In Mass Oratory and Political Power in the Late Roman Republic, Robert Morstein-Marx joins with scholars such as Fergus Millar in arguing that popular political speech be taken more seriously in assessing Late Republican power relations. For too long, they argue, students of the Republic, applying a patron-client model, believed the period's politics to be fully explicable on the basis of a "substratum of personal and private connections" without serious attention to the politics of the public sphere (p. 4). On such a view "there is no mediation, through political speech, between the levels of senatorial and popular action" (p. 5).

Also with Millar, Morstein-Marx identifies the contio—the non-voting popular assembly in which a wide manner of public speeches could be heard—as "center stage for the performance and observation of public, political acts in the Roman Republic" (p. 9). Morstein-Marx tries to fathom the public "voice" of the period by consulting three sources: ancient accounts of the contiones, the archeological record of the meeting places themselves (e.g., the changing architecture in the Forum), and—above all—the variety of rhetorical techniques extant in contional orations.

Contiones were convened for various purposes. Senatorial decrees were read out in contione, as were other announcements of public interest (e.g., news of military engagements). Special contiones, including formal arguments for or against pending legislation (the suasio/dissuasion), were required immediately prior to the convocation of the popular voting assemblies themselves, while others were convened ad hoc. More generally, Morstein-Marx claims, the contio was "perhaps the most important" venue "for the purposes of self-advertisement, communication, and ritualized communal action" (p. 9).

Contiones "could be summoned only by a magistrate of quaestorian rank or higher during his term of office (i.e., no pro-magistrates)" with the great majority convened by tribunes of the plebs (p. 38). Attendance was open. Unlike voting assemblies, the contiones could convene on market days, and while consuls and praetors could interrupt meetings called by those of lesser rank, no one was legally permitted to interrupt a tribune's contio. Ideologically, a contional audience's response (i.e., its reception of a speaker) was taken as the voice of the people, though Morstein-Marx discusses how—in any given instance—opposing politicians might question an audience's representative legitimacy.

Morstein-Marx departs from Millar, crucially, in understanding how the contio functioned within Late Republican society—in particular on the issue of whose interests the ostensibly popular institution ultimately served. In The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (2001) and The Roman Republic in Political Thought (1995), Millar advances a democratic portrayal, relying to a great extent on the contio with its prevailingly populist rhetoric. Morstein-Marx, meanwhile, concludes that "while an emphasis on the centrality of public speech and deliberation to the political culture of the Roman Republic is fully justified" the contio "did not, in fact, make the political system more than minimally responsive to popular needs" (p. 31). At most he credits the contio as "a place where important convergences of interest were continually negotiated between the 'elite' who supplied the speakers and the 'mass' who made up the audience" (p. 8).

Like some politicians of the era, we can question whether the contional crowd did, in fact, represent the populus Romanus. If attendance was systematically unrepresentative as Henrik Mouritsen argues in his Plebs and Politics in the Late Roman Republic (2001), then a democratic designation is suspect. Morstein-Marx does not avoid the question of whether there was a distinct plebs contionalis and concurs with Mouritsen (contra Millar) in supposing an over-representation of the urban shop-keeping class (most contiones convened in the Forum, after all). Still, the weight of Morstein-Marx's argument against the democratic thesis, lies elsewhere. He emphasizes, instead, the ways in which the contio was used by elites to reinforce their hegemony ideologically, regardless of audience make-up.

Morstein-Marx criticizes a "'common-sense' model of the contional speech situation"(p. 14)—the basis, he believes, of the democratic view. The common-sense assumption that a speaker's persuasiveness required that he "conform closely" to his audience's "values, beliefs, fundamental conceptions and wishes" (p. 13) is faulted on largely Habermasian grounds. Thus, Morstein-Marx tells us, the common-sense model ignores "the ideological effects of discourse" (p. 14), and the related asymmetries of knowledge and power that enabled strategic manipulation, rendering the contio a "less-than-ideal speech situation" (p. 21).

The Habermasian standard (itself based on a rigorous demand for Kantian autonomy) is, unfortunately, too ideal to be of much help in assessing the period's democratic credentials. It proves unnecessary as a prelude to Morstein-Marx's otherwise-useful discussion of the manipulative aspects of contional rhetoric (as demonstrated by his employment in Chapter 7, to better effect, of a less theory-laden notion of "symbolic" politics). The Kantian/Habermasian criterion also tends to obscure other important, if more mundane, considerations. Thus, while Morstein-Marx remarks on pervasive elite division—and even identifies the contio as a venue for rival elites in "competition for public trust" (p. 282ff)—he neglects the implications of such competition, something a less ideal notion of democracy (e.g., a Schumpeterian one) would encourage.

The contio's failure as an instance of deliberative democracy, or even the fact that it amounted to "political theater... a dramatic staging of political argument, characterized by highly developed methods of audience creation and response solicitation that activated a kind of ventriloquism"(p. 158), hardly distinguishes it from the popular institutions of democracies at other times. Nonetheless, the book includes numerous thought-provoking discussions, including one of Cicero, revealing a markedly more populist voice than either his own theory or reputation would admit. A similarly resourceful chapter vindicates plebian civic knowledge by tracing out historical references in contional oratory and in coinage, statuary and monumental architecture. Thus, the book easily achieves its aim of providing "a richer picture of the relationship between public speech and political power in the Roman Republic" (p. 32).

Tom Hoffman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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