User:Ifly6/Optimates and populares 2

The traditional definition of optimates and populares which is still prevalent in the public imagination emerges from 19th century scholarship by Theodor Mommsen. He identified populares and optimates as modern "parliamentary-style political parties", suggesting that the conflict of the orders resulted in the formation of an aristocratic and a democratic party.^[1] The source for this dichotomous view comes from readings of Cicero's Pro Sestio, where the orator defined optimates and populares as "antithetical political types".^[2]

In Mommsen's view, these parties had ideological predilections for the primacy of the senatorial aristocracy contrasted with reformers attempting to bypass the senate through the popular assemblies.^[2] For example, John Edwin Sandys, writing c. 1920 in this traditional scholarship, identified the optimates – qua party – as the killers of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BC.^[3] Mommsen also suggested that the labels themselves became common in Gracchan times.^[4]

Lily Ross Taylor, in Party politics in the age of Caesar (1949) wrote in this party-based model of republican political life, defining optimates as "members of a clique of powerful nobles who controlled the senate [and] were concerned about preserving the traditional constitution and retaining control over the profits of empire".^[2] Her views on the populares were, however, more complex: because there were clear factional differences between Crassus and Pompey c. 70 BC who both used the popular assemblies for their own ambitions, she identified two rivalling populist parties under their respective heads, who operated only outside of elections, where personal ties became more important than ideology.

The party-political view was re-evaluated, starting c. 1910 with Gelzer's Die Nobilität de Römischen Republik, with a model of Roman politics in which a candidate "could not rely on the support of an organised party[,] but instead had to cultivate a wide range of personal relationships extending both upwards and downwards in society".^[5] In later work, he returned to a more ideological interpretation of popularis, but viewed popularis politicians not as democrats, but as demagogues "more concerned about gaining the authority of the people for their plans than implementing [their] will".^[5]

By the 1930s, a far less ideological interpretation emerged, viewing Roman republican politics as dominated by parties, not of like-minded ideologues, but of aristocratic gentes.^[6] Syme in the 1939 book Roman Revolution wrote:

The political life of the Roman Republic was stamped and swayed, not by parties and programmes of a modern and parliamentary character, not by the ostensible opposition between senate and people, optimates and populares, nobiles and novi homines, but by the strife for power, wealth and glory. The contestants were the nobiles among themselves, as individuals or in groups, open in the elections and in the courts of law, or masked by secret intrigue.^[7]

Syme's description of Roman politics viewed the late republic "as a conflict between a dominant oligarchy drawn from a set of powerful families and their opponents" which operated primarily not in ideological terms, but in terms of feuds between family-based factions.^[8] Strausberger, writing also in 1939, challenged the traditional view of political parties, arguing that "there was no 'class war'" in the various civil wars (eg Sulla's civil war and Caesar's civil war) that started the collapse of the republic.^[9]

Similarly, Meier noted in 1965 that "'popular' politics was very difficult both to understand and describe[, noting] that the people itself had no political initiative but was 'directed' by the aristocratic magistrates it elected[, meaning that] 'popular' politics was... the province of politicians not the people".^[10] Moreover, "very few 'populares' appeared to embrace long term goals and most acted in a way described as popularis for only a short time".^[10]

He suggested four meanings for the word popularis in a fluid political environment with "issue-based political divisions and transitory alliances":^[2]

1. politicians acting as champions of the people against the senate,
2. politicians manipulating the popular assemblies,
3. politicians who took up a causa populi and paraded the people before the plebs urbana, and
4. a manner adopted by politicians who used "popular" means to prolong a political career.^[11]

His analysis viewed popularis in terms of a method "adopted by those who opposed the senatorial majority, [providing] a behavioural model which did not concern itself with attributing motive to political action".^[12] His perspective focused on the method of political activity, with so-called populares acting to build support for their own measures without an "democratic" ideological dimension. Roman politicians – populares included – did not aim for social or political revolution on democratic lines:^[2] Morstein-Marx notes, of democrats, that "such exotic creatures did not exist in Roman public life".^[13]

Mackie argued in an 1992 influential paper revitalising the ideological view that ratio popularis implied and required substantial argumentation based on Roman tradition to justify the intervention of the popular assemblies. Such argumentation took the form of an ideology of popular sovereignty, self-justifying the leadership of the comitia over that of the senate.^[14] Hölkeskamp suggested in 1997 that popularis ideology reflected a history of senatorial intransigence characterised as "partial and unlawful" which, over time, eroded the legitimacy of the senate in the republic.^[15]

There are other challenges to the ideological view. For example, Ferrary pointed out in 1997 the inconsistency of a popular party ideologically organised around transferring powers from the senate to the people when the reforms which the populares achieved tended to cement senatorial control of the state and never undermined the aristocratic constitution.^[2]

Morstein-Marx's book on mass oratory in the republic – often before contiones or assemblies of the people – focused, however, on how both opponents and supporters of legislation attempted to portray themselves as "true" popularis acting in the interest of the people and the other as demagoguery.^[16]

Citations

Sources

• Morstein-Marx, Robert (2021). Julius Caesar and the Roman People. Cambridge University Press. p. 580. ISBN 978-1-108-83784-2.
• Robb, MA (2018). "Optimates, populares". In Bagnall, Roger S; et al. (eds.). The Encyclopedia of Ancient History. John Wiley & Sons. doi:10.1002/9781444338386.wbeah20095.