How did the Roman Republic work?

A city that swore off kings

Roman tradition says the last king, Tarquin the Proud, was driven out in 509 BC, and Rome swore never to have a king again. What replaced him was the res publica, “the public thing,” meaning the people’s business. It gave us the word republic. The design had one goal: nobody would hold enough power, for long enough, to become a king. Three rules did most of the work:

• Every office was shared. Each regular post had at least two holders, and either could block the other.
• Every office was short. Terms lasted a year. Then the holder became a private citizen again, open to prosecution for what he had done.
• Almost anything could be stopped. One word from a colleague or a tribune halted an action.

Who did what

• Consuls. The two top officials, elected every year. They commanded the armies and presided over the Senate. Twelve attendants called lictors walked ahead of each, carrying the fasces, a bundle of rods around an ax.
• The Senate. About 300 former officials, members for life. In theory it only advised. In practice it ran the treasury, foreign affairs and the provinces, and its advice was rarely ignored.
• The assemblies. Citizens voted in person, in Rome, on laws, on war and peace, and on who held office. Votes were counted by groups, not heads, and in the assembly that elected consuls the groups were weighted toward the rich, who voted first.
• Tribunes of the plebs. Officials of the ordinary citizens, who could block almost any act with one word: veto, “I forbid.”
• The dictator. In a crisis, one man took full command, for six months at most.

Ambitious men climbed a ladder of offices, the cursus honorum, from quaestor to praetor to consul, and every rung was won in an election.

How the plebeians won their share

At first a few old families, the patricians, held every office. The ordinary citizens, the plebeians, fought back with the one weapon they had: themselves. In 494 BC, tradition says, they walked out of Rome and refused to fight until they got officials of their own, the tribunes. Around 450 BC the laws were written on twelve tablets and set up in the Forum for anyone to read. In 367 BC plebeians won the right to stand for consul, and in 287 BC the decisions of their own assembly became law for everyone.

The Greek historian Polybius, brought to Rome as a hostage in 167 BC, saw three kinds of government in it at once:

If one fixed one’s eyes on the power of the consuls, the constitution seemed completely monarchical and royal; if on that of the senate it seemed again to be aristocratic; and when one looked at the power of the masses, it seemed clearly to be a democracy.

Dictators, then and now

A Roman dictator was a legal emergency officer, not a tyrant, and the best were remembered for giving power back. Livy tells of Cincinnatus, called from his plow in 458 BC to rescue a trapped Roman army, who won, resigned after about two weeks and went home to his farm. The system worked for centuries. It broke when strong men stopped giving power back: Sulla took the dictatorship with no time limit in 82 BC, and Julius Caesar was named dictator for life in 44 BC. That is the story of how the Republic fell.

The vocabulary outlived it. Senate comes from senex, “old man.” Candidate comes from candidatus, “dressed in white,” after the chalked toga of a Roman running for office. And countries from France to India still call themselves republics.