I. THE ROMAN SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT
Roman political history has an unusual meaning and value for us, because the Romans had to face so many of the problems which confront us today, and their experience ran through such a wide range. Few peoples can boast of an unbroken history of a thousand years, and perhaps none has tried so many different forms of government. The early monarchy gives way to an oligarchy, to be displaced in turn by a democracy. The dual government of the prince and the senate which follows develops into the empire, and the emperor in time becomes the autocratic monarch. In this period of a thousand years from the seventh century before our era to the fourth century after it, we may see in the practical experiences of the Roman people the points of strength and of weakness in an aristocracy, a plutocracy, a parliamentary government, a democratic empire, and an autocracy. We may also trace in the history of Rome the development of a city-state into a world-wide empire. In its early days the territory of Rome covered scarcely a hundred square miles. Then followed one after another the conquest of Central Italy, of the whole peninsula, of the Western Mediterranean, of the Greek Orient, and of Western Europe and the region of the Danube, until Roman rule extended from the Sahara to the Rhine, from the Tigris and the Euphrates to the Atlantic. This tremendous territorial expansion, which brought within the limits of the State people of diverse races, colors, and religions, called for a constant recasting and readjustment of political forms and methods, and the solution of countless new political problems. In almost all of our colonies or dependencies today, in the Philippines, in Asia, and in Africa we have to deal only with peoples less advanced in civilization than we are, but the Romans had not only to civilize and govern the stubborn tribes of Gaul and Spain, but also to make their authority respected in the Greek East, among peoples who could boast of a civilization far higher and older than their own. That a city-state with the old and narrow local social and political traditions which Rome had could adapt herself to the government of a world-empire composed of such diverse elements as made up the Roman Empire is one of the marvels of history, and a study of the methods which she followed can not fail to throw light on political questions which we have to meet today. The range of social and economic conditions through which Rome went is equally wide. The Romans come on the stage of history as a primitive pastoral people with strongholds on the hills. In course of time they build cities all over the world whose beauty and magnificence have perhaps never been equalled. Their government had to keep pace with these social and economic changes, and consequently had to adapt itself to almost every conceivable state of society.
In spite of all these facts one may be inclined to raise the question whether our civilization can have much in common with one so far removed from it in point of time, and whether the study of such an ancient society will have more than an intellectual or historical interest for us. This would be true perhaps if we were studying the political system of almost any other people of antiquity. It is hard for us to understand or sympathize with the social or political ideas of the Egyptians, the Assyrians, or the Persians. Perhaps it is not easy to find much even in the political experiences of the Greeks which will be of practical service to us. But with the Romans it is different. If an immigrant from ancient Rome of the first century before our era should disembark in New York tomorrow, he would need less training in understanding our political machinery than many of our contemporary immigrants do, because the Anglo-Saxon and the Roman show the same characteristics in their political life. Both peoples are opportunists. Both peoples are inclined to meet a new situation by making as little change as possible in the old machinery. Both have a great deal of practical common sense, and no high regard for formal logic or consistency. The Romans had the institution of slavery, and we have developed a complex industrial system through the application of steam and electricity, and steam and electricity have changed the external aspects of our lives. But these differences have not affected deeply the political thinking of the two peoples. We have little in common with any other peoples of antiquity. We have still less with those of the Middle Ages. The ideals of chivalry, of feudalism, of the medieval church, and the submergence of the individual in society, are altogether foreign to our way of thinking. Perhaps it is the incomprehensible nature of these fifteen hundred years of medieval civilization that separate our times from those of the Romans which has prevented us from recognizing our political kinship to the Romans. From this resemblance between Roman civilization and our own, and between the Roman character and our own, it does not necessarily follow that their system of government was closely akin to ours, or that we have inherited many political institutions directly from them. It would, however, naturally mean that many of their political problems would be like ours, and that their method of approaching them would be similar to ours. In some cases they solved these problems with more or less success; in others, they failed. The legacy which they have handed down to us, then, is the practical demonstration in their political life of the merits of certain forms of government and of certain methods of dealing with political and social questions, and the weakness of others. The points of resemblance between the ancient and the modern, and the large extent of our direct and indirect inheritance will be defined later.
The natural political entity in antiquity was the city, with a small outlying territory about it. This state of things the Romans clearly recognized in fixing the status of conquered territory in Italy and across the sea. Thus, after the conquest of Sicily, Rome made her arrangements for ruling the island, not with a government representing all Sicily, but with the sixty-eight individual cities and towns of the island, and the citizens of Syracuse or of Agrigentum derived such rights as they had, not from the fact that they were Sicilians, but from their residence in the one or the other of these two cities.[1] This political system, based on the independent life of a small community, is familiar enough to us in the history of such Italian cities as Venice, Florence, and Siena in the Middle Ages, and preëminently in the story of Geneva under Calvin. In fact the political institution of antiquity which has had the longest life and which has enjoyed an unbroken history up to our own day is that of the city-state. Hundreds of inscriptions from various parts of the world show us the form of government which these municipalities had in Roman times. The control of affairs rested in the hands of an executive, of a small assembly of chosen men, and of the whole body of citizens. The comparative strength of these three elements differed in different cities, and varied from period to period in the history of each city. This was the government which we find in the city of Rome in early days. Continuity was given to it by the senate, or assembly of elders of the resident clans, who, on the death of the king, appointed one of their number to choose the king’s successor, whose assumption of office was dependent on the approval of the senate and the people.
Through an aristocratic revolution the kingdom was overthrown, and the king gave place to two annually elected magistrates, called later consuls, who had the right of veto on each other’s actions. The consuls were chosen from the ranks of the patricians, or ruling families, and at the end of a year became patricians again. They must therefore have been largely governed in their action by class prejudice. Consequently the position of the classes which lacked political privileges became intolerable. Another element in the situation aggravated the difficulty. Being located in the centre of Italy and on a navigable river, and being far enough from the mouth of the river to be safe from pirates, Rome grew rapidly, and the coming of a large number of immigrants to the city had a profound effect on its political history. The newcomers did not enjoy the same civil and political rights as the members of the original clans, and they were at an economic and social disadvantage.
The constitutional history of Rome for several centuries centres about the struggle of these people and of the other members of the lower classes to remove the limitations which were put on their rights in these four respects. The natural method of guarding the civil rights of the commons against the arbitrary action of the patrician consul was to limit his powers by law. But the Romans did not adopt this method. They chose class representatives, called tribunes, who were authorized to intervene in person when a plebeian was being treated unjustly and prevent the chief magistrate from carrying out his purpose. It is characteristic of the Roman, as we shall see in other cases, to take this concrete, personal way of bringing about a constitutional reform. The plebeians were at a disadvantage also, because they were kept ignorant of legal procedure and could not maintain their rights before a magistrate. The details of the law, or the accepted custom, were known only to the patrician priests and were handed down by word of mouth from one generation to another. About the middle of the fifth century, after a long struggle, this law was codified and was engraved on twelve bronze tablets, and the tablets were hung up in the Forum where they might be read by any one. These Twelve Tables[2] were regarded by the Romans as the basis of their civil liberty, and may well be placed by the side of the Mosaic Code, the laws of Hammurabi, the Gortynian Code, and Magna Charta. As we shall see later, they contained no formulation of general rights, but stated clearly and minutely the procedure to be followed in civil and criminal actions. If we may accept tradition, both these battles with the patricians were won by the very modern method of Direct Action.
This conquest of civil rights brought the plebeians a larger measure of political rights than they had enjoyed before. It was necessary for them now to organize a popular assembly of their own, in order to elect the tribunes; the tribune became their political leader, and within the next century, under his leadership, the plebeians forced the patricians to admit them to the consulship, and in consequence to the other important magistracies.
In early days the patricians had formed not only a close corporation politically, but also a social caste. Sons of patricians who married plebeian women lost the patriciate, and all the social, political, and religious privileges which went with it. By the Canuleian law in the fifth century the right to intermarry without loss of privileges was guaranteed. Henceforth the state tended to become a unit, and not two separate communities, and in the future when the interests of the two classes were in conflict prominent patricians were often led by kinship to support the plebeian cause at critical moments.
The fourth point about which the struggles in the early period centred was the land question. It was the age-old battle between the great landowner on the one hand and the peasant proprietor, the tenant, and the free laborer on the other. As Rome came into possession of new territory in central Italy by conquest or otherwise, the great landed proprietors managed to get most of it from the state at a nominal rental. The constant wars in which Rome was engaged during her early history called both rich and poor to the front, but the rich man’s slaves and dependents kept his land under cultivation, while the peasant’s holdings, left without anyone to till them, steadily deteriorated. The peasant found it hard, too, to compete with the great landowner who farmed on a large scale and used slave labor, while the free laborer was crushed in competition with the slave. A solution of these difficulties was sought in the Licinian laws of the fourth century and in later legislation. But this legislation did not reach the root of the trouble, and the land question came up in one form or the other for many generations to plague the Romans. The Licinian laws, perhaps supplemented by later legislation, limited the number of acres of state land to be occupied by an individual, stipulated that interest already paid on debts should be deducted from the principal, and fixed the proportional number of free laborers and slaves to be employed on an estate. The first and second provisions were intended to protect the peasant proprietor and to prevent the growth of large estates at his expense. If these three measures could have accomplished their purpose, that drift from the country to the city which ultimately wrecked the Roman Empire, and which is one of the dangerous tendencies today, might never have taken place.
The rapid growth of Rome and her conquest of adjacent territory not only brought to the surface the economic questions which we have just been discussing, but also necessitated an increase in the number of magistrates to manage the larger population and to meet the more complex conditions which had arisen. In the early Republican period the only important officials with positive powers were the two consuls. They presided over the meetings of the senate and of the assemblies which were made up of the whole people, and they were the chief executives and the judicial and financial officials of the community. They supervised the conquered districts of Italy, represented the city in its dealings with foreign states, and commanded the army. These manifold duties, and in particular the absence of the consuls from the city in carrying on war, made it necessary to relieve them of some of their civil functions. The first step taken in this direction was to increase the importance of a minor police official, the aedile. To this official was assigned the duty of keeping order in public places, of supervising commercial transactions, and later, as a natural development of these two functions, of taking charge of the public games and of providing a supply of grain for the city. The financial duties of the consul were turned over to the censor. First and foremost, of course, among these, were the collection of taxes and the expenditure of public moneys. In order that he might draw up a correct list of taxable property, the censor required every citizen to appear before him every five years and make a statement concerning his property, his business, and the main facts of his life. Consequently the censors not only knew the financial status of every Roman, but were also familiar with his occupation and his moral standing in the community. Now the value of a citizen’s vote in the principal popular assembly depended on the amount of property which he held, and certain occupations were regarded as beneath the dignity of a senator or likely to interfere with the disinterested performance of his duty. In later times, too, inclusion in the new social order of the knighthood depended on the possession of a certain amount of property. It was natural therefore that the censors, having all the necessary information before them, should assume responsibility for assigning citizens to their proper places in the centuriate assembly, and for revising every five years the lists of senators and knights. This attempt to supervise the morals of the community is one of the most interesting experiments in government which the Romans ever made. It reached certain social evils, like extravagance and cowardice, of which the courts could not readily take cognizance, and the penalties imposed, of loss of voting importance in the assembly or of exclusion from the list of senators or knights, were severe. It may well indicate a gradual growth of wealth in the community and a threatened disappearance of the simple life and the simple virtues of the olden time. What the censors tried to do was to maintain the moral and social standards of earlier days. While the censor’s office flourished, deviations from those standards were not defined by law, but were determined by officials, from whose decisions there was no appeal. Perhaps no official in Roman history enjoyed such absolute power within the limits fixed by the penalties which could be imposed.[3] The institution played an important rôle for many decades, but towards the close of the second century before our era, the population had become so large that an examination of the business and the life of every citizen became impossible. One of the objects which the Romans had tried to accomplish by the establishment of the censorship, they attempted later to attain by the passage of sumptuary laws.
The growth of Rome and the consequent increase of public business led the Romans to take his judicial functions from the consul in 367, just as they had previously relieved him of police duties and of financial business. Henceforth a new magistrate, the praetor, took his place in the courts. To no other institution in the Roman political system does the modern world owe so much as it owes to the praetor’s office. At first there was only one incumbent of the office, and since his duties confined him to the city he was called the urban praetor. A hundred years later when a second praetor was added, to deal with cases in which one party or both parties to the case were foreigners, the new official was styled the peregrine praetor and in his courts the principles of the law of nations were developed. Sulla ultimately raised the number of praetors to eight. With the institution of the praetor’s office our modern court system of judge and jury was firmly established, and a beginning was made in the development of Roman Law. On taking office the praetor published an edict containing the maxims of law and the forms of procedure which would govern him throughout his year of office. This document followed the edict of his predecessor, with such modifications and additions as his own judgment and the needs of the times required. The law in this way became a living thing and constantly adapted itself to the changing needs of society. The later history of the edict and certain additions to the praetor’s duties we shall have occasion to notice in another connection.
The increase which the tribune’s power underwent during this period almost made his office a new one. With their characteristic hesitation about introducing radical changes in the constitution, and with their tendency to take concrete action, the Romans at the outset had required the tribune to intervene in person when a citizen was being harshly treated. But their common sense showed them in course of time that it was far better to allow the tribune to record his opposition to a bill when it was under consideration than to have him prevent the execution of a law. This change placed a tremendous power in the hands of the tribune in his struggle with the senate and the nobility.
In the early period the senate had been composed of the representatives of the leading clans, but as public business became more complex, in making out the list of senators the censors gave a preference to ex-magistrates, who were already experienced in public affairs, and in course of time this practice was crystallized into law. The men who thus became senators by virtue of having held the praetorship, or consulship, for instance, were elected to a magistracy, to be sure, by the people, but the prestige of a candidate who could point to magistrates among his ancestors was so great that a “new man” had little or no chance of being elected against him. The results were twofold. A new nobility was established composed of ex-magistrates and their lineal descendants. In the second place the senate, being henceforth made up of men who had had experience in administration at home and abroad, easily gained supremacy both over the magistrates, who held office for a year only, and over the popular assemblies, which were unwieldy and ill-informed on important matters. For a century and a half, down to the time of the Gracchi (i.e., the second century B.C.), this nobility maintained itself, and Rome was ruled by a parliament. This state of things is the more astonishing in view of the fact that at the beginning of this period the democracy had won a complete victory, and the action of the popular assembly was accepted as final on all matters. The anomaly is easily explained by the fact that the senate controlled the magistrates; they only could bring bills before the assemblies, and they dared not submit measures of which the senate disapproved.
The ascendency of the senate during this period was due in no small measure to the necessity of dealing with important foreign affairs, for which the people were not qualified. Between 287 and 133 came the war with Pyrrhus and the acquisition of Southern Italy, the three wars with Carthage and the conquest of the Western Mediterranean, the wars with Macedonia and the subjugation of the Eastern Mediterranean. By 133 Rome’s territory included practically all the lands bordering on the Mediterranean. The government of this newly-acquired empire was a peculiarly difficult problem for a city-state. It was somewhat simplified however by the fact that in her ultimate arrangements Rome had to deal with city-states like herself. In Italy, at the outset, she gave conquered cities civil rights and the right of self-government. The Social War in 91-89 B.C. forced her to grant them the political rights of Roman citizens also. Henceforth Italy was a political unit, but, inasmuch as ballots could be cast at Rome only, voters outside the city were at a disadvantage. The Roman Republic never got far enough away from the tradition of the city-state to recognize the fact that citizens could cast their ballots elsewhere than at Rome or that other communities could send their representatives to Rome.
To provide for a new province outside Italy, the senate sent a commission of ten to co-operate with the Roman commander in drawing up a charter. In this document the province was divided into judicial circuits, and the status of each city was fixed either by separate treaty with Rome or by legislative action. Provincial cities were usually permitted to retain their senates, popular assemblies, local magistrates and courts. A few of them were “free cities,” exempt from taxation, but most of them were required to pay a fixed sum in taxes, or to turn over to Rome a certain proportion of the annual return from the land. The rate of taxation was not high, but farming out the taxes to contractors, whose sole desire was to extort as much from the provincials as possible, made taxation in the provinces oppressive. Roman governors were often in league with the moneyed interests at Rome, and were themselves anxious to line their pockets during their year abroad. After a period of experimentation the Romans settled down to the practice of sending out ex-consuls and ex-praetors as provincial governors. These men had experience in public affairs, but their term of office was so short that they acquired little knowledge of local conditions and felt little sympathy with the provincials. Public sentiment at Rome could effect no change, because, like most democracies, the Roman democracy felt little interest in the welfare of the provincials.[4]
The tribunates of the two Gracchi[5] at the end of the period which we have been considering begin the century-long revolution which ultimately overthrew the oligarchy and brought in the empire. The attention of Tiberius Gracchus was called to the gradual disappearance of the peasant proprietor from Italy, to the abnormal growth of the city at the expense of the country, and to the crushing out of the middle class. He and his brother set themselves to work to remedy this situation by limiting the size of landed estates, by assigning state lands to homesteaders, and by drafting off the city’s proletariat to colonies in Italy and abroad. In these plans Tiberius met the violent opposition of the senate, but carried his measures through in a popular assembly in spite of the senate’s efforts. By this action, and by securing “the recall” of a hostile tribune, he struck a fatal blow at the prestige of the senate, which had controlled legislation for a century and a half. Ten years later by securing the passage in the popular assembly of one bill to supply grain to the poor of Rome at a price lower than the market rate, of another imposing a penalty on a magistrate who carried out the final decree of the senate suspending certain constitutional guarantees, and of a third which dealt with the taxes in Asia, Gaius, the brother of Tiberius, vindicated the claim of the popular assembly to be the controlling factor in legislation on domestic and foreign affairs. The political history of Rome for the next century is a continuation of this life-and-death struggle between the nobility and the democracy, with one and the other contestant alternately in the ascendant. The development of the empire and the need of a standing army to carry on wars abroad and maintain order, in the end, gave a decisive turn to the struggle.
To maintain its integrity an oligarchy must keep its numbers small and must prevent individuals from gaining too great eminence or popularity. The traditional acceptance by the masses of certain families as the only families qualified to furnish rulers for the state had kept the nobility a close corporation. To accomplish the second object, that is, to prevent an ambitious individual from rising too rapidly to power, from holding his authority too long a time, and from securing too strong and compact a following, the senate had hedged the magistracies about with a number of legal safeguards. The strict laws enacted before the time of the Gracchi against bribery and prescribing a secret ballot were passed to protect the nobility, and not in the interests of morality. Custom at first, and later, legislation, fixed minimum age requirements for most of the offices, established a certain order in which they must be held, and required an interval between the incumbency of two successive magistracies. The reactionary recasting of the constitution under Sulla illustrates well the aristocratic policy in these matters. In it the important magistracies stand in the order of quaestorship, aedileship, praetorship, and consulship, and a two-year interval was necessary between each two. The minimum age requirement for the consulship was forty-three years, and no one might be reëlected to a magistracy until a period of ten years had expired. This is essentially the system which had been gradually worked out during the flourishing period of the oligarchy. It had also always been a fundamental principle of the Republic that no magistrate should hold office for more than a year, except the censor, whose term was eighteen months. This provision of the constitution took from the magistrate his power and desire to initiate political action. He had been a senator for many years before becoming consul. In twelve months he would be a senator again. He did not lose class-consciousness during his short term of office. If he had wished to assert himself, it would have been impossible. The senate was a body of trained administrators, many of whom had a wider technical knowledge of the questions at issue than he had himself. It was a body of men bound together by mutual self-interest, which had a tradition of centuries behind it. The danger point in the system for the oligarchy lay in the fact that an army and unlimited authority had to be given to the governor of a province. The senate tried to minimize this danger by keeping a tight grip on the purse-strings when appropriating money and in voting troops for the provinces, and by requiring governors to submit their arrangements in the provinces to the senate for ratification, when their terms had expired.
The decline of parliamentarism in the century which lies between the Gracchi and Caesar may be traced in the loss of these safeguards, one after another. Disorders at home, the pressure of wars abroad and the dominance of the army led to their disregard. A case in point occurred toward the close of the second century before our era. The senatorial leaders had shown great incompetence and venality in their campaigns against the Numidian king Jugurtha, and the popular party forced the election to the consulship of Marius, a man of humble birth, and gave him command of the forces in Africa. His brilliant success in this war made the people turn to him in 104, when the Cimbri and Teutons swept down into Italy and overwhelmed the aristocratic leaders. Once more he succeeded, and was elected to the consulship year after year, until, in the year 100, he held this office for the sixth time. The popularity of Marius brought his son to the consulship before he had reached his twentieth year. Twenty-five years later the senate itself was forced to give up an important feature of its policy. Sertorius, a brilliant democratic leader, had established himself in Spain; he had formed an alliance with Mithridates, Rome’s deadly enemy in the East, and threatened to return to Italy and restore the democracy to power. To avert this danger the senate made Pompey proconsul, although he had not yet held even the quaestorship, and sent him to Spain with 40,000 troops. A little later the Gabinian and Manilian laws, carried through by the democracy against the vigorous opposition of the oligarchy, entrusted him with extraordinary powers for a long term to carry on the wars against the Cilician pirates and against Mithridates. The dictatorship of Sulla in 82 B.C. and the sole consulship of Pompey in 52, both of which resulted from disorder in Rome, violated the principle of collegiality which was one of the most important safeguards of the oligarchy. Within one hundred years, then, of the time of the Gracchi all the bulwarks which the aristocracy had built up to protect its position were broken down. “New men” were put in the consulship. Popular favorites attained that office before reaching the minimum age required of candidates, and men were freely reëlected to it. The fixed “order of the offices” and the principle of collegiality were violated.
In its struggle for power, the democracy met a reverse in the suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy in 63 B.C., so that when Pompey returned from his campaign against Mithridates in the following year, the senate ventured to postpone the ratification of his arrangements in Asia and the reward of his veterans. This forced him to make common cause with the democratic leader Caesar, and with Crassus, whose wealth and financial associates made him a man of great influence. In 60 B.C. these three political leaders formed the compact, known as the First Triumvirate, which directed the politics of Rome through its control of the popular assembly for a number of years.[6] Caesar was given the consulship, and later an important command in Gaul. The death of Crassus in a campaign in Parthia left Caesar and Pompey face-to-face. Pompey who had staid in Rome ultimately threw in his lot with the senatorial party, and, when in 49 B.C. the senate tried to make Caesar give up his Gallic province and the Civil War broke out, Pompey was put in charge of the army operating against Caesar. Caesar’s success in the war made him undisputed master of Rome, and before his death he became dictator for life. The liberators, as they called themselves, made a last stand for the old régime, but were defeated at Philippi, and the victors, Octavius, Antony and Lepidus, formed the Second Triumvirate, the members of which did not content themselves with the unofficial position of political bosses, as Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey had done, but secured a legal basis for their autocratic power through legislation in the popular assembly. Again the elimination of one member of the triumvirate, Lepidus, and the battle of Actium in 31 B.C. left Octavius, or Augustus as we know him in later life, in undisputed control of the state. The revolution was complete. The old machinery of government had broken down under the strain put upon it by the policy of imperialism. Parliamentarism and the narrow policy of a city-state were ill adapted to the government of an empire. The large armies and the long terms of office abroad which Marius and Sulla, Pompey and Caesar had held, had put at their disposal greater resources than the state could command, and the Roman citizens and provincials who had been taught to obey them implicitly in the field maintained their allegiance to their old commanders upon the return of the latter to Italy.
The problem which confronted Augustus in revising the constitution after the battle of Actium was not simple. He had to provide a just and efficient government for an empire, which included southern and central Europe, the Near East, and northern Africa, without breaking away too violently from the traditions of the city-state. Rome must continue to be the capital. Italy must hold her privileged position above the provinces, and the old organs of government and the old forms and titles must be kept. The political life of the Republic had been embodied in two institutions, the senate and the tribunate. One represented the aristocracy; the other, the aspirations of the democracy. These two organs of government formed the core of the system which Augustus finally adopted. In this arrangement therefore he adhered closely to the tradition of the old city-state.[7] Other considerations reinforced in his mind the argument from tradition. The tribunician power, which he took for life, could be exercised in almost every field of administrative activity. Furthermore, the office was popular, because the tribune had from time immemorial been the champion of the masses and had protected the individual against the encroachments of the state. Probably Augustus also felt that the power of the office, from its nature and history, was capable of indefinite extension in all directions.
Outside of Rome and Italy the problem before him was the improvement of conditions in the provinces.[8] To the provinces also he applied the dual system of control. The supervision of Italy and the management of the older provinces were entrusted to the senate. The border provinces, where troops were stationed, he took into his own hands. He directed the government of them by virtue of the proconsular imperium which he held permanently. In this case, as in that of the tribunician power, he held firmly to an old practice, because proconsuls had ruled the provinces for centuries, but he extended the scope of his own imperium to cover all the unsettled provinces. This arrangement made him commander-in-chief of all the legions. He also held the power permanently, and he was not required to lay down the imperium, as republican proconsuls had done, on entering the city. The whole empire was thus put under the dual control of Augustus and the senate. This is the first instance in history of the establishment of a constitutional monarchy.
The provinces profited greatly by the changes which Augustus made in the method of governing them. The evils of the republican system come out in Cicero’s orations against Verres, the governor of Sicily, and in the letters which he wrote while he was himself governor of Cilicia. Governors had been sent out to the provinces without paying much heed to their competence. They received no salary, and their terms were short. The governors whom Augustus sent out were chosen on the score of honesty and fitness. Their terms were long enough to enable them to become familiar with conditions in their provinces. They received a generous fixed salary, and those who were capable and honest might look forward to steady advancement. The older provinces were still under the control of the senate, but the excellence of government in the imperial provinces exercised a beneficial influence upon them also. Italians and provincials welcomed the firm and stable government which the principate of Augustus promised them in the same spirit in which the French accepted Louis Napoleon.
The development of the city-state into a world-empire is well illustrated by the decadence of the popular assembly which represented the narrow, selfish interests of the city of Rome, and we are not surprised to find the election of magistrates transferred from this body to the senate under the successor of Augustus. As for the magistracies they lost their independence in large measure. Augustus introduced the practice of commending certain candidates for office, and his approval assured them election. Consequently they became subordinates in the new executive system, of which he was the head. The functions of government were divided between the prince and the senate, but the lion’s share fell to the prince. The senate could not successfully assert, in dealing with him, the claims which it had made good against an annually elected magistrate of much less prestige and power. Another circumstance contributed greatly to lessen the influence of the senate. During his declining years Augustus could not attend all its meetings. Consequently he adopted the practice of sending it his proposals in writing. They were always adopted without change, and propositions of this sort, known as orationes principis, became in the course of time part of the law of the land.
The powers which Augustus held were granted to him for life or for a term of years. It was not easy to arrange for their transmission to a successor, but he cleverly surmounted the difficulty by naming Tiberius as heir to his private fortune and by having him invested with the imperium and with the tribunician power. The theory of the republican magistracy was kept intact, inasmuch as the two powers just mentioned were conferred on Tiberius by the senate in coöperation with the people, but the action of the popular assembly was a pure matter of form, and the senate could be counted on to approve the choice of the prince. The precedent which Augustus set was followed by his immediate successors.
He materially strengthened his position by clearly marking off certain social classes from the rest of the population and by making their privileges dependent on his favor. No one could become a senator unless he had been elected to a magistracy, and success in an election required the support of the prince. He gave dignity to the knighthood and definiteness to its membership by making important appointments from its ranks, and by revising the list of knights at regular intervals. He even created an aristocracy among the freedmen in the municipalities.
No survey of Roman politics would be complete without some account of political life in these municipalities, for, as we have already noticed, the city was the organic political unit in antiquity. Several municipal charters,[9] most of which have been found within the last fifty or seventy-five years, give us a clear idea of the municipal system in the West and of the efforts which were made in the early empire to improve it and make it uniform. In cities of the typical form there were two local chief magistrates corresponding to the early republican consuls, two minor magistrates who bore the title of aediles, a senate or common council of one hundred members, and a popular assembly. The system adopted was conservative, inasmuch as the control of local affairs rested largely with the local senate, and the magistrates were its ministers. Most cities were allowed to keep a large measure of self-government under the early empire, and this fact kept alive the sentiment of local pride and the local patriotism of the citizens. So long as the cities were free to manage their own affairs, the empire was prosperous. As the cities lost their sense of responsibility, or as the central government encroached on their rights, as it began to do in the second century of our era, the decline of the empire set in. It was to this halcyon period of municipal prosperity from the latter part of the first to the close of the second century that Gibbon pays his famous tribute in the third chapter of his history: “If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.” We need not stop to consider in this connection whether the decline of this prosperity caused the decay of self-government or was due to it. At all events the two processes were contemporaneous.
To return from this brief account of city-life to the story of imperial politics,—as we have noticed, under the system which Augustus set up, there were two recognized sources of authority in the state, the prince and the senate. We say “recognized sources of power,” because in the background loomed up the sinister figure of the army, which was still capable of determining the fortunes of the state, as it had done in the times of Sulla and Marius, of Pompey and Caesar. Perhaps we may see the first step toward the intrusion of the army into politics again when Sejanus, the unscrupulous praetorian prefect of Tiberius, brought all the cohorts of the praetorian guard together in Rome. The control of these soldiers stationed in the capital put a powerful weapon in the hands of Sejanus, but, before he could strike, his designs were laid bare. The hereditary principle which Augustus had introduced, by adopting Tiberius and by conferring imperial honors upon him, a principle which was followed by his immediate successors, was for a time a safeguard for the succession. But when the Julian line became extinct on the murder of Nero, the field lay open to the imperial aspirant who was backed by the strongest army. After a year of struggle between four military leaders, Vespasian made good his claim to the prize, and in the year 69 founded a new dynasty, the Flavian. The precedent which Vespasian had set was not followed for a century, but from the close of the second century to the accession of Diocletian in 284 the praetorian guard and the army constituted the power which made and unmade the rulers of Rome. Within the period of seventy-three years which preceded the reign of Diocletian there were in fact twenty-three different emperors, almost all of whom owed their elevation to the throne to the force of arms, and kept their places on the throne so long as they could keep the favor of their armed supporters.
Vespasian, whose seizure of the imperial purple we noticed a moment ago, was not a native of the city of Rome, as all the members of the Julian line had been, nor did he belong to a noble family. These two facts might almost be taken as an omen of the great change which he and his successors were to bring about in the position of Rome and Italy in the Roman world and in the political standing of the senate. The exceptional position which Rome and Italy had held under the republic was taken from them in part by robbing them of their privileges and in part by raising the provinces to a higher political plane. Augustus had started the new movement by stationing troops in Italy and by taking the municipal departments in Rome under his control. Within a century the same fate befell other Italian municipalities which had befallen Rome, and they had to surrender to the emperor the control of their finances and their jurisdiction in all important civil and criminal cases. The privilege which at first Rome and later the Italian municipalities guarded most jealously was their exclusive right to Roman and Latin citizenship. Claudius turned from this tradition when he granted these privileges to certain Gallic cities, and the Flavian emperors violated it in a still more striking way by their generous treatment of many cities in Spain. The levelling down of Italy to the position of the provinces, so far as citizenship was concerned, was completed when Caracalla in 212 granted Roman citizenship to practically all freemen in the empire.[10] In this connection may be mentioned a significant change which was made in the organization of the army. The legions from the time of Hadrian on were recruited in all parts of the empire, and officers were no longer drawn solely from the Western and Latin-speaking portion of the Roman world, but from the East also. The army therefore ceased to be the great Romanizing influence which it had been in the past, and what was still worse, a feeling of local solidarity grew up which was destined in the end to be fatal to the unity of the empire. It was this feeling which gave rise to the nationalist movement in the third century, and the Gallic kingdom of Postumus in the West in that century and the kingdom of Zenobia in Palmyra in the East were concrete manifestations of this feeling and at the same time premonitions of the future dissolution of the empire.
We noticed not only that Vespasian was born outside of Rome, but also that he was of lowly birth. Perhaps the latter fact accounts in part for the hostility which the senate showed toward him, and for the effort which it made in the early part of his reign to assert its authority. The movement was short-lived. The prince and the senate were partners of unequal strength in the dyarchy which Augustus had established, and Vespasian soon made this fact clear to the senate. It came out still more clearly in the reign of his younger son Domitian, who had himself made censor for life, and by virtue of this authority drew up the lists of senators to suit his own pleasure. The tradition of the city-state had been violated and the prestige of the senate had been lowered when Julius Caesar admitted provincials to the senate. This revolutionary precedent was freely followed by emperors during the second half of the first century. This transformation of the Roman senate into a body made up of representatives drawn from all parts of the empire was part of the larger change of the Roman imperium into an international world-state. The senate was still allowed to elect the emperor, but the election meant nothing more than the formal ratification of a choice made by the candidate’s predecessor or by the army, and “Caesar’s candidates” for the magistracies were always elected by the senate. The senate’s legislative powers had almost disappeared, because the senate had given up to the emperor almost entirely its right of initiative. We have already observed the importance which the “discourses of the prince” had acquired in the field of legislation. Through the opportunity which they gave him of declaring his will, and by the issuance of edicts, decrees and other “constitutions,” as they were called, the emperor took the lawgiving power almost completely into his own hands. The one real power which the senate exercised under the empire, long after its legislative and electoral functions had lost most of their meaning, was its right to sit as a court, especially in important political cases. In this capacity it had authority to impose the penalties even of banishment, deportation, and death, but by the beginning of the third century this jurisdiction, except where senators were charged with crimes, had passed to the emperor. By the close of this century the Roman senate had completed the cycle and come back to the status which it had held in the primitive city-state, that of a municipal council.
This gradual loss of power by the senate meant a corresponding increase of course in the influence of the emperor, but his supremacy was assured also by positive additions to his authority in other directions. Hadrian in the early part of the second century built up a bureaucracy[11] so large and so systematically organized that it enabled him and his successors to reach into the remotest parts of the empire and control the government of municipalities and the lives of all the citizens. Probably the world has never known so complete and crushing a paternalistic system as is revealed to us by the Codes of Theodosius and Justinian in the fifth and sixth centuries.
The drift toward autocracy was greatly accelerated by the influence which Egypt and the Orient exercised on the development of the principate. Perhaps the Oriental practice of identifying the secular and divine rulers of the world never found complete acceptance in Rome, but the erection of altars in the provinces to Rome and Augustus, the attribution of the titles “Master and God” to Domitian by his procurators, and in the third century the introduction into the court of Elagabalus of the Persian practice of paying divine honors to the sovereign, the presence of eunuchs in the palace of Aurelian, and the wearing of the Eastern diadem by Diocletian, show clearly enough that the principate was taking on the form of an Oriental despotism. The conception of the emperor’s authority which these practices suggest finds expression in the Code of Justinian in the sixth century.[12] The first words of the rescript in which Justinian authorizes Tribonian to codify the laws of the empire are: “We, under divine guidance governing our realm, which has been entrusted to us by the powers above, etc.” We shall see in the next chapter that under the prevailing theory of Roman lawyers from the second to the sixth century the emperor derived his authority from the people, but this utterance of Justinian and other passages in the Code show us the beginnings of the doctrine of the divine right of kings which Rome transmitted from the Orient to the states of modern times. When this point in the development of the empire had been reached, the preëminence of the city of Rome had gone, the distinction between Italy and the provinces had been obliterated, Roman citizenship had lost its significance, the splendor of the senate and the magistracies had faded, and the municipalities, which had been the pride and glory of the early empire, were plunged in poverty and wretchedness. In their place is an autocrat, kept in power by an army made up largely of barbarians, who carried out his wishes through a bureaucracy; and this, in turn, was supported by a body of citizens divided into groups by a system of castes, and held in most cases to the soil and to their hereditary occupations by the will of the state.