Roman Public Life

by A. H. J. Greenidge

We have now exhibited the system of dual control as it existed in all the chief departments of the state. It would be easy to prove that in almost every particular it might be made a fiction. The senatorial power of legislation is directed to so large an extent by the imperial initiative that the oratio of the Princeps is sometimes cited in place of the decree of the Senate to which it gave birth;[1898] the independence of senatorial jurisdiction is often infringed by the tribunician power of the Emperor, while his authority is directly or remotely in conflict with that of the other courts at every turn; his praefects tend to usurp the administration of Rome and Italy, while his procurators are a check on the activity of the proconsuls of the public provinces; his influence over the aerarium can be asserted whenever he cares to take the trouble to initiate or support in the Senate the proposal of a grant of money to himself.[1899] But such a control of departments, if wisely asserted, by no means rendered the dyarchy nugatory. Under a judicious prince the Republican constitution was sufficient for its own sphere in perhaps ninety-nine cases out of every hundred; because in the hundredth some pressure was felt from the head of the state, we cannot pronounce the dyarchy to be a fiction. If the control by the Princeps is brutally and unwisely, however legally, asserted, he is by common consent not a Princeps but a tyrant. We must judge the Principate by its best names, by a Nerva, a Trajan, a Marcus Aurelius, an Alexander, a Decius. In the reigns of all these princes the dyarchy is a living thing. If it is objected that it becomes a living thing merely through a concession of the Princeps, the answer is that this concession was certainly not pictured by these Emperors to themselves as an act of grace, but was regarded as mere obedience to the constitution; and to maintain the theory that a constitution which demands obedience from the wise is a palpable fiction because it cannot enforce obedience on the headstrong, is to wring a strange admission from political science.

§ 6. The Senatorial and the Equestrian Nobility

Although the authority of the Princeps rested virtually on the support of the army, his position might have been unsafe, and would have been embarrassing, had he not secured for the work of administration at home and abroad an official class, that was dependent to some extent on imperial creation and, therefore, worked in harmony with himself. The old Republican nobility, so far as it had not been extinguished, might be utilised; but it could be employed only by being kept in fetters, and by power being given to the Princeps to recruit its ranks at his will. We have already considered his control of office, his right of adlectio, and his power of creating Patricians. But a wider power, cognate to the gift of the Patriciate, was needed, to make him the patenter of a nobility from which alone senators and magistrates were to be chosen. Such a power had been usurped by Augustus, and the recognition of a “senatorial order” was its result. Perhaps in the later Republic society had already recognised the right of the prospective senator to wear the broad scarlet stripe (latus clavus) on his tunic, but the right became more clearly defined with the commencement of the Principate; and the laticlavii are prospective senators and holders of Republican offices, either recognised as such by the Princeps or endowed by him with the symbol of senatorial rank. The senator’s son possesses the right to wear the latus clavus and to attend the meetings of the curia, in which he will one day take an active part;[1900] the eques to whom the symbol has been given may qualify for the Senate through the vigintivirate and the quaestorship. The first steps to office and to the Senate were, as we have seen, usually through the army; but the young soldier who was destined for the Senate differed, in service and in title, from his purely equestrian compeer. The tribuni laticlavii[1901] are a special class of officers, who may often have started their service, as mounted officers of the legions, with the brevet rank of tribune, and whose service was shorter than that of the other equites in order that they might be qualified for the quaestorship by the age of twenty-five.[1902] The possessors of the latus clavus must always have been expected to pursue a senatorial career;[1903] by the time of Claudius they might be compelled to this course, the penalty of refusal being the deprivation of the broad stripe, but sometimes of equestrian rank as well.[1904]

Great care was taken to preserve the dignity and purity of this senatorial order. The latus clavus was granted only to those who could trace free birth through four generations, and Claudius was forced to excuse his conduct in giving it to a freedman’s son.[1905] The Julian marriage laws prohibited marriage with freedwomen or actresses, not only to senators, but to their sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons.[1906] “The order” was reckoned to include the wives of senators and all descendants in the male line,[1907] together with adoptive children, until they were emancipated, and even those natural children who had been emancipated.[1908] The commercial disabilities of senators were perpetuated and sharpened. The Republican prohibition that they should not be purchasers of public contracts[1909] was renewed by an edict of Hadrian.[1910] They were permitted to invest capital at a moderate rate of interest, but at times even this was disallowed.[1911]

These disabilities were, however, to some extent compensated by privileges. As the senators ceased to be purely Roman, the question of their duties to their native states had to be considered, and the rule was fixed that, while they were allowed to retain their domicile of origin (origo), they owed no public duties (munera) to the cities of their birth.[1912] We have already mentioned the growth of the principle which reserved criminal jurisdiction on a senator to the senatorial court.[1913]

In the early Principate there was no distinct title reserved for the order, but after the close of the first century the epithet clarissimus came to be applied to its members, and the title clarissima is even given to women of senatorial rank.[1914] A distinction in office and dignity but no distinction in rank separates the Princeps from the senators. They are his “peers” (ὁμότιμοι),[1915] and this peerage is chiefly shown in their sole participation in Republican offices. They might, indeed, be delegates of the Princeps, but not his servants in the sense in which the procurators were. Besides filling the regular offices of state, senators possessed a monopoly of provincial government, where the country governed was a true provincia and not a department assigned temporarily or permanently to a procurator or praefect; they were the sole commanders of the legions, and, as Caesar’s nominees, they filled the office of praefect of the city and the various commissionerships (curationes) for duties which he had undertaken, such as the care of the water-supply, of the roads, of public works, and of the banks and channel of the Tiber (curatores aquarum, viarum, operum publicorum, alvei et riparum Tiberis).[1916]

We have already spoken of the military training and attitude of this nobility,[1917] and also of its gradually increasing provincial character.[1918] Both these characteristics were in harmony with its sphere of duties, which were mainly provincial. A successful member of the order could have seen but little of Rome or Italy until his declining years. If his early military service was real and not nominal,[1919] he spent most of the years between eighteen and twenty-five in the camps and on the frontiers. If he had shown military ability, he might be sent back as an ex-quaestor to take command of a legion, although such a legateship was usually reserved to men of praetorian rank.[1920] The praetorship and consulship qualified him for long terms of service in successive Caesarian provinces, and for the annual governorship of those still under the control of the Senate.[1921] This identification with provincial life was an identification with the Principate, for there were few Republican associations to impress the mind when the bounds of Italy had been passed. The principles of selection, training, and habituation to which this nobility was subject were thus directed to inspire it with a belief in, if not with an enthusiasm for, the accepted order of things.

The second order which supported the throne and did the work of the Empire was that of the Equites. The word eques has now, as in the Republic, a dual signification. Tacitus employs it to describe the capitalist class, presumably the possessors of a census of 400,000 sesterces,[1922] and it is obvious that current terminology did not accept the restrictions which the Principate may have wished to impose on the use of the term. It is uncertain what these restrictions were, for literature and inscriptions mention two methods of conferring equestrian rank, and it is not known whether these methods—the gift of the rank through the gold ring and through the public horse—were sometimes alternative or always concurrent. But the grant of knighthood to freedmen is described as having been effected by the gift of the gold ring[1923]—a gift which, as early as the time of Hadrian, had come to confer free birth (ingenuitas) merely and not equestrian rank,[1924] and it cannot be shown that the public horse was always given to members of this class when they were endowed with the insignia of knighthood.[1925] It is not improbable, however, that when the gold ring had lost its earlier signification and become merely a means of conferring free birth, only one order of official equites was recognised, and that the title in its proper sense was restricted to the order whose members had, from the time of Augustus, been pre-eminently the bearers of the name. This order was the old one of the equites equo publico, which was reorganised and vastly extended in scale at the very beginning of the Principate. We are told that even under Augustus the annual parade might witness the appearance of five thousand knights,[1926] and these could have been but a portion of the order, for many members of the corps must have been detained on financial, administrative, and military duties in the provinces. This increase in numbers seems to have led to the abandonment of the old centuriate organisation, for the equites of the Principate are grouped in turmae and commanded by seviri.[1927] Selection for the order was entirely in the hands of the Princeps,[1928] and probably any one with the requisite qualifications—free birth, good character, and a property of 400,000 sesterces—could get this patent of nobility from the Emperor’s hands. At the times when the censorship was revived in the person of the Princeps,[1929] the selection and elimination of equites may have followed the rules prevailing under the Republican system of revision;[1930] but, as the censorship was no part of the constitution of the Principate, some department must have existed from the first for the purpose of registering the names of applicants. We find a permanent bureau eventually established for this purpose. It bore the title a censibus equitum Romanorum, and seems to have been a branch of the general department of petitions (a libellis).[1931] Although this office was concerned primarily with the duty of admission to the order, yet its holders must have pointed out to the Princeps cases where the qualifications requisite for knighthood had ceased to exist, and they must thus have acted as the board that really controlled the tenure of the rank. The formal control in this particular was, however, effected, now as in the Republic, by a solemn and public act. The act, although a Republican survival, was not employed with its Republican meaning. The parade of the knights (transvectio equitum) on the Ides of July had, during the Republic, been a mere procession; it was now given the significance of the censorian review in the Forum,[1932] and became the means of testing the qualifications of members of the order (probatio equitum).[1933] The knights now passed on horseback, not on foot; they could not ask for their discharge (missio), for the tenure of their rank was no longer conditioned by military service, although Augustus finally permitted all members of the age of thirty-five, who were unwilling to continue in the corps, to return their public horses;[1934] but the knights were still questioned and made to give an account of their conduct,[1935] and those whose answers were unsatisfactory were dismissed from the ranks.[1936] That Augustus took this duty seriously is shown by the fact that he more than once asked the Senate for committees, whether of three or ten members, to assist him in the work.[1937] But, although this parade is found in the reigns of subsequent Emperors,[1938] and can be traced as late as the fourth century A.D.,[1939] the serious duty of rejection was probably exercised more and more by the permanent bureau which admitted to the order.

The eighteen centuries of Roman knights had, even at the end of the Republic, never lost touch with the army. They had ceased to be the citizen cavalry, but they were composed of the young nobility who furnished the mounted officers of the legions. This secondary military character was retained by the corps in the Principate; but it had an additional significance as well. There can be no doubt that it was from the equites equo publico that the Emperors chose those members of the official hierarchy—procurators and praefects—who were of equestrian rank. It is less certain whether this corps furnished all the judices during the early Principate. Jurisdiction, whether civil or criminal, was a burden (munus), and this may have been imposed on all who possessed the requisite census, whether they had made profession for the order or not.[1940]