Crisis and Constitutionalism

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 395 result of Maximian’s failure to defeat Carausius (90–91), his observations on the use of Julian’s panegyrics and the accounts of Ammianus Marcellinus and Zosimus (205–206), and his remarks on the relationship between Gratian and Theodosius (262). For Omissi, what a panegyrist chooses not to say is often as important as what is said. He is also very concerned to investigate the influence that the panegyrics and their perspective on events had on contemporary Roman historians (and thus on the histories that we write). This Roman revision of their own history is especially well brought out with respect to Julian’s successful and Procopius’ unsuccessful claim to the imperial throne. Omissi astutely questions whether historians like Ammianus Marcellinus were able to write independently of the state-preferred version of events and concludes that panegyrics influenced the way that Romans saw their recent past. The realities of panegyric preservation mean that we are limited to the winners’ versions of history, though we have a strong enough grasp of the genre to imagine the sorts of things that would have been said by panegyrists at the courts of the defeated. Overall this is an excellent piece of scholarship that makes a good complement to more traditional narrative histories of the fourth century. Most importantly, it places the fourth-century panegyrics in their historical context and draws attention to the need for Roman emperors to constantly assert their right to rule. Trent University Hugh Elton Crisis and Constitutionalism: Roman Political Thought from the Fall of the Republic to the Age of Revolution. By Benjamin Straumann. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2016. Pp xii, 414. In CRISIS AND CONSTITUTIONALISM, Benjamin Straumann provides a refreshing and wellargued intervention in several contemporary debates. Most crucially, he seeks to recuperate a twofold tradition in Roman normative thought that stretches from Polybius to Cicero to Bodin and beyond: Romans of the late republic responded to crises in politics by arguing for “constitutional safeguards and limits to government” (21); and, arising from this, they came to conceive “what one might call a specifically Roman ‘jural’ conception of politics” (25). This tradition has been obscured, Straumann avers, by the dominance, on the one hand, of notions of republican politics that focus on virtue, of which the preeminent exponents are Sallust in the late republic and Machiavelli in the Renaissance; and, on the other, modern analytic perspectives that one might term realist (Syme) or sociological (Meier), for both of whom normative discourses and ideological power alike amount to mere distractions.1 The introduction frames Straumann’s project in light of a problematic that commences with Benjamin Constant’s distinction between “ancient” and “modern” republics. Its influence has been so great, according to Straumann, that historians of political thought have tended to efface the distinctiveness of Roman institutions and normative thought in favor of assimilating the city-states of classical antiquity under the umbrella of “classical republicanism.” To accomplish his project of recuperation against this background, Straumann offers an argument in eight chapters (and three parts), as well as an epilogue. 1 R. Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford 1939); C. Meier, Res publica amissa: Eine Studie zu Verfassung und Geschichte der späten römischen Republik (Wiesbaden 1966). 396 PHOENIX The introduction to Part 1 establishes the ambition of the work as that of isolating a distinctively Roman jural conception of politics, in contradistinction to Greek normative theory, which Straumann calls eudaimonistic, i.e., focused on the creation of virtuous citizens and the conditions of a happy life. Chapter One elaborates the “Roman concept of constitution.” Chapter Two is deeply conventional in its topic and argument: it urges that Roman efforts to articulate and establish constitutional norms were provoked by the crises of the late republic that led individuals and institutions to resort to emergency measures. The basic building blocks of Chapter Three are likewise deeply conventional topics in certain traditions of study of the late republic: the distribution of powers among republican institutions; the right of citizens to trial before the people (provocatio); and a fundamental commitment to private property. My own views are that provocatio was at best a talking

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