Rome is both a city whose people repeatedly exercised sovereign power in public assembly and a historical case through which Rousseau traces the rise and decay of political institutions. Its arrangements connected citizens to voting, office, and legal protection; its later concentration of power illustrates how a government can turn against the sovereignty from which it derives. The same history makes Rome, in Rousseau’s account, evidence for the importance of civic participation and for the danger of political contraction.

Scale, Population, and Political Form

Rousseau treats Rome as a striking example of how a large population can participate in government. The last census he cites counted four hundred thousand citizens capable of bearing arms in the city, while a calculation of the Empire’s population listed more than four million citizens, excluding subjects, foreigners, women, children, and enslaved people. These figures serve a specific argumentative purpose: the size of the population did not make regular popular assembly impossible.

In Rome, weeks rarely passed without the people assembling, and some weeks saw several meetings. The assembly exercised sovereign rights, but also performed some governmental work: it considered matters and judged cases. Rousseau emphasizes that citizens appeared in the public meeting-place not only as citizens but also, in some respects, as magistrates. The example counters the claim that popular sovereignty is workable only in a small community, while leaving intact his broader argument that a state’s population and territory must be appropriately proportioned.

That argument begins with a limit: every body politic has a maximum strength, and growth can weaken rather than reinforce it. A small state, Rousseau maintains, is generally stronger in proportion to its size. The land must sustain the people, while the people must be numerous enough to maintain the land. Too much territory is difficult to guard and may be poorly cultivated; too little leaves a state dependent on neighbors. In either case, the imbalance can produce war. Rome thus figures within a wider account of political scale: its assemblies demonstrate one possibility, but state strength still depends on the relation between territory, population, and the demands of self-government.

Rousseau also proposes a general correspondence between state size and form of government: democracy tends to suit small states, aristocracy those of medium size, and monarchy great ones, although he allows that circumstances can produce exceptions. Rome’s history is not simply a counterexample to that rule. It is instead a record of changing institutions, whose sequence must be understood through the distribution of political power rather than through names alone.

Founding Divisions and Popular Assemblies

Rousseau acknowledges that the earliest records of Rome are uncertain and that foundational stories may be fables. He nevertheless turns to established customs and authoritative traditions to reconstruct how the Roman people exercised supreme power. In his account, the new republic after Rome’s foundation consisted of the army of its founder: Albans, Sabines, and foreigners. It was divided into three tribes, each into ten curiae, and each curia into decuriae, under leaders called curiones and decuriones. Each tribe also supplied one hundred Equites, or Knights, forming a century. Rousseau reads these divisions as initially military in character, while also suggesting that Rome’s early organization anticipated the needs of a much greater political future.

The original ethnic division created an imbalance. The Alban and Sabine tribes remained stable, while the foreign tribe grew as newcomers settled in Rome and soon became stronger than the others. Servius addressed the problem by replacing divisions based on descent with four tribes based on the quarters of the city, each associated with one of Rome’s hills. Residents were not allowed to move from one quarter to another, so the new scheme organized people by locality while also preventing the mixing of the groups. For Rousseau, this institutional change corrected a present inequality and prepared for future growth.

The people voted in assemblies called comitia, usually held in Rome’s public square or the Campus Martius. Rousseau distinguishes the Comitia Curiata, attributed to Romulus; the Comitia Centuriata, attributed to Servius; and the Comitia Tributa, attributed to the tribunes of the people. No law received sanction and no magistrate was elected outside the comitia. Since every citizen belonged to a curia, century, or tribe, Rousseau concludes that none was excluded from voting and that the Roman people was sovereign both in law and in practice.

That sovereignty depended on procedure. A lawful assembly required a convener with authority, a day permitted by law, and favorable auguries. The choice of day had a practical purpose: festivals and market-days were excluded so that rural people who came to Rome on business would not be unable to spend the day in the public square. The requirement of favorable auguries, by contrast, gave the Senate a means of restraining popular action, including the efforts of tribunes. Rousseau’s account therefore shows popular power operating through rules that could also constrain it.

Voting, Political Conflict, and Institutional Change

The different comitia did not distribute political influence in the same way. Rousseau considers the Comitia Tributa most favorable to popular government and the Comitia Centuriata most favorable to aristocracy. The Comitia Curiata, where the urban populace formed a majority, became associated with tyranny and disreputable designs. Each assembly had exclusions: the Comitia Curiata left out rural tribes, while the Comitia Tributa excluded the Senate and patricians. Rousseau therefore locates the full majesty of the Roman people in the Comitia Centuriata, which alone included all.

At first, citizens stated their votes aloud, and a clerk recorded them. A majority within each tribe, curia, or century determined that unit’s vote; majorities among the units then determined the vote of the people. Rousseau regards public voting as suitable when citizens are honest and feel shame at supporting an unjust measure or unworthy candidate. Once corruption and vote-buying took hold, secrecy became necessary: it could make purchasers uncertain and allow voters who had been corrupted to avoid openly betraying their own judgment.

Rousseau disagrees with Cicero’s claim that this alteration helped ruin the republic. In his view, the absence of necessary institutional changes is more likely to hasten a state’s destruction. A healthy political arrangement cannot simply be imposed on a corrupted people without adaptation; he compares the problem to a health regimen that does not suit the sick. He points to the long life of the Republic of Venice as an example of laws suited to people he characterizes as wicked. In Rome, secret tablets were introduced, along with new ways to collect them, count votes, and compare totals. These safeguards did not end suspicion of officials, and repeated edicts against electoral intrigue and vote-trading revealed how difficult it was to suppress them.

The Roman arrangement also illustrates Rousseau’s distinction between sovereignty and government. The people could be sovereign in the comitia, while magistrates and other institutions carried out governing functions; the balance among them could change without the vocabulary of the constitution necessarily changing. The assemblies’ forms and procedures were therefore not neutral machinery. They shaped which groups could act, what kinds of government were favored, and how securely popular authority was expressed.

Civic Protection and the Meaning of Roman Virtue

Rousseau presents the protection of individual citizens as another measure of Rome’s political character. In Macedon, he says, Alexander the Great would not have put a Macedonian criminal to death without first allowing the accused to defend himself before fellow citizens and be condemned by them. Rome, in Rousseau’s comparison, went further in the public authority required to condemn a citizen: neither the Senate nor the consuls could do so on their own, and an assembly of the whole people was necessary. The punishment of a citizen was treated as a public calamity rather than a matter of administrative convenience.

The Lex Porcia, as Rousseau describes it, commuted the death penalty to banishment for those willing to survive separation from their country. He connects this restraint to a broader civic bond expressed through honors: the cap awarded to a citizen freed from slavery and the civic crown given to someone who had saved another’s life were celebrated in Roman triumphs. The civic crown and the victorious general’s crown were, he notes, made of laurel, while other honors were of gold. These distinctions make the preservation of fellow citizens, rather than wealth alone, a visible source of public esteem.

This regard for citizens supports Rousseau’s account of how Rome became powerful. He links its civic virtue to reciprocal respect between citizens and their country, and argues that rulers should respect their fellow citizens and their liberty rather than exceed their authority. A country should act as a common mother; people should enjoy a share in public administration sufficient to make them feel at home, and laws should serve as guarantees of common liberty. These claims also expose a danger: rulers can leave rights formally intact while rendering them ineffective, and the appeal to the public good can become a weapon against the weak. The protection of poor people from the powerful is consequently part of the work of just government, not an optional addition to it.

From Republic to Dissolution

Rousseau rejects the idea that Rome simply passed in a straightforward sequence from monarchy to aristocracy and then to democracy. He describes what Romulus established as a mixed government that soon deteriorated into despotism and ended prematurely. In his account, the expulsion of the Tarquins marks the republic’s true birth, but the new arrangement remained unsettled because it retained the patriciate. Hereditary aristocracy continued to conflict with democracy, leaving the political work of the founding incomplete.

The establishment of the tribunate, which Rousseau associates with Machiavelli’s account, fixed the form of the government and made it a genuine democracy. At that point, the people were not only sovereign but also magistrate and judge. The Senate served as a subordinate body that could temper and concentrate government, while the consuls—though patricians, first magistrates, and commanders in war—were, within Rome, no more than presidents of the people.

After this settlement, the government followed what Rousseau considers its natural tendency and leaned toward aristocracy. The aristocratic power no longer belonged solely to the patrician order: it could reside in the Senate, composed of patricians and plebeians, or even in tribunes who began to assume an active governing role. For Rousseau, the names attached to institutions matter less than who actually rules. When rulers govern on behalf of the people, the government is aristocratic, whatever their titles.

Abuse of aristocratic government led, in Rousseau’s account, to civil wars and the triumvirate. Sulla, Julius Caesar, and Augustus became monarchs in fact; under Tiberius’s despotism, the state was dissolved. This progression confirms rather than refutes Rousseau’s general theory that government tends to contract from many to few, and from few to one. Because the government’s particular will continually opposes the general will, its exertions alter the constitution until the sovereign is suppressed and the social compact broken. Rome’s trajectory thus holds together the promise and the warning of Rousseau’s political analysis: popular authority can be organized in practical institutions and embodied in civic protections, but it can also be displaced as government accumulates power and the republic’s forms cease to match the power exercised in its name.