By laying undue stress on the Senatorial objection to the rule of one man, writers of the school of Cicero have concealed the real position of an orthodox Roman Senator. Cæsar was hated by the old Senatorial party, less because he was in fact King than because he had changed the constitution of the Senate, and endeavoured to make it a council of the Empire by inviting provincials to its ranks.
There is this essential difference between the suicide of Cato and the subsequent suicide of Brutus: the former was a legitimist, to whom the defeat of his cause meant the destruction of all that was holy, the final collapse of law and order and religion; the latter, if an honest man at all, was a fanatical doctrinaire who had been disappointed in his expectation of regenerating society; Cato died because he could not live under the new conditions, Brutus partly because he was disgusted with his failure, partly because he preferred death by his own hand to death at the hands of the ruffians of Antonius.
The conservative Senator objected to a King, it is true, but he objected no less and perhaps even more to such a reconstitution of the Senate as commended itself to Cicero and other reformers, who wished to remodel the political arrangements of Rome in terms of the Athenian Constitution or of some less extravagant ideal republic than that imagined by Plato.
While the Senate contained a party of irreconcilables whom we may call the Legitimists, it also contained a party who believed in the possibility of a genuine reform, and adaptation of the Senatorial constitution to the needs of the Empire; there was a liberal tradition as well as a conservative tradition inside the Senate; the men who had gradually broken down the barriers between Patrician and Plebeian in the early days of the Republic, and who had gone some distance in admitting the allies to a place in the constitution, had been succeeded by the men who had recognized the claims of the Equestrian order, and saw that some equitable distribution of the rewards of victory among the rank and file of the army was necessary to the well being of the State. The names of the men who took the lead in forcing reforms upon the Senate are Senatorial names, Glaucia, Fimbria, Saturninus, Livius Drusus, Cinna, no less than the Gracchi were Senators; and though they were ill advised in mistaking the Roman mob for a constitutional party, they were not demagogues in the sense that Danton was a demagogue; they belonged to the body which they wished to reform; their methods were injudicious, as was proved by the result, but it is not easy to see what other methods were open to them. After Cicero had pledged himself to the cause of the Conservative party in the Senate, he spoke of these men and other men who had proposed and passed measures of reform in terms of unmeasured reprobation, but we are no more bound to accept his condemnation as historically accurate than we are at liberty to accept the current terminology of political abuse in our own day as indicating anything more than the malignity of the speaker. Even the moderate reformer is stigmatized as a demagogue by those who object to his reforms.
Had Marius been as capable a politician as he was a general, it is possible that the reform party in the Senate might have brought about a gradual transition from the rule of the Senate to the inevitable monarchy, but the incapacity of Marius gave the reins to violence, and brought on the proscription of Cinna to be followed by the reaction and yet more violent proscription of Sulla.
Constitutional reform failed, but the breed of constitutional reformers was not extinguished even by the second proscription. Sulla had recognized this party, and had adopted two of its projects of reform; he had, in a measure, unified Italy, and he had provided for a quasi-representative constitution of the Senate by ordaining that men who had held the elective office of Quæstor should after their term of office pass into the Senatorial ranks; this did not exclude other means of admission to the Senate, but it partly broke down the exclusive system of co-optation through the Censor, and it gave a capable and pushing man from an Italian municipality, such as Cicero, a better chance of attaining the highest position at Rome.
The party of moderate reform was divided into two sections, the section which recognized the Empire, and the section which thought in the first place of the city; the former became the mainstay of Cæsar, the latter soon ceased to have any practical weight except in literature. When the great crisis came, it ranged itself for the most part with the Pompeians; but the former section was not able to accept Cæsar’s radical reforms, and became after his death anti-Cæsarian, till after being frightened by the extravagance of Antonius and the brigandage of Sextus Pompeius, it was won over by the moderate and cautious policy of Octavian. These were the men who fought beside Brutus and Cassius, and joined Lucius Antonius in the Perusine war, but when they saw that the choice was between anarchy and Octavian, gave their adhesion finally to his cause; the reign of Augustus bears the impress of their influence throughout. Among them were two men of note, Livius Drusus, father of Livia and grandfather of Tiberius, and Tiberius Nero, the father of the future Emperor.
The reign of Augustus did not finally conclude the reign of the Senate, but it removed from practical politics the party who could not see beyond the city State, and it definitely concluded the pretensions of the rabble of the streets to act in the capacity of the Roman people. It was only gradually that the Senate became an advisory council to the Emperors, recruited from the distinguished officials of the Empire, or from the legal profession; it retained for a long time its hereditary and domestic character.
It might have been anticipated that there would be a clear division of functions between the officials of Greater Rome and of the city itself, that the Emperor with his staff would manage the concerns of the Empire, and the Senate would govern the city; but it was long before the Government of the city sank to the position of an ordinary municipal Government. The division of the provinces into Senatorial and Imperial ultimately broke down, and was indeed from the beginning formal rather than real; it was a compromise by which the old nobility was conciliated, but the honours conceded to the old aristocracy became more and more titular as time went on; the Roman Senate could not step down, and it refused to accept the position of the city Council of Rome, or even of the Council of Italy. It was never formally disestablished, but it was eventually crowded out, though it was still sufficiently self-conscious, when Tacitus and the younger Pliny were writing, to resent the predominance of the Imperial Household, and to worship the traditions of an omnipotence which it believed to have been the realization of those dreams of liberty so dear to the Greek philosophers. So long as Rome continued to be the centre of the administration of the Empire, the Senate of Rome was always something more than a municipal council, and the name of the body which had once governed the Empire was always dignified by associations which could attach to no other assembly.