Though the Senate could not shake itself free from the traditions of its existence, and always represented the great families of the City of Rome rather than Italy or the Empire, except in so far as it provided the personnel of the Supreme Court of Appeal, it was curiously indifferent to municipal matters. The city was policed by the Prefect of the city, an official appointed by the Emperor, who held office for long periods, and it was guarded by troops commanded by the Emperor. The rank of Senator eventually became little more than an honourable distinction, though from time to time the body possessed sufficient coherence to bid for the power which it had lost, and even for short periods to wield it. The distinction between Senatorial and Imperial Provinces did not last long, the Imperial administration proving better suited to the needs of the Empire.
Many writers infected with the spirit of the nineteenth century have advanced the opinion that the Roman Empire collapsed because the Romans never hit upon representative government. It is curious that Augustus very nearly effected this supreme achievement. He at one time proposed to hold simultaneous elections of the Roman magistrates in all the cities of Italy; the names of the candidates were to be posted up, the votes were to be collected in ballot boxes, which were to be sent to Rome sealed up, and afterwards counted in the city itself. This scheme happily came to nothing, for the strength of the Roman Empire lay in its respect for local government. The Provincial Governors were the supreme umpires in their Provinces, but they did not concern themselves with the details of local administration; the constitutions of Athens, and even Sparta, continued to work even after these towns were included in the Province of Achaia, and similarly throughout the Empire original institutions were left to do their previous work. As we have seen, the Governors of Provinces did not even control the organization by which the Imperial taxes were collected. The local life of the Empire was strong; Antioch and Alexandria, even the new cities of Gaul, bowed reluctantly to Rome, and in course of time the position of the Patriarch of Rome was not to be that of Primate of Christianity till many a battle had been fought, and in fact the Popes never succeeded to the full heritage of the Emperors. The Empire was the bond of union and the peacemaker between an infinite number of self-governing units, it provided a supreme arbitrator, a Supreme Court of Appeal. The Empire, in fact, was peace; it was not a system of local as well as universal administration. The introduction of representative government, the substitution of an Elective Parliament at Rome for the Senate, would have killed the vigorous local governments, and would not have improved the administration of the Empire. Under such rulers as Augustus and Tiberius, the Flavians and the Antonines, the organization of the Roman Empire probably reached the limits of perfectibility; it would not have been improved by collecting deputies from all parts of the world, and expecting them to be responsible for the executive. Representative institutions have not prevented official corruption or no less deadly incompetence, nor has the absence of really free parliaments impeded the advance of some modern nations; those diseases of the body politic from which the Roman Empire is held to have suffered in a special degree, corruption and official formalism, have not been unknown in communities blessed with Houses of Representatives duly elected and accredited. A multitude of counsellors neither protects an Empire from corruption nor ensures wisdom in the conduct of its affairs, while the conscience of any corporate body is notoriously duller than that of each individual of which it is composed. The Roman Emperors were wise in respecting local institutions, and in not imposing a strict system of centralization, for it is unfortunately impossible to retrace our steps, and when once the local life has been killed, it cannot be revived. Decentralization as a matter of mechanical convenience is possible after the central authority has drawn to itself all the prestige of political life, but this is purely administrative decentralization; when once the central government has absorbed the vitality of local political life, it cannot give back that which it has taken away. It was good for the Empire that the Senate should not exclusively attract the ambition of capable men from the Provinces, and on the other hand that the energies of the Emperors should be distributed over a wide area. The Emperors had no time for universal tyranny, and the extravagancies of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian were scarcely felt outside Rome itself; they certainly did nothing to shake the foundations of that fabric which had been so wisely laid by the first two Emperors.
XVII
Sejanus
One of the most trusted public servants of Augustus was a Roman Equestrian named Seius Strabo; he hailed from an Italian, or rather a Tuscan, city, his family having been long settled at Vulsinii, and was thus exposed at Rome to the reproach of being a “new man.” Seius Strabo was content with administrative work, and did not aspire to high senatorial rank. Augustus made him commander of the Prætorian cohorts which formed the garrison of Italy, and afterwards entrusted him with the most important office in his gift, for he made him Governor of Egypt, that valuable appanage of the Roman Emperors upon which the corn supply of the capital depended. Seius married into the Junian gens, the gens of Brutus the Liberator, and his son could in consequence claim affinity through his mother with the most honourable Roman houses. This son was adopted by a member of the Ælian gens, and thus became known as Ælius Sejanus. He married a daughter of Apicius the Epicure, a very wealthy man, but notorious rather than distinguished.
The young Sejanus enjoyed the confidence of Augustus as his father had done. He succeeded him in command of the Prætorians, and was made adviser to Caius Cæsar when he went to the East. In this capacity he did his best to counteract the mischievous counsels of Marcus Lollius, and won the gratitude of Tiberius, which he soon improved into a personal friendship. As Sejanus was made his father’s colleague in B.C. 14, soon afterwards succeeding him in the sole command of the Prætorian guards, he cannot have been much younger than Tiberius, for he would hardly have been associated with his father before he was twenty years of age, and in that case Tiberius would have been his senior by only eight years. Even if we assume that Sejanus became his father’s colleague at the age of sixteen, an age at which young Romans commonly first entered on active service, he would still be only twelve years younger than Tiberius; but it is very improbable that so young a man would have been entrusted with the command of the Prætorians. The question is of some importance, for the language of the historians, perhaps unintentionally, conveys the impression that Sejanus was a comparatively youthful favourite of the Emperor’s, who owed his advancement to a blind partiality, whereas his acquaintance with Tiberius had been almost lifelong, even if we assume that he was little more than a boy when he first commanded the Prætorian guards. It is far more probable that there were only three or four years between the two men, and that the relations between Sejanus and Tiberius were comparable to those between Augustus and Agrippa.
Paterculus, who admired Sejanus, is curiously apologetic about the obscurity of his family. He suggests that it was not so obscure as was generally supposed, and again that obscurity of descent is no bar to admission to the public service; he quotes very ancient examples, and the more modern ones of Marius, Cicero, and Asinius Pollio.
In fact the Revolution, which had broken the political power of the old Roman aristocracy, had been succeeded by a reaction in favour of great names and exalted lineages, which would have given the Senate a new lease of power had that body been capable of effective work. The History of Livy, the Fasti of Ovid, the later books of the Æneid, had all combined to throw a glamour over the great Roman families, and the new world of capable officials recruited from Italy and other parts of the Empire found itself despised at Rome by the futile descendants of legendary ancestors. We are told that the Emperor Caligula was ashamed of his grandfather, Marcus Agrippa, and was offended if reminded of his descent from the ignoble Vipsanian stock. Tiberius himself was evidently inclined to be a formalist in matters affecting the aristocracy, and though he drew his trusted servants from all classes and races, the deference which he paid to the Senate and the old constitutional magistrates, along with his careful observance of the old legal ritual, tended to foster aristocratic pretensions.
To the memoir-writing Senators Sejanus was an upstart, and in spite of the recent precedents of Agrippa and Mæcenas and other capable colleagues of Augustus, the strict aristocracy could see nothing but evil in the “new man.” On the other hand, a large party in the Senate, representatives of the new hierarchy of officials, accepted Sejanus, as Agrippa had been accepted; they followed the lead of Tiberius, and after the death of Drusus in A.D. 23 were prepared to treat Sejanus as the second person in the Empire.
If Senators of ancient descent were disgusted at the position held by Sejanus, the family of the Emperor were even more so. Drusus, a hot-tempered man, is said on one occasion to have struck him, an incident which may well have occurred when Drusus was a little boy or petulant youth, and been turned to good account by sensation-loving writers of memoirs. Agrippina could not contain herself in the presence of this new oppressor of the children of Germanicus, the great-grandchildren of the sainted Augustus, and so forth. These poor innocents were, in her excited imagination, the victims of the ambitions of Sejanus; that they were not from the moment of their birth of an age to be entrusted with the conduct of affairs did not enter into her considerations.