Donald Trump, satire and the lex Caecilia Didia of 98 BCE

Classicists can be very nerdy. But there is one super-technical aspect of Roman legislative rules that might become more topical than you would imagine very soon. Let me explain, with no apologies for the nerdiness.

The key word here is the Latin satura.

The best-known sense of that word is literary. “Satire” was the only genre of literature that the Romans could count as wholly their own (in the tradition of Lucilius, Persius and Juvenal). But the word itself wasn’t literary in origin. It meant originally a “mixed dish” or a “pot pourri” or a “stuffed medley” – and that, of course, was the ancient character of “satire”, a good old mixture, rather than the biting wit which we associate with it.

Much less well known now is the legal sense of the term, to mean a single piece of legislation that brought together all kinds of different, often unconnected, provisions into a single “omnibus bill” (in modern terminology), to be voted on en bloc. In Roman law this was known as legislation “per saturam” and was fiercely prohibited, as it enabled all kinds of unwanted measures to be passed, almost hidden away, in the medley. The basic prohibition goes back early in Roman legal history, but it is most clearly stated in the law introduced in 98 BCE by the consuls Quintus Caecilius Metellus Nepos and Titus Didius. This reaffirmed two main legislative rules: first, that there had to be a minimum period, roughly three weeks in modern timekeeping, between promulgating a piece of legislation and voting on it (no unseemly haste in other words); second, that there were to be no mixed bills, per saturam. Cicero refers to that second principle of the lex Caecilia Didia (known by the names of its two proposers) a few decades later when he says: “the people are not to be forced in consequence of many different things being joined in one complicated bill, either to accept what it disapproves of; or reject what it approves”.

I doubt that the new US president has heard of the lex Caecilia Didia, but reports suggest that he is set on breaking its spirit in his “one big, beautiful bill” which will roll up several of his key MAGA policies all together, to be voted on per saturam, so that they can be got through more easily.

To be fair, US federal law seems to allow that, and it is certainly not unprecedented. But the popular phrase for such pieces of legislation, “big ugly bill” (which Trump parodies in “big, beautiful bill”), suggests that they are generally frowned upon. In some individual states, as in Rome, they are illegal. California is one of those, where they say, “you can stuff a turkey not a bill”!

Certainly, if Cicero were watching he would deplore the breaking of this fundamental aspect of legislative propriety – and I suspect that some of us will soon be finding it hard to resist a few references to the lex Caecilia Didia. It will be worse than satire, we might say.

The post Donald Trump, satire and the lex Caecilia Didia of 98 BCE appeared first on TLS.