LITMIR.BIZ

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Roman expansionism distinguished itself at the outset from Greek experience. The constitutional evolution of the city conserved aristocratic political power right down and into the classical phase of its urban civilization. Archaic monarchy was overthrown by a nobility in the earliest epoch of its existence, at the end of the 6th century B.C., in a change strictly comparable to the Hellenic pattern. But thereafter, unlike the Greek cities, Rome never knew the upheaval of tyrant rule, breaking aristocratic dominance and leading to a subsequent democratization of the city, based on a secure small and medium agriculture. Instead a hereditary nobility kept unbroken power through an extremely complex civic constitution, which underwent important popular modifications through the course of a prolonged and fierce social struggle within the city, but was never abrogated or replaced. The Republic was dominated by the Senate, which was controlled for the first two centuries of its existence by a small group of patrician clans; membership of the Senate, which was cooptive, was for life. Annual magistrates, of which the two highest were consuls, were elected by ‘assemblies of the people’, comprising the whole citizenry of Rome, but organized into unequal ‘centuriate’ units weighted to ensure a majority of the propertied classes. The consulates were the supreme executive offices of the State, and were legally monopolized by the closed order of patricians down to 366 B.C.

      This original structure embodied the political dominion of the traditional aristocracy pure and simple. It was subsequently altered and qualified in two important respects, after successive struggles which provide the nearest Roman equivalent of the Greek phases of ‘tyranny’ and ‘democracy’, but which each time fell decisively short of the comparable outcome in Greece. Firstly, recently enriched ‘plebeians’ forced the ‘patrician’ nobility to concede access to one of the two annual consular offices from 366 B.C. onwards; although it was not until nearly two hundred years later, in 172 B.C., that both consuls were for the first time plebeians. This slow change led to a broadening of the composition of the Senate itself, since former consuls automatically became senators. The result was the social formation of a widened nobility, including both ‘patrician’ and ‘plebeian’ families, rather than the political overthrow of the system of aristocratic rule itself, such as had occurred during the age of tyrants in Greece. Chronologically and sociologically overlapping this contest within the wealthiest strata of the Republic, was the struggle of the poorer classes to gain increased rights within it. Their pressure quickly resulted in the creation of the tribunate of the plebs, a corporate representation of the popular mass of the citizenry. The tribunes were elected each year by a ‘tribal’ assembly which, unlike the ‘centuriate’ assembly, was in principle genuinely egalitarian: the ‘tribes’ were actually, as in Archaic Greece, territorial rather than kin divisions of the population, four in the city itself and seventeen outside it (an indication of the degree of urbanization at that date). The tribunate formed a secondary and parallel executive agency, designed to protect the poor from the oppression of the rich. Eventually, in the early 3rd century, the tribal assemblies which elected the tribunes gained legislative powers, and the tribunes themselves nominal rights of veto over the acts of the consuls and the decrees of the Senate.

      The direction of this evolution corresponded to the process that had led to the democratic polis in Greece. But here too, the process was arrested before it could impend a new political constitution for the city. The tribunate and tribal assembly were simply added to the central existing institutions of the Senate, Consulates and Centuriate Assembly: they did not signify an internal abolition of the oligarchic complex of power which guided the Republic, but external accretions to it; whose practical significance was often much less than their formal potential. For the struggle of the poorer classes had generally been led by wealthy plebeians, who championed the popular cause to further their own parvenu interests: and this continued to be true even after the newly rich had gained access to the ranks of the senatorial order itself. The tribunes, normally men of considerable fortunes, thus became for long periods docile instruments of the Senate itself.¹ Aristocratic supremacy within the Republic was not seriously shaken. A plutocracy of wealth now merely enlarged a nobility of birth, both using extensive ‘clientage’ systems to ensure a deferent following among the urban masses, and lavish customary bribes to secure election to the annual magistracies through the centuriate assembly. The Roman Republic thus retained traditional oligarchic rule, through a composite constitution, down to the classical epoch of its history.

      The resultant social structure of the Roman citizenry was thus inevitably distinct from that which had been typical of classical Greece. The patrician nobility had early on striven to concentrate landed property in its hands, reducing the poorer free peasantry to debt bondage (as in Greece), and appropriating the ager publicus or common lands which they used for pasturage and cultivation. The tendency to abase the peasantry by debt bondage to the condition of dependent tenants was checked, although the problem of debts themselves persisted:² but the expropriation of the ager publicus and the depression of medium and small farmers was not. There was no economic or political upheaval to stabilize the rural property of the ordinary citizenry of Rome, comparable to that which had occurred in Athens or, in a different way, Sparta. When the Gracchi eventually attempted to follow the path of Solon and Peisistratus, it was too late: by then, the 2nd century B.C., much more radical measures than those enacted in Athens were necessary to save the situation of the poor – nothing less than a redistribution of land, demanded by both Gracchi brothers – with correspondingly less chance of them ever being implemented over aristocratic opposition. In fact, no durable or substantial agrarian reform ever occurred in the Republic, despite constant agitation and turbulence over the question in the final epoch of its existence. The political dominance of the nobility blocked all efforts to reverse the relentless social polarization of property on the land. The result was a steady erosion of the modest farmer class that had provided the backbone of the Greek polis. The Roman equivalent of the hoplite category – men who could equip themselves with armour and weaponry necessary for infantry service in the legions – were the assidui or ‘those settled on the land’, who possessed the necessary property qualification to bear their own arms. Below them were the proletarii, propertyless citizens, whose service to the State was merely to rear children (proles). The increasing monopolization of land by the aristocracy was thus translated into a steady decline in the numbers of the assidui, and an inexorable increase in the size of the proletarii class. Moreover, Roman military expansionism also tended to thin the ranks of the assidui who provided the conscripts and casualties for the armies with which it was conducted. The result was that by the end of the 3rd century B.C., the proletarii were probably already an absolute majority of citizens, and had to be themselves called up to deal with the emergency of Hannibal’s invasion of Italy; while the property qualification for the assidui was twice reduced, until in the next century it had sunk below a subsistence minimum on the land.³

      Small-holders never disappeared generally or completely in Italy; but they were increasingly driven into the more remote and precarious recesses of the country, in marshy or mountainous regions unappealing to engrossing landowners. The structure of the Roman polity in the Republican epoch thus came to diverge sharply from any Greek precedent. For while the countryside became chequered with large noble domains, the city conversely became populated with a proletarianized mass, deprived of land or any other property. Once fully urbanized, this large and desperate underclass lost any will to return to a small-holder condition, and could often be manipulated by aristocratic cliques against projects for agrarian reform backed by the assidui farmers.⁴ Its strategic position in the capital of an expanding empire ultimately obliged the Roman ruling class to pacify its immediate material interests with public grain distributions. These were, in effect, a cheap substitute for the land distribution which never occurred: a passive and consumer proletariat was preferable to a recalcitrant and producer peasantry, for the senatorial oligarchy which controlled the Republic.

      It is now possible to consider the implications of this configuration for the specific course of Roman expansionism. For the growth of Roman civic power was consequently distinguished from Greek examples in two fundamental respects, both related directly to the internal structure of the city. Firstly, Rome proved able to widen its own political system to include the Italian cities it subjugated in the course of its peninsular expansion. From the start, it had – unlike Athens – exacted troops for its armies, not money for its treasury, from its allies; thereby lightening the burden of its domination in peace, and

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