not only of tradition but also of earlier historical accounts.
There certainly are some problems with the details of the Conflict of the Orders as they have come down to us. One question that has exercised scholars is why several of the early consuls, including Lucius Junius Brutus himself, appear to have been plebeians at a time when only patricians were supposedly eligible. The answer may be that the clear distinction between the orders may only have developed later, but this is a puzzle-problem to which there is no definite solution.
Even if the details and dates of this protracted struggle as recounted by Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and other ancient sources are fictitious, there can be no doubt that from at least the third century BCE, the dominant elite in the Roman Republic was a combined patricio-plebeian aristocracy, which controlled not only the high magistracies of state, but also the senate, and the state religion. (See Stuart Stavely 2014.) It is significant that, from the fourth century BCE, every senatorial family was forever labeled as either patrician or plebeian, and the only way one could switch from one order to the other was by adoption, though entry to the plebeian part of the aristocracy was open to novi homines from outside.
“Monopoly of Office and Power”
But the fact that the Republic was dominated by a small elite is not in doubt. In rejecting this position, Millar was flying in the face of the evidence and opposing not only the Gelzer school of German scholars but also his own supervisor in Oxford, Sir Ronald Syme. (Syme 1939, p. 124.)
Gary Forsythe provides evidence of “…multiple offices shared by the same two individuals”, one patrician and the other plebeian, between 366 and 264 BCE, the century before the First Punic War. Forsythe lists no fewer than 16 such pairs, plus three further “…instances in which one person held two consulships with two brothers or members of the same family.” In addition, Forsythe notes the high frequency of repeat consulates in the twenty-five years after the reorganisation of 367 BCE. It is easy to pooh-pooh the Consular Fasti, the official list of consuls as recorded in the so-called Fasti Capitolini, as Millar does because they date only from the time of Augustus, but Forsyth based his observations on Livy’s history as well, which was also written during the reign of Augustus.
On the basis of detailed prosopographical evidence, Ernst Badian found that “…the proportion of consuls who came from families that had already produced at least one consul never fell below 70 percent in the whole period between 179 and 49 BCE.” (Badian 1990, pp. 371–413.)
Patronage or Clientela
Millar took issue with Matthias Gelzer’s classic view, advanced in 1912, that the Roman Republic was dominated by “a homogeneous elite (or ‘aristocracy’ or ‘nobility’) controlling the mass of the people through a network of patronage relationships.” (Millar, Ibid., p. 92.)
Gelzer may possibly have overestimated the importance of patronage in elections, but it is hard to believe that it played no role at all, considering its antiquity and the fact that it was clearly still alive and well in the Principate, not a time when it could suddenly have sprung into existence. In addition, there was a persistent aristocratic ethos throughout Roman history. A.H.M. (“Hugo”) Jones described the people of Athens in the fifth century BCE as “…rather snobbish in their choice of leaders” (Jones 1957, p. 49) even though their regime was decidedly anti-aristocratic. The same can be said of the Roman plebs both during the aristocratic dominance of the middle Republic and in their support of Populares in the late republic.
Following Peter Brunt, Millar argued against Gelzer that “…such patronage relations cannot serve as the key to understanding the political process in Rome.” I will take Millar’s and Brunt’s points one by one.
The citizen body of Rome was too large for such a system to have operated effectively (Millar, as paraphrased by Guy Maclean Rogers as editor of Millar’s Rome, the Greek World, and the East.) Referring to patronage or clientela as a “system” is a mistake. This mistake sets patronage up as an “Aunt Sally” or straw man, making it easy to knock down. In fact, clientela was not a “system” and cannot, therefore, be expected to have “operated effectively”, whatever that is supposed to mean. Patronage was an informal social institution. And, of course, not every Roman would have been a patron or a client.
Patronage was “marginal” in the Republic but “…enjoyed a heyday under the principate” and “…flourished under the late empire” (Brunt 1988). There is little doubt about the importance of patronage in the later Roman Empire, more usually under the title patrocinium, which eventually morphed into the medieval seigniorial system. (See Arnheim 1972.) What about the Principate? The Epigrams of the Roman poet Martial, published between 86 and 103 CE, show that patronage was alive and well during the Principate but probably less political than social and financial. “With the commencement of the Principate,” writes Yavetz, “the emperors became in a sense the patroni of the entire urban plebs.” (Yavetz 1988, p. 152.) Garnsey, however, opines, “If everyone is a client, no one is.” (Garnsey in McGill, Scott et al 2010, p. 44.)
This misses the point. According to Yavetz’s cogent portrayal, the emperor was the patron “…of the entire urban plebs” but not of the whole population. There is a very big difference between the two. The plebs had long been opposed to the senatorial aristocracy and had their own champions, the Populares, culminating in Julius Caesar, a position which Augustus, as Caesar’s heir, prized and cultivated. Hence, the use of the tribunician power by Augustus and all his successors. But Augustus was careful to balance his position as champion of the plebs with his claim to be the restorer of the Republic.
Brunt’s idea that patronage relations during the Republic were “…fragile, peripheral, short-lived, and did not count for very much” may possibly be correct as far as the turbulent late Republic was concerned but less likely for the middle Republic. (Brunt 1988.) There is evidence of patronage going all the way back to the Menaechmi of Plautus (c. 254–184 BCE), which indicates that rich men liked to be the patrons of as many clients as possible.
I agree with Professor John North’s characterization of the Brunt view as one of “sweeping negativity.” Brunt’s position was largely an argument from silence, based on the fact that “…clients are much less conspicuous in the sources” than we would expect if patronage was as important as was traditionally believed. North’s comment is apt: “It is quite possible that the basic relationships of society, so familiar to contemporaries, should be assumed and rarely referred to in contemporary texts”. (North 1989, p. 155.) But in fact, as Garnsey admits and as Brunt’s own footnotes show, the sources are by no means silent on patronage.
Polybius Was Right
Up to now we have been concerned with the tendency on the part of certain modern writers to dismiss large amounts of ancient evidence out of hand, with the danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We now come to the opposite tendency, namely to accept too uncritically certain other ancient evidence. Some writers even have managed to combine both these opposite tendencies in the same book. One particularly disquieting tendency is to accept too readily any suggestion that the Roman Republic was democratic and even that the Principate of Augustus had democratic elements.
The evidence is quite clear, however, that the Roman Republic was an oligarchy or an aristocracy controlled by a senatorial elite, which, however, was open to novi homines. This is a modified version of the traditional view that can be traced back to Matthias Gelzer’s Nobilität der römischen Republik (1912). Until the 1980s there was a basic consensus, in the words of Professor Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp, “that the social and political order of the libera res publica
