How Would Rome Have Been Different Without the Patron-Client System?

How would Rome have been different without the patron-client system? Would Republican politics be more sustainable without such a personalistic element? Assuming that lands would eventually still be distributed to soldiers by generals rather than the state, would it even have mattered? Could the empire have been held together without the massive networks of mutual assistance? How would it be possible to not have such a naturally patrimonialisic institution in the first place?
 
Isn't Rome based on the patron system? What would replace it?
Ja. That kind of question is impossible to answer. HOW do they get rid of it, what replaces it, etc., etc.
It's not quite as bad as 'How would Rome have been different if they didn't speak Latin'. The changes are so huge, that anything could happen.
 
Ja. That kind of question is impossible to answer. HOW do they get rid of it, what replaces it, etc., etc.
It's not quite as bad as 'How would Rome have been different if they didn't speak Latin'. The changes are so huge, that anything could happen.
It's funny, I've never seen any description of how it arose. Historians seem to almost treat it as autochthonous.
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
That's like asking what England would be like without the common law. The patron-client system was so deeply a part of how Rome operated that it's simply impossible to imagine Rome without it.
 
It's funny, I've never seen any description of how it arose. Historians seem to almost treat it as autochthonous.
It actually seems to have had close parallels in most Italic and Etruscan city-states we know enough about to guess, that is, usually South Etruria and Campania.
An Etruscologist whose name I forgot, and whose work I read recently, interprets the system of Roman clientage as an extreme within the spectrum of social dependence typical of all Mediterranean city-states of Iron and Classical age: Rome and Sparta likely represented the extremes, with clientes and helots being respectively the freer and less free among these non-slave dependent groups.
Roman clientage also appears to have been rooted at least in part to "Indo-European" ideological notions (the dependent retinue of a noble house with mutual, but unequal, obligations - there are known Celtic and Germanic parallels, though I am sure that a lot of this is not limited to IE speaking societies).
So yeah, it's hard to image a more basic institution in Republican Rome.
 
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