Patricians and Plebeians Patrons and Clients in Republican Rome

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Patricians and PlebeiansPatrons and Clientsin
Republican Rome
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Patricians and Plebeians

• The Problem of Patrician Identity
• The Struggle of the Orders Unhistorical?
• "As a working hypothesis, I suggest that the
  first Senate contained priests that priests were
  the patres, those with automatic seats in the
  Senate by virtue of their priesthoods that
  initially their heirs automatically succeeded to
  their priesthoods and thereby to their Senate
  seats and, since priests/patres held their
  positions for life and were caretakers of
  ancestral practices, that they were the ones who
  gave their approval (patrum auctoritas) to those
  public measures found to be in keeping with
  traditional behavior (mos maiorum)
• Mitchell, Patricians and Plebeians, 63.

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Compare the Ogulnian law of 300 BCE one of the
last concessions to the plebeians was access to
the major priesthoods. Even if Mitchell is right
in the idea that patrician priest, aren't
religious power and political power in early Rome
closely intertwined, and we could still have a
Struggle of the Orders?Patres Conscripti-
"Fathers and Conscripts"? This is the standard
address in later sources for the members of the
Senate. Are the "Fathers" an original noble
elite and the "Conscripts" their well-to-do
dependents? If so, we have further
differentiation in early Roman society beyond a
patrician/plebeian dichotomy. See A. Momigliano,
"The Rise of the Plebs in the Archaic Age of
Rome," in Social Struggles, ed. K. Raaflaub
(1986).
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Two Ways of Viewing Roman Society

• Class Conflict? Horizontal Division of Early
  Roman Republican Society?
• An Alternative Model Patrons and Clients-
  Vertical Division
• Roman Paternalism and Authoritarianism (patria
  potestas)
• Patronage- The Extra-Constitutional Institution
• (Ernst Badian, Foreign Clientelae).
• The Fabian Clan and the Battle of the Cremera
  479 BCE

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Patrons in Competition
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Complexities of Roman Politico-Social Hierarchies
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Ancient Passages on Patronage

• Cicero, On the Republic (De Re Publica), 2.16,
  written in the mid-50s BCE "He Romulus also
  divided the plebeians up among the prominent
  citizens, who were to be their patrons..."
  (Compare Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman
  Antiquities, 2.9-11).
• 12 Tables (Table 8 RC I, 32, pg. 113) "If a
  patron shall have defrauded his client, he must
  be solemnly forfeited".

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The Locus of Power

• Center of Power (great Roman families) and
  Periphery (A. Wallace-Hadrill).
• Access to Senate only through individuals.
• Rome does not develop a representative
  government. Rome remains the locus of power