Popular sovereignty in the late Roman Republic

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the development of Cicero's conception of the relationship between popular sovereignty and aristocratic government from the De re publica to the De legibus. When placed in its political and intellectual contexts, this development represents a significant strengthening of its aristocratic bias – specifically when considering Cicero's proposed reforms to the institutions of the senate and censorship as well as to the right to vote and the tribunate. The most striking conceptual outcome of this development is a transformation, to use Cicero's own terms, of real liberty into an empty ‘species libertatis’. While some modern commentators have interpreted these two theoretical works as complementing one another, others have described the form of government resulting from Book 3 of the De legibus as a ‘strengthened control from the top’, to use Dyck's expression, often denouncing Cicero's blind conservatism and the resulting political system as almost an anecdotal curiosity. Intervening in the contemporary political and intellectual debate on the censorship and in dialogue with his Platonic model, Cicero re-elaborates the notion of popular sovereignty as formulated in the De re publica. In the De legibus he advances not only an institutional reordering of the commonwealth, but rather a different conception of the commonwealth, characterised by a ‘quasi-alienation’ of the people's sovereignty.

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