Roman Public Life

by A. H. J. Greenidge

The Romanisation of the provinces was still effected by the insensible channels which had been operative during the Republic—social intercourse, commerce, and the forms of the provincial edict. But more conscious efforts in the same direction were made in the Western world. The foundation of municipalities of an Italian type, the encouragement given to a Latin-speaking foreigner to find a career in the imperial service, the state support given to Roman systems of education—all tended to make portions of provinces, such as Gaul and Spain, centres of as pure a Latinity as could be found in Italy itself. Even when the full civitas was not at once conceded, preparation for it was made by the grant of Latin rights which were now conferred on whole provinces, such as Sicily, the Maritime Alps, and Spain,[2169] and made the dwellers in these regions participants in all the private rights of Roman law. The general tendency was to elevate the West at the expense of the East, or rather perhaps to decline the struggle with Hellenic civilisation, and to rest content with Romanising the barbarism of the lands that encircled Italy. In spite of this, the greatest triumphs of the legal genius were to be found in the East; the gift for theory seemed to be still peculiarly a property of the Greek or Oriental mind, and it was Asia, Phoenicia, and Syria that produced the names of Gaius, Ulpian, and Papinian. Such men had the signal advantage of comparing and even practising two perfected systems; for until the beginning of the third century, Graeco-Oriental forms were the common law of the Eastern half of the Empire, and the edict of Caracalla, which by the grant of the civitas implied the future currency of Roman forms, must have created something like a legal revolution in this part of Rome’s dominions.[2170]

The omnipresence of Roman law was a fitting consequence and symbol of the even, harmonious, uneventful working of provincial life, and of the uniform machinery which was eliminating national characteristics and reducing all provinces to the same level of excellence or decadence. But, in spite of the highly organised character of provincial administration, it was the city-state (civitas) that was still the unit, and the character of its public life remained at all times the test of the effectiveness of the Roman system.

Amidst the brilliant variety of the urban life of the Empire, some uniformity had been secured even during the days of the Republic by Rome’s leaning to aristocratic types of organisation. But a slight modification of existing forms of constitution was all that was needed to bring the local machinery into harmony with that of the central government, and there was no effort made to create a uniform type of administration or to regard the provincial state as a mere municipality adapted only to serve the purposes of the imperial system. The Principate ushers in this latter tendency, but at first it is very gradual. In its initial stages it manifests itself in the light of a paternal interest, whether on the part of governors or Emperors, in the affairs of local corporations, in minute regulations as to the responsibilities of magistrates, the use of public funds, and the care of public property.[2171] Perhaps for a time such measures were beneficial; certainly for nearly two centuries, in spite of the fact that there is here and there observable a tendency to shirk municipal office as a burden,[2172] the vitality of the towns, fostered by peace and the large revenues of commerce, was strong enough to resist the enervating effects of this interference, and hundreds of inscriptions show us a wealth, a splendour, a generosity in endowment, and a thirst for municipal fame, that seem a sufficient reward for the untiring exertions of an anxious government. But this government finally came to lean on what it had fostered. The same tendencies, still very imperfectly understood, which changed professions into corporations, trades into guilds, and made even military service a hereditary burden, fastened on the towns, and the government sought to find in them a class which would be solely responsible for local and imperial duties. This was found ultimately in the local Senate—the order of decuriones or curiales—which had always formed the pivot of municipal administration controlled or created by Rome, but which now tended to become sharply severed from the other classes in the communities, and, while solely endowed with the privileges of office, held these privileges at a tenure which it would gladly have surrendered. The legal texts of our period do not yet show the crushed and broken aristocracy of a later date; but they reveal the beginning of the movement which was to lead men to regard membership of the Senate as certain ruin, and to flee from office as though it were the plague. In the first place, the local magistracy was ceasing to be a stepping-stone to the Senate. There is a tendency to recruit the order through an adlectio of otherwise unqualified members,[2173] a tendency which reveals an anxiety to preserve the maximum numbers of the order. This admission is effected by the board itself, and prepares us for the practice of the later Empire by which the order recruits itself from all qualified persons who are bound to serve. In another way also the earlier relation of magistrate to senate was being reversed. The principle of the earlier law, in accordance with which the previous possession of office is a necessary qualification for the curia,[2174] has been changed for one in accordance with which none but a decurion can be a magistrate. A definite grade of municipal nobility has been evolved, an official caste has been created, and the decurions are sharply severed from the Plebs.[2175]

Each class has its burdens, and, though the severest of these were ultimately to fall on the curiales, the municipal law of the Digest calls on all members of the communes to do their duties to their state and to the Empire. Each class has its appropriate duties; to the decurions belong the higher branches of administration, but every category of citizens has its munera congruentia.[2176] The legal writers divide the burdens of public life into two categories. The munera personalia are those that demand the activity of the person; the munera patrimonii those that are incumbent on wealth.[2177] To the former belong the functions of public officials such as those concerned with the finances of the state, with the inspection of the market, roads, buildings and aqueducts, with the maintenance of the peace or the representation of the interests of the city. But municipal duties by no means exhausted the category of such burdens. The state finally saddled the municipalities with the returns for the census and the raising of the revenue in corn or money, and made the collectors responsible for any deficit.[2178] The cost of the imperial transport and post had also become a municipal burden.[2179] These last obligations introduce us to the idea of the patrimonial burdens, which existed wherever by law or custom expense was incurred by the individual undertaking them. There were few in which such expenditure was not incurred, and the policy of the dying Principate was to lay heavy imposts on capital, which increased in proportion to the diminution in number of the wealthier classes. When exertion was met with this reward it tended to relax, and a decaying agriculture and an enfeebled commerce were the results of the oppression of the government. Whatever the primary cause of these evils was, whether military, social, or economic, they were doubtless aggravated by the relentless system of imperial administration, which marshalled citizens as though they were soldiers, treated all classes as the fitting instruments of official life, and regarded the subject as existing for the Empire rather than the Empire for the subject.

§ 3. The Worship of the Emperor

One result of the discipline which we have described was doubtless to create a strong, though not a warm, imperial sentiment. A gentler bond of union amongst the provinces and of attachment to the imperial house was to be found in the carefully cultivated world-religion which expressed itself in the form of Caesar-worship.

The cult of the Emperor, although stimulated and encouraged by the imperial government, was by no means a purely artificial product. Had it offended against Roman or Italian sentiment, it would have been strangled in its birth; and had it met with no genuine response from the subject nations, coercion[2180] and rewards would probably have given it merely a precarious and transitory existence. The worship assumed two forms, neither of which was a strain on the religious beliefs of the age. In its application to the living Emperor, it was merely a reverence permitted to his spiritual personality, that numen or genius, the abstract duplicate of man, the ever-present guardian-angel to whom, as realised in the self, the Roman had often drunk or prayed. If to the mind of the barbarian the genius and the self were still more truly one, the conception of the new worship was simpler but by no means less strong. The reverence paid to the dead Caesar was a still more natural effort of grateful piety, not unwelcome to a cultured society which accepted Euhemeristic explanations of the gods, and indigenous at least amongst the Greek-speaking and oriental portions of the Empire. In the provinces, too, all the sordid aspects of imperial humanity were removed; to the provincial mind Caesar was a potent and unseen power, a distant incarnation of wisdom and order, a being whose sway was far wider than that of any local god, whose ordinances penetrated to the ends of the earth, and in whose hands the safety and happiness of the human race were set.[2181] The idealism which to-day makes of a king something more than a man, had, in a less fastidious religious environment, made of the Roman Emperor a god, and even in the more prosaic West, in countries such as Gaul or Spain or Britain, where Caesar-worship required a certain amount of cultivation, we must suppose an undercurrent of genuine belief.

The first step taken in the inauguration of the new worship was a happy one. It was a graceful act to honour a predecessor, who had been the ruler of the Roman world, and might be regarded as a martyr in its cause, and Octavian permitted the consecration of a temple to divus Julius,[2182] who was regarded, from a sentimental if not from a legal point of view, as the founder of the new dynasty. His own worship the Emperor prohibited in Italy, and he declined an altar in the curia.[2183] But in the year 20 B.C. a temple dedicated to him under the name of Augustus rose at Panium in Palestine,[2184] and in the next year the form of dedication to “Roma and Augustus,” which associated his numen with that of the city, and whose modesty secured his consent,[2185] began to spread through the provinces. A temple with this rite sprang up at Pergamum,[2186] and in 12 B.C. a similar worship, which replaced that of the native sun-god Lug, was established for the Gallic nobles at Lugdunum.[2187] An attempt was also made to consolidate the infant organisation of the new province of Germany by establishing an altar at the Oppidum Ubiorum (Köln) as the centre of its religious life.[2188] Rome itself could not wholly be deprived of a cult that was becoming universal, and in 8 B.C. a recognition of the divinity of Augustus was permitted in the only form which he would allow during his lifetime. His genius was associated with the household gods or Lares in the worship of the vici of the capital.[2189] The movement spread through Italy. The old magistri vicorum become the magistri Larum, and soon gain the title magistri Augustales. They are found in every part of Italy, and beyond it in Sardinia, Narbonensis, Spain, Dacia, and even Egypt.[2190] On the death of the first Princeps his complete deification was accorded by the Senate,[2191] and the recognition was followed by the permission to erect temples in the provinces,[2192] while private as well as public initiative fostered the cult of divus Augustus. The precedent set in the cases of the first two emperors had firmly established the practice of posthumous deification, and its denial to a Princeps was almost equivalent to the condemnation of his reign.[2193] Although the merits of Claudius as a divinity might be questioned, and Vespasian, with sceptical tolerance, regarded his own deification as an inevitable consequence of his position,[2194] yet by the close of the second century the virtues of the Antonines had made the worship of the deified Emperor a more genuine cult than ever, and a man was regarded as impious who had not some image of Marcus Aurelius in his house.[2195] This worship of the Caesars had two lasting effects on the social and political life of the Roman, Italian, and provincial worlds.