And if this was true of Augustus, it was equally true of his successors in the first century. To be sure, they succeeded to power much as one king succeeds another. Augustus chose Tiberius as his successor, and Tiberius assumed the reins of power quite unopposed. But it must be noted that in several cases, as in that of Tiberius and again when Nero succeeded Claudius, the artful machinations employed to keep secret the death of the imperator until his chosen successor could take steps to fortify himself with army and senate, implied in themselves the somewhat doubtful character of the title to succession.
In point of fact, there was no legal title to succession whatever. Until the form of a choice by the senate had been gone through with, the new imperator had no official status. There was no question of the divine right of succession. Indeed, how little the majesty that doth hedge a king availed to sanctify the persons of the early imperators, is sufficiently evidenced in the record of their tragic endings. Regicide is not unknown, to be sure, even in the most stable monarchies; but where eight rulers out of eleven successive ones meet violent deaths, it is evident that the alleged royal power has hardly the semblance of sanctity.
Meanwhile, the nominal form of government of the Roman people remained the same as under the commonwealth. Ostensibly, the senate was still supreme. Consuls were elected year by year, as before; and how widely the imperial office differed from its modern counterpart is well evidenced by the fact that the emperor was from time to time chosen consul, sharing the dignity then with a fellow-citizen, who, theoretically, was his official equal.
If such was the nominal position of the emperor, what then was the real secret of his actual power? It rested, not on the tradition of kingship, but on the simple basis of military leadership. “Imperator,” as has been said, implied “commander of the legions”; and he who controlled the legions, controlled the Roman Empire. That was the whole secret. There is nothing occult or mysterious in it all. Rome’s position as mistress of the world depended solely upon her army; therefore, the man who controlled that army was master of the world. Hence it followed that when the army chose an imperator,[26] be it a youthful Otho or a senescent Galba, the senate had no option but to ratify that choice with its approving ballot. If, as happened after Nero’s death, the army chanced not to be a unit in its choice, different legions bringing forward each a candidate, the senate must indeed make a decision, as for example, between Vitellius and Vespasian, but it was the arbitrament of arms that ratified the selection. That the senate preferred Vespasian to Vitellius would have signified little in the final result, had not the army of the Flavians proved the stronger.
In a word then, this Roman Empire of the first century, whatever its nominal status, is a veritable military despotism: it is not merely the imperator who is dependent upon the legions; the very nation itself is no less dependent. The bounds of the empire extend from the Euphrates to the westernmost promontory of Spain and from Egypt to Britain. About this territory, embracing the major part of the civilised world, is drawn an impregnable cordon of soldiers. Twenty-five legions make up this chevaux-de-frise of steel in the day of Tiberius. Eight legions are stationed along the Rhine; three legions in Pannonia and two in Mœsia along the Danube; four legions are marshalled in Syria, two in Egypt, and one along the Mediterranean coast of Africa. Of the remaining five, two are in Dalmatia and three in Spain. Almost four hundred thousand men make up these legions. Under the successors of Augustus, Britain is invaded, and made, like all the other frontiers, a camping-ground for armies. A glance at the map will show how this great barrier of soldiers circles the mighty empire. Remove that barrier and the empire of Rome would shrink in a day from its world-wide boundaries to the little peninsula of Italy, perhaps even to the narrow confines of the city of Rome itself.
And why should it not be removed? What boots it to the citizen of Rome that his name should be a word of terror to the uttermost nations of the ancient world? What matters it more than in name that Spain and Gaul and Pannonia and Syria and Egypt acknowledge the sway of the city on the Tiber? The reply is that it matters everything; for these outlying provinces supply the life-blood of the empire. From these wide dominions all roads, as the saying has it, lead to Rome; and every road is worn deep with the weight of tribute. The legions that we have seen distributed all about the wide frontier were not placed there primarily to fight, but to exact tribute as the price of peace. Fight they did, to be sure; in one region or another they were always fighting. But this warfare was kept up primarily by the enemies of the state; Rome herself would seldom have taken the aggressive, had the people along her frontier chosen to submit to her exactions. She demanded only money or its equivalent; granted that, she was the friend and protector of all peoples within her domain.[27]
And sooner or later most of these peoples found that it was better to pay tribute peacefully than to fight and be plundered. Here and there an obstinate people like the Jews held out for a time, but the almost uniform result was that ultimately the might of the legions prevailed; and then there followed indiscriminate pillage of everything worth taking, to glorify the inevitable triumph of the Roman leader. The description of the treasures that delighted the eyes of the people of Rome when Titus and Vespasian triumphed after the destruction of Jerusalem, is but a sample of what occurred again and again in evidence of the prowess of Roman arms.
In the end, then, the provinces came to submit to the inevitable, however sullenly, and they poured their wealth into the hands of Rome’s censors to be passed on to the imperator, who deposited such portion as he chose into the official coffers of the city. In the time of Augustus it is estimated that the yearly tribute from the provinces amounted to from fifteen to twenty millions of pounds (seventy-five to one hundred million dollars). This was tribute proper, the literal price of peace. Nor was this all. Rome was the centre of trade for all these provinces—the world emporium where the merchant of Spain might barter with the merchant of Syria, and where the produce of Gaul and Pannonia might be exchanged for the produce of Egypt. All articles from whatever quarter were subject to import duty; and all transactions of the market had to pay a percentage for excise.
When all this is borne in mind it will appear how the imperator—at once the commander of the legions and the keeper of the public purse—was able to dictate the laws, controlling not merely the property, but the lives of his fellow-citizens; for the power of gold was no less—perhaps no greater—in antiquity than in our own day. We have seen what practical use the imperator made of this trenchant weapon. We have seen how the masses were pauperised; some hundreds of thousands of Roman citizens receiving bread without price. The largesses of Augustus are only comprehensible when one has fully grasped the position of the imperator as mulctor of nations. So long as all the productive nations of the world poured their earnings without equivalent into the imperial treasury, so long the citizen of Rome might live in idle luxury, taking no thought for a morrow, the needs of which were sure to be supplied by a paternal government. Not merely sustenance but amusement is supplied. Augustus sacrifices five thousand beasts in a single series of games; a band of elephants competes with an army of gladiators. Even a naval combat is arranged on an artificial lake near the city. And in the later day this phase of practical politics is developed to even larger proportions. Vespasian and Titus construct an amphitheatre—the famous Colosseum—which seats eighty-five thousand spectators; and on a single occasion Titus rejoices the people with a series of combats lasting through a hundred days.
It is good to live in Imperial Rome—place of inexhaustible bounty, of unceasing entertainment. There is no need to work, for slaves by tens of thousands conduct all menial affairs. Indeed, there is no business for the free man but pleasure—the bath, the banquet, the theatre, and the gladiatorial games. Rome is a glorious city in this day. With her renovated Forum, her new Capitol, her triumphal arches, her stupendous Colosseum, she is a city of marvels. To her contemporary citizens it seems that she is on a pinnacle of power and glory from which time itself cannot shake her. Looking back from the standpoint of later knowledge it is easy to moralise, easy to understand that decay was eating out the heart of the nation, easy to realise that all this mock civilisation rested above the crater of a volcano. But we may well believe that very few contemporary citizens had the prevision to match our modern thought.