M. Porcius Cato

This is the best question I've ever seen posted on this forum. To start it off, What makes the Romans Roman? To me, the best (albeit light-hearted) answer was provided by Dorothea Wender in her book Roman Poetry: I think this is the key to the 'essence' of the Romans--they were filled with contradictory impulses and desires. Hence, the variation. Hence, the competition. Hence, the selection. Hence, the GROWTH. As literate Romans became just one thing--just anarchic or just authoritarian, just 'decadent' or just feeling guilty about their desires--they became less of a Republic (which is all about variation, competition, and selection in politics), less pagan (which is all about variation, competition, and selection among the gods), and--lacking variation, competition, and selection--less dynamic. I guess this is sort of a Darwinian take on the Roman character, but I think it's right.

Yes, for the good of Roman literature (and the good of Rome), a Caesar-versus-Cicero debate would have been vastly more interesting! Unfortuntately, Cicero's speech--like his defense of Milo--probably would have never seen the light of day given the violence of the mob at that time. Right...I think that's populare paranoia. Pompey didn't have Caesar declared hostis until after all his efforts for peace had been exhausted, and when the Senate voted on a resolution that both Pompey and Caesar give up their commands and lay down their arms, the vote was 370 pro - 22 anti. Think about this a second. If 370/392 senators are willing to go that far to avoid a civil war--and proscribing Caesar would be a sure path to civil war (ask Brutus and Cassius)--even the worst case scenario for Ceasar (a trial by a randomly-selected number of the senate) would have in all likelihood (94%) led to acquittal. Heck, even if the jurors weren't randomly-selected, it would have been tough to get a conviction. Moreover, it isn't even clear that the jury would have been composed of senators--Pompey himself had opposed this move when Verres was up for trial.

Indeed they can, but how many have and - relevant to our area of interest - how many enlightened Roman leaders could have maintained an enlightened policy of trade-over-war ? While the theory of annual elections and term limits has a certain attraction the constant turnover makes consistent policy difficult. We'd need a much more mature and intelligent society than our own, let alone the Roman, to make it stick. What an excellent question--it drives straight to the heart of the matter! First, an enlightened policy of trade-over-war is almost exactly what the Pax Romana was, the period during which Rome reached her greatest heights. Generally, I would say that the best emperors were the ones who practiced the policy of keeping peace in the provinces through just administration, non-aggression, AND swift-almost-ruthless retaliation against anyone who attacked Rome or her allies. Moreover, this policy was advocated by many senators during the republic. One advocate, a correspondent of Cicero, eloquently stated the policy I'm endorsing here: "it is a much more splendid thing than a triumph to have the senate decide that a province was held and preserved rather by the mercy and incorruptibility of the commander than by the strength of a military force or the favor of the gods." The correspondent was M. Porcius Cato, who I believe would have been the kind of enlightened leader you're seeking. Second, you're also absolutely correct that matters of foreign policy cannot be solely dictated by the vicissitudes of annual elections, which is why it is crucial for an established and conservative body such as the senate to vote on all proconsular appointments. In this way, the rudder of the provinces is guided (indirectly) by a steady hand. As a further check, governors must stand down regularly to account for their actions in the provinces so that governors who abuse their power lose it while those who serve with mercy and incorruptibility are given the congratulations they are due. In the letter I quoted, Cato was (somewhat obliquely) praising Cicero for his wise administration of Cilicia. In this thread, I'm advocating the contrapositive, viz. that Caesar should have tried for his crimes against Rome's Gallic allies.

A number of other posters, Aquila, have maintained that the Republic was simply "doomed". But to me this seems like a non-explanation for the fall of the Republic. It simply begs the question--how exactly was it doomed? Did it fall due to bad laws? Bad men? Or some interaction of the two? I think it had to be some interaction of bad laws and bad men. Bad laws by themselves can be reformed--as long as there are good men who can make it happen. Bad men by themselves can also be neutralized--as long as the power of the state is greater than that of any single individual. But when good laws cannot be put into effect to check the power of bad men, and when bad laws cannot be reformed due to the powerlessness of good men, the Republic really is doomed. The republic certainly had a number of bad laws that needed reforming. Everyone acknowledges, for example, the inherent danger brought by Marius' military reforms, which had the effect of creating private armies, such as the one wielded by Caesar. The only remedy for this was to deny generals of their access to spoils, especially the granting of land to veterans; however, only Cato and a handful of senators had the foresight to realize this, and they were bitterly (and successfully) opposed by Pompey and by Caesar. Less well-known as an example of a fundamentally and spectaculary bad law were the leges Aelia et Fufia, whose provisions had the effect of putting rural Italians at the mercy of the urban mob of Rome. Briefly, the provisions of the law (from the mid-2nd century) were that no bill could be proposed in the 24 days prior to an election and that no bill could be voted on in the 24 days after an election (the election taking place only in Rome, to which virtually all Italians south of the Po were eligible to vote). This law effectively handed all control to the urban plebs because--not knowing when bills were to be proposed--there was not sufficient time between the announcing of a bill and the voting on it to assemble a large crowd from Italy. In some cases, the rural tribes had no reprsentatives at all present for the meeting of the tribal assembly, and it was in the power of the presiding officer for the tribunitial laws (and common practice) to simply have freedmen and slaves fill in for the Italians. Barring fundamental Constitutional reform, the only possible remedy would be to suspend this law, which the Senate was able to do from time to time, but more often the suspension of this absurd law was vetoed by the tribunes who represented the urban mob over everyone else. This was, by the way, the mechanism by which Cicero was exiled, and the same mechanism had the potential to exile any of the good men who might have saved the Republic. And this might have happened to all of them but for the check on the power of the tribal assemblies that was present in the centuries, which was the (rarely used) mechanism that finally allowed Cicero to return to Rome (probably the only vote in the centuries for 20 years). So, even with the absolutely disproportionate power wielded by the urban mob--a power that ultimately led to the Social Wars, the Republic was still not doomed. While there was a mechanism in place to destroy the Republic, this mechanism could have been dismantled over time through normal politics. But normal politics came to an end with the first triumvirate and ALL politics came to an end once Caesar crossed the Rubicon. There is a persistent myth that Caesar had to march on Rome to save his own life--that his opponents in the Senate would have had him executed for treason. This myth completely misreads the actual law and practice of the day. While it is true that people charged with crimes against the state once had their fates determined by the voters in the centuries and tribal assembly, this practice was long gone by the time Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Caesar, like Milo, would have been tried in the Forum, with all his supporters--and veterans--present. At least during the republic, the only restriction on the lawyer's freedom of speech was the lawyer's own courage--because the mob too was free to heckle and to intimidate (see again the case against Milo). Had Caesar not taken up arms against Rome, his fate would have been to face trial for his illegal adventures in Gaul and (probably) his earlier illegal rapine against a Roman ally in Spain. The charge against Caesar would have had a clear precedent in the case of the rapaciously corrupt Verres, who is the proper model for judging what fate might have awaited Caesar. Briefly, Verres was guilty as sin, and despite having jurors--like the senators Nasica and the Metelli--in his pay and despite the brother of the defending attorney also serving on the jury, the prosecution (led by Cicero) succeeded in its case by appealing to these senators' fear of the people, who as always loved the trials and in this particular case greatly influenced the outcome. Under circumstances like these, it is hard to imagine how Caesar could have been successfully prosecuted unless the case against him were even stronger than it was against Verres--even if the jurors were all packed by Catonians, they would have been risking their lives had they attempted to exile Caesar. Thus, from the standpoint of the law, of its practice, and of his own standing among the plebs, Caesar had absolutely nothing to fear if innocent (and probably nothing to fear if guilty). If, on the other hand, Caesar were guilty, and the case against Caesar were actually stronger than the case against Verres--so strong that (in the worst case for Caesar) a jury of all senators were willing to face their deaths to see him exiled, Caesar would have to have been a complete monster. Thus, in either case, Caesar was not justified in crossing the Rubicon. What doomed the republic, therefore, was not simply that its voting was corrupted by the urban mob, or simply that there were private armies, or simply that there were men (such as Ceasar) who had delusions of grandeur--none of these alone had ever been sufficient to destroy the Republic prior to Caesar. It is testimony to Caesar's ability (in a manner of speaking) that he was able to summon simultaneously the power of the mob, the power of a private army, and the power of his own megalomania to his purposes--for these were the very ingredients necessary for building a perpetual dictatorship out of the shaky elements of a fixable Republic. That many of us live in republics today and still admire Caesar--well, I can only shake my head in disbelief.

Thanks Virgil. As a die-hard Mac user, I'm filled with vicarious pride.

I'm SO eager to respond, but our wise and virtuous moderator says this thread isn't the place. So, welcome Aquila, and please do post a new thread defending Caesar, as I'm more than happy to take up the cause of the prosecution. Alternatively, you might begin by defending Caesar's conduct in Gaul (under the Gallic Wars thread), which is the issue on which the rest of your points rests.

Pompey's description was correct. Caesar had a unit of reserve infanty to repel Pompey's massive right cavalry. My memory is that Caesar simply had his middle line halt their charge mid-way thereby throwing Pompey's multi-lingual troops into confusion. See Battle of Pharsalus for a nice description. Depends on whether we're talking about cavalry, auxiliaries, or legionaries, but overall you're correct. They're talking about Alesia, where the 13th contributed to the battle against the Nervians. See Alesia.

Absolutely. In fact, didn't the Senate itself become completely hereditary (like the House of Lords, I suppose) in the Dominate?

Fair enough--once the differences between the two world-views are put on the table with the commonalities, this seems to be the proper verdict.

Exactly my point. Hence my scare quotes around "Roman".

Yes, of course, Catholicism has different strains and adopted many Roman rituals like burning incense. However, to argue that the Vatican is the last vestige of the Roman empire on the grounds of preserved rituals like incense burning strikes me as trivializing both Roman culture and Catholic theology. *What* the Romans celebrated was far more important than *how* they celebrated it.

While it's true that one can find strands of Christian beliefs in Stoicism, Neoplatonism, and various pagan cults, the Christians seem to have distilled from all these the very beliefs that were most opposed to the classical Roman culture--they made the love of wealth, sex, power, ambition, and freedom into vices. When you take these qualities out of Rome, should it be surprising you get a poor, depopulated, passive, weak, and servile society?

The old vestiges of republicanism were gone long before that; I'm saying that even the old vestiges of the Principate and Rome itself were gone too! What I mean is--if placed along an axis running from Cicero (a prototypic Roman) to Charlemagne (a Medieval 'Roman' emperor), Diocletian and Constantine would be so much closer to Charlemagne that Cicero wouldn't even have recognized them as his country-men. In my opinion, Aurelian was the last Roman emperor--after him, they were all just medieval kings (except Julian).

I agree with Sextus--but I'd go further. In many respects, the Church to this day is the polar opposite of the pagan Roman world. *The Church beatified a girl for pledging herself to chastity at age 3, and it still promotes abstinence until marriage. *The Romans had brothels next to temples and built giant baths where they could mix wine and sex with slave-girls. * The saints of the church were extolled for drinking laundry water, sleeping with a rock as a pillow, beating themselves bloody, and dying as martyrs. * The Romans loved luxury, wealth, power, and preferred others martyr themselves to Rome than vice-versa. *The Church condemns homosexuality, bisexuality, sex outside marriage, and sex for pure enjoyment. *The Romans loved to do it all, and (though they teased Caesar for being the Queen of Bithynia) they had no problem with their generals and emperors enjoying sex with anyone they wished. *The Church had people burned at the stake for heresy. *The Romans were open to anyone worshipping as many gods as they could find a purpose. *Faithful Catholics deck their halls with religious images of the human body either being tortured on a cross (Jesus) or clad in garments designed to hide every inch of flesh (Mary, the apostles, etc). *Decent Romans liked to depict their deity Priapus (and his enormous penis) just inside their doorway, and it was impossible to walk 5 feet in ancient Rome without seeing nudity and depictions of sex. * Pope John Paul warned scientists not to apply biology to the 'soul,' and there were reports that the Church was back-pedalling on whether humans evolved from non-human primates. Tertullian, "father of the Latin church", justified his belief in the Trinity by remarking, "Credo quia absurdum--I believe BECAUSE it is absurd." * Roman Epicureans denied the immortality of the soul and were pure materialists. And Stoics, such as Manilius, author of Astronomica, would be scandalized to admit absurdity: in their view, "Ratio omnia vincit--Reason conquers all." If a Roman from the era of Hadrian found himself in the Vatican today, he'd think his nation had been over-run by Vestal Virgins and eastern mystics. Really, don't you think there is something substantial in the fact that the Vatican plasters fig leaves on Roman sculptures? Don't you think there is a reason that the rediscovery of the ancient world coincided with the renaissance, with the enlightenment, and with the demise of Church authority? If you're Catholic, I mean no offense at all, but the notion of the Vatican being the last vestige of the Roman empire strikes me as a very, very long stretch. See above. There is much more to debate than mere geography.

But the Empire WAS greatly reduced in size--until Aurelian reclaimed it. What makes you think Diocletian put it back together? Like Frankenstein, Diocletian simply cobbled together a medieval monster from the parts of a dead world. The spirit of "I am a Roman, and you are just a king" was gone; all that remained of Rome was an inertia-led zombie.

Wow! I'm glad I asked. Thanks for the update. When last I was in school, the Herodotus theory was treated as seriously as there being a real ancient city of Troy.

When? And based on what evidence?

I totally agree, but then there's a big difference between living under Diocletian and living under many of the Emperors before him. Sure, just as there are warm days in winter, there were good emperors in the Principate.

Probably the most devastating and most consequential of the civil wars was wrought by the wrath of Octavian and Antony, following the tyrannicide of Caesar. His avengers shared absolutely none of Caesar's (much exaggerated) clemency. See especially Tacitus on the effects of their proscriptions and a chilling aside in Propertius on Octavian's suppression of the Perugian revolt. Even Livia, Suetonius tells us, did not weep when killing Augustus because she remembered the blood-lust of the young Octavian. These Civil Wars essentially wiped out the last defenders of the Old Republic.

I'll second the nomination for the lost works of Aristotle. Last Europe re-discovered Aristotle (thanks to Albertus Magnus), Europe started hard and fast upon the renaissance. Who knows what a second round of Aristotle could do? Perhaps wake her from her relativist slumber? But, since I'm only seconding Aristotle, I still get one true nomination--Cicero's Pro Cato, which has been totally lost and would help set the record straight on why "Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Catoni--The conquering cause pleased the gods but the conquered cause pleased Cato" (Lucan, Pharsalia).

Have him thrown from the Tarpeian Rock--after a trial of course.

No Roman law gave Augustus (or the Senate) the power to name a successor, so I'd uphold the law by marching on Rome, sending the supporters of Tiberius packing until I faced them in battle. If I won, I'd grant citizenship to all allies of Rome, hold elections immediately thereafter, run for consul, and restore the Republic.

OK, but this was directly proportional to the political power of those oligarchs--their power to flood the streets of Rome with slaves from their foreign adventures (which the people loved, though it meant unemployment), their power to unleash the rapacious publicani to support extravagant spectacles (to which the people flocked, though it meant higher taxes), and their power to wipe out whole sectors of the economy via arbitrary edict (such as the lex frumentaria, which the people adored though it meant Italian farmers almost entirely lost their urban market). If the lower classes had booed at the triumphs, had punished the extravagance of the aediles, and had tossed the corn dole into the Tiber, the power of the oligarchs would have been much diminished. Under the republic, such as it was, the lower classes at least had a portion of the political power (though not enough), but that portion was forever stripped of them once Caesar became dictator for life. Under the republic, the lower classes had freedoms which we do not today enjoy, and as the principate went on those freedoms diminished successively, until being finished off entirely by Diocletian, the lower classes had become abject serfs. In our evaluation of hereditary dictatorship (an evil that took over a thousand years to marginalize), it seems irresponsible to so exaggerate the conditions of the lower classes under the last great republic that it is impossible to see how much worse their conditions became after that republic was destroyed. For my part, I would rather have been a landless Roman under Sulla than to have been a farm-bound serf under Diocletian or any of the subsequent generations of monarchs.

Without question this occurred among the aristocracy, but would the common man have lived under much different conditions between the two systems? The individual and tribal assembly votes unarguably had less import in the principate, but hadn't it been subjected to all manner of corruption and bribery for centuries anyway. Sure, but even with the lower houses being bribed from time to time they still acted as a check on the power of the upper houses and consuls. Under the principate that vanished entirely. Moreover, I don't think the political enfranchisement of the plebes (though terribly important) is the *only* consideration in judging the effects of the principate on non-aristocrats. For example, I'd bet that when Nero rounded up Christians to light the night sky of Rome after the conflagration of 64, the Christians weren't too worried about their say in selecting local magistrates! Similarly, if Nero had to face election, I'd bet he wouldn't have torched so many voters. So, yes, voters were bribed under the Republic, but if a consul wanted to get re-elected, there was only so much he could spend to sway the vote, and this limited the extent of what consuls could do to the common man. After all, if Nero had been a consul when he torched your mom, could he have paid you enough to vote for him again? I don't think so.

I see your point on this but it is a bir a sweeping statement and makes all monarchies subject to the same kinds of instability does it not?. Besides which the Republic was far more unstable. Yes, assuming the monarch is an actual autocrat, I think all monarchical rule is subject to the same problems--you might have one great king but his son could be an imbecile and a sadist, which leads either to a civil war or to a reactionary surge in political murders and repression. In my opinion, all monarchs should have their power stripped from them and distributed among elected representatives. (Call me crazy.) As for the Republic being less stable, count the civil wars, proscriptions, exiles, and confiscations in all the years before the forces of Pompey were destroyed and in all the years after, and you'll find that the promised stability of dictatorship simply didn't obtain. In supporting the power-grabs of Caesar and then Octavian, Romans gave up their essential liberties to purchase a little temporary safety, but they found soon thereafter that they had neither liberty nor safety. As far as I can tell, the illusion of the stability of dictatorship arises from (1) our disproportionate attention to the civil wars immediately preceding the principate and the relative calm during the reign of Augustus, and (2) our disproportionate attention to civil wars over domestic repression (e.g., a dictator's use of confiscation, exile, and proscription). In evaluating the stability of a type of political organization, however, we have to take a longer view of history and a broader view of stability.