want, in my year of office, use my power--

I actually have power.

Senators don't have power, they have influence. But I

can use my power-- my political power--

to drive forward my agenda for change.

But I've got to do that knowing that when my year of office

is over, I go back into the Senate,

back onto the backbenches, and I have 599 or 299 other people

who are really angry with me because I've disregarded them

and I've forced three policy agendas which are mine

and haven't come out of collective debate.

So it's very difficult for magistrates

to carve out an independent path in defiance of the Senate.

We do see it happening, but magistrates

can't do it beyond the end of their year of office anyway.

Magistrates are only there for a single year,

and then they become private citizens--

ordinary senators.

So the Senate, because of the longevity of its members,

and because of its numbers and its size,

and because of its collective experience

is extremely important.

And it's that collective aspect that I

want to end by thinking about.

One of the crucial things about the late republic is consensus,

and the other thing is competition.

Those are the two C words that dominate

the study of late Republican politics, consensus

and competition.

The individual urge of the aristocrats,

of the would-be politician, the would-be general is to compete,

is, to be better than his peers, to come out

at the top of the heap to forged glorious reputation for himself,

and to pass that on to his family.

And that is in tension with the collective will of the Senate

to rule in a stable, steady manner which

acknowledges tradition and limits the power

of extraordinary individuals.

So you've got two things pulling in opposite directions.

One is the individual aspiration of the magistrate

or the aspirant politician, and the other

is the steady political gravity of the Senate, which operates

by consensus and by constraint.

What makes Rome great is that, for hundreds of years,

the power of the Senate--

and to some extent the power of the people--

act to prevent individual senators from becoming

excessively powerful.

It restrains that competitive urge.

It allows competition, but healthy competition,

up to a certain point, beyond which,

if you try to keep on competing, if you compete too far,

the Senate will use its collective authority

to rein you in.

A good example of this is Scipio Africanus.

Scipio becomes extremely powerful as the man who

threw Hannibal out of Italy, saved the situation in Spain,

and then crossed to Africa and defeated

Hannibal, Rome's greatest-ever enemy, at the Battle of Zama.

He and his brother gained enormous political capital

from this, but it is clear that 10 years after the end

of the war, many senators found Scipio's position overbearing.

They found him arrogant.

They didn't like his wife either.

And they felt that he was too big.

He didn't fit in this world of shared political values,

respect for tradition, and consensus.

Scipio and his brother were put on trial.

They were found guilty.

What the trial was actually for and what he'd done wrong is

a notorious historical problem, but probably

something to do with misappropriation of funds.

Put on trial, found guilty, sent into exile.

At this point, the classic republic is working.

The classic balance that the Greek historian Polybius

saw between the power of the magistrates,

the power of the Senate, and the power of the people

keeps the Republic in a steady equilibrium, which allows

it to prosper and expand.

And the system of checks and balances,

the power of consensus, the belief in tradition,

the belief that no one individual should dominate any

of his peers is still strong enough

that when Scipio steps over the line, he's cut down,

and his brother is taken out for good measure too.

He spends the rest of his life living in his villa in exile.

That shows the Republic functioning as it ought

to, with shared, collective values,

sense of tradition, and responsibility restraining

and keeping control of the potentially

unfettered aspirations of successful individuals.