How Democratic Was the Roman Republic?
Ward, Allen M. University of Connecticut
New England Classical Journal 31.2 (2004)
Abstract
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Western democratic triumphalism that followed in its wake, few in the West respect a government that does not conform to Western democratic ideals. That is no problem for historians of ancient Greece, since it is considered the birthplace of those ideals and, therefore, no stigma is
attached to their field of study despite the eventual rise of monarchic
Hellenistic empires. For most of the past century, however, historians of ancient Rome have had no period of democratic, or 
even semi-democratic, freedom to earn contemporary respect and approval for their field of history. The dominant view,
which owes much to the great nineteenth-century German historian Theodor Mommsen, has been that the Roman Republic was an oligarchy. The last significant appearance of a belief in the democratic nature of the Roman Republic was in the decade following the defeat of the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires by the alliance of the Western democracies in World War I, another period of Western democratic triumphalism.3 Now, perhaps not coincidentally, a new group of scholars is trying to make the case for a more democratic Roman Republic. A close analysis of the evidence will show that this effort is misguided.
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