CHAPTER XXI
THE LEGAL POSITION OF THE JEWS IN THE LATER EMPIRE
The empire established by Augustus was, as has been set forth (above, p. [259]), a more or less abstract thing. It was the imperium, or supreme authority, which a single community, the city-state of Rome, exercised over all the other communities existing within certain not over sharply defined geographic limits. This imperium was, by Roman statute or series of statutes, almost completely delegated to a single individual. The delegation however was not quite complete, and the legal theory that made it incomplete remained to work no little mischief in a crisis like the death of Nero or Domitian or Commodus.
When Diocletian reorganized the empire in 286 C.E., the theory was completely changed. The imperium was now a dominium; it was the authority that a single man possessed over all the inhabitants of a region greater even than it was under Augustus, and that authority was in point of law as limitless as that of a master over his slaves.
Between Augustus and Diocletian the reign of the Severan emperors, particularly the promulgation of the Edict of Caracalla, the Constitutio Antonina, which extended Roman citizenship to almost all the free inhabitants of the empire, may be considered the turning-point of the tendency toward absolutism.[[387]] It broke finally and completely with the legal theory that the populus Romanus was a paramount community within a complex of other similar and inferior communities. From that time on nearly all those who could possess rights and obligations at all, whether in regard to one another or to the state, were members of the paramount community, and the delegation of the imperium to the princeps, which had until then been subject to the remote but still conceivable possibility of revocation, became irrevocable by the sheer impossibility of conceiving the populus as acting in the only way the populus could legally act, by direct vote when assembled in mass in the Campus Martius.
In the period between Caracalla and Diocletian the vast political machine snapped at many points. Diocletian’s skill enabled it to go on for a considerable time, and yet the changes he instituted were administrative rather than social. Internally the new populus Romanus took its form in the third century.
A calculation of doubtful value makes the population of the empire at that time about 85,000,000.[[388]] Of these about half were slaves, i.e. at law not participants in the empire at all. The other half were nearly all cives Romani, Roman citizens, and it is the position of these cives that now concerns us.
Upon the civis Romanus devolved the task of maintaining a frightfully expensive governmental machinery. The expense consisted in the fact that a huge army had to be maintained on what was practically a war footing all the time, because, as a matter of fact, war with the barbarians on the northern frontier and with the Parthians in the East was always going on. Compared with that, the expenses of the court itself, although considerable, were scarcely important; but an important item was the vast horde of civil employees which the execution of so tremendous a budget necessitated. Then the local civic centers, generally the remains of old independent communities, had an organization of their own that was partly ornamental, but in all circumstances costly. That is to say, a very large share of the available wealth of the empire was diverted into unproductive channels, since it was devoted to the purpose of maintaining a machinery not altogether necessary to guard that wealth.
Many of the nations of modern Europe have a military budget relatively and absolutely greater than that of the Roman empire of the third century; but in these nations the economic system has a high degree of efficiency, compared with that of the older state, and the waste is incalculably less. The great difference lies in the slave system, which was the foundation of ancient society. The total absence of individual incentive wherever the slaves were worked in gangs—and that was, perhaps, true of the majority of slaves—made the efficiency and consequent productivity of each laborer much less.
We must further remember that human waste was also much greater, owing to the absence of all measures to restrict it. Only the most elementary of sanitary precautions existed, and they were directed against definite diseases of plainly infectious character. With a great percentage of the population undernourished, the ravages of any disease with epidemic tendencies must have been enormous. Even in the absence of any plague, such a scourge as consumption alone must have been much more generally destructive than it is now. As has been recently suggested, malaria in Italy had a heavy account to answer for in producing the physical debilitation of the populus Romanus, and was therefore a real factor in the gradual decay of the Roman state.[[389]]
The incidence of the state burdens was not regulated as it is at the present time. Taxes were imposed within certain districts, and upon each district devolved the duty of satisfying the impost. For a long time Italy had been free from such a burden, but even this exceptional position was abrogated by Constantine in 300 C.E.