Pax by Tom Holland;

Author:Tom Holland; [Holland, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2023-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

To become a duumvir—one of the two magistrates who served every year as the municipal equivalent of a consul—required votes. Securing votes, in turn, required a candidate to canvass his fellow citizens, to marshal heavyweight backers, to plaster walls with posters: everything that originally, back in the days of the republic, had characterised elections to the consulship. Admittedly, the duoviri—the ‘two men’—did not, as the consuls had done, lead armies or sway the fate of nations. Their responsibilities were more circumscribed: decreeing the erection of statues, supervising public funerals, appointing contractors to renovate temples. Additionally, every five years, a particularly distinguished citizen would be elected quinquennial duumvir: a magistracy that, much like the censorship in Rome, required the man who held it to evaluate the moral and financial standing of his fellow citizens, and to calibrate their status accordingly. He it was who decided the eligibility of Pompeians to vote in the annual elections; he it was who determined membership of the city council—the Order of Decurions, as it was termed. To be enrolled as a decurion was to rank as one of the hundred movers and shakers of the city: an official and incontrovertible member of the urban elite. Such a status, viewed from Rome, might not seem much to boast about; and yet it was amplified by a hunger for honour no less intense for that. The duoviri could know, at the very least, that they served as magistrates directly elected by the people. No consul could any longer say as much. The prestige a duumvir enjoyed was, within the walls of his city, no mean thing. A big fish in a small pond was, after all, still a big fish.

‘More than any other nation, the Romans have sought out glory and been greedy for praise.’22 So Cicero, Rome’s most celebrated orator, had declared back in the dying days of the republic. His own greed for praise had seen him enshrined as Rome’s supreme exemplar of social mobility: for he had risen from the obscurity of Arpinum, a one-horse town south of the capital, to become the first man in his family ever to win the consulship. His speeches in the law courts and to the senate had provided schoolboys ever since with both their syllabus and a source of inspiration. ‘His fame, his eloquence, that is what they pray for.’23 No wonder that Pliny, in his encyclopaedia, should have lavished Cicero with particular praise: the equestrian from Arpinum, to the equestrian from Comum, had provided an obvious role model. Even though Pliny himself, despite his success in climbing the rungs of advancement, had failed to reach the very top of the ladder, he could always vest his hopes in his heir. He had no son; but he did have a nephew whom he valued as a son. The younger Pliny, a student of eighteen in the summer of Vespasian’s death, had already imbibed from Cicero’s example dreams of scaling heights that his uncle would clearly now never attain: fame as a wit and an orator, rank as a senator and a consul.

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