Mary Beard

The principle, the basic principle of the republic,

well, it was complicated.

It was not a democracy.

I mean, I call it a kind of sort of democracy.

That's to say the big decisions like passing laws, who to go to war with, if you should go to war at all, that was in the hands of the male citizen body.

That looks, if you put it that way, that looks pretty democratic.

And there's an element of that.

I think the key about the Republic, though, is that everything about its organisation, its formal rules, gave political advantage to the wealthy.

Look, Dan, we live in a world in which we often think that powerful, rich white men have the whip hand.

The Roman Republic is something different because it formally gave them the whip hand.

That's to say the voting system was arranged differently.

so that more power went to the individual votes of somebody rich than someone poor.

So that was taken for granted, that this was a society stratified by wealth, though ultimately at the hands of these popular assemblies, even if they were biased towards the rich.

And I mean, I think a lot of people have trouble with this and the Romans had trouble with it because a lot of our kind of ideas about governmental political institutions are drawn from Greece.

democracy, aristocracies, oligarchies, kingships, etc.

And the Roman Republic doesn't fit into any of those.

It's quite difficult for even ancient Greek writers resident in Rome.

There's one great historian called Polybius who is resident in Rome in the second century BCE, and he struggles.

He has to say Rome's a mixed constitution.

That means he can't fit it into any of his categories.