{"id":70885,"date":"2025-05-03T01:00:11","date_gmt":"2025-05-03T05:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=70885"},"modified":"2025-05-02T08:57:01","modified_gmt":"2025-05-02T12:57:01","slug":"qotd-when-the-cursus-honorum-failed-so-did-the-roman-republic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/05\/03\/qotd-when-the-cursus-honorum-failed-so-did-the-roman-republic\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: When the Cursus Honorum<\/em> failed, so did the Roman Republic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Public men in the Roman Republic<\/a> had always been ambitious \u2014 it went with the territory; they built large parts of their culture around it \u2014 but by Caesar’s day the vetting process had been completely inverted.<\/p>\n

The Old Republic was full of men like Caesar, because people are what they are; there are always potential Caesars running around. But the names of the Old Republic’s Caesars don’t appear in the history books, because back then they still maintained the distinction between process<\/em> and outcome<\/em>. If there’s a conflict between them, process must yield, and so even though a potential Caesar did a competent job as quaestor<\/em><\/a> and was ready to stand for curule aedile<\/em><\/a>, he’d be taken aside by an old man (“senate”<\/a> comes from senex<\/em>, “old man”) for a stern talking-to … or more than a stern talking-to, if it came to that.<\/p>\n

By Julius Caesar<\/a>‘s day, though, process had completely eclipsed outcome. Again, the “real” Caesar is much debated by historians, but what’s not in dispute is his naked ambition. Everybody knew what Caesar was about, right from the get-go. But since there was no way to stop his climb up the cursus honorum<\/em><\/a> spelled out in the Policies and Procedures Manual, nobody did.<\/p>\n

Indeed, by Caesar’s time, the rot was so deep that most (I’d argue all<\/em>, but I’m not a Classicist) of the offices on the CH<\/em> were eyewash, just lines on a CV. The curule aediles<\/em> weren’t managing the grain supply; they had battalions of freedmen running that. They were still putting on games, of course, but they weren’t personally<\/em> putting them on; again, battalions of clever freedmen did that. The only thing the aedile<\/em> did for “his” games was pay for them … on credit, and only in order to take the next step up the ladder.<\/p>\n

And the rot was, of course, recursive. Caesar at least had clarity: He wanted to be quaestor<\/em> so he could be aedile<\/em>; to be aedile<\/em> so he could be praetor<\/em><\/a>; to be praetor<\/em> so he could be governor; to be governor so he could be general; to be general so he could be … well, whatever, that’s part of the great debate surrounding Caesar, but it doesn’t matter for our purposes. For us, what matters is that everyone else was doing the same thing, and because all the real work was being done by those battalions of clever freedmen, the quality of Republican leadership dropped off dramatically. How can a praetor<\/em>-in-name-only accurately judge the competence of an aedile<\/em>-in-name-only? Yeah, he technically held the office for a year, but he left it as ignorant of its duties as when he entered.<\/p>\n

Severian, “Cursus Honorum”, Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2021-12-27.<\/p>\n

[NR<\/strong>: Links to the Roman Glossary added.]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Public men in the Roman Republic had always been ambitious \u2014 it went with the territory; they built large parts of their culture around it \u2014 but by Caesar’s day the vetting process had been completely inverted. The Old Republic was full of men like Caesar, because people are what they are; there are always […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,62,84,7,41],"tags":[156,1111,261,1345,553,1462],"class_list":["post-70885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-europe","category-government","category-history","category-quotations","tag-fail","tag-juliuscaesar","tag-management","tag-romanrepublic","tag-senate","tag-severian"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-irj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70885"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95412,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70885\/revisions\/95412"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}