Early Rome: The Republic and Limited Government

Sources

The Powers That Be. It is hard for a citizen of any modern nation to grasp how little government Republican Rome had. The assemblies were quite clumsy and passed laws only occasionally. Magistrates had much more freedom of action but were remarkably few in number. Including promagistrates, the total in the late Republic was in the low hundreds. And recall that this government was not only of a city of hundreds of thousands of people but also of an empire whose population was in the tens of millions. These magistrates were, of course, supported by a bureaucratic staff of so-called apparitores. But these officials had little or no independent authority and were still few in number. Lack of information also made it harder to exercise systematic authority. The government had only a rough idea of where its citizens were and what they were doing; records of the government’s own actions were sometimes hard to find or nonexistent. One device to make up for this weakness was the reliance on local governments. Another was the contracting out of government functions such as tax collection. In sum, however, the government did little policing, little building except for the largest projects, little consumer protection, no education, and no direction of the economy. The average Roman was less burdened and far less protected by the state than persons today.

Sources

Frank F. Abbot, A History and Description of Roman Political Institutions (New York: Biblo & Tannen, 1963).

Andrew W. Lintott, The Constitution of the Roman Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press / New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).