Original scientific paper
Elections in the Republican Rome: Candidature and Voting
Ivana Jaramaz Reskušić
; Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Based on the analysis of legally relevant sources – albeit scarce and fragmentary (a few preserved statutes but mostly literary late Republican works) – and considering the fact that assembly elections of magistrates were held every year for almost five centuries of the Roman Republic and played the key role in forming its political and legal life, this paper tries to illuminate two essential points of the whole electoral procedure. For this purpose, some instructive comments on popular assemblies are presented, with an emphasis on the structural foundation of the centuriate as the politically most important electoral assembly.
The next part of the paper presents both the legal-social-economic assumptions necessary to realize ius honorum pretendorum, and the way the rules of lawful candidacy for any republican magistracy are determined. In this context it can be concluded that a late Republican candidate for performing the duty of the magistrate of the whole Roman people (magistratus populi Romani) could only be a fully legal Roman citizen, which means a physically healthy son of a free-born, with a property assessment befitting an eques, and who has actively served ten-year military service without a record of past offences, who is honourable, and neither a supreme priest nor a crafstman or a hired man. As far as the procedure of candidacy is concerned, the author has established that at the end of the Republic two presumptions necessary for a lawful candidacy took a more definite shape. On the one hand, the putting forward of the candidacy had to take place within a specific timeframe which began with the day of proclamation of the magistracy edict on the elections and lasted until the end of the third fair-day preceding the day determined by the edict, on which voting in popular assembly would take place. On the other hand, such declaration of the intention to run for magistracy had to be done in person before an informal assembly (contio) in Rome. In line with this, the author concludes that a lawful declaration of the candidacy (profiteri legitimos) did not mean a single act, i.e. a formal registration to a magistrate authorised to administer the elections, but the candidate’s personal and consecutive notification of his candidacy to an informal public assembly during trinundinum.
In the last part of her paper the author presents the course of the procedure of the elections themselves in authorised popular assemblies and also distinguishes, on the one hand, the procedural guidelines common to both centuriate and tribal assemblies, and on the other hand specific qualities in the manner of voting which - deriving from their different foundations, order and the moment when the voting is closed - resulted in more strikingly expressed inequality of the electoral (constitutionally equal) vote of Roman citizens while electing magistrates in the centuriate assembly even after a structural rationalisation had been carried out. To be more specific, the author concludes that in contrast to the inequality of vote at the elections for lower magistrates in the tribal assembly whose membership did not depend on wealth but on belonging to a rural tribe, more precisely to a relatively scarcely populated tribe near the city of Rome, electoral victory in the race for higher magistrates in the centuriate assembly did not (even after a structural interference of the tribal element) reflect the will of the majority of Roman voters who gave it certain (even seemingly) democratic legitimacy, but the will of the aged wealthy elite which wa,s due to political and safety reasons, disinterested in equal representation of citizens and their high voting turnout.
Keywords
Roman Republic; elections of magistrates; comitia centuriata; comitia tributa; ius honororum pretendorum; voting
Hrčak ID:
207487
URI
Publication date:
28.9.2018.
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