Remembering the Roman People: Essays on Late-Republican Politics and Literature

by Timothy P. Wiseman

In the Roman republic, only the People could pass laws, only the People could elect politicians to office, and the very word republica meant 'the People's business'. So why is it always assumed that the republic was an oligarchy? The main reason is that most of what we know about it we know from Cicero, a great man and a great writer, but also an active right-wing politician who took it for granted that what was good for a small minority of self-styled 'best people' (optimates) was good for the republic as a whole. T. P. Wiseman interprets the last century of the republic on the assumption that the People had a coherent political ideology of its own, and that the optimates, with their belief in justified murder, were responsible for the breakdown of the republic in civil war.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Roman History, Classics

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Drianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this. Wiseman's basic contention is that we should "put the ideology back" into our understanding of politics in the 1st c., that our modern orthodoxy about the Populārēs and Optimātēs being nothing other than two different ways of doing Machtpolitik with no actual adherence to values is a misunderstanding born of (esp) German scholarship in the early 20th c., and that it is nonsensical not to actually look at the ideological content of the Populārēs' views and actions; he then proceeds to try to recover some of those beliefs by "looking around Cicero." He tries to re-examine the 1st c. as people who were not our major, major source might have thought of it (people like Varro, but also others less famous).

I felt the entire time reading this book like these were ideas I should've considered at some point before, but just... hadn't.

Probably due to that whole 'Cicero blocks every other view' thing.

Extremely readable, as well.