Response to John McCormick's review of Oligargy

Extract

I am very grateful to John McCormick for his excellent review of Oligarchy. It is careful and thoughtful, and I especially appreciate the important criticisms he raises. On Rome, I fully concur that the scholarship in the “democratic school” raises important interpretative challenges. But I must confess to being more persuaded by the compelling work of Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp, Kurt Raaflaub, Robert Morstein-Marx, and especially Henrik Mouritsen than the admittedly influential authors McCormick cites. Fergus Millar and others have been criticized for their overly constitutional approach and relying perhaps too heavily on democratic discourse. Emphasizing factors like scale, place, and how power was exercised in actual practice, Mouritsen counters that the involvement of the poor—the vast majority—in the political affairs of Rome was exceedingly limited. At the contiones, “the people” were present more as a political concept than physically in attendance. The capacity of the comitium was at most 4,000 people for a demos of some five million citizens—who were themselves a privileged minority among tens of millions of non-citizens and slaves. The heavy time demands of direct democracy on these citizens trying to eke out a living would have been a major burden. Whatever democracy really meant or achieved in Rome (and Athens), it clearly did not aid the lower classes materially. There was a steady accumulation of wealth and power upward toward oligarchs as debt and poverty worsened among the plebs.