Rome’s popular assemblies – for unlike most poleis, Rome has not one but four major assemblies, three of which matter – are the subject of something of a paradox in Roman political history which has in turn served as the hub around which a fairly active debate on the nature of Roman politics has rotated now for decades. The paradox is this: on the one hand, legally the Roman assemblies are sovereign. Their decisions, once rendered, are final and cannot be overridden by any other part of the res publica. That would seem to make Rome quite democratic, but to the contrary: apart from a few very notable exceptional moments, the assemblies are largely the dog that did not bark. They have vast power, but in part because of the traditional conventions of Roman politics (the mos maiorum, the “customs of the ancestors”) and in part because of how they are structured, the power of the assemblies often sleeps.
And today we’re going to look at why it is that the assemblies never roar quite so often as you’d expect and in the process begin developing the arguments of perhaps the central scholarly debate currently about the Roman Republic: how democratic was it really?
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Roman Republic 101, Part II: Romans, Assemble!”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-07-28.
