Roman Republican Statehood in the works of S. I. Kovalev

Vasil'ev Andrei Vladimirovich ORCID: 0000-0002-0182-4250 PhD in History Associate Professor, Department of the History of Ancient Greece and Rome, St. Petersburg State University 199034, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Saint Petersburg, Mendeleevskaya line, 5, office 48 Ander-Vaas@yandex.ru

Prigodich Nikita Dmitrievich PhD in History Senior lecturer, Centre of Social Sciences and Humanities, Faculty of Technological Management and Innovations, ITMO University 191187, Russia, Saint Petersburg, Saint Petersburg, Tchaikovsky str., 11/2, room 1-C ndprigodich@itmo.ru

IntroductionThe life and scientific work of S. I. Kovalev fell at a crucial time in the history of our country: the years of the First World War, revolution, civil War, Stalinist terror and the Great Patriotic War.

In our turbulent times, the experience of this kind of "survival" in crisis circumstances and at the same time fruitful scientific and organizational work seems more relevant than ever.

It is often accepted to perceive Kovalev primarily as an organizer of science (it was he who became the founder of the Department of the History of the Ancient World of LSU, and now the Department of the History of Ancient Greece and Rome of the Institute of History of St. Petersburg State University, its successor), one of the creators of the Marxist concept of the history of the ancient world, an outstanding popularizer of scientific knowledge, as well as the author of the famous course on the history of ancient Rome (1948), which received recognition not only in our country, but also in Europe, having been reprinted many times in Italian and Spanish (suffice it to mention that one of the last Spanish editions was published in Madrid in 2007).

This article will focus mainly on the scientific work of the Leningrad professor, and in the part that rarely becomes the subject of attention in the history of science. As noted by E. D. Frolov, Kovalev was repeatedly attracted by two extreme points of Roman history – the formation of a civil community in Rome and the fall of the Western Roman Empire ^{[1, p. 441]}. Consideration of the second of them is not part of our task, but how Kovalev assessed the processes of the formation of a civil community in Rome and what hypotheses he expressed on certain issues of the development of Roman republican statehood is of extreme interest to us.

Roman Republican Institutes in the Works of S.I. KovalevIf in the early works of S. I. Kovalev, as well as many other Marxist historians of the 1920s, there were ideas of cyclism and a modernizing approach to ancient history, in which each individual cultural and geographical region passed through its own cycle from primitiveness to capitalism even within the framework of the ancient world, then since the late 1920s – in the early 1930s, he, like many of his colleagues, departs from such interpretations of Marxism.

As A. M. Skvortsov notes, the modernizing approach to historical material was an opportunity to preserve the research of ancient epochs in new conditions. The question of how to make the history of ancient Greece and Rome relevant to their time, and at the same time attractive for study, occupied the antiquarians of the first years of the existence of Soviet power. The "modernization" of antiquity was suppressed from above after the publication in the late 1920s of V. I. Lenin's work "On the State", which spoke of antiquity as a slave-owning society, where there were two antagonistic classes – slaveholders and slaves ^{[2, p. 175]}.

For the first time, S. I. Kovalev's views on the main problems of the history of ancient Rome were expressed quite fully by him in the two—volume "History of Ancient Society: Greece, Hellenism, Rome", the second part of which, devoted to Hellenistic and Roman history, was published in Leningrad in 1936. The first thing you can immediately pay attention to is the statement of the presence of Latins the polis system. From the point of view of the attitude to the authenticity of the tradition of early Roman history, Kovalev in these years took a more critical position than later. It is enough to compare his statements about the complete absence of anything historically reliable in the legend of the foundation of Rome and that the first more or less reliable event of early Roman history was the recording of the current law (laws of the XII tables) with a later scrupulous analysis of the legend of the foundation of Rome in the university course ^{[3, pp. 65, 67]}.

Already in this book, S. I. Kovalev expresses his idea that the transition of power from tsars to two consuls (praetors) was not simultaneous, since initially the consuls were not equal, and one of them was the eldest ^{[3, p. 75]}. Of course, the Leningrad historian was not the first to express this idea. It is based on the well–known testimony of Titus Livy about the ancient law (lex vetusta), inscribed on the right side of the temple of Jupiter 1 the All-Good Greatest, which read: "in the Ides of September, let the supreme praetor drive a nail here" (ut qui praetor maximus sit idibus Septembribus clauvm pangat- Liv., VII, 3, 5-8).

T. Mommsen believed that the term praetor maximus meant in this case any magistrate who, at the time of the ceremony, turned out to be supreme in the Roman Republic by status ^{[4, S. 74-76]}. Other scientists have made various assumptions on this subject, depending on their position regarding the problem of transition from tsarist power to the highest republican magistracy [Detailed analysis of existing points of view: 5, pp. 39-50].

From whom did Kovalev borrow his version of the origin of the higher magistracy? Apparently, he was an outstanding historian and classical philologist, the last rector of the Imperial Kharkov University, I. V. Netushil. Later, in the famous textbook, S. I. Kovalev will directly point to the hypothesis of I. V. Netushil concerning the appearance of the higher Roman magistracy, and align himself with it ^{[6, p. 67]}. In his fundamental work "An Essay on Roman State Antiquities", published back in 1894, Netushil suggested that even in the college of two praetors, one could well be called praetor maximus, being the senior in it. This was usually denied, based on the fact that in classical Latin maximus is the superlative degree of comparison of an adjective, and if there were two magistrates in the college, the term maior would be more logical. However, Terentius (Ter. Adelph., 881: natu maximus) and Livy (Liv., I, 3, 10: stirpis maximus) give examples of the use of the term maximus in the sense of "the eldest of two" (brothers), and not three or more ^{[7, pp. 80-81]}.

It is worth noting that in foreign historiography, the "theory of unequal collegiality" was recognized and widely spread later and, quite possibly, not without the influence of the Italian translation of Kovalev's textbook ^{[8, p. 743-766],[9, p. 161-175],[10, p. 257-286]}. In any case, Kovalev emphasized the predominantly military nature of the supreme magistracy of the republic at its foundation, and also gave a number of additional arguments in favor of its duality: the existence of "senior" and "junior" centuries, the leadership of the coup by two patrician clans ^{[6, pp. 66-67]}. Kovalev's calculations in this regard were by no means subjective or unfounded: similar ideas were expressed in the same years by the Italian historian A. Bernardi, pointing to the origin of the original praetura from two commanders of the Servian Legion, respectively for the "senior" and "junior" centuries ^{[11, p. 24-26]}.

Kovalev's view of the origin of the institution of dictatorship in Rome was interesting and original. In the work of 1936, he wrote that this apparently happened in 438 BC in connection with the war with the city of Veii, without giving any additional arguments for this ^{[3, p. 88]}. In his university course, Kovalev linked the establishment of the dictatorship with the appearance of the consular military tribunate. Prior to that, the post of dictator, in his opinion, was simply not needed, since the senior praetor had sole power, and the second was his assistant. With the advent of a college of military tribunes with consular authority, each of whom had equal rights, there could be, under exceptional conditions, the need for maximum concentration of power in the hands of one person. Then, on the model of the higher magistracy that already existed in some Latin communities, the post of dictator was introduced in Rome ^{[6, p. 82]}.

It should be noted that this statement by Kovalev about the causes of the dictatorship may be one of the arguments against the theory that the original ordinary magistrate was a dictator, designated by the term praetor maximus, who was replaced in 449 by the laws of Valerius-Horace by two consuls. The "theory of dictatorship" was based precisely on the strangeness of explaining the emergence of dictatorship in the Roman tradition shortly after the establishment of the republic as a result of the war with the Latins ^{[12, S. 42-53],[13, S. 125],[14, S. 231-236]}. The events of 367-366 BC, related to the Licinius-Sextius legislation, S. I. Kovalev rightly considered as a key stage in the formation of the Roman republican statehood. In the university course, the model of the emergence of the higher magistracy was finally formulated, which went back to the hypothesis of I. V. Netushil (which is characteristic, Kovalev here already openly recognized the continuity of his views from the pre-revolutionary scientist). According to this model, the office of consul did not exist in the Roman Republic before the adoption of the Licinius-Sextius laws, but there were two praetors, the elder and the younger, who were replaced from time to time by military tribunes with collegial authority. Therefore, in reality, Licinius' rogation seems to have been reduced to the fact that a third praetor joined the two already existing praetors. He was to be elected only from the plebeians and in his power was completely equated with the eldest of the patrician praetors. Both of them, therefore, now represented the college and began to be called "consuls". The younger patrician praetor was assigned judicial rights, he did not enter the collegium and retained the old name of "praetor". At the same time, there was a doubling of the Aedile posts. This, according to Kovalev, is the most likely picture of the formation of the consulate, the collegiate higher magistracy, which was the historical completion of the decemvirate and military tribunate with consular authority ^{[6, pp. 85-86]}.

It is characteristic that such a prominent researcher of Roman state law in the middle of the XX century as K. von Fritz considered the events of 367-366 BC as an administrative reform ^{[15, p. 3-44]}. And the idea of the emergence of collegiality of the Roman magistracy no earlier than 367 BC also finds adherents in the historiography of recent decades ^{[16, S. 182-212]}. However, as V. V. Dementieva rightly noted, the first Roman magistrates endowed with equal collegiality were decemvirs, and it was under them that par potestas received its true formalization, expressed, first of all, in the right to impose a ban on the action of a colleague (ius intercessionis) ^{[17, pp. 72-90]}. Finally, according to the testimony of Dion Cassius in the transmission of the late author of the XII century. John Zonara (Zonar., VII, 19), it was from 449 BC that the highest magistrates, formerly called praetors, began to be called consuls.

Another problem that S. I. Kovalev tried to explain is the nature of the state structure of the Roman Republic. The Roman constitution as it developed by the beginning of the III century BC, in his opinion, was very far from the ideal of ancient democracy: the leading role of the nobility, the great importance of the senate, the disorganization of the people's assembly – all this made Rome an oligarchic rather than a democratic polis ^{[3, p. 87]}. Such conservatism of the Roman state system in comparison with advanced slave-owning democracies was explained, in his opinion, by the agrarian nature of the Italian economy and the lack of sufficient prerequisites for the development of simple commodity production in it, which led to insufficient growth of trade and craft elements of the city. It was the weakness of urban democracy that led to a compromise between the top of the plebs and the patrician and the creation of a new oligarchy of nobles ^{[20, p. 93]}. The old patrimonial nobility of the patricians was replaced by a new nobility (nobility), and the Roman Republic of the third century was, in essence, an oligarchic, not a democratic polis ^{[6, p. 93]}.

The recognition of the oligarchic nature of the Roman republican statehood was almost universal in the historiography of the Kovalev era: however, the prosopographical direction of M. Gelzer and F. Munzer set the tone for research during this period, arguing about informal instruments of power and influence as the foundations of the rule of nobility ^{[18; 19]}.

ConclusionsSumming up, it should be noted that the last years of S. I. Kovalev's life were devoted to the study of the history of early Christianity.

His work at the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism contributed to the appearance of a number of publications on this topic ^{[20; 21; 22]}. S. I. Kovalev's correspondence with the Italian historian of Christianity A. Donini, professor of the Department of the History of Christianity in Bari, Marxist and Secretary General of the Italian Association for the Development of Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union ^[23] also speaks of the historian's genuine interest in these subjects.

It is interesting to cite some details from this correspondence: for example, Donini's complaints that scientific and historical publications in Italy almost never exceed 2,000 copies of circulation, which is incomparable with the circulation of scientific publications in the Soviet Union. Donini also admitted to Kovalev that Italian historians of the Marxist trend are forced to divide their time between scientific pursuits and active political activity, since public life in Italy must be radically transformed before it is possible to engage in science more painstakingly. Parliamentary work took him 15-20 days a month, which greatly reduced the possibilities of systematic historical research ^{[23, p. 2-3]}.

Shortly before the death of the Leningrad professor, the Deutsche Literaturzeitung magazine, in a letter dated October 8, 1960, invited him to write a review of the book by the outstanding Italian historian Santo Mazzarino "La Fine del Mondo Antico" ^[24]. It remains only to regret that this review never saw the light.

In general, despite the schematism and simplicitness noted in the research literature in the scientific work of the first decades of Soviet power, the dogmatism of the Marxist formation doctrine and the attraction of Soviet scientists to broad generalizations, looking at the experience of scientific activity of S. I. Kovalev and his judgments on the main problems of the history of the Roman Republic, it is impossible to recognize them as superficial or in isolation from the then trends in the development of historiography of Roman history in leading European countries. In this regard, it is worth noting the readiness of the Marxist historian to approach with attention and respect the study of the works of outstanding Russian pre-revolutionary historians of antiquity, first of all, I. V. Netushil. In such a conservative discipline as antiquity, reliance on the traditions of the research school has always been an important help for the success of a novice researcher.