Tiberius the Tyrant

by John Charles Tarver

The contemporary history of the years during which the Roman Empire took organic form is written in terms which tend to disguise the real significance of the change; our attention is attracted almost exclusively to the internal politics of the city of Rome; it is withdrawn from the politics of the Empire; the long struggle which ended by giving the whole civilized world one system of Government, which welded together in orderly association Italians, Greeks, Syrians, Africans, Egyptians, Spaniards, Gauls, Germans, and even Britons, is represented to us as being little more than a constitutional revolution inside the city; we see the external pressure, which forced a revised constitution upon the Roman oligarchy, but we only see it dimly; no Roman historian has been at the pains to trace out the process by which the civil administration of the Roman Empire was developed—surely no less wonderful an achievement than the conquests of the Roman generals. We have seen other conquerors, and more brilliant feats of arms than any Roman general achieved, but we have not seen any other nation impress its language and its law upon the populations of so wide an area or so permanently. Alexander did much, but the effects of the conquests of Rome have been more lasting than those of the conquests of Alexander; except in Asia there is not a civilized people in the world which does not somewhere or other bear the impress of Rome, or cannot trace the pedigree of its religion and its law back to the Italian city. This great destiny was concealed from the makers of the Empire, but the immediate possibility, the consolidation of the conquests of Rome, and the permanent establishment of order over the whole area which drains into the Mediterranean was present to their minds; unfortunately the makers of the Empire have been mostly silent, and the only voices which have reached our ears are those of men who could only grasp the great idea intermittently, if at all, or who were annoyed by its insistence. Under Augustus for the first time the Empire became conscious, Virgil and Horace spoke in terms of the larger conception, but the grip of the Roman oligarchy has never relaxed its hold upon the imagination of educated men.

Conquest did not involve in ancient times any responsibility towards the conquered; war was believed to be, and was, a profitable investment; as Rome pushed her conquests, the organization which she gave to the conquered peoples was one which suited her own purposes, she did not consult their convenience, external pressure alone forced her to modify the conditions of conquest which were universally accepted by the ancient world; very gradually and very reluctantly she broke down the barriers which surrounded the city state of antiquity, and admitted first her immediate neighbours, and lastly the whole of Italy to some sort of constitutional communion with her. For a long time war had been forced upon Rome, the invasions of the Gauls, the domination of Carthage in the Mediterranean, the invasion of Pyrrhus, the invasion of Hannibal, and lastly the invasion of the Cimbrians and Teutons involved her in a succession of defensive wars; the city itself could not find a sufficient supply of soldiers, and the price which Rome had to pay for being allowed to recruit over Italy was the partial incorporation of the Italians in the State. Wars of defence were accompanied and followed by wars of aggression; success encouraged speculation; after the happy issue of the second war with Carthage the Roman oligarchy began seriously to turn its attention to the Eastern Mediterranean, and another century found it entering upon the heritage of Alexander. This is the turning point of Roman history; from this time onwards a new conception occupied the minds of ambitious Romans; alongside of the ideal of the city State there existed the ideal of an extended Empire, of a world-wide organization, of something more permanent than conquest; alongside of the men who dreamed of Platonic republics in which perfect justice would be realized, there grew up men who formed a yet grander and no less civilized ambition. Pompey triumphed over Mithridates wearing a robe which had been worn by Alexander; Augustus used a head of Alexander for his signet ring; it was by the example of Alexander that Cleopatra seduced Mark Antony.

Alexander was no vulgar adventurer; he solved a problem which had hitherto baffled the most highly civilized race of the ancient world; he combined the city state of the Greeks with the Imperial organization of the Persians; and though, when the Romans came into close contact with Alexander’s Empire it had fallen into fragments, each fragment preserved the impress of the great whole, and Roman generals could converse at Pergamus, at Antioch, or at Alexandria, with men trained to administer states in terms of the wider conceptions derived from Alexander and possibly through him from Aristotle; at the same time many men accustomed to deal with financial problems on a large scale passed into the service of the Roman conquerors as slaves or honoured dependants.

While the possibility of a beneficent organization of the conquests of Rome was thus presented to one order of mind, to another the same events introduced another set of ideas; while some Romans studied Alexander in the vestiges of his work, others entered into the full possession of the Greek historians and philosophers; the ideals of the Greek city state were replanted in a virgin soil, and the Romans for the first time began to theorise about their own Constitution. The men who were taken captive by Plato and Demosthenes did not see that Rome had long outgrown the conditions under which the theories of these men were applicable to her political life. The true liberal policy was the policy of Alexander, the false liberal policy unintentionally gave a new lease of life to the blind selfishness of the narrow oligarchy which had governed Rome. The daggers which struck down Cæsar were aimed by admirers of Verres no less than by students of Plato; and Cicero’s effusions over the merits of the tyrannicides were effectively stopped by the unforeseen but necessary emergence of Mark Antony, a tyrant of the conventional type.

From the moment when a year’s office as Consul or Prætor in the city of Rome was followed by a term of practically irresponsible government in a dependency, the Civic Constitution was doomed; the magistracies of Rome were now of minor importance compared with the career to which they opened the way; it was impossible any longer to discuss the politics of Rome in terms of the politics of Athens or Plato’s Republic with any practical advantage, and indeed without inviting anarchy; but it was highly convenient to the hereditary aristocracy of Rome and its adherents that it should pose as representing the principles of Harmodius and Aristogiton; it found a clever man of letters and a skilled advocate, who had his own reasons for falling in with this conception, and who perpetuated it long after the facts had demonstrated its hollowness even to himself. Cicero as a politician is alternately a tragic and a comic figure; he is comic because he lived complacently in a world of his own imagining, which seldom lost its hold on his imagination, in spite of the rudest shocks, for it satisfied the promptings of his child-like vanity; he is tragic because he had his moments of seeing the realities clearly, and because combined with his vanity there was a genuine admiration for fine conduct, which led him to face danger manfully in his old age, and in some sense invite the death of a political martyr; he is yet further tragic, because he became the father of an equally blind posterity of politicians, who wasted their energies in spoiling the work of men of greater enlightenment; it is perhaps due to Cicero, more than to any other man, that the city of Rome has persistently filled a larger space than that of the Roman Empire in the works of subsequent historians.

In an expanding community the actual facts of the administration are seldom in exact correspondence with the forms; apparent rigidity, real elasticity, enable business to be carried on in accordance with the claims of new social factors without any sense of insecurity. The Roman, like the Englishman, preferred making new laws to repealing old ones; and when he made a fresh departure, he was at pains to represent it as a development of something by which it had been preceded; in both cases this profound respect for the historical aspect of law has been the foundation of national greatness; it has been extended beyond the races in which it originated, and in the case of England, as in that of Rome, has resulted in an exceptionally successful government of alien communities; laws and customs which are sanctified by immemorial usage appeal to the sympathy of the Englishman and command his respect; it was the same with the Roman. England has had her periods of aberration when she has given way to the proselytizing tendencies of sections of her population, but the broad lines of her policy in dealing with subject nationalities have followed the principle of accepting the existing conditions; in the same way Rome accepted the laws and customs of the Eastern Mediterranean and of Western Europe; she supplied a common law for her Empire, which applied where the local law had no application; its excellence was such that it became predominant, but she did not insist on remodelling every community over which she held supreme power in terms of her own constitution. This respect for antiquity and adherence to established forms has resulted in a misrepresentation of some of the facts of Roman constitutional development, and especially of those which concern the development of the Empire, which is in the highest degree embarrassing to the student of the period in which the change took place. There was a time when the constitution of Rome and her political history differed little from that of any other city state of antiquity, but it would not be easy to state when that period began or ended; of one thing we may be quite certain, viz., that after the destruction of Carthage and the completion of the first great period of conquest in the Eastern Mediterranean in 145 B.C., the political life of the city of Rome was no longer comparable to that of any other city state; the forms remained, and the faith in the forms remained, but the substance was gone. There is for instance no term so misleading as one which was seldom out of the mouth of Cicero, “the Roman people”; there unquestionably was a time when the Roman people was an organized part of the Roman constitution, when it voted in an orderly fashion according to a property qualification for the election of certain magistrates, and the ratification of certain laws; when it voted according to a residential organization for the election of other magistrates, and to pass other laws; but the forms of popular government were maintained long after the reality of popular government had departed. It suited the convenience of noble agitators, such as the Gracchi, to see in the rabble of the streets the Comitia Tributa, it was equally convenient to the princely houses to dignify their own private arrangements with the forms of an election in the Comitia Centuriata, it was particularly pleasing to the middle class Roman to share in the spoils of the Empire by exacting direct or indirect payment for his vote, and so the forms were maintained; an outward deference to them answered everybody’s purpose, but the real political power and the real political struggles lay outside and beyond them. The Roman people, as a body of civilians, could riot, as the raw material of the Roman army it could strike, it was necessary to keep it in good humour, and to allow it to regard itself as an organized part of the constitution, as a body of free and independent electors; but to accept its own estimate of itself as an important factor in the politics of the Empire is to misread history; popular Government in any sense which would commend itself to the intelligence of an Englishman of to-day, or of an Athenian who listened to Demosthenes, did not and could not exist in the Rome which had begun to control the destinies of the Mediterranean; it was a legal fiction which it was convenient to maintain, the attempt to make it once again a reality resulted in the revolutionary excesses which preceded the Empire.

The real government of Rome was in the hands of the Senate, an assembly of nobles and capitalists, who shared between themselves the profits of the Roman conquests. Like all such assemblies, the senators had their good times and their bad; between the second and the third wars with Carthage they so conducted themselves as to impress the imagination of the civilized world; the successes of their armies, their fidelity to engagements, their comparative moderation in conquest, were the wonder of men; admiration for these qualities tempted Judas Maccabæus to engage their assistance in checking the aggressions of the Greek rulers of Antioch; their mediation was invited by the chieftains of Gaul; it was recognized as an honour to them to be called friends of the Roman people, and the honour was attended by practical advantages. Success was followed by intoxication, and the time came when the sense of responsibility was lost in the secure accumulation of riches, and when the unscrupulous venality of the Senate became a by-word. Then the power of Rome seemed to be tumbling to decay; Jugurtha defied her in Africa, Mithridates in Asia, Spain threatened to organize itself against her under a Roman general, the Cimbrians and Teutons swarmed over her borders, her Italian allies made war upon her, she could with difficulty suppress an organized revolt of her rural slaves, at home she was at the mercy of the savage mob in her streets; out of this confusion she emerged victorious, and greater than before. The reason is a simple one; during her period of good behaviour Rome had become the financial capital of the world; she was indispensable, and when she could no longer help herself, others were ready to help her. Left to itself the Roman Senate would have brought ruin on the Roman Empire in the first half of the century preceding the Christian era; but it was not left to itself; its incompetence involved the ruin of too many other interests. We have the story of the Roman generals in full, but nobody has yet written the story of the Roman bankers; we are accustomed to think of the Romans as soldiers and lawyers, we forget that they were also shrewd financiers; with the Romans, as with ourselves, commerce usually preceded the flag; the soldier completed the work begun by the capitalist. We are told that the first war with Mithridates began with a massacre of 80,000 Roman citizens in Asia Minor; the figures are probably exaggerated, but they are not questioned by any Roman historians; it did not appear improbable to them that the Roman residents in Asia should have been so numerous at that comparatively early date; and though part of the country was already a Roman province, and we may assume that the popular fury was largely directed against collectors of taxes, even the rich towns of Asia Minor can hardly have acquired the services of so large a body of revenue officials.

The political genius of a nation is shown by nothing so much as the success with which it supplements the deficiencies of its formal constitution by informal but recognized agencies. Rome was provided with a machinery for collecting and distributing her domestic revenue; she had a treasury and a staff of clerks, but she had no separate civil service for the Empire; the constitution of a city state did not admit of such a thing, and the collection of the revenue of a province was left to semi-private agencies, its taxes being farmed. At fixed periods the right of collecting the taxes assigned to the public treasury from the provinces was sold by public auction; the purchaser paid a lump sum to the treasury, and made the best of his bargain in the provinces; the speculation was an exceedingly profitable one, but its profits threatened to disappear owing to excessive competition among the farmers of taxes; in order to eliminate competition the farmers of taxes formed themselves into a close corporation, the taxes were bought in the name of an individual, but in fact by an association.

Alongside of the Senate there thus gradually grew an organized body which formed the permanent civil executive of the provinces, the body which was known as the Equestrian Order. As in our own history, so in Roman history, the value of terms alters from period to period, almost from year to year; it would therefore be rash to declare that at any one period every titular Roman knight was an active member of the Financial Corporation which farmed the taxes, or that the collection of revenue was the sole business of the corporation as a whole, or of its individual members. Again, that differentiation of functions in the case of the individual, or the association, which is to us almost a law of existence, was unknown to the ancients, or worked on lines of division not readily comprehensible to ourselves; there was, for instance, nothing absurd to Roman conceptions in sending out an advocate like Cicero to govern a frontier province, and placing him on active service in command of an army, for civil, military, and judicial functions of the highest responsibility were exercised simultaneously or successively by the same individual as a matter of course. But though it is difficult to draw fixed lines, there is quite sufficient evidence to warrant us in asserting that the Equestrian Order held a recognized position in the State, that it practically formed the Civil Service of the provinces, that its interests were repeatedly opposed to those of the Senate, that it roughly represented Greater Rome, as opposed to the city of Rome, that through all the disturbances of the Civil Wars it kept the machinery of Government outside Italy in working order, that it was the channel through which the leading provincials gradually passed into the Civil Administration, and that eventually the Imperial Executive was built up on the foundation, not of the Senate, but of the Equestrian Order, and the Imperial Household.

The origin of the Equestrian Order is to be found in the Servian Constitution; we may not altogether believe in the Servian Constitution, which, as it is presented to us in the pages of Livy, looks like the clever guess of an antiquarian who was familiar with the Constitution provided for Athens by Cleisthenes, but we have no difficulty in believing that there was a time, when every citizen possessed of a certain amount of property was obliged to keep a horse for the service of the State, and was expected to take the field as a cavalry man; or that he was allowed certain distinctions of dress, and other privileges indicating public consideration; it is also easy to imagine the process by which the yeomanry force so constituted was replaced by more efficient cavalry soldiers, and the military significance of the Equestrian Order disappeared, while the name remained; of the intermediate steps which followed we have no detailed account; in theory every Roman citizen possessing more than a definite amount of property was entitled to be enrolled in the list of the Equestrian Order by the Censor, and if his property reached a yet higher value to be similarly called to the Senate, but the practice must have been different; not every man became a senator or a knight, who had the necessary property qualification, though demonstrated want of means might be a disqualification, and entail a loss of position when the Censor was rigorous, or when an excuse was wanted for reducing the numbers of the Senate or the Order, or setting aside an undesirable personality. The time came when two political careers were open to the ambitious Roman; he could become a candidate for Public Office, and under the forms of public election eventually gain admission to the Senate through the Quæstorship, or he could be enrolled on the lists of the Equestrian Order. In the first case he might eventually become Prætor, Consul, and then Viceroy of a Province; in the second he became a member of the great financial corporation which supplied the Civil Service of the Empire; in the first case he might command armies and figure prominently before the eyes of men; in the second he might make a large fortune, but would not enjoy some of the sweets of power which attract ambitious men.