Rome in the Late Republic

130 Pages·2000·2.46 MB·English

by  Mary Beard

ROME IN THE LATE
REPUBLIC
Problems and Interpretations
SECOND EDITION
Mary Beard &
Michael Crawford
Bristol Classical Press
This impression 2012
Second edition 1999
First published in 1985 by
Bristol Classical Press
an imprint of
Bloomsbury Academic
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square
London WC1B3DP
Copyright © Mary Beard & Michael Crawford 1985, 1999
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN 978 0 7156 2928 4
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY
www.bloomsburyacademic.com
Contents
Preface v
Introduction vi
1. The Nature of the Problem 1
2. The Cultural Horizons of the Aristocracy 12
3. Religion 25
4. Political Institutions 40
5. The Working of Politics 60
6. Rome and the Outside World 72
Epilogue 85
Appendix: Literary sources in translation 93
Bibliography and abbreviations 97
Index 119

Preface
This book is the result of a happy co-operation — not only between the
two authors, who have survived their partnership without a serious
quarrel, but also between the authors and many of their friends, who
have generously read and commented on all or part of the text. Spe­
cial thanks are due to Keith Hopkins, who improved not only the argu­
ment, but also the English of all he read; and also to Graham Burton,
Averil Cameron, Robin Cormack, John Crook (for kind instruction
in Roman Law), Carlotta Dionisotti, John North, Simon Price, Richard
Sailer and Brent Shaw. We have happily incorporated many of their
suggestions. They bear no responsibility where we have wilfully ignored
them.
We should also like to thank Joyce Reynolds, not for any help with
this book — which is a present for her — but for all that she has taught
us both over many years.
1985 W. M. B.
M. H. C.
Fourteen years after writing our original preface, we should just like
to say again how grateful we are to Joyce Reynolds, with whom we
have both continued to work, play and learn, in the comfort of British
libraries or looking at inscriptions in the field.
1999 W. M. B.
M. H. C.
Introduction
Cicero would have disapproved of this book. He would have been dis­
tressed to find his own part in it so small; and he probably would not
have seen why we have defined the problems of the late Republic in
the way we have. That is precisely what we intended. It is impossible
now to understand the first century BC in first-century terms. We have
aimed at a far more straightforward — and at the same time more
challenging — goal: that is to make the first century make sense for us
in our own twentieth-century terms.
We have written a short book — again unlike Cicero! For most of our
readership — some sixth-formers, undergraduates and their teachers —
we imagine that this will seem a considerable advantage. But inevita­
ble consequences follow. First we have had to assume some basic
knowledge of the narrative history and physical environment of the
late Republic. Absolute beginners are advised to read the relevant sec­
tions of Scullard’s Gracchi to Nero and Brunt’s Social Conflicts before turn­
ing to what we have to say. They are also advised to acquire some grasp
of the geography of Italy and the Mediterranean — see, for example,
T. J. Cornell and J. Matthews, Atlas of the Roman World (Oxford, 1982).
Secondly, we have been forced to be highly selective. Most of our own
favourite topics are included, and our favourite books and articles men­
tioned. We apologise in advance to those who find their own favourites
missing.
The main text stands on its own; but the footnotes form an impor­
tant part of the book, in providing a guide to further reading on many
topics we have treated sketchily. In writing these footnotes we have
decided to refer to no works in languages other than English (except
picture books) and to indicate, where possible, the degree of difficulty
of the works we do cite. Full details of works cited by short title only
may be found in the Bibliography, which also lists all the other modem
literature we have mentioned. Since we assume our readers will have
become familiar with Brunt’s Social Conflicts and Scullard’s Gracchi to
Nero, we have not normally mentioned them in our notes; they are rele­
vant to a very large part of what we have to say. The Appendix lists
readily available translations of ancient sources we have cited.
1985
Introduction vii
Before you read on...
Ancient History changes quickly: new ideas and new discoveries
are always making a difference to the way we analyse any historical
problem or period. Fifteen years on we are grateful to our publishers
for inviting us to accompany this edition of Rome in the Late Republic
with a short account of recent work in the field and with a bit of
self-criticism, offered of course with the benefit of hindsight.
If we were starting afresh, we would still adopt much the same strat­
egy as we did in 1985. We would still subvert your expectations by
starting with a chapter on the culture of the late Republic, closely
followed by religion, though it would now be curiously self-effacing,
in the light of Beard, North and Price, Religions of Rome, for us to
claim (as we did on p. 25) that ‘there is no reliable modern handbook
of Roman religion in English’. We would still regard the fashion for
biographies of ‘heroes of the nations’ (from respectable portraits of
Cicero to lurid accounts of ‘tarnished triumvirs’) as completely
misguided, now more convinced than ever that the reassembled ‘life
stories’ of even the best documented characters of the period are
worth more as fiction than as history.
Yet, in other respects, the emphasis of the work might have
changed. The publication of Paul Zanker’s The Power of Images in
1988, though largely concerned with Augustus, helped to stimulate
a whole new way of seeing the importance of Roman imagery and
its physical setting. Historians writing in the 1990s have been much
more alert to the interaction between Roman culture and politics,
and such things as the layout of the Forum, the human geography
of Italy and even the mountains and deserts of the Mediterranean.
To understand Tiberius Gracchus, we now see much more clearly
than before that you need to understand the space in which he oper­
ated and addressed the Roman people. Likewise, travellers of the late
nineteenth century knew well, but later historians have tended to
forget, that Cicero spent many weeks of his life being conveyed
across the alternately freezing and burning Anatolian plateau: his
way of seeing and understanding his world cannot fail to have been
influenced by such experiences. Claude Nicolet’s Space, Geography
and Politics has shown us how much we can reconstruct of the way
the Romans mapped their world.
There would also be changes in tone if we were writing this book
now. Some of the battles we thought we were fighting (happily) no
longer seem so urgent. Our chapter on Religion would no longer
need to be so strident about avoiding a Christianising perspective.
viii Introduction
And much recent work has broken out of the stereotype of being
exclusively ‘history’ or ‘culture’; in fact our chapter on the Cultural
Horizons of the Aristocracy would now be a contribution to a
debate on what is called ‘the Roman cultural revolution’ (and it
might well have more to say about those outside the aristocracy
than it did in 1985). Much of this debate, as well as recent discussions
on the phenomenon of ‘becoming Roman’, has gone beyond the rela­
tively simple teleology (as if there was a clear progression between
non-Roman and Roman, non-Hellenised and Hellenised) that some­
times underlay what we wrote.
We remain pleased at the dissent that was provoked by some fea­
tures of the book and hope that it will go on provoking students
and colleagues to think (self-)critically about the late Republic.
1999
Chapter One
THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM
By the mid-first century BC, the republican form of government at
Rome had effectively collapsed. Out of this collapse there emerged,
in the aftermath of civil war, first the dictatorship of Caesar and then
the principate of Augustus. In a swift and striking transformation, a
political system founded upon principles fundamentally opposed to
monarchy was replaced by a system monarchical in all but name.
So far, the narrative is simple — and would not be questioned by any
historian, ancient or modern.
By contrast, the causes of the collapse and the steps which led up
to the final outbreak of civil war are far from straightforward. The
modern literature on the subject is vast and there are many areas of
controversy. Different occasions have been proposed as the ultimate
origin of the revolution. Different events have been accorded special
significance in the build up to civil war. Historians have isolated differ­
ent factors in the search for the underlying cause for the whole process.
So, for example, in some accounts (ancient and modern) we find the
breaking point set in 133 BC — when political conflict led to violence
and the tribune Tiberius Gracchus was lynched. In others it is set in
60 BC — when Pompey, Caesar and Crassus formed an unofficial com­
pact which effectively dominated the operation of politics. This diver­
sity is illuminating; for it throws into prominence many events whose
significance might otherwise be overlooked. But it also causes problems,
presenting us with a series of seemingly mutually exclusive explana­
tions for the collapse of the Republic.1
The idea that there was a single start to the process is itself
problematic. Scholars have always recognised that any sharp boundary
1. Asinius Pollio (76 BC- AD 4) chose 60 BC as the starting point of his History of the
Civil Wars; likewise Syme, Roman Revolution (see, especially, pp. 1-9). The Civil Wars of
Appian (written in the second century AD) and Scullard’s Gracchi to Nero start, by con­
trast, in 133 BC. For other views on the ‘turning point’ of late Republican history, see
Gruen, Last Generation, esp. 1-5 and 498-507 (but note the criticisms of M. H. Crawford,
JRS 66 (1976), 214-217); and Badian, ‘Gracchi to Sulla’, 215.