Optimates and populares

Mommsen's paradigm, however, has been criticised by generations of historians, first by Friedrich Münzer, followed by Ronald Syme, who considered that Roman politics was marked by familial and individual ambitions, not parties.

Ancient usage was also far from clear: even Cicero, while linking optimates to Greek aristokratia (ἀριστοκρατία), also used the word populares to describe politics "completely compatible with... honourable aristocratic behaviour".

These ad hoc alliances and many different methods of gaining political influence meant there were no "neat categories of optimates and populares" or of conservatives and radicals in a modern sense.

[20] The traditional view of the optimates refers to aristocrats who defended their own material and political interests and behaved akin to modern fiscal conservatives in opposing wealth redistribution and supporting small government.

[21][a] To that end, the optimates were viewed traditionally as emphasising the authority or influence of the senate over other organs of the states, including the popular assemblies.

Such measures were not "the sole preserve of the so-called populares" and "were not per se incompatible with traditional senatorial policy, given the extensive colonisation the senate had overseen in the past and the grain provision which members of the elite occasionally organised on a private basis".

In other words, if we follow Meier's approach to its logical conclusion, the two concepts become virtually meaningless, as illustrated by the famous vote in December 50 when the senate rejected the hard-line "optimate" opponents of Caesar and endorsed Curio's compromise option by 370 to 22.

[29] References to populares in scholarship today "do not imply a co-ordinated 'party' with a distinctive ideological character, a kind of political grouping for which there is no evidence in Rome, but simply allude to a... type of senator" who is "at least at that moment acting as the people's man".

[34] This is in contrast to the 19th century view of the populares from Mommsen, in which they are a group of aristocrats which supported democracy and the rights and material interests of the common people.

[8]The ratio popularis, or strategy of putting political questions before the people writ large, was pursued when politicians were unable to achieve their goals through the normal process in the senate.

[39][40] The content of popularis legislation was tied to the fact that politicians choosing to go before the people required needed strong support therefrom to overrule the decision of the senate.

This forced politicians choosing a popular strategy to include policies that directly benefited voters in the assemblies, such as debt relief, land redistribution,[41][pages needed] and grain doles.

[43] Other benefits proposed attempted to empower supporters in the popular assemblies, with introduction of secret ballot, restoration of tribunician rights after Sulla's dictatorship, promotion of non-senators onto juries before the law courts, and the general election of priests.

[52] Nor does an ideological approach explain the traditional identification of certain politicians (eg Publius Sulpicius Rufus) as popularis when the policies they advanced were only weakly connected to the welfare of the Roman voter.

[30] Robb argues, moreover, that the premise of the label, ie that a certain person or policy benefits the people write large, is of little use: "the principle of acting in the popular interest was a central one that all politicians would claim to be following".

[54] Young Roman politicians also turned regularly to controversial rhetoric or policies in an attempt to build their name recognition and stand out from the mass of other political candidates in their short one-year terms, with few apparent negative impacts on their longer-term career prospects.

[55] Popularis rhetoric was couched "in terms of the consensus of values at Rome at the time: libertas, leges, mos maiorum, and senatorial incompetence at governing the res publica".

[56] In public speeches during the republic, legislative disagreements did not emerge in party-political terms: "from the rostra... neither the opponents of Tiberius Gracchus, nor Catulus against Gabinius, nor Bibulus against Caesar, nor Cato against Trebonius even so much as suggested that their advice to the populus was predicated on an 'optimate' policy based on a different arrangement of political ends and means from those of the 'popular' advocates of a bill... there was, it seems, virtually no place on the rostra for ideological bifurcation".

[45][64] Furthermore, much of the perceived difference between optimates and populares emerged from rhetorical flourishes unsupported by policy: "no matter how emphatically the people’s interests and 'sovereignty' may have been asserted, the republic never saw any concrete attempts to change the nature of Roman society or shift the balance of power".

But the terminology Cicero uses turns out to be unique and unlike anything else found in the ancient sources... We are therefore not dealing with an observable phenomenon for which the Pro Sestio happens to offer a convenient label.

Rather, it is the other way round: Cicero’s use of popularis in that particular speech has reified what would otherwise have remained discrete difficult-to-classify events and individuals and turned them into manifestations of a single political movement.

During his consulship, he "stak[ed] his own claim to being popularis [in] the popular mandate he [held] as an elected consul" and drew a distinction between himself and other politicians as to who truly acted in the interests of the Roman people.

[77] In his work on the Jugurthine war, he does have a narrative of two parties: one of the people (populus) and one the nobles (nobilitas), where a small and corrupt section of the senate (pauci, 'the few') is contrasted oligarchically against the rest of society.

[79] He also gives the "dissenting nobles and their factions" no labels, "for the simple reason that they lacked the common characteristics which would have enabled such a categorisation",[80] instead presenting a cynical view in which Roman politicians cloaked themselves opportunistically in terms of libertas populi Romani and senatus auctoritas as means for self-advancement.

[38] The works of Livy, the author of Ab Urbe Condita Libri (known in English as the History of Rome), have been used to argue in favour of a distinction between populares and optimates through to earlier periods such as the Conflict of the Orders.

[85] Livy only uses the word popularis in contrast to optimates in political terms only once, in a speech put into the mouth of Barbatus on the tyranny of the Second Decemvirate in the 450s BC, centuries before the late republic.

[87] 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.

[89] This 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".

[103] Mackie argued in a 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.

[104] 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.