Laurens E. Tacoma, Roman Political Culture. Seven Studies of the Senate and City Councils of Italy from the First to the Sixth Century AD, Oxford – New York (Oxford University Press) 2020, XII, 320 S., ISBN 978-0-19-885080-9 (geb.), £ 87,–

“Roman Political Culture” is a book of considerable ambition. In it, Laurens T(acoma) selects for study six bodies of evidence, from six contexts of Roman senatorial or Italian civic government between the first and sixth centuries CE. He aspires to reveal aspects of what he terms the “political culture” of civic government in the Italian peninsula. The individual chapters display noteworthy empirical control of the pointillist evidence each considers. By contrast, the attempt to craft a larger argument is hampered by the project’s assumptions, as well as T.’s understanding of the theoretical infrastructure he adopts and the very limited definition of politics that he employs. To these more critical matters I will return.

The Introduction describes T.’s approach. With the advent of what was substantively a monarchy, “all key decisions” were removed from the institutions of republican government and transferred to the emperor, court and bureaucracy (4). And yet, the institutions of civic government persisted. On T.’s understanding of politics, whatever those institutions did for the next six hundred years, “it clearly did not qualify as politics proper” (11). Their longevity in spite of this is the focus of his investigation, with the caveat that because T. does not understand their remit as “politics,” he urges that they be investigated “in a social rather than a political direction.” In other words, T. argues that the function of these institutional spaces was largely restricted to the sustaining and management of an elite: “The institutions might be regarded as self-referential and self-definitional: they structured relations internally between individual members of the elite and collectively between the elite and other members of society” (10; see also 8; the terms “self-referential and self-definitional” are repeated on 265, albeit never defined).

The first chapter studies Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis as a lens on the issue that “the space for debate was restricted” (25). The chapter reads Seneca as responding to actual speeches of Claudius, notably, the text preserved on the tablet from Lyon. This is often well done, even if questions about “space for debate” would seem to require at least some investigation of the rich documentary material on attendance and meeting places of the senate. The second chapter is a study of elections at Pompeii. Its ostensible target is the role of patronage in elections, but the chapter displays prudence about what the evidence under consideration – electoral graffiti – can reveal. The third chapter concerns elections as well, but from a very different perspective, namely, via the younger Pliny’s remarks on elections, above all in Ep. 3.20 but also elsewhere. The chapter reads Pliny against Cicero, De Legibus 3, and follows Woodman in suggesting that Pliny may well be responding to Cicero. The two chapters on elections deserve an audience and should be read together.

Chapter 4 turns to the reign of Commodus, or, rather, a report contained in the Historia Augusta of the senatorial debate that followed that emperor’s death. T. suggests that the substantial role played by acclamation in the account deserves special attention, but the chapter’s own attention wanders through many issues related to Commodus’s reputation and interaction with interest groups. The analysis is not without interest, but neither contemporaneous evidence for acclamation nor relevant secondary literature is much engaged. The fifth chapter studies Constantine’s rescript to Hispellum, which T. reads – along with the dossier from Orcistus – as an instance of an ongoing discourse about cities and civic life. Chapter 6 turns to the reign of Theoderic and studies public correspondence about a building project, namely, drainage works along the via Appia. Finally, the seventh chapter is a welcome study of the Ravenna papyri, and the documentary and knowledge cultures in which they were crafted and played their role.

Several of the chapters can be warmly recommended as studies of their dossier. The questions to be posed of a monograph, however, concern not the achievement of individual chapters but of the whole: preeminently, how does it define its project, and is this done well; how well does the book meet its objectives; and how does it stand, and what does it contribute, in relation to its field. I commence consideration of broader issues by remarking on two assumptions that undergird the book’s design before turning to T.’s understanding of politics.

The book’s case studies range from the first century CE principate to Ravenna in the sixth and early seventh centuries CE. T.’s allows in the Conclusion that a “major question” concerns the extent to which “it is legitimate to consider the political culture of Roman Italy” over this span of time as “a coherent entity” (270). But the very next sentence sets this question aside: “This book is premised on the assumption that this is indeed the case.” No justification for this assumption is offered. A profound opportunity is thereby lost. The entire project is premised, as we have seen, on the notion that the particular “political culture” under consideration was birthed by the advent of monarchy. But neither the monarchy, nor the court, nor their ideology, nor imperial ceremonial, nor public law, nor their relation to other loci of ideological power in civil society, remained the same over this period – whatever that would mean (and see p. 225). It is very hard to see how T.’s explicit refusal of the possibility of historical change as a methodological position can be squared with his own theory of the causal mechanism that gave rise to his object of study.

To be sure, he himself admits that his approach “is by its very nature not capable of tracking such changes over time” (271). This assertion, too, receives inadequate explanation, but I take him to be saying that the highly formalized genres from which his evidence derives, and the hermeneutic strategies that he deploys, resist interrogation at this level. If this is so, T. is perhaps admitting aporia before the problem of language that Tacitus first identified, namely, that the successful cooptation of the languages of republican politics by the Principate left contemporaries without a vocabulary of critique (Tac. ann. 1.3.7). I find it odd to confess that the intervening millennia have taught us nothing about how to surmount this difficulty at the level of method.

It so happens that this very problematic, that of deceptive continuities between republic and principate, also concerns T. He allows that “many of the tensions and ambiguities that have been discussed in this book were already visible in the political system [read: ‘culture’?] of the Late Republic” (274); he admits, too, that this system formed an anchor for the institutions of the later republican monarchy. But how did the institution of monarchy bring about an end of “politics proper” in these spaces if their languages continue? Perhaps the problem is other? Perhaps the problem is not that the principate induced systemic misapprehension of the operation of republican institutions, but that republican politics were always already ‘about’ the creation and sustaining of local elites, and the supervention and formal qualities of macroregional power were oblique to this history? Perhaps domination was always the substance, if not the surface, of “politics proper”? “Roman Political Culture” cannot address these questions, because the (model of) “causality” on which its argument is founded is “assumed” (275).

Here we return T.s version of “the concept of political culture” (11–12). Although he quotes with approval Lucian Pye’s definition, to wit, “political culture is […] the manifestation in aggregate form of the psychological and subjective dimensions of politics” (12), T.’s focus on formal and public documents scarcely allows him access to these issues, nor in the end do they interest him. Instead, he wishes to read institutional operations in light of economic models of decision making, as modified by the notion of “bounded rationality” (15). This is a map not for the excavation and analysis of “the psychological and subjective dimensions of politics,” but for the overtly stated rationales and interests of contemporary actors. T.’s version of the history of a “political culture” is thus limited to the rehearsal of its surface ideological commitments.

It is hard to stress how surprising it is to find “politics proper” and “political culture” so defined. It is as though neither Marxist nor any form of post-Marxist thought had ever existed, nor feminism, nor even late liberal or post-liberal concerns for the basic structure. The granular achievements of the book, in respect of antiquarian and philological evaluation of evidence, are seriously diminished by this failing.