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Are we giving Athens too much credit?

ddt said:
This was a peculiarity that the Roman system had too. There was no such office as the public prosecutor, and not the clear distinction between criminal law and civil law as we understand it today. If someone had committed a crime, it was also incumbent on an aggrieved party - the victim or their family - to sue the perpetrator.
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Well, sort of. They had public law and private law, the difference was that public law related only to crimes against the state, whereas all other crimes were considered a private matter.

Their systems also changed. The third iteration of the Roman legal system broke from tradition, whereby the process was a private matter agreed by both parties, and became much more like the modern system where the state controlled everything.
 
gumboot said:
The very notion of a shift from "Republic" to "Empire" is really a modern framing of history that doesn't accurately or usefully describe the reality. Even the terms "Republic" and "Empire" are totally wrong, as both co-existed simultaneously for the entire duration - indeed you cannot have one without the other.
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Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Annals
I.3-4 How few were left who had seen the republic! Thus the State had been revolutionised, and there was not a vestige left of the old sound morality. Stript of equality, all looked up to the commands of a sovereign...
I.7 For Tiberius would inaugurate everything with the consuls, as though the ancient constitution remained, and he hesitated about being emperor. Even the proclamation by which he summoned the senators to their chamber, he issued merely with the title of Tribune, which he had received under Augustus.
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gumboot said:
The very notion of a shift from "Republic" to "Empire" is really a modern framing of history that doesn't accurately or usefully describe the reality. Even the terms "Republic" and "Empire" are totally wrong, as both co-existed simultaneously for the entire duration - indeed you cannot have one without the other.
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Actually, I'd say that neither really existed, in the meaning we have today. They had "res publica" and "imperium" all along, but that's something slightly different.
 
HansMustermann said:
Actually, I'd say that neither really existed, in the meaning we have today. They had "res publica" and "imperium" all along, but that's something slightly different.
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I'll buy that. But in Rome the Imperium swallowed the republic.

In the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth century France was a republic, but had a colonial empire. Unlike in Rome - the Imperium is gone: the political res has remained publica.
 
Well, what we call Imperium swallowed what we call the Republic. For them the two concepts were broader enough for that to make no sense.

I mean, seriously, for them "imperium" was just one out of 4 or so kinds of power that they had different terms for. (They were pretty picky and specific about whether your power was auctoritas, or potestas, or imperium, unlike today when we make a hash of it.) It was used all the way from kingdom, through republic, and all through the empire era.

Unlike later, when everyone scrambled to define empire in a way that lets them claim to be like the Romans, the Romans made no pretense of it being based on anything else than that they had the state power to command in that territory. And even that use of "imperium" to mean "the territory over which we have imperium", was really a figurative use of "imperium".

If you want a term that became more associated with imperial power, try Imperator, which was appropriated by the emperor as early as Augustus. (Previously, anyone who had imperium was an imperator.)

And the "res publica" can't become anything else either or disappear, because it meant "public matters" or "public affairs." It didn't mean it had to be run by the public. It was just the "res", as in a concrete thing not something abstract (see how it got us "reification"), and "publica" as in belonging to the public sphere. Compare with "res privata" (private matters, or "property") or "res militaris" (military matters.) It's not about who runs it, it's about what domain of "res" you're talking about.

It wasn't even used to mean republic until well into empire times, when it was sometimes used figuratively to mean how things used to run back then.

Basically, what I was trying to say with that message to gumboot was more like let's not make a hash of our concepts and the Roman concepts. Yes, we can say that the Empire replaced the Republic, by our concepts, and whether that fit the words and concepts the Romans had for it, well, who cares? :p
 
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HansMustermann said:
Actually, I'd say that neither really existed, in the meaning we have today. They had "res publica" and "imperium" all along, but that's something slightly different.
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When the people no longer participate in choosing their rulers, the res is no longer publica. That happened in Rome, and the people who witnessed it knew that it had happened. Republican forms were preserved, as Tacitus notes in the practice of Tiberius, but would his behaviour as Emperor have been remotely possible in the days of the Gracchi or of Q Fabius Maximus?

The res publica appeared to retain a ghostly existence because the emperors who were in reality despotic monarchs, and even hereditary ones, decorated their coins and their proclamations with republican official titles like Tribune and Consul. If the United States is ever usurped by a dynasty of monarchs, do you think they will call themselves "kings"? The Roman ones knew not to do so! No, they will call themselves Presidents of the Republic.
 
gumboot said:
To be fair "the people"'s role in choosing their rulers was always pretty limited.
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The issue always is, what is the definition of "the people". In the early US it had a much wider definition than elsewhere, but it excluded many human beings, including slaves of course. In England it was much smaller, say ten percent or so of males could vote. In Scotland perhaps only two or three percent prior to the 1830s. But the definition of people can be extended. If the concept of popular politics is lost altogether, then the res publica disappears altogether. The concept of collective sovereignty is not merely restricted, but utterly destroyed.
 
Look, seriously, if you want to talk about modern meanings of words, just use the modern words. Trying to use some words from the 1st century BC as if they're same as some words from our era is just silly.

If you want to say "republic", just say "republic" and be done with it. The whole dance about when the "res publica" isn't the "res publica" is IMHO beyond silly. And wrong too.

It's like trying to use the old "seelie" (holy or blessed) as meaning the same as the word "silly" it begat, or as if the ancient Greek's "tyrannos" meant the same as the modern "tyrant", or as if the ancient Greek's "apologia" means the same as "apology". It just doesn't work that way.

In fact, it's a textbook example of the etymological fallacy.

Yes, the roman republic got morphed into an empire. No, the res publica, meaning such public matters as administration and internal policy, did not become anything else than matters of administration and internal policy.

You don't need to run into dada land with latin words meaning something else, to make a point that really is based on English meanings.
 
HansMustermann said:
Look, seriously, if you want to talk about modern meanings of words, just use the modern words. Trying to use some words from the 1st century BC as if they're same as some words from our era is just silly. <snip> Yes, the roman republic got morphed into an empire. No, the res publica, meaning such public matters as administration and internal policy, did not become anything else than matters of administration and internal policy.

You don't need to run into dada land with latin words meaning something else, to make a point that really is based on English meanings.
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It appears to have had various meanings, including yours and also the one I refer to, which is clearly used by Tacitus in the expression
quotus quisque reliquus qui rem publicam vidisset? - How few were left who had seen the republic!
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He can't possibly have meant the state in general or the answer would have been: everyone, and they're still seeing it.

See also
1 Res publica usually is something held in common by many people. For instance a park or garden in the city of Rome could either be "private property" (res privata), or managed by the state.
2 Taking everything together that is of public interest leads to the connotation that the res publica in general equals the state. For Romans this equalled of course also the Imperium Romanum,
3 Roman authors would also use the word res publica in the sense of the era when Rome was governed as a republic, that is the era between the Roman Kingdom and the Roman Empire. So in this case res publica does distinctly not refer to the Roman Empire, but to what is generally described as the Roman Republic.
4 Res publica could also be used in a generic meaning, referring to "public affairs" and/or the general system of government of a state.
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Abstracted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Res_publica.
 
Yes, figuratively, and even then he at least once feels a need to qualify it as "the old res publica". Plus, the same Tacitus has no problem using the same "res publica" term to refer to conducting business by barbarians, or the barbarian society.

At any rate, trying to make some convoluted arguments about how the res was no longer publica is still silly, since that's not how those words work in any case. Even if a combination of words has a specific connotation or meaning when used figuratively, there is no reason to assume that you can twist the individual words in it like that. Even in English, there are combinations of words which mean something completely different together than the individual words mean (e.g., "jumping the shark", "taking the piss", etc.) And you can't really retrofit the meaning from whole to part, to make an argument about how someone is still jumping but not the shark, or still has the piss but isn't taking it any more.

Talking about state property or administrative policy as res that is no longer publica, is exactly like talking about piss that isn't taken. At best you might manage to coin your own funny expression, and at worst it just sounds silly, but neither of those actually is an accurate use of the words involved.
 
Well, according to Heidegger, what really makes the difference is whether you emphasize "res" or "publica."
 
I think the Greeks, and ancient Athenians in particular get too much credit for a lot of things.
 
HansMustermann said:
Yes, figuratively, and even then he at least once feels a need to qualify it as "the old res publica". Plus, the same Tacitus has no problem using the same "res publica" term to refer to conducting business by barbarians, or the barbarian society.
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Indeed not! For he makes the point that the barbarians are free.
The Agricola ... covers the geography and ethnography of ancient Britain. As in the Germania, Tacitus favorably contrasts the liberty of the native Britons with the tyranny and corruption of the Empire
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Wiki.
 
Brainache said:
Couldn't you also argue that a lot of Germanic and Norse people came up with their own versions of democracy? I'm pretty sure they had a big influence on the way government developed in the west, especially in Britain.
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That's what I thought too.

Thinking about it, lots of ancient peopled had systems of government which allowed for limited popular influence. The Celts. The Carthaginians. Among others.
 
Craig B said:
Indeed not! For he makes the point that the barbarians are free. Wiki.
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No, not in the places where he uses the res publica expression. Sorry. One such mention is that they don't conduct public or private business without being armed, and another is that after a certain age they become members of society. Neither is used in any comparison or making any point about the republic.

Plus it would be stupid to say that they become members of the "republic", when the same Tacitus in "Germania" tells us that those barbarians had a hereditary monarchy, or possibly some mix of heredity and elective. ("They choose their kings by birth," so there is room to argue how much was birth and how much choice.)

He also mentions that some of those tribes (e.g., the Rugii and Lemovii) lived in servile submission to their kings. (Although other tribes still had some freedom.)

Seriously, trying to say that Tacitus was actually writing about the German republic is just nonsense.
 
Humes fork said:
That's what I thought too.

Thinking about it, lots of ancient peopled had systems of government which allowed for limited popular influence. The Celts. The Carthaginians. Among others.
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I think the industrial revolution played a big part in detaching the populace from government. Even in a feudal society, peasants were directly engaged in governance (at least at the local level).
 
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