How to Roman Republic 101, Part I: SPQR

From the blog post:

This is the first of a planned five-part series looking at the structure of the Roman Republic as another example of civic governance structures in antiquity, to match our series on the Greek polis. As with that series, we’re going to start by defining our community and its constituent parts in this part, before moving through the elements of its government in subsequent essays in this series.

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Not only is the res publica thus not simply a collection of citizens, but it is in a real sense understood as a shared interest of different groups in the community, of which the populus is only one group. The Romans, more comfortable with open hierarchy among the citizens, can understand the republic as a balancing act between the interests of the political and social elite (the exact composition of which changes over time, but their mouthpiece is the Senate) and the people. The elite do not represent the people, they are not a select group of the people, but instead a distinct interest within the state which has its own legitimate expression, balanced against the expression of the people.

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One of the themes that is going to become really clear here over time is that the Romans are a lot more comfortable with open status distinctions among the citizenry as compared to the Greeks. A Greek polis might restrict the number of politai down to a very small number, but the expectation was that there was at least some nominal equality within that number. The Roman citizen-body is much larger, Roman citizenship is substantially more open to new entrants, but the Romans are also a lot more comfortable with status distinctions within the citizenry.