2.5 Roman Republic
The history of the Republic is a history of continuous war. All of the stories, which become the basis of the Roman value system come from this period of warfare. As with the Roman kingdom, the Republic was based on a constitution, but this was not a formal or written document; rather, it consisted of a number of commonly understood traditions and laws. Enormous power was placed in the hands of the Roman leaders; therefore, although the Romans did not re-institute a monarchy, they still were led by a few individuals – basically, an oligarchy with one important difference: their terms of power were limited.
The Roman Republic had a fairly complex system of government and representation, but it was one that would last about 500 years and preside over the vast expansion of Roman power. An assembly, called the Centuriate Assembly, was elected by the citizens and created laws. Each year, the assembly elected two executives called consuls to oversee the laws and ensure their enforcement. The consuls had almost unlimited power, the aforementioned imperium, including the right to inflict the death penalty on law-breakers, and they were preceded everywhere by twelve bodyguards called lictors. Consular authority was, however, limited by the fact that terms were only a year long and each consul was expected to hold the other in check if necessary. Under the consuls there was the Senate, essentially a large body of aristocratic administrators who controlled state finances. The whole system was tied closely to the priesthoods of the Roman gods, who performed divinations and blessings on behalf of the city. While the Romans were deeply suspicious of individuals who seemed to be trying to take power themselves, several influential families worked behind the scenes to ensure that they could control voting blocks in the Assembly and the Senate. When Rome faced a major crisis, the Assembly could vote to appoint a dictator, a single man vested with the full power of imperium. Symbolically, all twenty-four of the lictors would accompany the dictator, who was supposed to use his almost-unlimited power to save Rome from whatever threatened it, then step down and return things to normal. While the office of dictator could have easily led to an attempted takeover, for hundreds of years very few dictators abused their powers and instead respected the temporary nature of Roman dictatorship itself.
While the Senate began as an advisory body, it later wrested real law-making power from the consuls (who were, after all, almost always drawn from its members). By 133 BCE, the Senate proposed legislation and could veto the legislation of the consuls. An even more important power was its ability to designate funds for war and public building, giving it enormous power over what the Roman government actually did, since the Senate could simply cut off funding to projects it disagreed with.
The Assembly was divided into five different classes based on wealth (a system that ensured that the wealthy could always outvote the poorer). The wealthiest class consisted of the equestrians, so named because they could afford horses and thus form the Roman cavalry; the equestrian class would go on to be a leading power bloc in Roman history well into the Imperial period. The Centuriate Assembly voted on the consuls each year, declared war and peace, and acted as a court of appeal in legal cases involving the death penalty. It could also propose legislation, but the Senate had to approve it for it to become law.
Plebeians and Patricians
As Rome grew, wealth became concentrated in the hands of a few people. These were the patricians, and they were the only ones who could sit in the Senate or hold elected office. Everyone who was not a patrician was a plebeian—the majority of the population. Some plebeians owned land, but, for the most part, plebeians were laborers. The Assembly was the body meant to represent the plebeians, which gave them only a small voice in the government of Rome. Thus, the power of Rome was concentrated in the hands of the few.
Rome struggled with a situation analogous to that of Athens, in which the rich not only had a virtual monopoly on political power, but in many cases had the legal right to either enslave or at least extract labor from debtors. In Rome’s case, an ongoing class struggle called the Struggle of Orders took place from about 500 BCE to 360 BCE, in which the plebeians struggled to get more political representation. In 494 BCE, the plebeians threatened to simply leave Rome, rendering it almost defenseless, and the Senate responded by allowing the creation of two officials called Tribunes – men drawn from the plebeians who had the legal power to veto certain decisions made by the Senate and consuls. Later, the government created a plebeian council to represent the needs of the plebeians, approved the right to marry between patricians and plebeians, banned debt slavery, and finally, came to the agreement that of the two consuls elected each year, one had to be a plebeian. By 287 BCE, the Assembly could pass legislation with the weight of law as well. Roman soldiers were citizen-soldiers, farmers who volunteered to fight for Rome in hopes of being rewarded with wealth taken from defeated enemies. An important political breakthrough happened in about 350 BCE when the Romans enacted a law that limited the amount of land that could be given to a single citizen after a victory, ensuring a more equitable distribution of land to plebeian soldiers. This was a huge incentive to serve in the Roman army, since any soldier now had the potential to become very rich if he participated in a successful campaign against Rome’s enemies.
That being said, class struggle was always a factor in Roman politics. Even after the plebeians gained legal concessions, the rich always held the upper hand because wealthy plebeians would regularly join with patricians to out-vote poorer plebeians. Likewise, the richer classes had the legal right to out-vote the poorer classes – the equestrians and patricians often worked together against the demands of the poorer classes. Practically speaking, what this meant is that by the early third century BCE the plebeians had won meaningful legal rights, namely the right to representation and lawmaking, but those victories were often overshadowed by the fact that wealthy plebeians increasingly joined with the existing patricians to create something new: the Roman aristocracy.
Most state offices did not pay salaries, so only those with substantial incomes from land (or from loot won in campaigns) could afford to serve as full-time representatives, officials, or judges – that, too, fed into the political power of the aristocracy over common citizens. In the midst of this ongoing struggle, the Romans came up with the basis of Roman law, the system of law that, through various iterations, would become the basis for most systems of law still in use in most of Europe today. Private law governed disputes between individuals, while public law governed disputes between individuals and the government. In addition, the Romans established the Law of Nations to govern the territories it started to conquer in Italy; it was an early form of international law based on what were believed to be universal standards of justice.
The plebeians had been concerned that legal decisions would always favor the patricians, who had a monopoly on legal proceedings, so they insisted that the laws be written down and made publicly available. Thus, in 451 BCE, members the Roman government wrote the Twelve Tables, lists of the laws available for everyone to see, which were then posted in the Roman Forum in the center of Rome. Just as it was done in Athens a hundred years earlier, having the laws publicly available reduced the chances of corruption. In fact, according to a Roman legend, the ten men who were charged with recording the laws were sent to Athens to study the laws of Solon of Athens; this was a deliberate use or “copy” of his idea.
Romans reformed their government as needed, but not with any particular platform in mind. Their initial desire for security and their belief in the necessity of a buffer zone between themselves and others gradually developed as a thirst for conquest that became the hallmark of the later empire. This process began with the expulsion of the Etruscans and eventually led to direct conflict with more distant peoples in the Punic Wars. But before these Punic Wars were a series of conquests that led to Roman expansion of territory unlike anything seen on the European continent before.
“The Republic of Rome.” Republic of Virtue: Ancient Worlds. Films on Demand. 2010. 2:35.
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