Dion Cassius, whose history ends with this reign, gives the following view of the numbers and disposition of the legions, at this period. Of the twenty-five which were formed by Augustus, only nineteen remained, the rest having been broken or distributed through the others; but the emperors, from Nero to Severus inclusive, had formed thirteen new ones, and the whole now amounted to thirty-two legions. Of these, three were in Britain, one in Upper and two in Lower Germany, one in Italy, one in Spain, one in Numidia, one in Arabia, two in Palestine, one in Phœnicia, two in Syria, two in Mesopotamia, two in Cappadocia, two in Lower and one in Upper Mœsia, two in Dacia, and four in Pannonia, one in Noricum, and one in Rætia. He does not tell us where the two remaining ones were quartered, neither does he give the number of men in a legion at this time, but it is conjectured to have been five thousand.[c]
RENAN’S CHARACTERISATION OF THE PERIOD
[180-235 A.D.]
On principles less disastrous than those of unbridled military despotism, the empire might have survived the ruin of the Roman spirit in the death of Marcus Aurelius, might have given peace to Christianity a century earlier and have avoided the streams of blood shed to no purpose by Decius and Diocletian. The part of the Roman aristocracy was played out; after having worn folly threadbare in the first century, it had worn virtue threadbare in the second. But the hidden forces of the great Mediterranean confederacy were not exhausted. Thus, after the downfall of the political edifice founded on the sovereignty of the family of Augustus, a provincial dynasty, that of the Flavians, was found to restore the empire, even as after the downfall of the edifice built up by the adoptions of the Roman aristocracy, there were found provincials, Orientals and Syrians, to restore the great association in which all men found peace and profit. Septimius Severus did, without moral grandeur but not without glory, what Vespasian had done.
It is true that the representatives of this new dynasty are not to be compared to the great emperors of the second century. Even Alexander Severus, who equals Antoninus and Marcus in kindliness, is very inferior to them in intelligence and greatness of soul. The principles of the government are detestable; men outbid one another for the favour of the legions; a price is set on mutiny; none approaches the soldier except with purse in hand. Military despotism never took a more shameless form; but military despotism can be long-lived.
Side by side with hideous spectacles, under the Syrian emperors, what reforms do we find! What progress in legislation! What a day was that when, under Caracalla, all free men dwelling within the empire attained equal rights!
We must not exaggerate the advantages offered by such equality; yet in politics words are never wholly void of meaning. Many excellent things had been inherited. The philosophers of the school of Marcus Aurelius had disappeared, but their place was taken by the masters of jurisprudence. Papinian, Ulpian, Paul, Gaius, Modestinus, Florentinus, Marcian, during years of execrable evil, created masterpieces and actually brought the law of the future into being. The Syrian emperors, though far inferior to Trajan and to the Antonines as far as political traditions are concerned, inasmuch as they were not Romans and had none of the Roman prejudices, often give proof of an openness of mind which would have been impossible to the great emperors of the second century, all of whom were intensely conservative. They permitted and even encouraged colleges or syndicates. They went to extreme lengths in this matter, and they would have organised the trade guilds as castes with a distinctive garb. They flung the doors of the empire wide open. One of them, that noble and pathetic figure Alexander Severus, the son of Mamæa, almost equalled in his plebeian goodness the patrician virtues of the great age; the loftiest ideas pale before the honest effusions of his heart.
It was in religion above all that these Syrian emperors inaugurated a liberality of mind and a tolerance unknown before.[46] The Syrian women of Emesa, Julia Domna, Julia Mæsa, Julia Mamæa, Julia Soæmias, beautiful, intelligent, venturous to the point of utopianism, are hampered by no tradition or conventionality. They dared to do what no Roman woman had ever done; they entered the senate, took part in its deliberations, and practically governed the empire, dreaming of Semiramis and Nitocris. It was a thing that such a woman as Faustina would not have done for all her frivolity; she would have been checked by tact, by the sense of absurdity, by the rules of good Roman society. The Syrian women hesitated at nothing. They had a senate of women, which enacted every sort of absurdity. The Roman religion seemed to them cold and meaningless. They had no family reasons for attachment to it, and being more in harmony, imaginatively, with Christianity than with Italian paganism, they delighted in the tales of the travels of gods upon the earth. Philostratus enchanted them with his Apollonius; perhaps they had a secret leaning towards Christianity.
During this time the last noble ladies of the older society, such as the elderly daughter of Marcus Aurelius, honoured by all men and put to death by Caracalla, lived in obscurity, looking on at an orgy which formed so strange a contrast to the memories of their youth.
The provinces, and those of the East more particularly, which were far more active and enlightened than those of the West, gained a decided ascendency. Elagabalus was certainly a madman, but nevertheless his chimerical idea of a central monotheistic religion, established in Rome and absorbing all others, shows that the narrow circle of Antonine conceptions had been to a great extent broken through. Mamæa and Alexander Severus were to go further; whilst the jurisconsults continued to transcribe their old and ferocious maxims against liberty of conscience with the calmness of habit, the Syrian emperor and his mother studied Christianity, and manifested sympathy with it. Not content with granting security to the Christians, Alexander, with touching eclecticism, introduced the name of Jesus among his household gods. Peace seemed made, not, as under Constantine, by the abasement of one party, but by a generous reconciliation. In all this there was certainly a daring attempt at reform, inferior in rationality to that of the Antonines, but more likely to succeed because it was much more popular and took the provinces and the East more into account.