We watched HBO’s “Rome” tv miniseries again over the last few days. Its easy to be dazzled by the story, script, acting, and production values of this masterpiece, but the second time through gives you a chance to do a little reflection on some of the themes involved.

What jumped out at me on my second viewing was the uncanny parallels of the Roman Senate to our own legislature in America. It should come as no surprise. Our founders were men of action and affairs, highly capable and well-educated intellectuals living in an enlightened (by 18th century standards) age. They were well familiar with the history of the Roman Republic, and highly suspicious of Greek (Athenian) democracy, which they viewed as rule by the mob. The organization and even the iconography of our constitutional legislature owes a great deal to the Roman Senate.

Rome was a city in Italy originally under the occupation and control of the Etruscans, a mysterious neighbor civilization from Northern Italy. After gaining their independence, Rome embarked on a period of expansion and conquest, subduing neighboring city-states and tribes in Italy. During that time they were ruled by a variety of tyrants and kings, but eventually coalesced into a Republican (de res publica, of the people) form of government. Rome was controlled by wealthy noble families, great landholders, who mistrusted being under a boss free to tax them, expropriate their property, or send them off to war without their having any say in it. Unlike Athenian Democracy, where every male born in the state was entitled to a vote and encouraged to do so, the Romans were an aristocracy, an oligarchy, and most important, one based on slavery. The Roman Republic’s founders were men of action and affairs, too. Highly educated, admirers of their predecessors, the Greeks, but determined not to let the Mob rule them. Our founders admired the Romans too, even more so than the Greeks, so they chose the Republic over Democracy. (The similarity to the names of our present political parties is purely coincidental).

Although slavery was common in the ancient world, the Roman state evolved the latifundium, the world’s first agribusiness, a corporate farm, the massive agricultural estate worked by slaves while the patrician owner commuted to his villa in the city where he could enjoy the benefits of civilization and protect his political and economic interests in the Senate, either by direct participation or by active lobbying and partisanship. There is a great scene in “Rome” where Marc Antony reassures Brutus, Cicero and the other conspirators that they need not fear him trying to overthrow them in the Senate. I paraphrase, but as close as I can quote from memory, he tells them “I’m giving up on Rome and Politics. Like old Cincinnatus, I’m going back to my farm where I can live in peace, till my soil, and fuck my slaves.” We know how well that all worked out.

The Roman Republic went through a lot of changes and evolutions, and was occasionally punctuated by relapses into dictatorship and tyranny, and the plebes did eventually get some representation and even a veto vote. Still, it was mostly an oligarchy, mostly run by the aristocracy. The Romans talked a lot about Liberty and Freedom, (from their speeches, they were obsessed by it), they loathed tyranny, monarchy and dictatorship and loved and treasured their Republican form of government. They eventually evolved a complex informal constitution based on custom, precedent and procedure, an elaborate structure of law, checks and balances. The whole system was designed to let the patricians run the state without too much interference from the lower classes. The Senate’s primary function was to keep the plebes out of the government, but not let any particular patrician or faction take it over, either. Government was not meant to be a tyranny, but it was certainly designed to be an instrument of class dominance.

They did it by controlling the franchise. Just as in post-Colonial America, only native-born property-owning Roman males were allowed, women, other Italians, slaves and freedmen were not. You couldn’t be in the Senate without money, connections, noble birth, powerful friends and making lots of promises. It was not unheard of for well-to-do commoners of great merit and talent to rise to positions of power and influence (such as Pompey), but they were always the exception, not the rule. Not too different from our founders, or even our politicians today, actually. Then, as now, politicians were mostly lawyers and businessmen. Today, of course, noble birth doesn’t matter. Our founders were businessmen and gentlemen farmers, but they were not aristocrats. But the electoral college saw to it that the will of the people was first filtered through and modulated by the patricians. Money and economic power now takes the place of blue blood and land ownership.

So what went wrong? Julius Caesar did. Caesar was ambitious, a good soldier, filthy rich and of noble birth. But he bought the love of the plebes (with bread and circuses), who were suffering mass unemployment and hunger because the nobles had bought them off the land and slaves had taken all the jobs. The Senate took care of him, but it precipitated a power struggle that finished the Republic forever, and led to an Empire that lasted another five centuries.