As Caesar crossed the Rubicon and quickly took control over Italy, he was faced with an urgent problem – how to legitimise his position as de facto ruler of Rome. Both consuls had followed Pompey to Greece, which seriously limited Caesar’s options, since only they could preside over a consular election or appoint a dictator. To overcome this obstacle Caesar had the senate and augurs issue a decree that was then ratified by the assembly, exceptionally allowing a praetor to nominate a dictator. Caesar’s ally, the praetor M. Lepidus, could therefore appoint him to his first dictatorship and in turn enable him to preside over his own election to the consulship of 48.Footnote ¹ It was transparently a fudge that deceived no one in Rome; Cicero calls it illegal and compares it to the way Sulla had gained his dictatorship in 82. Still, the fact that Caesar went to this length to achieve a veneer of legitimacy is telling.

A similar preoccupation with procedure is noticeable among Caesar’s opponents, the ‘government in exile’. According to Dio, at the height of the civil war in 48 there were two sets of magistrates representing the two sides in the conflict, but only those appointed by the Caesarians in Rome were ‘normal’ officials elected according to established rules. Those of the senatorial side, which had fled to Thessaly, merely had their tenure extended as proconsuls, propraetors, proquaestors etc. The reasons for this arrangement are intriguing; for as Dio further explains, although they had ‘appropriated a small piece of land for the taking of auguries, in order that these might seem to take place under some form of law, so that they regarded the people and the whole city as present’; ‘they had not appointed new magistrates for the reason that the consuls had not proposed the lex curiata’.Footnote ² The latter was in political terms a formality, a ritual performed by thirty lictors in Rome, which granted (or enabled) the imperium of senior officials.Footnote ³ Still, it mattered sufficiently to stay the hand of the rulers of the empire during one of the most dramatic confrontations the republic had yet experienced. As Dio observed, the senators in Thessaly were ‘very careful about precedents’ and ‘anxious that the acts rendered necessary by the exigencies of the situation should not all be in violation of the strict requirements of the ordinances’ (41.43.4 Loeb).

Five years later the dictator was gone and Rome was again engulfed in civil war. At that point Cicero unleashed a fierce campaign against Antony, which caused such a stir in the senate that hostile rumours suggested that he was preparing to seize the fasces and make himself dictator. In his final Philippic oration, Cicero strongly denies the accusation, declaring that he is no Catiline but on the contrary the staunchest defender of the res publica. But he then changes tactic and points out the formal obstacles such an adventure would face, asking his audience: ‘Under what auspices should I, an augur, receive these fasces? How long should I possess them? To whom should I hand them over?’Footnote ⁴ In other words, a serious allegation of planning a coup is publicly rebutted by reference to the procedural difficulties involved in an attempt of this nature.

Examples such as these illustrate how even in times of extreme political turmoil when any semblance of normality had disappeared formal procedure was still painstakingly observed. As such they reveal an almost obsessive concern about due process, which seems detached from any underlying political principle. Thus, Vervaet noted that although Sulla had gained power by ‘unrestrained atrocities, brutal force and sheer terror’, the terms of the lex Valeria which formalised his position ‘still responded to legalistic scruples and the need of public legitimacy’.Footnote ⁵ Similarly, Caesar carefully notes in the De bello civili (3.1) that his second consulship – achieved through civil war – met the statutory interval between offices required by the leges annales.

This attention to proper form and procedure, even in the midst of complete social and political breakdown, reminds us that when studying Roman politics we enter a world where power was not just negotiated but also conceptualised in ways quite different from those with which we are now familiar. Therefore, to understand their political institutions and processes on their own terms requires a conscious leap of the imagination. Political systems, in antiquity as well as today, develop conventions and practices which may appear paradoxical and illogical to outsiders, but are taken for granted and regarded as natural by those who view it from within. The Athenians famously would not have recognised modern representative systems as ‘democratic’, while their use of the lot to fill public offices nowadays strikes most people as eccentric, as does the Spartan practice of ‘voting by shouting’. Even in the modern world, where universally embraced democratic ideals have led to a high degree of ‘homogenisation’ of political systems, otherwise comparable countries still display features which cause bafflement among foreign observers.Footnote ⁶

As frameworks for day-to-day government and administration, political systems are rarely questioned by those who operate within them, certainly not with regard to their basic principles. A government’s legitimacy is generally accepted as long as it conforms to the rules and procedures which are themselves justified by tradition and custom. Rome was no different in this respect. The overriding concern among Roman politicians was the observance of correct procedure, a feature that is often seen as an expression of a distinctive Roman type of formalism, apparent also in their religious practices. It could also be argued that the emphasis placed on ‘formalities’ is characteristic of societies with poorly developed ‘Staatlichkeit’. The Romans had no ‘state’ in the modern sense and only a limited set of public institutions. In their place we find the res publica, the shared public interests, which were to a great extent upheld through a dense web of rules and procedures scrupulously observed even when they seemed to serve no ‘rational’ purpose. The mass of accumulated rules and conventions served to regulate who could claim legitimacy, which is key to any political system. By defining who could wield power, how they could do it and for how long, they safeguarded the common interest against the ‘law of the jungle’. The more complex and detailed the rules, the less the risk of uncontrolled power; in the same way as the gods were ‘tied’ through ritual and procedures, so were those who governed in the temporal sphere.

This study will explore aspects of Roman notions of legitimacy and the often paradoxical expressions they found in the world of ‘real’ politics. They created striking incongruities between political practices and constitutional principles, which often stood in glaring contrast to each other. Thus, part of the inspiration comes from my previous work on political participation in the late republic, which suggested a discrepancy between the constitutional role of the populus and the small crowds which in practice represented it.Footnote ⁷ To capture the logic behind these apparent contradictions we need to question our preconceptions about what a political system should look like and how it functions. Any attempt to ‘defamiliarise’ Roman politics and recover a more genuinely Roman understanding of their system of government faces basic obstacles, however. The process of ‘normalisation’ began already in antiquity under the influence of Greek experiences and theorising. It is therefore natural to start our survey with Polybius who laid the foundations for this approach with his ‘interpretatio graeca’, and then turn to Cicero, who embraced the Greek models while at the same time modifying them in important ways.

Moving on from that discussion, we will then look at the political institutions and their articulations, which seem to reflect a uniquely Roman conceptualisation of power and legitimacy. Most importantly, the populus occupies a central but also highly complex role in this system. Its role in the political process was highly formalised, reduced almost to abstraction. As noted, the aim is to get closer to the Romans’ own understanding of their political system and the logic that informed it. The problem is that when we analyse it in conventional terms and try to identify the location(s) of power, we are confronted with a basic indeterminacy that seems to be integral to the Roman ‘constitution’ itself. As part of this survey we will then consider the historical evolution of the institutions during and after the so-called Struggle of the Orders, in many respects the formative period of the republic. Special attention is given to a little-known reform of the assembly that introduced an element of lottery in elections which illustrates the particular rationale that shaped these procedures.

While the first section looks at institutions and their underlying principles, the second turns to actual practice – what happened in Roman politics on a day-to-day basis? The central question is again the location of power and the long-debated issue of the influence of the people. In line with recent scholarship it will be argued that the assemblies functioned as civic ‘rituals’ rather than decision-making bodies. However, following the ‘communicative turn’ attention has now shifted from the assemblies to the public meetings, contiones, which are now seen as the main fora for popular influence. After a critical assessment of the tenets of this theory, it will be suggested that Roman politics, like most other historical polities, was controlled by the elite, albeit an elite that extended well beyond the narrow confines of the senate. The office-holding class was, moreover, in many ways distinct from that of other aristocratic societies, displaying ‘meritocratic’ features that may have helped to consolidate Roman society during what has become known as the ‘middle republic’. In this context the question of ‘political culture’ also becomes significant, suggesting as it does that the ‘secret’ of Rome’s success may be sought outside the political sphere, in social, economic, and not least military structures.

Finally, no study of Roman politics can avoid dealing with the ‘fall of the republic’, and one of the themes explored in the third section will be the impact of the political system itself on the catastrophic series of events that led to the advent of monarchy. It will be argued that intrinsic weaknesses in the political structure contributed to the growing instability of the later period. In this context the notion of ‘political instability’ will have to be considered as well as the question of ‘periodisation’, which has a direct impact on the conceptualisation of the process leading up to the ‘fall’. Was there a ‘late republic’, and if so, what did it look like? The question involves a discussion of the nature of political conflict in the last century, including the modern ‘two-party’-model of ‘optimates’ and ‘populares’ which will be examined in some detail since it lies at the heart of the conventional ‘crisis narrative’ of the late republic.

Needless to say, this study makes no claim to presenting a full picture of ‘Roman politics’ (however one defines that) covering all relevant topics. It is by necessity selective, and issues are chosen primarily for their exemplary qualities and ability to illustrate aspects of Roman public life and governance that have perhaps not previously been viewed from this particular perspective. It is therefore essentially an attempt to draw attention to elements that question our preconceptions about political structures and processes, and thereby contribute to a discussion about how one studies a polity like the Roman republic.