Addressing the counterexample of Rome

Roman society was fundamentally built on the Cursus Honorum. Meaning ‘course of honor’, the system started officials at the lowest end of the ranks: quaestors. Then worked their way up to the aediles, praetors, and finally consuls. Each rank level was reserved for more senior officials, culminating at the top, where the most senior officials worked. Winning these elections not only conferred official governing authority on the individual but also brought prestige and glory to the individual’s family lineage.

On the one hand, this societal structure seems to undermine the very premise of negotiation and cooperation within a collective value framework. However, examining how officials gain popularity and power reworks the structure in a critical way. Many dependency networks between ‘patrons’ and ‘clients’ bound the Roman society together. Wealthy officials and aristocrats provided resources, food, and support to the lower classes. In exchange, the lower classes supported public defense, political backing, and public support through ‘salutatio’, or the morning greetings. Officials often spent their fortunes on public services. Infrastructure, grain distribution, and games were widely supported by these officials. Known as the ‘munera’, meaning duty or obligation, it was the officials’ duty to support the lower classes through these acts. It was not seen as philanthropy, but rather an investment in the officials’ public image. If an official failed to live up to his munera, he might endure public shame, loss of power, or office. Group opinion then became a key factor in officials’ actions. If an official did not follow the majority opinion, he would risk losing the power he had fought so hard to gain.

At first glance, we might see Roman culture as a system in which only those at the very top make all the decisions for the masses. This might serve as a counterexample to our core argument, in which negotiations among individuals through the cooperative process are the fundamental deciding factor in the value structure of a given collective. Looking deeper into the process, the officials have little to no power in the cooperative process at all. They are merely representatives of the general opinions of the masses. Their duty is to hear opinions and act in the best interests of the people they serve. Rome was at its most successful when, for centuries, it thrived on this practice.

This structure completely broke down around the first century, when the pursuit of personal prestige grew so intense that individuals began to use private armies and circumvent laws to gain power and authority. Marius began the process that eventually led to the downfall. He created a system of dependence when he reformed the army to enroll the poorest Roman citizens, promising them land in exchange for service. The problem was that the Senate refused to fund the land for these new soldiers, leaving them fully dependent on Marius to fulfill his promise. As a result, armies shifted from national service to a private tool for wealthy individuals to gain influence. Sulla began his career as a political rival of Marius. However, after the Senate stripped him of a key military position and gave it to Marius, Sulla felt his honor had been deeply insulted and took things into his own hands. He marched his own Roman legion into Rome and took control of the city by force, naming himself dictator after a brutal civil war against Marius’s faction. A rule of terror then followed. Sulla created hit lists of all of his political enemies, publicly executing anyone on the list and seizing their property. Eventually, he stepped down from his position as dictator and attempted to reinstate the previously held institutions, but the damage was already done. Once the doors opened up to taking power by force, they could never be closed again. Julius Caesar came to power at the perfect time to exploit the cracks in the system. When Caesar’s command was ending, his political enemies demanded that he disband his army and return to Rome as a private citizen to face lawsuits. However, because of the structure of power and prestige, being publicly humiliated was worse than death for a Roman aristocrat. Instead of surrendering, he stated his ‘dignitas’ was dearer to him than life itself and marched his loyal army across the Rubicon and into Rome, igniting a civil war. After his victory in battle, he declared himself dictator for life and rendered the Senate completely helpless in his wake. In 44 BCE, a group of Senators assassinated Caesar in an attempt to save the empire, but the damage was done. The system had broken, and corruption reigned supreme. The centralization of power following Caesar led to the first emperor, Augustus.

The Roman Senate’s loss of authority directly led to the Republic’s collapse and transition into an imperial cult. Understanding the cooperative negotiation beneath the Senate, we can understand the shift as a transition from cooperative selection of values to central value choices at the top level. The system worked properly when the communal cooperative power supplied it. When the value structure abandoned the collective, the system fell apart in the pursuit of personal glory.

Our theory proposes that the ordering of values shifts from the individual to the collective level as a collective grows in size. The smaller the collective, the more individualized the value structure; the larger the collective, the more communal the value structure. A collective as extensive as the Roman Empire can function efficiently only under the value structure that holds it together. Once that structure breaks, it’s only a matter of time before the entire system crumbles under the pressure of individuals within it whose values are not being met. So, while the Cursus Honorum system functioned as a process that individuals had to follow to represent themselves and to exercise authority, it survives. Once that system descends into an individual’s value structure at the very top, the system collapses because it no longer serves the collecti