Roman Elections: Democracy With Limits
Rome held elections. This fact is worth stating plainly because it tends to get lost between two competing misrepresentations: the idealization of Rome as a proto-democracy, and the dismissal of Roman electoral institutions as theatrical exercises without real content. Neither is accurate. Roman elections were genuine competitive contests for real offices with real power, fought with money, organization, personal canvassing, and the full toolkit of electoral politics in any era. They were also structured in ways that systematically disadvantaged the poor and advantaged the wealthy, organized to ensure that the most socially significant votes were cast by the smallest and most elite groups, and eventually undermined by exactly the same combination of money, violence, and structural manipulation that undermines elections in other political systems under sufficient stress.
The assemblies through which Romans voted were organized in groups rather than as individuals, which is the fundamental structural feature that distinguished Roman from modern democratic voting. In the centuriate assembly — the comitia centuriata, which elected consuls, praetors, and censors and voted on war and peace — citizens were organized into 193 centuries, each of which cast one collective vote. The centuries were not of equal population: the first class, the wealthiest citizens, was divided into many small centuries while the lower property classes were grouped into fewer and larger ones. The first class’s votes were cast before the lower classes voted, and voting stopped when a majority of centuries had been reached, which typically happened before the poorest centuries were called at all. The structural effect was that the wealthy cast the decisive votes and the poor rarely had their votes count in practice.
The tribal assembly — the comitia tributa, which elected quaestors, aediles, and tribunes and passed most ordinary legislation — was organized into 35 tribes based on geographical origin, with similar structural effects: rural tribes with smaller populations counted the same as urban tribes with far larger ones, which overrepresented the interests of the rural property-owning classes that dominated the rural tribes and underrepresented the urban poor concentrated in the few urban tribes.
Within these structural constraints, Roman electoral competition was vigorous and expensive. The candidate for office — the magistratus, wearing the toga candida whitened with chalk for visibility, from which the English word candidate derives — spent months before an election in the process of canvassing: appearing in public, visiting markets and meeting places, pressing flesh, making promises, and cultivating the networks of personal obligation that Roman social life organized. The ambitio — literally, going around — was the source of our word ambition and described precisely the physical process of the candidate circulating through Roman public space to make his face and name known to as many voters as possible.
The role of money was acknowledged and regulated, in the way that money in electoral politics is always acknowledged and regulated and always exceeds the regulations. The lex Ambitus — the law against bribery — was periodically strengthened, which is reliable evidence that bribery was periodically increasing. Buying individual votes was illegal but buying the services of persons who could deliver organized blocs of votes through their social networks was harder to prohibit, since the line between legitimate patronage and illegal bribery was difficult to draw with the precision that enforcement required. Cicero’s speech Pro Murena, defending a consul-elect against bribery charges, illuminates the mechanics of Roman electoral organization with a frankness that reflects both Cicero’s advocacy skills and the complexity of applying anti-bribery law to practices so embedded in Roman social organization that they were impossible to cleanly separate from legitimate political activity.
The Pompeii electoral notices painted on the walls of the city are among the most charming survivals of Roman civic life: endorsements for candidates for the aedileship and other local offices, painted by professional sign-writers, supporting candidates from specific professional groups, neighborhoods, and social associations. The bakers, the fullers, the neighbors of a particular street, the devotees of a particular deity — all expressed their electoral preferences in public notices that were regularly whitewashed and replaced as campaigns progressed. The notices give the impression of a genuinely participatory municipal electoral culture, which is a more accurate picture of local Roman politics than the senatorial electoral system whose structural distortions made it less competitive at the top.
By the late Republic, Roman elections had been substantially corrupted by the combination of money, organized violence — the gangs that Clodius and Milo deployed to control assembly meetings — and the patron networks that converted free votes into managed blocs. The tribunate was used to block assemblies; soldiers were kept in the city to intimidate; bribes were distributed through organizational intermediaries in amounts that made competitive counter-organization prohibitively expensive for candidates without access to enormous resources. The elections continued; the competition they represented became increasingly theatrical as the real political decisions were made by the men with legions rather than the men with centuries. Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon resolved the underlying political conflict by a method that made the electoral system’s subsequent irrelevance explicit rather than merely implicit. Under the principate, elections continued for most offices but the outcomes were shaped by imperial recommendation in ways that preserved the form while removing the substance.