We noticed not only that Vespasian was born outside of Rome, but also that he was of lowly birth. Perhaps the latter fact accounts in part for the hostility which the senate showed toward him, and for the effort which it made in the early part of his reign to assert its authority. The movement was short-lived. The prince and the senate were partners of unequal strength in the dyarchy which Augustus had established, and Vespasian soon made this fact clear to the senate. It came out still more clearly in the reign of his younger son Domitian, who had himself made censor for life, and by virtue of this authority drew up the lists of senators to suit his own pleasure. The tradition of the city-state had been violated and the prestige of the senate had been lowered when Julius Caesar admitted provincials to the senate. This revolutionary precedent was freely followed by emperors during the second half of the first century. This transformation of the Roman senate into a body made up of representatives drawn from all parts of the empire was part of the larger change of the Roman imperium into an international world-state. The senate was still allowed to elect the emperor, but the election meant nothing more than the formal ratification of a choice made by the candidate’s predecessor or by the army, and “Caesar’s candidates” for the magistracies were always elected by the senate. The senate’s legislative powers had almost disappeared, because the senate had given up to the emperor almost entirely its right of initiative. We have already observed the importance which the “discourses of the prince” had acquired in the field of legislation. Through the opportunity which they gave him of declaring his will, and by the issuance of edicts, decrees and other “constitutions,” as they were called, the emperor took the lawgiving power almost completely into his own hands. The one real power which the senate exercised under the empire, long after its legislative and electoral functions had lost most of their meaning, was its right to sit as a court, especially in important political cases. In this capacity it had authority to impose the penalties even of banishment, deportation, and death, but by the beginning of the third century this jurisdiction, except where senators were charged with crimes, had passed to the emperor. By the close of this century the Roman senate had completed the cycle and come back to the status which it had held in the primitive city-state, that of a municipal council.
This gradual loss of power by the senate meant a corresponding increase of course in the influence of the emperor, but his supremacy was assured also by positive additions to his authority in other directions. Hadrian in the early part of the second century built up a bureaucracy[11] so large and so systematically organized that it enabled him and his successors to reach into the remotest parts of the empire and control the government of municipalities and the lives of all the citizens. Probably the world has never known so complete and crushing a paternalistic system as is revealed to us by the Codes of Theodosius and Justinian in the fifth and sixth centuries.
The drift toward autocracy was greatly accelerated by the influence which Egypt and the Orient exercised on the development of the principate. Perhaps the Oriental practice of identifying the secular and divine rulers of the world never found complete acceptance in Rome, but the erection of altars in the provinces to Rome and Augustus, the attribution of the titles “Master and God” to Domitian by his procurators, and in the third century the introduction into the court of Elagabalus of the Persian practice of paying divine honors to the sovereign, the presence of eunuchs in the palace of Aurelian, and the wearing of the Eastern diadem by Diocletian, show clearly enough that the principate was taking on the form of an Oriental despotism. The conception of the emperor’s authority which these practices suggest finds expression in the Code of Justinian in the sixth century.[12] The first words of the rescript in which Justinian authorizes Tribonian to codify the laws of the empire are: “We, under divine guidance governing our realm, which has been entrusted to us by the powers above, etc.” We shall see in the next chapter that under the prevailing theory of Roman lawyers from the second to the sixth century the emperor derived his authority from the people, but this utterance of Justinian and other passages in the Code show us the beginnings of the doctrine of the divine right of kings which Rome transmitted from the Orient to the states of modern times. When this point in the development of the empire had been reached, the preëminence of the city of Rome had gone, the distinction between Italy and the provinces had been obliterated, Roman citizenship had lost its significance, the splendor of the senate and the magistracies had faded, and the municipalities, which had been the pride and glory of the early empire, were plunged in poverty and wretchedness. In their place is an autocrat, kept in power by an army made up largely of barbarians, who carried out his wishes through a bureaucracy; and this, in turn, was supported by a body of citizens divided into groups by a system of castes, and held in most cases to the soil and to their hereditary occupations by the will of the state.
II. ROMAN POLITICS AND MODERN POLITICS
1. Rome and the Church of Rome
In the brilliant argument which Belloc makes in Europe and the Faith to prove that “the Roman Empire with its institutions and its spirit was the sole origin of European civilization,” he goes so far as to maintain that “the divisions and subdivisions of Europe, the parish, the county, the province, the fixed national traditions with their boundaries, the routes of communication between them ... all these derive entirely from the old Roman Empire, our well-spring.” He finds in the Church of Rome the medium through which this inheritance has been transmitted. With this Catholic essayist the Protestant historian, Harnack, is in substantial agreement when he writes: “The Empire has not perished, but has only undergone a transformation.... The Roman Church is the old Roman Empire consecrated by the Gospel.”
Before we take up for consideration certain points of resemblance and of difference between our political institutions and those of ancient Rome, it is interesting to stop for a moment to ask ourselves in what respects the tradition and the ideals of the Roman state have been perpetuated by the Church of Rome. In the first place the Church is the lineal successor of the Empire in the sense that she saved Europe from chaos when the political ties which bound its several component parts to Rome were severed, and she conserved with all her power through the Middle Ages the Roman elements which escaped being engulfed by the wave of barbarism. More than that, she kept alive the old tradition of world-empire, no longer of the flesh, but of the spirit. Like the old Empire her domain embraced diverse lands and peoples. She resembled and she resembles the Empire now in the fact that she follows law and tradition strictly. She requires implicit obedience from the individual, and the interests of the individual are subordinated to those of the organization. In all these characteristics she is the true spiritual daughter of the Roman Empire. We noticed a moment ago that the realm of the Church, like that of the Emperor, included many different lands. The territorial parallelism between the two systems goes beyond this general point of resemblance.
As Sohm has put it in his Outlines of Church History, “the city or civitas was the lowest political unit of the Empire. It became the lowest political unit of the Church. In the constitution of the Church the territory of the city appeared as the episcopal diocese. In the constitution of the Empire the province, with the provincial governor, stood above the civitas. The episcopal dioceses were united in like manner under the direction of the metropolitan, the bishop of a provincial capital, forming an ecclesiastical province. In the constitution of the Empire, from the fourth century, several provinces composed an imperial diocese under an imperial governor (vicarius). The imperial diocese also (at least in certain parts of the Eastern Greek Church) formed, after the fourth century, part of the ecclesiastical constitution, as the district of a patriarch, to whom the metropolitans of the imperial dioceses were subordinate. Finally the general union of the churches corresponded to the general union of the Empire, with the imperial Council (the so-called Oecumenical Council) as its legitimate organ.... Thus in its old age the Roman Empire bequeathed its constitution to the young Church.... It was its last great legacy to the future.”
And later Sohm goes on to say: “To this day the diocese of the Catholic bishop is the copy of the Roman civitas; the province of the Catholic archbishop, the copy of the Roman imperial province; and the Catholic Church under a Pope declared omnipotent by law, the copy of the ancient Roman Empire, with its Caesars who claimed the world as their possession.” The Church extended its limits in ancient times and still extends them by new conquests, just as the Empire did. The missionary expeditions of Gregory in the sixth century, like the Jesuit enterprises in North and South America in recent times, were carried out in the spirit of Caesar or Trajan, and, after the Christian conquest of England, Gregory spoke as a Roman Emperor might have spoken, when he said “In one faith He linked the boundaries of the East and the West.” The absolute power of the Emperor in the later period is continued in tradition by the infallibility of the Pope, and the remarks of the city prefect, Themistius, to Theodosius the Great, “thou art the living law,” might be made with propriety to the Pope of today. The title “Pontifex Maximus” is common to both rulers, and there is a striking similarity between other ecclesiastical titles and those in the official Roman list of the Notitia Dignitatum. Latin is the official language of the Church, as it was of the Empire; the Pope consults the College of Cardinals, as the Emperor consulted the Senate; Canon Law, which has been derived in part from Roman Civil law, is codified as Roman Law was; the Councils seem to follow the parliamentary procedure of the Roman Senate, and the dress of Church officials is reminiscent of Roman times. In other words, what is characteristic of the spirit of the organization and of the externals of the Church of Rome is a direct inheritance from the Empire.