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Populares ("favoring the people", singular popularis) were leaders in the late Roman Republic who relied on the people's assemblies and tribunate to acquire political power. They are regarded in modern scholarship as in opposition to the optimates, who are identified with the conservative interests of a senatorial elite. The populares themselves, however, were also of senatorial rank and might be patricians, noble plebeians or Equites.
Populares addressed the problems of the urban plebs, particularly subsidizing a grain dole. They also garnered political support by attempts to expand citizenship to communities outside Rome and Italy.
Popularist politics reached a peak under the dictatorship of Julius Caesar, who had relied on the support of the people in his rise to power.[1] After the creation of the Second Triumvirate (43 BC–33 BC), popularis ceased to be a relevant political label.
Besides Caesar, notable populares included the Gracchi brothers, Marius, Cinna, Sertorius, Saturninus, Sulpicius Rufus, Drusus, Clodius Pulcher, Rullus and (during the First Triumvirate) Crassus and Pompey. Both Pompey and Crassus had, however, fought on the side of Sulla during the civil war, and after the death of Crassus, Pompey eventually reverted[2] to his position as a conservative optimas. These shifting allegiances are reminders that the designation populares refers as much to political tactics as to any perceived policy. Indeed, Republican politicians 'had always been more divided on issues of style than of policy'.[3]
A historian of the Late Republic cautions against understanding the terms populares and optimates as formally organized factions with an ideological basis:
This summarizes the dominant interpretation of the populares in 20th-century scholarship, deriving in large part from Ronald Syme in the Anglophone literature. In the early 21st century, and as early as the publication of the ninth volume of The Cambridge Ancient History in 1994,[5] the validity of examining popularist ideology in the context of Roman political philosophy has been reasserted. T.P. Wiseman, in particular, has rehabilitated the use of the word "party" to describe the political opposition between optimates and popularists, based on Latin usage (partes) and pointing to the consistency of a sort of party platform based on the food supply and general welfare of the populus, making land available to those outside the senatorial elite, and debt relief.[6]
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