Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Western democratic triumphalism that followed in its wake, few in the West respect a government that does not conform to Western democratic ideals. That is no problem for historians of ancient Greece, since it is considered the birthplace of those ideals and, therefore, no stigma is attached to their field of study despite the eventual rise of monarchic Hellenistic empires. For the past century, however, historians of ancient Rome have had no period of democratic, or even semi-democratic, freedom to earn contemporary respect and approval for their field of history.
Ever since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, German and Anglo-American scholars have usually rejected the optimistic view of Polybius, the philo-Roman Greek historian who was trying to legitimize the Roman domination of Greece in the eyes of his fellow Greeks when he claimed that the Roman republican constitution embodied the Peripatetic philosophers’ ideal of a balanced mixture of the three good types of constitution: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Scholars like Friedrich Muenzer, Matthias Gelzer, Ronald Syme, Ernst Badian, and T. R. S. Broughton argued that instead of being this balanced mixture, the Roman Republic was really an oligarchy in which a small number of wealthy, land-owning consular noble families controlled the major magistracies, the senate, and the popular assemblies through durable networks of personal relationships and factional alliances.
More recent work by Christian Meier, Erich Gruen, Robin Seager, Robert Devlin, and Peter Brunt has made untenable the idea that powerful republican noble families formed long-lasting factions among themselves to perpetuate their dominance of Roman Republican politics. Now, following the lead of Peter Brunt, several British scholars like Jeremy Paterson, Michael Crawford, Mary Beard, and, preeminently, Fergus Millar have seized the chance to rehabilitate Republican Rome in modern eyes by de-emphasizing its oligarchic nature altogether and stressing the supposedly democratic role of the popular assemblies and the tribunes of the plebs. Nowhere, however, have any of them provided a comprehensive definition of democracy against which the supposedly democratic nature of the Republic can be evaluated.
The very early Roman Republic may have resembled what Thorkild Jacobsen called “primitive democracy” in a chapter that he contributed to a book called The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man. In the early Republic, rich and poor, high and low, lived in close proximity and the social and economic gap between them was not so great as it was later. The state was basically the army, the original meaning of the word populus, where the soldiers elected the higher officers from among their richer neighbors and gave approval to major decisions about peace, war, and other matters affecting them, such as the division of booty or the punishment of those who broke the rules. Still, that is more the inchoate democracy of any small, face-to-face community and cannot be compared with a formally democratic state.
The closest any of these scholars have come to applying a definition of democracy to an analysis of the Roman Republic in its formally developed state from the third century B.C. onward is Fergus Millar in his recent book The Crowd in the Late Roman Republic (U. of Michigan Press, 1998). There, it is clear that for Millar to consider a state democratic, the ultimate power to legislate must lie in the votes of all the citizens and that their votes must count equally. He defines the Roman res publica as a “direct democracy” because “the most fundamental of all rights of the people was … that they, and they alone, could legislate” (209). He sees the Roman Forum “not only as the stage for the delivery of political discourse but as the long-established 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.” He further claims that such domination was important because it “was a function of the more fundamental fact that laws in the res publica could be enacted only by the votes of the people.” Therefore, he concludes, “In that limited sense, in its modes of persuasion (by the delivery of speeches to those who turned up) and in its modes of legislation (by direct popular votes) the system of the Roman res publica was indeed democratic” (225).
