The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 06

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CHAPTER XXIX. THE EMPIRE AND THE PROVINCES

When Augustus entered upon secure possession of absolute power, the Roman Empire included the fairest and most famous lands on the face of the globe and all the civilised peoples of the ancient world found a place in its ample bosom. It extended from the ocean on the west to the Euphrates, from the Danube and the Rhine to the cataracts of the Nile and the deserts of Africa and Arabia. And although, in the first decades of imperial rule, a few tribes within its huge circumference had not completely assimilated the system of Roman civilisation and law; although in the Alps and Pyrenees, on the lower Danube and in the inaccessible gorges of the Taurus some warlike races retained their savage freedom and did not stoop their necks to the rods and axes of Rome, the mighty mistress of the world—they offered but a futile defiance, better fitted to assert and exercise the martial vigour of the legions than to inspire the masters of the world with dread or set bounds to their dominion.

The wars which Augustus or his legates waged in the Cantabrian Mountains of northwestern Spain, in the Alps and the wooded hills of Dalmatia, merely served to consolidate the empire and strengthen its frontiers, and gave the imperial ruler an opportunity of renewing the martial feats and triumphs of the republic. The Spanish mountaineers were transplanted to the plains and constrained to conduct themselves peaceably. Deprived of their savage liberty, they accustomed themselves to agriculture and social life; and the Spanish cities, endowed with privileges and connected by highroads, soon became seats of Roman culture and spheres of active influence in trade and commerce. The products of the soil, the largess of the sea, the fruits of industry—oil and wine, honey and wax, wool and salt fish—were exported in large quantities from the ports of Spain and filled the seaboard cities with wealth. The fierce and predatory tribes of the Alpine range, from Savoy and Piedmont to Istria, were again and again smitten with the edge of the sword and forced to submit; the newly founded military colony of Augusta Prætoria (Aosta), in the country of the Salassians and at the junction of the Graian and Pennine Alps, served thenceforward as a bulwark to the Roman possessions in northwest Italy, after the stubbornness of the hardy mountaineers had been broken by the carrying off of such men as were capable of bearing arms to the slave market at Eporedia (Ivrea).

[15 B.C.-7 A.D.]

In the year 15 B.C. the free races of Rætia, Vindelicia, and Noricum were conquered, from the Lake of Constance and the Valley of the Inn to the Adriatic; and Tiberius led his legions from Gaul to the sources of the Rhine, there to join hands with Drusus, the vigorous youth for whom was reserved the honour of “ushering in the last hour of the liberty of the mountains,” and who was then advancing from the south. A single campaign sufficed to destroy forevermore the freedom of these disconnected tribes, who had no national ties to unite them into a political entity. A trophy on the southern slope of the mountain rampart proclaimed to posterity that under the leadership and auspices of Augustus four-and-forty nations, all mentioned by name, had been vanquished and subjugated by the sword of Rome. The transportation of the most vigorous elements of the population to foreign parts, the construction of Alpine roads, the erection of fortresses and castella, and the founding of military colonies (amongst which Augusta Vindelicorum, the present Augsburg, and Regina Castra, the modern Ratisbon, quickly took the first rank), secured these conquests and won fresh territory for the dominion of Rome; so that in a short time all the land between the Danube and the Alps was included in the provincial dominions of the Roman Empire.

At the same time the great stretch of country from Istria to Macedonia and from the Adriatic to the Save was won for the empire; what had hitherto been the maritime province of Illyricum was not only augmented by the addition of the territory of the Iapydes (Iapodes) and Dalmatians, but a station and magazine was established on the lower Danube by the conquest of the Pannonian town of Siscia at the confluence of the Colapis (Kulpa) and Save. In vain did the Iapydes defend their capital with the courage of desperation; the emperor himself, though wounded in the thigh and in both arms, prosecuted the attack until all men capable of bearing arms had fallen in the fray, and the women, old men, and children had perished either in the flames of the burning town or by their own hands. In a very short time strong fortified lines were drawn through Pannonia and Mœsia to the southern bank of the river, and presently a continuous chain of fortresses under the charge of six legions prepared the way for the acquisition of fresh provinces, and warded off the raids of the northern barbarians.

The Thracian principalities south of the Hæmus sank into a more and more dependent position. In the reign of Tiberius, Cotys, a gentle and amiable prince, was murdered by his cruel uncle Rhescuporis. The widow appealed to Rome, whereupon the perpetrator of the crime was deposed by a decree of the senate, and the country divided between the sons of the two kings. Under these circumstances the sovereignty of Rome struck ever deeper root, till at length the last shadow of liberty and independence vanished and the whole of Thrace was gathered into the ample bosom of the world-empire.

The attempts at revolt made by the Pannonians and Dalmatians in the years 12 and 11 B.C. were savagely suppressed by Agrippa, and after his death by his successor Tiberius. The deportation of the men capable of bearing arms into slavery and the disarmament of the remainder re-established quiet and submission for a long while. But the love of liberty was not quelled in this warlike race. Infuriated by the extortions of Rome, who—in the words of one of their leaders—sent “not shepherds and dogs, but wolves, to tend the flocks,” and at the enlistment of their gallant sons for service in foreign parts, the Dalmatians and Pannonians again drew the sword in the year 6 A.D. to free themselves from the burdens of taxation and military service.

The rebellion spread rapidly through the whole country; enterprising leaders, two of whom bore the name of Bato, marched upon the Roman fortresses of Sirmium and Salona, ravaging the land as they went, while others harassed Macedonia with a large army. A bold troop of armed men threatened to invade Italy by way of Tergeste (Trieste); a disquieting agitation was abroad among the fierce Dalmatian and Sarmatian horsemen of the grassy steppes beyond the Danube; Roman traders were robbed and murdered. The alarm which took possession of the capital at these woeful tidings, and the military activity aroused throughout all Italy, sufficiently prove that Rome did not underestimate the danger that menaced her from the East. Discharged veterans were again enrolled in the legions, a slave tax was imposed to defray the cost of the war, peace was concluded with Marboduus, the prince of the Marcomanni, whom the Romans were on the point of attacking.

This devastating war, according to Suetonius the most terrible since the Punic Wars, lasted for three years [7-9 A.D.]. Tiberius and his nephew Germanicus, the son of Drusus, marched through the length and breadth of Dalmatia and Pannonia—now tempting the fortune of war, now treading the paths of treachery, and fostering discord by negotiations. After many sanguinary battles Bato came to terms with the Romans for the surrender of the impregnable mountain stronghold of Anderium, not far from Salona, and went with his family to Ravenna, where Tiberius granted him a liberal allowance to the end of his days, in recompense for his desertion of his country’s cause.

The fortress of Arduba, built on a steep height and protected by a turbulent river, held out longer; the most determined of the insurgents had thrown themselves into it, together with a large number of deserters. But its hour at length drew nigh. After the flower of the garrison, having made a sortie, had fallen in a sanguinary fight at close quarters, the survivors set fire to their homes and, with their wives and children, sought death in the flames or in the foaming torrent. The other towns then surrendered at discretion, and mute obedience settled once more on all the land between the Adriatic and the lower Danube. But the country was waste and inhabitants were few in the blood-sodden fields. The great river from source to mouth soon formed the northern boundary of the empire. The Thracian principalities were merged into the province of Mœsia.

[30 B.C.-14 A.D.]

In Asiatic countries, too, there were many conflicts to be endured, many complications to be unravelled, before the states and nations west of the Euphrates bowed in awe and submission to the supremacy of Rome. The order of things established by Pompey had indeed remained valid in law down to the days of Augustus, but great changes had taken place in the various states in consequence of the civil wars. The republicans Brutus and Cassius, no less than the triumvirs Antony and Octavian, had requited the friendly or hostile sentiments of princes, towns, and provinces with rewards or penalties, had given or taken away privileges and dominion, had bestowed or withdrawn their countenance according to merit or liking. When Augustus appeared in the East, ten years after the battle of Actium, native kingdoms, temporal principalities and hierarchies, free cities, and other territorial divisions, occupying a more or less dependent position towards Rome and bound to render her military service, still existed, as in former times, side by side with the four Roman provinces of Asia, Bithynia, Cilicia, and Syria. Many of these were deprived of their previous status on various pretexts, and swallowed up in the congeries of Roman provinces.

Thus, after the death of that able factionary Amyntas, the general and successor of Deiotarus, Augustus created the province of Galatia out of the major part of his possessions, adding to it first Lycaonia, and later, after the death of Deiotarus Philadelphus, the grandson of the famous Galatian king, the inland region of Paphlagonia. The Pontic kingdom, together with Lesser Armenia, Colchis, and the seaboard towns of Pharnacia and Trapezus, were ruled under favour of Antony and Octavian, by the brave and prudent Polemon as the “friend and ally of the Roman people,” and to these dominions he added the kingdom of the Bosporus, the heritage of his wife Dynamis. After his death, his widow Pythodoris bestowed her hand upon King Archelaus of Cappadocia, who likewise owed his kingdom to the favour of Antony and Octavian and to his devotion to Rome.

By this means the two kingdoms were united, and formed an excellent barrier against the eastern barbarians. But this new creation was not destined to last. Lesser Armenia and Cappadocia were merged into the province of Cappadocia as early as the reign of Tiberius, after Archelaus had died at Rome of fear at the charges brought against him in the senate by the emperor, whose displeasure he had incurred, and the hieratic principality of Comana was added to the same province. Under the rule of Rome the ancient cities rose to great wealth and magnificence, especially Nicomedia in Bithynia and Cæsarea in Cappadocia. Dioscurias and the myth-haunted region about the Phasis became the centre of a far-reaching commercial activity, the market of the world. There Roman merchants bought wool and furs from northern lands, and precious stones, seric (silken) garments, and luxuries from the far East.

Augustus and his successors endeavoured in like manner to unite the disjointed provinces of southern Asia Minor and to range them under the Roman provincial system. The confederacy of Lycia maintained its existence and liberty for some decades longer as a “ruin of antique times,” and Antony and Octavian exerted themselves to the best of their ability to stanch the wounds which Brutus had inflicted. But the confederacy, its prosperity shattered and its bonds loosened by internal discords, was so far past recovery that its conversion into a Roman province in the reign of Claudius seemed a boon. The province of Cilicia was augmented by the addition of Pisidia and the island of Cyprus. A Roman garrison was set to guard the “Cilician Gates” leading to Syria, and Augustus committed to some native dependent princes the work of conquering the robber tribes which dwelt in savage freedom in the mountains and gorges of the Taurus and Amanus. These were not incorporated into the actual dominions of Rome till the reign of Vespasian.

After the battle of Actium, Syria with her subordinate provinces reverted to her old position, which had been temporarily disturbed by the Parthian invasions and the donations of Antony to Cleopatra and her children. Four legions provided for internal tranquillity and security against the neighbour races to the south and east. The northern mountain region of Commagene, with the town of Samosata, the last relic of the Seleucid empire, remained in possession of an independent prince for some time longer, and at his death it was annexed to the province of Syria. A like fate befell the district of Judea, which the Romans had long treated with peculiar favour, for the Julian family was at all times well disposed towards the Jews. After the death of King Herod, who had contrived to gain and retain the favour and confidence of the emperor and Agrippa, his son-in-law and general, by flatteries, presents, and services, the kingdom of Judea, convulsed by party hatreds and dissensions, was also merged, as we have seen, into the Roman world-empire. As a Roman province it was put under the rule of a procurator, who, though nominally under the control of the governor of Syria at Antioch, exercised most of the prerogatives that pertained to proconsuls and proprætors in other countries, in particular the power of inflicting capital punishment. Judea was nevertheless for a long while the “spoiled darling of Rome”; the people of God remained in possession of their faith, their laws, and their nationality; they were exempted from military service and enjoyed many rights and privileges in all countries.

The procurator (agent) for Judea resided at Cæsarea, the new port which Herod had founded, and which rose rapidly to commercial prosperity under Roman rule. Many foreigners settled there under the protection of the Roman garrison, which had its headquarters in the seat of government. The governor was subject in all military matters to the proconsul of Syria, in so far that the latter was bound to come to his assistance in war if appealed to. The inconsiderable garrison at Cæsarea and the small force encamped at Jerusalem were only just sufficient to maintain tranquillity and order in time of peace. At festivals, when great crowds gathered together in Jerusalem, the governor himself went to the Holy City with an army, and “probably disposed of a good deal of business in the supreme judicature and other matters which had been deferred till then.” He then resided in the prætorium, near the Antonia. He gave judgment from a lofty judgment seat set up in a portico adorned with beautiful marble. The trials took place in an inner court. The army had another camp in Samaria.

Augustus

(From a cameo)

Though the Jewish nation had more liberty to manage its domestic concerns under Roman rule than under the Herods, it found small relief from the burden of taxes and customs. The Romans exacted a property tax (a poll tax and ground rate), a duty on houses, market produce, and many other imposts. The temple tax, on the other hand (assessed at two drachmæ), was regarded as a voluntary rate and collected by priestly officials, the Romans not concerning themselves about it. A general census which Augustus caused to be made by P. Sulpicius Quirinus, knight and proconsul, after he had taken possession of the country (about 10 A.D.), with a view to finding out how much the country could annually yield to the revenue in proportion to its population, the acreage under cultivation, and other circumstances, was the first thing that gave deep offence to the orthodox among the Jews.

The small dominions which Augustus and his family left to be administered as vassal states by the Herod family—such as the northeastern district with the old town of Paneas, first ruled by the upright and able Herod Philip, who expanded Paneas into the great city of Cæsarea (Philippi); and Galilee and Perea, the heritage of the subtle and greedy tetrarch Antipas, (commonly called Herod) the fulsome flatterer of the Romans, and founder of the cities of Sepphoris (Diocæsarea) and Tiberias—were merged into the Roman world-empire some decades later by the failure of heirs to the subject dynasty. On a journey to Jerusalem the last-named prince, Antipas, the Herod of the Gospels, became enamoured of Herodias, the beautiful wife of his half-brother Philip, herself a member of the Herod family, and prevailed upon her to leave her husband and bestow her hand upon himself.

This criminal marriage bore evil fruit for the tetrarch. His former wife fled to her father, the Arab prince of Petra, and urged him on to make war upon her faithless husband, who allowed himself to be led in all things by Herodias, and heeded the sullen disaffection of his people as little as the open rebukes of the preacher of repentance, John the Baptist. In the reign of Caligula, Antipas was deprived of his kingdom on the indictment of his cousin and brother-in-law Herod Agrippa, and banished with his wife, Herodias, to Gaul, where they both died. Under the emperor Claudius, however, Herod Agrippa, grandson of Herod the Great, who had been brought up at Rome, again gained dominion over Judea and Samaria, and maintained his authority for three years (41-44). An adventurer and soldier of fortune, and a favourite and flatterer of the Cæsars by turns, he was smitten with a horrible disease while looking on at the games in the circus, shortly after a persecution of the Christians, and succumbed to it in a few days.

The deserts in the southeast of the province of Syria were inhabited by free Arab tribes, which from the earliest times had led a roving and predatory life. Augustus acted as Pompey had done before him; he concluded a treaty and alliance with Malchus of Petra, the Nabatæan prince and successor to Aretas, and with the chieftain Iamblichus of Emesa, whose father, another Iamblichus, had been executed by Antony, guaranteeing to them the possession of their paternal inheritance on condition that they should ward off the predatory incursions of the sons of the desert. An attempt made by Ælius Gallus, governor of Egypt, to subjugate Arabia Felix in the year 24 ended miserably. The glare of the sun and the perils of the climate soon scared the invaders away and protected the natives from the Roman swords. The general of the Nabatæan prince, who had conducted the desert campaign, paid for his supposed treason with his life; but the disloyalty of the servant was not laid to his master’s charge.

Rome had still an affair of honour to settle with the Parthians; the day of Carrhæ was not yet requited and the blood of Crassus and his comrades cried for vengeance. Augustus nevertheless cherished no desire to expose himself and his legions to the darts of the iron horsemen. In this instance fortune again proved his ally. Parthia and Armenia, which at that time stood in intimate relations with one another, were distracted with quarrels over the succession. Tigranes, son of the unhappy Artavasdes, appealed for Roman aid against Artaxias, the nominee of the Parthian king. Tiberius invaded Armenia with an army, and bestowed the throne on the protégé of Rome, Artaxias having been slain by the natives at the general’s coming (20 B.C.). This catastrophe filled the Parthian king with apprehensions that the Romans might declare for the pretender Tiridates, and procure for himself a like fate with Artaxias. He therefore complied with the demands of Augustus and restored the Roman ensigns and the prisoners who had been detained in the far East ever since the disaster of Carrhæ. The emperor celebrated the restoration of the eagles by a sacrificial feast, as if it had been a victory, and dedicated a temple to Mars the Avenger.

But Armenia attained to no lasting tranquillity; at one time it was dominated by Roman influence, at another the Parthians gained the upper hand; kings were installed and exiled, quarrels for the throne and party feuds filled the land. Under Nero, the Parthian king Vologeses I set his brother Tiridates on the throne of Armenia, and thus fanned the embers of war between the Romans and Parthians to a blaze.

The perfidious Armenians themselves supplied occasions of strife by invoking the aid of Rome on the one hand to save themselves from falling completely under the sway of their eastern neighbour, and favouring the Parthians on the other, lest they should be oppressed by Rome. In local situation and similarity of manners they were, as Tacitus observes, more closely akin to the Parthians, with whom they intermarried freely; and were inclined to servitude by reason of their ignorance of liberty. At this time Domitius Corbulo won great renown and revived the terror of the Roman arms, even under the vilest of the emperors. Having restored discipline among the legions, he victoriously invaded the mountain country, took its principal towns, Artaxata and Tigranocerta, and set up a certain Tigranes as a Roman claimant to the throne and a rival to the Parthian pretender (58 B.C.). Tigranes and his successor, a scion of the Herod family, held their ground for five years by the aid of Rome; then the Parthians regained the ascendency and again bestowed the throne on their own candidate Tiridates, Cæsennius Pætus, Corbulo’s successor, being powerless to prevent this revolution. But when Corbulo himself advanced once more into Armenia with his army the Parthians despaired of being able to hold their own in defiance of Rome. They therefore effected a compromise. In an interview with Corbulo, Tiridates consented to lay down his royal fillet before the emperor’s image and to receive it back from his hand at Rome. From that time forward the peace of the Eastern provinces long remained undisturbed.

In the province of Asia little alteration was made in the existing state of things, the privileges of certain cities were increased or curtailed according to the position they had taken up during the civil wars, and restrictions were imposed on the right of sanctuary of the Ephesian Diana, which had made the city a harbourage for criminals. The fresh vigour which Augustus infused into the disordered commonwealth produced a splendid aftermath of prosperity in the ancient seats of civilisation. Under the sway of order, that “bounteous daughter of heaven,” the peaceful arts rose to fresh glory, and in the first century of the empire the province of Asia contained five hundred populous cities. From the Greek islands the Romans imported articles of luxury and sensuous enjoyment; Parian and Phrygian marbles for their gorgeous buildings; the wine of Chios, the sea fish of Rhodes, and the game of Asia Minor for their epicurean banquets. Ephesus and Apamea were the marts and emporiums for the produce and artistic productions of the East. Thence the Roman merchant brought his fine Babylonian tissues, his Arabian and Persian incense and ointments, his robes of Tyrian purple. In the island of Cos were made the fine female garments which displayed rather than concealed the limbs, the “Coan robes” against which Seneca so vehemently inveighs.

The provinces of Achaia and Macedonia underwent no great change; they had both long since grown accustomed to the Roman rule, and though the former (which embraced the territory of ancient Greece up to the Cambunian and Ceraunian mountains and the islands of the Ægean Sea) had not, like the latter, renounced all interest in political life, but had sided with one party or the other in the wars of the Roman despots, the Romans of those days were too ardent admirers of Greek culture to visit the transgressions of individuals upon the mother of humane studies as Sulla had done. Cæsar, Antony, and Augustus forgot with equal magnanimity the support which Pompey and Brutus had found amongst the fickle Hellenes, and requited their misdeeds with benefits. Augustus, however, tempered the full flood of favour which Antony had outpoured upon Athens, by emancipating the island of Samos, where he had several times made a long stay. But great as was the consideration extended to Hellas, her vital force was broken; she had lost the capacity of rising to healthy political life.

Augustus devoted the closest attention to his adoptive father’s Celtic conquests and his own acquisitions on the Nile. The wide region of Gaul, on the far side of the Alps, received its first stable provincial organisation at his hands. Cæsar, its conqueror, had not had time to secure and consolidate what his sword had won by a permanent organisation; the old system of local divisions was still in force, taxation was unequal and arbitrary. Augustus put an end to this lax condition of things; in an assembly of the most distinguished chiefs and elders at Narbo he defined afresh the divisions of the country, and at the same time undertook a census of the inhabitants and their landed property, with a view to a more equitable distribution of the public burdens.

Three new provinces were added to the old provincial territory, which last bore from that time forth the name of Narbonensian Gaul. They were Aquitania, from the Pyrenees and Cevennes to the Loire; Gallia Lugdunensis, between the Loire, Seine, and Marne, and extending to Lugdunum on the east; and Belgica, the great northern tract, in which the Sequani and Helvetii were also included. The new towns of the Rhone—Vienna, Lugdunum, Augustodunum (Autun), and Burdigala (Bordeaux)—soon vied with the old province in wealth, commercial activity, and culture, with Massilia, Nemausus, Arelate, and Narbo. Lugdunum (Lyons), whither the military roads led from every side, rose to great importance. At the point where the Araris (Saone) mingles with the Rhodanus the Gallic tribes erected a magnificent memorial and temple to the emperor Augustus, and the anniversary of its dedication was thenceforth kept as a national holiday, with musical and gymnastic entertainments.

In the north, Augusta Trevirorum (Trèves) became the centre of Roman civilisation; under the benediction of peace agriculture, industry, and prosperity arose on all sides. The country on the left bank of the Rhine, inhabited for the most part by German tribes, was placed under a separate military administration under the name of Upper and Lower Germania. To guard the Rhenish frontier from the warlike Germans, strong permanent camps and bulwarks were erected along the river, and the army of occupation was gradually raised to eight legions. Then began the building of cities on the banks of the beautiful frontier river. Cologne was specially favoured by exemption from taxes and other privileges.

Augustus devoted the same care and circumspection to the ordering of his possessions beyond the Mediterranean. The territory of Carthage and the kingdom of Numidia, formerly divided into two proconsulates, were now united to form the province of “Africa.” This was bordered on the west by the independent kingdom of Mauretania, which Augustus after some hesitation bestowed upon Juba, a loyal and devoted subject prince, till the time came for its incorporation into the world-empire in the reign of Claudius. To the east of the great Syrtis the fertile region of Cyrene stretched right to the borders of Egypt, and was combined with Crete to form a second province.

If Augustus left these two provinces to be administered by the senate, he kept his own grasp all the more firmly upon the province of Egypt, which extended from the oasis of the desert to the Arabian Gulf, and from the river delta to the rocky mountains of Syene. A military advanced post in Ethiopia was withdrawn at a later time, for it was no part of Augustus’ scheme to enlarge the borders of the empire. The emperor regarded Egypt as his own special domain and watched over it jealously. No senator was allowed to travel through the country without his express permission; the administration and the supreme command of a very considerable army of occupation were in the hands of a trustworthy man who possessed his full confidence. The care which Augustus bestowed upon agriculture, irrigation, and trade was well repaid by the fertility of the country and its advantageous situation. In the first period of Roman dominion Egypt attained a height of prosperity which threw the years of the Pharaohs and Ptolemies into the shade.

Egypt not only became the granary of the hungry populace of the capital, but its fine garments of linen and cotton were highly prized commodities, even as they had been in the remote past; while the passion for scribbling which possessed the Romans made the papyrus leaf an important article of export. Moreover Alexandria was the emporium and mart for both Indian and Arabian wares, for delicate fabrics of cotton, from the ordinary calico to the most valuable tissues which constituted the costliest dress of Roman women and were even the chosen wear of effeminate men. These last were called Seric robes, and were made from a product of the silkworm, the genesis and local habitation of which was shrouded in mysterious obscurity all through antique times.

More than a hundred Roman merchantmen sailed yearly from the Red Sea to the west coast of India and the Persian Gulf, to procure in their native places the treasures of the tropics and the costly wares of eastern lands and seas—spices and drugs, incense and myrrh, odorous ointments and dyestuffs, ivory, precious stones, pearls, and other articles of luxury—to sell at a great profit in Rome and Baiæ and the splendid seats of the nobility. The Seric (Chinese), Indian, and Arabian commodities which annually found their way through Alexandria to Italy are said to have amounted in value to over £1,440,000 or $7,200,000. But this great prosperity redounded less to the advantage of the natives than of the ruling race.

The oppressive system of taxation introduced by the Ptolemies was still in force, and became so intolerable in course of time that the people repeatedly had desperate recourse to violent remedies, thus merely increasing their own misery and helping the province forward on the road to poverty, decay, and desolation. The succeeding emperors were constantly under the necessity of carrying on campaigns in the Nile region, on account of the mischief done by the bucoles or cattle-herds, those numerous robber bands which dwelt in the impenetrable reed-swamps on the middle arm of the Nile, keeping their women and children safe on small barges and themselves undertaking hostile raids on the neighbouring districts, in defiance of all forms of civil order.

In all this regulation and organisation we can plainly trace the plan of a sagacious ruler, who intended to put an end to the lax conditions that prevailed under the republic, with its exactions and arbitrary dealings, to check offences against property, and to mould the state into a durable monarchical form. What Cæsar had begun in times of violent agitation and party strife, his more fortunate successor accomplished on a magnificent scale under more peaceful circumstances. Protected from oppression and ill treatment by laws and ordinances, the provinces rose to renewed prosperity; many of them like Gaul, Spain, and the Alpine tribes now entered for the first time upon a political and civilised existence worthy of the name.

The Hellenic states could not struggle to the height of their former greatness under the iron hand of Rome, but the fault lay chiefly in the weakness they had brought upon themselves before the days of Roman supremacy by their suicidal fury. Their part in history was played out, and they slowly perished of the wounds inflicted by their own hands. “It was beyond the power of Rome to renew the youth and creative energy of intellect in the Greek races,” says Hœck, “but what she had to give she gave. She preserved Anterior Asia from the worst of fates, that of falling a prey to the eastern barbarians; she saved the aftermath of Hellenic culture, and procured for this nation, as for others, a pleasant private life in the evening of its ancient historic existence.”

By judicious regulation and admirable administration the monarchy healed the wounds which the free commonwealth had inflicted upon the subject countries. “The time was gone by when the right of the victor brought an endless train of the vanquished to the capital and when Rome took for her own the most glorious works of foreign art, the creations of a nobler age and race.” The requisitions and imposts were not small, the land tax and property tax, the poll tax and other subsidies, levied from the provincials in the senatorial provinces by quæstors for the ærarium or state treasury, in the Cæsarian provinces by procurators for the imperial privy purse and military exchequer. Under the empire as under the republic the mines and the port and frontier duties were claimed by the government. And the obligation of military service was occasionally burdensome. Yet all these drawbacks were far more than counterbalanced by the state of order and equity which Augustus endeavoured to establish in all parts. The proconsuls and procurators were appointed either by the absolute authority of the emperor or with the concurrence of the senate, were responsible to the former for their conduct in office, and had fixed salaries and allowances for equipment and travelling expenses.

The orderly business departments opposed a barrier against encroachments and arbitrary dealings on the part of governors or their legates and minor officers, and provided the appeal to the imperial tribunal as a protective measure. The civil and military supremacy of the emperor kept provincial officials within bounds. It became customary to commute payments in kind (tenths of grain, fifths of the vintage and oil harvest) into payments in money based on average prices and a moderate estimate; the burden of military service and taxation was mitigated by means of the exemption accorded to particular districts and communities, by security from devastating wars and hostile incursions, and by the fact that the leading positions and military honours were open to all.

Augustus laid the foundation of the great system of roads, which connected the provinces with one another and with imperial Rome. Military roads, the construction and extent of which fill us with admiration to this day, gave facilities for traffic in all directions. They were adorned with milestones, all of which took their start from the golden milestone which Augustus himself had set up in the midst of the Forum, and provided with stations (mutationes) and hostelries (mansiones), the former for changes of couriers or horses and conveyances,—for the military roads were also used for the state post organised by the emperor,—the latter for accommodation at night. Means of transit by water were also increased, and distance ceased to form a gulf of separation. Armies could move with great rapidity from any part of the empire to any destination, and the emperor’s commands could be transmitted to the remotest regions. Daily journals carried the news of what occurred at Rome in the briefest possible time to all quarters of the world; Rome was the centre of the empire and the heart of the body politic.

The careful scheme of colonisation which Augustus undertook after the example of Cæsar and carried out on an immense scale, and which was also pursued by succeeding emperors, contributed above all things to disseminate Roman culture, speech, and jurisprudence, and to impress a uniform character upon the whole of the great empire. The results of imperial colonisation were in the highest degree beneficial. For while in barbarous lands they sowed in virgin soil the seeds of a noble civilisation and a workable system of law and political organisation, they infused fresh vigour into old and moribund civilisations and furnished them with stable political and judicial institutions; thus supplying the men of the toga who were dispersed all over the whole empire with a centre and fulcrum for their commercial and industrial activity. At the same time they offered the emperor the most satisfactory means of providing for his discharged legionaries and establishing settlements of impoverished Romans and Italians.

To add a greater attraction to this emigration beyond sea the colonies were as a rule endowed with the full rights of Roman citizenship, and rendered capable of a free and dignified political existence. They were exempted from the jurisdiction of the local governor, they elected their own town council and magistrates in common assembly, their suits were decided according to Roman law, and in short the colony was a Rome in miniature, a daughter plantation, where the language, religion, customs, and social habits of the mother city grew up in wholesome soil, and the various elements of the population united under the ægis of equality of political and civil rights to form a single municipal community.

If the foreign element preponderated in any provincial town, or if, for other reasons, it was undesirable or impracticable to rank it among Roman colonial cities, it was admitted to the status of a municipium. These latter possessed the rights of Roman citizenship and were assigned to a tribus like the colonies, but they differed from them in their municipal and magisterial system and sought justice according to their local laws and legal formulæ and not according to Roman institutions. They were free cities in which few Romans lived, if any. As a rule their constitution was based on that of the Italian municipal organisation. In every province there were municipia of this character, and in organising them local tradition was treated with the utmost consideration. They promoted the civilisation of the natives, disposed them favourably towards Roman institutions, and familiarised them with Roman life.

Everywhere imperial Rome was sedulous to transmit to the provinces the organisation, constitution, and legal system which had been perfected in Italy through the course of centuries, and to gain over the various communities by granting them a privileged position before the law, exempting them from the jurisdiction of the local governor, or lightening the burden of taxation. In Spain, Gaul, and other less civilised countries she endeavoured to bind the several communities to their allegiance to Rome by enrolling them among the municipia, or exempting them from the land tax by the bestowal of the jus Italicum, or by admitting them under the “Latin law” which insured to the communal magistrates the honorary freedom of the dominant city and conferred on such communities the rights of ownership over the soil, freedom of commerce and autonomous municipal administration. On the other hand, the Greek cities in Hellas, which prized highly the glorious names of liberty and autonomy even after they had long become empty sounds, were won over by being elevated to the rank of “free cities,” a distinction flattering to their national vanity, which privileged them to manage their own municipal affairs, to elect their own magistrates, and to maintain their national laws and judicial procedure, while it relieved them of the burden of maintaining garrisons and having soldiers billeted upon them and secured to them the right of coinage and the ownership of the soil.

Thus were the provinces compassed about with a network of varying conditions, which linked them to Rome by every kind of tie. Even if the old policy of “divide et impera” lay at the bottom of this diversity of legal status, better conditions being held out as the reward of loyalty, devotion, and service to the supreme government, as a means of attaching the influential and ambitious to the Roman interest, yet this provincial organisation was a logical outcome of the political and juridical system developed under the republic.

The Roman government did not aim at uniformity or centralisation. Augustus and his immediate successors merely transferred to their provincial dominions the typical organisation evolved by the senate for the races and communities of Italy, and the relations of the various communities with Rome were ordered according to their conduct and loyalty by contracts and concessions. Every grade of political rank was represented, from the full rights of Roman citizenship in the colonies and municipia to the Italian and Latin law of the emancipated communes and the status of the subject cities, which last were under the jurisdiction of the local governor in all public affairs, whether administrative or judicial. Even these retained a shadow of self-government and independence in the right of electing their civic magistrates, subject to certain restrictions, in the unhindered continuance of religious and communal associations, and the ownership of municipal property.

Thus in all parts of the provinces we come upon evidences of revived prosperity, a well-ordered state of things in legal matters, and a society animated by interests of commerce, industry, and art. Where writers are mute, the splendid monuments of architecture, the remains of temples and public halls, theatres and amphitheatres, baths and aqueducts, bear witness with no uncertain voice.

It was otherwise in the capital and in Italy. Here also the monarchy succeeded to the heritage of the republic, but found a condition of social disorder past remedy. Agrarian distress and conflict, which had been at work since the days of the Gracchi, consumed the vigour, prosperity, and vital spirits of the races of middle and lower Italy. The civil wars with their proscriptions and confiscations, the settlement of brutalised soldiers, unfit for agriculture and the labours of peace, in the most beautiful and fertile regions, the cultivation of the fields by hordes of slaves, and the absorption of large districts into private estates or latifundia, had almost annihilated the free peasant class of earlier times and had filled the peninsula with an alien population, bound to the soil by no ties of affection or association, linked by no natural piety to the paternal roof or the inherited acres. The honest, industrious, and thrifty peasantry of primitive times had vanished, the ownership of the soil had passed, in part, into the hands of the rich, who transformed the arable land into parks and gardens, groves and fish-ponds, for the adornment of their country-seats, or who, from greed of gain, used them as pasture for their flocks and herds, or as vineyards and olive gardens, with a view to the trade in wool, wine, or oil; in part, they had been assigned to veterans as a recompense for military service. In the places where free peasant families had led a quiet life in numerous villages and homesteads, and had cultivated their cornfields with assiduous industry, might now be seen the dungeon-like lodgings of purchased slaves or the half-ruinous dwellings of foreign legionaries, who reluctantly and sullenly applied themselves to unfamiliar labours and cares.

To add to the general wretchedness, numerous robber bands infested the country, and constituted a danger to liberty, life, and property. In the fair and fruitful valley of the Po alone, but recently incorporated into the Roman body politic, prosperity and security prevailed amidst settled conditions, and trade and industry flourished in populous cities. Patavium, Cremona, Placentia, and Parma provided Italy with woollen cloth and carpets, and supplied the army with salt meat.

The state of things in the capital was no more satisfactory. More than half of the inhabitants—estimated at this time at about two millions—belonged to the slave class, and were dispersed in the houses and villas of the wealthy, where they performed the various offices indispensable in a great household. These included not merely the tasks and services which fall to the share of domestics and menials among ourselves, but such functions as in modern times are left to artisans; such as the making of clothes, the preparation of food-stuffs, building, and the manufacture of household utensils. This multitude of slaves ministered to the luxury and ease of the senatorial or knightly families. The number of the latter can at no time have amounted to more than ten thousand, and many of them, in all likelihood, did not possess much more than the fortune required by law—1,200,000 sesterces [£6,912 or $34,560] for a senator, and the third part of this sum for a member of the knightly class.

Statue of Augustus in the Vatican

The whole body of the population then remaining (some 1,200,000 souls) consisted of the free inhabitants of the metropolis, most of whom lived from hand to mouth without any definite means of support. Of these a large proportion were aliens and freedmen. Almost the only occupations open to them were retail trading and traffic in the necessaries of daily life, or posts as subordinate clerks and officials; for most trades and manufactures were carried on by slaves for their masters’ profit, while wholesale trade and financial affairs were almost entirely in the hands of knights and revenue farmers, who frequently took up their abode in the large provincial cities for this purpose. Consequently, great as were the riches which poured into the metropolis every year from all quarters under heaven, there was no well-to-do middle class, the groundwork of every healthy political society; the influx of wealth only increased the luxuries and enjoyments of the aristocratic class, the gulf between the senatorial and knightly nobility and the populace of the capital was nowhere bridged over, nor was there any transition or compromise between the palaces of ostentatious and gormandising luxury and the hovels of the poverty-stricken and starving masses.

The dying republic had suffered under this incongruity, and whatever efforts Augustus might make to mitigate the evil, it was too deep-seated to be radically cured. The number of citizens who had to be maintained by regular donations of provisions from the public storehouses and by charitable gifts amounted to half a million, and yet this aid was but an inadequate makeshift; many of those disqualified to receive it were in no better case. There were thousands of free Romans who had no shelter but the public halls and colonnades of the temples, whose hopes were set upon the luck of the next minute, whose cares did not extend beyond the coming morrow.

The distress was the less capable of remedy because, under the most galling circumstances, the free Roman cherished the proud consciousness that he was a member of the ruling race, and was withheld by his innate pride of nationality and hereditary prejudice from the humble tasks which furnished the alien, the freedman, and the slave with a tolerable livelihood and occasionally with wealth. He felt it less disgraceful to starve or live upon alms and gifts than to labour with his hands; he scorned the physical toils of agriculture and handicraft, and the trouble of serving another; but he had no scruples about begging for his living, and regarded the distributions of corn and the popular entertainments as no more than his due. The free beggar looked haughtily upon the bedizened slave, whose alms he took as he would have taken the fruit of the woodland tree or the draught from a spring. The easy life of the capital attracted needy and indolent persons from all parts of Italy to Rome, the city swarmed with beggars and vagrants, with idlers and proletarians, who all claimed their maintenance from the state.

Augustus, like Cæsar before him, strove to remedy these evils to the best of his power. To reduce the hungry rabble in the capital he devised methods of emigration to the colonies and established settlements on property purchased out of the public funds; he restricted the number of recipients of corn by a careful scrutiny of the material circumstances of the applicants and by the exclusion of all aliens, non-citizens, and abusers of the public bounty. But all these restrictions were palliatives merely; the sources of misery were not stopped. The provisioning of the capital with cheap corn was one of the most onerous duties of the government. That he might more directly control the regular supply from the “grain provinces” of Sicily, Africa, and Egypt, Augustus caused the office of “cereal prefect,” which Pompey had once held, to be conferred upon himself, and then appointed a permanent bureau to manage and superintend the importation of corn, the markets, and the public storehouses from which the indigent populace monthly drew their fixed allowance on presentation of a counter. In times of scarcity and want, such as not unfrequently occurred, the distributions were made on a larger scale, and every joyful or propitious event was a welcome opportunity for the emperor to purchase the favour of the populace with gifts and pecuniary donations.

Augustus devoted the same attention to other parts of the Italian peninsula. He endeavoured to recover waste districts for agriculture and industry by establishing settlements, and made use of rewards and privileges as inducements and incitements to energy. He cleared the country of robber bands by squadrons and armed watchmen, protected the coast towns from pirates, and by a careful examination of slave-tenements (ergastula) set at liberty all freeborn persons who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery by these roving gangs. With the establishment of the monarchy, Italy, like the provinces, entered upon a new life, and there also the restoration of security and order brought vigour and prosperity into being. The twenty-eight colonies which Augustus peopled, partly with veterans, and partly with Roman and Italian settlers of the poorer class, were furnished with a suitable legal and political status. Their municipal constitution was modelled on that of Rome, and served in its turn as a model for the other municipia and prefectures of the peninsula. Beside their local rights of citizenship they all possessed the civitas or freedom of Rome; they all had the right of electing their officers and chief magistrates (decuriones) in the assembly of the people, the autonomous administration of communal property, freedom of worship according to their hereditary ritual and solemnities, and their own judicature according to Roman law; and any burgess removing to Rome ranked in all things on the same footing as the old freemen of the capital. The differences of legal status which at first prevailed gradually disappeared under the empire; all provincial towns occupied the same relative position towards the capital, and approximated to each other by degrees in their individual organisation and administration.

Everywhere we come upon a college of decuriones or civic magistrates,—composed of a greater or lesser number of members elected from among the wealthiest citizens or supplemented from the government departments of the city,—which gradually absorbed all authority and constituted the supreme governing body of the municipium, under the presidency of two or four chief magistrates (duumviri or quatuorviri). In the prefecture cities the control of the administration and judicature was vested in a prefect annually appointed by Rome, under whom a number of elective municipal officers managed the current affairs of the city. The magistracies of all provincial towns were modelled, both as to titles and departments, upon those of the capital. The heads of the decuriones exercised jointly the functions of consuls and prætors, and were attended in public by lictors with fasces; the public revenue and expenditure was controlled by quæstors, ædiles superintended the markets and retail trades and were responsible for the town police; censors kept the lists of burgesses and the census records. In questions of criminal law, however, the decisive sentence was usually pronounced at Rome. The imperial court of appeal was the court of highest instance for the whole empire. In upper Italy, which Cæsar had been the first to transfer from the position of a province to that of an integral part of the Roman state and jurisdiction, the administration of justice in civil affairs—left in older municipalities to the municipal courts—was subject to considerable restriction.

The rigid rule of the monarchy and the exact organisation and strict supervision of the municipal authorities obviated the danger of revolts and serious disturbances among the populace, and Italy (the capital and its vicinity only excepted) was clear of garrisons. The naval forces stationed at Ravenna and Misenum served to protect the coast and maritime towns, and in the hour of danger a sufficient army could always be summoned from Dalmatia and Pannonia. The imperial guard of prætorians (of which three cohorts consisting of one thousand men apiece were quartered in Rome, and the other six in the neighbouring towns) was mainly composed of Italians. It shared with a German and Batavian troop of horse the duty of guarding the palace and the sacred person of the monarch.

It is in the nature of every monarchical system of government to bring all conditions into congruity, to smooth over the diversities which prevail among its subjects, and to impress the stamp of uniformity upon the whole state. This was the case in the organisation of both provinces and municipalities, for in spite of modifications of legal status they were all cut upon the same pattern and organised according to definite classes. The same thing took place in financial affairs and taxation. During the republican period Rome and Italy had enjoyed a privileged position, and foreign countries had been exploited for the advantage of the dominant race. The principate, on the contrary, endeavoured to bring about an equalisation of duties and contributions as well as of privileges. The customs dues, which formerly applied only to subject countries, were extended to Italy under the monarchy, part of the proceeds being allotted to the public revenue and part to the Italian municipalities; the property tax, from which Italy had been exempt in the later days of the republic, was likewise introduced throughout the empire on the basis of the census or rating of property; an excise duty was levied for the fiscus (imperial privy purse) upon all articles imported into Italy for sale, amounting to one per cent. of the price, and two or even four per cent. in the case of slaves; the twentieth part of every inheritance which did not fall by right to the next of kin had to be paid into the military treasury, and a tax was imposed on the manumission of slaves.

If the revenues of the state were increased by these means under the empire the improvement was mainly due to sounder financial administration, to the abolition of revenue farming for the regular land tax and property tax in subject countries, and to the strict control exercised over the tax-gatherers; and according to Gibbon’s estimate the annual revenue secured must have amounted to at least fifteen to twenty million pounds sterling [$75,000,000 to $100,000,000]. Even if five million pounds were spent on the army and navy, if the distributions of corn to the poor of the city swallowed a few millions more, and the salaries of the imperial officials in Rome and the provinces and the police expenditure disposed of no inconsiderable sum, the surplus was none the less sufficient to provide for the erection of magnificent buildings, to cover the empire with a network of highroads, to satisfy the popular love of spectacles by gorgeous entertainments, and to rejoice the hearts of citizens and soldiers with gifts and feasts.

The public buildings and pleasure grounds, the splendid private houses and villas, with which the republic had begun to adorn the capital and its environs, grew from year to year, and became ever vaster and more elaborate. The Forum of Augustus, with the temple of Mars the Avenger, the sanctuary of Jupiter Tonans on the lower slope of the Capitoline Hill, the white marble temple of Apollo on the Palatine, the temple of Quirinus on the Quirinal Hill, and others of the same character, were among the most splendid edifices in the city. Magnificent colonnades perpetuated the names of the wife, sister, and grandsons of Augustus; the number of temples restored by him is estimated at eighty-two.

The imperator’s example was imitated by his wealthy and powerful friends; Agrippa, whose services to the health and cleanliness of the city in the construction of the huge vaulted sewers (cloaca) have already been mentioned, perpetuated his name by a succession of magnificent gardens for the use and embellishment of Rome. He had two new aqueducts constructed, and he repaired the older ones that had fallen into decay; so that no town in the world had such an abundant supply of pure spring-water as ancient Rome, an advantage which the city enjoys to this day. He completed and adorned the Septa Julia which Cæsar had begun on the Field of Mars, for public assemblies and entertainments, and surrounded the space with three colossal and splendid edifices—the portico of Neptune, the Baths, and the Pantheon, the magnificent circular building in honour of Jupiter the Avenger and of Venus and Mars, the ancestors of the Julian family. Beams of bronze supported the domed roof with its gilded tiles, the walls and floor were lined and paved with marble. Even now the church of S. Maria Rotunda is among the most remarkable buildings of the city. The Diribitorium—the most spacious building ever constructed under one roof—where the populace received their corn allowance and voting tablets and the soldiery their pay, was the work of Agrippa.

Such was the constitution of the world-wide empire over which Augustus ruled as an absolute monarch with unlimited powers for forty-four years after the day of Actium. The frontier provinces were protected by standing armies, the members of which, collected from all countries and nationalities, had forsworn their native land and national spirit, and obeyed no orders but those of their military lord; the coasts were guarded by a well-manned fleet. On the Rhine eight legions (each consisting of 6100 foot and 726 horse) quartered in permanent camps, formed a strong bulwark against the Germans and kept Gaul under control; Spain was garrisoned by three legions; two were quartered in Africa, and an equal number watched over the safety of Egypt. Four legions maintained the supremacy of Rome in Syria and on the Euphrates; the Danubian provinces were guarded by six legions distributed through Mœsia, Pannonia, and Dalmatia. The eastern frontier being thus sufficiently protected by an army of occupation of 50,000 men, the banks of the Danube by a similar force of 70,000, and the Rhine district by 100,000; the fleets stationed in the harbours of Misenum, Ravenna, Forum Julii (Fréjus) and elsewhere kept the islands and maritime states under control and insured protection and security for commerce and traffic.

Roman Emperor in the Dress of a General

(Based on De Montfaucon)

A regular system of tolls and taxes brought the public revenue into good condition and filled the ærarium and fiscus; a vigilant police force and fire brigade, which Augustus distributed through the fourteen divisions of the capital, maintained tranquillity and order, protected life and property from evil-disposed and malicious persons, and curbed the outbreak of savage passions. Huge aqueducts, solidly constructed roads, stately buildings, temples and halls, aroused the admiration of contemporaries as of posterity. On the Field of Mars there arose a new and splendid city, composed of temples and halls, of public buildings for government purposes and for the amusements of the people, which excelled the glory of the City of the Seven Hills, “unique in character, unsurpassed in ancient or modern times,” so that Augustus could boast that he had found a city of brick and should leave a city of marble. In the provinces the improved government and administration of justice bred a condition of wealth and outward prosperity.

But with all these advantages imperial Rome suffered from grave moral defects. The love of liberty, the common patriotic sentiment, the vigour, and martial virtue of the republican period, were gone; in ease, tranquillity, and enervating pleasure, the arm of the citizen grew feeble, and the self-respect and manly pride of earlier days degenerated into servility and grovelling adulation. The city swarmed with foreign soldiers of fortune and with enriched freedmen. The old seats of culture in the East sent forth not scholars and artists only, but ministers of luxury, gluttony, and voluptuousness. Together with a few wholesome elements, all the evils and defects of human society flowed together here and preyed upon the scanty remnant of the old Roman morality and virtue. Rome became the meeting place of all nations on the face of the earth. Interest in public affairs grew steadily feebler since the offices and dignities had become empty honours void of power. The senators had often to be constrained by penalties to attend the sessions of the senate, although the latter had been reduced to two principal meetings a month; the office of ædile was shunned as a burden until the state took it upon itself to defray the cost of the public entertainments; candidates for the tribunate had often to be put forward by the emperor. The citizens were not ashamed to enrol themselves in the list of paupers and to share in the public distributions of corn and alms; nay, rather than apply themselves to any honest calling, many Romans, especially of the knightly class, preferred to take service for board and wages with the purveyors of gladiatorial combats, and to hazard their lives in a brutal popular amusement which gained ground steadily from that time forward, exercising an effect all the more demoralising on the minds of men, and rousing and stimulating their licentious instincts all the more keenly because the verdict of life or death was given by the humour of the crowd, at whose signal the victor spared or transfixed his prostrate opponent; a right of appeal even more inhuman than the old custom that the duel should end with the death of one of the combatants.

The degeneration of morals and the decay of domestic virtue kept pace with the passion for brutal spectacles. Strenuously as the emperor strove to raise the standard of family life and to curb immoderate expenditure on dress and food and the growing license of women by sumptuary and moral edicts, to enforce legal marriage and the procreation of legitimate offspring as a duty and honour by legal ordinances and curtailment of privileges, to render divorce difficult and to check the rampant vice of adultery, the state of indolent celibacy and the excesses of both sexes in connection with it spread more and more, in the upper classes out of liking for a licentious life and forbidden pleasures, in the lower from poverty and laziness. The corruption of morals, checked but ineffectually by Augustus, made rapid strides after his death; above all, when the rulers themselves tore away the veil which still shrouded shameful living under the first principate. But even Augustus could never disclaim his origin from Venus Aphrodite, the ancestress of the family of Julius.[b]

AUGUSTUS MAKES EGYPT HIS PRIVATE PROVINCE

[30 B.C.]

The day of Egyptian independence was over as a matter of course. Cæsar needed the country, with its corn and its riches, for his scheme of reorganisation.

The city of Rome capitulated to the grain fleet of the Nile and sold her ancient liberty for a supply of daily bread, and the price at least was paid her. By the Cæsar Egypt had been conquered and under the rule of the Cæsar she remained, like all countries which Cæsar was the first to unite with the Roman Empire.

It is obvious that a conquered province cannot at once be placed on exactly the same footing as older parts of the empire; a transition period is almost always necessary; but Egypt never took quite the same position as other subject countries. Before the partition of the empire into senatorial and imperial provinces was effected, Egypt had come to occupy a unique position with regard to the emperor; and after the partition the ties which bound it to him became even closer. Among the imperial provinces there was none more intimately related to the emperor than this, which surpassed all others in importance. Egypt was of much the same consequence to the Roman Empire as India is to the England of to-day.

The wise yet strict government of a foreign power may be a blessing to any country in comparison with the tyranny and extravagance of its native sultans; but the foreign rulers profit even more by it, and are therefore always striving to keep the rich country, with a population ignorant alike of war and politics, in a state of political tutelage, to perpetuate the gulf between the dominant and subject races, and to render all interference on the part of rivals impossible. In a word, they keep their most important province as the apple of their eye.

Nature and history assuredly conspired to give the country an exceptional position. Without being an island it possessed the advantages of an insular position; for it was bounded on two sides by the sea and on the other two by the desert or barbarous tribes whose raids and predatory incursions might incommode the province but could never become a menace to the existence of the empire. Thus the Egyptians could hardly be drawn into the political broils of the continent so long as they confined themselves within their natural frontiers; and for this reason the third Ptolemy Euergetes acted wisely when of his own free will he restored his conquests to Seleucus king of Syria. His military situation had nothing to lose by such a step, for Egypt proper was easy to defend and difficult to attack, and was accessible to a land force only by way of Pelusium. On the other hand any power that established itself in the country found there such an abundance of resources as was offered by hardly any other country of ancient times.

The fecundity of Egypt has passed into a proverb; even in a season of moderate harvests great quantities of corn could be exported every year, and after the country had been conquered by the Romans the grain tribute of Egypt was absolutely necessary for the sustenance of the capital. Whoever held Egypt could procure a famine in Rome and Italy at his pleasure; and for that reason pretenders of later times always secured Egypt first and then Italy. The wealth of the country was increased by commerce and trade, and it was therefore densely populated, even more so than at the present day.

The abundant resources of the fertile valley of the Nile were united and almost doubled by a homogeneous and strictly centralised administrative body; Egypt was ruled by a scribbling bureaucracy of a kind up to that time unknown to the ancient world; and its inhabitants, though wholly unaccustomed to arms by long disuse, were none the less hard to rule. A great proportion of the fertile land was the private property of the prince, as it has been down to our own times; but this very proprietorship, coupled with the excitable temper of the populace of a great city like Alexandria, placed great obstacles in the way of regular government, and would have rendered it absolutely impossible had not a military been quartered in the country in sufficient strength to maintain order. The presence of several legions in Egypt was in itself enough to give the Cæsar reason for excluding senatorial government; and the Cæsars always strove with jealous care to keep men of the senatorial class away from Egypt, because the consequences of an attempt at rebellion there might well have been most serious.

Cæsar the dictator had in his time been confronted with the question as to whether he should permit the continuance of the independence of Egypt, already forfeit in fact; and the motive that finally made him decide in its favour (apart from his love for Cleopatra) was that the most formidable rival to Rome there would be her own representative. The reasons that led the dictator to maintain the political existence of Egypt likewise induced his son to maintain the old state of things under certain limitations. As a ruler and organiser the latter is distinguished by his regard for historic continuity.

[30 B.C.-14 A.D.]

Now in Egypt, with its fertile soil and dense population, a strong monarchic government is in a manner prescribed by the character and history of the country; as is demonstrated by the whole course of its development from the earliest beginnings of human civilisation down to the present day. Cæsar therefore desired to make no more alteration in the peculiar and intricate conditions of Egypt than was absolutely necessary, and to leave the rest as it was. The Cæsar merely stepped into the place of the kings of the Ptolemaic dynasty, and thus brought Egypt into connection with Rome by a kind of personal union.

The most important change was that the sovereign no longer resided at Alexandria but at Rome, and that the great offices of the Egyptian court, the chief master of the ceremonies, the grand master of the household, and the chief forester, were not filled by fresh appointments; though the scholars of the famous Museum of Alexandria enjoyed the same patronage and encouragement as before. At the head of this richly endowed institution was a priest, formerly appointed by the king and in future to be appointed by the Cæsar. The latter regarded himself as in every respect the successor of the Ptolemies, and caused the Egyptian priests to do him honour with the very ceremonial that had grown up under his predecessors. It is true that the Roman emperors did not habitually reside in Alexandria, but their viceroys had to assist at all the religious rites in which the Ptolemies had formerly taken part, for the new ruler was wise enough to introduce no alteration whatever in matters of religion. The ancient gods of Egypt, which had survived the dominion of the Greeks, continued to exist as before, in peaceful association with the gods of Greece. The Egyptian gods were naturally wroth at the fall of the monarchy; their statues turned a gloomy gaze upon their worshippers, Apis bellowed hideously and even shed tears. But Cæsar was not disconcerted; he did indeed decline in his own person to visit the Apis of Memphis on his journey through Egypt, but he did not put the least hindrance in the way of his worship by the Egyptians, still less did he dream of starting a propaganda in Egypt on behalf of the state religion of Rome.

The position of the various classes of the population also remained what it had become in the course of historic development. The native Egyptians, the original lords of the soil, remained in the subjection to which they had been reduced by the conquests of the Persians and Macedonians; they constituted the population of the country districts and country towns, and had neither political organisation nor political rights. The foreign conqueror naturally had no inducement to give the vanquished rights that had been denied them by their own kings. Egypt was to be a province absolutely dependent upon himself, and that would have been impossible if the Roman element in Egypt had grown so strong and had so far intermingled with the natives that the sovereign was forced to take it into account. The Egyptian proper was therefore on principle precluded from acquiring the rights of Roman citizenship. For example, an Egyptian of ancient days could no more act on a Roman jury than a Bedouin could nowadays be elected to the English parliament. In later times this prohibition was occasionally evaded by first conferring the freedom of Alexandria upon the native and then admitting him to Roman citizenship as an Alexandrian. On the other hand the material condition of the Egyptian population improved under the judicious rule of the Cæsars.

The mechanism of government, administration, and taxation had been admirably organised through centuries of practice; it naturally discharged its functions as well under the new sovereign as under the old, and consequently became the type of the technics of imperial administration. In this respect the republic had left the empire much to do. The Romans were the first to appoint officers in the level land who had more to do than collect the taxes. Their epistrateges of upper, lower, and middle Egypt, their nomarchs and ethnarchs, had of course only a circumscribed sphere of action, but they saw to the maintenance of law and order and probably decided simple lawsuits among the natives.

Among the Egyptians, unlike the Hellenes, we find a simple division into nomes instead of a municipal organisation; and like many provincial cities under the Roman Empire, these nomes were allowed to strike their own coins, though only with a Greek superscription. A collective organisation was, however, denied to the natives. In the latter days of Augustus the various provinces of the Roman Empire had diets of their own, invested with very modest political rights; Egypt alone never had a provincial diet, in token that it was not really a province at all but was regarded as a great demesne of the sovereign.

Next above the Egyptians was the Græco-Macedonian population, which was practically if not entirely concentrated in Alexandria, and was separated from the natives by a great gulf. As members of the same race as the Egyptian kings the Greeks of Alexandria enjoyed political rights and communal autonomy; and these they retained in the main under the Romans. In like manner their language remained the official language of Egypt under the empire, Roman officials addressed Greeks and Egyptians in Greek; only in the Latin garrison of Alexandria, Latin was naturally predominant.

The Greeks of Alexandria possessed their own municipal officers, their high priest, chief magistrate, town-clerk, and chief of police; but on the other hand a genuine town council was denied them. The few other Greek cities in Egypt were similarly organised.

The whole province, with its population of Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, was committed by the Cæsar to a viceroy, who, though belonging only to the knightly class, ranked on an equality with the senatorial proconsuls in virtue of his position as the confidant and representative of the emperor, and surpassed them in authority in virtue of his command over the legions, although he lacked the insignia of this authority. C. Cornelius Gallus, famous as a poet and proven as a general and personal enemy of Antonius, was the first to be made viceroy of the new province; and on the whole he justified the confidence reposed in him by his master, for he succeeded in repressing with great vigour some local attempts at rebellion among the inhabitants of Heroöpolis and the Thebaid.

His subordinates, like himself, were men of no rank higher than knighthood and were the personal servants of Cæsar; the mechanism of government remained the same as had been perfected under the Ptolemies, only from this time forward the Greeks were superseded by the Romans. Among the higher offices were those of chief magistrate, administrator of the chest of the dominion of Egypt, prefect of Alexandria, or of certain districts in the capital; and one procurator fari Alexandriæ was certainly chosen from among the ranks of freedmen.

The taxes were no less high than before, but Cæsar saw to it that Egypt was placed in a position to pay her taxes every year. He had all the Nile canals, which had got choked or dried up under previous rulers, thoroughly cleansed and repaired by his soldiers; he completed the canal system where it required completion; and the beneficial results of these necessary measures were very soon apparent. The famous statue of the Nile is surrounded by sixteen putti, as a symbol that the river must rise sixteen cubits if Egypt is to hope for an abundant harvest; if it only rises half that height it means dearth and famine in the land. But after the restoration of the canal system under Augustus a rise of twelve cubits indicated a good harvest as early as the governorship of Petronius, and if the rise was only eight, it did not necessarily mean a bad one. In one of the latter years of Augustus the Nile must have risen to an extraordinary height, if we may trust the mutilated records of the Nilometer at Elephantine—probably twenty-four cubits.

Roman Catapult

The soldiers of Augustus were also employed in making roads and constructing cisterns at various places. Coptos is the point to which most of the roads which connect the Nile Valley with the Red Sea converge. Here an interesting inscription has recently been discovered, dating probably from the last years of the reign of Augustus, and bearing a long list of the names of the soldiers who had made cisterns at various points along these roads and laid out a fortified camp where they met.

The Indian trade rose rapidly to prosperity under Augustus. As early as the time when Strabo journeyed through Egypt he saw at the most diverse spots signs that the country was beginning to recover from the ruinous consequences of the system of government pursued by the last Ptolemies. In the latter years of Cleopatra’s reign barely twenty ships had ventured to put out from the Red Sea; under the rule of Augustus there was a stately fleet of Indiamen, which engaged in the African and Indian trade with great success, and brought in a substantial profit to the Egyptian government, which not only exacted import duties but afterwards charged a considerable export duty upon Indian goods. But it is hardly possible to estimate, even approximately, the revenue which Augustus drew from his newly acquired province.[c]

ADMINISTRATION OF THE PROVINCES

An explanation should be given of the general principles which were followed by the Romans in the administration of subject lands. The consecutive pursuit of these principles secured the result that provinces originally disparate in every particular, through the influence of Roman administration, were made into a single whole which was not only externally symmetrical but also internally harmonious—a whole in which the various nationalities with their political, civil, and social idiosyncrasies more or less disappear.

The word “provincia” is much older than those conquests outside Italy which we have hitherto designated with the name of provinces; it requires particular explanation. So long as the kingdom existed in Rome, the king was the sole exerciser of the imperium, that is to say, of unlimited military and judicial power. But with the beginning of the republic it was transferred to two consuls, from 367 B.C. it was in the hands of one prætor, from 247 B.C. in the hands of a second prætor; it therefore became necessary to define the limits of a power that was practically unbounded and was the appanage to each of these officials, to establish a definite sphere of action for each of them, the official designation of which is “provincia.” By provincia then we understand the area of activity specially assigned by law or by a senatus consultum or also by lot or accord to a consul or prætor, the area within which he exercises his imperium. In this sense we say consulibus Ligures provincia decernitur, and in this sense we call the office of the prætor urbanus provincia urbana and that of the prætor peregrinus provincia peregrina. No provincia is assigned to offices which do not possess imperium, for where there is mention of the provinces of the quæstors the provinces of the consul or of the prætor are meant to whom the quæstor acts as a subordinate official.

After the occupation of Sicily and Sardinia in the year 227 B.C. four prætors were appointed instead of two and the imperium was also geographically so marked out that in the newly defined districts two prætors received military and judicial powers, that is to say the old consular imperium, simultaneously, this moreover being shared by the remaining prætors and later on by the proconsuls and proprætors. From this time forward provincia becomes the designation for a governorship across seas and means first, in the abstract sense, command in a country outside Italy, secondly, in a concrete sense, the country subjected to the governor itself.

All provincial land is however distinguished from Italic land by the fact that it is subject to tribute, that is pays either vectigal or tributum; for at all events from the time of the Gracchi it is a recognised political maxim that property in a provincial dependency has passed to the Roman people, the original owners retaining only a right of user; so that the province is a prædium populi Romani whose revenues pour into the state exchequer. Accordingly one may define the province as an administered district of the Roman Empire, geographically marked out, committed to the control of a permanent higher official and subject to taxation. The obligation to pay taxes is so important a feature in the conception of the province that the historians, in treating of every country actually subordinated and made subject to taxes by the Romans, include it with the provinces, even if it was not yet incorporated in the Roman system of administration; and the dynasties in Cilicia and Syria although not directly subject to governors, are regarded as an integral part of the empire on account of their obligation to pay duty.

The organisation of the province at the time of the republic was directed upon instruction from the senate by the victorious general himself with the subsidiary aid of a commission of ten senators appointed by the senate for this object. The fundamental law of the province thus established (lex provinciæ) determined the character of the administration from that time forward, laws affecting private relations being adopted partly through Roman laws and partly through the edicts of the governor. The duties of the commission were concerned with the following points: First, there was a fresh parcelling out of the whole province into definite districts of administration with one of the larger towns, where such were available, for a centre; of such town dioceses there were about sixty-eight in Sicily, sixty-four in the three Gauls, forty-four in Asia, eleven in the Ora Pontica, the part of Bithynia that became a province in 63 B.C., six in Pontus Polemoniacus, twenty-three in Lycia, seventeen in Syria, five in Cyrene. The magistrates and the senate of these towns, although appointed for the affairs of their commune, are at the same time of use to the government in taking over the gathering in of taxes in the district assigned to them.

For the purposes of jurisdiction the territorial divisions according to towns are reunited to form larger parishes of jurisdiction conventus, διοικήσεις, in the chief places of which the governor goes through the regular days of jurisdiction (assizes). Finally the religious festivals, associations in which the inhabitants of the provinces unite from time to time, take place in the favoured towns to which we allude. In provinces that were poor in towns instead of town dioceses we have country circuits. Here a policy was observed of breaking asunder the original connections of one people with another, so far as was found necessary, by dissolution of the existing state unities and by an arbitrary division and grouping of neighbourhoods; in some cases it was even found well to abolish the commercium between the single states, which had the effect of making it more difficult for the provincials to alienate their real estate and caused Roman landholders to emigrate into the province and concentrate in their hands large landed estates. Favoured towns had their area widened by the incorporation of towns and spots which thereby lost their separate existence; in this way the communes entrusted to the Romans were raised and enlarged and the rebellions completely annihilated. Mountainous and desert lands which yielded nothing valuable and were difficult to administer were left in the midst of the province under their native despots until, often after a long time, it was held safe to place these parts, too, directly under the governor.

The boundaries of the territories once established, the next step was to regulate their political and financial position. Towns conquered by force of arms were destroyed, their lands included in Roman domains and leased out to men of private enterprise by the censors at Rome in exchange for a proportion of the produce raised. Where royal domains were found, as in Syracuse, Macedonia, Pergamus, Bithynia, and Cyrene, they were taken possession of as ager publicus Romani in the same way, and their working population was united into village communities in the manner used for the district of Capua after 211 B.C. Such communes, on the other hand, as had submitted by surrender without offering extreme resistance certainly yielded to the unbounded power of the victor (as was embodied in the terms of surrender), town and country, men, women and children, rivers, ports, and their holy possessions; but as a rule the citizens and their families were allowed to remain in possession of their liberty and their private fortunes and to the town was left its territory and its town rights. In return for this on all the farm lands whether of private persons or of the town was laid a natural impost (vectigal) or else a hard and fast tax (tributum, stipendium) and where advantageous, also a Roman toll (portorium).

This then is the class of civitates vectigales or stipendiariæ in which the majority of provincial towns are to be reckoned, and which are to be contrasted with a small number of particularly privileged communities, those for instance who had been guaranteed their freedom on the score of earlier alliances or well-attested fidelity, and secondly those which the Romans themselves had constituted as Roman colonies or municipia. Altogether then there are three main divisions of communities included within the provinces: towns with free native constitutions, towns substantially subject, and towns with Roman constitutions.[d]

ARMY AND NAVY UNDER AUGUSTUS

The higher career of an officer (militia equestris) was open to every Roman citizen possessed of the rank and fortune of a knight or senator. All young knights were not bound to serve, but every man who was ambitious of public career had to fulfil the obligations of military service for five years; after which he was given the command of a cohort or served as a military tribune. Hitherto there had been no separation between military and civil office as far as the upper classes were concerned, and it was the emperor’s intention that there should be none henceforth, otherwise the aristocracy would have almost given up going into the army. We cannot tell with certainty how these young aristocrats who entered the army as officers acquired the necessary technical knowledge, or whether they had to undergo any kind of apprenticeship.

The senator was excluded from the army on principle; the knight on the contrary was bound to render military service if he hoped to serve the state in peace or war. His promotion was, of course, in the emperor’s hands. In the time of the republic the people did not make all the appointments, but they had twenty-four posts to dispose of; in the reign of Augustus these tribuni militum a populo were still elected by the people, but this emperor, who had deprived the senate of all means of influencing the army, also took from the people their practically obsolete privilege of electing officers, and about the time of his death the title of tribunus militum a populo ceases to appear in inscriptions.

In republican times the supreme command in war had been one of the official duties of the elective magistrates; but under the empire it became the duty and privilege of the imperator, who was represented by his legates in the several divisions of the army. Under Augustus each legion had a legatus legionis, so called to distinguish him from the governors of the imperial provinces (legati provinciæ). The officers of the imperial army were divided according to their social rank in the senatorial and knightly classes.

Many peculiarities of the army system of Augustus lose much of their singularity in the eyes of the modern observer by a comparison with corresponding conditions at the present time. The English army is the only contemporary force which can be compared with the Roman army under the empire.

In both nations the first duty of the army is not to defend the country, which is secured from the danger of invasion by its isolated situation, but to keep the provinces under control. Accordingly the country of the ruling race, Italy in the one case, England and Scotland in the other, has only insignificant garrisons of professional soldiers, who hardly suffice to supplement the police at need; while the bulk of the army is scattered all over the globe, wherever the interests of the ruling race appear to be imperilled. The troops are nowhere stationed in larger numbers than is absolutely necessary, because as a matter of fact their numbers are totally inadequate, and every serious incident shows that the aims of the state bear no proportion to its military resources.

The parallel is peculiarly apt in the non-enforcement of universal military service and the consequent lack of a sufficient reserve. The latter would be too heavy a financial burden for the state, as it has to treat its mercenary troops with consideration and grant them large donations of money. The England of to-day pays the bounty money on enlistment; imperial Rome bestowed considerable sums of money on her soldiers on their discharge.

The Roman soldiers were employed on peaceful tasks which were but remotely connected with the military uses of an army, in the same way as English soldiers nowadays. It has already been mentioned that Augustus had roads, canals, cisterns, and public buildings constructed by his legions. The demands made upon the English army in this respect do not go quite so far, but in the island of Corfu any one who drives from the capital to Palæocastrizza may see a bronze tablet let into the face of the rock to perpetuate the memory of the English regiment which constructed this difficult bit of road.

Led by young aristocrats more or less ignorant of the service when they enter it, both the Roman and English armies have generally attained the objects set before them and made up for the lack of organisation by the energy and capacity of their members.

As the Romans induced subject communities and states to furnish them with auxiliary troops, so England has enlisted Indian regiments officered by Englishmen, which are recruited only from among the warlike races such as the brave mountaineers of the Himalayas, the effeminate inhabitants of Bengal being scarcely represented amongst the Sepoys. This is in exact accordance with the principles on which Augustus acted in the formation of his auxiliary troops. Of course the military resources of those princes who still retained a show of independence were likewise at the disposal of the ruling power if the imperial troops had to be spared or were not sufficient to quell local disturbances.[c]

The permanent institution of the emperor’s proconsular authority naturally led to the perpetuation of the military establishment, or in modern phrase the standing army of the empire. Originally the legions had been raised for special services, and disbanded at the conclusion of each campaign. When the wars of the republic came to be waged at a greater distance from the city, and against the regular armies of Greek or Asiatic potentates, the proconsular levies were enrolled for the whole period of the contest in hand. In ancient times Rome secured every petty conquest by planting in the centre of each conquered territory a colony of her own citizens; but when her enemies became more numerous and her frontiers more extensive, it was necessary to maintain her communications in every quarter by military posts, and the establishment of permanent garrisons. The troops once enlisted for the war could no longer be discharged on the restoration of peace. The return of their imperator to the enjoyment of his laurels in the city only brought another imperator, whose laurels were yet to be acquired, to the legions of the Rhone and the Euphrates. The great armies of the provinces were transferred, with the plate and furniture of the prætorium, the baggage and materials of the camp, from each proconsul to his successor.

The legions came to be distinguished by numbers, indicating the order of enlistment in the eastern or western division of the empire respectively, or by special designations of honour, such as the martia, or the victrix. With their names or numbers the particular history of each was duly recorded, and some of them became noted perhaps for a peculiar character and physiognomy of their own. The principle of permanence thus established to his hand, Augustus carried it out systematically, and extended it from the provinces to Rome itself. He instituted a special service for the protection of his own person, in imitation of the select battalion which kept watch round the imperator’s tent. These prætorian guards were gratified with double pay, amounting to two denarii daily, and the prospect of discharge at the end of twelve years, while the term of service for the legionaries was fixed at sixteen. They were recruited from Latium, Etruria, Umbria, and the old Roman colonies of central Italy exclusively. They were regarded accordingly as a force peculiarly national, nor when reminded of this distinction were they insensible of the compliment. But the emperor did not entrust his security to these Italian troops only. Besides the prætorian cohorts he kept about his person a corps of picked veterans from the legions, a few hundred in number, together with a battalion of German foot soldiers and a squadron of Batavian horse. Cæsar had employed these barbarians, distinguished for their personal strength and courage, on the wings of his own armies, and his successor may have placed this confidence in them on account of their tried fidelity. In addition, however, to these household troops, the whole number of which did not exceed five or six thousand, Augustus first introduced a regular garrison into the city, consisting of four cohorts of fifteen hundred men each, which were also levied exclusively in Italy. He established no permanent camp or fortress to overawe the capital. The soldiers were billeted on the inhabitants or lodged in the public edifices; they were always at hand to repress tumults and preserve the peace of the city, when the stores of grain ran low and the prevalence of tempests on the coast menaced it with prolonged scarcity. But the ordinary police of the streets was maintained by an urban guard, named vigiles or the watch, seven hundred of whom sufficed for the service. The whole armed force of every description employed in the city might amount to twelve or fifteen thousand men.

Augustus disbanded the unruly multitudes who had crowded into the service of the great military chieftains of the civil wars. He strained every nerve to gorge them with the largesses for which alone they would forego the periodical plunder of unoffending cities, in which their leaders had been compelled to indulge them. But while they were reposing upon their estates, or rioting with their profuse gratuities, he speedily remodelled his military establishment, and equipped a force of twenty-five legions for the defence of the empire. He fixed a reasonable scale of pay for every armed man in his service, from the rank and file of the cohorts to the “lieutenant of the emperor with proconsular rank.” The proconsular armies were maintained and paid by the machinery of the proconsular government in the provinces; so that the emperor, without being ostensibly the paymaster of the legions, did in fact, through his lieutenants, hold the purse upon which they depended. We have seen how incompetent we are to state the salary of the provincial governor; nor can we estimate the pay of the various grades of officers. We only know that the simple legionary received one denarius daily, a sum which may equal eightpence half-penny of English money. A part of this sum was stopped for his arms, implements, and accoutrements; but he retained perhaps a larger proportion of it than the pocket money of the British private, and the simple luxuries of the wine shop were cheap and accessible. Marriage was strongly discouraged, and generally forbidden in the Roman ranks, and the soldier’s allowance was perhaps chiefly expended in averting the blows of the centurion’s vine-staff, and buying occasional exemption from the fatigues of drill and camp duty. If we are justified in drawing an inference from the proportion observed in a military largess in the time of Cæsar, we may conjecture that the centurion received double, and the tribunes four times, the pay of the legionary.

The full complement of each of the twenty-five legions was 6100 foot, and 726 horse; and this continued with occasional variations, to be the strength of the legion for a period of four hundred years. The cohorts were ten in number; and the first, to which the defence of the eagle and the emperor’s image was consigned, was nearly double the strength of the others. These brigades became permanently attached to their distant quarters: in later times the same three legions occupied the province of Britain for two or more centuries. They were recruited ordinarily from the countries beyond Italy; in the first instance, from the Roman citizens in the provinces. But even while the rights of citizenship were extended, this restriction was gradually relaxed; and instead of being the requisite qualification for admission to the ranks, the freedom of the city was often bestowed on the veteran upon his discharge. Numerous battalions of auxiliaries, differently arrayed and equipped from the legionaries themselves, continued to be levied throughout the most warlike dependencies of the empire, and attached to each legionary division. It is generally computed that this force equalled in number that of the legions themselves, and thus we arrive at a total of 340,000 men, for the entire armies of the Roman Empire, exclusive of the battalions maintained in Rome itself.

Augustus may be regarded as the founder of the naval power of the great military republic. She had exerted indeed her accustomed vigour on more than one occasion in equipping powerful fleets, in transporting military armaments, and sweeping marauders from the seas; but the establishment of a permanent maritime force, as one arm of the imperial government, was reserved for the same hand which was destined to fix the peace of the empire on a firm and lasting basis. While the influence of Rome extended over every creek and harbour of the Mediterranean, she had no rival to fear on the more distant coasts of the Atlantic Ocean or the Indian Ocean. But experience had shown that the germ of a great naval power still continued to exist in the inveterate habits of piracy, fostered throughout the inland seas by centuries of political commotion. The Cilician corsairs had distressed the commerce and insulted the officers of the republic; the armaments of Sextus had taken a bolder flight and menaced even the city with famine; a conjuncture might not be distant when the commander of these predatory flotillas would dispute the empire itself with the imperator of the Roman armies. Augustus provided against the hazard of such an encounter by equipping three powerful fleets. One of these he stationed at Ravenna on the upper, a second at Misenum on the lower sea, a third at Forum Julii (Fréjus) on the coast of Gaul. The two former squadrons amounted to 250 galleys each, the third to about half that number. Besides these armaments he posted a smaller flotilla on the Euxine, and established naval stations on the great frontier rivers, the Euphrates, the Danube, and the Rhine.[e]

Roman Ship with Scaling Ladder, for attacking a Sea Wall

It was only to be expected that the victor of Actium should not neglect the fleet, to which he owed everything, to the same extent as the republic had done; and as matter of fact he made a permanent navy the counterpart of his standing army. Up to that time Rome had only fitted out a fleet, or caused her allies to fit it out, for some definite purpose, and had dismissed it at the conclusion of the war. Augustus realised that a change must be made in this respect now that the whole coast of the Mediterranean was Roman and the sea had become the centre of the empire.

His first care was to construct the requisite naval ports. The Adriatic coast of Italy is not rich in harbours, even leaving naval ports out of the question. Brundusium was too much of a trading mart to come into consideration as a possible naval station for the empire; while Ravenna, farther to the north, near the delta of the Po, appeared to answer the end the emperor had in view. The place was easy to defend on account of the marshes about it; the harbour, though none of the best, was capable of improvement; and by means of the imperial canal (Fossa Augusta) Augustus secured a communication between his new naval station and the southern mouth of the Po. This was an advantage as far as the provisioning of the forces was concerned, for the produce of the fertile basin of the Po could thus be shipped direct to Ravenna; on the other hand it probably accelerated the silting up of the harbour. The whole scheme seems to have been put in hand shortly after the battle of Actium, for we meet with what appears to be a reference to these works in the writings of Valgius Rufus in the first years of the empire.

During the civil wars the fleet had used the Julian harbour on the west coast of Italy, but its inconvenient entrance and deficient anchorage unfitted it for a regular naval station. It was therefore abandoned in favour of the neighbouring harbour of Misenum, which surpassed even that of Ravenna in importance.

From both stations small bodies of men used to be detached to Rome to protect the emperor and the capital. The marines naturally did not find much to do at Rome; when the emperor arranged a sea fight (naumachia) he counted, of course, upon their co-operation, at other times they were deputed to spread the awnings at the entertainments given to the people.

Of less importance and probably of briefer duration was a similar work of Augustus on the coast of Gaul. Forum Julii (Fréjus) was raised by him to the rank of a naval station soon after the battle of Actium, and may have attained a certain degree of importance during the Cantabrian War; in the latter days of the empire we find no mention of any such naval port.

In Spain itself Augustus thought that he could dispense with a naval station on the Mediterranean coast, and he never dreamed of commanding the ocean. A naval base in the vicinity of Lisbon would have materially contributed to the conquest of the Asturians and Cantabrians, but only on condition that the Roman warships had been adapted to ocean navigation. The oared galleys of ancient days would hardly have proved seaworthy in the Atlantic. In the Spanish War a Roman fleet occasionally appears in the Bay of Biscay, but it was probably composed of transports from the neighbouring harbours of Gaul. Under Drusus and Germanicus the Rhine flotilla occasionally ventured out into the North Sea, but its constant mishaps soon frightened it out of risking farther hazards.

The emperor devoted some attention to his Mediterranean fleet, but far less than he bestowed on the army. In his summary Augustus makes frequent mention of his legions, while he rarely mentions the fleet to which he owed the victory of Actium. The army stood in quite a different relation to the princeps than was occupied by the navy. In the Monumentum Ancyranum the emperor invariably speaks of his navy: it is never styled the navy of the Roman people. The legions, on the contrary, belonged, in theory at least, to the state. The crews of the fleet and their officers were the personal servants of the princeps. The sailors, up to the grade of captain of a trireme, were slaves or freedmen, and were reckoned in law as belonging to the household of the emperor; and even the naval prefects, though free men, were not of Roman birth. Such were A. Castricius Myrio, and Sext. Aulienus, who worked his way up from the ranks to be a centurion and was then promoted to the rank of knight. An admiral of the imperial fleet (præfectus classis) ranked on the same footing with the imperial tax-collectors; a fact which speaks volumes for the position of the navy which had made Augustus an absolute monarch.

Augustus seems to have neglected the navy, especially in the latter years of his reign, from motives of economy. In the war with the Dalmatian rebels we hear nothing of the intervention of the Ravenna fleet when Bato was harassing the Adriatic shores as far as to Apollonia. The fact that the fleet at Misenum was in an equally melancholy state is proved by the insecurity of Sardinian waters, which was so great that no senator dared to land on the island; and it had to be administered by the emperor’s officers instead of by a regular governor.[c]

A Lictor

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