The relative positions are fairly comparable to those of an English member of Parliament, and an English clerk in a Public Department in the days before the Reform Bill; a young Englishman of good position could be nominated in those days by an influential friend either to a seat in the House of Commons, or to a subordinate place in one of the Executive Departments; in the former case he might ultimately become Prime Minister, in the latter Permanent Head of his department. In the one case he would be widely known and possibly respected; in the latter he might do work of the highest public utility, and never be heard of outside official circles.
To be successful in a senatorial career was an expensive and arduous process; it was necessary to pay a heavy initiatory fee in the form of direct and indirect bribery to the electors; it was then necessary to force a way into the inner circle, which distributed the honours and emoluments; a new man could only do so by showing that he had a very strong force of public opinion behind him, and that he could make himself felt; admission to the Equestrian Order was less costly, and there was less risk; in consequence the career was deliberately chosen by large numbers of Romans, whose wealth and family connections might have tempted them to enter the ranks of the Senate; further, admission to the Equestrian Order was less jealously guarded; it probably had its hierarchy, and its inner circle like all similar organizations; and the summons of the Censor was possibly a mere formality, the nominations made by him having been previously determined by others; but it was much easier for an Italian, and eventually for a Provincial to become a Roman Knight than a Roman Senator. A Provincial, who had once secured the status of a Roman citizen, could secure the further dignity of a Roman Knight by processes which we may surmise, but cannot definitely prescribe; once a Roman Knight, he might look forward to a share in the financial administration of the provinces during the reign of the Senate, and to a Governorship under the Emperors.
It would be a mistake to assume that all Roman Knights were members of the Civil Service, that is to say, that they all belonged to the hierarchy which farmed the taxes and managed other business necessarily connected therewith; there were doubtless many Equestrians whose dignity was chiefly titular; others who as private financiers and contractors only were connected with the Order, but the continued allusions to the status of “Eques Romanus,” which multiply as the Empire takes shape, forbid us to believe that this was in all cases a purely honorary dignity, which could be assumed by any wealthy man on application to the Censor. Were there no other evidence, the fact that we find the Equestrian Order ranged formally against the Senate at the beginning of the great constitutional struggle which ended in the Empire, shows that we have to do with no haphazard collection of wealthy individuals, distinguished from their fellow-citizens by an honorary precedence.
Cicero made his first triumphant appearance as a public man at Rome, when he conducted the case against Verres; whatever may have been the misconduct of Verres, and it was undoubtedly very serious, the action against him was not promoted by pure philanthropy; the case was a test case, it was part of a campaign directed against the provincial administration of the Senate by the Equestrian Order, whose interests were imperilled by rapacious Viceroys. The only check upon the proceedings of a Roman Proconsul lay in the possibility of bringing an action against him for improper exactions; in the purer days of the Senatorial administration such an action when instituted by the provincials might be successful, and the possibility of its success might be a deterrent, because though the offending Senator was in such a case tried by his peers, those peers, even if influenced by no higher motive, were interested in preventing the exhaustion of a province; any one of them might succeed to the wasted estate; the Proconsul who succeeded a Verres was not likely to make much out of his office, for he found the estate stripped. As the Senate became reckless, having found fresh and apparently inexhaustible pastures in the East, scant attention was paid to the complaints of provincials till their cause was taken up by the Equestrian Order.
The Roman Proconsul was supreme Judge and supreme executive authority in his province; he imposed, sanctioned, and sometimes encouraged public works, such as roads, harbours and buildings; he regulated the mutual relations of the different independent communities within the area over which his authority extended; he had ample opportunities for indirect and direct extortion, but he did not collect the taxes; the collection of revenue was in the hands of the farmers of the taxes, that is to say, as time went on, of the Equestrian Order. A divergency of interests soon declared itself: if the Proconsul harried the province unmercifully, the tax gatherer found little or no revenue to collect, and could not reimburse himself. The Proconsul had the unfair advantage, that cases between the collectors of revenue and the provincials were tried in his court; thus the farmers of the taxes found that they had an interest in promoting appeals to Rome, and in aiding the provincials to bring actions for extortion against the provincial Governors at the end of their term of office. So long as the Senate acted equitably no great harm was done, but as soon as the Senate was found invariably to acquit its own members, the Equestrian Order became ranged formally against it, and pressed for reforms; it succeeded for a time in getting these case tried before a court composed entirely of its own members; Sulla the reactionary gave back the jurisdiction to the Senate. One consequence of the trial of Verres was the establishment of a mixed court composed partly of Senators, partly of Equestrians. The net result was that the Equestrian Order formed an organized party, commanding enormous financial resources, in sympathy with the provinces, and more thoroughly conversant with the details of provincial business than the Senate. Thus eventually the Equestrian Order came to represent the party of the Empire, as opposed to the Senate which was the party of the ancient oligarchy of the city; for with the internal politics of the city the Order was only concerned so far as they affected or were affected by the standing quarrel between itself and the Senate. There were men of high moral standards at Rome both in the Senate and in the Order, who wished to deal justly with the provinces; but they were few. Either party left to itself would have plundered the provincials unmercifully; circumstance ruled that the selfishness of the Equestrians should be enlightened, that of the Senate unenlightened, while financial relations with men of business in the provinces, with skilled Greeks and Jews, taught the Order sounder views of political economy than were open to the average Senator. However oppressive the methods of the Equestrian Order might appear when judged by modern standards, they commended themselves to the favour of antiquity; the Roman Civil Service worked better than its predecessors, otherwise there would have been no Roman Empire. The ultimate collector of taxes is never a popular character, and the Roman Publicans enjoyed to the full the unpopularity which has been the fate of their brethren at all times, and in all places; but the revenues of the provinces were collected by the Roman Knights with less friction, and less capriciously, than by the representatives of Perseus of Macedon, or Mithridates, or Antiochus; and in their own interests the Equestrian Order discountenanced other extortioners, whether high-placed officials or private adventurers. When the Civil Wars came the Order was interested in finding a counterpoise to the Senate, and eventually in arresting the progress of anarchy. Cæsar backed by the Order could confidently face the Senate and Pompeius; similarly his nephew having once gained its confidence was a match for the spendthrift Marcus Antonius. The Cæsars and the Order were of one mind in putting an end to the Senatorial misgovernment of the provinces, therefore Greater Rome recognized its champions in the Cæsars, and supported the organization of which they were the head without stopping to inquire whether the officials whom they employed were Freedmen or of the purest Roman nobility.
In order not to form a mistaken conception of the process by which the Roman Empire was built up, it is important to bear in mind that the term “province” only gradually acquired the territorial significance with which it is now inseparably associated. Any responsibility outside the city of Rome and the domain governed directly by the annually elected magistrates of the city might be called “a province.” The “province” at one time assigned to Pompeius was the duty of repressing piracy throughout the Mediterranean. The territorial aspect of a “province” was in fact accidental. The first territorial provinces, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, happened to be islands, and a natural limitation was thus fixed to the responsibilities of the Roman Governors, whose duty was to maintain the Roman interests in Sicily and the other islands against the aggressions of Carthage; the result was the unification of Sicily, and the realization of a political condition closely resembling though not absolutely identical with the modern conception of a province. As the dominions of Alexander successively passed into the hands of the Senate, it was convenient to use previously existing boundaries for the delimitation of the several spheres of influence for which the Roman Proconsuls were responsible, and thus a territorial significance increasingly attached to the words province and provincial. Similarly modern usage perverts the significance of the word “provincial” as applied to the inhabitants of those cities which passed under the protectorate of Rome. There was not quite the same quality of disparagement in the ancient use of the words as in the modern. The units of the Roman Empire were not originally territories, but individual cities, then, as the conquests of the Roman Generals extended to peoples not living under the city organization of the Greeks, Italians and Phœnicians, tribes or nationalities. Rome was first the universal peacemaker; only at a later time and by a gradual process did she become the universal ruler, and the centre of a hierarchy of officials. Such centralization of the details of Government as we are now familiar with was never realized by the Roman Empire; the inhabitants of the great cities of the East did not consider themselves “provincial” in our sense of the word.
II
The Roman People
The official style of the Roman Government was that of the Senate and the Roman people. It is not easy to form an estimate of what constituted the Roman people at any particular date. In these days of individual freedom and independence the term people has a definite meaning; we know that for political purposes the English people means every registered voter, and that the process by which any resident within the limits of His Majesty’s dominions can acquire a vote are comparatively simple for white men; but citizenship was not so simple a matter in ancient times, and antiquarian research fails in some measure to enlighten us, because the Romans had a habit of keeping the old names and the old forms long after their original significance and the powers implied had passed to new institutions or suffered complete change.
The very phrase the Senate and the Roman people is deeply significant, for it excludes the Senate from the people. Whatever may have been the original meaning of the word “Populus,” it was clearly something distinct from the Senate, which was not representative of the people, but another power. The fusion between the two powers was in fact never completed till the predominance of the Imperial Hierarchy practically eliminated the Senate. There was a time in the history of the Republic when this fusion seemed to be approaching completion, and when the Senate moved in the direction of becoming a representative body; but the Roman conquests threw such preponderating influence into the hands of the Senate, that the constitutional position which had been slowly won for the “people” became nominal rather than real. The oligarchy of Rome was never in the Republican period disestablished as the oligarchies of many Greek cities were disestablished.