The administration of justice. The republican system of civil and criminal jurisdiction was inherited by the principate, and the courts of the praetors continued to function for Rome and Italy, while the proconsuls were in charge of the administration of justice in the senatorial provinces. In addition the Senate, under the presidency of the consuls, acted as a tribunal for the trial of political offences and criminal charges brought against members of the senatorial order. The Senate also served as a court of appeals from the [pg 267]decisions of the proconsuls. But from the time of Augustus the princeps exercised an unlimited right of jurisdiction which enabled him to take cases under his personal cognizance (cognitio), or appoint a delegate to try them. The imperial officials administered justice in their respective spheres by virtue of delegated authority and consequently appeals from their courts were directed to the princeps. The development of judicial functions by the military and administrative officials of the princeps in Rome—the praetorian prefect, the city prefect, the prefects of the watch and the prefect of the grain supply—seriously encroached upon the judicial power of the praetors. In addition, the consulares of Hadrian, and the iuridici of Marcus Aurelius further limited the sphere of the praetorian courts. Ultimately, under Septimius Severus, we find the city prefect as the supreme judicial authority for all criminal cases arising in Rome or within a radius of one hundred miles of the city and also exercising appellate jurisdiction in civil cases within the same limits, subject however, to an appeal to the court of the princeps. For the rest of Italy, the court of the praetorian prefect was now the highest tribunal in both criminal and civil suits. By this time also the princeps had acquired supreme appellate jurisdiction for the whole empire, a power which was regularly exercised by the praetorian prefect acting in his place, In the third century the Senate ceased to exercise any judicial authority whatever.
As a result of the above processes the princeps became in the end the sole source of legislative, administrative and judicial authority. The republican magistrates had become practically municipal officers, and one of them, the aedileship, disappeared in the third century. The complete victory of the princeps over the Senate is marked by the exclusion of senators from military commands under Gallienus, and their removal from the provincial governorships in which they had continued to exercise civil authority between the time of Aurelian and the accession of Diocletian.
The friction between the Senate and the princeps. It might be thought that owing to the gradual admission to the Senate of the nominees of the princeps that harmony would have been established between the two administrative heads of the state. But although this new nobility was thoroughly loyal to the principate, they proved just as tenacious of the rights of the Senate as the descendants of the older nobility who preserved the tradition of senatorial rule. Au[pg 268]gustus and Tiberius endeavored to govern in concord with the Senate by organizing an advisory council appointed from the Senate, but their successors abandoned the practice. The friction between the princeps and the Senate was due in part to the realization that it was from the senatorial order that rivals might arise and in part to the fact that those emperors who did not interpret their position, as did Augustus, in the light of a magistracy responsible to the Senate, were bound to regard the Senate’s powers as restrictions upon their own freedom of action, and as an unnecessary complication of the administration. The chief services of the Senate were to provide a head for the government when the principate was vacant, and to furnish the only means for the expression of opinion with regard to the character of the administration of the individual emperors. The spontaneous deification or the damnatio memoriae of a deceased princeps was not without weight, for it expressed the opinion of the most influential class in the state.
While the Senate as a body was thus stripped of its power, the senatorial order remained a powerful class. Originally embracing the chief landholders of Italy, it came to include those of the whole empire. Collectively the senators lost in influence, but individually they gained. By the end of the second century the senatorial order had acquired an hereditary title, that of clarissimus (most noble), indicative of their rank.
II. The Growth of the Civil Service
The first steps. The necessary counterpart to the assumption of administrative duties by the princeps was the development of an imperial civil service, the officials of which were nominated by the princeps, and promoted or removed at his pleasure. In this Augustus had taken the first steps by the establishment of equestrian procuratorships and prefectures, and the opening up of an equestrian career, but the number of these posts greatly increased with the extension of the administrative sphere of the princeps at the expense of the Senate. The idea of conducting the government through various departments manned by permanent salaried officials was absolutely foreign to the Roman republic, which only employed such servants for clerical positions of minor importance in Rome. However, the chaotic conditions which had resulted from the republican system showed the need of a [pg 269]change, and the concentration of a large share of the administration in the hands of the princeps both required and gave the opportunity for the development of an organized civil service. This development was unquestionably stimulated and influenced by the incorporation in the Roman empire of the kingdom of Egypt, which possessed a highly organized bureaucratic system that continued to function unchanged in its essential characteristics.
The imperial secretaryships. At first the imperial civil service lacked system and there was little or no connection between the various administrative offices in Italy and in the provinces. Augustus and his immediate successors conducted the administration as part of their private business, keeping in touch with the imperial officials through the private secretaries of their own households, that is to say, their freedmen, who, in another capacity, conducted the management of the private estate of the princeps. An important change was introduced under Claudius, when his influential freedmen caused the creation within the imperial household of a number of secretaryships with definite titles that indicated the sphere of their duties. The chief of these secretaryships were the a rationibus, the ab epistulis, the a libellis, the a cognitionibus and the a studiis. The a rationibus acted as a secretary of the treasury, being in charge of the finances of the empire which were controlled by the princeps; the ab epistulis was a secretary for correspondence, who prepared the orders which the princeps issued to his officials and other persons; the a libellis was a secretary for petitions, who received all requests addressed to the princeps; the a cognitionibus served as a secretary for the imperial inquests, entrusted with the duty of preparing the information necessary for the rendering of the imperial decision in the judicial investigations personally conducted by the princeps (cognitiones); and the a studiis, or secretary of the records, had the duty of searching out precedents for the guidance of the princeps in the conduct of judicial or administrative business. The establishment of these secretaryships in the imperial household tended to centralize more completely the imperial administration and to give it greater uniformity and regularity. At the same time the influence of the freedmen who occupied these important positions was responsible for the admission of freedmen to many of the minor administrative procuratorships. It was under Claudius also that the preliminary military career of the procurators was more definitely fixed.
The reforms of Hadrian and Septimius Severus. Hadrian took the next decisive step in the development of the central administrative offices when he transformed the secretaryships of the imperial household into secretaryships of state by filling them with equestrians of procuratorial rank in place of imperial freedmen. From this time the latter were restricted to minor positions in the various departments. Under Hadrian also there was a marked increase in the number of administrative procuratorships owing to the final abolition of the system of farming the revenues and their subsequent direct collection by imperial officials as well as the establishment of the public post as a means of intercourse throughout all the provinces. It was possibly with the object of supplying the necessary officials to undertake these new tasks that Hadrian created the office of the advocate of the fiscus as an alternative for the preliminary military career of the procurators.
Septimius Severus, as we have seen, opened the posts of the civil administration to veteran officers upon the completion of a long period of military service. Thus, although a purely civil career was established, which led ultimately to the highest prefectures, nevertheless, during the principate the civil administrative offices were never completely separated from the traditional preliminary military service. It was Septimius Severus also who made the praetorian prefect, as the representative of the princeps, the head of the civil as well as of the military administration.