Download Ch.2 Rome: Power, Authority and Sovereignty

1
Tom Burns
Organisation and Social Order
Chapter II
ROME: POWER, AUTHORITY AND SOVEREIGNTY
No medieval or modern state has looked to Athenian democracy as a model for its
constitutional or administrative institutions. What we look to Athens for are political
ideas, political analysis and the concept of politics itself, not useable models of political
organisation.
The case is different when it comes to Rome. There is a continuity, however attenuated or
corrupted the connection was at times, which is quite absent in the case of Greece. To a
quite extraordinary extent, Rome has provided either the model or the actual starting
point for many of the political and legal institutions around which medieval and, to a
large extent, modern Europe has organised itself.
Many of its institutional forms are instantly recognisable from the second- or third-hand
models of them now in use. This is perhaps more easily appreciated nowadays, when
many of the grosser popular misconceptions seem to have been disposed of - those,
anyway, which were founded on the affinity with ancient Rome of modern France,
Britain, America or Germany claimed by historians, essayists and politicians of the
nineteenth century and earlier. The Roman world seems altogether closer to us. There is
even a familiar feel about the mental contortions by which Romans managed to reconcile
their rather grand notion of liberty with slavery and with the power the head of a family
could - legally - exercise over wife and children, about the salient role of social rank in
the structure of society and of authority in organised collective action. Twentieth century
classicists seem to be cooler, more judgmental, more 'objective' about Rome - though
also, unfortunately, just as divided in the weight they give to different kinds of evidence
and in the conclusions they derive from it.
It takes some time before one realises that even the sense of affinity that this familiarity
breeds is deceptive. It transpires, for example, that 'libertas' is quite different from what
we understand by 'liberty,' and 'auctoritas' is both more than what we mean by 'authority'
- and yet only half of it. The belief, fostered by generations of historians, that it was the
Romans who created a legal system founded on the principle of 'equality before the law',
has been seriously undermined. Citizenship in general, which in democratic Athens
meant equal political voice and, at least for some time after Solon, recognition that
fellow-citizens should not be reduced to destitution by debt-bondage or other demands on
them made and enforced by the wealthy, meant for Romans simply a place in a society
rightly and unalterably ordered in gradations of wealth, worth and power, gradations in
which individuals were arranged in social positions achieved ordinarily (though not
ineluctably) by birthright and which prescribed one's style of life, manners, conduct and
the kind of activity or occupation in which one's time was invested. It is better thought of
as a grading system rather than a class structure in the modern sense, or of caste, but
Roman society was undoubtedly founded on an image of man as 'homo hierarchicus', in
Louis Dumont's phrase.1
I
One can begin with an aspect of Roman life and civilisation that, even nowadays, is all
too often overlooked, or at best pushed aside as of marginal significance. This is the part
played by violence, by the use of brute force, in the history of Rome - a part, incidentally,
which is usually given full weight in the treatment of other ancient civilisations and
empires in the middle east, the far east, and America. Yet there are any number of
incidents, outside those of war and conquest, to drive the point home: the thousands of
slaves who were crucified and lined the road from the south-west to Rome after the
Spartacus revolt; the destruction of Corinth (in the same year as that of Carthage) and the
enslavement of the entire surviving population; the colonies of veterans planted in Britain
who drove the natives - "prisoners and slaves" - from their land and expropriated their
buildings and cattle, aided and abetted, according to Tacitus, by their former comrades in
the legions, who looked forward to enjoying the same licence.
In general, though, it was not a matter of military occupation, of whole societies being
oppressed by a Roman government with armed forces always at hand. The army
numbered no more than 150,000 - 170,000 (with a rather larger number of auxiliaries)
when the empire was at its fullest extent, with a population of between fifty and sixty
millions; men of senatorial and equestrian rank actively engaged in the imperial
administration were possibly as few as 150.
There is a whole catalogue of cases showing how the rich resorted habitually to the same
methods that the colonists in first-century Britain had used. Nor are these exceptional
incidents, to be dismissed or qualified as isolated or extreme examples of what men will
do when provoked by fear or greed. "Throughout all our evidence, scattered though it is
through several centuries, the methods employed and their openness point to the
existence of extralegal power to a degree quite surprising. However majestic the
background of Roman law and imperial administration, behold in the foreground a group
of men who could launch a miniature war on their neighbour - and expected to get away
with it."2
Further evidence in plenty is supplied by Keith Hopkins. "Bloodshed and slaughter joined
military glory and conquest as central elements in Roman culture. They persisted as
central elements even when the pax Romana was established under the emperors in the
first two centuries AD. They re-created battlefield conditions for public amusement" in
the Colosseum at Rome and in Italy and the provinces, with organised fights to the death
between hundreds of gladiators and the mass execution of criminals.3 There is an
1
See L. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, Paladin Books edn., 1972, esp. pp. 35-55.
R.MacMullen, Roman Social Relations, Yale Univ. Pr. 1974, p.7.
3
K.Hopkins, Death and Renewal: Sociological Studies in Roman History, Vol. 2. C.U.P., 1983, p.2.
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everyday quality about an emperor's having one of his guards flogged to death for failing
to clear the brambles from his path. It was no less, as it was no more, of a commonplace
than execution by being thrown to wild beasts and the popular entertainment provided by
gladiatorial contests.
Rome (which one has constantly to remind oneself lasted longer than any other political
entity in European history) kept itself going by a variety of methods. Violence and terror
were among them. They were not necessarily prominent at all times as an instrument by
which power might be asserted and authority reinforced, nor were they always employed
as first resort, but their commonplace, everyday presence century after century in the
lives of everyone, and especially as spectacle in Rome itself, gives them an almost unique
prominence - even beyond that of the widespread episodes of violence to which people in
the twentieth century have been exposed.
What has to be emphasised is that the use of violence lies not so much in its being the
instrument of power itself but as a means of terrifying others into submission. The point
is made by Georg Simmel in a passage to the effect that even what we call the 'absolute'
coercion imposed by a tyrant is relative. Of course, there is no choice when the action
demanded of us is actually forced on us by main physical strength. Then we have no
freedom to choose not to obey. In all other cases, what we choose to do may well be
conditioned by our desire to escape the dire consequences of refusal, but we do have a
choice.
The point Simmel is making is simple enough. Social relationships are two-way affairs.
This is just as true for power relationships as it is for other kinds. And power is - can only
be - exercised through a relationship. To have power means that others demonstrate that
they acknowledge it; to exercise power means that others act in an acceptably responsive
fashion. This is true even in the extreme case of coercion by violence. "Nobody, in
general, wishes that his influence completely determine the other individual. He rather
wants this influence, this determination of the other, to act back on him. Even the abstract
will-to-dominate, therefore, is a case of interaction. This will draws its satisfaction from
the fact that the acting or suffering of the other, his positive or negative condition, offers
itself to the dominator as the product of his will.... [and] consciousness of his efficacy."4
Violence was familiar and incidental at all levels and in all situations in medieval Europe
- and, for that matter, in most times and places in the history of the world. But Roman
society - and the Roman ethos - seems to have been saturated with violence. It was not
simply that rule was maintained by violence alone, by its exemplary use, or by the threat
of violence. Nor is it implied that people in general were infected by a cult of cruelty of
the kind that makes an appearance at different times in different societies. Rather, Roman
society seems to have been sustained in some measure (it is impossible to say how far) by
consent in violence - a consent which was indulged and catered for by spectacles of
violence, and supported, though not created, by the usefulness of violence. To take one
direct instance, flogging, and other brutalities, were commonplace methods of enforcing
military discipline in European armies and navies until the nineteenth century; the
4
G.Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, (ed. and trans. K.H.Wolff), Free Press, 1950, p. 181.
Romans went further. They could, and more than once did, resort to decimation: in units
which were judged to have fought badly, or lost too easily, one in ten soldiers were
ordered to be clubbed to death by their own comrades.
The propensity for violence ties in with what seems to be an overriding value, guiding
principle, or basic assumption which characterises Roman history. It is perhaps best
thought of as bellicosity - the readiness of the community as a whole to resort to arms.
There was of course nothing exceptional about the early Republic's perpetual
involvement in war. It seems to have bulked larger than it did in the case of its
contemporaries in Greece, but the difference, if it exists, is one of degree. Nor does one
have to picture Romans as 'militaristic,' which suggests putting a high value on military
parades, displays of military force and so on for their own sake and as good in
themselves. There is in the case of Rome rather a sense of war being a perennial,
ordinary, part of existence, of victory and conquest as being the most rewarding - and
profitable - of all undertakings, of the spectacle of mass killings of the most brutal and
savage kind as popular entertainment. The sheer bellicosity of the Romans has much
more to do with Romans seeing themselves as a society organised for war and with their
recourse to violence as the obvious and readiest means of enforcing their will.
II
Our ideas about Rome and its legions are so indissolubly linked to our idea of the Roman
empire itself that it is difficult to realize just how extraordinary it was for the Romans to
maintain, after Marius, a professional standing army for century after century. There was
no precedent for it, and nothing like it appeared again in Europe until the fifteenth
century, when the newly integrated kingdom of France began to maintain a force of
25,000 men at the king's disposal in peace as well as war. Yet the presence of a standing
army of professional soldiers during the lifetime of the Roman Empire, seems to be
treated as though there were some logical inevitability about it.
In fact, the developmental path followed in the transition from what had been, up to the
time of the Punic Wars, a 'people in arms' to the professional standing army of the last
century of the Republic (and throughout the Empire) was hidden under the almost
uninterrupted succession of wars fought during that last century. Wars to defend
frontiers, or openly to extend them by 'pacifying' neighbouring tribes and kingdoms, were
intermingled with the series of civil wars. The professionalisation of the army by Marius
was merely one step in a continuous process of imperial expansion and internecine
conflict. But it was a step of crucial importance for the future - and also of some
significance as an indicator of the peculiar ethos which animated Rome. For despite what
has been said, in the previous chapter, about working for somebody else being looked on
as demeaning, the army, after Marius, afforded a form of employment which was wellregarded and rewarding, and which could, in the later Empire, lead to advancement well
beyond the dreams of any merchant or entrepreneur. Soldiers made up far the largest
wage-earning section of the population. And soldiers provided increasingly the most
powerful, and eventually the only serious, body of support for the politically ambitious.
5
At every turn of events during critical periods of the Republic and Empire, either civil
violence or military force was the deciding factor. The process of building the empire and
contending for domination of it was so continuous that the true character of what was
happening (or that aspect of it which directly concerns us) tends to be lost in the welter of
events and the elucidation of their outcome. For what the history of Rome reveals especially during the last two hundred years of the Republic and the first hundred years
and more of the empire, but before and after that stretch of years, too - is that the army
was, first and last, an instrument for profitable undertakings.
Senior magistrates - consuls, praetors, quaestors, etc. - served without pay. They were,
under the Republic, empowered to recoup their expenditure from the booty of war - but
this could only happen if the army was victorious. Booty, slaves and confiscations
provided the immediate return for the Romans on organized ventures in military
conquest. Tribute and taxation exacted from conquered peoples continued thereafter to
provide a more than reasonable return on the cost of the standing army and provincial
administration.
If there is, for us, something anomalous about the absence of private trading or
manufacturing enterprises of large - or even medium - size throughout the history of
Rome as well as of Athens, then the solution may lie in the fact that the Romans
organised themselves for profitable enterprise along different lines. The opportunity costs
for the rich and powerful of investing talent or money in trade and industry instead of in
advancing one's career through a succession of military, magistral, administrative or
political posts - all of them connected with each other in parallel or sequential paths and
all obtainable by cultivating the right people - were so high as never to be seriously
contemplated. Snobbery usually has its own political or economic rationale, and for the
Romans it may have made sound economic sense to rate commercial pursuits as ignoble.
III
For all the manifold differences between them, there is one quite fundamental feature
which the Greek polis and the Roman Republic had in common. There was no conception
of an impersonal, abstract, 'state', such as we are seized with. There was no other name
for the Roman 'state' than that simply of the people who composed it, the 'populus
romanus.' The term res publica was adopted in later times to signify a form of political
constitution which dispensed with hereditary rulers, but the phrase really stands for the
affairs - the administrative, political, diplomatic and other concerns - of the Roman
people. In Rome, as in Athens, the polity was the political community itself, the
collectivity of citizens.
But here the resemblance between Athens and Rome ends. There were, naturally,
aristocratic families in Athens, as elsewhere in Greece, who exercised a considerable
amount of political influence. They played the kind of part in political affairs and power
struggles made familiar by powerful dynasties of magnates in the Europe of the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance. Such families produced a disproportionate number of political
and military leaders, but in principle and, for long periods, in practice too, they had no
prescriptive right to political authority or leadership. When democracy obtained in
Athens, they were on equal political footing with their fellow citizens, and at all times
subject to challenge by them.
From the very earliest times of the Roman Republic, on the other hand, there was a welldefined category of patrician families, which held, and did not merely claim, military,
economic, cultural and political leadership - a nobility, in fact, although the label was not
adopted until quite late on. It constituted an established elite which was social, economic
and political, asserting aristocratic descent from an ancestry as old as Rome itself, though
the order did (like most aristocracies) admit newcomers in later years. The supremacy of
the patrician order had its origin, naturally, in their ownership of the bigger landed
properties which, in their hands, tended to grow into larger and larger estates, especially
after it became common practice for the nobles to expropriate the ager publicus, the
farmland in conquered territories which belonged legally to the people of Rome. Their
superior military standing was also founded on superior wealth, for in the early Republic,
their elite status was tied in closely with the fact that they could afford (and so were
obliged) to equip themselves with horses for military service. The patrician order formed
(though as mounted infantry rather than cavalry) the most mobile, and therefore effective,
military force. It was also the core of the army.
The way the law itself operated reflects the division between rich and poor - although
nobody seems to have thought that this particular emperor had no clothes before
J.M.Kelly asked the question: "How did the practice (as distinct from the theory) of law
fare in a state whose social and political life was conditioned by enormous differences in
power, wealth and prestige?"5
It was his study of Roman litigation, published in 1966, that made it clear that, "despite
the ideal of justice expressed in sources from Cicero to Justinian, the procedures and
operation of the law clearly reflected the harsh realities of Roman society, and failed to
mitigate the difference between rich and poor."6
Rank ordering permeated Roman society. From the earliest times the patriciate had its
gentes - clans - which were peculiar to it. The members of each gens had a common name
and a common cult and, up to the later years of the Republic, inheritance and wardship
was determined by the gens relationship. The Senate was organised by rank in
accordance with the magistracies each member had held; the leading role in debate
attached to senior members, since the presiding magistrate would call upon senators to
speak in order of their rank. And even after plebeians had gained admission to the senior
magistracies (and, as a consequence, to Senate membership), patrician senators still
retained a number of privileges exclusive to themselves.
The plebs who composed the mass of the Roman people were also organised into
divisions, in the first instance for attendance at their three comitia - assemblies. The
5
J.M.Kelly, Roman Litigation, O.U.P., 1966, p. 1.
M.W.Frederiksen, Review of J.M.Kelly, Roman Litigation, in Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 57, 1967,
p. 254.
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comitia curiata was meant for religious purposes and ceased quite early on to have any
practical significance, or indeed any reality as an assembly, since its meetings were
attended by a representative of each of the thirty curiae. It was the comitia centuriata
which had a political role to play as an assembly. The fact that it was organised in
centuries bespeaks its miltary origin - the Populus Romanus was not so much a citizenry
in arms as a military electorate. Again, a rank order obtained, this time founded on
relative wealth, and, to begin with, tied in with their capacity to equip themselves for
military service. All the citizens were divided into classes by property qualification, and
the classes allocated among the 193 centuries, irrespective of the numbers in each
century. This part of the Roman constitution had gerrymandering written into it: since
voting was by century, not by individual citizen, wealthier citizens could, by winning a
majority in just over half the centuries, outvote the rest. In the early days of the Republic,
too, ordinary citizens served under patrician leaders in time of war, as part of the services
which they owed the patricians who were usually their landlords or, if not, their patrons.
The institutional connection between war, wealth and politics remained significant
throughout Roman history.
What underlined (and reinforced) the superior standing of the patrician order still further
was control of the religious institutions of Rome. The colleges of priests - Pontiffs,
Augurs and Fetiales - were all in their hands. They "were the guardians of the ius divinum
and had charge of the Roman calendar. By determining what was fas and nefas they
elaborated the earliest criminal code and the procedure in private law; by declaring what
days were lucky (fasti) or unlucky (nefasti) and by their interpretation of prodigies they
obtained considerable influence over public business."7 Again, only the augurs might
interpret auspicia, the signs which showed the favour of heaven, and this too could be
politically useful.
The clear distinction which obtained between patricians and plebs, amounted not so much
to what we regard as a division between two social classes, although the term 'class' is
Roman enough in origin (classis signified originally mobilisation for war, a call to arms),
as to the existence of distinct status groups. It is close enough to what used to be known
in Germany as Stand (in France as ordre), being a category (often a group, too) of people
who enjoyed, within the larger society, privileges special to their status, assumed
exclusive right to participate in certain rituals and ceremonies, to appropriate to its
members certain magisterial, priestly or military offices, and to display evidences of their
rank. These privileges often became legal rights, as they were in the early Roman
Republic, under sumptuary and other laws.
The religious aspect of leadership diminished in significance with growing sophistication,
at least in religious matters, and among the more well-to-do. What did not diminish,
though, was the authority assumed by patricians, an authority which they conferred on the
Senate, and which membership of the Senate conferred on them. For the chief military
and magistral officers of the Republic, praetors and consuls, were drawn - exclusively at
first, and later principally - from the patrician order. After completing their term of office,
7
H.H.Scullard, History of the Roman World From 753 To 146 B.C., Methuen, 4th. edn., 1980, pp. 65-6.
which normally lasted a year, they automatically became members of the Senate. The
Senate was a deliberative body (which the consuls and other senior magistrates were
nevertheless obliged to consult); it also served as a reservoir of candidates for other
magistracies.
It is at this point that the quite special peculiarity of the political organisation of Rome
enters in, a peculiarity which could be (and has been) read as both the driving force and
the arena of the political history of the Roman Republic. Up to the last days of the
Republic and even beyond, in theory (and, so far as observing the formal procedure goes,
in practice), the citizenry at large were always held to be the repository and the source of
power. It was for the leading citizens, the Senate, to propound and determine specific
policies; the people could be convened in their assembly only by order of the appropriate
magistrates. But "Senatus censuit, populus iussit." Cicero's phrase expresses the
fundamental constitutional principle of the Republic: although 'resolutions' were taken by
the Senate, 'commands' issued from the people (or senators found it advisable or useful to
say so). Even though candidacy for most senior magistracies was reserved to patricians,
for example, the election of magistrates was, up to the end of the Republic, the preserve
of the popular assembly - the comitia. Again, it was for the people's assembly to make
any formal declaration of war although consuls and other generals were given a good deal
of latitude when they were 'in the field.'
What the Senate and its members had was authority - a word replete with meaning, but a
meaning somewhat different from what it holds for us. The term auctoritas had a quite
specific significance for the Romans. The opinions and, to a degree, the decisions of
someone with authority carried greater weight than those of other persons, although they
might not take a legally binding form. "Under the Roman Republic a resolution of the
Senate was termed auctoritas, until the legal step had been taken which made it a
consultum; and if this step was barred by a tribunician veto, the resolution was entered on
the minutes of the Senate and exerted such influence as the considered opinion of so
eminent an assembly could command."8
The Roman notion of authority stands over against the Roman conception of liberty. And
this too was something rather different from the idea of liberty that has come to prevail
since then, and which holds good today. As with the citizens of Greek cities, Romans
thought of themselves as free men, and this meant being able quite literally to do
whatever they pleased.9
It was this notion of liberty as untrammeled freedom which enshrined the conception of
the people as a whole as the repository of power and so underwrote the voting rights of
the popular assembly in Rome.
Roman libertas had something in common with the rule of the Abbey of Theleme that
Gargantua founded: 'Fais ce que vouldras.' Liberty meant the absence of restraint. The
8
H.S.Jones, "The Princeps", Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. 10, chap. 5, C.U.P., 1934, p.131.
P.A.Brunt, "Libertas in the Republic", The Fall of the Roman Republic and Related Essays, O.U.P., 1988,
pp 281-350.
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fact that this meant eliding any distinction between licence and liberty (something that
Rabelais celebrated and Hobbes condemned) was just as apparent in the ancient world as
it is for us. It could be argued, and was, that laws, polite usage or respect for others
imposed limits on such freedom, and that the essential point was that free men were free
to choose to accept such limits; they chose to obey laws because to do so freed them from
certain kinds of coercion, just as they, as free men, voted for or against instituting new
laws or abolishing old ones. But comfortable wisdom of this kind is, as Professor Brunt
has argued, pretty specious, and seems to have made little impression on either the
commons or the aristocracy.
For liberty, in the sense of doing whatever one pleased, had its 'positive' meaning too.
Both Greeks and Romans "could regard dominion over others as an extension of
freedom."10 A man's Herrschaft over his household and his ownership of slaves meant
that he had that much more 'liberty'. And since the authority which patricians - senators saw themselves as possessed of, both individually and collectively, was exercised over
the common people, and therefore a constraint on their liberty, the auctoritas of the
Senate counted as an extension of liberty for patricians - and a constriction of the libertas
of common citizens.
It was this differentiation of the whole body of citizens into rich and poor, with its
connotation of superior and inferior orders and its graduation of entitlements to liberty,
which underlay the succession of civil disturbances throughout the last centuries of the
Republic - many of which resulted in political gains for the plebeians.
In the end, the authority of the higher orders won, but only at the cost of translating
authority into imperial autocracy and the patriciate into a sort of clientele of the emperors.
Increasingly, under the Empire, liberty became what it started out as in medieval Europe:
a bundle of rights, entitlements, and privileges granted by or extracted from emperors,
kings, and princes set in authority over 'the people.'
IV
It would, however, be wrong to represent patricians and plebs as confronting each other,
throughout the whole lifetime of the Roman Republic, in a class-struggle which the
patricians eventually won, only to lose out themselves to autocratic rule. There are
complications, the most important of which can be subsumed under the heading of
patron-client relationships.
Patrons and clients have been present in most societies in which there is differentiation of
status by power, by wealth, by prestige or even, in some instances, by age. But the
relationship between the two sides is subject to sometimes subtle, sometimes fairly gross,
variation. The strength of the tie may verge on complete dependency, as was the case in
the earliest manifestation of clientela in early Rome, from which the relationship takes its
generic name, 'clientage'. Centuries later, the men of letters, philosophers and orators who
were the closest associates of Roman Emperors, acted as his personal counsellors, and
10
P.A.Brunt, "Libertas in the Republic," p.312.
were called his 'friends' (amici) are none the less recognisably their Emperor's clients,
and, indeed, dependants: his favour brought offices and a profusion of gifts; relegation
might well mean exile and loss of possessions.
Clientage merges into patronage on one side and dependency on the other. Although it
has always been one of the more obvious aspects of the realities of political and economic
life, it has not often been featured as a concrete feature of organisation. This is probably
because clientage has never served as the overt governing principle of formal political,
economic or other social groupings. It usually turns up in the literature under the guise of
a customary method of recruitment to public office or of promotion, or as a kind of allpurpose social adhesive, cementing political factions in the last century or two of the
Roman Republic, or the different orders of privilegies in the ancien regime, or political
parties in eighteenth century England, or the more blatant kinds of 'machine-politics'
practised in America, Italy and third-world countries in the twentieth century.
The same sort of variation occurs in its pervasiveness as in its strength or significance; it
may be widespread to the point of being all-embracing, as it is in Southern Italy, or
highly selective, as with the feed-line established from Balliol to a number of
Government departments in nineteenth century Britain, or secretive, as with the dealings
of the arms trade with ministers and strategically placed civil servants, where it can be
juxtaposed with corruption and sometimes indistinguishable from it.
On the surface, the relationship between patron and client is one of exchange. Armed
service, loyalty, friendliness (if not friendship), conformity with the status-quo in which
the patron is lodged, an electoral vote (or the active, participant, demonstration of
solidarity with the patron and his interests), even a show of deference, is given in return
for a benefice (land, a title, a remunerative appointment) a favour, a donation, preferential
treatment in a competitive situation, or protection.
Clearly, the exchange-relationship between patron and client is asymmetrical. The
outcome of the exchange leaves the client under an obligation; the special loyalty he
owes the patron is founded on his sense of this obligation; he is, and usually declares
himself to be, in his patron's debt. Secondly, quite apart from the face-value of what the
patron gives to the client, as against what he gets in return, it is a relationship between
one patron and many clients. On the other hand, the act of patronage is itself a
commitment: it is a gesture presumptive of trust, well-wishing, perhaps of friendship. As
such, it may be regarded on either side as one step in a progress towards further
exchanges of benefice and service. The obligation is not altogether one-sided.
Thirdly, the distinguishing characteristic of the patron-client relationship is that it is
particular to the individual patron and the individual client. Even where actual and
potential clients form a community (or several communities) the relationship between
them and the patron is essentially person-to-person. What is on offer on both sides is
unique; it is of the essence of clientage relationships that what is exchanged is precisely
what the recipient wants and that it is on offer from no one else. Formally and publicly at
least, neither shops around; there is no market.
11
With so many dimensions of variation, the part played by patron-client relationships in
social affairs is always somewhat problematical. It is much less obtrusive in economic
organisation, although nepotism, which has been quite normal and legitimate throughout
most of history, shades off into more institutionalised, or more blatant, forms in the case
of the larger medieval banking and commercial houses and of the great joint-stock
companies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In its most obvious and potent
form - in Rome, say, or seventeenth century France and eighteenth century England, or
contemporary America and Italy, or Renaissance Florence - clientage has been in the
forefront of the stage on which politics are acted out. At other times and places - in
ancient Greece, or nineteenth-century England - the part it plays is more obscure, though
not necessarily unimportant. In either case, clientage is the basic relationship sustaining
the forces supporting members of the ruling class; in other words, oligarchy (even - or
perhaps especially - where it is not formally written into the constitution of a political
unit, as in the case of the later Venetian republic) is founded on clientage.
When one moves beyond these more patent manifestations of the relationship, however,
its role becomes more amorphous - although sometimes even more consequential. The
personal bond between a lord and his 'man' in medieval Europe, in which the latter served
his lord by soldiering, working on his land, or presenting him with farm produce in return
for a fief, or a small holding of land, and protection, is one version of the patron-client
relationship; it was public, authorised by law, and sanctioned by the Church. At other
times, the relationship makes its presence felt in the political arena, along with pressuregroups and lobbies, largely through the activities of brokers. Typically, this is when the
'constitutive system' (the politically active sections of society) is disunited, faction-ridden,
or divided between organised political parties. It is brokers, too, who seem almost to
create and maintain what are essentially patronage systems or sub-systems by acting as
purveyors of electoral votes or of suitable recruits for public office.
Lastly, there is the obvious circumstance that what is on offer by patrons can in fact be
bought. Corruption, in the form of venality - the sale of offices, titles, favourable
treatment over rivals - may co-exist with patronage, or even replace it. It often does; the
embattled estates who contended with the kings and princes of Germany, and even with
the Emperor, and the privilegies and noblesse de robe who organised the opposition of
the parlements and the municipalities to the 'encroachments' of royal power regarded the
titles, the offices, and the incomes their ancestors had bought as lawful entitlements, not
benefices.
The most important function of the patron-client relationship in all its various forms is to
serve as a mechanism for mobilising political, or military, or economic power. Just as
important, it is worth noting briefly, is the demobilising effect of corruption and venality.
For when official posts, preferential treatment, and other favours are seen as saleable
commodities, any sense of enduring obligation which the relationship subtends has to be
foregone - and even reversed, sometimes.
In the earliest days of Rome, the distinctions which prevailed between patricians and
plebs were founded on socio-economic status but were closely interrelated with the
variety of relationships which existed between landlord and tenant, creditor and debtor
and perhaps chief and clansman. Such relationships seem to have merged early on with
that of patron and client, a central and enduring characteristic feature of Roman life
throughout its entire history.
Clientage in early Roman times involved a kind of peonage (although this may have been
started by the Roman practice of 'absorbing' people from the tribes of Latium they had
conquered). The landowning patricians were themselves farmers, keeping for their own
use a home farm which they ran with the help of their sons and a few slaves. The rest of
the land they owned they allowed their clients - prisoners of war (and their children)
together with, probably, plebeians with little or no land of their own - to occupy and farm
in return for payment in kind and in services. In the case of plebeians (who were of
course citizens), such services included political support in elections as well as armed
service under the command of their patron in war. But the same, or similar, relationships
turn up in a wide variety of guises. Slaves manumitted by a citizen became his clients,
and the relationship was in theory held to persist until either the patron's or the freedman's
line died out. The same applied to prisoners of war and to refugees, exiles, debtors and
others who could obtain protection by surrendering themselves to a patron.
Although the institution of clientela, in its strict, legally enforceable, form, had lost some
of its force by the later Republic, the exchange of loyal service for protection and
patronage seems to have remained a characteristic feature of Roman life. Moreover, "at
the very end of Roman history we find again, in the relationship between landowner and
half-free tenant (colonis), almost the same form of client status that existed in the earlier
period."11
V
The question arises of how to account for the sheer survival of the Greek cities and the
Roman republic under these circumstances, let alone the unique intellectual and cultural
vitality of the one and the unsurpassed imperial achievement of the other.
The same question posed itself to the Greeks and Romans, too, and the writings on
history and politics of Herodotus and Thucydides, Polybius and Livy, of Plato, Aristotle
and Cicero are, in some respects, attempts to solve the puzzle.
There are four answers, broadly speaking, to be found in what they have written. The
first, and most familiar, is the interpretation of both the cultural, political intellectual and
military achievements and the conflicts and discord as manifestations of the same
endeavour (which they also reflected in their writings), namely, the search for the social,
political and moral conditions of existence which would enable men to satisfy their deep-
11
W. Kunkel, Introduction to Roman Legal and Constitutional History 2nd. edn. (trans. J.M.Kelly), O.U.P.,
1971, p.7.
13
seated desire for justice, virtue, the good life and the fulfillment of whatever individual
skills and capacities they had.
The second answer, as negative as the first is positive, is that the affairs of men, while not
entirely governed by chance, were liable at all times to the unforeseeable and
uncontrollable intrusion into their lives of Fortune - tyche. In so far as this was visible
retrospectively (or prospectively, if oracles and auguries were consulted and rightly
interpreted) as bringing good luck or bad, it was regarded as the result either of
providential interventions by non-human forces (which only the ignorant and gullible
really believed were propitiable) on the side of an individual or a community, or of false
hopes and mischance leading them to catastrophe. There was a connection between good
and bad fortune and whether or not the basic rules of virtue and justice had been
observed, but it was deeply buried and, as the Greek tragedies which have survived show,
often unfathomable.
Then there was a third answer. (None of these, incidentally, is to be thought of as
incompatible with the others.) This was the product of a merging of the kind of analytical
understanding of political systems we accept as Aristotelian with what was thought of as
a pragmatic understanding of history: the notion that there was a virtually cyclical
movement through different kinds of political situation and constitution. The three kinds
were labelled monarchy (or tyranny); aristocracy (or oligarchy); and democracy (or
ochlocracy): rule by the one, the few, or the many, with the better or the worse versions
of each serving as alternative possiblities at each transition, or with the worse version
(tyranny, oligarchy, ochlocracy) proving the successor to the better (monarchy,
aristocracy, democracy) with the onset of degeneration.
In the case of Rome, there is a fourth and final answer, and here there is a semblance of
chronology in the sequence. It is to be found in Polybius, although its later enunciation by
Cicero is more definitive, and familiar. Not surprisingly, it turns out to be a
rationalisation of the constitution (somewhat idealised) of the later Republic. This, it was
claimed, was a constitution which avoids the instability inherent in any one of the three
'ideal type' polities based on the rule of the one, the few, or the many, by incorporating
elements of all three. What is more, this happy solution had been arrived at 'naturally',
i.e., by having evolved through the centuries. The right constitutional mix, says Cicero, is
for there to be something which provides an element of royalty, of distinction, something
else which will allow for added weight to be allotted to the opinion of the more important
citizens, and provision for certain matters to be left to the judgment and wishes of the
citizenry at large. 12
By the time Cicero was writing, the mix had started to ferment, so to speak, and to form
precipitates. But the formal structure was still supposed to exist, or to be capable of
12
Cicero, De re publica, I, xlv. The same comfortable notion seems to have been the view of their own
English constitution common among English patricians, or at least their professional spokesmen, during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and the twentieth century, too, for that matter). See W. Bagehot, The
English Constitution (1867), Fontana edn., 1963, p.80.
revival, was constantly invoked and, unbelievable as it has seemed ever since, was
claimed by Augustus, when he was completing its destruction, to be formally 'restored.'
VI
When the Roman Republic began, the trappings of former royalty did pass on to the
senior magistrates - praetors, then consuls - but there were two of them, and they held
office for no more than a year. Their most important function was military leadership, as
had been the case with the kings, but the executive powers associated with leadership in
war ceased to be operative within the boundaries of the city.
The two functions of military leadership and executive authority, together with the
administration of justice within the city and the government of Roman possessions
formed a unitary and all-embracing authority to command. This was imperium. Above
and beyond everything else, imperium meant supreme command in war, but, since Rome
was perpetually either engaged in war or actively preparing for it, imperium, though
essentially military, stood from the very beginning for command of a nation in arms. It
was not specialised in function. "The holder was empowered to act for the state in every
branch of its life. In peace as well as in war he could 'coerce' the private citizen. He was
the supreme judge in matters civil and criminal.13
In other words, the power inherent in 'the people' was conferred (by a special vote of the
assembly) on the two consuls. The consuls' power was absolute, except where it was
qualified by specific laws enacted by senate and people or by the specific powers they
had conferred on specific magistrates. As Finley remarks, this contrasts with what
obtained in Greece, where magistrates could impose fines for offences but could go no
further without specific authorisation.14
Central to the influence which Roman institutions have exercised over the minds of the
people directly involved in the kind of actions and deliberations which have produced the
modern state has been the model Rome has presented of what constitutes sovereignty: the
totality of legal and administrative authority and lawful power to coerce: and of the
separate elements which go to its making. The core of the concept is imperium.
Yet imperium, to begin with, was an impersonal construct, unthinkable in terms of
lifetime personal sovereignty. It was a single entity which could be, and was, divested of
distinct pieces, each of which carried a specific, almost measurable, portion of the total.
All the different pieces, when put together, could represent no more - as they could
assuredly represent no less - than the authority and command over power which, in the
earliest days, were vested in two consuls for a year or, in times of extreme emergency, in
one person, a dictator.
According to the principles of the Roman constitution, power lay with the people.
Moreover, even if that power was siphoned off and distributed among the individual
13
14
H.S.Jones, "The Early Republic", Cambridge Ancient History, Vol.7, chap. 14, C.U.P., 1928, pp.441-2.
M.I.Finley, Politics in the Ancient World, C.U.P., 1983, p. 20.
15
patricians who filled the higher magistral offices, those to whom power was thus
surrendered were nevertheless to be guided in all things by one condition, namely, that
the welfare and safety of the people was the supreme law: salus populi suprema lex esto.
No distinction was made, or was feasible, between what may nowadays, at times, stand as
almost opposing principles: the national interest and the public good.
The Romans, like the Greeks, were not, and did not see themselves as, citizens of a state,
still less as its subjects. They were the state. We have to understand by that not merely the
political community but a moral, quasi religious, entity, with the adherence of the
individual to the citizen body almost a matter of communion rather than, in our terms, a
contractual relationship involving obligations and rights. Hence, the fact that there was
constant tension between groups, between factions, and between individual nobles and
their families and followers had no direct bearing on the continued existence of the
community as a politically constituted unit except in so far as it weakened its defences
against possible conquest and its consequence in permanent subjection, enslavement or
even extermination.
Internal conflict did not even necessarily connote the onset of changes in the political,
social or economic structure, or in all three, which is the orthodox, the 'natural'
interpretation of such conflict in the modern state. Of course there were political changes,
and conflicts were about them (or about bringing them about). What has to be borne in
mind is that the idea of history as progress, or even as a process of irreversible change, is
an invention of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Political changes were regarded in
ancient Rome either as departures from what was the true, the permanent, structure of the
Republic, and to be regarded therefore as temporary emergency situations, or as
unconstitutional and illegal, or as moves towards its restoration. Indeed, when the greatest
change of all was carried through by Augustus, and the Republic itself (in our eyes)
extinguished, it was represented as being in strict accordance with the constitution of the
Republic - in fact, as a set of measures designed to restore the Republic after the
transgressions of Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and Antony.
Economic change, in the sense of systemic change, was not recognisable as such. Social
change was so slow that, although later generations were certainly conscious of changes
that had happened (for example, the emergence into relative affluence and some political
influence of the 'new men' and the institution of a new social order of 'knights', or the
spread of degenerate practices of the kind highlighted by satirists), it was a fairly
imperceptible or unregarded process, especially when measured against intellectual and
cultural changes, the spread of empire, and the rush of events. Even what we would now
regard as revolutionary political changes were, seemingly, treated more as a 'fact of life',
i.e., part of the climate of fear and of expectation of disaster, or of hope of release and
prosperity, in which people lived their lives - as we do now, although the fears and the
hopes may be different.
VII
Yet, and of course, things did change. The Republic which Augustus claimed to have
restored after the long succession of civil wars and the extra-constitutional concentration
of powers into the hands of one, two, or three men can be regarded as a transparent sham.
It usually is. The Roman Empire is conventionally dated from 29 B.C., with the
inauguration of Augustus as 'princeps'. On the other hand, two years later, in 27 B.C., he
annulled all the 'illegal and unjust ordinances' he had issued during the civil war, resigned
to the Senate and the people all the provinces which were still officially governed in his
name by the legates he had appointed during the six years he had been consul and, in his
own words, "transferred the Republic from my own authority to the free disposal of the
Senate and the people of Rome." True, he was again consul (for the seventh time), and so
retained command of the army; but he announced that the seventh would be his last
consulship, and he had, after all, disbanded more than half the sixty legions which had
composed his army two years earlier.
It was all theatre. Three days later, the title of Augustus was conferred on him and he was
nominated 'princeps'. As consul, which he still was, he retained command of all the
provinces that mattered: i.e., where the army was stationed; even when he did finally
resign the consulship, he still kept command of the army as proconsul. What was more,
he was given the right, still without precedent, to exercise the full powers of imperium
within Rome itself.
The brief specification given here of the construction of Augustan sovereignty out of a
complex variety of institutional survivals from Rome's republican past is meant to serve
two purposes. In the first place, it does, I believe, make it easier to bring into
comprehensible mental focus what is for us a strange and mystifying moral, intellectual
and institutional apparatus which terms like 'republic', 'city state' and 'empire' obscure for
us rather than reveal.
Secondly, the account displays in snapshot form the actual process of transformation
itself. Because, even if the constellation of powers and entitlements which Augustus put
together were, individually, strictly constitutional, and even if putting them together and
attaching them to a single person was no more than an extrapolation from precedents
established by Marius and Pompey and Caesar, the role Augustus played was
unprecedented. As it was worked out in practice, it served as the model - in fact, the
matrix itself - from which absolutism and sovereignty were subsequently formed; the
very titles adopted by later claimants to sovereignty - emperor, czar and Kaiser, prince were imitated from his. In sheer effectiveness and in the degree to which power and
authority was concentrated in the hands of a single person, it went beyond anything that
followed, at least in Western Europe, until the time of Napoleon; and Napoleon's period
of absolute rule, and his empire, lasted rather less than fifteen years. Augustus 'reigned'
for forty-one years and was first of a line of emperors which lasted many centuries.
17
Augustus is the greatest of all opportunists. Other major instances, like the coup of
Brumaire which put Bonaparte at the head of government, or Lenin's manipulation of
political forces in the second half of 1917 do not even remotely compare with Augustus'
achievement.
Imperium in its strict, narrow, sense of command of the army in the field and the wide
powers that went with it was undoubtedly the most important set of powers handed over
to Augustus. From the very beginning of the Republic, the authority of the praetor, later
the consul, comprehended "the areas which were later described as coercitio (executive
power) and iurisdictio (jurisdiction), and which, together with the function of military
command (imperium in the narrow sense), made up the concept of all-embracing
authority (imperium in the wider sense)."1515. Imperium remained attached to the office
of consul, proconsul or praetor. (The title 'imperator’ had been reserved for a
commander-in-chief after an outstanding military success. Hence it is no surprise to find
Cicero, always the constitutionalist, naming the populus - of Rome, that is - as 'imperator
of all peoples'.) In the case of Augustus and his successors, the likelihood is that a lex de
imperio was passed which empowered them to make treaties with whomsoever they
chose, and with it, presumably, the power to make peace or war, a power which had
previously belonged to the comitia.
Those elements of sovereignty which had inhered in the Roman people as a whole (i.e., in
the comitia), as against the Senate, were transferred to Augustus in two other items of the
bundle of official titles and magistral powers. He had earlier been granted the
inviolability attached to the office of tribune, and to this was now added the
administrative power and competence proper to the office of tribune without, however,
being elected to the office. This was a separation of powers from obligations which was
without precedent.
By the same law, the princeps was given "the right and power to do all such things as he
may deem to serve the interests of the Republic and the dignity of all things divine and
human, public and private,"16 a 'right and power' confirmed by his being made pontifex
maximus.
This is an office which is more difficult than most to render in terms of modern or
understandable equivalencies. There was no separate priesthood; religious rituals and
ceremonies were carried out by members of a priestly college (rather than order). The
members of the colleges were also, ordinarily, magistrates, with civil and sometimes
military responsibilities. What was special about the pontifex maximus was that,
traditionally, it was he, together with his colleagues, who acted as guardian of the criteria
laid down 'by the gods' for distinguishing between right and wrong; the form which these
criteria took made them directly applicable to the judgments of magistrates and to the
opinions uttered by people who had been magistrates and were thus called upon, or
entitled , to speak with auctoritas. The point of importance here is that the terms in which
15
16
W. Kunkel, Introduction to Roman Legal and Constitutional History, p.15.
H.S.Jones, "The Princeps", Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. 10, C.U.P., chap. 5, p.141.
the powers and responsibilities of the pontifex maximus were couched relate to the notion
of a higher moral order which bound together all the members of a community.
The Roman notion of a moral order which underlay - or, rather, enjoined - the prevailing
social order resembles that of the Greek concept of koinonia in its effects, but was
significantly different in form. Ius denotes an order morally binding on every individual divine as well as human. Ius divinum, however, was something discernible only to the
pontifices who were its guardians, and was distinct from ius humanum. "They alone could
distinguish fas from nefas, properly that which might be uttered from that which might
not; these terms were especially applicable to the utterances of authority....In the course
of time fas came to signify in general that which the gods permitted, and eventually the
word seems to have acquired the meaning of a sort of code of ius divinum".17
Augustus' pontifical powers, somewhat diluted, of course, by the growth over the
centuries of sophistication along with wealth and territorial acquisitions, were reinforced
by the law which conferred on him the appellation divus, which gained some currency
during his lifetime and was required by law after his death, and the name Augustus in
place of Octavius. Emperor worship had no place in Rome or the West until three
centuries later, but it had some significance in the eastern (and by far the richer and more
populous) half of the Empire, where the kings who ruled the parts into which Alexander's
empire had been divided up had claimed for themselves the observances and deference
reserved for gods to the point at which people who came before them prostrated
themselves. The special significance of the name Augustus is that it linked him with the
founder of Rome, Romulus; both, on first taking the auspices, had been vouchsafed
augusto augurio - the sign of the Twelve Vultures.
There was nothing exceptional, or exceptionable, about the titles conferred on Augustus.
All the bits and pieces which went to make up Augustus' sovereignty were transferred to
him legally and according to customary practice. Laws to that effect were introduced into
the Senate, approved by it, and passed by the tribunes of the people or in the comitia. So
far as constitutional forms and their observance was concerned, the Republic was still in
being. There was ample historical precedent for each one of the assortment of rights,
powers, privileges and honours which he had chosen to adopt or have conferred on him.
What was really new was the sheer comprehensiveness and lifetime duration of his full
set of offices and official powers. Under the Principate, which lasted until A.D.284, what
passes nowadays for absolute sovereignty remained attached in name to the people, but
the constellation of powers and privileges held by any Caesar Augustus Imperator
belonged to one person, for him to dispose of or allocate as he wished. He could, and did,
extend or detach any such powers to an heir, a fellow consul (there continued to be two),
or to one or more legates who were empowered to rule provinces or command armies in
his name. Imperium was still the impersonal construct it had always been; pieces of it
could be broken off and allocated to different persons. This was in fact the style
ordinarily chosen for nominating a successor - i.e., by according him some of the powers
and titles proper to Caesar Augustus. All such procedures followed constitutional forms
17
W. Kunkel, Introduction to Roman Legal and Constitutional History , p.26.
19
because of his role as 'princeps', who was simply the senator first called upon to voice his
opinion in any matter of public policy which came before the Senate. Once voiced, the
opinion of the princeps on any issue was enough to set in train the whole process of
senate consultation and vote by acclamation by the Roman people.
It is the quite idiosyncratic juxtaposition of republican forms and imperial actualities
which makes it possible to enumerate the different elements which went together to make
the position of Caesar Augustus Imperator what it was. It is also what makes it worth
while descending to particularities so remote, at first sight, from our main concern. For it
is this first and only instance of its being put together in a legitimate, constitutional,
manner which makes it possible to analyse in detail what constitutes sovereignty - of the
kind we now think attaches to the duly constituted government of modern states rather
than the heavily qualified 'absolutism' which made its debut in the sixteenth century.