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Document A: Polybius
11. I have given an account of the constitution of Lycurgus. I will now endeavour to
describe that of Rome at the period of their disastrous defeat at Cannae (216 BCE).
I am fully conscious that to those who actually live under this constitution I shall appear
to give an inadequate account of it by the omission of certain details. Knowing
accurately every portion of it from personal experience and from having been bred up in
its customs and laws from childhood, they will not be struck so much by the accuracy of
the description, as annoyed by its omissions; nor will they believe that the historian has
purposely omitted unimportant distinctions, but will attribute his silence upon the origin
of existing institutions or other important facts to ignorance. What is told they depreciate
as insignificant or beside the purpose. What is omitted they demand as vital to the
question, their object being to appear to know more than the writers. But a good critic
should not judge a writer by what he leaves unsaid, but from what he says. If he detects
misstatement in the latter, he may then feel certain that ignorance accounts for the
former; but if what he says is accurate, his omissions ought to be attributed to
deliberated judgment and not to ignorance. So much for those whose criticisms are
prompted by personal ambition rather than by justice. . . .
Another requisite for obtaining a judicious approval for an historical disquisition is that it
should be germane to the matter in hand. If this is not observed, though its style may be
excellent and its matter irreproachable, it will seem out of place, and disgust rather than
please. . . .
As for the Roman constitution, it had three elements, each of them possessing
sovereign powers; and their respective share of power in the whole state had been
regulated with such a scrupulous regard to equality and equilibrium that no one could
say for certain, not even a native, whether the constitution as a whole were an
aristocracy or democracy or despotism. And no wonder, for if we confine our
observation to the power of the consuls, we should be inclined to regard it as despotic; if
on that of the Senate, as aristocratic; and if finally one looks at the power possessed by
the people, it would seem a clear case of a democracy. What the exact powers of these
several parts were and still, with slight modifications, are, I will now state.
12. The consuls, before leading out the legions, remain in Rome and are supreme
masters of the administration. All other magistrates except the tribunes are under them
and take their orders. They introduce foreign ambassadors to the Senate; bring matters
requiring deliberation before it; and see to the execution of its decrees. If, again, there
are any matters of state which require the authorization of the people it is their business
to see to them, to summon the popular meetings, to bring the proposals before them,
and to carry out the decrees of the majority. In the preparations for war also, and in a
word in the entire administration of a campaign, they have all but absolute power. It is
competent to them to impose on the allies such levies as they think good, to appoint the
military tribunes, to make up the roll for soldiers and select those that are suitable.
Besides, they have absolute power of inflicting punishment on all who are under their
command while on active service. They have authority to expend as much of the public
money as they choose, being accompanied by a quaestor who is entirely at their orders.
A survey of these powers would in fact justify our describing the constitution as despotic
— a clear case of royal government. Nor will it affect the truth of my description, if any of
the institutions I have described are changed in our time or in that of our posterity. The
same remarks apply to what follows.
13. The Senate has first of all the control of the treasury and regulates the receipts and
disbursements alike. For the quaestors cannot issue any public money for the various
departments of the state without a decree of the Senate, except for the service of the
consuls. The Senate controls also what is by far the largest and most important
expenditure, that, namely, which is made by the censors every lustrum for the repair or
construction of public buildings. This money cannot be obtained by the censors except
by the grant of the Senate. Similarly all crimes committed in Italy requiring a public
investigation, such as treason, conspiracy, poisoning, or wilful murder, are in the hands
of the Senate. Besides, if any individual or state among the Italian allies requires a
controversy to be settled, a penalty to be assessed, help or protection to be afforded —
all this is the province of the Senate. Or again. outside Italy, if it is necessary to send an
embassy to reconcile warring communities or to remind them of their duty or sometimes
to impose requisitions upon them or to receive their submission or, finally, to proclaim
war against them — this, too, is the business of the Senate. In like manner the reception
to be given to foreign ambassadors in Rome and the answers to be returned to them
are decided by the Senate. With such business the people have nothing to do.
Consequently, if one were staying at Rome when the consuls were not in town, one
would imagine the constitution to be complete aristocracy. This has been the idea
entertained by many Greeks and by many kings as well, from the fact that nearly all the
business they had with Rome was settled by the Senate.
14. After this, one would naturally be inclined to ask, What part is left for the people in
the constitution, when the Senate has these various functions, especially the control of
the receipts and expenditure of the exchequer; and when the consuls, again, have
absolute power over the details of military preparation and an absolute authority in the
field? There is, however, a part left the people, and it is a most important one. For the
people are the sole fountain of honour and of punishment; and it is by these two things
and these alone that dynasties and constitutions and, in a word, human society are held
together. For where the distinction between them is not sharply drawn both in theory
and practice, there no undertaking can be properly administered — as indeed we might
expect when good and bad are held in exactly the same honour. The people, then, are
the only court to decide matters of life and death; and even in cases where the penalty
is money, if the sum to be assessed is sufficiently serious, and especially when the
accused have held the higher magistracies. And in regard to this arrangement there is
one point deserving especial commendation and record. Men who are on trial for their
lives at Rome, while sentence is in process of being voted — if even only one of the
tribes whose votes are needed to ratify the sentence has not voted — have the privilege
at Rome of openly departing and condemning themselves to a voluntary exile. Such
men are safe at Naples or Praeneste or at Tibur, and at other towns with which this
arrangement has been duly ratified on oath.
Again, it is the people who bestow offices, which are the most honourable rewards of
virtue, on the deserving. They have also the absolute power of passing or repealing
laws; and, most important of all, it is the people who deliberate on the question of peace
or war. And when provisional terms are made for alliance, suspension of hostilities, or
treaties, it is the people who ratify them or the reverse.
These considerations again would lead one to say that the chief power in the state was
the people's and that the constitution was a democracy.
Source: Polybius, The Histories, 167-119 BCE.
Document B: Professor Fergus Millar
If we are to understand the very strange and anomalous political system which the later
Republic was, we have to distinguish between three different things: its formal
structures; the social realities of participation or otherwise in these structures; and the
exercise of power, persuasion, and force between those individuals and groups who did
particulate. As regards formal structures, the fundamental argument of this book is that
our evidence will remain unintelligible unless we accept that the constitution of the
Roman res publica made it a variety of democracy. Every adult male citizen, unless
specifically disqualified, had a vote, and there was no formal exclusion of the poor. Free
slaves could also vote, and the repeated debates and conflicts about whether they
could be registered and cast their votes in any of the thirty-five tribus or should be
confined (as they were in the end) to the four tribus urbanae presupposed the more
fundamental principal that they were citizens, and could vote.
The system within which they voted was characterized by the feature that all voting,
without exception, took place within subgroups (tribus or centuraie). Within each
subgroup, the principle of the majority vote prevailed. The vote of each subgroup, which
counted as one, and the result (whether electoral, legislative, or judicial) was
determined by the majority of group votes. In one of the voting structures, the comitia
centuriata, a principle of stratification by wealth prevailed, according to which the richer
citizens both belonged to centuriae with smaller numbers of individual members and
were able to vote first, with voting being abandoned when a majority (of centuriae) had
been reached. But it is a far more significant fact that in the other group voting structure,
the comitia tribute, no form of social stratification applied, and each citizen’s vote
counted equally.
Finally, it should be stressed that the res publica was a directly democracy, not a
representative one. Membership of the Senate, it is true, was an indirect result of
election to public office. But, which the Senate had important deliberative and even
decision-make and administrative functions, it was in no sense a representative body,
was not a parliament, and could not legislate. The widespread notion that the Senate
was the governing organ of the Roman Republic is not merely misleading, it is
straightforwardly false.
The formal powers of the citizen as voter were divided into three categories. First, there
was a residual role of the comitia to meet as criminal courts. . . . Then there were
elections, conducted by either the comitia centuriata or the comitia tribute, both of which
now met for this purpose in the Campus Martius. Over fifty public offices were not filled
annually by election, and by 63 direct popular election also applied, after repated
conflicts and changes, to vacancies in the “colleges” of priests and to the position of
Pontifex Maximus.
The most fundamental of all the rights of the people was, however, the fact that they,
and they alone, could legislate. Proposals were leges could be put before them only by
a limited group of elected annual magistrates, namely, consuls, praetors, or tribunes. It
was not obligatory, except in the decade following Sulla’s reforms, for any such
proposal to have been approved by the Senate. The comitia centuriata could pass leges
but very rarely did so. The normal assembly for the passage of leges was the comitia
tributa, and it was far more common for laws to be proposed to the assembly by one of
more of the ten tribune plebis of each year than by any other elected officeholders. The
exclusive right of the assemblies to pass legislation is by far the strongest reason why,
in purely formal terms, the Roman res publica has to be characterized as a democracy.
Source: Fergus Millar, The Crowd in the Late Republic, 1998.
Document C: Professor Alan Ward
There are many other ways in which popular sovereignty was not exercised
democratically in the Roman Republic. If all citizens or their democratically elected
representatives in a state have no likelihood of being able to cast their votes regularly,
then those who cannot are effectively disenfranchised, so that their sovereign rights are
only theoretical and of little value. Moreover, under those conditions, one
unrepresentative group of voters can easily dominate sovereign popular institutions at
one time and another at another time, so that the wishes of the people as a whole are
not expressed. That was very much the case in Rome after the early Republic.
As Henrik Mouritsen has cogently pointed out, in response to those who see Rome as
democratic, “The failure to distinguish consistently between the ‘people’ as a political
concept and the ‘people’ as the sum of individuals making up the citizen-body is the
main weakness of the democratic interpretation. While the former held a central place in
the political system, the latter were to a large extent excluded by the workings of the
assemblies. Aside from the previously discussed problems with the unit-voting systems
used in the various assemblies, there were very practical barriers to fair and equitable
voting in the popular assemblies. For example, all voting had to be conducted in Rome.
Once Roman territory had expanded beyond the immediate environs of the city in the
fourth and third centuries, it was mostly the well-to-do rural voters and their clients who
could afford the time and expense to come to Rome to vote.
Moreover, except for electoral assemblies, which were usually held in July, there was
no set schedule of meetings that people living at a distance could easily plan to attend.
In fact, after 286 B.C., it was illegal to hold assemblies on market days, when country
residents would have crowded the city; and at some point before the first century B.C.
legislative comitia were not even allowed to be held within the required period of at least
a trinundinum, which encompassed three market days (a minimum of seventeen days),
between the announcement of electoral candidates and the holding of an election, the
very time when more rural people than usual would have been present because of the
elections. On the other hand, the lex Caecilia Didia of 98 B.C. did ensure that voters
had advance notice of votes on proposed legislation by providing that a trinundinum
must elapse between the promulgation of a bill and when an assembly met to vote on it.
Similarly, in trials before the people it was the practice since at least the third century to
hold the formal assembly for voting on a verdict a trinundinum after the last of the three
public meetings (contiones) that were held in the Forum to hear evidence and speeches
by the prosecution and defense. Therefore, urban voters and many well-to-do rural
voters would have had time to make preparations to vote, but these provisions probably
would have made little difference to poorer rural voters.
The difficulties facing poor rural citizens in coming to Rome to vote would have had little
effect on the comitia centuriata, where the unit votes were already biased toward the
wealthier property owners no matter how many voters showed up, but it greatly
distorted the assemblies that voted by tribes. In the middle Republic, the more
numerous but poorer rural voters were at a distinct disadvantage in tribal assemblies.
Then, in the late Republic, after an enormous influx of poor rural citizens into the urban
center and its environs, where many of them seem to have retained registration in their
rural tribes, poor urbanized voters in rural tribes could outweigh both the large and small
landowners because they lived in Rome where they could more easily vote.
How easily a small number of urban residents registered in a rural tribe could determine
the vote of that tribe is clear from the small percentage of citizens who actually voted.
Ramsay MacMullen persuasively argues that only 2% of Roman citizens usually voted,
which renders any notion of direct democracy nugatory. The picture is not much better
even if one accepts Andrew Lintott’s confessedly optimistic estimate that “about a
quarter of the registered citizen population” voted during elections in the late Republic.
Moreover, those who did vote were often the targets of massive bribery.
Ironically, bribery became a serious problem after the introduction of the secret ballot in
the 130s B.C. While the secret ballot did reinforce popular sovereignty by weakening a
member of the elite’s ability to exert traditional controls over voters whom he might
otherwise have expected to follow his lead, it did nothing to change the inherently
undemocratic voting systems, any attempts to change which were bitterly opposed and
ultimately failed. Instead, the secret ballot provided both the opportunity and the
necessity for competing members of the elite to employ bribery to influence more voters
than they could have through traditional means of patronage and pressure on individual
voters, whose previously open votes were able to be observed. Bribery may well be
more likely than not to occur in democratic societies and, when combined with the
secret ballot, give the voter the freedom to pocket whatever bribes he can get and still
vote as he chooses; but in Republican Rome, it was just another way to try to
manipulate undemocratic voting systems.
Also, in Republican Rome, the secret ballot did nothing to change the undemocratic
situation in which the voters faced only the legislative and electoral choices presented
by the higher magistrates and the plebeian tribunes, who could look forward to
achieving senatorial rank once the senatorial cursus honorum was opened to plebeians
after 367 B.C. Indeed, by the end of the second century, tribunes were even
automatically admitted to the senate. To be eligible to run for these offices, moreover,
one needed to have enough wealth, a minimum of 1,000,000 asses (400,000
sesterces), to be eligible for becoming and remaining a senator. Therefore, even
tribunes, the official defenders of the plebs, either came from plebeian senatorial
families or were plebeians rich enough to be senators. Since they were just starting their
political careers, they tended to work with important senators who could promote their
advancement to higher offices. That would mean, of course, that a tribune might side
with a senator who was radically at odds with a majority of the senate on some issue. If
a tribune happened to propose radical legislation totally unacceptable to a majority of
senators, another of the ten tribunes usually could be found who would veto the
proposal, but if not, there were other ways to silence recalcitrant radicals. Even radical
tribunes often became stalwarts of the establishment once they had made their mark,
particularly if they had had the support of at least some of the elite on a controversial
issue, and started moving up into the higher senatorial ranks.
The voters had no role in selecting candidates for office or in proposing legislation in
any assembly. The presiding official, one of the current senatorial office-holders or a
senatorial appointee, could reject the candidacy of someone whom he thought unworthy
or unqualified. Similarly, the censors, the highest senatorial magistrates, could eject
from the senate anyone who did not meet their standards or pleasure. Thus the senate,
the magistrates, and the tribunes remained firmly in the hands of the elite. At the same
time, the magistrates and tribunes, with or without a prior recommendation from the
senate, were the only ones who could place legislation before the voters.
To be sure, this situation does not mean that in the competitive atmosphere of
Republican politics there was no chance for ordinary citizens to influence the views of
electoral candidates or the legislation placed before the assemblies. One of Millar’s
main arguments for labeling the later Republic a democracy is that the Roman Forum
functioned “not only as the stage for the delivery of political discourse but as the longestablished public space in which the conspectus populi Romani [the onlooking of the
Roman people] could develop into active response and dialogue and into physical
competition for the domination of the area,” where people could express their opinions
pro and con on public issues and electoral candidates. In a recent article, Peter O’Neill
has even perceptively identified references in the sources to one of the mechanisms by
which ordinary citizens among themselves discussed political issues and formulated
their positions, which they could later express, if only by shouting or rioting, in the
Forum. It would have been strange indeed if elite politicians had paid no attention to the
opinions of the crowds whose validation as leaders they sought.
Source: Alan Ward, “How Democratic was the Roman Republic?” 2003.