Yet over the last decade or so, several scholars have been nibbling away at republican Rome's undemocratic reputation, arguing that it was an imperfect but still recognizable democracy. The Roman republic was a private fief of ''a narrow aristocratic cabal,'' compared with Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., which was revered as the birthplace of a purer show-of-hands democracy. ''The frozen waste theory'' is how Richard Talbert, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, describes what has become the conventional view. To most historians of this century, the Roman republic was a corrupt oligarchy ruled by a rich and decadent aristocracy despite its democratic Constitution, popular assemblies and regularly elected officials.
