Ted Stevens, it turns out, was not content to wield the awesome power of senior Republican member of the United States Senate, or trade it for the opportunity to make vast riches as an influence peddler. No, Uncle Ted wanted both – at the same time. Today, we call that an ethics violation, but the idea that great public offices are for public service, and not also private enrichment, is relatively novel to our day and age. It is hard to imagine a courtier under Louis XIV failing to exploit his power for personal gain – to say nothing of history’s first great republican world power: Rome.

Uncle Ted
To be a Senator in the Roman Republic you had to meet two criteria – neither of which was election. First, you had to belong to a “noble” family. Although we throw around the term patrician pretty casually, the truth is that there were plenty of plebians in the Senate as well – they just had to be of an old and well established gens. Patrician in the modern English usage is a good way of thinking about it: your family had to have a long history of service to the State, military and political being the most illustrious forms, and an equally long history of intermarriage with other acceptable people. True patricians were nobles dating back to the Roman Kings, and were undeniably the creme de la creme of Republican society, but by the time of Julius Caesar, there were few rights reserved to them which were not accessible to the noblest plebian families as well.
The second key criterion was wealth. Big-time wealth. To be eligible for Senate membership during most of the Republic, one usually had to be comfortably in the top 1% of Roman citizens by net worth. Certain exceptions were made at different times for winners of high military honors and others, but generally speaking being a Senator also required being filthy rich. Now that’s not to say the rules were always enforced. Indeed one of the most important times in the lives of many a Senator from illustrious but penurious family was whenever the state decided to conduct a new census. This was done in a shockingly arbitrary manner. If the two senior officers of the Senate called Censors were elected, and they often were not, it was their duty to carry out the census – but no one looked over their shoulders. Thus many families retained their Senatorial rank for generations without having their assets subject to review, and many more were allowed to slip through the cracks when it came time to tally the numbers. After all, even the prickliest rule-follower would have trouble throwing out his wife’s brother – especially if said relative carried a name like Julius, Servilius, Cornelius or Junius.
Of course, every so often, that’s exactly what happened. It was during these times of peril that the pressure to squeeze money out of one’s office was really on. Technically Senators were not allowed to engage in trade of any kind, including the lending of money – activities which were reserved for the non-Senatorial banking and business class known as ordo equestor – or “knights” in modern parlance. That meant the only valid source of income for Senators was land: rents, farms, agriculture, etc. good traditional preserves of any aristocratic elite, no matter how Republican.

Cato the Elder, a famous Censor and all around moralizer
In practice, land was the first thing to go when a family hit hard times and needed cash, so many of the poorer Senators lacked an estate to call their own. Indeed, Julius Caesar himself was famously poor at the start of his career, his father having left him a plot of land that was just enough to meet the Senatorial census, but was too mortgaged to provide much income. Nobles of the Senatorial class usually had access to vast amounts of credit, but Roman bankers were not above taking their vaunted clients (and sometimes their relatives) to court to recover their loans, and at any rate, borrowed cash would not appease the Censor’s clerks.
The grand result? The purpose of any ambitious Senator was to achieve the high offices of state and line his pockets as thickly as possible on the way. The Roman Republic was governed by a set of magistrates and it was mainly through exercise of these offices that the conscript fathers enriched themselves.
Every year the Republic elected two Consuls, who served as head of state and government; four or six praetors who were administrators and the heads of the courts; and a number of lesser officials. Each praetor and consul when finished with their year in office was given one of Rome’s provinces to govern. These governors – known as propraetors and proconsuls – were absolute rulers within their provinces, answerable only to the Senate and Assemblies, and only once they got back to Rome.
Based on this system, two major forms of public corruption emerged. First the corruption of serving magistrates. Typically this involved accepting massive sums of money, often from foreign rulers, in exchange for advancing certain legislation or policies – sound familiar? For example, it is speculated that the last Kings of Egypt regularly distributed unholy sums of cash to needy Senators to prevent a Roman seizure of their wealthy but weak realm.
Second was the corruption of provincial governors. Fighting a small war was usually a good way to make a buck, since the general/governor got a healthy slice of whatever spoils were seized before they went to the Treasury. The dumbest governors simply appropriated cash, goods and land from their provincial citizens – but while effective in the near term, this was a great way to get hauled up before the corruption courts on your return to Rome. Cicero made his reputation as an advocate prosecuting corruption, including one famously avaricious governor who was exiled for life after he was convicted of stealing precious works of art from Greek cities in Asia Minor.
The smart governors got into the tax racket. Like most pre-modern governments, the Roman Republic did not have a centralized bureaucracy capable of collecting taxes accross its vast domains. So, to ensure the flow of revenue, the Senate contracted collection to firms of “tax farmers” who got a portion fo the revenue as a fee for their trouble. Governors who colluded with their local farmers could make a killing by imposing new taxes on their province – using whatever excuse was handy – and then accepting a share of the revenue generated by the collection firms as a “thank you” gift from the happy profitmakers.

the Roman Province of Asia during the Republic
This practice was more or less invented in the generations prior to Caesar and started out relatively small. By the end of the Republic however, tax farming was big business and the profits were heady indeed. The problem was that rich provinces like Greece and “Asia” (encompassing most of modern day Turkey) were squeezed to the breaking point by avaricious profiteers and their gubernatorial collaborators. This reduced the amount of tax revenue reaching the Treasury as well and tax farmers became highly unpopular people.
So while some stigma still attached itself in Rome to the idea of wealth gained through office – other than by prosecuting a war against the enemies of the state – it was still accepted as a fact of life. Imagine our world today if Governors were allowed to keep a portion of their state’s tax revenue? And yet still we grapple with the gray areas. What of all the former Members of Congress who join lobbying firms? Think about the current hot water Tom Daschle is in for his lucrative career as an adviser and rainmaker even though it is clear he did nothing approaching wrong.
One of the fundamental burdens we struggle with in our modern democracy is the meaning of a spirit of public service. In a world where such awe inspiring material rewards are available to the brightest, most driven people, what are we asking of their personal morality to devote their lives to the public good? To drive Toyotas while they watch their peers acquire beach houses and yachts? And what about those elected officials of huge personal wealth, our modern day Crassuses? Does their money get them immunity to petty corruption – and if so, what about the more vast and tempting opportunitites available to a lawmaker with a few hundred million to invest? These questions have been a part of elected government’s self examination since the dawn of democracy and they will continue. The important thing is that we think about them regularly, and have open public dialogue. As for Senator Stevens, I may not have agreed with most of his politics, but it is undeniably a sad thing to watch a towering personality of historic importance undone by a free viking stove and a gas generator. Makes you think.