Collections: Teaching Paradox, Imperator, Part IIIa: De Re Publica

This is the first half of the third part of our three-part (I, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb) look at Paradox Interactive’s ancient grand strategy game Imperator: Rome, running from the late fourth through the first century BCE, a period that, relevant for today’s discussion, covers the Middle and Late Roman Republic, including the collapse of the Roman Republic during the first century. Previously, we’ve looked at how Imperator looks at the question of Roman military expansion and rising urbanism. This week, we’re going to start looking at the last of the three core pillars of Imperator‘s design: its considerable interest in the internal politics and stability of ancient states.

Imperator is remarkably interested in simulating the internal politics of ancient states (and non-state polities), precisely because those politics cut to that last of the three major lenses through which the public understands this period: the fall of the Roman Republic and its replacement with the monarchy of the early Roman Empire. However, because Paradox’s design ethos includes a commitment to making as many polities on the map playable as possible, Imperator cannot simply have a bunch of bespoke mechanics just for Rome, but rather is forced to create a common set of political systems which apply equally to all of the states in question, so that not only can the Roman Republic collapse (as it did), but so too can the Seleucid Empire (as it did, torn apart by succession disputes) and any other state. That, of course, matches the tremendous political variety in this period, the first in which the broader Mediterranean was knit together economically, politically and culturally to a substantial degree.

Indeed, the ambition of this vision is remarkable and may have been too much for this, or any game, to really handle effectively. While Europa Universalis IV covers a broader range of polities, it largely abstracts away much of their internal politics, such that ‘feudal’ monarchies, republics, theocracies, early administrative states and vast sweeping empires all function broadly similarly. Victoria III simply opts not to simulate non-state polities, hardly an option for the ancient world where such polities could be major players in war and politics, while Crusader Kings III takes advantage of the fact that European, Middle Eastern and South-Asian personalistic polities in its period ended up being broadly recognizable to each other, based on (more or less) similar principles and structures to flatten the distinctions into a single system with relatively limited variations.¹

To keep a handle on this scope, we, however are going to stay fairly focused on how the game treats Rome and Rome’s political system (republics), though I will glance over from time to time to look at the other forms of government as well as other non-Roman republics (especially Carthage). This examination of politics is going to come in two parts: this week we’re going to do some foundation laying discussing the basic components of Imperator’s political vision and then try to match that against how the Roman Republic functioned through the bulk of this period (prior to the collapse), then next week we’ll look at how the game handles stability and collapse and the degree to which it matches up to how we understand the collapse of the Roman Republic to have been caused.

And to lead in with some of the conclusion, what we’re going to see this week is that Imperator is rather more successful with tribal and monarchic governments than with republics, in particular because the extremely elite-centric design of its political systems cannot incorporate the democratic elements of the mixed constitutions of states like Rome and Carthage. That said, the Roman Republic is such a complicated creature that fully simulating it in this context might never have been feasible from a gameplay perspective.

But first, like any good Roman nobilis canvassing for office, I rely on generating word-of-mouth buzz for this project, so if you like what you are reading, please share it. If you really like what you are reading, you can vote for me as consul support me, my academic research (on the Roman Republic!) and this project on Patreon! If you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings, assuming there is still a Twitter by the time this post goes live. I am also on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social).

Kings and Chiefs

We should start with the mechanics that all three major government types (tribal, monarchic and republican) share.

Regardless of type, every polity has the same basic building blocks: there is a ‘leader’ (chieftain, king, suffete, consul, etc), over whom the player has greater control (being able to pick their personal schemes, for instance), and as such the game essentially has the player playing ‘as’ that character (which works rather better for kings and chieftains than the rotating cast of consuls or suffetes in republics). The player is also responsible for staffing the government, with each polity having eight country-wide ‘offices’ along with selecting one governor for every region you control beyond your capital region (which is governed by the leader). The key challenge here, which we’ll come back to, is in balancing the need to select governors and officials (and generals and admirals) between their skills at the job and their political expediency in terms of keeping elite families happy.

While the country leader is selected through a system the player has limited control over (succession or election), all of these other offices are appointed by the player and their holders can be dismissed at will unless something has gone quite wrong (either the holder’s loyalty is below 33 or country stability below 20). The player can pick any character in the country for these roles, however most characters will belong to one of several of those key families.

And here to understand how these pieces come together, we need to discuss character loyalty. We’re going to come back to this more when we discuss the Fall of the Republic next week, but right now a short explanation will suffice: each character has a score that indicates how politically important they are (‘power base’) and how loyal they are (‘loyalty’ from 0 to 100) to the state. If too many characters with too much power base (the ‘civil war threshold,’ a shifting red line of disloyalty) become disloyal (loyalty below 33), it triggers a countdown to civil war, which for this post we can just treat as something of a failure state (we’ll get into it more in the next post). Most players will strive to avoid it.

While each character has their own individual loyalty score, impacted by their personal relationship with the ruler, their personality, the offices they hold and their power base and so on, most of these characters are also grouped into a few key families (the number varies with country size). The head of each of these families gets substantial bonuses to power base, making it more important to keep them loyal. Each of these major families also expects to hold a certain number of offices: for every office below that number they are missing they become scorned, losing 5 loyalty; this is a stacking penalty (so a family missing two offices is -10), and a flat -5 penalty across an entire family is substantial, so the player is strongly encouraged to balance offices between the major families to keep them happy.

Returning, to a moment, to characters, it is important to note what they generally do not do: they don’t make policy. Unlike vassals in CKIII, who can build up holdings, raise armies, plot, scheme and generally do lots of policy stuff, office holders in Imperator generally exist to do two things: they provide a mechanical bonus based on their stats and at the same time getting the job makes them slightly more loyal (and their families, if it makes sure they’re not scorned). But making a pro-democracy character head of the treasury doesn’t result in, say, programs for the poor. or the construction of granaries to facilitate grain distributions. Governors are the exception, as they do set a policy (a choice of one of several flat sets of bonuses and penalties) in their provinces, though if governor personality influences those choices, the influence is minor enough to be ignored – what matters is governor skill (most notably, finesse) which influences output and happiness.

Instead, this is a system governed by what YouTuber Rosencreutz describes as ‘player autocracy,’ a design philosophy that aims to empower the player by giving them as much control over the polity they are playing as possible – generally far more control than any historical leader would have. Because players in strategy games are generally not constrained by political process or procedure (in the interests of this ‘player autocracy’) it is generally in the constraints and responses to player action that a game sets out its vision of how polities function.

These constraints are generally expressed by some key ‘currencies’ for states, one that is common across all of them (‘tyranny’) and then a specific currency for each government type. We’ve already discussed aggressive expansion and stability; somewhat ironically stability has little political influence on a country in Imperator – it makes provincial revolts more likely, but not civil wars (which we’ll get into next week). More important for our purposes is tyranny – not the absolutely excellent game by Obsidian you all slept on and should now go play – tyranny in Imperator is a currency with both positive and negative effects. On the one hand, high tyranny causes aggressive expansion to decay faster (for reasons I’ve never quite understood), but more importantly for us, tyranny carries both faction-wide loyalty penalties for characters and lowers the civil war threshold, meaning that by both making more characters disloyal and reducing the number of disloyal characters necessary for a civil war, pushes a country quite hard in that direction if it is high. However, tyranny drops off relatively quickly and most government types (except republics!) don’t have huge sources of it, making it a lot safer to take a little tyranny for an action in Imperator than, say, ‘tyranny’ (a global opinion malus) in CKIII.

In monarchies, the other constraint is legitimacy (scaling from negative to positive 100), which I think functions fairly well to model kingship as a form of leadership. High legitimacy makes it easier to have untroubled successions (it boosts primary heir attraction), but low legitimacy damages the loyalty of all characters even more than equivalent amounts of tyranny. High ruler popularity improves legitimacy (ironically, as we’ll see, making this a more important statistic to care about in hereditary monarchy than in an elective republic, which doesn’t seem quite right!), as does high stability, while war exhaustion and corruption lower legitimacy. A player in need of legitimacy can trade political influence and a little bit of tyranny for a ticking bonus to legitimacy (trading 0.02 tyranny for 0.05 legitimacy, so the ratio is quite favorable), which can be stacked multiple times if a rapid boost of legitimacy is necessary.

The equivalent ‘currency’ for non-state ‘tribal’ governments is centralization, but the actual constraint for those governments is the power of their ‘clan chiefs,’ (from whom the leader is always selected) who are the leaders of the major families. Some actions, including law changes for tribal governments require all current clan chiefs to be loyal in order to perform and clan chiefs are always the commander of their retinues (which form much of the polity’s army) meaning that disloyal clan chief’s troops will be uncontrollable in war.

That system actually, I think, within the confines of the system works reasonably well at modeling non-state polities in this period. It might be a bit more accurate if clan chiefs (or their youths) could take the polity to war without the player’s permission, but I suspect that would be an intolerable breach in player autocracy. The player that loses the game because the young men of his tribe scuttled his diplomacy with Rome by raiding Roman territory would be quite upset at having their strategy overridden by random chance, no matter how historically accurate that sort of thing would be (this exact thing very nearly happened to the Cenomani in 197 (Livy 32.30.6) and the town of Lutia in 134, App. Hisp. 94).²

Overall, I think both of these sets of mechanics work to express some historical ideas. Power in monarchic governments in Imperator is focused into the person of the king, but constrained by the need to act kingly in order to retain legitimacy, which is in turn the primary tool for retaining the loyalty of the subordinates the king relies on to collect his taxes and lead his armies. By contrast, tribal governments are essentially coalition of aristocrats, each commanding their own network of subordinates, but only loosely controlled by any kind of central authority.

But I want to turn to what I think is substantially the most complex government type in Imperator and the one the game clearly focuses on: Republics, especially the Roman and Carthaginian Republics.

Imperator‘s Republics

Republics are far more mechanically complex than either tribal or monarchic governments and one assumes, given that this is a game – as the title, Imperator: Rome declares – about the Middle and Late Roman Republic, that republican forms of government also got the most development time. Now, I should note that from a gameplay perspective, this complex system can often end up as little more than a single constraining resource (‘senate approval’) that works a lot like legitimacy, simply with more complex knobs and levers to manipulate. Part of this is that elections are both frequent (every 5 years normally) and difficult for the player to directly influence and so tend to just happen – the player is more ‘rolling with’ whatever results they get (akin to how one handles ruler changes in EUIV – you can’t pick your ruler, so you adapt your strategy to what the Random Number Generator gives you) than trying to shape those results (cf. CKIII‘s inheritance system).

Nevertheless, the mechanical systems that produce those results say quite a bit about how Imperator understands ancient republics in general and the Roman Republic in particular (among other things, all of the artwork for republics is Roman inspired; it is kind of funny playing as Carthage, when your senate is pictured all wearing togas).

Each Republic has a Senate. These may go by different culturally determined names, but they all function the same, though I do want to note that having the Athenian ekklesia and other Greek states’ (like Argos) gerousia be different names for the same thing speaks to some of blurring of important distinctions happening here. Readers of our How to Polis series will remember that most poleis had both an assembly (ekklesia) and a council (gerousia, boule) and that these were quite distinct!³ Nevertheless, in Imperator all republics are ‘unicameral,’ with just one key political organ, represented by that ‘senate.’

Each senate is split into three factions, which for most countries are oligarchs, traditionalists and democrats, but for Rome are optimates, boni and populares; this is mostly just a culture-flavor name switch, but there are some minor mechanical differences (e.g. oligarchs actually like tyranny, but optimates do not) and the Roman factions provide different bonuses. Every character (that is, named political elite) in a country is ideologically committed to a faction (this can change, but doesn’t do so frequently) and the faction’s power (represented by the senate seats it commands) is a product of the total ‘senate influence’ of all of the characters supporting that faction, which in turn largely a product of their ‘power base.’ The player can thus influence which senate faction is ascendant in the long-term through things like office selection, as access to offices will grow the power base of those characters, thus (very slowly) increasingly the influence of their senate factions.

In turn, the ruler and co-ruler (so consuls, suffetes, etc.) are elected by the Senate (!) based on the support of senate seats, with the highest prominence member of each faction (the faction leader) getting a substantial boost from that faction. Characters get a small boost for their ‘popularity’ statistic (representing their mass appeal) and their statesmanship statistic (representing their actual experience governing) as well as for family prestige, but since faction leaders get a whopping 50% bonus (compared to fractions of a percent per-point for the others) to votes from their faction (a family member of the faction leader gets a 10% bonus) and anyone not in a given faction gets a 40% malus to votes from that faction, the ‘major players’ here tend to be the faction leaders of the largest factions in the Senate.

Each time a new leader is elected, they come with an objective or agenda they want done, though for the most part the penalties for doing or not doing these agendas are usually slight enough that most players will only complete them if they fit with their already active strategy.

More critically for the player is senate approval, the variable which replaces ‘legitimacy’ both mechanically and in the user-interface. Each faction has a certain ‘approval’ score, which is then multiplied by the percentage of seats they hold; these are then added together to create a single senate approval rating, effectively a seat-weighted average of faction approval. Faction approval reduces character loyalty if below 50 and raises it if above 50, so this is an important mechanic to track, however it is senate approval that represents the major constraint on player activity in republics.

If senate approval is above 51, it imposes no constraints on the player’s actions. However, if senate approval falls below 51, any action that requires senate approval incurs a tyranny cost of 0.67 per every point below 50 the country is. Quite a wide range of player actions fit under this rubric, including nearly all foreign policy actions (both big choices like making alliances or declaring war, but also small choices like starting to improve another country’s opinion or sending an insult), as well as all law changes and some character interactions (imprisoning, holding triumphs, etc). If senate approval drops below 30, these actions will simply be blocked entirely. The fact that this sort of approval covers so many foreign policy actions makes sense for the Roman Republic, where the senate dominated foreign affairs for much of this period.

The significance of this mechanic is that, perhaps somewhat ironically, republics can accrue tyranny much faster and in much larger amounts than monarchies or tribal governments, if they aren’t careful. Tyranny, in turn, of course, lowers character loyalty (which low faction approval is also doing), but also lowers the faction approval of ‘democrats’ (but not populares) factions, leading to a trap where if the democrats-faction is both strong and unhappy, the player can trap themselves in a tyranny doom-loop and are essentially forced to do nothing until the whole system cools off.⁴

One oddity of the way this system is implemented is that it isn’t quite clear who the senate is or is not approving. Faction approval (and thus senate approval) doesn’t reset on a new consular election, when the ruler of the country changes – instead it gradually drifts, with a slow-moving bonus if the current country leader is also in the relevant faction. As a result, this isn’t the senate’s approval of its actual leaders or government but the senate’s approval of the player, a forth-wall breaking mechanics that is a product of the fact that Imperator can never quite decide if you are playing as the ruler (as in CKIII) or the state (as in EUIV) or the nebulous ‘spirit of the country’ (as in Victoria III).

Nevertheless, senate approval as a mechanic does a decent job of communicating something true about the Roman Republic, which is that elite opinion substantially constrained decision-makers for most of this period. It was, as we’ve discussed, foolish for almost any Roman political figure to ignore the collective will of the senate.

One thing I have not gotten into here are the different variants of republics (and indeed, monarchies also have different variants) because, to be frank, I don’t think they matter very much. Different sorts of republics (aristocratic, oligarchic, democratic, and so on) all use the same mechanics. They merely differ in the government bonuses they receive and relatively minor mechanical tweaks like alterations to the election age or having (or not having) co-rulers. The Athenian Democracy (or ‘Athenian Republic’ as its called in game) does not function meaningfully differently than an oligarchic republic or the Roman (aristocratic) Republic.

Lost on the Path of Honors

Now that we have all of the mechanics out of the way, we can talk about the vision of Roman politics (and the politics of other ancient republics more broadly) they imply.

Fundamentally this is a vision of politics driven functionally entirely by a small group of elites, most of whom hail from a tiny handful of families. Indeed, the in-game text description of the ‘aristocratic republic’ government form (which both Rome and Carthage have) reads, “Whilst outwardly democratic, an Aristocratic Republic limits leadership to those who enjoy high status.” While there is a strong element of player autocracy here, in that the player is free to select whatever office holders and governors they like from among the elite, the elements that are removed from player autocracy – leader elections and senate approval – are entirely expressions of elite will. Leaders are elected by the senate in Imperator and it is only senate approval which allows or blocks actions, both foreign or domestic.

And while we’ll get to the question of stability and collapse next week, it’s also worth noting that the question of loyalty and civil war is also a question of the individual loyalty of elites, which is in turn heavily dependent on the loyalty of their families and political factions. Mob violence in Rome around demagogic politicians forming street-gangs – a real part of the chaos of the 50s BC in Rome – aren’t a mechanical factor in the game (though some events allude to them). In short, this is a system driven by elites, who in turn function within two cross-cutting factional systems, one political and one familial and who aim to maximize power for their faction and family.

There are, I think, three weaknesses to this system, one minor and two major. The minor weakness is that this system still encourages the player to see political actors as members of larger factional systems, rather than individual free-agents, but in ancient political systems, the latter was far more often true. Roman gentes did not, in fact, generally move together politically in this period (they may have done earlier in the Republic) and the populares and optimates distinction was more about tactics than fixed political parties.⁵ That said, Imperator, in its current form, allows more political free-agenting than any other simulation of the Roman Republic I’ve seen – contrast both Rome-themed Total War games, where individuals are always and entirely loyal servants of their families – so this may actually be a minor merit, so much as a weakness.

The first major weakness is the absence of the cursus honorum.

The cursus honorum, literally the ‘path of honors’ was the Roman term for a political career, but it also signified a clear traditional progression of offices an elite Roman was expected to run for. All of these offices, contrary to Imperator‘s setup, were elected and the expectation was that they were held in sequence (with breaks in between), such that holding office on the previous steps is what qualified one to run for more senior offices. There was no written rule that one could not skip steps (until Sulla adds one), but few Romans did so: you held each office in turn (each office lasted for a year), which provided the necessary experience and political clout to hold the next one.

As a result, elite Romans were not simply available for whatever job might be necessary, but engaged in a process of climbing a ladder of offices with the consulship at the top. As you may note, the ladder is an elimination contest, with fewer steps as one goes higher, eliminating less electorally successful candidates until only two consuls each year remained. The senate was not directly elected, but rather consisted of anyone who had at least reached the quaestorship; a bit of demographics and life expectancy meant the senate was generally around 300 seats, but it may not have been a fixed number. Speaking order in deliberations in the senate was based on the highest office someone had reached (and seniority after that) meaning that the prestige of how high one had climbed on this ladder followed them even when they were out of office.

(I should note, the Carthaginian Republic lacked any comparable system. Carthaginian generals were directly elected and indeed it was possible for election to be one’s ‘first job,’ as it were, as was the case with Hannibal Barca, who was elected to follow his father (Hamilcar) and brother-in-law (Hasdrubal the Fair) as the general in Spain at the ripe age of 26. Such a meteoric ascent was, in theory, impossible in the Roman system, where by custom no one could be elected to the consulship before the age of 42 (though Scipio Aemilianus does it at age 38, the precocious fellow))

This competition for office, waged in campaigns for election by the people (see below) was the central rhythm of Roman politics and is entirely absent in Imperator, where a talented young Roman may be instantly elevated to a position as a provincial governor (generally a job for a praetor or former praetor) or even the censorship (an elected position almost always held by senior former-consuls)! Moreover, in Imperator, once appointed men hold these offices for long periods, but under the Republic, offices were all held for just one year (except for the censorship, which was an 18 month term every 5 years), meaning that rather than a fixed cast of the most talented (or politically expedience) candidates, Rome was led by an annually rotating cast of aristocrats, with the consequence that the average capability of Roman leaders often mattered more over time than the genius of individuals.⁶

Now, I understand why Paradox didn’t opt to implement the cursus honorum in Imperator. For one, it would be a single-country (no other ancient state quite does this) bespoke system that would be very complex and hard to balance. But having all of your leaders shift out annually in an uncontrollable series of elections would also be profoundly disempowering for a player who would thus be at the mercy of whatever fellows the Roman senatorial elite could cough up for key posts that year. Of course, that is exactly how the Roman Republic actually functioned, but it would hardly make for a great play experience.

At the same time, controlling such a system would more or less demand the player to keep careful track of hundreds of Roman aristocrats as they progressed through the system, which would hopelessly bog down gameplay. I have some thoughts for how this might be managed (below), but I find I understand why implementing this key element of the Roman Republic was not attempted.

The P in SPQR

Something else, however, is missing in this model of the Roman Republic, some part of the Senatus Populusque Romanus that isn’t here.

The People. The entire populus.

This is a frequent problem in modeling the Roman Republic – indeed, Total War: Rome II‘s model is, if anything, much, much worse in this regard – and I can’t help but feeling like, to some degree, historians and history teachers may be responsible. We know, when we teach the Roman Republic in the context of a modern liberal democracy that the instinct of students is going to be to see the common elements between their society and Roman society and assume that the Roman Republic is democratic in nature. But that would be a serious mistake and a substantial overstatement of the power The People had in the Republic. The Republic is, after all, a balancing of the interests of the People and the elite (in the form of the Senate), whereas in a democracy, the People are fundamentally sovereign.

Needing to hedge against that mistake leads us to emphasize the anti-democratic elements of the unwritten Roman constitution – the voting bodies slanted by wealth, the (somewhat large) handful of elite families who dominated politics and the impact of patronage – in order to make the point that this is not a modern, liberal democracy. But it also isn’t an oligarchy or pure aristocracy! On this point, Polybius leaves us in little doubt (Polyb. 6.11-14): the Republic has oligarchic elements in its structure, but also a substantial power reserved for the people.

And Imperator almost entirely leaves this element of the Roman Republic out.

We can start with some of the basic inaccuracies in the mechanics. Roman consuls were not elected by the Senate; indeed the Senate could not elect any officials (though it could ask currently serving officials to continue what they were doing with authority delegated to them by the new magistrates). None of Rome’s key officials were appointed either: they were all elected by the people in popular assemblies, with magistrates having imperium elected in the comitia centuriata, those without in the comitia tributa, except for the tribunes of the plebs, elected in the concilium plebis. Nor could the Senate pass laws, or – legally – prevent their passage, though the influence of the senate might often be used to dissuade the people from passing laws.

That said, an elite-centric vision of the Roman Republic isn’t entirely out of step with the scholarship on the Roman Republic, but it is out of step with the scholarship on the Roman Republic for the last roughly 35 years or so. What Imperator presents is a vision in which Rome is controlled by a relatively narrow, hereditary oligarchy, which features few new entrants (your handful of elite families provide most of your politically meaningful characters and they stick around) and in which the people have little to no say. Instead, while Rome may have had voting, this vision assumes that common Romans were both always the clients of powerful Romans (not always true, by the by) and that they followed their patrons politically in lock-step, such that elite Roman gentes could unfailingly deliver large numbers of their clients to win elections on behalf of aristocratic ends. J. North⁷ termed this the “frozen wastes” version of Roman politics, associated with the older scholarship of figures like Ronald Syme and Matthias Gelzer.

But the “frozen wastes” vision has been thawing for some time and at this point, large chunks of its icy argument have been broken off. Keith Hopkins⁸ and P.A. Brunt⁹ started by noting that the makeup of the Roman leadership class was quite a bit more fluid than Syme had imagined: rather than locking down power, elite Roman clans (gentes) tended to drift into and out of relevance over time, replaced either by other parts of the old Roman aristocracy or by new entrants into Rome’s political elite; at the same time, these gentes rarely moved as clear political factions (something Imperator actually does grasp, separating political factions from families, even if that means pulling the popularis–optimates distinction forward almost 200 years). In fact, at Imperator‘s start date (304 BC), a substantial influx of new blood into Rome’s political elite stood within living memory, as the consulship had been opened to (rich) plebians only in 367 and the praetorship to them only in 337. Truly new entrants to this system (novi homines) were rare, but there was a steady trickle of them; Imperator‘s main gentes, however, remain fixed.

But the big ‘break’ in this old vision comes with Fergus Millar’s The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (1998). Millar notes the importance the Romans placed on public deliberation through speeches at informal political gatherings (called contiones) and, indeed, on expressions of popular will through voting, when it came to making political decisions. Amassing positive ‘vibes,’ as it were, for your position was important both for getting it passed through an assembly, but also because under the mos maiorum – the traditional, unwritten rules of Roman politics – most Roman elites (senators, magistrates) were not willing to stand in the way of popular legislation, or press unpopular legislation too hard.

Millar’s view has been complicated by subsequent scholarship, with H. Mouristen, Plebs and Politics in the Late Roman Republic (2001) noting that the voting and meeting spaces this takes place in were nowhere near big enough to service a meaningful slice of the Roman citizen body (which was enormous) and so this must have to some degree limited political participation and channeled it towards the well-to-do class who had the time to be present for these things (but the ‘vibes’ of those present might still matter a lot). Meanwhile Robert Morstein-Marx, Mass Oratory and Political Power in the Late Roman Republic (2002) argues that the rituals of Roman civic participation – the contiones especially – were more about getting the people on board with what the elite already planned to do, though in turn, getting the people on board mattered.

Now it is the case that the Roman people rarely bucked the will of the senate, especially on matters relating to foreign policy, but it did happen. In 200 BC, the Senate advocated for a war against Philip V of Macedon and the consul, P. Sulpicius brought the matter to a vote and were blocked (Livy 31.6) and as a result the senate and the consul had to back up, promise substantial compromises (particularly not to draft anyone who had served in the recent Second Punic War (218-201)) in order to get the vote through (Livy 31.8.6). In 195, the senate split over the question of if the Lex Oppia, a sumptuary law restricting the display of wealth by Roman women passed during the Second Punic War to encourage those women to donate their riches to the war effort, should be repeated. Key senators (including Cato the Elder) and the tribunes try to block the legislation, but popular support became too intense to prevent a vote and the repeal passed (Livy 34.8.3), an even made more unusual by the fact that the campaign to get this done was driven by Roman women who could not vote, but who could influence the votes of others through what today we’d call activism. And, of course, the most famous example of this are the political programs of the Gracchi in 133 and 123, passed through robust popular support in the concilium plebis despite the strong opposition of the Senate.

Not only did the Senate not elect officials in Rome, it rarely weighed in on elections, but in the rare instances that it did, it did not always get its way. P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus is elected, so far as we can tell, against the will of the senate, to the consulship twice, first in 147 (App. Pun. 112) and then again in 134 (App. Hisp. 84; Plut. Mor. 201A-B). Gaius Marius ran for his first consulship in 107 on a platform that we might describe as ‘to hell with the Senate’ (Sall. Iug. 84.1), wins, is denied by the senate permission to hold a traditional levy, takes volunteers and goes and wins the war anyway (Sall. Iug. 86.1-2; Plut. Mar. 9.1; this wasn’t the first time this trick was used, Scipio Africanus had done the same trick in 205 to get around senatorial opposition to an Africa campaign, Livy 28.45.9-12).

That these clear rejections of the will of the Senate were relatively rare doesn’t mean that the people only expressed their will in these limited instances. Rather, I would suggest that it is indicative of how relatively flexible the system was and how relatively adroit the Roman elite generally was at accommodating shifts in public opinion for most of this period. James Tan makes an interesting argument¹⁰ that it was the necessity of collecting taxes (in the absence of hard coercive methods to do so) to pay the stipendium (army pay) introduced in Roman armies in 407 (Livy 4.59.11) which compelled Roman elites to engage in a degree of negotiation and accommodation with the assidui (Romans with enough property to be liable for conscription and taxes).

In short, of Roman elites wanted to accomplish their aims – which were to ascend to high office, command armies and win glory in war – they had to ‘ride,’ as it were, the ‘vibes’ of the Roman citizenry.

All of which feeds back into Polybius’ statement I noted before. Polybius looks at the Roman Republic and concludes that, “if one fixed one’s eyes on the power of the consuls, the constitution seemed completely monarchical and royal; if on that of the senate it seemed again to be aristocratic; and when one looked at the power of the masses, it seemed clearly to be a democracy” (Polyb. 6.11.12, trans. W.R. Paton). This wasn’t empty language: this was a mixed constitution, a recognized kind of government in Greek thought which in Greek political thinking aimed to treat the aristocracy, the people and the chief magistrates almost as three separate constituencies to be balanced against each other.¹¹

This isn’t the place to get into what we know of the Carthaginian political structure (less than we’d like!) but I should note that Carthage too was understood to be a mixed constitution (Arist. Pol. 2.1273a), though Polybius argues that in fact by the Second Punic War, the democratic element of the Carthaginian constitution had come to dominate (Polyb. 6.51.6-7) which Polybius, being something of a snob, views as a bad thing. Modern scholars, I should note, haven’t always agreed on how seriously to treat this statement, though given the ability of the Barcids to get their commands in Spain confirmed by the people despite hints of elite political opposition, I don’t think we ought to dismiss it either.¹² So Rome is hardly alone here as being somewhat conspicuous in missing a clear democratic element.

Imperator at best only weakly gestures towards this role filled by the people, in that characters have a ‘popularity’ statistic, which offers a fairly modest increase to both senate influence (increasing the power of that character’s faction) and the probably of being elected as the leader or co-leader. But this is quite a weak representation, suggesting politicians with relatively fixed, stable followings they could reliably deliver as voters – exactly the ‘frozen wastes’ vision of patronage’s impact of Roman politics that has been largely abandoned by Roman historians.

Simulating the Roman Republic

Assessing the validity of this model leaves me a bit torn. On the one hand, leaving out both the cursus honorum and the popular assemblies essentially strips both the heart and lungs out of the Republic – what is left only superficially resembles the actual historical system. At the same time, those who have read my series on how the Roman Republic functioned – How to Roman Republic – will already recognize that the Roman Republic itself is fiendishly complex with a lot of interlocking components. At any given moment, Rome has roughly thirty major magistrates, who can call four different voting assemblies along with a 300-member senate with no formal powers but tremendous influence.

That is a very hard thing to render into a game system. And I think it is worth noting: as popular video-game representations of the Roman Republic go, this may be one of the stronger ones. It is certainly a lot better than the absolute mess that is the representations of the Republic in both Rome: Total War games, which reduce this complex creature to squabbling dynasties – at least Imperator recognizes that Roman politicians functioned as free agents (although, again, they’ve pulled the political factions of the first century far too far forward chronologically and to a degree misunderstood how they functioned). It also lacks some of Expeditions: Rome‘s baffling misstatements (less pardonable there because that is an RPG rather than a political simulation – there was no need for the errors).

But, to be frank, it also isn’t a very good representation of the Roman Republic, presenting a mixed constitution as a raw oligarchy and missing the way a Roman politician progressed through a political career.

I’ve thought a bit about how I would try to fix this while retaining an enjoyable game experience and I’ve come to a very tentative solution which I think also resolves one of Imperator‘s fussier problems, which is that it can never quite decide if the player is the state or the ruler. Resolve this problem by making the player the people in a Republic (just as the player is clearly the king in monarchies).

At the start of each election cycle (probably not every year, that’d be accurate but too frequent; perhaps every five years), have the system generate your ten quaestors for the year and assign them randomly (quaestors were assigned by lot). Then have the player next, acting as the people voting in the assembly select which of the last rounds quaestors get to advance to the next offices (aediles and tribunes, probably cutting down the number of tribunes to account for plebian tribunes coming from outside of the cursus honorum, a thing we know happened), knocking a few out. Those fellows now fill the country-wide bonuses roles for the next cycle. Then, the player gets the list of last cycle’s aediles and tribunes and selects which ones advance to the praetorship – two praetors run the courts (country-wide bonuses), the others are available as governors. And finally, to cap off each election, you pick the two ‘winners’ for the consulship from last cycle’s praetors.

That process presents the player with some hard strategic questions, in part because these offices are going to demand different skills! Consuls lead armies, but aediles manage festivals and buildings, so the player has to consider keeping good military men (who might make lack-luster tribunes or praetors) in the pile to have solid consuls. At the same time, popularity and positions in elite families should matter as they do in game: slighting the popular scion of a great family repeatedly might well make him disloyal – and this is an elimination contest where there are always many losers and few winners. Perhaps most importantly, the player is largely forced to work with the cast of characters they’ve given themselves in repeated runs through the system, as the characters who succeed here become the key figures in the senate, shaping its politics and approval. At the same time, policy, reforms and law changes ought to be available based only on who is holding the relevant offices at that time, requiring the player to line up the right consul or tribune (to propose the law) with the right senate (to back it) in order to get a chance to bring it to a vote and approve it.

Of course, even as I explain this, you can see the challenge of implementing this sort of a system into a game like Imperator – such a tremendously bespoke system for just one country would be fiendishly hard to balance against the rest and involve a ton of development time. It is the sort of system which I think you might expect to see deployed in a major DLC or expansion in the second or third year of a game’s run. Alas, Imperator did not last long enough to get such substantial updates.

And speaking of things that cannot last, next week we’ll bring this series to a close, looking at the Fall of the Roman Republic.

1. And are only now, several years into development, preparing to add the complexity of adding an ‘Administrative’ polity-type which is essentially adding the state to their game that is otherwise about the function of non-state polities. That’s a huge addition and I don’t blame them for waiting a few years to do it as part of a major expansion. Alas, Imperator never got any such major expansions.
2. This is also something of an issue in Crusader Kings: your vassals can start wars, but a border vassal can’t, by beefing with the vassal of another king, drag you into a major war against your will, a thing which was actually a real hazard with vassalage based polities.
3. Even more attentive readers may have furrowed a brow at Argos being an oligarchic republic with a gerousia at game start, as Argos was a democracy for most of this period. Argos adopted a democracy after the Persian Wars where the main voting body was a haliaia teleia, with two smaller assisting councils, the Bola (a boule) and ‘the Eighty.’ Details via the Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis, eds. M.H. Hansen and T.H. Nielsen (2005)., 604-5.
4. It is somewhat striking that by both removing the oligarch’s bonuses for tyranny and corruption and the democrats penalties for them, Rome’s entirely unique and bespoke faction system is essentially ‘republic on easy mode’ (or at least less complex mode) and one wonders if this was intended to reduce the complexity of managing this system, as a lot of new players will play Rome first.
5. And I should note that the boni, ‘good men’ was just another term for the optimates (‘the best ones’) and shouldn’t be a distinct political group here.
6. The Roman Republic, in the event, was very good at churning out solidly workmanlike but not exceptional military commanders, but produced few true great talents (really just Scipio Africanus and Caesar); solidly competent leadership was, however, enough when it was consistent.
7. In J. North, “Democratic politics in republican Rome,” Past & Present 126 (1990) 3-21
8. In Conquerors and Slaves (1978)
9. In Fall of the Roman Republic and Related Essays (1988)
10. J. Tan, “The Long Shadow of Tributum in the Long Fourth Century” in Making the Middle Republic, eds. S. Bernard, L.M. Mignone and D. Padilla Peralta (2023)
11. If you are hearing echoes of ‘checks and balances,’ you aren’t entirely wrong (this is part of what the Framers are thinking with) but the Roman Republic isn’t structured quite like that: instead of checking or balancing other elements, each element is understood to have its own customary sphere of activity and to be dominant in that sphere.
12. On Carthaginian generals, see M.J. Taylor, “Generals and Judges: Command, constitution and the fate of Carthage” Libyan Studies (2023).