STELLUNGNAHME ZU

Gregory Coates: Rezension von: Frederik Juliaan Vervaet: Reform, Revolution, Reaction. A Short History of Rome from the Origins of the Social War to the Dictatorship of Sulla, Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza / Sevilla: Editorial Universidad de Sevilla 2023, in: sehepunkte 24 (2024), Nr. 6 [15.06.2024], URL: https://www.sehepunkte.de/2024/06/38933.html

Von Frederik Juliaan Vervaet

Before formulating a brief rejoinder to the reviewer's criticisms of my monograph, I would like to thank him for taking the time and the trouble to read it and engage with some of its analysis. For brevity's sake, I here confine myself to some reasonably simple responses to what I consider the most important criticisms, roughly in order of appearance in the review.

According to the reviewer, "Rome was a backwards-looking society, where tradition and ancestral custom dominated political debates, and where every member of the elite qualified, more or less, as 'conservative' in outlook." This representation of Roman elite political culture - to be duly distinguished from other, sub- or non-elite political cultures [1] - as unimaginative and innately retrospective can be traced back to Mommsen and especially Meier [2], and arguably amounts to an outdated and reductionist appraisal. The reform packages passed or proposed by, for example, Tiberius and especially Gaius Gracchus and his close ally Fulvius Flaccus, and next Livius Drusus and P. Sulpicius, demonstrably broke new ground (even if Tiberius may well have defended his agrarian legislation as a partial revival of a 4th century law) and can therefore hardly be labelled as conservative (on the Gracchan reforms and the severe conservative backlash, see for example J. Tan's magisterial Power and Public Finance at Rome, 264-49 BCE, Chapter 6: "The Death and Taxes of the Gracchi"). Indeed, even Sulla's dictatorial reforms, a seemingly paradoxical combination of reactionary, conservative, and novel measures, are defined by Cicero (in 80 BCE) as future-oriented (Rosc. Am. 22: quae praeterita sunt, reparet et ea, quae videntur instare, praeparet - "repairing the past and preparing for whatever the future might hold"). For more on all of this, I would invite the reviewer to take note of my forthcoming chapter (with Christopher Dart and David Rafferty) on "Reform Unwillingness and the Death of the Roman Republic" in F.J. Vervaet, D. Rafferty & C.J. Dart (eds), How Republics Die. Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond (Berlin & Boston, 2025).

Many of the key measures proposed by the above-mentioned reformers sought to render the Republic's political processes more participatory and democratic, for example seeking to enfranchise hundreds of thousands of Latins, Italians, and freedmen on a footing of equality with the existing Roman citizen body. Therefore, they can certainly be defined as forward-looking or even progressive, and the political opposition as conservative in the sense that they were championing the status quo. Regardless of the identity of the driving forces behind these measures (i.e., Roman politicians or the Italian elites/municipal constituencies, all with self-interested political agendas), one can therefore certainly consider this movement a civil rights movement, akin to for example the movement that sought to secure equal civil rights for the black minority in the modern United States. In this respect, it is, furthermore, well worth noting that the reviewer on the one hand believes that my work struggles "under the weight of anachronism", but, on the other, terms the Romans "the colonial oppressors of Italy", an overly simplistic appraisal one could just as easily label anachronistic by the reviewer's own standard that "we must judge Rome's political culture on its own terms", not through modern (post-)colonial frameworks and terminology.

The reviewer repeatedly takes issue with my allegedly uncritical handling of the secondary ancient source material, singling out my use of Appian in particular. Whilst prone to mostly chronological mistakes, Appian drew on well-informed Latin sources (cf. B Civ. 5.45), and the reviewer's rejection of Appian's explanation of why the Social War began entirely ignores the unequivocal attestation of Cicero, who had personally witnessed the Social War, that the Italic allies had taken up arms to compel the Romans at long last to invest them with full Roman citizenship (Phil. 12.27), a tradition reinforced by some passages in the equally 'pre-imperial' Rhetorica ad Herennium and Diodorus Siculus. [3]

The reviewer furthermore argues that Velleius 2.14.1 states that Drusus "turned to the Italians only when the rest of his laws were in danger of being repealed (i.e. in October/November 91)", claiming that "instead, the bulk of the evidence indicates that, at the start of 91, Drusus' objective was to restore senatorial control over criminal juries". The reviewer here seems to ignore that the Italians did not yet have the suffrage, indicating that Velleius (like some other sources) suggests that Drusus instead looked to them to support his legislative program through intimidation and violence. And if we uncritically assume that Drusus' "reactionary agenda" merely concerned the return of the criminal court juries to the Senate, why on earth then did he bother to push through a wide range of other, hardly 'conservative' (let alone reactionary) measures (agrarian, colonial, etc.) after having succeeded in carrying a compromise judiciary law sharing the juries between senators and equestrians with the support of the Senate? Again, applying the principles of historical criticism, could it not be that Velleius here aligns with a hostile senatorial tradition that sought to recast Drusus as a latter-day 'Gracchan' and shift responsibility for the Italic uprising to him alone, an accusation probably first made in the Senate by his foremost political opponent, the consul L. Marcius Philippus (Liv. Per. 71; Plin. HN 25.52; Vir. Ill. 66.12; comp. Asc. 69C)? It is highly problematic that the reviewer firmly rejects the relatively well-documented tradition that the Italians sought to achieve legal equality with the Romans through force but uncritically accepts the scholarly line of thought that they sought "to destroy Rome" as an objective historical fact, even if this scholarly position does require us to reject or explain away an entire body of literary evidence.

Similarly, the reviewer strongly objects to my acceptance of "Appian's claim that Sulla passed a series of laws after marching on Rome in 88", asserting that "only Appian mentions these laws", that Plutarch remains silent on this issue, and that Sulla was very unpopular after his unprecedented capture of Rome. First, Appian's narrative is succinctly corroborated by the epitomator of Livy, who recounts in Per. 77 that L. Sylla civitatis statum ordinavit ("L. Sulla established order in the state"): compare the very similar language concerning Sulla's dictatorial legislation in Per. 89 (Legibus novis rei publicae statum confirmavit ("He strengthened the Republic by new legislation") and Vir. Ill. 75.12 (Republica ordinata dictaturam deposuit - "he laid down the dictatorship after having restored order in the Republic."); comp. also Suet. Div. Aug. 28.2, where we are told Augustus took considerable pride in having established an 'optimus novus status' through his reforms. Second, the reviewer ignores that Plutarch, hardly interested in the niceties of Roman public law/legislation, in his Life of Sulla remains equally silent as to his impressive legislative activity in his capacity of dictator (82-79 BCE). And finally - apart from the fact that I do not at all downplay the unpopularity of Sulla in 88 - the reviewer for good measure ignores the fact that Sulla was able to do what he did after capturing Rome because he presided over a large military force in Rome, hardly conducive to a free political debate in both Curia and Forum: for all of this, see pp. 139-144 of my book.

In the matter of my allegedly "uncritical approach to the sources", I would also like to add that I take issue with the rather high-handed and self-complacent view that "imperial narratives, written hundreds [sic] of years after the event" had "little understanding of Republican politics" - clearly we modern Roman historians, writing roughly two thousand years after the events, are in a much stronger position to properly understand what transpired in the late Roman Republic and therefore entitled to ignore or explain away any inconvenient evidence that doesn't sit well with our own tentative explicatory reconstructions of events.
As for the reviewer's rather odd critiques that "there are frequent digressions that disrupt the narrative" and that "the footnotes", allegedly written "in a strangely belligerent, unsympathetic tone" take up too much space: as explained in the introduction, the entire purposes of the substantive footnote apparatus is to ensure that scholarly debates and digressions on technicalities do not interrupt the flow of the narrative in the main text, catering to both those interested only in the overall narrative analysis of events and those keen on more detailed explanation, scholarly debates, or further reading. The use of such terms as contra to flag scholarly variances in economic fashion (as opposed to more wordy formulations in the vein of "as opposed to the views of", or "arguing against the position of") is perfectly in keeping with well-established scholarly conventions and as such not to be interpreted as belligerence or hostility.

A final exercise in historical criticism perhaps goes some way towards explaining the remarkably negative tone of this review, as well as why the reviewer is adamant that "a decent book-length narrative of this period remains a desideratum". As it happens, the reviewer is a recent doctoral student of Professor Henrik Mouritsen (duly referenced in n. 1 of the review), eminent and prolific historian of the Roman Republic with whom I indeed respectfully disagree on a number of key issues, and graduated with a dissertation on Victoria nobilitatis: politics, civil war, and the Roman nobility in the age of Marius and Sulla (September 2023), a study largely dealing with the period discussed in my monograph and probably currently in preparation for publication in book form. I sincerely wish the reviewer well with this endeavour: may he excel where I failed so dismally, and may his work receive a more gracious and balanced reception.

Notes:

[1] D. Machado, "Roman Republican Politics: Past, Present, and Futures" (Review Article of C. Rosillo López 2022; C. Barber 2022; and V. Arena & J. Prag 2022), Polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought 41 (2024) 351-367.

[2] C. Meier, Res publica amissa: Eine Studie zur Verfassung und Geschichte der späten römischen Republik, Wiesbaden (1966) [1980].

[3] For a recent, less dismissive appraisal of the Alexandrian historiographer, see K. Welch (ed.), Appian's Roman History: Empire and Civil War. Roman culture in an age of civil war, Swansea (2015). For an unconvincing attempt to explain away even the testimony of eye-witness Cicero, see H. Mouritsen, "From hostes acerrimi to homines nobilissimi. Two Studies in the Ancient Reception of the Social War", Historia 68 (2019) 302-326.

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