BMCR 2009.04.38: Ando on Bispham, From Asculum to Actium. The Municipalization of Italy from the Social War to Augustus. Oxford Classical Monographs

Edward Bispham, From Asculum to Actium. The Municipalization of Italy
from the Social War to Augustus. Oxford Classical Monographs.  Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007.  Pp. xviii, 566.  ISBN
978-0-19-923184-3.  $215.00.

Reviewed by Clifford Ando, University of Chicago
([email protected])
Word count:  1997 words
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Table of Contents
(http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy0803/2007032484.html)

Preview (http://books.google.com/books?id=SNmEv_ppkssC)

>From Asculum to Actium is a history of the higher magistracies in the
polities of Italy created de novo as municipalities in the aftermath of
the Social War.  It began life as an Oxford dissertation, which Bispham
completed in 1994.  I mention that fact because the size and cost of
the volume the dissertation has become are likely to be significant
factors in its reception.  This is up to a point a shame, because many
of Bispham's conclusions to arguments both minor and major strike me as
sensible.  But he and the Press must bear the blame for having
presented the material in this form; as I shall endeavor to
demonstrate, Bispham is himself aware that the amount of background and
source-critical excursus will try the patience of readers and the
capacity of library budgets.[[1]]

Bispham himself describes chapters 6-9 as "form(ing) the core of the
book, presenting a detailed discussion of the senior municipal
magistracies (the quattuorvirate and the duovirate) as they emerge from
the epigraphic sources" (51).  This statement prompts reflections of
two kinds.  On the one hand, chapter 6 begins on p. 247, on my estimate
some 130,000 words into the book.  In other words, the reader is asked
to traverse the equivalent of something like a standard monograph
before Bispham's argument begins.[[2]] And on the other, this
represents a conscious narrowing of a far more ambitious and
interesting programme sketched and occasionally taken up but ultimately
eschewed by Bispham himself.

Near the opening of the book, Bispham offers a brief description of the
ethnic, linguistic, juridical and sociological diversity of the Italian
peninsula in the early first century B.C.E. and asks, "How was this
huge diversity of culture, language, tradition, outlook, and aspiration
to be managed?"  He responds, "My task is to examine how Rome addressed
this problem" (10).  But in the next such programmatic statement, some
sixteen thousand words on, the brief Bispham sets himself has narrowed:
"My discussion of the means by which the transition from an allied
community to Roman municipium was effected is essentially a juridical
one, a constitutional study of the new municipia" (40).  Soon, it
narrows further still:  "Yet for the post-Social-War period a detailed
study of the constitutional development of the Italian communities
based on the epigraphic evidence is lacking....  This book represents,
I think, the first systematic attempt to analyse all the epigraphic
(and literary) evidence for the municipal quattuorvitate and duovirate
between the Social War and the battle of Actium..." (46-47).

Bispham helpfully sets forth a great deal of the relevant epigraphic
evidence in an Addendum (473-510).  But it is hard not to conclude from
reading his discussion of it that the evidence could have been
presented in tabular form, as indeed Bispham himself presents data on
the public-law status of Italian communities in Appendix 3.  This is so
not least because the inscriptions in questions are overwhelming
honorific or commemorative.  That is to say, if one reads them with an
eye toward "the constitutional development of the Italian communities,"
the data they yield addresses the questions what magistracies existed
in Italian communities and when are they attested.  The epigraphic
evidence tout court may have been able to address other questions (more
on this in a moment), but on the topic of constitutional history
narrowly conceived, this may be all we can glean from this particular
data set.  To the extent that the texts provide any sense what the
competencies of a magistracy were, and hence any indication regarding
conceptions of the public sphere and the responsibilities of
government, they suggest that wealthy individuals in public office saw
to the construction and repair of buildings--but that is naturally what
we would expect from a body of texts inscribed at the site of such
works.  Acts of municipal senates or texts of municipal decrees would
naturally have provided information relevant to these questions, but,
as Bispham observes, "less than perhaps half a dozen municipal decrees
[are] extant from the Republic" (313).

I will return momentarily to the conclusions Bispham does draw from
this data:  some are narrow and sound; others are more fragile.  But
for reasons that shall become clear when I do so, I must first describe
one set of issues Bispham rightly asserts as relevant but declines to
consider.

In chapter 4 Bispham considers (in a deeply roundabout way) the name,
date and content of the post-Social War law or laws that established
the public law structures of the new municipia, as well as the
institutional mechanisms established or exploited for enrolling the new
citizens.  Looking back on the conclusions of that chapter at the start
of chapter 5, Bispham writes:


This [legislation] obviously left a large number of important questions
unanswered, and uncertainty about the future of a whole range of
practices which had been fundamental to the life of the communities of
Italy as independent states, but might not be acceptable or Roman
enough, to survive enfranchisement.  The obvious example is in the
field of civil law:  marriages, inheritances, loans and business
partnerships, land sales, and guardianship (to name a few aspects at
random) were for Romans governed by Roman ius civile.  Italian
practices in these and other areas of society were, by definition,
not.... (205).


Bracketing some important matters of fact and interpretation embedded
in these sentences, allow me to point out that these topics would seem
to be embraced in any robust answer to the question, "How was this huge
diversity of culture, language, tradition, outlook, and aspiration to
be managed?" (10).  But these questions are effectively set aside:  "On
the thorny question of jurisdiction I have little to add; a detailed
consideration of Roman law and its adoption in the newly enfranchised
part of Italy lies outside the scope of this work" (421).  This is so
despite the fact both Cicero and Livy in very similar language describe
the taking up or refusal by Latins--or imposition by Rome--of select
leges de iure civili as an essential constituent of those processes of
negotiation and relations of power by which communities Romanos se
fieri paterentur (the first phrase is from Cicero Balb. 21, quoted by
Bispham on p. 159; the latter from Livy 9.45.6-7, quoted by Bispham in
p. 104 n. 150; see also 245).  It is so despite Bispham's own
insistence--with which I am entirely in agreement--that "it seems that
the Roman Senate expected that the absorption of the principles of
criminal and civil law was one of the main functions of
acculturation.... After all, they had had centuries of experience of
how quickly and in which areas their civil law was assimilated by
incorporated peoples" (223).  And yet, systematic study of these issues
is repeatedly refused.

This stance is lamentable for two reasons.  First, Bispham must surely
know the relevant evidence better than nearly anyone in field and it is
a loss to us all not have his reflections on these issues (see, e.g.,
pp. 158-159, citing pre-Social War legislation that extended civil law
regulations to aliens, as well as 162 n. 4, discussing Sulpicius Rufus
on Latin and forms of betrothal, from Gellius 4.4 = fr. 2
Huschke-Seckel-Kuebler (though neither the citation from Gellius nor
the fragment number is given)).

More importantly, Bispham himself frames the achievement of the
municipal system, and the broader implications of his own analysis,
within an evaluative framework that contrasts the "uniformity of the
quattuorvirate" and the "external similarity" it "imposed" over against
the "high flexibility" that lay beneath such "exterior uniformity":
the municipal system succeeded because it "allowed for the preservation
of local and traditional elements" (437-438).  As he said in an early
summary of the conclusion's argument, he understands the "broader
political significance of municipalization" to be "located in its
provision of political and public structures which to a certain extent
met the needs and aspirations of Italians" (51-52).

There are a number of problems here:  most significantly, because he
has declined to offer systematic study of any aspect of
municipalization beyond the titulature of magistracies, Bispham
provides us with no data by which to index this "high flexibility," nor
indeed any contemporaneous evidence that such flexibility was a
normative ideal.  Indeed, his own remarks on the Roman Senate's
expectations in regard to law and acculturation before the Social War
would seem to argue against this having been an ideal at the level he
seems to assume.  On another level, I take it that the evidence that
municipalization "met the needs and aspirations of Italians" consists
largely of the negative token that serious sedition in Italy in the
aftermath of the Social War is not attested; and in the positive
evidence that individuals who held office in the new system and who
thus found their social standing affirmed and perhaps elevated by that
system chose to commemorate themselves and others of their
socio-political peer group.  It may well be that this evidence can be
made to speak to the broader needs and aspirations of all Italians, but
no hermeneutic is herein offered by which to justify that act of
generalization.

I want in closing to highlight three conclusions drawn by Bispham:  the
first two derive from the arguments at the core of the work, while the
third seems to me not simply important but genuinely novel.

First, Bispham is able to conclude, with considerable force, that "the
pressure for the promotion of submunicipal centres to the status of
municipia, the incentives to dioikismos and sunoikismos, the processes
which were creating many of the new centres in the late Republic,
likewise lay with the local domi nobiles: no real incentive to
advancement was offered by the Senate as a matter of policy" (417).
This may well be true; if so, as regards urbanism, it is a striking
departure from Roman practice outside Italy, where the forced
resettlement of populations was an enormously regular feature of life
in the aftermath of annexation.  More generally, it is a striking
testament to the highly structured devolution of authority to local
elites practiced by Rome, patently kindred to that widely visible in
Macedonia and Achaea in the second century B.C.E.

Second, Bispham urges that the appearance of duoviral municipalities
should be read at least in part "as an attempt by them to assimilate
themselves outwardly to the colonies," in the context of a Roman
politics in which significant relations between regional centers and
Rome were being conducted on a nakedly personalized level, between
dynasts of their colonies (402-403).  This would seem to permit, even
encourage, a rereading of late Republican politics, such that, e.g.,
the seemingly distortive relations obtaining between generals and
veteran colonies were paraded as beneficial before municipalities at
nearly the very moment when those municipalities were being asked to
imagine themselves within some normative Roman politics that no longer
existed.

Third, Bispham traces in relief the existence and history of the wide
swaths of Italy that long remained unmunicipalized (80-81; 410-412).
The treatment is necessarily cursory, if only because his topic is
rather very precisely municipalities.  But the topic is of the utmost
importance, and Bispham has done a huge service by drawing attention to
it and, indeed, to a point mapping it.

There is much more here but I cannot summarize it all, not least
because Bispham's emphases are at the least idiosyncratic and
ultimately, I fear, self-subverting. It very much seems that a record
is here presented of every path taken in the research for this book,
and the argument for retracing any given path is simply that it was
once taken.  But the result is that the conclusions Bispham ultimately
emphasizes are not necessarily well-supported by the armature
articulated in the body of the work.  Not all toil undertaken in a
course of research must find its way between the same covers, and the
author and the Press have not served each other or the public well by
allowing that in this case, not least when the result is so
prohibitively expensive.


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Notes:


1.   Bispham devotes pp. 39-46 to a biographically-organized discussion
of method, describing in counterpoint his framing of questions and his
seeking after evidence to address them and subsequently the skills to
use that evidence.  He concludes:  "What matters here is that the kinds
of things which can be done, and which I would now want to do with the
epigraphic evidence, are not the same objectives which I believed
useful and justified when I began the work.  I hope the final product
is not too obviously a Frankenstein's monster, stitched together from
horribly incompatible aims."

2.   Rather than overload the text with examples, and perhaps give an
overly negative impression of my assessment of his treatment, I here
merely observe that the first half of the volume treats at enormous
length topics of no direct relevance and often reaches entirely
conventional conclusions.  As Bispham himself writes regarding his
study of the Romano-Karthaginian treaty: "it tells us nothing concrete
about munipalization" (35); again, "we have very few really encouraging
data, if any, about what municipalization meant on a day-to-day basis
before the first century B.C." (37)--but he devotes the next 130 pages
to just that topic; 74 pages on, he sums up, "with no claim to
originality" (111); and continues, another 50 pages on, that we must
cover still more "ground well-trodden":  "nevertheless, a thorough
analysis of the evidence is indispensable."  Not, it is not:  at least,
that analysis need not be conducted in print again, not if it has been
done before, and the conclusions to be reached have "no claim to
originality" (cf. p. 335:  "My date for the first appearance of the
quattuorvirate iure dicundo brings me (along with the majority of
scholars writing on the subject since 1935) into disagreement with the
conclusions reached by Hans Rudolf" [parenthesis in original]).