Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret: COVID-19: The Great Reset. Cologny: Forum Publishing, 2020.

 

 

Written six months into the coronavirus pandemic, this book urges the use of the disease to accelerate the project variously known as ‘world government,’ ‘global governance,’ or ‘globalism’. Both authors are economists (the senior author no less than the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum); they keep their ultimate goal vaguely stated, but the end game is fairly obvious. More than three decades ago, I had a conversation with a young middle-management fellow who worked on Wall Street. He earnestly explained how the world would be much better off if executives of international corporations ruled it. Our authors are less blunt in their advocacy for a global oligarchy but it’s safe to say that that’s what they want.

Their rhetorical strategy cannot be described as subtle. The pandemic is “our defining moment”; “many things will change forever.” Luckily, such “deep, existential crises” as this “favor introspection and can harbor the potential for transformation.” Indeed “people feel the time for reinvention has come.” What people? People like themselves, at least for starters, and what a heady thought that is: “A new world will emerge, the contours of which are for us to both imagine and draw,” now that “a fundamental inflection point in our global trajectory” has so happily occurred. How fundamental? Well, “Radical changes of such consequence are coming that some pundits have referred to a ‘before coronovirus’ (BC) and ‘after coronovirus’ (AC) era.” That would be fundamental, all right. One could almost say ‘messianic.’

Past epidemics, notably the Black Death, have led to pogroms, wars, famines. Admittedly, this one “doesn’t pose a new existential threat,” as “whole populations will neither be exterminated nor displaced.” Nonetheless, “the pandemic is dramatically exacerbating pre-existing dangers that we’ve failed to confront adequately for too long,” the chief of which is “the partial retreat from globalization” seen in the rise of nationalism. The authors therefore undertake to show that the only cure for such a horror is a firm move towards internationalism, assuring their readers that “the possibilities for change and the resulting new order are now unlimited and only bound by our imagination, for better or for worse.” “We should take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to reimagine our world, in a bid to make it a better and more resilient one as it emerges on the other side of this crisis.” “Better and more resilient” means (they assure us) “more egalitarian” not “more authoritarian,” with “more solidarity” not “more individualism,” “favoring the interests of the many” not “the few.” Exactly how the administrative rule of organizations like the World Economic Forum would make things more egalitarian, fraternal, and people-favoring has proved a puzzle for ‘progressives’ for the last two centuries or so. For the most part, our authors tiptoe around questions regarding the underlying political question: the regime they have in mind.

Economists to the bone, they deploy textbook jargon in labeling the book’s three main topics: the “macro reset,” the “micro reset,” and “possible consequences at the individual level.” The “macro reset” consists of five categories: economic, social, geopolitical, environmental, and technological; it is noteworthy that “geopolitical” substitutes for political, which would bring up such messy problems of conflicting political regimes which rule sovereign countries.  Throughout the discussions of these categories they provide a “conceptual framework” which identifies “three defining characteristics of today’s world”: interdependence, velocity, and complexity. By “interdependence” they mean “the dynamic of reciprocal dependence among the elements that compose a system.” The “system” they have in mind is of course the world itself, which they liken to a cruise ship currently afflicted with a contagious disease spreading from cabin to cabin,” owing to “global governing failure.” By “velocity” they mean the “culture of immediacy” the Internet has wrought. Velocity engenders impatience, a time lag between events and the ability of rulers to react to them, and an overload of information that slows rulers’ decision-making still further. By “complexity” they mean “what we don’t understand or find difficult to understand”—the results of categories 1 and 2 combined with “non-linearity,” which means that “a change in just one component of a system can lead to a surprising and disproportionate effect elsewhere.” One might suppose that this would lead our authors to worry that “global governance” might well prove a hopeless task. One would be mistaken. For example, “Many Asian countries reacted quickly” to the pandemic “because they were prepared logistically and organizationally,” thanks to the previous SARS epidemic, to say nothing (which is exactly what they do say) about the lack of civil liberty under those many regimes. 

How would global governance work? Planning, my boy, planning. In terms of economics, we already know that because “wars destroy capital while pandemics do not” economies rebound faster in the aftermath of wars, as people rebuild their cities and factories. When, at the beginning of the pandemic, “governments worldwide made the deliberate decision to shut down much of their respective economies”—a choice the authors endorse because a higher death rate would injure economic life even more—this caused “an abrupt and unsolicited return to a form of relative autarky, with every nation trying to move towards certain forms of self-sufficiency” at the cost of “a reduction in national and global output,” especially in such countries as the United States, where the ‘service sector’ (more seriously injured by policies of ‘social distancing’ than any other) provides 80% of the jobs. “Such a scenario will almost inevitably lead to a collapse in investment among business and a surge in precautionary saving among consumers, with fallout in the entire global economy through capital flight, the rapid and uncertain movement of large amounts of money out of a country, which tends to exacerbate economic crises.” Additionally, the pandemic will accelerate replacement of jobs with machines; while this normally boosts employment in the long run, the velocity of the current shift will lead to greater dislocations, especially among “low-income workers in routine jobs.” The rich may or may not get richer, but the poor will get poorer.

Crucial to our authors’ ‘globalization’ argument is their need to link the global pandemic to another main ‘globalist’ talking point, climate change. Originally, internationalists advocated world government as a cure for war, but now that nuclear weapons have made world wars considerably less palatable to ambitious rulers, climate change has taken its place. “The deep disruption caused by COVID-19 globally has offered societies an enforced pause to reflect on what is truly of value. With the economic emergency responses to the pandemic now in place, the opportunity can be seized to make the kind of institutional changes and policy choices that will put economies on a new path towards a fairer, greener future.” This in turn “will require”—notice the imperative language—a “shift in the mindset of world leaders”—no longer merely statesmen—to “place greater focus and priority on the well-being of all citizens and the planet.” This means a concurrent shift in the “metrics” by which those “leaders” measure “progress”—specifically, a shift from emphasis on quantitative, material well-being measured by ‘gross domestic product’ (now much too gross and much too domestic—indeed, a form of “tyranny”) toward such ‘quality of life’ activities as “the care economy” (childcare, eldercare), education, and medicine. In keeping with the rhetoric of ‘progress,’ our authors identify “forward-looking countries” as those which “prioritize a more inclusive and sustainable approach to managing and measuring their economies, one that also drives job growth, improvement in living standards and safeguards the planet.” 

This is all very well for countries that can afford it, our authors remark, but what about “emerging and developing economies”? “Most of them don’t have the fiscal space required to react to the pandemic shock.” This may well lead to a scenario that any respectable member of the World Economic Forum well might dread: politicians might push central banks into finance “major public projects, such as an infrastructure or green investment fund”—policies leading to huge financial deficits as governments give the banks’ money to their constituents and the consequent “uncontrollable inflation” as governments aim at paying for those expenditures with devalued money. Even in the affluent countries, politicians will be tempted to pursue such policies. If they occur in the United States the dollar itself—long the most trusted currency in the world and the lynchpin of the American economy as it has interacted with the rest of the world—could result in “a much reduced geopolitical role or higher taxation, or both” and more, the possible abandonment of the dollar as the world’s dominant currency. 

“To a large extent, US global credibility also depends on geopolitics and the appeal of its social model.” Turning next to the “societal reset,” our authors cite the criticisms of governing institutions throughout the world, very much including the United States, and the exacerbation of social problems in the poorer countries. Countries that have fared better in the pandemic were (sure enough) those for whom “inclusivity, solidarity, and trust” are “core values.” In less hazy terms, that means “cost-effective and inclusive healthcare” systems, bureaucratic preparation, “rapid and decisive decisions,” and “citizens” (one would not wish to say ‘subjects’) who “have confidence in both the leadership and the information they provide” (not to be stigmatized as ‘propaganda’). Therefore, our authors rather breathlessly anticipate a “post-pandemic era” characterized by “massive wealth redistribution, from the rich to the poor and from capital to labor,” the “death knell of neoliberalism” which favors “competition over solidarity, creative destruction over government intervention and economic growth over social welfare.” “It is no coincidence,” they intone, “that the two countries that over the past few years embraced the policies of neoliberalism with most fervor—the US and the UK—are among those that suffered the most casualties during the pandemic.” Ah yes, the frightful Reagan and Thatcher: into the dustbin of History with them! “Massive social turmoil” is in the future of such malefactor societies, and they deserve it. 

Help is on the way. “One of the great lessons of the past five centuries in Europe and America is this: acute crises contribute to boosting the power of the state.” This time, too, “governments will most likely, but with different degrees of intensity, decide that it’s in the best interests of society to rewrite some of the rules of the game and permanently increase their role,” “as happened in the 1930s.” They will move toward “a broader, if not universal, provision of social assistance, social insurance, healthcare and basic quality services” and toward “enhanced protection for workers and for those currently most vulnerable.” In particular, “the COVID-19 crisis has laid bare the inadequate state of most national health systems.” One might ask, “inadequate” for what? An worldwide emergency—that is, a thing by definition insusceptible to fully effective national responses. And what might meet such an international or global crisis other than “improved global governance”? Our authors hope that you will answer, “Nothing!” and take your bearings from precisely the global crisis instead of the routine national and even regional or local crises. 

Hence their central “reset,” the “geopolitical reset.” In this century, “the determining element of geopolitical instability is the progressive rebalancing from the West to the East,” particularly the confrontation between the “rising power,” China, and the “ruling power,” the United States. The “progressive disengagement” of the United States from the world additionally causes countries which had relied on the United States for such “global public goods” as defense of sea lanes and counterterrorism “to tend to their own backyards themselves.” “The 21st century will most likely be an era devoid of an absolute hegemon”; “as a result, power and influence will be redistributed chaotically and in some cases grudgingly.”

Economic globalization will continue, although the pandemic will slow and even reverse it for a time. Our authors instead maintain that economic globalization, political democracy, and the nation state are “mutually irreconcilable.” One of them will need to go, and it isn’t hard to anticipate which one they would like to kiss goodbye. “The rise of nationalism” is their bugbear, “global governance” their preference. As they define it, global governance isn’t exactly equivalent to a world government, at least not yet. Global governance is “the process of cooperation among transnational actors aimed at providing responses to global problems,” encompassing “the totality of institutions, policies, norms, procedures and initiative through which nation states try to bring more predictability and stability to their responses to transnational challenges”—an “effort bound to be toothless without the cooperation of national governments and their ability to act and legislate to support their aims.” That is, global government resembles the law of nations, except that “transnational actors” must seek to bring national actors into line with what transnationalists want to do. For this, the pandemic (added to climate change) may prove a useful crisis, as “COVID-19 has reminded us that the biggest problems we face are global in nature,” yet it hasn’t “triggered a set of measures coordinated globally,” but has instead done the opposite: “a stream of border closures, restrictions in international travel and trade introduced almost without any coordination, the frequent interruption of medical supply distribution and the ensuing competition for resources.” “In a functioning global governance network, nations should have come together to fight a global and coordinated ‘war’ against the pandemic” but the existing system “failed, proving either non-existent or dysfunctional.” Alas, the authors sigh, “the United Nations organization has no power to compel information sharing or enforce pandemic preparedness.” 

You can tell that a contemporary political writer is getting desperate when he reaches for analogies to quantum mechanics. Supposedly, the quantum mechanics model teaches us that when it comes to political principles and regimes, “there isn’t a ‘right’ view and a ‘wrong’ view, but different and often diverging interpretations that frequently correlate with the origin, culture, and personal history of those who profess them.” That is, nature as seen through the lens of quantum mechanics yields moral and cultural relativism in world politics. You may “think that observation and measurement define an ‘objective’ opinion, but the micro-world of atoms and particles (like the macro-world of geopolitics) is governed by the strange rules of quantum mechanics in which two different observers are entitled to their own opinion (this is called a ‘superposition’: ‘particles can be in several places or states at once’).” Therefore, “a ‘Chinese’ view and a ‘US’ view can co-exist, together with multiple other views along that continuum—all of them real!” 

What an entertaining sophistry! I exclaim, demonstrating that I too can deploy exclamation points. If nation-states are like subatomic particles, then they too should be capable of being in several places or states at once. But they’re not. A nation-state has borders over which it is sovereign. Those borders may change but they scarcely act as subatomic particles act, or seem to act, depending upon the position of the observer. What our authors could argue to make their argument coherent, if still dubious, is this: habits of mind and heart generally shared in one regime—or, more broadly, in one civilization—often differ radically from habits of heart and mind generally shared in another; the differences between those sets of habits may differ so radically that citizens or subjects within those regimes may form far different opinions concerning moral and political phenomena. Their divergent opinions are indeed equally ‘real’ in the sense that they are sincerely and deeply held. This reality must be taken into account by statesmen—sorry, ‘global leaders.’ But that doesn’t mean that “two different observers are entitled to their own opinion.” It only means that each does in fact have one.

As with almost every political appeal to moral or cultural relativism, our authors’ quantum-mechanics jive covers their own political agendum. Sure enough, a few pages after instructing us on modern physics’ correlation to political science we read: “Wealthier countries ignore the tragedy unfolding in fragile and failing countries at their peril.” A consistent quantum mechanist in politics would add, “or not.” But now our authors have discovered themselves entitled to make such judgments despite their self-alleged incapacity to do so.

Indeed, they insist on it. Both the pandemic and climate change amount to “existential threats to humankind”—objectively speaking, in their opinion. They share five attributes: first, “they are known…systemic risks that propagate very fast in our interconnected world and, in so doing, amplify other risks from different categories; second, “they are non-linear, meaning that beyond a certain threshold, or tipping point, they can exercise catastrophic effects” regionally or globally; third, “the probabilities and distribution of their impacts are very hard, if not impossible to measure”; fourth, and crucially for the ‘globalist’ argument, “they are global in nature and therefore can only be properly addressed in a globally coordinated fashion”; fifth, “they affect disproportionately the already most vulnerable countries and segments of the population.” Finally, both are tied to worldwide population growth, as crowding facilitates viral contagion and larger populations expend more of the pollutants that are said to contribute significantly to global warming. To combat both, “it will be incumbent on us all to rethink our relationship with nature and question why we have become so alienated from it.”

I can answer that last one. We have become alienated from nature because nature can be harsh, with or without global warming. The same science that has theorized quantum mechanics was inaugurated as an effort to conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate—deemed to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short by one of modern science’s earliest advocates. One need not take so extreme a view, or project so optimistic a solution, to see the point. 

But to return to our authors. They propose four main preliminary approaches to these troubles. “Enlightened leadership” will “make ‘good use’ of the pandemic by not letting the crisis go to waste.” They “may want to take advantage of the shock inflicted by the pandemic to implement long-lasting and wider environmental changes”—clearly the intention behind this book. They will emphasize that “we ignore science and expertise at our peril”; that is, we should be more compliant with policies proposed and enforced by people like our authors. This means we must change our “behavior,” acknowledging that we have “no choice but to adopt ‘greener living.'” We should applaud “the motivation for change” which has been “emboldened” by the pandemic, “trigger[ing] new tools and strategies in terms of social activism.” How those “tools” differ from those familiar to anyone who recalls the ‘Movement’ politics of the 1960s remains unclear. However, unlike many on the old New Left, and many in the environmentalist movement, our authors would have us embrace technology, especially contact. But will technology turn into a tool of social and political oppression, as it has done in many of those regimes whose ‘points of view’ (we’ve been assured) are entitled to their own opinions? “It is for those who govern and each of us personally to control and harness the benefits of technology without sacrificing our individual and collective values and freedoms,” they intone, neglecting to suggest how they, and we, might go about doing that. They hurry on to the next level, the “Micro Reset.”

Our authors define “micro” institutions as those governing business and industry. The message is simple: Get on board, or fail. Forget about “a return to business as usual. This won’t happen because it can’t happen.” For capitalists, “the key issue will be to find the apposite balance between what functioned before and what is needed now to prosper in the new normal.” More specifically, this means accelerating the trend toward “stakeholder capitalism,” a term that evidently denotes not simply concern for the demands of consumers and of workers but for the those of climate change activists, advocates of “gender diversity,” and similar groups self-classified as proponents of social justice (typically defined as social egalitarianism). “The pandemic leaves no doubt in boardrooms that the absence” of such considerations “has the potential to destroy substantial value and even threaten the viability of a business” through the “reputational cost” of lawsuits and boycotts. “The ‘price’ of not doing so will be too high in terms of the wrath of activists, both activist investors and social activists.” If sufficiently frightened by the scarecrow of activism, capitalists too can be deployed in cooperation with rather than in opposition to the global governors; both ‘sides’ will work (intentionally or not) at the service of globalists.

As Tocqueville taught his readers nearly two centuries ago, such ‘intermediate’ institutions as townships and counties can inhibit the ambitions of statist centralizers and maintain the spirit of liberty among citizens. On the level of globalism, nation-states serve that function, but so do many capitalist institutions, cities, and universities. Our authors therefore applaud what they take to be the likelihood of de-urbanization in the pandemic’s wake, as companies shift their employees from working in offices to working at home. This will result in “far fewer tenants to rent empty office buildings,” “puncturing the global real estate bubble that [has] been years in the making” and bringing much of the residential real estate market in cities down with it. Same for universities (“particularly the expensive ones in the Anglo-Saxon world”): they, too, “will have to alter their business model or go bankrupt because COVID-19 has made it obsolete.” Why pay “the same high tuition for [the] virtual education” to which universities have resorted? Sure, the online model of education, or some hybrid form resulting from mating it with in-person education, “has the disadvantage of erasing a large aspect of social life and personal interactions on a campus.” Too bad, but that’s the way it will be. The noteworthy, if unstated, theme here is ‘divide and conquer.’ The fewer social “interactions” at work and at school and the more social life becomes ‘virtual.’ the less real resistance to global governance there can be. Traditional institutions capable of resisting globalism will weaken, and flash mobs organized by online agitators won’t stand up for long against well-organized, trained law enforcement officers—especially if they learn to talk the talk of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ which are becoming the (largely rhetorical) price of doing real business.

Finally, the “individual reset.” Whereas natural disasters usually “bring people together,” pandemics “drive them apart.” “Psychologically, the most important consequence of the pandemic is to generate a phenomenal amount of uncertainty that often becomes a source of angst,” then shame, as we hesitate to step up and help one another for fear of infection. “Often, the fear of death ends up overriding all other human emotions.” Fueled by such fear, false rumors and conspiracy theories erode social trust. But this too is only one more crisis not to be wasted, as it invites a debate over what the common good is. For example, in the United States and Britain—those two bastions of the ‘neoliberalism’ our authors earlier scorned—there are persons who argue that recessions kill people as surely as diseases do, and that governments should not be too quick to shut down economic activity in an attempt to control the coronavirus. Ah, yes, our authors riposte, “in the US, recessions do indeed kill a lot of people because the absence of limited nature of any social safety net makes them life-threatening.” And so we are left with what is “ultimately a moral choice about whether to prioritize the qualities of individualism or those that favor the destiny of the community.” Individuals, too, stand in the way of global governance. Community “destiny” ‘must’—as a matter of both historical and moral necessity—take precedence. From complacency about social life in workplaces and schools, our authors now veer toward an endorsement of sociality. “We are social animals for whom the many minor and often nonverbal clues that normally occur during physical social interactions are vital in terms of communication and mutual understanding”; without such communicative clues, our brain is “simply overwhelm[ed], and “we get the feeling of being drained of energy and left with a sense of profound dissatisfaction,” which “in turn negatively affects our sense of mental well-being.” This points to a “reset” of sociality, away from workplaces and schools—let alone the civil associations of self-government Tocqueville admired in America—towards a bureaucratized society, its global governors well out of the reach of its subjects, in which sociality is somehow experienced through government-sponsored social welfare programs. It will be called a worldwide ‘social democracy’ but it will be a socialist oligarchy. 

In preparation for this new order, ‘we’ shouldn’t let the crisis go to waste. “Offering as it did the gifts of more time, greater stillness, more solitude (even if an excess of the latter sometimes resulted in loneliness), the pandemic provided an opportunity to think more deeply about who we are, what really matters and what we want, both as individuals and as a society.” Alone, we can undergo a “period of enforced collective reflection”—a very fine turn of phrase, indeed, for connoisseurs of adroit self-contradiction. And what shall ‘we’ think about? Our authors stand ready with helpful suggestions: “Do we know what is important? Are we too selfish and overfocused on ourselves? Do we give too great a priority and excessive time to our career? Are we slaves to consumerism?” Having already pointed us toward their preferred answers, Mssrs. Schwab and Malleret hit their ‘environmentalist’ key: “One clear message has emerged from this: nature is a formidable antidote to many of today’s ills.” “Nature makes us feel good.” Very well then, as the Sixties Left once insisted, ‘If it feels good, do it.’ Forward with global governance in the name of climate protection.

“We need to change; we should change. But can we?” “Simply put, will we put into motion the Great Reset?” The Great Reset is “about making the world less divisive, less polluting, less destructive, more inclusive, more equitable and fairer than we left it in the pre-pandemic era.” And what can ‘we’ do to effect this consummation so devoutly to be wished? “The absolute prerequisite for a proper reset is greater collaboration and cooperation within and between countries.” Without “shared intentionality” to “act together towards a common goal” we “simply cannot progress.” In the face of the prospect of a world “even more divided, nationalistic and prone to conflicts than it is today,” ‘we’ have “an opportunity to embed greater societal equality and sustainability into the recovery, accelerating rather than delaying progress towards the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and unleashing a new era of prosperity.” For those so benighted as not to know what the “Goals” are, suffice it to say that they were adopted by the United Nations in 2015 (during the Obama administration) and center on the rather ambitious goal of ending poverty in the world.

Our authors are confident that this can be done because “a multitude of surveys conclude that we collectively desire change,” including “international surveys finding that a large majority of citizens around the world want the economic recovery from the corona crisis to prioritize climate change and to support a green recovery.” Quite apart from the question of how effective wishful thinking is likely to be, this raises a problem our authors do not consider. What “international survey” of public opinion could register public opinion in, say, China, Russia, or any of the other illiberal oligarchies? And if regimes still matter, where does that leave the claim that all ‘opinions,’ like all subatomic particles, are entitled to vibrate with equal velocity? And if they are, where does that leave this rather dodgy ‘we’ for which our authors so confidently speak?

Titus Livy: The History of Rome. Books I-V. Valerie M. Warrior translation. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006.

Titus Livy: Rome’s Italian Wars. Books VI-X. J. C. Yardley translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

 

Tocqueville describes the advance of equality in civil societies throughout the modern era in the West, an advance concurrent with the retreat of aristocracy. He identifies that the advent of Christianity as the archē of this movement, which he understands not as an effect of ‘History’ but as the increasing awareness by all human beings of their own nature as humans, beings equal first of all before God and therefore among one another. Philosophers, Tocqueville said, had understood this for centuries, but Christianity brought this truth to ‘the many.’ The eighteen centuries since Christianity began, civil-social equality or “democracy” had pervaded Christendom; America, he wrote, was the “sample democracy,” the regime in which democracy had been most thoroughly instantiated in the habits of mind and heart of the people. Such a civil society could support a republican regime, as in America, or a despotism, as in Russia. In time, it might also generate a new form of aristocracy or oligarchy—perhaps in the form of industrial corporations or in the form of an administrative state. (Or, one might now think, so combination of the two.) Tocqueville called upon the remaining aristocrats not to resist democracy but to guide it toward well-founded republicanism.

The reader of Tocqueville who comes to Livy will see a similar movement in the first pentad of The History of Rome. Rome moves from kingship to tyranny to aristocracy to a mixed regime that saw the plebeian class, ‘the many,’ gradually if unsteadily assume more ruling authority. Conflict between plebeians and patricians within the mixed regime continued throughout the second half of the fifth century BC, near the end of which time Marcus Furius Camillus first comes to sight as one of a set of eight newly-elected military tribunes. In Livy’s estimation, Camillus was the preeminent Roman statesman of his generation and more, a model statesman for any time or place.

In the sixty years preceding Camillus’ first election to high office, Romans enacted several important law enhancing plebeian authority. Perhaps the most important of these was introduced by plebeian tribune Gaius Terentilius Harsa in 462 BC. During a war with the Volsci, when both consuls were out of the city, leading the armies, Terentilius “spent several days complaining to the plebs about the arrogance of the patricians, criticizing in particular the power of the consuls as excessive and intolerant in a free state” (III.ix.173). In ridding themselves of the monarchy, Romans had merely exchanged one master for two. He proposed a law establishing the election of a five-man committee to “write up laws concerning the power of the consuls,” so that “the consuls’ whims and license would not serve in place of laws” (III.ix.174). Thwarted initially in the senate, the Terentilian Law would remain the focus of Roman class struggle for many years. 

By the mid-450s, in negotiations with the senators, the tribunes argued that if the patricians “disliked plebeian laws, they should allow lawmakers to be appointed jointly from plebeians and patricians who would pass measures that were advantageous to both sides and would ensure equality before the law” (III.xxxi.201)—the principle underlying the mixed regime as outlined by Aristotle. The patricians agreed, with the caveat that only a patrician could propose a law. A delegation was sent to Athens to “write down the famous laws of Solon and acquaint themselves with the institutions, laws, and customs of other Greek states” (III.xxxi.201). With this information in hand, in 451 BC the senate agreed to a major change in the regime, whereby authority passed from the consuls and the tribunate to a board of ten, the Decemvirate. “It did not last long” (III.xxxiii.201); within a year, the Decemvirs began to rule by terror over plebeians and senators alike. “If anyone should utter a word that was reminiscent of liberty, either in the senate or before the people, the rods and axes were immediately at the ready, if only to frighten the rest” (III.xxxvi.207). They employed squads of young patricians as enforcers, granting them the property of those they beheaded. “Corrupted by these rewards, the young nobles not only did not resist such injustice but openly preferred license for themselves, rather than liberty for everyone” (III.iiivii.208). By 449 BC, “liberty was mourned as lost forever” (III.iiixiii.209).

It took a military emergency, a Sabine invasion of Roman territory concurrent with an Aequian attack on Rome’s allies, the Etruscans, to move the senate to action. Senator Marcus Horatius Barbatus now called the Decemvirs “the Ten Tarquins” (III.iiiix.211), but the senators, hating the plebeian tribunate even more than the Decemvirs, failed to move against them. After the leading Decemvir committed an outrage against a plebeian girl and plebeian soldiers refused to fight until the tribunate was restored, the senate yielded, abolishing the first Decemvirate and allowing a new election of plebeian tribunes and reestablishing the consuls. Moreover, laws enabling the plebeians to self-legislate, restoring the right of appeal of a consul’s judgment (“the sole defense of liberty”), and establishing the sacrosanctity of the tribunes ensured that return to old institutions did not leave the plebeians back where they had begun before the founding of the Decemvirate (III.lv.229-30). This enhancement of ‘the democracy’ even reached the army, as Horatius, now a consul leading troops against the Sabines, assured his men that “whatever strategy and spirit I am going to use will be up to you soldiers” (III.lx.239). After the victories, when the senate refused to grant a triumph to either victorious consul, the people themselves granted them a triumph—the “first time [that] a triumph was celebrated at the bidding of the people,” through their tribal councils, “without the authorization of the senate” (III.lxiii.241).

Factional strife continued, nonetheless. Although the plebeians “were quiet,” “the younger patricians began to maltreat them” again (III.lxv.243). They did so in accord with “cabals of the more powerful” (III.lxv.244). The tribunes were too weak to protect the plebs and, “on the other hand, the older senators, though thinking their young men too headstrong, preferred to have their excessive spirit on their own side rather than that of their adversaries, if moderation had to be disregarded” (III.lxv.244). Livy comments, “So difficult it is to be moderate in the defense of freedom. By pretending to want equality, an individual raises himself up in order to put another down. By protecting themselves against fear, men actually make themselves the object of fear, and, when they have defended themselves from injustice, we proceed to injure others, as if it were a necessity either to do or to suffer wrong.” (III.lxv.244).

A few years later, another step towards democratization occurred with the passage of the Lex Canuleia. Plebeian tribune Gaius Canuleius proposed a law reinstating marriage between patricians and plebeians. When the senate tried to promote a war scare to distract the plebeians, Canuleius blocked the troop levy and demanded discussion of his bill. Complaining that “the tribunes’ madness could no longer be tolerated” and “that there was more war being stirred up at home than abroad,” the consuls charged that passage of the law would only reward sedition, encouraging it in the future” (IV.ii.254-55). “The patricians,” they continued, “should recall the majesty of the senate that they had inherited from their fathers, which they were likely to pass on to their children in a diminished state; whereas the plebs could boast of their growing strength and importance. There was no end to this, nor would there be one as long as the leaders of sedition gained office in proportion to the success of their sedition.” (IV.ii.255). Intermarriage would “defile” patrician families “and create confusion in both public and private auspices, so that nothing should be pure, nothing unpolluted,” and “no one would recognize himself or his own kin” while “patricians and plebeians mat[ed] together like beasts” (IV.ii.255). What is more, another proposed law would allow plebeians to be elected to the consulship itself; “leaders of the rabble were now getting themselves ready” to assume that hitherto distinguished office (IV.ii.255).

In reply, Canuleius argued that plebeians are “fellow-citizens” who “inhabit the same native land, even though we do not possess the same wealth” (IV.iii.256). Citizenship is “more than intermarriage,” and we plebeians already have it (IV.iii.256). He asked the plebeians, “Don’t you realize in what an atmosphere of contempt you live. They would deprive you of part of the daylight, if they could. They resent the fact that you breathe, that you speak, that you look like human beings,” claiming in effect that “it is a religious abomination to elect a plebeian consul.” (IV.iii.257). But in fact many kings of Rome were foreigners. “As long as no stock was spurned that was prominent for excellence, Roman dominion increased”; foreigners can become patricians and consuls but according to patricians most native Romans should not marry into the patrician class or be elected to a consulship (IV.iii.257). Some of “the vilest of mortals” were patricians who served as Decemvirs; some of “the best of the kings” were “newcomers” (IV.iii.258).

“Must no innovation be made?” (IV.iv.258). If so, no pontiffs or augurs would have been created by Numa, no census and division by centuries and classes by Servius Tullius, no consuls after the expulsion of the monarchs. “Who doubts that, in a city that is founded for eternity and is growing immeasurably, new powers, priesthoods, and rights of families and individuals should be established?” (IV.iv.258). And as for intermarriage between members of the two classes, no one will be compelled “to make a marriage contract against his will” (IV.iv.259). The children will belong to the father’s class, and the parents of the couple will choose whether they approve of this outcome.

Finally, and crucially, “does the ultimate power belong to the Roman people or to you,” the patricians, or do “all men” in Rome deserve “equal liberty”? (IV.v.260). For their part, the plebeians “are ready for your wars, be they genuine or false, on the following conditions: if you finally unify this citizen body by restoring the right of intermarriage; if they are enabled to unite, be connected and joined with you in the ties of family and kinship; if brave and vigorous men are given hope and access to high offices; if they are granted a share in the partnership of government; and if, as is the mark of true liberty, they are allowed to take their turn, both in obeying the annually elected magistrates and in exercising magisterial power” (IV.v.260). Livy’s Canuleius defines liberty exactly as Aristotle defines politics, as ruling and being ruled in turn; to complete the resemblance, a law permitting patrician-plebeian intermarriage tracks Aristotle’s location of political relations in the household relationship between husband and wife, where the habit of ruling an being ruled in turn originates.

The marriage law passed. Election of plebeian consuls did not win favor, but the two factions reached a compromise whereby patricians and plebeians alike could elect military tribunes with consular power. In the first such election, all those elected were patricians. “Where will you now find”—under the regime of the emperor Augustus—in “one individual that moderation, fairness, and loftiness of mind that characterized the entire people at that time?” (V.vi.262). Democratization took another step forward.

Plebeian advancement hardly moderated factionalism, however. If, as James Madison wrote, republicanism is to faction as air is to fire, Rome could not escape that danger. Livy considers it dangerous, indeed: Factional strife “has brought and will continue to bring destruction to more people than have foreign wars, famine, disease, or other national disasters that men attribute to the anger of the gods” (IV.ix.266). And, given the fact cited by Canuleius, that Rome was “growing immeasurably,” one source of faction might well be the “various kinds of religious practice, mostly foreign, [which] assailed [Roman] minds,” especially during times of drought and plague, practices that arise “because men who make a profit from superstition-prone people were posing as seers and introducing new rituals of sacrifice into Roman homes,” rituals imported from Greece which turned Romans’ attention away from the noble and politic Olympians towards the cthonic gods of the underworld. And finally, the ever-calculating patricians often blunted plebeian sway by persuasive speech “if,” as one smart senator put it, “from time to time they adopted a rhetoric that was mindful of the situation rather than their own grandeur” (IV.xlviii.314-315). With a bit less self-preening grandiloquence, a couple of tribunes usually could be found to veto the democratizing proposals of the others. Once the senators voted to pay the soldiers, the same senator hit upon the notion of demanding year-round military service, which would keep many plebeians out of the city and away from political life.

Such was the political condition of Rome in 403 BC, when Marcus Furius Camillus won election as one of eight military tribunes. Since (as editor Kathleen Warrior observes) a camillus is a boy who assists priests in religious rites, it is likely that he was understood to be a pious young man, and he remained mindful of the gods throughout his career. He exhibited virtue beyond that of his colleagues several years later in a war against the Veientines. The war had not gone well, but when Camillus was chosen as dictator “the change of commander suddenly changed everything. Men’s hopes were different, their spirits different; even the fortunes of the city seemed different” (V.xix.356-57).

Why? First, while still in Rome, he unhesitatingly re-imposed military discipline on the soldiers who “had fled in panic from Veii” during the initial engagement (V.xix.357)—discipline being central to the Roman way of war. He thereby “prov[ed] that the enemy was not the worst thing that the soldiers had to fear” (V.xix.357). He also declared a military levy to raise fresh troops for the campaign before “hastening in person to Veii to strengthen the soldiers’ morale” (V.xix.357). Returning to Rome, he made a religious vow to celebrate the Great Games and to restore and rededicate a temple if his troops were victorious. 

Thus prepared, he fought a couple of minor battles as he proceeded toward Veii. “All his actions were carried out with consummate planning and strategy and so, as is usual, were attended with good fortune” (V.xix.357); for the Livyan statesman, Fortuna cannot be mastered, but at times she can be persuaded. He had most of the spoils turned over to the quaestor, the treasurer, “and not too much to the soldiers,” whose minds he wanted to concentrate on fighting not pillaging (V.xix.357). Upon reaching Veii, he commanded the men to build forts and to refrain from fighting without orders; they also built a tunnel into the enemy citadel, working the men in six-hour shifts to prevent exhaustion and to ensure that the work would be continuous. “There was no letup by night or day until they had made their way into the citadel” (V.xix.358). Rightly anticipating victory, but knowing what controversy distribution of the spoils from such “a very wealthy city” would spark, he turned the matter over to the senate, which eventually decided to solidify plebeian approval for the expedition by giving them a share (V.xx.358). Finally, before engaging the enemy, he spoke a public prayer to Pythian Apollo, vowing a tenth of the spoils to his temple, while vowing to Veii’s divine patroness, Juno Regina, “a temple worthy of your greatness” in Rome if she switches sides—a traditional ritual of evocation described by Fustel de Coulanges (V.xxi.359). Camillus proceeded “to attack the city from all directions with overwhelming numbers in order to minimize the perception of the danger that was coming from the tunnel” (V.xxi.359). Victory came easily and the Veientine citizens were sold into slavery, the money going to the state treasury. “This was the fall of Veii, the wealthiest city of the Etruscan people, which showed her greatness even in her final overthrow. For ten continuous summers and winters she was besieged, inflicting more disasters than she sustained. In the end, when even fate was against her, she was taken,” like Troy, “by siegeworks and not by force.” (V.xxii.362).

In a military republic, the path to political prominence will pass through the battlefield. So with Camillus. As a military commander, Camillus distinguished himself from his contemporaries by exhibiting the ability to organize. Even before he had engaged the enemy he planned for ‘the postwar’ in a way that showed his recognition of the political factions in Rome and his intention to moderate them. Indeed, one of the few mistakes he made in his career occurred during the magnificent triumph he was granted upon his return to the city. He rode into the city “in a chariot drawn by four white horses, seemingly superior to not only citizens but also mortals. Men thought it tantamount to sacrilege that the dictator was making himself the equal of Jupiter and the Sun by using these horses.” (V.xxiii.362). He further offended the plebeians by following through on his pious promise to allocate a portion of the spoils to Apollo and his priests instead of giving it all to the plebeians.

On this latter point, Camillus stood his ground against this “disgraceful contentiousness,” “harangu[ing] the people over and over again” for being “more concerned about everything else than about discharging its religious obligation” (V.xxv.364-65). The senate backed him, but “as soon as men’s minds were relieved of their religious obligation, the plebeian tribunes renewed their political unrest, arousing the crowd against all the leading men, but especially against Camillus” (V.xxv.365). The senators, however, elected him to the military tribunate in 394 BC. 

In the ongoing war with the Faliscans, Camillus exhibited the virtue of justice alongside his well-established virtues of courage and prudence. A Greek tutor of some children of Faliscan aristocrats led his students to the Roman camp, offering them to Camillus as hostages. Camillus spurned the offer. “A criminal yourself,” he told the Greek, “you have come with a criminal gift to a people and a general who are not like you” (V.xxvii.367); that is, your ethos and ours contradict. Further, not man but “nature” implants that ethos in we Romans: “There are laws of war as well as of peace, and we have learned to exercise them justly, no less than bravely” (V.xxvii.367). He will conquer the Faliscans “by Roman skills, valor, siegeworks. and arms, just as I did at Veii” (V>xxvii.367). “He had the man stripped, his hands tied behind his back, and gave him to the boys to be led back to Falerii, handing them rods with which they were to beat the traitor as they drove him back into the city” (V.xxvii.367). When the Faliscans saw the children, “the entire citizen body now united in demanding peace,” praising “Roman fair dealing [fide or trustworthiness] and their commander’s sense of justice” (V.xxvii.368). Faliscan ambassadors went to Rome and told the senators that “you and your commander have won a victory over us that neither a god nor man could begrudge,” having convinced us by this act that “we shall live better lives under your rule than under our laws” (V.xxvii.368). They surrendered, and “Camillus was thanked by both the enemy and his fellow citizens” (V.xxvii.36). In sharp contrast to their treatment of the Veientines, the senate merely required the Faliscans to pay the salaries of the Roman soldiers for the year. “Camillus returned to the city, distinguished by a far better kind of glory than when the four white horses had drawn him in triumph into the city, since he had conquered the enemy by justice and fair dealing” (V.xxviii.368).

In addition to the dispute over the distribution of the Veientine war spoils, the plebeians also coveted Veientine land, some going so far as to say that they would prefer to move the capital of Rome to Veii. Two plebeian tribunes who opposed this and vetoed the bill were indicted by their colleagues and heavily fined. “Camillus openly charged the plebs with wrongdoing, since they had turned against their own and failed to understand that they had subverted their veto by their perverse judgment of the tribunes and, by subverting their veto, overthrown tribunician power” (V.xxix.371). Recalling his successful prayer to Juno Regina to leave Veii and accept a Roman temple as her new home, “he thought it a sacrilege that a city that had been deserted and abandoned by the immortal gods should be inhabited” (V.xxx.371). On the basis of this religious appeal, the senators went amongst their own tribes, “begging them not to drive the Roman people into the city of their enemies,” deserting their household gods (V.xxx.372). The appeal worked, and the tribes rejected the bill by one vote. The senators then apportioned Veientine farmland to every plebeian family, while keeping the city itself uninhabited.

Still resentful of Camillus’ intervention on the issue of the Veientine spoils, a plebeian tribune indicted him. To avoid the dishonor of an unjust conviction, Camillus went into exile in 391 BC.

That same year, a new and formidable enemy appeared, attacking the Etruscans. The Gauls turned toward the Etruscan town of Clusium, a Roman ally, which desperately requested Roman aid. The Romans sent envoys to negotiate a settlement with this unknown invader. The envoys failed to negotiate a peace settlement, rejecting the Gallic demand for some Clusian territory and the envoys themselves “took up arms, contrary to the law of nations” (V.xxxvi.379). When the Gauls sent ambassadors to Rome to protest this conduct, the plebeians elected those same envoys to the military tribunate “When this happened, the Gauls were enraged, as they had every right to be, and returned to their own people, openly uttering threats” (V.xxxvi.380). The Gallic army then advanced on Rome.

With “tribunes whose rashness had brought about the war” in “supreme command” of Roman forces, the city lacked adequate defenses because no one had anticipated such a sudden attack. That is, Romans had lacked exactly the things the exiled statesman excelled in; prudent foresight and the ability to rightly order an army. Defeated in a battle near the Allia River, most of the Roman troops fled to Veii, leaving Rome unguarded. The few remaining men of military age and the senators withdrew to the citadel, and a plebeian brought the Vestals and many of the city’s sacred objects to Caere. The Gauls entered the capital unopposed, but were repelled by the defenders of the citadel; having found no grain in the city that would support a siege of its citadel, they simply withdrew, taking to plundering the surrounding countryside.

At Ardea, Camillus was “grieving more for the fortune of the state than his own,” blaming gods and men alike (V.xliii.388). “In wonder and indignation”—in mind and in heart—he “asked where were those heroes who, with him, had taken Veii and Falerii and also waged other wars often with more bravery than good fortune” (V.xliii.388). His lamentations were cut short when he learned that the Gauls were approaching Ardea. At that, “touched by nothing less than divine inspiration,” he headed for the Ardean assembly to rally the people (V.xliii.388). Citing their “shared danger,” he offered the Ardeans the service of one whose “skill” in wartime service gave him high standing in his native land (“unconquered in war, I was driven out by my ungrateful citizens in a time of peace”) (V.xliv.389). Establishing the common ground for action and his hosts’ need for his military prowess, he next assessed the enemy. The Gauls are “a race to whom nature has given a physique and a spirit that are large rather than reliable”; they “bring more terror than strength into every conflict” (V.xliv.389). As proof, he pointed to their actions after their conquest of Rome. Instead of taking it over, they have taken to wandering through the countryside, filling themselves “with the food and wine they have hastily consumed” and laying themselves down to sleep “like wild beasts, without any protection, any guards or outposts” (V.xliv.389). Now is the time to strike, “when they are constrained by sleep and ready to be butchered like cattle” (V.xliv.389).

And so they were. Meanwhile, at Veii, the Roman army reorganized, “a strong body [that] lacked a head” (V.xlvi.391). Reminded of Camillus simply by being in Veii, the city he had conquered, upon the approval of the senate the soldiers summoned Camillus from Ardea. In Rome itself, a contingent of Gauls launched a night attack; the Romans were awakened by the sacred geese of Juno, which hadn’t been killed and eaten by the besieged but still pious Romans in the citadel. Although they warded off the attack, they were starving and soon capitulated to the besieging Gauls.

“Both gods and men prevented the Romans from living as a ransomed people” (V.xlix.394). Camillus and his forces arrived, routing the Gauls in two battles. “Everywhere the slaughter was total” (V.xlix.395). Camillus “was hailed with sincere praise as a Romulus and as father of his country and second founder of the city” (V.xlix.395). But once again Camillus thought not only of the war but its aftermath. The plebeians and their tribunes again wanted to migrate to Veii, now that Rome had been burned by the invaders. Camillus therefore did not resign his dictatorship after receiving his triumph but moved to prevent the migration. 

As before, he first attended to religious obligations. In gratitude to the citizens of Caere for receiving Rome’s sacred objects, permitting worship of the gods to proceed uninterrupted, Rome should “establish ties of hospitality” with them; additionally, Capitoline Games should be held in honor of “Jupiter Best and Greatest,” who has “protected his own abode and the citadel of the Roman people at a time of peril” (V.l.396). Addressing the citizens of Rome, Camillus took the occasion to deplore the plebeians’ intention to leave the city, despite “the religious obligations established” at its founding and the most recent evidence of the gods’ favor, allowing the city’s recovery from the Gauls. With this, “I would think that no human being will ever neglect the gods’ worship” (V.li.398). Punished by the gods for having violated the law of nations, making us “an object lesson to all the world,” Romans nevertheless enjoyed divine mercy because they never departed from “our worship of the gods” (V.li.398). “Therefore they have restored to us our homeland, victory, and the longstanding renown for warfare that we had lost,” turning “terror, flight, and slaughter upon our enemy” (V.li.398). As there is “no place [in Rome] that is not filled with a sense of religion and gods,” will you plebeians now “abandon all these gods,” “both those of the state and those of the family” in time of peace, when no necessity requires it? (V.lii.398-99).

Apart from these religious considerations, he continued, it would be “pitiful and shameful for us, but glorious for the Gauls” if Romans abandoned Rome (V.liii.401); the Gauls would return and occupy the deserted city where the Capitol and the citadel still stand, despite the destruction of so much else. A city is more than its infrastructure. “Does the soil of our homeland and the earth that we call our mother have no hold on us? Does our love for our homeland depend on buildings and their beams?” (V.liv.402). Not only the gods of Rome but the nature upon which Rome rests—its “hills and plains, the Tiber and the region familiar to my eyes, and this sky beneath which in was born and reared”—these too are Rome (V.liv.402). To this patriotic sentiment he joins an appeal to reason. “Not without reason did gods and men choose this place for the foundation of a city—the health-giving hills; a convenient river by which crops can be brought down from inland areas and foreign goods received from abroad; a sea nearby for usefulness, though not exposed by being too near to danger from foreign fleets; an area in the middle of Italy—a place, indeed, uniquely and naturally suited to the growth of a city” (V.liv.402). With an oath, he condemns the intention to leave such a sacred place with such natural, rationally understandable features. “Though your valor may be able to go elsewhere”—he is careful not to impugn their virtue, the source of their pride in Romanness—the “fortune of this place surely cannot be transferred” (V.liv.403).

As that fortune would have it, a centurion passed through the Curia Hostilia with his cohort as the senators deliberated. He called for his men to plant the standard, saying, “It will be best for us to stay here” (V.lv.403). Fortified with an event which they could interpret as a good omen, the senators rejected the migration bill and the plebeians concurred with their decision. They began to rebuild the city. “The city was then reborn, from its original roots, as it were, with greater vigor and fecundity, and from that point on, from its second beginning, its history on the home front and in the military field will be presented with greater clarity and certitude” (VI.i.6).

After this new founding, “the city’s stability initially depended on the support it found in its leading citizen,” “who was also the prop responsible for its recovery” (VI.i.3) and indeed “the mainstay of Rome” (VI.iii.5). Camillus presided over the first elections of military tribunes in the renewed city before overseeing the conduct of wars against the Etruscans, the Volsci, the Latins, and the Hernici, peoples hoping to take advantage of Rome’s apparent weakness. By now, his military reputation was so great that his mere arrival at a foreign city would cause it to surrender, as the Etruscans did at Satricum.

While “his colleagues admitted that, when there was any urgent threat of war, the overall direction of affairs should rest with one man, and they had already decided that their imperium should be secondary to his” (VI.vii.11), one patrician of “illustrious reputation,” Marcus Manlius Capitolinus, envied his preeminence (VI.xi.15). Observing that “his own influence among the senators was not as great as he felt it should be,” Manlius “became the first of all senators to champion the popular cause” (VI.xi.15). “Denouncing the senators and flirting with the commons, he was driven along by popular favor rather than by his use of judgement, preferring to have a grand reputation rather than a good one” (VI.xi.15). He conspired with groups of plebs, pointing out that the same men who showed such bravery in battle in building an empire, in ruling foreigners, lost their spirit when “attempting to achieve (rather than defend) liberty” (VI.xviii.24). When arrested and arraigned before the senate, the prosecutors turned the plebeians against him by charging him with aspirations to monarchy. He was executed, thrown off the Tarpeian Rock.

Camillus needed to do nothing to counter Manlius’ threat to the regime, but in Lucius Furius, a young military tribune who incited the soldiers against him in their campaign against the Latin city Praeneste. Its citizens had defected from it alliance with Rome, then joined with the Volscians to seize Satricum, now colonized by the Romans, whom they abused. “The Romans were angry over this,” and appointed aging Camillus as the sixth member of the military tribunate (VI.xxii.29). When the Roman army arrived in front of Satricum, Camillus deliberately held back from attacking, “seeking to use strategy to augment his strength” before doing so (VI.xxiii.30). Infuriated by the enemy’s taunts, the soldiers listened to the impatient younger tribune, who told them that “the old man’s ideas were feeble and spiritless” (VI.xxiii.30). Far from countermanding his impatient young colleague, who was legally his equal in the command, Camillus contented himself with building up the reserve forces and positioning himself “on some higher ground, where he kept a close eye on how another’s strategy would turn out” (VI.xxiii.31).

It did not turn out well. In their over-eagerness to attack and pursue, the Roman troops under Lucius Furius’ command overextended themselves and fell victim to the enemy’s counterattack. As the Romans retreated in disorder, Camillus intervened, shamed them into following him, and reassigned the chastened Lucius to the cavalry command. Camillus regrouped the infantry, and personally led them to victory. But this lesson in the advantage of experience over youth isn’t the main lesson Livy intends to draw. That comes in his account of Camillus’ conduct after returning to Rome, seeking senate approval for a campaign against Tusculum. Although everyone in the army and in Rome “was saying the same thing, that amid the fluctuating fortunes of the war with the Volsci the blame for the unsuccessful battle and flight lay with Lucius Furius, while all the kudos for the successful engagement went to Marcus Furius,” when he was asked to name his adjutant in the campaign against the Etruscans Camillus “took everyone by surprise and chose Lucius Furius” (VI.xxv.33). “By such forbearance Camillus alleviated his colleague’s disgrace while at the same time winning great distinction for himself” (VI.xxv.33). When they learned of Camillus’ appointment and saw his troops marching into their territory, the Etruscans wisely sued for peace. Having “won fame for his prudence and bravery in the war with the Volsci,” he won it again for “his outstanding forbearance and self-restraint to his colleague in both operations” and for the resultant peace with the Etruscans (VI.xxvii.35). He stepped down after once again overseeing the election of the next year’s military tribunes.

Plebeian agitation recurred. The senate attempted to dampen the unrest by keeping the plebeians out of the city on military expeditions, but plebeian tribunes Gaius Licinius and Lucius Sextus organized resistance around three bills: one to reduce debt by deducting monies already paid in interest from the principal of the loan; another to limit the extent of rural property allowed to any one property owner, which would reduce patrician sway in the countryside; and a third to prohibit the election of military tribunes and to require that one of the two consuls be a plebeian. “What was being proposed put at risk simultaneously those things for which all human beings have an inordinate craving: land, money, and high office” (VI.xxxv.44-45). By the year 369 BC, Licinius and Sextus had become “experts at manipulating the feelings of the plebs” (VI.xxxvi.46).

Elected dictator once again, this time to face a domestic threat, Camillus addressed the tribal councils, which were considering these bills. As before, he argued that “tribunician capriciousness” undermined the veto the plebs had won by their secession (VI.xxxviii.49). When the tribunes “reacted with disdain” to this, Camillus threatened to conscript all men of military age and take them out of the city; this “struck sheer terror into the plebs” but not into the plebeian tribunes (VI.xxxviii.49). Camillus resigned, probably (in Livy’s judgment) because it was discovered that the auspices conducted prior to his election were unfavorable. All the bills passed, and in the following year, having been reinstated as dictator, he negotiated a compromise whereby the plebeians were guaranteed one plebeian tribune in exchange for patrician control of the office of praetor, the official charged with overseeing the law courts. “So it was that, after a long period of bad blood between them, the orders were restored to harmony” (VI.xlii.56). Camillus died two years later, in 365 BC, “certainly a man without peer in all circumstances” (VII.i.57).

The factual accuracy of Livy’s account may be left to historians. Since Livy writes a political history in both senses of the word—a history of how Rome was ruled and a guide for Roman citizens and statesmen—his reader should first of all consider his account in light of that intention, attending to the lessons the historian finds in his portrait of Camillus. What made him peerless in all circumstances?

Camillus confronted troubles arising from the increasing democratization of republican politics in Rome. As a military republic, Romans united across class lines in honoring warlike virtues, as the patricians found glory in battle, the plebeians protection. The plebeians often went so far as to defer their demands for democratization of Roman institutions to the need for mutual defense, although their leaders would sometimes persuade them to withhold military service in exchange for political concessions. Even military success brought difficulties with it, as territorial expansion could lead to sharpened factionalism, thanks (for example) to the introduction of foreign religions.

As a military tribune, Camillus imposed discipline on his troops through a combination of force, religiosity, and morale-building rhetoric. Having established that indispensable prerequisite to victory, he attained victory itself with careful planning, overwhelming numbers, and careful division of war spoils between soldiers, ordinary citizens, and priests. That is, he exhibited the virtues of courage (fighting in the front line with his men), prudence (holding back, for example, when young Lucius Furius insisted on attacking Satricum without adequate preparation), and justice both in punishing dereliction of duty and in distributing rewards. After his display of hubris during his first triumph, he learned moderation, as well. Finally, he exhibited the crowning virtue, magnanimity, remaining loyal to Rome during his exile in Ardea (a small-souled man would have delighted in the Gauls’ humiliating conquest of his city) and in rescuing rash Furius from retaliation and installing him as second-in-command for his next campaign. In rescuing Rome first from the Gauls and then from the Romans themselves, when the plebeians wanted to abandon the city for what they took to be greener pastures, doing so in the latter case with words not deeds, invoking religiously-grounded patriotism. 

Above all, he served as a one-man balance-wheel in Rome’s ‘mixed’ regime, opposing the plebeians’ passions when they threatened to dominate the patricians (while forbearing with Furius, he made no attempt to rescue the rabble-rousing Manlius Capitolinus). When opposed by the plebeian demagogues, he refrained from force and forbearance alike, preferring to negotiate a political settlement whereby both plebeians and patricians were accorded institutional privileges. More than once, he presided over elections of officials replacing him. 

Camillus was indeed the mainstay of the republic. In effect, he served as a sort of much-needed monarch, one careful to act and speak in ways that preserved the regime by alternatively granting and denying plebeian ambition to rule. As such, he demonstrated the grandeur of Rome while exhibiting its weakness. Absent ‘the one,’ and a supremely virtuous ‘one’ at that, ‘the many’ and ‘the few’ would continue their rivalry, and factionalism would at last ruin the republic. Rome needed a middle class to go along with the occasional middle man.

 

 

 

Livy: The History of Rome. Books I-V. Valerie M. Warrior translation. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006,

 

In retirement at his home in the village of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, Charles de Gaulle came upon his grandson studying an oration by Cicero. Seeing which one it was, he reached down and placed his large hand over the page, elevated his gaze to the middle distance, and recited the oration to the astonished boy. After completing its peroration, he looked down and said, “You should read Livy. He is much more grand.” 

In what does the grandeur of Livy consist? Livy writes political history with political intent. He teaches his readers—most immediately Romans in the decades immediately before and after the birth of Christ—what amount to lessons in statesmanship. Philosophy can teach a student how to think logically; religious writings teach piety and right doctrine concerning divine and human conduct. Teaching statesmanship may seem impossible, an attempt to bring the student to a practical reasoning usually inculcated only by experience, that hardest of teachers. Political history enables its students to learn the lessons of experience with a minimum of injury to themselves. It second-handedness may be less vivid than experience but it is also less painful. When the historian recalls the history of one’s own country he additionally appeals to the love of one’s own, while spurring consideration of the lasting geopolitical interests and traditions that must enter into any serious consideration of Roman policy, moving forward. As Livy puts it in his Preface, “it will be a pleasure to have celebrated, to the best of my ability, the memory of the past achievements of the greatest people on earth,” a people now living in a vast empire, “laboring under its own size”—so much so that in “recent times [the Latin phrasing has the double meaning of “revolutionary times”] the might of a most powerful people has long been destroying itself.” Historical narration of Roman events with accompanying portraits of the Roman politicians who spoke and acted in the course of them will enable him, and his readers, “to turn away from the contemplation of the evils that our age has seen for so many years.” Under the watchful eye of the Emperor Augustus, it would not do to suggest that a reader might glean from his book any means to remedy those evils, but the thought does occur.

Livy is no ‘scientific historian,’ obsessed with separating fact from fiction. But he does want to get at the truth insofar as he can. “The intent is neither to affirm nor refute the traditions that belong to the period before the foundation of the city or the anticipation of its foundation, for these are embellished with poetic tales rather than based on uncorrupted records of historical events.” The ancients made “the beginning of cities more august by mingling human affairs with the divine,” sanctifying the foundings they recall by “reckon[ing] their founders as gods.” “These and similar things, however they will be regarded and judged, I shall not for my own part regard as of great importance.”

Five things are more important: the kind of lives men lived; what their moral principles were; by what individuals and with what skills Roman dominion was born and grew; how, as discipline collapsed, there was as it were a disintegration of morals; how Roman morals decline, until the present time in which “we can  endure neither our own vices nor their remedies.” That is, Livy undertakes an account of the several Roman regimes, especially the way of life of each regime and its purpose, its principles, and the rulers. He omits mention only the form or institutional structures by which the Romans ruled, perhaps because these were the phenomena Romans struggled over in exhibiting their habits of heart and mind. The “particularly healthy and productive element of history [is] to behold object lessons of every kind of model as though they were displayed as a conspicuous monument.” From such examples “you should choose for yourself and for your state what to imitate and what to avoid as abominable in its origin or as abominable in its outcome,” inasmuch as “there has never been a state that is greater, or more righteous, or richer in good examples,” one in which “greed and luxury migrated so late into the citizens, nor where there has been such great respect for small means and thrift.” Grand indeed, as the founder of France’s Fifth Republic said.

Livy’s work extended to 142 books, most now lost. The first five books or “pentad” recount the city’s founding in the eighth century BC to its conquest (soon reversed) by the Gauls in 390 BC. The first two books discuss not only the founding but several important regime changes from kingship to aristocracy to tyranny to its overthrow. The third chapter, the central and pivotal chapter, shows the gradual ‘democratization’ of the regime, how the plebeian class gradually came to control some of the key institutions, with the patricians opposing them at every step; the result, a republic or ‘mixed’ regime, survives military challenges from neighboring city-states and continues to see further democratic encroachments on aristocratic authority.

Livy begins his story with the more-or-less legendary figures of Aeneas and Antenor, who were spared by the Greeks after the conquest of Troy because “they had always advocated peace and the return of Helen” (I.i.5). Antenor settled in the uppermost gulf of the Adriatic Sea, where the people had lost their king at Troy. As for Aeneas, “fate guided him to initiate greater achievements” (I.i.5). In Livy’s hand, even mythological history has value because he can produce lessons for statesmen out of it. Here, two heroes win very different degrees of fame not through virtue alone, not even through virtù alone, but because fate treated them differently. Statesmen must understand that; respect for circumstances is the first thing they need to learn.

Aeneas and his men went to Macedonia, then to Sicily and then to Laurentum, fifteen miles south of Rome. There they confronted King Latinus and the aborigines, made peace with the king, who gave his daughter in marriage to Aeneas, who became king. The basis of the polis is the family, which is also the basis of the regime of kings. The newly-strengthened polis fought the Rutulians and their king, Turnus, who allied with Etruscans—the rulers of both people worried by the increased power of Laurentum. “Confronted with such a formidable war and the need to win over the minds of the Aborigines, Aeneas called both peoples Latins so that everyone would not only be under the same law, but also the same name. From that time on, the Aborigines’ dedication and loyalty to King Aeneas was no less than those of the Trojans. Aeneas relied on the spirit of these two peoples, who daily became more united” (II.ii.7). Nomos means both ‘name’ and ‘law’; the new king was a statesman who understood that citizenship and law can unite disparate peoples. King Aeneas died after leading the successful defense of the city against the Rutulian-Etruscan alliance.

Aeneas’ line ruled the polis well for several generations, founding the polis of Alba Longa, until younger brother, Amulius, exiled his older brother, Numitor, the rightful inheritor of the throne. “Violence was more powerful than the father’s wishes or respect for age,” and Amulius used violence thoroughly, murdering his brother’s male children and, “under the pretext of honoring his brother’s daughter Rhea Silvia, selected her to be a priestess of Vesta,” thereby “condemning her to perpetual virginity” (I.iii.9). There would be no one from Numitor’s line to claim the throne Amulius had usurped.

But again the fates ruled otherwise. “To the fates, as I suppose, was owed the origin of this great city and the beginning of the mightiest empire that is second only to that of the gods” (I.iv.9). “The Vestal was raped and produced twins,” claiming “that Mars was the father of her doubtful offspring, either because she believed this or because it was more honorable to put the blame on a god” (I.iv.9) “But neither gods nor men protected her or her children from the king’s cruelty” (I.iv.9); he commanded that the infants be throne into the River Tiber. Fate or the gods—”some heaven-sent chance” (I.iv.9)—caused the Tiber to overflow, and the lazy executioners of the tyrant’s command left the children on the edge of the tidewater, where Faustulus, master of the royal flock, found them and took them home to his wife. Livy reports the rival stories that the infants were suckled by a she-wolf before their discovery or, perhaps, only by their adoptive mother, “who was called ‘she-wolf’ among the shepherd community, since she had been a prostitute” (I.iv.10). However that may have been, they became hunters as well as farmers and shepherds. “In this way the achieved strength of body and mind” (I.iv.10). Faustulus suspected that the boys were “of royal birth,” having heard that the Amulius had order the exposure of two mail infants just before he found them. Their exiled grandfather, Numitor, took custody of Remus and, observing the “temperament” of both twins,” which was not at all slavelike,” readily entered into a conspiracy with them, now grown, to overthrow the tyrant. Romulus and Remus led separate forces against Amulius; it was Remus who got to the tyrant first, killing him.

With Numitor restored as the legitimate king of Alba Longa with the support of Romulus, Remus, and the people (“a unanimous shout of assent” [I.vi.12)), the brothers were “seized by a desire to establish a city in the places where they had been exposed and raised,” gathering a group consisting of Albans, Latins, and the native shepherds, all of whom hoped that their new city would soon grow bigger and better than the poleis they had left behind (I.vi12). “But these thoughts were interrupted by the ancestral evil that had beset Numitor and Amulius—desire for the kingship,” that is, a struggle over control of a monarchic regime (I.vi.12). “From quite a harmless beginning, an abominable conflict arose” (I.vi.12); Livy means to impress his reader with the vulnerability of monarchy to tyranny, a lesson that might well be taken by anyone living under the rule of Augustus and the subsequent monarchs of the Roman Empire, many centuries later. 

In this case, neither contender for the throne could claim legitimacy on the basis of prior birth. “They decided to ask the protecting gods of the area”—every place has a ‘genius’ or ‘genii,’ local deities—to “declare by augury who should give his name to the new city and who should rule over it after its foundation” (I.vi.12). [1]  When the augury proved ambiguous, Remus was either killed in a brawl between his followers and those of Romulus or when Romulus himself killed his brother when Remus jumped over the wall separating his section of the polis, the Aventine, from Romulus’ section, the Palatine. However it happened, it happened in violence, and “Romulus became the sole ruler and the city, so founded, was given its founder’s name” (I.vii.13). Monarchic regimes originate, then, in one of three ways: alliance or consent (Aeneas) or violence (Romulus). They are perpetuated either by legitimate succession (the kings up until Amulius) or violence (Amulius). Either way, they may be decent kingships or indecent tyrannies and, either way, they may or may not win the consent of the few who are rich and/or the many who are poor.

Romulus solidified his rule by reassuring the people in two ways. He fortified the Palatine, looking after their physical safety, and he sacrificed to the gods and to Hercules, whose legend was associated with the area—attending to the religious concerns of his new subjects. Livy pauses to explain the significance of Hercules to the founding. It was “the only foreign rite undertaken by Romulus” (Hercules having been a Greek) (I.vii.13); according to the local legend, the hero had killed a cattle thief there—that is, someone who had seized Hercules’ property, as Remus had attempted to do to Romulus. Although Hercules was accused of “blatant murder” by the shepherds, Evander, an exile from the Peloponnese whose “wonderful skill with the alphabet, a novelty among men who were untutored in such arts” was “revered” by the shepherds as a consequence, intervened in his defense (I.vii.14). Citing a prediction handed down by his mother, “who was believed to be divine and was admired as a prophetess,” this Evander proclaimed that Hercules was a son of Jupiter and that an altar would be “dedicated to you” here, an altar to be called “the Greatest Altar” by “the race that was destined one day to be the most powerful on earth” (I.vii.14). Hercules shook hands with his new ally, said “he accepted the omen and would fulfill the prophecy by establishing and dedicated an altar” I.vii14) “A fine cow was taken from the herd, and the first sacrifice was made to Hercules,” punisher of cattle thieves (I.vii.14). By so associating Rome, and himself, with Hercules, “Romulus was already honoring the immortality won by valor, an honor to which his own destiny was leading him” (I.vii.15).

As his final act of establishing his legitimacy, Romulus “made himself venerable by adopting symbols of office,” including royal dress and a retinue of twelve lictors—symbolism backed by force, and the only way “by law that [the Romans] could become a unified community” (I.viii.15). He undertook a building campaign, “more in expectation of a future population than for the number of men they currently had” (I.viii.16). He also had recourse to the myth of autochthony, “long used by founders of cities, who gather a host of shady, low-born people and put out th story that children had been born to them from the earth” (I.viii.16). Rome became a city of asylum; “the entire rabble from the neighboring peoples fled their for refuge,” men and women “without distinction, slaves and freemen alike eager for a fresh start” (I.viii.16). “This was the first move toward beginning the increase of Rome’s might” (I.viii.16). The founder wisely saw that strength is not enough, “add[ing] deliberation to strength” by appointing one hundred men as senator, called patres or fathers, their descendants called patricians (I.viii.16).

With deliberation comes stratagem. The next move to enhance the population was the famous-notorious ‘rape’ of the Sabine women. “Already Rome was so strong that she was the equal of any of the neighboring states in war,” but this wouldn’t have lasted if the polis lacked a sufficiency of women to produce an equally populous next generation (I.ix.16). Romulus sent embassies to the neighboring tribes, seeking alliance and intermarriage. The envoys told their hosts that poleis, “like everything else, start from the most humble beginnings” (I.ix.16); the Romans were not to be despised. More, “great wealth and a great name are achieved by those cities that are helped by their own valor and the gods”; “the Romans were men like themselves, and so, as neighbors, they should not be reluctant to mingle their blood and stock with them” (I.ix.16). Neither the appeal to piety nor the appeal to common humanity swayed the neighboring peoples, who “fear[ed] for both themselves and their descendants, the great power that was growing in their midst”; to this geopolitical concern they added contempt for the low origins so many of the Romans, deeming them unworthy to wed their daughters. “The young Romans resented this attitude, and things were undoubtedly beginning to look violent” (I.ix.17). 

Romulus himself had a smarter course to follow. He “hid his resentment” and instead announced a festival in honor of Neptune, patron of horses, inviting the neighbors to attend (I.ix.17). The grand new buildings he had constructed drew a large crowd, animated by their human curiosity; the rapidity of construction had been possible precisely because the Romans had no real household, no families to care for. These peoples included the Sabines, who brought their wives and children to enjoy the holiday. On signal, “the Roman youths rushed in every direction to seize the unmarried women,” with “some exceptionally beautiful girls” seized by plebeians at the command of the senators, for the senators (I.ix.17). The enraged parents could only call down the wrath of the god in whose honor the festival was ostensibly organized. Romulus stepped in, telling the maidens that their parents were to blame, having arrogantly refused intermarriage with Romans and assuring them that they would have all the rights of marriage, a share in the household properties, citizenship in Rome, “and the dearest possession that the human race has—children” (I.ix.18). “They should calm their anger and give their hearts to those to whom chance [!] had given their bodies. For, he said, often affection has eventually come from a sense of injustice. They would find their husbands kinder because each would try not only to fulfill his obligation, but also to make up for he longing for their parents and homeland. the men spoke sweet words to them trying to excuse their action of the grounds of passionate love a plea that is particularly effective where a woman’s heart is concerned.” (I.ix.18). Some time later, Romulus’ wife, Hersilia, would persuade the king to grant amnesty to the women’s parents and “grant them citizenship,” too, “saying that by this means the state would grow in strength and harmony” (I. xi.20). This policy worked because by then Rome had defeated those neighbors who were outraged at the theft of the women, leaving their parents’ spirit “collapsed as a result of the defeat of the others” (I.xi.20). At this point the Sabines themselves attacked but Romulus again led his soldiers effectively and, as the battle intensified, the Sabine women intervened, “their womanish fear overcome by the terrible situation” in which fathers and husbands were killing each other (I.xiii.22). Like so many Helens of the Troy from whose citizens the Roman founders descended, they cried, “We are the cause of war; we are the cause of wounds and deaths to our husbands and our fathers” (l.xiii.22). Unlike Helen, however, they said something effective to halt the war: “Better that we die than live as widows or orphans, without either of you” (I.xiii.22). Their appeal halted the fighting and led to a treaty merging the two peoples into one, with a shared kingship but with Rome as the capital. Romulus honored the women by naming each of the thirty wards he established in the city after the women.

Romulus’ monarchic counterpart, Tatius, proved unfortunate. Some of his relatives assaulted a group of visiting Laurentine envoys, “who protested under the law of nations” (I.xiv.23). “More influenced by partiality for his relatives and their pleas,” he died at the hands of a mob that surrounded him in Lavinium (I.xiv.23). “Romulus took this less badly than was proper, whether because of the disloyalty that is inherent in shared rule or because he thought that Tatius’ murder was not unjustified” (I.xiv.23). He renewed the pact between Rome and Lavinium “in order to expiate the insults to the envoys and the murder of the king” (I.xiv.23). He went on to win subsequent battles with two attacking Etruscan poleis, Fidenae and Veii. “The strength that he gave to Rome enabled her to have untroubled peace for the next forty years” (I.xv.25). “More popular with the people than with the senators,” he as “above all…dearest to the hearts of the soldiers,” enjoying the protection of 300 armed bodyguards (I.xv.25).

These men were not unfailing in their vigilance, however. Presiding over an assembly of the people, Romulus disappeared when a thunderstorm “enveloped him in a cloud so dense that it hid him from the view of the people” (I.xvi.25). The people “readily believed the assertion of the senators who had been standing nearby that he had been snatched up on high by the storm”; “stricken with fear as if they had been orphaned,” they all decided that Romulus should be hailed as a god, son of a god, king, and father of the city of Rome” (I.xvi.25-26). Livy raises an eyebrow: “I suppose that there were some, even then, who privately claimed that the king had been torn into pieces by the hands of the senators” (I.xvi.26). This remained the minority view, although the people still longed for a king and disliked the senate. If they did indeed plot the king’s assassination, the senators navigated around that dilemma, as an outright murder would have sparked a popular uprising. A patrician appeased the people by claiming an epiphany: “Today at dawn, Romulus, the father of this city, city descended from the sky and appeared before me. Overcome with fear and awe, I stood there, beseeching him with prayers that it might be permissible for me to gaze on him. But he said, ‘Depart, and proclaim to the Romans that it is the gods’ will that my Rome be the capital of the world. So let them cultivate the art of war; let them know and teach their descendants that no human strength has the power to resist the arms of Rome.'” Livy comments, “It is astonishing what credence was given to this man’s story, and how the longing for Romulus felt by the people and army was alleviated by belief in his immortality” (I.xvi.26-27). By encouraging the people’s pious superstition, ‘the few’ maneuvered themselves into greater authority over ‘the many’ while never assuaging their distrust. 

“An ambitious struggle for the kingship engaged the minds of the senators” (I.xvii.27); given the newness of Rome’s general population, no prominent men had yet arisen from it, so there could be no competitors for the position from that quarter. “All wanted to be ruled by a king, for they had not yet experienced the sweetness of liberty” (I.xvii.28). The senators split between the “original Romans” and the Sabines, each wanting a king from their group. Deadlock ensued, and for a time they established a power-sharing arrangement whereby the senators divided into groups of ten, with a representative from each group presiding over the government. This aristocracy or oligarchy caused popular “grumbling,” as it seemed that Romans’ servitude “had multiplied,” with rule by “a hundred masters instead of one” (I.xvii.28). If they could not offer a candidate for the monarchy from amongst themselves, surely they could elect one from among the senators. Alarmed, the senators “won the people’s favor by granting them supreme power on such terms that [the senators] gave away no more of their power than they retained”; the people could elect the king but “their choice would only be valid if it was ratified by the senators” (I.xvii.28). “This so pleased the people that they did not want to give the appearance of being outdone in goodwill, and so they merely resolved that the senate should decide who should be king in Rome” (I.xvii.28). Such popular deference to both monarchic and aristocratic rule would endure for a long time. Livy does not neglect to compare the electoral arrangements of early Rome to those of his own time, when the people are allowed to vote for laws and officials but only after the senators have “ratif[ied] the outcome of an election in advance, before the people can vote” (I.xvii.28).

Eventually, the Sabine Numa Pompilius attained the kingship, a ” great man” “famed for his justice and his sense of obligation to the gods” (I.xviii.28,29). Numa was learned in divine and human law but his virtues were natural; “I think that Numa’s mind and moral principles derived from his own native disposition (I.xviii.28). His elevation to office duly solemnized by an augur, Numa set about “giv[ing] the new city that had been founded by force of arms a new foundation in justice, law, and proper observances,” seeing that “the warlike spirit of his people must be softened by their giving up of arms” (I.xix.29). At the same time, he also saw that such softening, augmented by the peace treaties he signed, would “cause the spirit that had been held in check by military discipline and fear of the enemy [would] become soft from idleness” (I.xix.30). His remedy was “to instill in them a fear of the gods, on the assumption that it would be most effective with a populace that was unskilled and, for those days, primitive” (I.xix.30). “Since he could not get through to their minds without inventing some miraculous story, he pretended that he had nocturnal meetings with the goddess Egeria,” who instructed him on the establishment of divinely-approved rites (I.xix.30). He also established a calendar, the political benefit of which was that it marked out holy days when no public business could be done, “since it was desirable to have times when nothing could be brought before the people” (I.xix.30). Popular religious piety could thus be deployed to limit popular authority. Anticipating that “in a warlike nation there would be more kings like Romulus than like himself,” he also used piety to tame the Romans, establishing permanent priestly offices, including a pontiff to govern the practice of sacred rites, public and private, guarding against the introduction of the foreign religious practices to which frequent military expeditions would expose patricians and plebeians alike (I.xx.31-32). Perhaps as a guard against rapine, he also “chose virgins for the service of Vesta, a priesthood that originated in Alba and was thus associated with the race of Rome’s founder” (I.xx.31); the Vestal virgins, supported by public expense, would enjoy “revered and inviolable status” (I.xx.31).

Numa’s constitutional lawgiving worked. “Consideration and attention to these matters turned the thoughts of the entire people away from violence and arms. They had something to occupy their minds, and, since the heavenly powers seemed to have an interest in human affairs, the people’s constant preoccupation with the gods had imbued the hearts of all with such piety that the state was governed by regard for good faith and oaths, rather than by fear of punishment under the law” (I.xxi.32). Rome’s neighbors accordingly “came to feel such a respect for the Romans that they considered it sacrilege to do violence to a nation that had so entirely turned to the worship of the gods” (I.xxi.32). This was another reason why peace endured for decades after Romulus’ death. “Thus two successive kings, each in a different way, promoted the state: the one by war, the other by peace,” as “the state was not only strong but moderated by the arts of both war and peace” (I.xxi.33). 

Livy finds such dualities a core feature of Rome, eventuating in the longstanding tension between patricians and plebeians within the city, warfare with the peoples outside it. The next king, Tullus Hostilius, would confirm Numa’s expectation of Roman kings generally; “even more ferocious than Romulus,” Tullus thought “the state was enfeebled by inaction” and so “looked around for an excuse to stir up war” (I.xxii.33). He maneuvered ambassadors from the nearby Alban people to declare war on Rome. The Alban dictator, Mettius Fufetius, nonetheless offered some prudent advice. “If truth is to be spoken, rather than a show of words, it is a desire for dominion that is goading two related and neighboring peoples to take up arms” (I.xxiii.35). Without “discussing the rights and wrongs of the matter,” Mettius pointed out that both his people and the Romans were surrounded by the Etruscans, whose “strength on the sea is even greater than on land” (I.xxiii.35). If Alba and Rome go to war, the Etruscans will wait until the two nations exhaust themselves, then step in to conquer both. “Since we not content with the certainty of liberty but are casting dice for slavery or dominion, let us find a way whereby it can be determined which side will rule the other, without great loss of life or bloodshed on either side” (I.xxiii.35). They agreed to a solution involving a double duality: two sets of three brothers, the Horatii and the Curiatti, would meet in a combat of champions to settle the conflict. When the Romans won (the surviving Horatian then killing his sister, who dared to mourn her fiancé, a Curiatian he had killed in the fight), Tullus ordered the Alban dictator to keep his men under arms for a war against the Etruscan city of Veii. The Roman people themselves acquitted Horatius of murder when his father intervened, “implor[ing] them not to make him childless” (I.xxvi.40). “The people could not endure either the father’s tears or the courage of the young man who was steadfast in every peril. They acquitted him in admiration more for his valor than for the justness of his cause” in keeping with their warlike character. (I.xxvi.40).

Pressured by the Alban people, who were “resentful that the dictator had entrusted the fortune of the state to three soldiers” and evidently did not appreciate his larger geostrategic objective, Mettius betrayed Rome within “the guise of the alliance,” stirring up the peoples of the Roman colony Fidenae and the Veientines to attack the Romans and promising he would join them (I.xxvii.41). In fact he planned to hold his troops back, ready to attack whichever side was losing. After winning the battle, Tullus, who had uncovered Mettius’ treachery, punished Mettius but rewarded the Albans, bringing them into Rome and granting citizenship to the people, their leaders to positions in the senate, “mak[ing] one city and one state” (I.xxviii.43). Out of duality, oneness: Mettius, he said, “as you divided your mind between the Fidenates and the Romans, so now you will give your body to be torn apart,” a lesson for “the human race to hold sacred the bonds that have been violated by you” (I.xxxviii.43). This punishment, Livy remarks, itself “ignor[ed] the laws of humanity”; “in other cases, we can boast that no other nation has decreed more humane punishments” (I.xxviii.43). After the Albans were brought to Rome, their city, Alba Longa, was demolished; for the ancient peoples, such a loss was even more catastrophic than it would be for ‘we moderns,’ as every city, and every household within it, harbored the lar and the penates of the people. Tullus spared the public temples of the gods.

Rome’s population now doubled, Tullus turned his warlike attentions to the Sabines. Rome won again, but Tullus died, after a thirty-two-year reign, “his famed ferocious spirit broken along with his physical health” during a plague (I.xxxi.46). The Romans too had wearied of war, now “want[ing] to return to the situation under Numa, believing that the only help for their sick bodies was to seek favor and pardon from the gods” (I.xxxi.46). They elected, and the senate ratified, Ancus Marcius, grandson of Numa, as their next king. Although “both the citizens who yearned for peace and the neighboring states were led to hope that Ancus would adopt the character and institutions of his grandfather,” the Latins began a series of raids on what they took to be a weakened rival (I.xxxii.47). “Ancus’ disposition was midway between that of Romulus and that of Numa; he was mindful of both. He was convinced that, in his grandfather’s reign, a people that was both young and ferocious had a greater need of peace; but he also believed that the absence of war without being exposed to injustice would not fall as easily to him as it had to Numa. His strength was being tested and, having been tested, was the object of contempt.” (I.xxxii.47). At the same time, he did not want Roman war-making to ignore the gods. “Since Numa had set up religious practices in time of peace, he wanted to hand on a ceremony for war so that wars might not only be waged, but also declared with some kind of ritual,” whereby Rome would first ask restitution from a foreign state for a perceived injury before a formal declaration of war could be issued (I.xxxii.47).

The Latin aggressors wanted no peace, however, and got none. Rome conquered them and integrated their population into Rome. This demographic shock led to a regime crisis. “The enormous increase in the population of the city resulting in a blurring of the distinction between right and wrong,” the distinction both Numa and his grandson had striven to establish (I.xxxiii.50). The rule of law was undermined, presumably because the size and heterogeneity of the population weakened moral consensus by introducing new and contradictory ways of life to the city while making the old ways of life harder to enforce, given the sheer numbers of persons to govern—Livy himself does not explain. This moral and legal derangement afforded an opportunity to a dangerous foreign man.

Tarquinius Priscus was the son of an exile from Corinth who had settled in Tarquinii, an Etruscan town located 56 miles north of Rome. Despised as the son of a foreign exile, despite his wealth and the wealth of his wife, he set out for Rome, where Tanaquil “could see her husband in a position of honor,” given the Romans’ condition as “a new people, where nobility was quickly acquired and based on merit,” not birth, as seen in the lives of the Sabine Tatius and Numa the Curiatti (I.xxxiv.52). According to the story Livy relates, as they approached Rome an eagle “came gently down,” removed the cap from Tarquinius’ head, the “deftly replaced the cap on his head, sent, as it were, by the gods for this purpose” (I.xxxiv.52). “Tanaquil, a woman skilled in interpreting prodigies from the sky, as Etruscans generally are,” “embraced her husband” and “told him to expect a high and exalted position” in Rome, the eagle having “performed the auspice around the highest part of a man,” removing the cap “placed on a mortal’s head, only to put it back with divine approval” (I.xxxiv.52). He did indeed rise quickly in Rome, winning the confidence of King Ancus to such an extent that he was named guardian of the king’s children.

Upon the king’s death, with the sons conveniently dispatched on a hunting expedition, Tarquin seems to have become “the first to canvass votes for the kingship and make a speech that was designed to win over the hearts of the people,” citing the precedents of foreign kings in Rome, his apprenticeship with King Ancus, his familiarity with Roman laws and rites, and his goodwill toward the people—all “claims that were by no means false” (I.xxxv.52-53). Upon election, he took the precaution of adding a hundred members to the senate, effectively packing it with partisans; he then captured a Latin town and inaugurated the Great Games in honor of Jupiter, thus checking the boxes (as it were) of military prowess and piety. He also increased the number of the cavalry, which proved the decisive factor in a rout of the Sabines, who had launched an unprovoked attack on Roman territory. While Numa had counteracted the threat of peacetime softening of the Roman spirit with a spirit of piety, Tarquin preferred to put the people to work, directing the construction of defensive walls in unfortified parts of the city, draining swamps, and constructing sewers. He also built a temple to Jupiter that he had vowed during the Sabine war, far from neglecting respect for the gods even as he busied Romans with these tasks.

What of an heir to the throne? King Ancus’ sons had by now attained their majority and were “outraged that they had been driven from their father’s throne by their tutor’s deceit and that Rome was ruled by a stranger who was not of neighboring stock, still less Italian” (I.xl.58). Tarquin and Tanaquil had already designated another successor, a child Livy suspects to have been the child of the wife of the king of Corniculum, a Sabine city; Tanaquil had rescued the woman after the city’s capture, befriended her, and raised her son as “a safeguard to our royal house when it is stricken,” attributing a reported miracle attributed to the child as a glimpse into “the will of the gods” (I.xxxix.57). The disinherited sons of Ancus hired two “ferocious shepherds” to assassinate Tarquin, and they succeeded (I.xl.58). Unintimidated, Tanaquil concealed her husband’s death and elevated her now-adopted son, Servius, to the throne, the partisan senate concurring in this without the consent of the people.

Servius secured popular support and reinforced senatorial approval of his rule by routing the Veientines and other Etruscans. More important in terms of the regime, he formalized the class distinctions in Rome, first instituting the census, then decreeing that “a man’s duties in war and in peace would be determined, not indiscriminately on an individual basis as before, but in proportion to a man’s wealth” (I.xlv.60); that is, the new Roman class system would consist of political distinctions based upon ‘economic’ distinctions. There were six classes in all, with the poorest exempt from the military service that can serve as a pathway to honor. What is more, “now suffrage was no longer given indiscriminately to all,” with the upper classes voting first; since votes were weighted to favor those classes, voting on laws “almost never…descend[ed] as far as the lowest citizens” before a law was enacted (I.xlv.62). Servius further divided the city into four territorial divisions, their inhabitants called “tribes,” probably a derivative of “tribute” because tributes were collected according to one’s place of residence, not class. “The king had promoted the state by enlarging the city and arranging domestic affairs to meet the needs of both war and peace” (I.xlv.64). “Now undoubtedly king de facto, Servius was formally so declared, having “won over the goodwill of the people by dividing the territory captured from the enemy among all the citizens” (I.lvi.65).

The senate was another matter. Servius had married his two daughters to the sons of his predecessor, Tarquinius Priscus. “It was the women who began all the trouble” (I.xlvi.66), trouble that resulted in “a crime worthy of a Greek tragedy, in order that hatred of kings might hasten the coming of liberty and the last kingship be one that was obtained by a criminal act” (I.xlvi.65). Lucius Tarquinius was spirited and ambitious, Arruns Tarquinius “a young man of a gentle nature” (I.xlvi.65). The women they married were similarly “very different in their characters” (I.xlvi.65), but the gentle wife was married to the ambitious man, the ambitious wife married to the gentle one. The wife of Arruns “turned completely from him to his brother; he was the one she admired, calling him a man and one of true royal blood. She despised her sister, because, as she said, now that the other woman had a real man as a husband, she had lost the boldness that a woman should have. similarity quickly brought the two together, as usually happens since evil is most drawn to evil.” (I.xlvi.65). They murdered their spouses and married; unable to prove that crimes had been committed, “Servius did not prevent the marriage but hardly gave his approval” (I.xlvi.66). Further goaded by his wife, Lucius denounced his father before the senate, pretending that Servius, a man of low origins, hated nobles and had divided Roman land “among the rabble” (I.xlvii.67). Lucius then threw Servius down the steps of the Senate, where the king was murdered by Lucius’ partisans. To complete the enormity, his wife drove her carriage “over her father’s body” (I.xlviii.68). Thus the regime changed from kingship to tyranny.

Lucius Tarquinius earned the name “Superbus,” for his arrogance. He forbade the burial of his father-in-law, killed the leading supporters of Servius in the senate, surrounded himself with bodyguards to prevent his own assassination, and ruled with neither popular support nor senate approval. “His rule had to be protected by fear, since he had no hope of the citizens’ affections” (I.xlix.69). (Centuries later, that profound student of ancient Rome, Montesquieu, generalized this point, identifying fear as the principle of despotism.) Tarquinius Superbus went on to murder more senators in order to seize their wealth and to “bring more contempt on the senate” (I.xlix.69). “The first of the monarchs to break with the custom of consulting the senate on all matters, a custom handed down by his predecessors,” he sought support instead from the Latin peoples, “in order that assistance from them might give him greater safety among the citizens at home” (I.xlix.69,70). Thus, like many monarchs and especially tyrants, he appealed to ‘the many’ against ‘the few’—in this instance, a people only recently added to the Roman population, thus less tied to the customs and traditions of the original stock. 

Some of the Latins regarded the tyrant’s overtures with suspicion. Turnus of Aricia warned that Tarquinius “would press them into servitude” if they followed him, treating you as he has treated his own people, with murder and theft (I.l.70). A “rebel and troublemaker” himself, Turnus soon attracted the tyrant’s unfavorable attention. “He began to plot Turnus’ death, so that he might inspire in the Latins the same fear that he had used to oppress the spirit of the citizens back home” (I.l.71). “He trumped up a false charge and so destroyed an innocent man” (I.li.71). This had the desired effect. Out of fear, the Latins acceded in renewing their association with Rome while relinquishing the right to have their own military commanders.

“Unjust as the monarch was in peacetime, he was not a bad general in war,” Livy concedes (I.liii.73). He waged a successful campaign against the Volsci, initiating a series of conflicts between the two peoples that would continue for the next 200 years. He also took the city of Gabii with “guile and trickery, a thoroughly un-Roman stratagem,” then had his son, Sextus, execute the city’s leaders, some in public and others secretly (I.liv.75). In a show of piety at Rome, he built the temple of Capitoline Jupiter as “a memorial of his reign and of his family” while deconsecrating several sanctuaries and shrines established by the ill-fated Sabine co-king, Tatius (I.lv.75). Portents were interpreted to predict the future greatness of the Roman empire. As for the Roman people themselves, he imitated King Ancus by putting them to work, this time on the sewer system and the seats for the Circus Maximus.

Conspiracies to overthrow Tarquinius Superbus’ tyranny began to emerge. His two younger sons hoped to exploit an oracle they had been granted at Delphi to eliminate Sextus from the succession. At the same time, Lucius Junius Brutus, the son of their aunt, Tarquinia, bided his time, playing the fool and concealing “the great spirit that was to free the Roman people” (I.lviii.79). Lucius Tarquinius had initiated a war against the Rutulian city of Ardea; it was a wealthy place, and he needed the money to pay for his vast public works and to pay off the increasingly disgruntled people of Rome. “Seized by an evil desire to debauch” Lucretia, the wife of the son of the Ardean king—her beauty and her chastity equally inflamed him—he blackmailed him into committing adultery with him by threatening to kill her and her slave, then laying them together and thereby ruining her reputation (I.lvii.80). After reporting the crime to her father and grandfather, she committed suicide so that no unchaste woman could ever use her example as a precedent.

This gave Brutus the opening he needed. Swearing vengeance on the Tarquins and the overthrow of the monarchic regime in Rome, he entered into a conspiracy with Lucretius’ widower, Collatinus, and her aggrieved father and grandfather. They gathered an army and moved against Rome, under Brutus’ command. “There he gave a speech that was quite inconsistent with the spirit and disposition that he had feigned up to that day,” he denounced Lucius for his crime and his arrogance in rule, including his policy of near-enslavement of the people for the purpose of building and cleaning sewers and ditches (I.l.ix.82). The tyrant, still in the camp at Ardea, returned to Rome but found the gates closed; he had been exiled by a vote of the people. For his part, Brutus had made the opposite journey, from Rome to Ardea, where he received the enthusiastic support of the army. 

“The rule of the kings at Rome, from the foundation of the city to its liberation, lasted 244 years” (I.lx.83). It was replaced by the rule of two consuls, the hero-liberators Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus—yet another duality, this one ending Tarquinius Superbus’ malign rule of one. Livy ends Book I here. He has provided his readers with a guide to monarchic statesmanship, both its advantages and its defects. His Book I thus serves as an ‘ancient’ equivalent of Machiavelli’s The Prince, in term of its theme. It stands in strong contrast to Machiavelli’s treatment of monarchy in two ways; although it shares some of the Florentine’s inclination to recommend the use of piety for purposes of ruling unruly peoples, it never departs from the classical virtues; what Machiavelli would term virtù enters in strictly as subordinate to those virtues. More, Livy never suggests that Fortuna can be mastered by human beings. Fortuna, and behind it Fate, put limits on human action in ways Machiavelli denies they need to do.

In Livy’s presentation, the monarchic regime presents a problem of ‘one versus two.’ As the story of Romulus and Remus demonstrates, a dual regime may lead to fatal inconveniences. However, no one monarch is usually good enough. A people needs two things, not one for good government; it needs both rule by force and rule by law. Yet no one man is likely to be good at both modes of rule; early Rome itself oscillates between forceful and lawful monarchs—Romulus types and Numa types. The attempt to combine the two in one person can as easily result in a tyrant, who combines the two modes malignly—saying in effect, ‘I am the law’—as it does in a wise and just monarch who uses force in accordance with the law. It was exactly this tyrannical eventuality that ruined the monarchic regime in Rome and led to the installation of ‘republicanism’—initially rule of ‘the few.’

Hence Livy’s opening sentence of Book II. “The libertas of the Roman people, their achievements in peace and war, government by annually elected magistrates, and the rule of laws that overrides the rule of men will be my theme from now on” (II.i.84). Livy carefully counsels his readers that Brutus “would have acted in the worst interests of the state if, in a premature desire for liberty, he had wrested the kingship of any of the earlier kings” (II.i.84). A people consisting of shepherds and refugees would not yet have been prepared for governing themselves. “Released from fear of a king’s power, they would have been buffeted by the storms of tribunician demagogues, creating quarrels with the senators of a city that was not their own, before pledges of a wife and children and love of the very soil—a characteristic that develops over a long period—had created a sense of community” (II.i.84). Factionalism would have destroyed Rome “before it reached maturity.” before it could “bear the good fruits of liberty” (II.i.85).

The Romans replaced the one king with two consuls. Crucially, the limited the term of the consulship to one year, rather than reducing the power wielded by the new ‘kingly’ offices. Also, only one consul at a time could hold the fasces, the symbol of the power to flog or execute wrongdoers. Quite sensibly, the liberator Brutus was chosen to hold the fasces at first, and he “prov[ed] as keen a guardian of liberty as he had been its champion” (II.i.85). Brutus brought the Senate back up to strength, enrolling leaders of the equestrian class to replace those murdered by the tyrant. If anything, the liberated Romans “went too far in protecting their freedom,” forcing one consul, Tarquinius Collatinus, to abdicate simply because he was a member of the hated Tarquin family, all of whom were then exiled, their lands either distributed to the plebs or consecrated to Mars (II.ii.86). The senators intended this to persuade the plebs to “dismiss forever any hope of peace with the Tarquins” (II.v.89).

The first threat to the regime came not from them, however, but from young aristocrats, “sons of families of some importance whose pleasures had been less restricted under the monarchy,” having been the “companions” of the Tarquins and “accustomed to living like princes” (II.iii.87). They preferred “license” under tyranny to liberty under republicanism (II.iii.87). Under tyranny, “there was scope for receiving and doing favors,” as monarchs know “the difference between a friend and an enemy” (II.iii.87). “The law, however, was deaf and inexorable, more helpful and better for the weak than for the powerful; it was inflexible and lacking indulgence, if one exceeded the limit” (II,iii.87). For the young aristocrats, “it was dangerous to rely on innocence alone” (II.iii.87). They plotted to restore the monarchy, and two sons of Brutus himself joined in the conspiracy. But a slave overheard their conversation and reported the matter to the consuls, who “crushed the whole plot without any disturbance” (II.iv.88). The traitors were “stripped, scourged, and beheaded”; although the Romans were grieved by the betrayal of Brutus, Romans generally, and the gods by Brutus’ sons, as was Brutus himself (his “face revealed his natural feelings as a father as the state’s retribution was administered”), the informer was rewarded with money, liberation from slavery, and citizenship in Rome, “to provide in all respects an outstanding deterrent to further crimes” (II.v.89-90). 

“When news of what had happened was reported to Tarquin, he was enraged with not only disappointment at the collapse of his great hopes” (II.vi.90). Conspiracy having failed, “he realized that he had to prepare openly for war” (II.vi.90). He found allies in the Etruscan cities of Veii and Tarquinii—his people, who had suffered defeats at the hands of Rome. “Two armies from the two states followed Tarquin to restore the monarchy and make war on the Romans” (II.vi.91). In the battle, Brutus and Arruns Tarquinius, a son of the former tyrant, rushed at one another, each then mortally wounded. The victorious consul, Publius Valerius, returned to Rome in triumph, but his “popularity turned to hatred and suspicion,” “so fickle are the minds of the mob,” frightened that he secretly aimed at kingship (II.vii.92). It took his resignation from the consulship and a conciliatory speech to the people to assuage their fears; these actions, along with new laws granting the people the right to appeal the decisions of magistrates and “pronouncing a curse on the life and property of a man who plotted to seize the throne,” brought him back into public favor, and he was granted the title “Publicola,” “the People’s Friend” (II.viii.93). This was among the earliest steps of bringing an aristocratic ‘republic’ closer to a mixed-regime republic.

Tarquin was dead, but the Tarquins still lived. The fled to the city of Clusium, asking the king, Lars Porsenna, to rally to the standard of monarchy against republicanism. “The end was at hand for monarchy, the finest institution known to gods and man,” they argued (II.ix.95). The panicky Roman senators, still unsure that the people would stand firm in defense of the new regime, freed them from taxes and customs duties while assuring them a ready supply of grain and salt. The people, they saw, might incline to either rule by ‘the few’ or rule by ‘the one,’ and their actions secured popular allegiance to themselves against the monarchists. “This liberality on the part of the senators so maintained the harmony of the state in the harsh times of siege and famine that were to come, that the name of ‘king’ was abhorrent to high and low alike. Nor was there any individual in later years whose demagogic skills made him as popular as the senate was at that time because of its good governance.” (II.ix.95).

In this war, such ardor led to the famed battlefield prodigy of Horatius Cocles, who faced off against the invaders in defense of the bridge across the Tiber River with only two companions at his side. He held out long enough for the bridge to be destroyed, preventing the monarchist army from overrunning Rome. Another hero, Mucius Scaevola, infiltrated the enemy camp in an attempt to assassinate Lars Porsenna; captured and threatened with death by fire, he thrust his own hand into the fire, saying “Look and see how cheaply the body is regarded by those who look to great glory,” and averring that there were hundreds more young Romans just like him (II.xii.99). The intimidated king offered peace, which was accepted. He later persisted in requesting that the Tarquin monarchy be restored, but the Roman envoys explained that “what the king was seeking was contrary to the liberty of the Roman people” and that “they were united in this vow that the end of liberty in the city would be the end of the city” (II.xv.102). 

To Livy, then, the maintenance of republicanism requires citizen virtue, virtue based on the superiority of the soul, and particularly the spirited aspect of the soul, thumos, over the body and its appetites. A soft people—and not only the men, as he recounts the stories of courageous women, as well—must unhesitatingly risk and even sacrifice their bodies in defense of political liberty. 

Next to plot against Rome were the Sabines. Although the war faction among its rulers prevailed, there was a substantial peace faction, including one Artus Claudius, who fled the country with his “large band of clients” (II.xvi.102); admitted to Rome, they were granted citizenship there, and Claudius became known as Appius Claudius. The Sabine threat soon induced the senate to appoint a new office, the dictator, selected from the ex-consuls to meet military emergency with a unified command. This quasi-monarchic office struck fear into the plebs and the Sabines alike. Temporarily stripped of the right to appeal from one consul to the other, the plebs saw no other recourse for themselves but the path of “scrupulous obedience” (II.xviii.105). The Sabines took the precaution of forming an alliance with the Latins, who broke their peace treaty with Rome. The indignant and well-disciplined Romans won the war, and the practice of appointing a dictator as the leader in major wars was affirmed.

The great republican, Publius Valerius died, and his son also died in battle against Latin forces allied with the Tarquins. Tarquinius Superbus himself died in exile in 495 BC. “The senators were cheered by this news, as were the plebs. But the senators indulged too much in their joy. The nobles began to mistreat the plebs, whose interests up to that time they had most diligently served.” (II.xxi.108). Removal of the regime threat and perhaps the increased commerce made possible in peace (the senate dedicated a temple to Mercury, god of commerce, at this time) as it were elevated care for the body. The citizens of ancient Carthage, a commercial republic, were accustomed to prosperity; the citizens of the military republic, and especially its ruling class, may have been corrupted by it, and were in any event made arrogant when fear of losing their regime to rival monarchists abated. A peace treaty with the Latins reinforced this. Roman duality recurred, this time in the form of class struggle.

From then on, the Roman republic saw “hatred between the senators and plebeians, especially on the question of those who were ‘bound over’ to their creditors for debt (II.xxiii110)—that is, forced into servitude to their creditor until the debt was paid. “The freedom of plebeians,” the plebeians complained, “was safer in war than in peace, amid enemies rather than amid fellow citizens” (II.xxiii.110). Indeed, the threat of war was often the only thing that cut short the periodic plebeian rebellions. And even then, on many occasions, the plebs would simply refuse to enlist when the consuls attempted to raise an army, holding out for concessions even in the face of serious foreign threats.

Unfortunately for the plebs, what has been conceded can be taken away, once the threat has been removed. It was the former Etruscan Appius Claudius who sided with senate oligarchs, opposing his milder consul counterpart, Publius Servilius, who, in “steering a middle course… neither avoided the hatred of the plebs nor won the goodwill of the senators” (II.xxvii.115). “The latter considered that he was soft and courting popularity, whereas the plebs deemed him equally hateful” (II.xxvii.115). “At last, these consuls who were hated so hated by the plebs went out of office. Servilius had the goodwill of neither side, but Appius was amazingly popular with the senators.” (II.xxvii.116). Out of office, Appius Claudius, “harsh by nature and brutal because of his hatred of the plebs on the one hand and the senators’ adulation on the other, said that such a great uproar had arisen, not because of the plebs’ miserable lives, but because of license: the plebs were more out of control than enraged” (II.xxix.118). He diagnosed the problem as insolence stemming from their right to appeal the decision of one consul before his counterpart, and urged the appointment of a dictator to put a stop to that. He nearly got himself appointed to the office—”a move that would have alienated the plebs at a most dangerous time, since the Volsci, Aequi, and Sabines all happened to take up arms at once” against Rome (II.xxx.119). The senate prudently chose Manlius Valerius, whose brother had proposed the law that gave them the right to appeal; “they had no fear of harsh or arrogant action from that family,” and they went along with the military call-up (II.xxx.119). The resulting army went on to defeat the enemies.

Victory merely returned the senators to their arrogance. They rejected Valerius’ call for a fair policy respecting credit and debt. “You don’t like it when I urge harmony,” he told them; “you will soon wish, I guarantee, that the Roman plebs had patrons like me”—a moderate, not some demagogue to inflame them against the patricians (II.xxxi.121). Sure enough, the plebs withdrew from the city, fortifying a camp, which caused “great panic” among the oligarchs (II.xxxii.122).

The senators sent Menenius Agrippa as an emissary to the plebs. “An eloquent man who was dear to the people because he was one of their own by birth,” he brought them back into the city by telling them a parable “in an old-fashioned, rough style of speech” (II.xxxii.122). This was the famous parable of the belly, which recalls a mythical time when the parts of the human body were poorly coordinated, with each having “its own way of thinking and its own voice” (II.xxxii.122). All were angry at the belly, which alone among them appeared to consume without producing. They decided “starve the belly into submission,” but soon learned that the belly had a function after all, which was to supply “all parts of the body the source of our life and strength—our blood, which it apportions to the veins after it is enriched with the food it has digested” (II.xxxii.123). This showed the plebs “the similarity between the internal revolt of the body and the anger of the plebs toward the senators, and so won over men’s minds” (II.xxxii.123). 

The plebs nonetheless exacted a major concession from the senators. The plebeians were given magistrates “who would be sacrosanct”; the “tribunes” would “have the right to give help to the plebeians in actions against the consuls” (II.xxxiii.123). The tribunate would endure as an important institution in the republic from then on.

The next threat to plebeian rights came from a young soldier, Gnaeus Marcius, later given the cognomen Coriolanus. His rise, based on his military prowess, began at the same time as the death of Menenius Agrippa, the lifelong “promoter and mediator of civic harmony” between patricians and plebeians. Due to the plebs’ temporary secession, Rome suffered a grain shortage. Coriolanus was “foremost” among those who “thought that the time had come to repress the plebeians and recover the rights that had id been forcibly wrested from the senators as a result of the secession,” describing this as a “humiliation” comparable to that experienced by defeated soldiers forced to pass under the yoke by their triumphant enemies (II.xxxiv.125). The senate, he contended, should “annul the tribunician power” by withholding grain just as the plebs had withheld themselves (II.xxxiv.126). This infuriated the plebs, who intimidated the senators, who then exiled Coriolanus. 

He settled at Volsci, where his host, Attius Tullius, shared his animosity toward the Roman people. Since the Volscians generally had lost interest in fighting Rome, “they would have to employ devious means in order to provoke the Volscians’ hearts with some fresh anger” (II.xxv.127). At the next session of the Great Games in Rome, Attius warned the Romans of a likely disturbance by Volscian youths; they were expelled, giving him the opportunity to complain, upon their return to Volsci, that the city had been humiliated, its youths treated as if unclean. “War has been declared on you—but those who made the declaration will greatly regret it, if you prove your valor” (II.xxxviii.130). Coriolanus led the march on Rome.

This led to the dramatic story Shakespeare presented, as the women of Rome, including Coriolanus’ wife and mother, came out of the city to beg for mercy. At first “intransigent,” Coriolanus was intent on attack, but “the weeping of the entire crowd of women and their lament for themselves and their country finally broke the man” (II.xxxix.132). “The men of Rome did not envy the praise won by the women—people at that time did not disparage another’s glory” (II.xxxix.132); Livy marks the magnanimity of early republican Rome, glancing at small-souled contemporaries in passing. Coriolanus lived to an old age. The Volsci and their Aequian allies retreated, then fell to fighting one another after dumping Attius Tullius as their leader. “The good fortune of the Roman people destroyed two armies in a struggle that was as ruinous as it was stubborn” for their enemies (II.xxxix.132).

Domestic faction re-ignited when the consul Spurius Cassius proposed to divide land gained by treaty from the Hernici between the Latins and the plebeians. The senators were “concerned for the state, thinking by his largesse the consul was building up an influence that endangered freedom”; he might be favoring the people in order to install himself as a king (II.xli.133). “This was the first time that a land bill was proposed, a measure that, from that day to within present memory, has never been brought up without causing great upheavals” (II.xli.133). The other consul, Proculus Verginius, sided with the senators and vetoed the bill. When Cassius then order that money received from the sale of Sicilian grain be allocated to the plebs, they “rejected this as an obvious bribe to get the kingship” (II.xli.134), despite the continued economic depression. Cassius was prosecuted for treason and convicted; his house was demolished.

During a war with the Aequi and the Veientines, the plebeians, led by the tribune Spurius Licinius, withheld military service, this time “to force a land bill upon the patricians” (II.xliii.136). This caused the consul Quintus Fabius to suffer “considerably more trouble with his fellow citizens than with the enemy” (II.xliii.136). His foot soldiers did report for duty and defeated the enemy but then refused to pursue the fleeing Aequians. “The commander found no remedy for this ruinous and unprecedented behavior”; Livy observes that “men of talent are more often deficient in the skill of governing their fellow citizens than in that of defeating the enemy” (II.xliii.136). 

The accounts of Coriolanus, Cassius, and Fabius illustrate a weakness of a military republican regime. Powerful in war, its way of life does not foster the kind of souls which readily master the arts of peace—souls inclined to civility, souls that do not carry the passions of war into civil life. In battle-ready Rome, factions inclined to militancy not compromise. 

And so, in 480 BC, when another tribune, Tiberius Pontificus, sponsored another land bill, the plebs again obstructed a troop levy and the senators again “were thrown into confusion” (II.xliv.137). And again, Appius Claudius was unbending, confident that the senator “would never lack a tribune “who would be willing not only to seek for himself a victory over a colleague but also to ingratiate himself with the better element for the good of the state” by opposing any such proposal by an ambitious tribune who attempted to curry popular favor (II.xliv.137). The same policy of divide-and-conquer that works in foreign policy and war could be applied to domestic policy and faction.

Rome’s enemies saw the city’s factionalism and attempted to exploit it. Rearming, the Etruscans were “spurred on… by their hope that Rome would be destroyed by her internal strife” (II.xliv.137). “This was the only poison; this was the decay that had been found to work on wealthy states, making great empires subject to mortality,” namely, that “two states had been created from one, each with its own magistrates and its own laws,” making “military discipline” shaky (II.xliv.138). “Under such pressure, Rome could be defeated through her own soldiers. Indeed, all [the Etruscans] had to do was to make a declaration and a show of war. The fates and the gods would automatically do the rest.” (II.xliv.138). Or so the Etruscans hoped, clearly not without reason. The Roman consuls themselves “dreaded nothing except their own forces and military might,” given “this new kind of mutiny when armed men were silent and inactive,” not loud and openly rebellious (II.xv.138). 

On the battlefield, the Etruscans insulted the Roman soldiers, dividing plebeian hatred between the Etruscan and Roman aristocrats. That is, the attempt to divide and conquer the Romans only succeeded in dividing their outrage, refocusing part of it on the leaders of the enemy troops. Meanwhile, “the consuls put their heads together, as if they were deliberating, and conferred for a long time” (II.xlv.138), effectively employing what we would now call ‘reverse psychology’: “The more [the soldiers] believed the consuls did not want battle, the more their ardor increased” (II.xlv.138). For their part, the Etruscan officers, assuming that the Roman consuls feared engagement, redoubled their insults, thereby redoubling the fury in the ranks of the Romans, who finally “rushed to the consults,” clamoring for battle (II.xlv.138). The consuls still demurred, but finally Fabius demanded that “they swear” not merely to the consuls but to the gods “that they will return victorious from this battle” (II.xlv.138). So they swore, and so they returned, and when the soldiers returned to Rome he put the wounded soldiers under the care of his family, bringing his family to enjoy popularity for the first time, “a favor won by a skill that promoted the health of the state” (II.xlvii.142). The following year, the Fabii volunteered not only to lead the army against the Veientines but to pay for the expedition themselves. “People praised the Fabii to the skies. One family had shouldered the burden of the state.” (II.xlix.143). But success made the Fabii restless; all but one was killed in battle, the survivor “hardly more than a boy” (II.l.146). A year later, however, the arrogance lodged in the other set of heads, and the Veientines fell victim to a disastrous ambush.

Once again, in the characteristic pattern, peace abroad brought strife at home, as “abundance and idleness again made the Romans irresponsible,” with tribunes “stir[ring] up the plebs with the usual poison, a land bill” (II.lii.148). Between 476 BC and 468, this kind of oscillation continued, with the plebeians winning the right to elect the tribunes through the Tribal Assembly, a move that “deprived the patricians of all their power of using their clients’ votes to elect the tribunes they wanted” (II.lvi.152). “While consuls and tribunes were each pulling in their own direction, there was no strength left in the middle. The state was torn and mangled. The question was in whose hands the state belonged, rather than how it might be safe.” (II.lvii.154). (At one point the Volsci won a rare victory over Rome in battle.) Rome now had a mixed-regime republic of sorts, but without the feature Aristotle regards as indispensable to that regime: a strong middle class to act as a balance-wheel between the many poor and the few rich. 

 

Note

1. See Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges: The Ancient City. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.