Roman politics

by Frank Frost Abbott

2. Post-Augustan

The problem which confronted Augustus in revising the constitution after the battle of Actium was not simple. He had to provide a just and efficient government for an empire, which included southern and central Europe, the Near East, and northern Africa, without breaking away too violently from the traditions of the city-state. Rome must continue to be the capital. Italy must hold her privileged position above the provinces, and the old organs of government and the old forms and titles must be kept. The political life of the Republic had been embodied in two institutions, the senate and the tribunate. One represented the aristocracy; the other, the aspirations of the democracy. These two organs of government formed the core of the system which Augustus finally adopted. In this arrangement therefore he adhered closely to the tradition of the old city-state.[7] Other considerations reinforced in his mind the argument from tradition. The tribunician power, which he took for life, could be exercised in almost every field of administrative activity. Furthermore, the office was popular, because the tribune had from time immemorial been the champion of the masses and had protected the individual against the encroachments of the state. Probably Augustus also felt that the power of the office, from its nature and history, was capable of indefinite extension in all directions.

Outside of Rome and Italy the problem before him was the improvement of conditions in the provinces.[8] To the provinces also he applied the dual system of control. The supervision of Italy and the management of the older provinces were entrusted to the senate. The border provinces, where troops were stationed, he took into his own hands. He directed the government of them by virtue of the proconsular imperium which he held permanently. In this case, as in that of the tribunician power, he held firmly to an old practice, because proconsuls had ruled the provinces for centuries, but he extended the scope of his own imperium to cover all the unsettled provinces. This arrangement made him commander-in-chief of all the legions. He also held the power permanently, and he was not required to lay down the imperium, as republican proconsuls had done, on entering the city. The whole empire was thus put under the dual control of Augustus and the senate. This is the first instance in history of the establishment of a constitutional monarchy.

The provinces profited greatly by the changes which Augustus made in the method of governing them. The evils of the republican system come out in Cicero’s orations against Verres, the governor of Sicily, and in the letters which he wrote while he was himself governor of Cilicia. Governors had been sent out to the provinces without paying much heed to their competence. They received no salary, and their terms were short. The governors whom Augustus sent out were chosen on the score of honesty and fitness. Their terms were long enough to enable them to become familiar with conditions in their provinces. They received a generous fixed salary, and those who were capable and honest might look forward to steady advancement. The older provinces were still under the control of the senate, but the excellence of government in the imperial provinces exercised a beneficial influence upon them also. Italians and provincials welcomed the firm and stable government which the principate of Augustus promised them in the same spirit in which the French accepted Louis Napoleon.

The development of the city-state into a world-empire is well illustrated by the decadence of the popular assembly which represented the narrow, selfish interests of the city of Rome, and we are not surprised to find the election of magistrates transferred from this body to the senate under the successor of Augustus. As for the magistracies they lost their independence in large measure. Augustus introduced the practice of commending certain candidates for office, and his approval assured them election. Consequently they became subordinates in the new executive system, of which he was the head. The functions of government were divided between the prince and the senate, but the lion’s share fell to the prince. The senate could not successfully assert, in dealing with him, the claims which it had made good against an annually elected magistrate of much less prestige and power. Another circumstance contributed greatly to lessen the influence of the senate. During his declining years Augustus could not attend all its meetings. Consequently he adopted the practice of sending it his proposals in writing. They were always adopted without change, and propositions of this sort, known as orationes principis, became in the course of time part of the law of the land.

The powers which Augustus held were granted to him for life or for a term of years. It was not easy to arrange for their transmission to a successor, but he cleverly surmounted the difficulty by naming Tiberius as heir to his private fortune and by having him invested with the imperium and with the tribunician power. The theory of the republican magistracy was kept intact, inasmuch as the two powers just mentioned were conferred on Tiberius by the senate in coöperation with the people, but the action of the popular assembly was a pure matter of form, and the senate could be counted on to approve the choice of the prince. The precedent which Augustus set was followed by his immediate successors.

He materially strengthened his position by clearly marking off certain social classes from the rest of the population and by making their privileges dependent on his favor. No one could become a senator unless he had been elected to a magistracy, and success in an election required the support of the prince. He gave dignity to the knighthood and definiteness to its membership by making important appointments from its ranks, and by revising the list of knights at regular intervals. He even created an aristocracy among the freedmen in the municipalities.

No survey of Roman politics would be complete without some account of political life in these municipalities, for, as we have already noticed, the city was the organic political unit in antiquity. Several municipal charters,[9] most of which have been found within the last fifty or seventy-five years, give us a clear idea of the municipal system in the West and of the efforts which were made in the early empire to improve it and make it uniform. In cities of the typical form there were two local chief magistrates corresponding to the early republican consuls, two minor magistrates who bore the title of aediles, a senate or common council of one hundred members, and a popular assembly. The system adopted was conservative, inasmuch as the control of local affairs rested largely with the local senate, and the magistrates were its ministers. Most cities were allowed to keep a large measure of self-government under the early empire, and this fact kept alive the sentiment of local pride and the local patriotism of the citizens. So long as the cities were free to manage their own affairs, the empire was prosperous. As the cities lost their sense of responsibility, or as the central government encroached on their rights, as it began to do in the second century of our era, the decline of the empire set in. It was to this halcyon period of municipal prosperity from the latter part of the first to the close of the second century that Gibbon pays his famous tribute in the third chapter of his history: “If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.” We need not stop to consider in this connection whether the decline of this prosperity caused the decay of self-government or was due to it. At all events the two processes were contemporaneous.

To return from this brief account of city-life to the story of imperial politics,—as we have noticed, under the system which Augustus set up, there were two recognized sources of authority in the state, the prince and the senate. We say “recognized sources of power,” because in the background loomed up the sinister figure of the army, which was still capable of determining the fortunes of the state, as it had done in the times of Sulla and Marius, of Pompey and Caesar. Perhaps we may see the first step toward the intrusion of the army into politics again when Sejanus, the unscrupulous praetorian prefect of Tiberius, brought all the cohorts of the praetorian guard together in Rome. The control of these soldiers stationed in the capital put a powerful weapon in the hands of Sejanus, but, before he could strike, his designs were laid bare. The hereditary principle which Augustus had introduced, by adopting Tiberius and by conferring imperial honors upon him, a principle which was followed by his immediate successors, was for a time a safeguard for the succession. But when the Julian line became extinct on the murder of Nero, the field lay open to the imperial aspirant who was backed by the strongest army. After a year of struggle between four military leaders, Vespasian made good his claim to the prize, and in the year 69 founded a new dynasty, the Flavian. The precedent which Vespasian had set was not followed for a century, but from the close of the second century to the accession of Diocletian in 284 the praetorian guard and the army constituted the power which made and unmade the rulers of Rome. Within the period of seventy-three years which preceded the reign of Diocletian there were in fact twenty-three different emperors, almost all of whom owed their elevation to the throne to the force of arms, and kept their places on the throne so long as they could keep the favor of their armed supporters.

Vespasian, whose seizure of the imperial purple we noticed a moment ago, was not a native of the city of Rome, as all the members of the Julian line had been, nor did he belong to a noble family. These two facts might almost be taken as an omen of the great change which he and his successors were to bring about in the position of Rome and Italy in the Roman world and in the political standing of the senate. The exceptional position which Rome and Italy had held under the republic was taken from them in part by robbing them of their privileges and in part by raising the provinces to a higher political plane. Augustus had started the new movement by stationing troops in Italy and by taking the municipal departments in Rome under his control. Within a century the same fate befell other Italian municipalities which had befallen Rome, and they had to surrender to the emperor the control of their finances and their jurisdiction in all important civil and criminal cases. The privilege which at first Rome and later the Italian municipalities guarded most jealously was their exclusive right to Roman and Latin citizenship. Claudius turned from this tradition when he granted these privileges to certain Gallic cities, and the Flavian emperors violated it in a still more striking way by their generous treatment of many cities in Spain. The levelling down of Italy to the position of the provinces, so far as citizenship was concerned, was completed when Caracalla in 212 granted Roman citizenship to practically all freemen in the empire.[10] In this connection may be mentioned a significant change which was made in the organization of the army. The legions from the time of Hadrian on were recruited in all parts of the empire, and officers were no longer drawn solely from the Western and Latin-speaking portion of the Roman world, but from the East also. The army therefore ceased to be the great Romanizing influence which it had been in the past, and what was still worse, a feeling of local solidarity grew up which was destined in the end to be fatal to the unity of the empire. It was this feeling which gave rise to the nationalist movement in the third century, and the Gallic kingdom of Postumus in the West in that century and the kingdom of Zenobia in Palmyra in the East were concrete manifestations of this feeling and at the same time premonitions of the future dissolution of the empire.