Roman Public Life

by A. H. J. Greenidge

With respect to the other powers which Caesar assumed, the praefectura morum, given for three years in 45 B.C.,[1570] has the appearance of a special conferment for a given purpose; but the tribunicia potestas was granted early in his period of rule (48 B.C.) and given for life; it must have been regarded even now as the ideal complement of a lasting imperium, valuable for the inviolability it conferred and for the “civil” and popular colouring which it gave its holder. To realise the nature of Caesar’s authority by an inspection of the bases of his power needed some reflection; but none was wanted to mark the external symbols of royalty—the triumphal robe, the portrait-head on coins, the statue placed amongst those of the seven kings in the Capitol. These were the symbols that were taken as tests of what the future monarchy was to be, and which reduced, not merely rigid constitutionalists, but even moderates and men of compromise, to despair. With Caesar conciliation was not accompanied by its requisite complement, compromise; he was tender of everything but sentiment, and did not care to estimate the force of what he must have considered mere prejudice; but, in spite of the modifications introduced into his theory of government by Augustus, it was he who pointed out that the necessary basis for the future Principate was the tribunician power combined with some kind of military imperium.

The murder of Caesar had, in words of the time, abolished the rex but not the regnum,[1571] and the Triumvirate of 43 B.C. was but a suspension of hostilities between the rival claimants. In form it was a provisional government, like that of the early Decemvirate, for the reform of the constitution, and received the sanction of the people;[1572] but so purely was it an agreement between the contending personalities that its renewal was contrived in 38 B.C. without any reference to the comitia.[1573] For ten years (38-28 B.C.) Octavian’s position was far more irregular than that of Caesar had ever been, and, even after the defeat and death of Antonius, his sole claim to power was an imperium, which had never been conferred, irregularly continued from a usurped Triumvirate. These indefinite powers resting, as he himself describes them, “on universal consent,”[1574] were essential to the accomplishment of the work that had to be done before the forms of the constitution were restored. The consulships which he held did not give the requisite authority, and the value of the tribunicia potestas, which he had possessed from 36 B.C.,[1575] was negative rather than positive. In the course of his sixth consulship (28 B.C.) he considered the time to be ripe for a final settlement. It assumed the form of a surrender. He issued a solemn decree in which he cancelled the irregular ordinances of the Triumvirate,[1576] and he fixed January 1, 27 B.C. as the date on which he would divest himself of his extraordinary power.[1577] On this day “he gave back the commonwealth to the discretionary power of Senate and people.”[1578] A return was expected, and had doubtless been arranged, but the gift made by the grateful Senate seemed small in comparison with what had been surrendered. It was enough, however, to make the abdicating monarch a very powerful head of the executive of the state. Augustus, as he was now for the first time designated,[1579] was given imperium for ten years with the government of certain specified provinces,[1580] while at the same time he was made commander-in-chief for life of all the forces of the state, with the sole right of raising levies and of making war and of declaring peace.[1581] Yearly consulships were still the chief basis of his dignity, if not of his authority, in the capital, while the tribunician power still continued but was as yet sparingly employed.

Such was the settlement that was greeted, officially and unofficially, as a restoration of the Republic,[1582] but which later writers held, with equal reason, to be the commencement of the legitimate monarchy.[1583] The weak point in the arrangement was the authority of the prince within the capital. The consulship had admirable Republican associations, but was hemmed in by awkward limitations. Its jurisdiction had become almost extinct, its initiative was fettered by colleagueship, it was technically not the highest power in the state, and the constant usurpation by the Princeps of one of the two offices of highest titular rank was a bar to the legitimate ambition of aspiring nobles. Hence the need for the new settlement which was attained in 23 B.C. The details of the change, which gave the Principate its final form, will be described elsewhere. Its essential features were that the constant investiture with the consulship was dispensed with, that the tribunicia potestas was shifted from the background to become the chief symbol of authority for the Princeps in Rome and Italy, and that an imperium, which must now be described as proconsulare, was renewed and perhaps increased.[1584] Further isolated grants were made to fill up the gaps in this heterogeneous association of powers, and to elevate the new extraordinary magistrate of the Republic to the requisite height above the ordinary officials of the state.

CHAPTER X
THE PRINCIPATE

§ 1. The Powers of the Princeps

We have seen that the powers on which Augustus based his position as Princeps were the proconsulare imperium and the tribunicia potestas. In the theory of a constitution which he presented to the world the first of these prerogatives was supposed to establish his power outside Rome and Italy, the second, with its purely civic traditions, to be the basis of his influence within the central state. His object in exalting the tribunician power to the first place in Rome and her Italian dependencies now merged in the city, was to conceal as carefully as possible the military basis of his rule. The unlimited imperium was to be felt only by his army and his provincial subjects.

It needed little reflection to show that this principle, although in appearance the most important that underlay the Principate, was practically unworkable. Government in Rome was inconceivable without an imperium, and supreme government impossible without one of such an indefinite character that it should seem to stand out of relation to the regular and limited imperia of consuls and praetors. This power was secured by an easy juristic device. By a special exemption, which had its prototypes in Republican history, the Emperor was allowed to retain the full imperium within the walls;[1585] and lawyers were careful not to declare explicitly what was implied in this retention. It might have meant—as it would have meant during the Republic—that the Emperor was not debarred by his presence in Rome from holding command abroad. It might signify that the limitations imposed by the city walls now rendered the proconsular a quasi-consular imperium, and this was perhaps the ruling theory. But a different line of interpretation would have rendered it easy to show that the imperium here as elsewhere was unlimited. The nebulous atmosphere of this mockery of a magistracy was as well suited to the despot as to the constitutional ruler. In the actual position of the Princeps within Rome we find traces of all these theories. As a provincial ruler he governs from the capital; as commander-in-chief he keeps his praetorian guards in Italy and his fleets at Ravenna and Misenum; while as the wielder of an undefined but civic imperium he gives justice, as a court of first instance or a court of appeal, and issues edicts to supplement the laws.

But the recognition of an imperium within Rome was not alone sufficient. Even when this was joined to the tribunician power, great gaps were left in the position which should be held by a true head of the state. To fill these up, and thus supply a solid foundation for autocracy, fresh grants of isolated powers were necessary; and these grants, though in theory occasional, soon became permanent in practice. The Emperor, like the tribune, possessed no distinctive official dress while he resided in Rome: hence the consular insignia had to be conferred;[1586] he possessed in virtue of his tribunician power only the right of making the third proposal at the Senate: hence the grant of the jus primae relationis.[1587] Such grants admitted of indefinite extension, and the stage which they had reached by the date of the accession of Vespasian is partially known to us from the only official document which throws light on the powers of the early Principate. In the existing fragment of this charter, which appears to be a decree of the Senate meant to be submitted to the people for their formal assent,[1588] we find the Emperor credited with the heterogeneous powers of making treaties, extending the pomerium, commending candidates for magistracies, and issuing edicts as interpretations of law human and divine. The measure further exempts him from the operation of certain enactments and gives him certain privileges, not possessed by the other magistrates, in his relations with the Senate. These powers cannot be brought under any single legal designation; but, as most of them are more or less directly connected with some kind of imperium, the view that they were tacked on to the bill conferring the tribunician power, which received the formal ratification of the Plebs, is improbable. On the other hand, they cannot be said to have belonged originally to a law conferring the imperium; for the imperial biographies frequently speak of the gift of the proconsulare imperium (by the Senate) and of the tribunicia potestas (by Senate and People) without any hint of a general law conferring the “imperium.”[1589] Yet the gift of the imperium is sometimes mentioned,[1590] and if the passages of jurists of the second and third centuries, which speak of imperium being conferred through a lex,[1591] are genuine, we must conclude that the centre of gravity in the powers of the Princeps had shifted with the course of years. Originally the casual collection of powers, which appears in the law sanctioning Vespasian’s rule, must have been a mere supplement to the two leading prerogatives—the proconsular and the tribunician powers. But it is quite possible that in the course of time the vast development and the great importance of these added privileges may have caused the enactment containing them, now known as the lex de imperio, to overshadow the other sources of the imperial authority.

There was one source, however, most distinctively expressive of the character of the Principate, which found no expression in legal enactments. The military oath (sacramentum), which during the closing years of the Republic was tending to become a bond of personal allegiance between a legion and its chief, was naturally taken in the Principate by the whole army to its sole commander.[1592] But on the very first transference of the throne a new departure was made. At the accession of Tiberius the oath of fealty was taken voluntarily by the civil orders;[1593] it was administered by provincial governors and was renewed twice a year, on the first of January and on the anniversary of the Emperor’s accession.[1594] The fact that a soldier’s oath bound the whole Roman world was the fittest expression of the military character of the new despotism.