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Chapter 10 - The Ritual Grammar of Institutionalized Politics

from Part II - Translations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2025

By
Egon Flaig
Edited by
Amy Russell  and
Hans Beck
Translated by
Kathrin Lüddecke
Amy Russell
Affiliation:
Brown University, Rhode Island
Hans Beck
Affiliation:
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany
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Summary

Through the complex processes of generating mutual expectations and demands, senatorial consensus resulted in a wider consensus held by all. Only on four occasions did the popular assemblies ever vote in a way that went against the senate’s expectations, in 209, 200, 167, and 149 BCE. Discussion of each of these instances demonstrates that the people were not accustomed to, or interested in, following their own preferences: when rogationes were brought before the popular assemblies, they were certain to be agreed. What united the very few cases of rejection was that the people’s response was highly personalized, that is, the initial rogatio pertained to a specific individual; the response aimed at inconveniencing that person; and the senatorial elite was itself divided on the person. Egon Flaig performs a threefold analysis: he measures the strength of preferences in the peoples’ assemblies; he explores the limitations to what is labelled the institutional automatism behind the acceptance of motions; and he teases out the tactical and ritualized manoeuvres of withdrawing precarious proposals. The results are merged into a checklist that gauges the semantic and situational variety of action before the contio.

Keywords

Roman RepublicRoman politicspolitical cultureRoman historypopular assembliesdemocracymass/elite interaction
Type
Chapter
Information
The Roman Republic and Political Culture
German Scholarship in Translation
 , pp. 294 - 327
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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