The exchange of ideas, readings and results, the discussion of methodological approaches and communication in general between German (and other continental) European scholars on the one hand and English and American classicists on the other has for a long time been particularly intensive in the international scholarly community working in the field of politics in the Roman Republic. In particular, this continuous exchange has gone on and on ever since Matthias Gelzer and Friedrich Münzer published their classic books on the Roman nobility and on the aristocratic parties and families in 1912 and 1920 respectively – in the decades before and after the Second World War, language barriers were not (yet) a serious obstacle. It is by no means accidental, however, that both books were among the few works translated into English – if only rather belatedly, namely in 1969 and in 1999,Footnote ² when a reading knowledge of German was no longer a matter of course among a younger generation of anglophone scholars. It was as late as 1986, more than half a century after its publication, that a prominent anglophone scholar, namely Ronald Ridley, hailed Gelzer’s Nobilität as a decisive ‘turning-point’. However, for him it was Münzer’s ‘masterwork’, the Adelsfamilien und Adelsparteien, which was ‘the most important book ever written on Roman politics’ – and then, at long last, ‘English-language students of Roman history’ had ‘the opportunity to go much more profoundly into the making of one of the great modes of historical analysis’ of the twentieth century.Footnote ³

The long history of the aforementioned intensive communication, with an ‘elitist’ concept of politics as focus, indeed continues to be of prime importance to the present day, because it has implicitly and even explicitly been referred to in the modern debate on the ‘political culture’ of the Republic which began in the 1980s and is still going onFootnote ⁴ – in spite of the deplorable ‘tendency to ignore much of what is written in Italian and German’ (as well as in French, to be fair) ‘which appears to be on the increase once again’ and makes a certain part of the anglophone research (not only) on Rome and the Republic look, as this ‘tendency’ was once aptly described, ‘curiously insular’.Footnote ⁵ There are few scholars on both sides – that is, anglophone ancient historians on either side of the Pond on the one hand and the European (or, in English common parlance, the ‘Continental’) community of researchers in the field on the other – who would not agree that this is a problem and a serious obstacle to mutual understanding and exchange of, and engagement with, ideas, impulses, and innovative approaches.Footnote ⁶

***

Be this as it may, let us return to serious business. It was in an article published in 1990 that the concept of ‘political culture’, as far as I know, appeared for the first time in the context of Republican studies. It was a partly polemical rejoinder to John North’s critical review of the ‘frozen-waste theory’ of politicsFootnote ⁷ in Republican Rome in the style of Gelzer’s concept of ‘factions’, ‘friendships’ and mutual obligations, clientelae and patronage, and of Münzer’s ‘aristocratic parties’ and their thinly veiled ‘arcana imperii’.Footnote ⁸ Moreover, this label was also meant to denounce Sir Ronald Syme’s concept of politics as a never-ending ‘strife for power, wealth and glory’ (in Syme’s own inimitable style of writing) within the exclusive circles of ‘an aristocracy unique in duration and predominance’. This sombre vision of the decline and fall of the libera res publica was elegantly expounded in Syme’s influential masterpiece The Roman Revolution, published in September 1939 – just four days after Great Britain had declared war on the Third Reich.Footnote ⁹

Syme not only acknowledged his debt to ‘Gelzer’s lucid explanation of the character of Roman society and Roman politics, namely a nexus of personal obligations’ in a footnote, but in his introduction also made clear that his ‘conception of the nature of Roman politics’ owed much ‘to the supreme example and guidance of Münzer’Footnote ¹⁰ – the recognized and (rightly) revered doyen of Republican prosopography, author of no fewer than 5,000 valuable prosopographical articles (needless to say, in German) in the Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, who was to perish in the Nazi concentration camp of Theresienstadt in 1942.Footnote ¹¹ Others were luckier, such as young Ernst Badian. In 1938, the latter emigrated with his family to New Zealand – he was to become the pupil of the other New Zealander at Oxford, namely Syme. Badian went on to become, as John Moors Cabot Professor of History at Harvard, one of the most influential historians of Republican Rome in the twentieth century. In a similar vein as his teacher, Badian explicitly singled out Syme as well as Gelzer and Münzer, ‘who revolutionised the approach to the study’ of the (late) Republic, in the preface to his first great book, Foreign Clientelae, published in 1958Footnote ¹² – and occasionally he even dedicated an article Fr. Muenzeri amicitia. Badian claimed that Münzer’s method had been ‘applied, with masterly skill and important results, to various periods of Roman history’ – alas, not only by ‘the pioneers and masters of prosopographic method’ Münzer and Syme: in the very next sentence, he warned that ‘some recent work reveals the dangers and inadequacies of the method, where it is used with excessive confidence and insufficient safeguards’.Footnote ¹³ Unfortunately, Badian did not bother to name names.Footnote ¹⁴

As a consequence of the predominance of the ‘factionalist’ orthodoxy, during the 1950s and much of the 1960s, the underlying concept of Republican politics was still based on the very same concomitant set of interdependent assumptions. Political life was not characterised, once again in Syme’s words, ‘by the ostensible opposition between Senate and People, optimates and populares, nobiles and homines novi’, let alone ‘by parties and programmes of a modern and parliamentary character’. Rather, politics was conceived as a zero-sum game among a small number of dominant families striving for power in the form of the consulship – that is, ‘the supreme magistracy’, regarded by ‘the narrow ring’ of nobiles, an oligarchy within the senatorial oligarchy, ‘as the prerogative of birth and the prize of ambition’. In order to achieve this one and only objective, the leading figures – ‘in any age of Republican history’, never more than ‘twenty or thirty men’ – formed alliances on the basis of purely personal relations, kinship, dynastic marriages and ‘friendships’: ‘Roman political factions were welded together, less by unity of principle than by mutual interest and by mutual services (amicitia), either between social equals as an alliance, or from superior to inferior, in a traditional and almost feudal form of clientship: on a favourable estimate the bond was called amicitia, otherwise factio.’ Therefore, it has to be the ‘composition’ of this ‘oligarchy of government’, the ‘alliances and feuds of their families’ and their ‘rise and fall’ which emerges ‘as the dominant theme of political history’.Footnote ¹⁵ Until the last decades of the Republic – according to Lily Ross Taylor’s book on ‘party politics in the age of Caesar’, originally published in 1949 and reprinted as recently as 2019 – the basic pattern of political manoeuvring revolving around ‘personalities’ and the ‘members of the hereditary noble or consular houses’ as ‘dominant figures in Roman party politics and party organization’ did not change radically. Although the author developed a kind of ‘binary model’ along the optimates/populares dichotomy, she also explicitly admits to the influence of Gelzer, Münzer and Syme: It was still amicitia which ‘was the good old word for party relationships’ – ‘described by factio and pars’.Footnote ¹⁶

Already by the mid-Republic, according to Howard Scullard’s similarly influential Roman Politics 220–150 bc, first published in 1951 and republished in 1973, these alliances or even this downright ‘elaborate system of groupings and counter-groupings’ indeed ‘formed the real, if unadvertised and unofficial, basis of Roman public life’. They were taken to be stable over generations. They rose to take over the ‘government’ when others fell from ‘power’ only to rise again – a never-ending wheel of fortune: the titles of chapters like ‘domination’ and ‘predominance’, ‘decline’, ‘recovery’, or ‘revival’ are programmatic.Footnote ¹⁷ In his peculiarly defensive answer to his critics in the foreword to the republication, Scullard conceded that such ‘unofficial coteries’ around ‘nobles and their friends’ are not to be conceived as ‘self-conscious corporate personalities’, but insisted that ‘Roman factions were private groupings around an individual’, ‘personal and unofficial and remote from the possibility of exact institutional definition’, which might ‘on occasion unite to form coalitions’ – and he goes on to argue that the ‘unavoidable fact’ of their existence is indirectly corroborated by another ‘fact’, namely that there are no traces of their ‘back-stage manoeuvres’ in the annalistic tradition. In fact, this reaffirmation of Münzer’s arcana imperii obviously ties in with ‘the general picture of political life of the Republic’, as ‘it is envisaged’ by Ronald Syme.Footnote ¹⁸

Syme, in papers published as late as 1986 and posthumously in 1991, and in spite of a wave of criticism, still imperturbably defended his radically elitist view as a metahistorical, indeed eternal truth: ‘In all ages, whatever the form and name of government’ or ‘whatever may be the name and theory of the constitution’, ‘be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the façade’.Footnote ¹⁹ It had also been Syme who formulated the most important underlying axiom of the ‘factionalist’ approach to politics with an almost cynical clarity – obviously alluding to the famous dictum attributed to Caesar: ‘the res publica is nothing, a mere name without body or form’. Syme ruled that the ‘Roman Commonwealth’, the res publica populi Romani, was not only just a ‘name’, but the ‘constitution’ of the Republic was indeed nothing but a ‘façade’, ‘a screen and a sham’.Footnote ²⁰ In his typically magisterial – or should I say: ‘imperious’ – tone, Syme declared the whole of Roman history, ‘Republican or Imperial’, to be ‘the history of the governing class’. It was this ‘oligarchy of government’ and its ‘composition’, the machinations of the ‘parties’ or ‘factions’ in their midst, and the typical ‘weapons’ which their noble leaders wielded in their ‘lust for power’ and ‘domination’ which remained the ‘dominant theme of political history, as the binding link between the Republic and the Empire’. On the receiving end, as it were, the amorphous and anonymous ‘other classes’ were at best ‘susceptible to auctoritas, taking their tone and their tastes from above’. Ronald Syme – himself an aristocrat in style and habitus – had gone even further and ruled that the ‘lower classes’ of the people not only ‘had no voice in government’, but even had no ‘place in history’.Footnote ²¹

In spite of this unabashed and unreformed ‘top-down’ view of history, which was rapidly becoming old-fashioned, Syme’s Roman Revolution continued to be widely read – and not only by an anglophone educated public, but also in Germany. Interestingly, a revised and (for the first time) complete translation was published as late as 2003.Footnote ²² It has been (and still is) welcomed as ‘a work of art unmatched among major historical works, and one’, as Syme’s star pupil Fergus Millar rightly predicted in 1981, ‘which would still be read as such even if the day were to come when our knowledge of Roman history has been transformed by new evidence, or when we have found wholly new means of interpreting it’.Footnote ²³

***

And this day had (long) come. Already by the late 1960s, the winds of change had gained momentum – not least thanks to a young German ancient historian, who in 1966 published – in the wake of the aforementioned work of his teacher Matthias Gelzer – his first major book and went on to become one of the leading historians of his generation. In his detailed analysis of the decline and fall of the Republic (titled Res publica amissa: Eine Studie zu Verfassung und Geschichte der späten römischen RepublikFootnote ²⁴), Christian Meier on the one hand systematically and radically deconstructed the received ‘factionalist’ orthodoxy once and for all – and not only, in the vein of earlier critics, by examining concrete instances of ‘factionalism’ and empirically proving them patently false, but also by dissecting the underlying explicit and (more often than not) implicit assumptions concerning the character of Republican politics and policies. On the other hand, he offered a much more complex concept of mutual obligations (necessitudines), which he described and analysed as a dense and multidimensional web of obligations, and suggested a radically new and innovative reading of the volatile and permanently changing constellations within the ruling class due to what he termed the ‘conspicuous division’ and ‘divisibility’ of politics and policies on a broad spectrum between continuous traditional routine politics as a rule and major challenges as exception.

The influence of this book immediately began to make itself felt, if only slowly and gradually – in spite of a spate of reviews in English, French and German.Footnote ²⁵ Eventually, even Scullard acknowledged its importance, however without fully understanding the far-reaching consequences of Meier’s approach.Footnote ²⁶ In his opus magnum on the ‘last generation of the Roman Republic’, Erich Gruen – who had been, and in 1974 still professed himself to be, an adherent of the prosopographical method in the vein of Münzer, Gelzer, and Syme – still remained convinced that ‘its use as a tool remains indispensable for any understanding of the Roman Republic’, because political ‘coalitions relied largely on family ties, marriage alliances, and unofficial pacts for mutual cooperation’, including ‘adoptions, amicitiae, and clientelae’, ‘aristocratic lineage’, and even ‘necessitudines, hereditary bonds and obligations created by beneficia’, which ‘furnished the most substantial determinants in the comitia’. And in the election to the ‘supreme magistracy’ until the very demise of the Republic, this meant, in Erich Gruen’s words, that ‘[t]ies of patronage, which bound the voting populace to the dominant clans of the aristocracy, remained unbroken’ and therefore ‘continued to be a principal element in determining the behavior of the electorate’.Footnote ²⁷ However, Gruen had nevertheless formulated precautionary provisos as early as 1968 in his book on politics and the criminal courts: he warned against the ‘abuse’ of the method, the assumption of ‘a consistency and a pattern’ or the one-sided concentration ‘on evidence from electoral results’, as neither ‘consular collegiality’ nor ‘succession in office’ could be ‘used to argue political cooperation’, and ‘the decisive influence of magistrates over succeeding elections’ had ‘never been satisfactorily demonstrated’.Footnote ²⁸ In fact, these reservations already amounted to a radical questioning of indispensable basic assumptions of the Münzerian approach, which were laid to rest for good by a German representative of the so-called ‘Meier school’.Footnote ²⁹ In his book on the complex politics, political constellations, and controversial issues in the ‘last generation’ of the Republic, Gruen began to dissociate himself further from the traditional picture of factions – even more than before did he emphasize the volatility, fluidity, and fragility of groupings and the fragmentation of the political scenery after SullaFootnote ³⁰ (and in a way, he thus came closer to Christian Meier’s position than either he or Meier would probably be prepared to admit). The same is true, at least to a certain extent, for Alan Astin’s attempt to identify Scipio Aemilianus’ ‘friends and enemies’ around the mid-second century: although convinced that ‘the consideration of “family-group” factions and of motivation by factional rivalry is indispensable to the understanding of Roman politics’ and referring to Gelzer, Münzer, and Scullard, he time and again in his detailed ‘discussion of the political groupings of the period’ has to recognize the ‘limitations and hazards involved’. He emphasizes that the ‘multiplicity of ties of old allegiance, of obligation, of kinship, and of marriage … must often have led to cross-ties and cross-obligations, to rival claims for support, to, so to speak, factiones being rather ill-defined at the edges’ – and he ends his empirical search for these ‘factions’ by the less-than-surprising conclusion that ‘there was always some fluidity in the situation, a fluidity increased’ not least ‘by the complex nexus of kinship, traditional ties, and beneficia, which not infrequently must have made men feel obligations in more than one direction’Footnote ³¹ – which comes pretty near to Meier’s concept of multidimensional necessitudines, mentioned above.

The catalogue of reservations just mentioned was repeated like a prayer wheel by less circumspect adherents of the model – naturally in order to immunize the model itself and thereby save it. After paying lip service to one or another of the aforementioned provisos, they would insist that a combination of individual criteria, such as succession, collegiality in office, and other factors indicating a ‘close connection’ between ‘members of different gentes’ in ‘a number of times’, was to be taken as ‘evidence for association between the two families’Footnote ³² – and then return to business as usual and reconstruct such groupings.Footnote ³³

However, at about the same time, Peter Brunt not only criticized Erich Gruen for his continued ‘belief in aristocratic factions’ and the resulting ‘tissue of speculative explanations’ of electoral results,Footnote ³⁴ in spite of his professed caution, but also, in a series of meticulous empirical studies Brunt revised the all-too-one-sided notion of amicitia and insisted on a much broader understanding of the concept and the complexity of personal relationship – and he radically deconstructed the fundamental assumption that there were any cohesive, stable, and durable ‘factions’ at any time and that clientela-like relationships were the only decisive factor for the outcome of elections.Footnote ³⁵ About ten years later, in his survey of ‘recent work’ on the Republic, Allen Ward could already look back on Chester Starr’s previous tour de force through the ‘past and future’ of ancient history as a discipline and approvingly quote his witty remark on ‘recent treatments of the internal politics of Rome’, which had ‘cast far too much in terms of factions which are analysed by prosopographical methods; but the popularity of chasing down who was whose uncle may at last be waning’ – and Ward admitted with appealing honesty that he himself had been ‘one of those who sometimes too zealously tracked down uncles – and aunts and cousins too!’ – in his previous work.Footnote ³⁶ And although a few people who still believed in old-school prosopography were fighting a sort of rearguard action, Ward quite rightly characterized a ‘new direction’ of Republican studies as a promising attempt ‘to de-emphasize the oligarchic control of Republican politics and put more emphasis on the role of the comitia, …, on whom the aristocratic leaders depended for election and the passage of legislation’ and even to claim ‘an admixture of democracy’ in the Republican political order.Footnote ³⁷

***

By the 1990s, the winds of change had become somewhat stormy. It was none other than the aforementioned Fergus Millar who went even further than Peter Brunt. He not only rejected the apparently well-established ‘factionalist’ orthodoxy but eventually admitted, if only years later, that it was his own teacher Syme who had been its most influential representative.Footnote ³⁸ Millar also offered a new, indeed iconoclastic, reading of the ‘political character’ of the Republic as a whole in a series of articles and a monograph with the programmatic title The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (Reference 64Millar1998), although he never systematically explained his analytical categories. Millar claimed that the libera res publica was to be conceived as a variant of ancient democracy, which was much more akin to the direct democracy of classical Athens than modern (once again, especially German) scholarship had been prepared to admit. In obvious contrast to Syme, Millar not only held that it was the populus Romanus, ‘as represented by the various forms of assembly’, which was ‘in a formal sense the sovereign body in the Republican constitution’. He even suggested that it was therefore only fit and proper, and indeed high time, that the Roman people be restored ‘to their proper place in the history of democratic values’ and the Republic be counted among the ‘relatively small group of historical examples of political systems’ that ‘might deserve the label “democracy”’.Footnote ³⁹

Millar even explicitly questioned whether there ever was ‘a “governing class”, an “aristocracy”, or an “élite”’. Candidates for public office – even if they were of nobilis status – had to run as individuals. The term nobilis was only ‘social or political, not constitutional’, and a man called nobilis did not enjoy anything like the hereditary constitutional rights of an English peer. In fact, however, nobody – not even Theodor Mommsen, Gelzer, and Münzer – had ever dreamt of claiming as much. As a consequence, Millar flatly denied the existence of any homogeneous ruling class. To put it in a nutshell, for Millar neither an aristocracy nor an oligarchy ever existed in the Republic.Footnote ⁴⁰

Paradoxically enough, the new elitist scapegoat was now Christian Meier, even though the latter had not only offered the first comprehensive deconstruction of the received ‘factionalist’ wisdom, but also – in the important introduction on his theoretical assumptions and methodological approaches in the 1980 edition – developed innovative perspectives such as a general theory of political group formation in pre-modern societies.Footnote ⁴¹ Moreover, he had suggested a completely new concept of the Republican ‘political grammar’, in order to describe and analyse the complex interdependence – or rather: interplay – of the particular Republican framework of institutions and formal procedures, practical everyday political routines, long-term policies, fundamental issues and extraordinary challenges as well as the underlying social conditions and omnipresent hierarchies.Footnote ⁴² Finally, he had put this new view to the test by following the decisive stages of the acute crisis from the late 90s onwards: the causes and results of the Italian civil wars and of Sulla’s reform project to the complex, ephemeral, and rapidly shifting political constellations of the late 60s and 50s.Footnote ⁴³

This important contribution in general and Meier’s analysis of the fundamental conditions of the constitutional reality and political practices in particular have not received the attention which they deserve – at least partly due to the language barrier. In contrast to Meier’s famous biography of Caesar,Footnote ⁴⁴ Res publica amissa has never been translated into English. Moreover, in spite of its obvious influence on much of modern research in any language, interestingly enough, the book has quite often not even been quoted itself, but, as it were, indirectly: quite a few serious anglophone scholars just refer to reviews in English, above all to the detailed discussion in the influential review by Peter Brunt (who did in fact acknowledge the importance of Meier’s innovative approach – as did, by the way, Erich Gruen).Footnote ⁴⁵

***

Back to the late 1980s and 1990s. Millar’s conception of the Republic as a ‘direct democracy’, in his words, on the ‘strictly and purely formal’ basis of a ‘constitution’ in the narrow sense of the concept, namely a ‘structure’, ‘system’, or even ‘complex machinery’ of institutions and procedures,Footnote ⁴⁶ soon met with criticism – not least from German scholars like Martin Jehne, who not only took issue with Millar’s concept of a Roman ‘constitution’, which seemed to owe too much to Mommsen’s Römisches Staatsrecht.Footnote ⁴⁷ Above all, Millar’s continental critics regretted his refusal to engage with Meier’s Res publica amissa (or, for that matter, with Erich Gruen’s Last Generation of the Roman Republic, also mentioned above) and Millar’s outright dismissal as ‘entirely circular’ of Meier’s trenchant dictum: ‘Wer Politik trieb, gehörte zum Adel, und wer zum Adel gehörte, trieb Politik’ – once again for the anglophone public, I quote Millar’s translation (whose command of German was perfect, by the way, as was his knowledge of scholarly literature in German and other languages): ‘whoever played a political role belonged to the aristocracy and … whoever belonged to the aristocracy played a political role’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Millar’s critics insisted on the continued importance of a basically oligarchic political class – a ruling class or rather status group with a remarkable rate of reproduction, given the fact that in the middle Republic it had never become a completely closed caste: from the mid-third century onwards, the number of consuls with consular ancestors never dropped below 70 per cent and eventually rose to more than 80 per cent in the last generation of the Republic.Footnote ⁴⁹

However, Millar was certainly right in emphasizing the simple, but fundamentally important, fact that even ‘a person who was both a patricius and a nobilis had to compete for office’Footnote ⁵⁰ – and his critics took that up. The reformed ‘elitist’ concept of the Republican political culture is based on the view that the role of popular assemblies and of Syme’s ‘other classes’ needs to be taken seriously – namely as a crucial factor in the constitution and reproduction of a particular variant of a ruling class. If reputation, relative rank, and indeed membership in this elite as such was regularly and exclusively based on election to certain offices, the institutionalized participation of popular assemblies cannot be dismissed as merely formal, passive, powerless, or nominal or as a charade or façade.Footnote ⁵¹

Moreover, Millar had raised important issues, which went far beyond his narrow and formalistic conception of the political system – and by no means only the ‘continental’ representatives of the new ‘elitist’ model acknowledge these innovative impulses. Above all, Millar had insisted on the overwhelming importance of mass oratory, the central role and function of the orator before the people assembled in the Comitium or Forum, and the particular kind of publicity of politics in general and of decision-making processes in particular. Interestingly enough, it was this specific form of direct communication and interaction which became an important theme of the debate on the political culture, which got off the ground with the exchange between John North and his critic, mentioned above.Footnote ⁵²

In recent research, public performance, publicity and the role of the ‘public’ have been taken seriously in a new way: the (not at all rare) cases in which the people showed resistance to the ‘cultural hegemony’ of the elite and asserted their will and interests in one concrete way or another – by voicing discontent and even by passing laws against the will of a majority in the senate – call for detailed exploration and explanation.Footnote ⁵³ This aspect ties in well with recent research on the ‘public opinion’ of plebs and people, and its influence on politics.Footnote ⁵⁴ These different perspectives converge, as it were, in a demand for a supplementary or complementary ‘bottom-up’ view of the Republican political culture and therefore need to be taken into account in a modern modified elitist concept.

***

The debate on the specific character of Roman Republican political culture continues to the present day – and at least in this field, the stormy winds of change seem to rock the aforementioned language barrier. The debate is still a truly international discussion, which has long gone far beyond the less than fruitful question whether or not we should conceptualize the Republic as (a sort of) democracy. German participants in this debate such as Hans Beck, Egon Flaig, Martin Jehne, Uwe Walter and the authorFootnote ⁵⁵ – who are said by some scholars in other countries to form a kind of ‘new school of Roman Republican studies’ or even ‘Meier school’, in spite of considerable differences in theoretical and methodological approaches – owe much to the ongoing intensive and fruitful exchange of new questions, ideas, and results with the international community of ‘Republicans’ (in a specific sense).Footnote ⁵⁶ This particularly active group includes – naturally without claim to completeness – scholars of three generations such as Jean-Michel David, Michel Humm, and Frédéric Hurlet from France,Footnote ⁵⁷ Francisco Pina Polo and Cristina Rosillo-López from Spain,Footnote ⁵⁸ and Guido Clemente, Giuseppe Zecchini, and Andrea Angius from Italy,Footnote ⁵⁹ on the one hand, and America-based colleagues such as Erich Gruen, Harriet Flower, Robert Morstein-Marx, Nathan Rosenstein, and Amy Russell,Footnote ⁶⁰ as well as Henrik Mouritsen, Henriette van der Blom, and Alexander Yakobson, teaching at universities in Britain and Israel,Footnote ⁶¹ on the other. It is the vibrant liveliness and truly international character of this permanent exchange which has given the study of the Roman republic a new lease of life – and which has also triggered a remarkable production of original and stimulating contributions to concrete aspects and particular problems as well as to theoretical models and methodological approaches. The bibliography at the end of this contribution – admittedly extravagantly extensive, but again without any claim to completeness – may give an impression of this output. Moreover, well-informed and detailed surveys of modern researchFootnote ⁶² make clear that the enormous gain in insights has been generated precisely by the exchange between representatives of different intellectual, academic, and classical traditions.

In concrete terms, the aforementioned new ‘elitist’ view has focused in recent years on the so-called informal, seemingly purely ornamental aspects of ‘political culture’, namely on the communicative as well as symbolic, performative, and ritual dimensions of politics, and on the strategies and media of self-representation, self-legitimization, and indeed self-construction of the political class as a kind of ‘meritocracy’.Footnote ⁶³ Recent research has shed new light not only on the particularly spectacular rituals such as the triumph, the pompa circensis, and the pompa funebris, which have sparked considerable interest in the last twenty years.Footnote ⁶⁴ Moreover, scholars have described and analysed in detailed studies the informal ‘processions, passages and promenades’ of senators, magistrates, and other prominent figures as well as the culture-specific pomp and circumstance which characterize any appearance in public, in the Forum Romanum, the Capitol, the Campus Martius, and the streets which link these particularly central spaces.Footnote ⁶⁵ Scholars have looked afresh at the rituals of symbolic affirmation and reproduction of the citizen community and its religious integrity and civic identity – such as the census and the lustrum, military dilectus and oath.Footnote ⁶⁶ They have explored in detail the spectrum of different dimensions of public, informal, and indeed everyday interaction and communication between high and low, informal rules and norms of behaviour in public – such as, for example, the ritualized salutatio and the social and cultural functions of the Roman aristocratic houseFootnote ⁶⁷ as well as particular practices such as ostentatious lamentation and other forms of demonstratively public gestures.Footnote ⁶⁸

In particular, the international debate continues to revolve around the contio as oratoris maxima scaena and the forum of public debate before (not with) the people in attendance as addressees – the presiding magistrate or tribune of the plebs on the one hand and the orators whom he invited (or coerced) to take the floor on the other were (almost) invariably members of the ruling class. The renewed interest in this specifically Roman Republican form of a popular assembly is inseparably connected with empirical explorations of the technical and ritual functions of oratory, rhetorical strategies, key concepts, and their meanings and messages.Footnote ⁶⁹ Moreover, with respect to assemblies in general, recent research has highlighted ritual dimensions beyond the formal procedures and their symbolic functions of representing the identity and integration of the Roman citizenry on the one hand and the steep internal hierarchies of the citizen body on the other. The complementarity of these functions turns out to be only seemingly paradoxical.Footnote ⁷⁰

This aspect is closely connected with the problem of the complex complementary relation of the omnipresent, permanent and stiff competition for rank and reputation through honour and honores in the shape of positions of power and authority on the one hand and the construction and permanent renegotiation of a consensus about rules and norms containing and channelling this competition on the other, which was of vital interest for the ruling class and for the extraordinary stability and durability of its collective regime under rapidly changing conditions of the emerging ‘imperial republic’Footnote ⁷¹ – to name but the most important concrete issues: the complex process of the emergence of the cursus honorum; the leges annales on minimum age, intervals between offices and qualifications of candidates; the rules regulating prorogation of imperium and iteration of the consulship.Footnote ⁷² The sensitive issue of curbing certain practices of self-advertising – such as lavish spending on games or ambitus in the run-up to the annual elections – and the re-negotiation of the changing borderlines between legal and illegal practices as well as the closely related intricate problem of regulating and solving conflicts over norms and rules have attracted increasing attention in recent years.Footnote ⁷³ They concern controversies over the strict application of traditional rules of sacral law and the allotment of provinces, dissent regarding or even denial of a triumph, as well as the particularly sensitive issue of admission and repudiation of (consular) candidates in the fiercely competitive atmosphere in the run-up to the annual elections regularly demanded pacifying strategies.Footnote ⁷⁴

Another field of lively debate, which is inseparably connected with the competition/consensus complex, concerns the character, contents, and dynamics of the collective (or ‘cultural’) memory of the populus Romanus and its elite in general.Footnote ⁷⁵ In concrete terms, the ongoing discussion revolves around the discourse figure of the exemplum and, more generally, around the status and functions of ‘exemplarity’ for the construction of memory and memories, remembrance and the ‘cultural memory’ as such. In this case the influence of German scholarship on ‘memory studies’, the development of its theoretical foundations, methodological approaches, and empirical application was even explicitly acknowledged in a recent monograph on the Roman ‘world of exempla’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Moreover, a close look at – or ‘close reading’ of – the particular ‘monumental memoria’ in the shape of equestrian statues and togati, dedications of booty, representative buildings, and images of all kinds designed to immortalize the achievements, honours, and ‘triumphs’ – in the metaphorical as well as literal meaning – of individual nobiles and their families helps us to understand the complex repertoire of their strategies of self-fashioning and self-construction by means of visual media.Footnote ⁷⁷ These monuments, their presence and visibility in public spaces like the Forum Romanum and the Comitium, the Capitol, the Campus Martius, and their implicit interaction or ‘intersignification’ createdFootnote ⁷⁸ – by their implicit and explicit cross-referencing with performative strategies such as the pompae mentioned above – a particular, culture-specific kind of ‘publicity’ and indeed defined the character of an increasingly dense political-sacral topography.Footnote ⁷⁹

This apparently sweeping ‘cultural turn’Footnote ⁸⁰ in modern views on the Roman republic does not mean that the political-social order in general and its institutional framework in particular has been neglected or at least marginalized in the last three decades – on the contrary: Mommsen’s magisterial Staatsrecht remains an ‘continual challenge’,Footnote ⁸¹ especially, but certainly not exclusively, for German scholars. A modern ‘cultural history of politics’ must not only avoid the ‘constitutional-law trap’ but also go far beyond the orthodox ‘constitutionalist’ paradigm in the Staatsrecht traditionFootnote ⁸² – and even consider the vexed question whether or not the Republic and its political-social structure can adequately be described in terms of ‘state’, ‘stateness’ or ‘statehood’ (Staatlichkeit), which indeed seems to be a typically German debate.Footnote ⁸³ On the other hand, by the way, the debate about the character of Rome as a ‘city-state’ is again very international.Footnote ⁸⁴

The ‘culturalist’ approach should also include a systems-theoretical model of ‘institutionality’ which conceives ‘institutions’ not as units or organs sui generis and sui iuris, established once and for all, but in terms of diachronic processes of acting out functions and their change as well as in terms of ‘habitualization’ and ‘structuration’, ritualization, formalization, and, ultimately, ‘institutionalization’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Such a model should be able not only to describe the ‘technical’ framework of institutions and formal procedures of deliberation and decision-making, that is, the functions and offices of the political system in question and its particular degree of ‘institutionalization’ or institutional consolidation, but also to explain the negotiation, emergence (or demise), and implementation of rules and norms, written and unwritten,Footnote ⁸⁶ and also of procedures and practices, formalized or informal, which determine the complex interaction among ‘institutions’. This model includes not only the magistracies and their support personnel,Footnote ⁸⁷ their potestates, imperium, and auspicia,Footnote ⁸⁸ the tribunate of the plebs and its particular functionsFootnote ⁸⁹ as well as the senateFootnote ⁹⁰ and the assemblies,Footnote ⁹¹ but also the formal procedures of deliberation, making and implementation of decisions,Footnote ⁹² and of voting in general, elections and legislation.Footnote ⁹³ Last but not least, a modern view on institutions and procedures necessarily includes a close look at the ritual and symbolic dimensions of these institutions and procedures.Footnote ⁹⁴

Even the early Republic – in particular, the development of these institutions, procedures, and practices on the one hand and the complex formative process of a new patrician-plebeian elite, its value system focused on politics and war, and its specific strategies of self-representation mentioned above on the otherFootnote ⁹⁵ – has found new interest, not least due to the integrated innovative interpretation of new archaeological data and the desperately scanty literary evidence. However, there is still no consensus about how to deal with the latter, whether or not there is a methodologically acceptable way of identifying authentic ‘structural facts’ in a ‘narrative superstructure’ which is the result of a continuous process of ‘modernization’ and adaptation to changing attempts to make sense of a glorious history for contemporary needs.Footnote ⁹⁶ According to sceptical scholars, however, the so-called ‘annalistic tradition’ is generally judged to be fraught with literary topoi, retrospective constructions, speculation, and downright invention. But there is the ever-fascinating question of the origins, preconditions, impulses, and contingent factors which made the dynamic rise of the small city on the Tiber to power in Italy and then in the whole Mediterranean possibleFootnote ⁹⁷ – however, this is another field where something like a unanimous consensus is not to be expected (and perhaps not even desirable, as there is probably not one single ‘true’ explanation).

Last, but not least, there is yet another old debate – closely related to the new interest in early Rome – which has recently gained new momentum, namely a discussion on the character of ‘power’, internal as well as external, on expansion and ‘imperialism’, and on the structure and organization of the ‘republican empire’.Footnote ⁹⁸ This topic has never lost its fascination for scholars ever since Theodor Mommsen ruled that the Republican empire was the result of a specific ‘defensive imperialism’.Footnote ⁹⁹ The complex interdependence of ‘fear, greed, and glory’, of strategic precaution, economic motives, and the value system of a fiercely competitive aristocracy focused on success in war as driving forces of expansion and its particular dynamic is still, and will remain, a matter for hot debate.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ That is certainly true of the suggestion that the true secret of the ‘unification of central and southern Italy’, the emergence of Roman Italy and its ‘longevity and stability’ was the ‘key role played by landed elites’, ‘non-Roman extended lineages’, and their successful ‘fluid factional networks’, which were involved in a ‘grand bargain’ based on a ‘negotiated compromise with an administrative center’ and ‘broad negotiated consensus at the elite level’. This purportedly original and radical approach even aims ‘to challenge specialists of later periods and other regions to engage with the new concepts, mechanisms and causalities’ and, moreover, ‘has the potential to expand and enrich the comparative debate on premodern empires’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The key concepts here are ‘competition’ and ‘consensus’, ‘negotiation’ and ‘integration’, ‘networks’ and even ‘factions’ in a new guise – or rather, here and there, it is a matter of old wine in new skins, when the author searches for ‘long-standing factions’ and (in spite of their ‘under-the-table nature’) their ‘wheeling and dealing’ on the one hand, and dismisses ‘votive assemblies’ as ‘stacked and controlled by wide-ranging factional networks’ (sic!) on the other.Footnote ¹⁰² Surprisingly (and regrettably), this ambitious programme completely fails to engage with the aforementioned international debate on the social, institutional, and discursive construction and legitimization of ‘power’ and hierarchies and on the character of the political culture of the Republic in general. At least in this respect, it is a serious setback, which should not form a precedent.Footnote ¹⁰³

Moreover, in recent research inspired by post-colonial studies and global history, the debate on the degree – and indeed the very concept – of ‘Romanization’,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ the (limited) degree of political, social, and cultural ‘unification’, homogenization, and/or even ‘institutionalization’ of Italy have long been under discussion.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Now this is also true of the role of patronage and clientelae in Italy and beyond.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ More recently, the character of the Empire between ‘hegemonial’ or even ‘world power’ and ‘world state’ as the result of expansionFootnote ¹⁰⁷ and the very form, contents, and construction of ‘power’ as such is also certain to continue and produce new views on a topical theme.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Research on the interesting and fascinating topics mentioned above, which have been continuously under (controversial) discussion, as well as on other fields, which would need detailed documented surveys in their own right, such as religion, rituals and cult practice,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ and public, private, criminal, and procedural law,Footnote ¹¹⁰ has made considerable progress and offered a lot of results in recent decades.Footnote ¹¹¹ To reconstruct these developments is a fascinating challenge in itself – not least, because progress in many fields did go well beyond what was and could be expected, say, in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Roman Republic (at least the early and middle Republic) was widely considered a well-tilled field, if not hopelessly over-researched in the anglophone community of ancient historians (as opposed to the French and Italian classical communities). Now we know that the Republic was not at any stage of its development an inert, self-contained and self-sustaining system, but a socio-political order characterized by a dynamic capacity for adaptation to changing conditions and challenges, which was deeply inscribed in its structure.Footnote ¹¹² It was this capacity that made the development and stabilization of the ‘imperial republic’ possible. However, this is only a partial and provisional as well as rather general and abstract diagnosis. I have tried to map out the broad spectrum of old problems, new questions, and innovative empirical approaches for future research in recent publications.Footnote ¹¹³ Against this backdrop, it seems fit, then, to end on a mildly optimistic note and quote Winston Churchill’s famous speech on 10 November 1942 one last time: ‘This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’