Iris Project publication: How to win an election in the Roman Republic

It’s General Election season, and the Iris Project, which promotes Classics to schools and young people, are seizing the opportunity to run some topical articles on how ancient election campaigns compare and contrast with what we do today. I was asked to cover the case of Republican Rome, and my article has gone up online today. I will put the first couple of paragraphs up here as a teaser:

The UK is deep in the grip of election fever. Party leaders are touring the country in battle-buses, shaking hands, announcing policies, and chasing photo opportunities – all in the hope of winning over voters. But what did aspiring politicians need to do to get elected in ancient Rome? To answer this question we first need to understand some of the differences between the Roman political system and our own. While some aspects of campaigning persist across the ages, different systems reward different behaviours. In other words, it took different tactics to win a Roman election than it does a British one.

For one thing, there were no party leaders – or indeed political parties – in ancient Rome. Politicians stood for election as individuals, running largely on the basis of personal reputation rather than any policy platform. This is extremely clear from the Commentariolum Petitionis (‘Little Guide to Electioneering’), an ancient text giving advice to Cicero in his campaign for the consulship of 63 BC. Cicero (figure 1) is told that while a candidate he “must not pursue political measures, either in the senate-house or in public meetings” (Comm. Pet. 13). Instead, he should hold back, and allow himself to be judged on his established reputation and character. To win, then, it was more important to be seen as a good sort, generally capable of running the state, than it was to put forward particular ideas about how this should be done.

And you can read the rest here. I’m really pleased with how it has come out.

The quinquennium of Clegg and Cameron

The full Con-Lib coalition agreement has now emerged, Cameron and Clegg have held an extraordinary press conference, and we now know who’s in the cabinet

I found the press conference fascinating, and am not surprised that everyone and their fish was likening it to a civil partnership ceremony – a piece of social vocabulary, of course, which we must remember that we have the Labour party to thank for. As a Classicist, though, I also couldn’t help but see it in terms of the inauguration of a pair of consuls. Consuls were more equal in rank than our new pairing, but there was an acknowledged ‘senior’ consul, who took up the office first and got to speak first in debates – just as Cameron did yesterday.

Consuls also knew full well that they would have to serve together once they were elected – that, in fact, was the whole point of having two of them. The system was designed to ensure that no one person had a monopoly on state power, and for that reason, either consul could veto the actions of the other (‘veto’ simply being Latin for ‘I forbid’). Clegg and Cameron don’t seem to have any such formal mechanism for stopping one another’s actions, but of course in practice they do both know perfectly well that if either of them does anything which the other one seriously disapproves of, their coalition will fall apart, and both of their political careers will be over. So that’s a pretty strong motivation to work together, even if it’s not what they anticipated before the election.

Consuls served for only one year, not five – and that certainly did lead to catastrophic short-termism of the kind David Cameron assured us yesterday that he wants to avoid. In particular, it encouraged consuls to rush headlong into military campaigns, since they knew that if they didn’t score a victory during their short time in office, that honour would go to their successor instead. But the five-year period was also pretty important in Roman politics. It was known as a quinquennium, which just means ‘period of five years’. (Isn’t it a lovely word, though? Any word with two Qs in it (and Latin has a fair few) has got to be good value for money.) In Rome, censors (whose responsibilities were different from what our modern word ‘censorship’ might imply) were elected every five years in order to perform a census of the general population and revise the membership of the senate – which is part of what’s just happened to parliament, of course, though not quite so directly at Cameron and Clegg’s initiative. Meanwhile, five-year periods of special military command became increasingly common in the late Republic, though they were never an official part of the system and always required extraordinary legislation to be passed. More on those in a moment.

Not all consuls got on, of course. They were not like American presidential and vice-presidential candidates, running on a joint ticket for the same party. Roman politics didn’t actually have parties, anyway – the closest it came were factions, which were basically like modern political parties would be if they were only about tribalism, nepotism and power, and didn’t involve policies or (heaven forbid!) principles at all. Factions would, of course, try to get their boys into both offices whenever possible, but it didn’t always work, and sometimes bitter rivals shared office together. And if you think the Tories and LibDems can be described as ‘bitter rivals’, then let me tell you that the greatest gulfs which you can identify between them are as NOTHING compared to the rivalries of late Republican politics.

Perhaps the most famous example of ill-matched consuls is Caesar and Bibulus in 59 BC. Caesar already had very powerful friends behind him – particularly Pompey and Crassus – and basically saw his consulship as a chance to secure everything that these three men and their cronies were after: land for their soldiers, preferential treatment for their legislation and lucrative appointments for the following year. Bibulus hated Caesar and everything he stood for. He began by trying to veto Caesar’s actions, but quickly found that his veto was actually meaningless, because Caesar’s supporters simply attacked him (with literal physical violence) when he tried to interpose it. So he then fell back on his position as an augur – a priest who divines the will of the gods by watching the behaviour of birds. Bibulus spent the rest of the year standing on the roof of his house, proclaiming that the omens were bad, and that therefore all Caesar’s legislation was contrary to the will of the gods – and, hence, invalid. Caesar just ignored him.

Back to Clegg and Cameron, thankfully, they seem to be getting on rather better than this – so far, at least! We certainly don’t want their time in power to end the way Caesar and Bibulus’ did, anyway, because it was in 58 BC at the end of his consulship that Caesar headed off across the Alps to take up one of those five-year military commands I mentioned earlier on, and use it to conquer Gaul. I mean, I know Cameron’s a Eurosceptic, but I’d hope that is going a bit far, even for him. Meanwhile, though, I did notice a couple of points during the joint press conference, particularly towards the end, when Clegg looked up at the skies:

Could he have been checking the omens? If he was, the birds were certainly all singing very nicely, and he doesn’t seem to have felt the need to declare that the meeting should be adjourned on grounds of being contrary to the will of the gods. So they must have been good ones. I hope they stay that way – but I also hope he remembers to keep checking.