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The Senate from an extra-institutional point of view

Chapter 8 studies how conversations and meetings impacted political deliberation and deal-making in the Senate, thus fusing extra-institutional and institutional politics. How did senators look for support and probe each other regarding specific issues? How did preparatory conversations work? It is a fact of life, in ancient Rome as nowadays, that the written text of a decision does not fully reflect the previous groundwork, negotiations, and discussions that led to it. The study of Atticus allows us to consider the role and influence of non-senatorial actors. The aim of this chapter is not to claim that a certain measure was enacted because A and B had a conversation during a dinner or because someone secured the support of C and D during a quick chat in the Forum or in a corner of the Senate house (although such actions are described). Going beyond the micro-scale and specific instances, the interest of this study is to analyse how these actions illuminate our understanding of how the Roman political system worked in practice. This chapterargues that the role of conversations and meetings did not mean that all was decided beforehand; a senator could gather support for a draft of a law or a policy through previous conversations, but he still had to defend it and fight for it in public institutions (the Senate, contiones, and assemblies), without always being able to guarantee success beforehand.