The reconstitution by Augustus appeared to the men of his day as the inauguration of an epoch. Poets hailed the dawn of a new day, and unqualifiedly saluted its great figure as a living god.[[275]] But we shall receive a false impression of the time and its condition, if we assume it to resemble an empire of modern type.
The Roman empire as founded by Augustus was simply the expression of the fact that between the Euphrates and the Ocean, between the Danube and the great African Desert, all the various forms of constituted authority were subject to revision by the will of the Roman people, i.e. those who actually lived, or had an indefeasible right to live, within the walls of the Roman city. The populus Romanus had chosen to delegate functions of great extent and importance to a single man, to Augustus; but the power wielded by Augustus was not in any sense the power of an unrestrained master, nor was the rule of the Roman people the actual and direct government of the nations subject to it.
It would be quite impossible to enumerate the various communities which, under Augustus, as they had before, maintained their customs as the unbroken tradition of many centuries. In the mountains of Asia Minor it is likely that such a people as the Carduchi, whom Xenophon encountered there, were still under Augustus determining their mutual rights and obligations by rules that were either the same as those of Xenophon’s time or directly derived from those rules.[[276]] So the cartouches on the Egyptian monuments might have been read by the clerks of Amen-hem-et, and would have excited no queries from them. The communities of the Mediterranean enforced their law—that is, the rules which constrained the individual member to respect the claims of his fellows—without noticeable break. The difference was that there was a limit to which it might be enforced, and that limit was set by the caprice of another and a paramount people.
Although the sovereignty of the Roman people was limitless, it was not, as a matter of fact, capriciously exercised. During the republic the theory of provincial organization had been somewhat of the following nature. Within any given territory contained in the limits of the province, there existed a certain number of individual civic units, which might take the form of city-states, territorial states of varying extent, leagues of communities, kingdoms, tetrarchies, or hieratic religious communes. Any or all of these might be gathered within a single province, a word which is essentially abstract, and denoted a magisterial function rather than a territory. Into the midst of these civitates, this jumble of conflicting civic interests, there was sent a representative of the sovereign Roman people, invested with imperium, or supreme power, a term in which for Romans was the essence of the higher magistracies. Since the provincial magistrate had no colleagues, and since the tribunician check upon him was inoperative beyond the first milestone from the city, the wielder of the imperium outside of Italy was at law and often in fact an absolute despot for the period of his office.
However, in theory his functions were divided as follows: first, he was the only officer with jurisdiction over the Roman citizens temporarily resident in the province; secondly, he kept the peace; thirdly, he guaranteed the treaty rights of those communities that had treaties with Rome; and fourthly, he enforced and maintained the local customary law of all these communities. His judicial functions might include cases of all these kinds, so that in rapid succession the praetor or propraetor might be called upon to enforce the Twelve Tables and an ancient tribal usage of the Galatian Tectosages.
The checks upon the holder of imperium at Rome consisted in the peculiar Roman theory of magistracy, one of the corollaries of which was the right of any other equal or superior magistrate, or of any tribune, to veto any administrative act. A second check lay in the right of appeal in capital cases to the people. A third was found in the accountability for every illegal or oppressive action. This accountability however existed only after the magistracy had expired.
Outside of Rome only the last check existed. For everything done beyond the functions enumerated above, it was possible, even usual, to attempt to make the governor responsible after his term of office was over. We know how frequently that attempt was futile, and how constantly and flagrantly corrupt juries acquitted equally corrupt governors. “Catiline will be acquitted of extortion,” writes Cicero in 65 B.C.E., “if the jury believes that the sun does not shine at noon.”[[277]] The jury evidently thought so, since he was acquitted. But upon occasion, and generally when there were personal and political motives at work as well, these governors were convicted, so that there was always a certain risk attached to any attempt at playing the tyrant for the brief period of a governor’s authority.[[278]]
The Augustan monarchy brought no real change into the theory of provincial organization, except as to relatively unimportant details. But one great reform was instituted. The responsibility of the governor became a real one, and was sharply presented to those officials. For the provinces, accordingly, the advent of Augustus was an unmixed blessing, since, except for a few sentimentalists, the presence of the Roman representative as the final court of appeal was not at all resented. We can accordingly understand the extravagance with which the rich and populous East, always the center of wealth and civilization, received the Reformer, and the unanimity and perhaps sincerity with which he was hailed as living god.[[279]]
We cannot be certain that this was encouraged by Augustus himself. There is nothing in his character that indicates any special sympathy with the point of view demanded by it; nothing of that daemonic strain noticeable in Alexander, which makes it easy to believe that the latter was one of the first to be convinced by the salutation of the priests of Ammon. But Augustus recognized at once the value for unity that the tendency to deify the monarch possessed. The reverence for the living monarch, to be transformed into an undisguised worship at his death, was, however, to be superimposed upon existing forms. Nothing was more characteristically Roman than Augustus’ eagerness to make it clear that the vast domain of the empire was to remain, as before, a mass of disparate communities of which the populus Romanus was only one, although a paramount one, and that in each of these communities every effort was to be made to maintain the ancestral ritual in government and worship. What he added was simply the principle that to keep the community together, to prevent the chaos and anarchy of a dissolution of the empire, it was necessary to bestow on the princeps, on the First Citizen of the paramount Roman people, such powers and functions as would assure the coherence of the whole. These powers he selected himself. Such a step as that taken by the Constitution of Caracalla, which attempted to enforce a legal merging of all the communities into a single state, would have been nothing else than abhorrent to Augustus.[[280]] And, indeed, it was a distinctly un-Roman idea.
In Rome Augustus was chiefly intent upon a restoration of everything that could well be restored in the social, religious, and political life of the people. Certain of the political elements, such as the actual sovereignty of the populus, as far as it could be physically assembled in the Campus Martius, had to be abandoned, as demonstrably inconsistent with the larger purpose which Augustus had set himself. But in every other respect, he did not, as Julius Caesar had done, compel the Romans to face the unpleasant fact that a revolution had taken place, but professed to be simply a restorer of the ancient polity. Perhaps he did not face the facts himself. At any rate he seems sincerely to have believed that morality and sobriety could be reconstituted by statute, and that one, by dint of willing, might live under Caesar as men lived under Numa—barring such un-Sabine additions as marble palaces and purple togas.