CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Republican Nobiles:
Controlling the Res Publica
Veit Rosenberger
The senate was the dominant political power in the Roman republic: senators held
the highest offices, almost all political issues were decided in the senate, not in the
assemblies, and the major priestly colleges consisted largely of senators. Within the
senate, the nobilesformed an elite. Nobileswere the members of the few extremely
successful families who had reached the consulate, the highest office in the republic,
over several generations. Nonetheless, the nobileswere not a homogeneous group:
the most successful family were the Claudii, reaching the consulate in every genera-
tion over a period of four centuries; even the emperors from Tiberius to Nero belonged
to this family. During the republic, there existed on the one hand a wide consen-
sus within the senatorial aristocracy. Roman nobilesacted within a dense network
of structures and mechanisms guaranteeing, reproducing, and sanctioning both
the vertical and horizontal integration of classes, groups, and individuals. Their
identity manifested itself in a rich repertoire of rituals and other symbolic forms of
(self-)representation, such as triumphs and funeral processions (Hölkeskamp 2004:
112–13). On the other hand, senatorial competition, which ultimately led to civil
wars and to the end of the republic in the first century bc, seems to have threatened
the consensus within the Roman nobility since at least the time of the First Punic
War (264 –241 bc); the problems were probably much older and inherent in the
republican system (Bleckmann 2002: 243).
An important field of action for Roman senators was divination. In Roman
thought, divination could be classified in two ways: artificial versus natural divination
and solicited versus unsolicited divination. Artificial divination is based on knowledge
and requires interpretation, for instance the augural discipline, prodigies, astrology,
or oracles given by lots. The opposite, natural divination, relies on divine inspira-
tion and is conveyed intuitively, for example through dreams, ecstatic utterances,
and oracles (Cic. Div.1.12). Divination by solicited signs comprises all techniques
which were used to ask the gods at a specific moment; most auspiciabelong to this