But the dilemmas that arose out of the state’s steady expansion in influence gave the experts much material for comment. The fact that Rome’s administrative machinery constantly needed to adapt to new circumstances militated against any visionary’s drafting a constitution that would last for long. That, in turn, forced the innately conservative Roman governing class to accept innovation and sometimes even permanent reform in the political system.
New military and administrative challenges periodically threatened to stretch the old, inherited city-state institutions to their breaking points. Of course, concurrent with Rome’s annual pattern of political give and take was its seemingly inexorable growth in power.
3 So involved and ingrown became political Rome that the rationale for some aspects of its system, such as the procedure for electing certain high-ranking magistrates, escaped even the curious. Indeed in all periods, the shifting dynamics of Rome’s profoundly hierarchical society (about which we shall say something later) influenced institutional processes. In the later Republic, the knights (or equites) – the wealthy non-office-holding arm of the Roman ruling class – added themselves to this heady mix. For some centuries, each successive year at Rome had seen the complicated interplay of individual (mostly annual) magistrates and quasi-magistrates with each other and with a number of strong but hardly monolithic corporate entities – most vitally, the senate (the body that advised the magistrates), the people (i.e., Latin populus, patricians and plebeians together) and plebs (the body of nonpatricians) in their several organized and even unorganized forms, 2 and various boards of priests. 200 b.c.), the political system was even in its essentials too vast to take in as a whole. Another factor is that, by the time a Latin legal literature was first developing (say, c. One basic reason is that the people most likely to draft such a document – the leading members of Rome’s senatorial establishment – were in all periods fully conscious that writing things down served only to cut into their own class prerogatives and influence. It may be worth considering, if only for a moment, why not. One must add that a well-connected outsider, the Greek Polybius, writing in the mid-second century b.c., left us an invaluable, though frustratingly selective and overschematic, sketch of the Roman state as he saw it.īut, again, the Romans of the Republic never made a comprehensive attempt to formalize their public law.
Cicero’s On Laws, to single out just one of his contributions to political philosophy, actually contains a short (idealizing) constitution, a theoretical piece that treats Rome’s magistracies and some aspects of the state religion. 1 In the developed Republic, at any rate, some important colleges of priests maintained books of precedents the senate’s past decrees could be consulted in written form.
200 b.c., the Roman élite was taking an academic interest in the city-state’s legal history. A few went a bit further than ad hoc pronouncements. And at all times it had men who were willing to make confident assertions – as senators, magistrates, priests, or specialists in jurisprudence, or in more than one of these roles at once – about what was legally possible under an often fuzzy and ever evolving political and administrative system. It did, however, have an array of remarkably tenacious continuing institutions (in the broadest sense of the term), some of which were or at least seemed virtually primeval. Republican Rome had no written constitution.
0 kommentar(er)
