UNFULFILLED POSSIBILITIES
But the Roman nation existed no more, and in the senate under the empire a Cineas would now have seen, not a council of kings, but, like the emperor Tiberius, an assemblage of men prepared to brook any form of servitude. If it had been possible to give legal representation to the Roman citizens in Italy and the romanised provinces, the system devised by Augustus might have been destined to enjoy a longer lease of life. The emperor Claudius, who had some sensible ideas intermingled with his follies, would have admitted Gauls of noble birth to the senate, as Julius Cæsar had done. We can read in Tacitus of the vehement opposition with which this proposal was received by the senators, who would not hear of any diminution of their exclusive class privileges; and even the Spaniard Seneca has nothing but angry scorn for the defunct emperor who wanted to make the whole world a present of the rights of Roman citizenship and “to see all Greeks, Gauls, Spaniards, and Britons, in the toga.”
And yet this would have been the only way to infuse fresh sap into the decaying organism, to maintain the vital forces of the senate, to establish the government of the empire on a broader basis, and to bind the nations which had been subdued by the sword to the empire with indissoluble ties. It is true that by the so-called jus Latii which Vespasian bestowed upon the whole of Spain as a testimony to the Romanisation of the country, the magistrates, and after the second century the town-councillors, of such cities as did not enjoy full rights of citizenship, were admitted to the ranks of Roman citizens, a very sensible measure, though of benefit to a limited circle only, by which the best elements of provincial society became Roman citizens.
Full rights of citizenship were also bestowed on the peregrine soldiers when they entered the oriental legions, and on the Vigiles at Rome, and the soldiers of the fleet and auxiliary forces on their discharge. But from the reign of Antoninus Pius onwards this important privilege was not accorded, as before, to the children of these soldiers, but churlishly confined, with few exceptions, to the men themselves; and the bestowal consequently lost its virtue as an agency for the assimilation of the population of the empire; and when, two hundred years after the death of Augustus, the son of the emperor Septimius Severus, who himself had broken with all the national traditions of Rome, granted Roman citizenship to all subjects of the empire, as we are informed (though by authorities which greatly exaggerate the scope of the measure), it was no longer felt as a political privilege but as the outcome of a greedy financial policy.