Polybius on the politics of Rome
Polybius, who knew Rome as both an enemy and a friend, was uniquely well placed to reflect on the rise of the city and on its institutions. Born into the political aristocracy of a town in the Peloponnese, he was in his thirties in 168 BCE, when Aemilius Paullus defeated King Perseus, and he found himself one of 1,000 Greek detainees taken to Rome as part of the political purge, or precautionary measures, that followed. Most of them were placed under a light-touch regime of house arrest and scattered among the towns of Italy. Polybius, who already had a reputation as a writer, was luckier. He quickly fell in with Aemilianus (they apparently met over the loan of some books) and his family and was allowed to stay in Rome, where he became the young man’s de facto tutor and as close as ‘father to son’. Snatches of Polybius’ advice to Aemilianus were still being quoted, or misquoted, more than two hundred years later. ‘Never come back from the Forum,’ he is supposed to have urged, ‘until you have made at least one new friend.’
The surviving hostages were released around 150 BCE. Only 300 were still alive, and one outspoken Roman is supposed to have complained about the senate wasting its time ‘debating whether some elderly Greeks should be buried by undertakers here or in Greece’. But Polybius was soon back with his Roman associates, travelling with the army to Carthage and acting as an intermediary in the negotiations that followed the destruction of Corinth in 146 BCE. He was also still writing his Histories, which ended up spreading over forty books, mainly focusing on the years 220 to 167 BCE, with a brief flashback to the First Punic War and an epilogue to bring the story down to 146 BCE. Whoever was Polybius’ main intended readership, Greek or Roman, his work became an important reference point for later Romans trying to understand their city’s rise. It was certainly on Livy’s desk when he was writing his History.
32. This image of Polybius was put up in the second century CE in a small town in Greece by a man who claimed to be one of the historian’s descendants. His only ‘portrait’ to survive, it can hardly be a realistic likeness. In fact, it casts him in the guise of warriors from fifth century BCE classical Greece, 300 years before his time. To make things more complicated, the original sculpture has been lost and survives only as the plaster cast shown here.
Predictably, modern historians have found it hard to know quite where to fix the boundary between Polybius the Roman hostage and critic of Roman rule and Polybius the Roman collaborator. He certainly sometimes performed a deft balancing act between his different loyalties, giving behind-the-scenes advice at one point to a distinguished Syrian hostage on how to slip away from his detention, while carefully insisting in his Histories that on the day of the great escape he himself was at home, ‘ill in bed’. But whatever Polybius’ political stance, he had the advantage of knowing both sides of the Roman story, and he had the opportunity to quiz some of the leading Roman players. He dissected Rome’s internal organisation – which he insisted underpinned its success abroad – from a vantage point that combined a couple of decades of first-hand experience with all the sophistication of the Greek political theory in which he had been trained back home. His work is, in effect, one of the earliest surviving attempts at comparative political anthropology.
Not surprisingly, his account is a wonderful combination of acute observation, bafflement and occasionally desperate attempts to theorise Roman politics in his own terms. He scrutinised his Roman surroundings and his new Roman friends with care. He spotted, for example, the importance of religion, or ‘fear of the gods’, in controlling Roman behaviour, and he was impressed with the systematic efficiency of Roman organisation; hence his important – but now often skipped – discussion of military arrangements, with its teach-yourself rules on laying out an army camp, where the consul’s tent should be pitched, how to plan a legionary baggage train, and the savage system of discipline. He was also sharp enough to see beneath the surface of various Roman customs and favourite pastimes to their underlying social significance. All those stories of Roman valour, heroism and self-sacrifice that he must have heard – told and retold around military campfires or at dinner tables – were not simply for amusement, he concluded. Their function was to encourage the young to imitate the gallant deeds of their ancestors; they were one aspect of the spirit of emulation, ambition and competition that he saw running right through Roman elite society.
Another aspect of this – one that he makes into an extended, if slightly ghoulish, case study – was to be found in the funerals of ‘distinguished men’. Again, Polybius must have witnessed enough of these to draw out their deeper significance. The body, he explains, was carried into the Forum and placed on the rostra, normally propped up somehow in an upright position, so it was visible to a large audience. In the procession that followed, family members wore masks made in the likeness of the dead man’s ancestors and dressed in the costume appropriate to the offices each had held (purple-bordered togas and so on), as if they were all present ‘living and breathing’. The funeral address, delivered by a family member, started with the achievements of the corpse on the rostra but then went through the careers of all the other characters, who by this time were sitting on ivory, or at least ivory-veneered, chairs lined up next to the dead man. ‘The most important upshot of this,’ Polybius concludes, ‘is that the younger generation is inspired to endure all suffering for the common good, in the hope of winning the glory that belongs to the brave.’
This is perhaps a rather rosy view of the competitive side of Roman culture. Unchecked competition eventually did more to destroy than to uphold the Republic. Even before that, it is a fair guess that for every young Roman inspired to live up to the achievements of his ancestors, there was another oppressed by the weight of tradition and expectation that fell upon him – as Polybius might have realised if he had chosen to reflect on all the stories in Roman culture about sons who killed their fathers. But it is a view nicely encapsulated in the words of another epitaph in the tomb of the Scipios, which it is tempting to think Polybius might have seen: ‘I produced offspring. I sought to equal the deeds of my father. I won the praise of my ancestors so that they are glad that I was born to them. My career has ennobled my family line.’
At the heart of Polybius’ argument, however, lay bigger questions. How could you characterise the Roman political system as a whole? How did it work? There was never a written Roman constitution, but Polybius saw in Rome a perfect example in practice of an old Greek philosophical ideal: the ‘mixed constitution’, which combined the best aspects of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. The consuls – who had full military command, could summon assemblies of the people and could give orders to all other officials (except the plebeian tribunes) – represented the monarchical element. The senate, which by this date had charge of Rome’s finances, responsibility for delegations to and from other cities and de facto oversight of law and security throughout Roman and allied territory, represented the aristocratic element. The people represented the democratic element. This was not democracy or ‘the people’ in the modern sense: there was no such thing as universal suffrage in the ancient world – women and slaves never had formal political rights anywhere. Polybius meant the group of male citizens as a whole. As in classical Athens, they – and they alone – elected the state officials, passed or rejected laws, made the final decision on going to war and acted as a judicial court for major offences.
The secret, Polybius suggested, lay in a delicate relationship of checks and balances between consuls, the senate and the people, so that neither monarchy nor aristocracy nor democracy ever entirely prevailed. The consuls, for example, might have had full, monarchical command on campaign, but they had to be elected by the people in the first place, and they depended on the senate for funding – and it was the senate which decided whether the successful general should be awarded a triumph at the end of his campaign, and a vote of the people was required to ratify any treaty that might be made. And so on. It was, Polybius argued, such balances across the political system that produced the internal stability on which Roman external success was built.
This is a clever piece of analysis, sensitive to the tiny differences and subtle nuances which distinguish one political system from another. To be sure, in some respects Polybius tries to shoehorn the political life that he witnessed at Rome into a Greek analytical model that does not entirely fit. Saddling his discussion with terms like ‘democracy’ is, for example, deeply misleading. ‘Democracy’ (demokratia) was rooted politically and linguistically in the Greek world. It was never a rallying cry at Rome, even in its limited ancient sense or even for the most radical of Roman popular politicians. In most of the conservative writing that survives, the word means something close to ‘mob rule’. There is little point in asking how ‘democratic’ the politics of Republican Rome were: Romans fought for, and about, liberty, not democracy. Yet, in another way, by nudging his readers to keep sight of the people in their picture of Roman politics and to look beyond the power of the elected officials and the aristocratic senate, Polybius sparked an important debate that is still alive today. How influential was the popular voice in Roman Republican politics? Who controlled Rome? How should we characterise this Roman political system?
It is easy enough to paint a picture of Republican political processes as completely dominated by the wealthy minority. The upshot of the Conflict of the Orders was not popular revolution but the creation of a new governing class, comprising rich plebeians and patricians. The first qualification for most political offices was wealth on a substantial scale. No one could stand for election without passing a financial test that excluded most citizens; the exact amount needed to qualify is not known, but the implications are that it was set at the very top level of the census hierarchy, the so-called cavalry or equestrian rating. When the people came together to vote, the system of voting was stacked in favour of the wealthy. We have already seen how that worked in the Centuriate Assembly, which elected senior officials: if the rich centuries were united, they could determine the result without the poorer centuries even having the chance to vote. The other main assembly based on geographical ‘tribal’ divisions was more equitable in theory – but, as time went by, not necessarily so in practice. Of the thirty-five geographical divisions which were finally defined in 241 BCE (up to that point the number of tribes had increased as citizenship was extended through Italy), only four covered the city itself. The remaining thirty-one covered Rome’s now far-flung rural territory. As votes could be cast only in person in the city, the influence of those who could afford the time and the transport to make the journey was overwhelming; the votes of the resident city population had an impact on only that tiny minority of urban tribes. Besides, strictly speaking, the assemblies were simply for voting, on a list of candidates or on a proposal put by a senior official. There was no general discussion; no proposals or even amendments could come from the floor; in the case of almost every piece of proposed legislation we know of, the people voted in favour of what was put before them. This was not popular power as we understand it.
Yet there was another side to it. As well as the formal prerogatives of the people that Polybius stresses, there are clear traces of a wider political culture in which the popular voice was a key element. The votes of the poor mattered and were eagerly canvassed. The rich were not usually united, and elections were competitive. Those holding, or seeking, political office set great store on persuading the people to vote for them or for their proposed laws and devoted enormous attention to honing the techniques of rhetoric that would allow them to do that. They ignored or humiliated the poor at their peril. One of the distinctive features of the Republican political scene were the semi-formal meetings (or contiones), often held immediately before the voting assemblies, in which rival officials tried to win over the people to their point of view (Cicero delivered his second and fourth speeches against Catiline, for example, at contiones). Quite how frequent or well attended they usually were, we do not know for sure. But there are several hints that they involved political passion, vociferous enthusiasm, and very loud noise. On one occasion, in the first century BCE, it was said that the shouting was so thunderous that a crow, which had the bad luck to be flying past, fell to the ground, stunned.
There are also all kinds of anecdotes about the importance and intensity of canvassing, and how the vote of the people could be won or lost. Polybius tells a curious story about the Syrian king Antiochus IV (Epiphanes, ‘famous’ or even ‘manifest god’), the son of Antiochus the Great, who had been ‘crushed’ by Scipio Asiaticus. As a young man he had lived more than a decade as a hostage in Rome before being swapped for a younger relative, the one whom Polybius later advised on his escape plans. On his return to the East, he took with him a variety of Roman habits that he had picked up during his stay. These mostly came down to displaying a popular touch: talking with anyone he met, giving presents to ordinary people and making the rounds of craftsmen’s shops. But most striking of all, he would dress up in a toga and go around the marketplace as if he were a candidate for election, shaking people by the hand and asking for their vote. This baffled the people in his showy capital city of Antioch, who were not used to this kind of thing from a monarch and nicknamed him Epimanes (‘bonkers’ or, to preserve the pun, ‘fatuous’). But it is clear that one lesson that Antiochus had drawn from Rome was that the common people and their votes were important.
Equally revealing is an anecdote about another member of the Scipio family in the second century BCE, Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica. He was out canvassing one day in a bid to be elected to the office of aedile and was busy shaking the hands of voters (standard procedure, then as now) when he came across one whose hands were hardened by work in the fields. ‘My goodness,’ the young aristocrat joked, ‘do you walk on them?’ He was overheard, and the common people concluded that he had been taunting their poverty and their labour. The upshot, needless to say, was that he lost the election.
So what kind of political system was this? The balance between the different interests was certainly not as equitable as Polybius makes it seem. The poor could never rise to the top of Roman politics; the common people could never seize the political initiative; and it was axiomatic that the richer an individual citizen was, the more political weight he should have. But this form of disequilibrium is familiar in many modern so-called democracies: at Rome too the wealthy and privileged competed for political office and political power that could only be granted by popular election and by the favour of ordinary people who would never have the financial means to stand themselves. As young Scipio Nasica found to his cost, the success of the rich was a gift bestowed by the poor. The rich had to learn the lesson that they depended on the people as a whole.