The Political Treatment of the Roman People During the Republic and Empire

During the centuries of Rome’s supremacy, as well as the metamorphosis of its political system from a republic to an empire, the treatment of the citizen public varied enormously. Under the republic, there were numerous laws debated concerning the rights of peasants to keep their own land rather than have it swallowed up, as well as a political post which specifically had ‘promoting the interests of the common people’ as its remit. Unfortunately, under the Roman Empire, that post was abolished, and the public, reliant on the client relationship as they were, were reduced to voter points and mindless mobs to be used as the various candidates for political posts.

During the republic, as stated in the introduction there was a senatorial post known as the tribuni plebis, or Tribune of the People\People’s Representative. The holder of this post represented the Roman People in the Senate and Tribal Assemblies and was expected to work towards safeguarding the rights of the Roman public. Arguably the most famous Tribune of Roman history was Tiberius Gracchus, elected tribune in 133 BC respectively. Tiberius Gracchus was famous because of his proposed lex agraria, a land bill that proposed a system of providing allotments to Roman peasant farmers which were safeguarded against being bought up by the owners of the fashionable new slave-worked farms which became more and more common after the Punic Wars. He was unpopular with the senators who owned the large farms for this reason, and also because in attempting to pass the bill he bypassed the normal procedures of involving the senate in the decision-making process, thereby depriving them of part of their political rights. This was perhaps a more grievous situation than it appears to us because a large part of the Senate’s political power came from individual Senators’ ability to attract and keep a stream of ‘clients’ from the lower levels of Roman society.

The patronage system was a system that enabled senators to build and extend their political power throughout both the Republican and Imperial phases of ancient Rome’s political history. This system ostensibly was one where a ‘patron’ would attract a number of ‘clients’ from the lower levels of Roman society was used in a variety of ways to benefit everyone involved. During the Republic, this was true, but during the Empire, the patronage system degenerated into simply a method for opposing senators to bully and intimidate each other (see the famous Optimates/Populares divide), which finally culminated in the chaos between rival candidates Clodius and Milo, where Clodius was killed. The ‘patrons’ in the system, instead of doing their duty to their ‘clients’ and helping them in exchange for their votes, now vied with one another to provide more and more lavish bread and circuses’ for the Roman public in general, hoping by these displays and entertainments to drum up support for their own candidacies within the Senate and military. The system had gone from a quid pro quo way of ensuring social stability to a way to incite violence between factions in the lower levels of society for the benefit of the upper levels.

The Roman public had gone from being seen as an important segment of society, one which was heavily involved in the patronage system and which had its own public figure within the city to mediate with the Senate on affairs which affected them, to a system which enabled the rich Senatorial candidates to exploit the lower levels of society for their own benefit. During the Republic, Tribunes like Tiberius Gracchus worked with (and sometimes against!) the Senate to pass bills such as the lex agraria, which would keep citizen farmers safe from the huge slave-run farms which were owned by rich senators. During the empire, the only reason any of the candidates looked at the poorer levels of society was to see if their lavish spectacles had produced the desired result in moving the Roman People to vote them into power.

Bibliography

Scullard, H.H (2007), From the Gracchi to Nero, a history of Rome from 133 BC to AD 68 (5th ed.), Oxon, Routledge.