Money, Games, and Power: Rome's Lower Magistrates and the Development of a City

Abstract

This project traces the development of civic institutions and legal culture, as the character of the Roman state transformed from informal, changeable government by means of appeal to custom and prestige, to a more recognizable state with formalized rules and laws. This stands in contrast to previous scholarship, much of which treats the Republic as legalistic from the beginning. In order to explore this development, I focus on the aediles and quaestors, the two magistrates most responsible for running the city. I aim to understand how their jobs changed as they responded to the city’s evolving needs. Drawing on the works of Bourdieu, Geertz, and Agamben, I also develop a model for their role in the state from 310-91 BCE in what was a functioning government. Chapter one serves as an introduction and explores the roles that both of the aediles and quaestors played within the Roman state in the early third century BCE. Chapter two focuses on the nature of potestas, the formal power with which magistrates were invested and traces the development of the quaestorship from the first Punic war down into the early second century. Potestas, I argue, was the power to look after the res publica, the common interests of the Roman people. Magistrates were elected each year by the people, who were expected to select the best men (in terms of personal traits). The magistrates would then be assigned their roles by the senate, which directed domestic and foreign policy. From here I use a mysterious expansion of the quaestorship, around 267 BCE, as a case study for exploring what limits the Romans envisioned for potestas, and what they imagined the role of a magistrate furnished with potestas could be. Chapter three traces the development of the aedileship and the cursus honorum during the same period. As a result of the rapid expansion of the praetorship from 242-227 BCE, as well as the irregularities of office holding during the second Punic War, when a military crisis necessitated giving command in the war over to a very small group of individuals, and also the tremendous influx of wealth that occurred in the first part of the second century BCE, the aedileship was transformed from the locus of civic administration in the city of Rome to a stepping stone on an aristocrat’s path to the consulship. The fourth chapter shifts our focus back to practice and explores what the quaestors actually did and how they did it during the heyday of the Republic in the second century BCE. Chapter five adopts a similar approach for exploring the wide array of tasks for which the aediles were responsible in looking after the community and the urban fabric of Rome. Whereas the previous chapters focused on historical developments and cultural perceptions of office holding, these two narrow our focus to the more practical details of what a magistrate did and how he did it. The next stage of this project will explore the development of legalism in Roman political thought, as legislators progressively sought to use law to change the state and restore it to what they imagined it had been in the fourth and third centuries BCE. This political project entailed redefining the aedileship and the quaestorship in altogether new ways.