Reconstructing the Roman Republic: An Ancient Political Culture and Modern Research (review)

This book offers not only a translation but a revision of the author's important 2004 work, Rekonstruktionen einer Republik (Munich 2004). Many passages have been rewritten, new material added, and the bibliography updated. Like its German original, this new, English version aims to provide a broad overview of scholarship, mainly in German, on the political culture of the Roman Republic over the past forty-five years. For specialists, much of the ground covered will be familiar, although the author's judgments are often shrewd and his power to summarize wide-ranging and often complex issues is nothing short of magisterial. For nonspecialists, Hölkeskamp's tour d'horizon delivers an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the current state of play in the study of Republican political culture.

Beginning with Gelzer's seminal work on the Roman nobility, a scholarly consensus long held that an aristocracy governed the Republic and hence the study of its political history necessarily focused via prosopography on the alignments and conflicts among its members. This was particularly the case among English-language scholars. The last half of the twentieth century, however, saw the foundations of that view—especially the nature of patron-client relations and the permanence of political alliances—progressively undermined until little was left standing. Into this void came Fergus Millar's provocative claim in the mid-1980s that the Roman Republic was really highly democratic, thereby bringing into question its fundamental political character. Although effective rebuttals were soon forthcoming, Millar's challenge highlighted the fact that, if an aristocracy indeed governed the Republic, we no longer really understood how it maintained its dominance in light of the formidable formal powers of the popular assemblies. Hölkeskamp's basic point is that if American and British scholars had been keeping up with the work of their German colleagues, particularly Christian Meier and those influenced by his pathbreaking 1966 study, Res Publica Amissa (Wiesbaden 1966), we would already have known at least the outlines of the answer.

That answer involves not constitutional structures or who was related to whom, but the values, traditions, and practices that informed the worldview of elite and ordinary Romans alike, in other words their political culture. Hölkeskamp begins by criticizing Millar's treatment of Gelzer and other predecessors, and then contrasts Millar's static Mommsonian view of the Republican constitution with the characterization offered by Meier and Weiacker of an organic, evolving entity. He then notes the well-known limits on the assemblies' power and the rarity of their lawmaking in the middle Republic as opposed to the wide-ranging—because undefined—powers of the senate and the hierarchical nature of Roman social relations. Important, too, is what could and could not become subject to political debate: the crisis of the Republic only arose when the consensus on the latter broke down. Hölkeskamp stresses the importance of the value system for understanding how political power was constructed and surveys its concrete manifestations in language, through ceremonies like the triumph and aristocratic funerals, and in places of memory, public rituals, and contional speeches. Aristocratic status was not hereditary. It had to be earned by members of a family in each generation and rare was the family that managed to remain at the top for more than a few generations. Competition therefore was keen but could only take place, as the sociologist Georg Simmel argued, in the context of a fundamental consensus on the rules of the game and arbitration from outside the aristocracy itself. This latter role the popular assemblies played. Hence aristocrats' need to present themselves before the public and the critical importance of a family's symbolic capital in winning and maintaining status. Hölkeskamp closes with a plea for a "modern" ancient history, one informed by methodologies and theories of social and political science.

This brief summation cannot do justice to Hölkeskamp's nuanced and...