Forster's Habilitationsschrift ambitiously tackles the problem of the Roman senate before the lex Ovinia. It is a meticulously argued and footnoted book which will take its place alongside the increasing number of books and studies of the institutional history of archaic Rome. It remains the case of course that we have not augmented the textual evidence, and so we are part of an interesting phenomenon whereby that of which we cannot know much has led us to speak more.

The first chapter outlines the background to the study, noting that Cornell's fundamental intervention in 2000 [1] necessitates a reconsideration of the tradition. The methodological principle enunciated here is 'ein nach Möglichkeit plausibles Gesamtbild zu zeichnen.' The literature on the subject generally is outlined followed by a chapter on the Lex Ovinia itself. On the most controversial aspect of the text, Forster comes down firmly for the reading curiatim not iurati.

That reading then drives chapter 3 to be an account of the constituent parts of Roman society, curiae, gentes and tribus. If the senate is enrolled by curiae, then it fits into a mosaic of familial organizations which matches the nomenclature of the senators as patres. That naturally leads on to a discussion of the patriciate.

Chapter 4 then considers the role of the senate in protecting the auspicia in the absence of a king, and in interregnum. Taken together the two chapters construct a picture of king and aristocrats in dialogue, with a powerful set of family heads meeting from the earliest period to guide the city's transformation in counterpoise to the power of the king, a weak figure early on, increasingly powerful and eventually tyrannical. The Senate is then key to what happens when monarchy falls.

Chapter 5 places the development of the senate in the context of the Struggle of the Orders. Forster largely adheres to the idea that Rome was not strictly divided into patricians and fully excluded plebeians, but rather that there was a degree of porosity, especially early in the Republic. The closure of the patriciate was a change and an unsuccessful one, with the leges Liciniae Sextiae and the lex Hortensia representing formal breaches of patrician monopoly, as the patres conscripti had been more informal breaches earlier.

Forster's boldest step comes in chapter 6 where he rejects the consensus of a fourth century date for the lex Ovinia and places it after the end of Livy's narrative in Book 10 and into the third century. His argument is that the change was so great that Livy would surely have mentioned it in his text, but the absence from the Periochae can be explained by the fact that they tend not to record constitutional change. The key problem was managing the list of who actually was a senator, to avoid excluding the largely plebeian patres conscripti, and by finally including and excluding individuals to create a senate which would evolve into the standing body of former magistrates. This then would be a perfect sequel to the lex Hortensia. The row over whether the flamen Dialis was a senator then becomes part of the last stand of the patriciate at around the same time, the early third century BC.

The book concludes with an elegant summary, and notes that the long success of the senate as an institution may reasonably attributed to the work of the lex Ovinia in securing its openness to the proper ruling group of Rome, part of rather than in opposition to a changed Roman world.

There is much to like about this clear, thoughtful and well-argued account. If the Roman sources do indeed somehow pass on to us a reasonably plausible account of the sequence of events, and institutional structures, we are entitled to rewrite them to construct a probabilistic account, and this is a good version of that approach. By building on and alongside other recent accounts of archaic and early Republican Rome, we can trace a political evolution that at times reads strikingly like the constitutional history of a modern or at least premodern society. The king's council becomes the parliament.

Inevitably the weakest part of the argument is for the earliest period. Foster's account of the kings is for me too trusting, too flat. Did Rome really have kings that followed each other with relatively few gaps and who managed to hold the families together? Why, if so, were the Roman families almost entirely absent from the Roman account of the regal period? Why were they not written in, or why were they written out?

And what happened in 509? The bibliography is pretty full, but Wiseman's contrarian essay [2] is absent - a perhaps more realistic account of a chaotic transition.

What did the senate actually do? What would it have felt like to be at a meeting? It is not unreasonable to say that we cannot say, and that that is a different sort of question. But the sources do have accounts of chaotic meeting and disputes. How performative was the senate at any time? Forster has written an account of what senate was rather than what it did, but the problem with that is that Romans were interested in what it did. Take for instance the tremendous battle of Spurius Cassius' reforms which in Dionysius of Halicarnassus rages between senate and assembly, senator and senator. Is this what the senate did?

Or was it really all about religion? Forster does not spend long on this, but arguably that's one of the most important functions for this strange body. One could write a different version of Forster's thesis along the lines of an institution which was politically useless but essential for religion. Much of what we hear the patres worrying about is the religious stability and governance of Rome. Of course it is artificial to distinguish religion and politics, but there is still something here about the kind of compulsion which could require the presence of an otherwise highly fissive aristocracy. Much of the Struggle of the Orders can be read through the problem of the auspicia which Forster discusses well but primarily as political legitimation.

Forster has done an excellent job of describing what Rome might have been like if it was full of Mommsens and Bagehots, and this is a genuinely important contribution. Rome was instead full of Claudii and Fabii and replete with prodigious hermaphrodites, thunderbolts, and military disasters. Pushing the lex Ovinia so late makes it even harder to explain what the senate did, and how and why, up to the early third century. It makes the mechanisms of coherence trickier to explain even as it aligns with the current trend towards re-establishing a political interpretation heavily biased towards Roman family competition.

This is why curiatim has to be Forster's reading of the Festus 290L because only then can the senate be slotted into an argument that consolidates the desperately difficult bits of evidence into a picture of a coherent society. I have enormous sympathy with this approach, but one needs to be honest that it might be hopelessly wrong.

Notes:

[1] T.J. Cornell: The Lex Ovinia and the Emancipation of the Senate, in: C. Bruun (ed.): The Roman Middle Republic: Politics, Religion, and Historiography c. 400-133 BC, Rome 2000, 68-89.

[2] T.P. Wiseman: Roman Republic, Year One, in: Greece & Rome 45, no. 1 (1998), 19-26.

Christopher Smith