Pubblico assembleare tra contiones e comitia

The contribution seeks to investigate the relationship between the audience attending to late Republican contiones and the people participating to voting comitia, with the aim of assessing the impact of public discourse onto popular vote. In the first part of the paper, the focus is the social composition of contional assemblies: the problem is addressed from a fresh perspective, showing that some social groups and professional categories generally neglected by scholars concerned with the matter prove to be particularly relevant to the structure of average contional audiences. In the second part, a completely new way of interpreting the evidence available is put forward: all the discourses produced before contional audiences kept circulating after the assemblies were over, , thanks to the agency of popular opinion leaders, reaching a much wider public than the one attending in person: such circumstance, on the one hand, makes the matching rate of the audiences of contiones and comitia scarcely relevant for determining the relation between political discourse and popular vote; on the other, reveals the importance of popular networks in the moulding of public opinion and the setting of political agendas.