Tiberius the Tyrant

by John Charles Tarver

The Roman historians have preserved for us a constitution based on property qualifications, which might tempt us to imagine that there was a time when a Government with something approaching to a democratic organization controlled the destinies of Rome. It is possible that there was a time when the Roman people was divided into classes according to their assessed property, and when each class voted separately; but it is exceedingly improbable that even in that golden age of liberty there was anything approaching to free and independent elections as we understand them.

The independence of the individual has always been tempered by the necessity of belonging to some form of organization. In these days a man belongs to a party, or a trades union or an association, and sacrifices a portion of his independence to the advantages gained by sharing in the strength of an organized coherent body; in ancient times even a modified independence of this kind was not possible, and in early times at Rome a man was expected to vote for his patron through thick and thin. To us it would appear that a man lost personal dignity by following blindly the fortunes of a greater man than himself; to a Roman it would seem that the individual had no personal dignity, if he were not recognizably attached to a patron.

Individual independence is only possible in a very highly civilized society. Men may be technically equal in the eyes of the law long before they are so practically; even in modern England it has been found necessary to form associations whose members are bound to mutual assistance in defending or instituting some actions-at-law. The difference between ancient and modern society, and indeed between modern society before and after the French Revolution, lies in this, that the modern association is most commonly one of equal individuals for certain definite purposes, while the ancient association was one of inferiors of various degrees with a superior for all purposes. It would be rash to attempt to define too closely, but the general statement that in ancient Roman society there was no such thing as a free and independent individual, except among the wealthiest or otherwise most powerful, is near the truth. Numberless conditions unknown to modern society contributed to produce the same result; among them the following may be mentioned.

Residence as a means of acquiring political status was not recognized by the ancients; a man might reside in the same town all his life, and his children might succeed him, but neither he nor they could buy or sell, plead in the law courts, intermarry with the citizens, acquire real property, or in fact enjoy any of the benefits of civilized society, without making special arrangements; the resident was an alien until the authorities of the town in which he dwelt had conferred upon him a political status. Towns such as Rome and Athens, which admitted resident aliens comparatively readily to a modified form of citizenship, expanded more quickly than other towns, and the history of the expansion of Rome is from this point of view the history of the processes by which she gradually admitted the stranger within her gates, and then the stranger without her walls to the privileges of citizenship.

The privileges of a citizen according to ancient ideas were separated into two classes: they were private and public; to the first class belonged the rights of buying and selling, intermarrying, making valid contracts, and acquiring by various tenures real property; to the second the right of voting in all or some elections, and, as the climax, of standing for some or all magistracies. The various degrees of citizenship might be conceded to individuals or to communities; Rome might admit all full citizens of Arpinum to all or some of the rights of Roman citizenship, and vice versâ, or similarly favour an individual citizen of Arpinum. Long before an alien community or individual received the benefits of citizenship business relations might be necessary, and in order to get over the difficulty of conducting business with persons who had no legal status, it was customary for aliens to form private relations with full citizens through whom their business was conducted; and here again the alien might be a whole community or a single individual. At Rome the citizen who thus took charge of an alien’s business was called his patron, and the alien was called a client. The principal service rendered by the patron was to appear on his client’s behalf in those law courts to which the client had otherwise no access; the case was dealt with as the patron’s case by a convenient legal fiction. The service rendered by the client was not definitely prescribed in this case; it could not be, for he was unknown to the Roman law; but we have no reason to suspect the Roman patrons of not exacting a satisfactory equivalent for their services. The same men who were clients at Rome would be patrons in their own towns, and transact business for their Roman friend at Ephesus or Alexandria in return for his services at Rome. In the same way aliens resident at Rome, who for various reasons were unable or unwilling to acquire rights of citizenship, enrolled themselves among the clients of a patron. The system added enormously to the wealth and influence of the powerful men at Rome; for much in the same way that the status of citizen in its various degrees was personal and transmitted by descent, only to be revoked by a solemn process, so the relation of patron and client was personal and heritable on both sides. This combination of personal with business relationships is one of the peculiarities that make ancient society so difficult for us to understand.

Even after an alien had acquired the rights of citizenship the tie between his family and the patron’s family would continue. It would not be easy to prove that it was strictly obligatory in the eye of the law, but it was recognized by sentiment, and ingratitude on the part of the client, or neglect on the part of the patron, were severely punished by the unwritten law, and in certain cases by the written law.

Thus one form of the relation of patron and client arose out of the difficulties of intercourse between communities and individuals for business purposes in a state of society which regarded citizenship as a special personal qualification, and not as an incident of residence.

A second form was the relation between a Roman noble and his freeborn dependants in various degrees.

Such a city as Rome was not comparable to a modern city in many particulars; even after the definite establishment of the Empire when it had approached the modern conception, there were still survivals from a previous state of things. It would not, for instance, occur to a wealthy citizen of London to start from his residence in Park Lane with a pack of hounds, and all the other paraphernalia of a hunting expedition, in order to impress his fellow-citizens with a sense of his importance as a territorial magnate; such a thing was possible at Rome even in the reign of Domitian, or there would be no point in one of Martial’s epigrams. The heads of the great Roman families were not originally rich men who conducted their business in Rome, and possessed houses in the country to which they went to enjoy sport and the amenities of Nature; they were originally territorial magnates, whose importance was due to the fact that they were such; it was a later development which made them approach to the position of our great commercial princes in London. The ancient city community was not a thing enclosed within walls; it extended over a considerable area. The land outside the city walls might be held under some form of communal tenure and subdivided into small plots, but it might also be occupied by large holders in positions analogous to our conceptions of a tenant-in-chief, whose subtenants were free citizens with full civic rights in the eye of the law, but who were also in many respects vassals. Dionysius has a statement of the relations between patron and client which may be inaccurate in the letter, but which in its spirit at once suggests the feudal system. It is inevitable in certain stages of social development that the small man should associate himself in some way or other with the big man, in order to be able to render effective the rights which the law gives him. The Roman noble took charge of his client’s interests in the law courts, the client voted as his patron directed at the polling booths. The free and independent electors who swarmed in from the country to give their votes were pledged to support the candidates and measures recommended to them by their patrons; had they failed to do so, they would have been thought deficient in a Roman virtue.

There was a third relationship of patron and client which was fairly strictly defined by law; when a man emancipated a slave, the relations between them were changed from those of master and slave to those of patron and client. The slave did not always receive full citizenship on emancipation, but all through the various degrees by which he passed from the servile status to that of full citizen, he and his descendants continued in the position of client to the original manumittor and his descendants; the relationship was so close that the property of an intestate freedman went to his patron or his patron’s representatives. The legal statements on this subject are somewhat obscure, but enough remains to show that the connection was recognized by the law as a close one, and that there were rights on both sides; the relationship was not purely a matter of personal choice nor readily dissoluble.