The Earliest Romans: A Character Sketch

8. Practical (continued)

8 j PRACTICAL (continued) The trait of practicality de‹ned at the beginning of chapter 4 continued to shape the collective behavior of the Romans in the opening centuries of the Republic. National character like individual character is (to repeat once more) best known from what people do, not from what they say about themselves , and there is in any case no one of those days to tell us, “This is how we are, we Romans, a down-to-earth, problem-solving, uncomplicated folk”. Introspection even in a better-documented period was not something Romans much indulged in (and watch out when anyone describes himself as simple!). We have, however, an early event that is quite useful and revealing. It is the First Secession of 494 in response to continued bad times, when the chief sufferers in the city staged a walkout and extracted from their oppressors, the big property-owning class, not only some of the changes they sought but novel institutions for themselves corporately: chie›y a tribunate of the people and a tribal assembly, as was described above. These successes were won without bloodshed or other great risks; the structure of law, as opposed to abuses, remained in place, unchallenged ; and, since the tribunate and assembly are ‹xtures in subsequent history and their origin is not placed in any other moment, the outline of these events may be accepted as fact. The same may said of the second walkout in 449 following on prolonged agitation that led to the Twelve Tables . It looks like real history—in outline at least and so long as we disre98 gard some of the very silliest pages in the Latin literary tradition, with which the account concludes.1 In these episodes a broad cross-section of the city is involved, although no doubt their own leaders were propertied themselves. It is almost fair to call the actors “the Romans” without quali‹cation. Over the next couple of centuries, however, the whole people in action play no further part. Instead , it is the people at the top who take over the stage, whether patrician or plebeian: a Claudius, a Junius, and so forth. “Roman history” is theirs— as we could not say if there had continued to be more general walkouts, more popular rejections of the leadership that led to institutional change. How decisions were actually made within this upper class cannot be learned from the narratives that survive. These are untrustworthy at any level of detail, as Classicists so often complain; and the writers who composed them had no interest to spare for the process, anyway. The fact is strange; yet in 1831–32 Tocqueville must have been continually aware of the two great political parties then taking on their de‹nitive names and historic shape in the United States before his very eyes, without his ever actually seeing them; for he never alludes to them.2 So also in the whole run of ancient Roman annalists, so far as we can tell from their surviving texts, no page was given to decision-making that took place before the open meetings of the senate and assembly. Perhaps power arrangements made in more or less private settings lacked the drama or dignity that deserved a record. I must simply assume that Roman nobles often ate their evening meals with each other and did much business there, as noble lords in nineteenth -century Britain and sheikhs in the modern Middle East are shown to do. In what terms they talked, with what aims and assumptions, may be indirectly inferred from the suicides of two disgraced noblemen in the First Secession—a dark match for the shining deaths sought by other, heroic noblemen on behalf of their country in Roman legend.3 The stories serve to show, not actual events, but a value system in place in oral history to be retold to generations that touched the writers of the late third century. It was a system by the rules of which great exertions and sacri‹ce for fame were clearly expected of the leadership class; and my conclusion—beyond cautious!—leads into the question how such intense and potentially destructive competition could be contained, for the good of all involved. It was certainly in the interests of the gentes-leaders that it should be contained, and much of it obviously ‹tted well enough within the narrow con‹nes of the Comitium, where control was easy. Elections of major Practical (continued) • 99 [3.137...