CHAPTER X

THE PRINCIPATE AND THE ADMINISTRATION

I.

THE ARMY AND THE STATE

THE problems confronting the Roman world in AD 68 and 69 were as grave as any since the struggle which culminated at Actium. In the days of the 'Second Triumvirate' the character of the government had been determined by the arbitrament of war: in the Year of the Four Emperors it had been submitted to the same hazard again. And on both occasions the personality of the victor was the most potent factor in setting the course which Rome should take when peace had been restored. At Actium the issue was between East and West, and victory gave power to the man who insisted that the imperial culture and the traditions of the imperial regime should be predominantly Latin. By AD 68 the achievement of Augustus had set a mark upon the world, and at worst its destruction could not make it as if it had never been. Though Vespasian might allow himself to be regarded as the conqueror who should come out of the East, he and all his rivals were Italians. Nevertheless, if the work of Augustus could not be destroyed, it might well be denied its full fruition. The form of government which he had framed needed time for the revelation of its merits; and by the death of Severus Alexander, when the Principate began to move rapidly and irrevocably in the direction of a Dominate, the Augustan system had endured so long as to be entitled to a place among the historical types of government which it could not have claimed if its end had come in AD 69. On the accession of Vespasian that system was threatened; and the threat came from the same quarter as that which finally proved fatal. In the third century the increasing importance of the army enabled it to bestow the Empire on men whose only distinction was popularity with the troops or success in military command. Against martial prowess culture ceased to count; experience in civil administration was not considered; and the Empire fell under the control of war-lords who made inevitable. the process by which Principate gave way to Autocracy. This was the danger already plainly present in the sequel to Nero's death.

Five of the army-groups, in jealous rivalry, had taken up arms to champion the claims of various candidates for the succession; and a momentous secret had been revealed. Then there was raised the crucial question—would the army contrive to take charge of the Empire, or not? Vespasian gave the answer. Instead of becoming its master, the army remained the servant of the State; the princeps was not its puppet but its commander, as before; and so were restored conditions in which the Augustan Principate, rescued from the danger of extinction, might survive in any form the princeps chose to give it.

When Vespasian left Alexandria in AD 70 the problem which awaited him in Italy was difficult. Like Octavian, he owed his position to his men; but, whereas Octavian had been at most the symbol of a cause, Vespasian was the cause himself. The armies of Syria and the Danube had intervened with no other object than to secure that he, and not the nominee of legions on the Rhine, should succeed to the Imperial position. And when their object was achieved, it still remained to see whether that brief indulgence of their vanity would be enough. They might, indeed, be content once they had placed their chosen hero on the throne. But they might, on the other hand, go farther, and demand that his tenure should be on terms of their own dictation.

According to one famous theory the legions in AD 68 and 69 had risen to protest against the degenerate travesty of good government for which Nero had been responsible and to have done with the increasing favor shown to the Praetorians at the expense of the provincial armies. If this view could be accepted, its implications about the future aims of the soldiers would be grave. Their action must have meant that they intended, if not to exercise a permanent supervision of the princeps, at least to place him under the threat of renewed intervention whenever his policy should give the same offence as Nero’s. In such a version there is, indeed, a large element of truth; but it would be misleading if emphasis on the legionaries’ jealousy of the Guards and their resentment at the unworthy performances of Nero were allowed to suggest that it was the rank and file who played the leading part in starting the campaigns of AD 68 and 69. A more potent factor was the fear with which Nero's brutalities, and especially his intolerance of military success, had inspired the higher command. There is no reason to deny the widespread resentment which Nero had aroused, but men’s disgust at his behavior need not have led to mutiny if mutiny had not found a leader. Yet, even though the armies were set in motion more by the incitement of their commanders than by their own resolve to take a hand in government, their entry into the political arena was ominous enough. Galba, the choice of the only legion in Nearer Spain, had been murdered when the Praetorians in Rome had been roused by the bribery of Otho and his own proud refusal to buy their favors; Otho in turn had been driven to suicide by the victorious advance of the armies from the Rhine; and their candidate, Vitellius, had finally been butchered when Rome had fallen to the vanguard of the force whose mission it was to proclaim Vespasian. By the action of Galba the right to bestow the Principate had been made a prize for which every army-group might compete, and the competition had been severe. The armies had entered politics; and, when the issue which provoked this dangerous development had been decided, it remained to see whether they would tamely withdraw from a field in which their presence was a threat.

In the period of reconstruction much depended on the personality of the Princeps, and the attitude of Vespasian to his first great problem—the problem of restoring the army to its proper place—was the attitude to be expected of a man who had grown up under the system established by Augustus. Nowhere had Augustus’ respect for the accumulated experience of the Roman Republic been more wisely shown than in his insistence that the higher posts in the civil and the military services should, so far as possible, be held in turn. With rare exceptions the greater commands were accessible to none who was held unfit for the consulship, and to none, in consequence, who had not made that intimate acquaintance with the civil traditions of the Senate which was involved by progress through the hierarchy of urban magistracies. Thus the generals whom the legions might champion for the succession were all men who, however willing they might be to profit by the devotion of the troops, were familiar enough with an ideal of government which did not look to the rank and file for the inspiration of policy. Such was the class to which Vespasian belonged. At the outset he had been sparing in his promises; and though something like a mutiny in Rome had forced Mucianus to delay demobilization in the Urban Garrison, Vespasian was not long deterred. The Guards were the hardest corps to handle; but despite the delicacy of the task their strength was soon reduced, and by AD 76 at latest, in place of the sixteen Praetorian Cohorts which Vitellius had recruited, Rome had only nine.

The provincial armies, to which Vespasian himself showed no anxiety to be generous, called not for reduction but for a measure of reform; and the new Princeps made it one of his first objects to secure that their discipline should be maintained in those times of political crisis when it was most essential. Lack of evidence reduces us to speculation about the social character of the classes to which he looked for his recruits, and his motives are difficult to disentangle because there were two distinct elements in the problem with which he had to deal. Not only must the army as a whole have its interest in politics destroyed, but the forces on the Rhine in particular called for treatment which would show that disloyalty was not venial and would ensure that the lessons of the Gallo-German rising should not be lost. It was local reasons which caused four of the legions to disappear; but local reasons were probably less cogent than considerations of a more general kind in accelerating the application of principles, not wholly unrecognized in earlier days, which came in course of time to exercise powerful effects on the history of the Empire.

It was no matter for regret that henceforward the auxiliary units were more often stationed in places remote from those in which they had their origin; and if local recruits were accepted, until this practice became regular in the second century it had the valuable effect of reducing the racial solidarity of the corps to which it was applied. More questionable, however, was the increased tendency to compose the legions of provincials. For a time the system was useful: it meant that the troops were largely drawn from classes whose interest in the details of political life in Rome was as slight as their knowledge. But ultimately its results were bad. In the third century, when the army finally—took control of government, a defenseless Italy found itself at the mercy of forces which in origin were provincial, and whose Romanism was not even the highest which the provinces could produce. Italy in the end paid dear for her forgetfulness of the burden of empire, and Vespasian has his share of responsibility for encouraging a dangerous indifference to her military obligations, which one day would give truth to the gibe “provinciarum sanguine provincias vinci”. Nevertheless, it is not to be supposed that he intended to enervate the Italian population. For many years after his time there is evidence enough to show that warlike virtues were not frowned upon in Italy, and there is no good reason to doubt the truth of Dio’s word that it was left for Septimius at the end of the second century, when he made transfer to the Guards a reward for good service in the legions, to strike a heavy blow at Italian morale.

The risk that legions would form groups and that the groups would take up arms against one another had been familiar enough to Rome since the consequences of Marius’ changes in enlistment had first become manifest. Later, when the army was made standing, Augustus had removed one frequent cause of mutiny by his momentous establishment of the Aerarium Militare, whereby the State proclaimed its responsibility for pensions and the troops were freed from the temptation to see in their immediate commander the only hope of provision for their old age. But the danger that the army, instead of being one and with a single loyalty, would split into groups, that each group would regard itself, not as part of the army of the Empire, but first and foremost as the garrison of the region in which it stood, and that at length the groups would fall to fighting with one another, was more insidious and less easy to dispel. Of the one certain safeguard little use was made. Though legions were freely moved to meet the demands of war, for reasons which may be sought in the slowness and difficulty of transport, a regular and frequent change of quarters was no part of the military system in times of peace. That valuable expedient was as strange to those who followed Vespasian as to his predecessors; and Vespasian himself, after the measures which had been taken to inflame the Syrian army against Vitellius, was scarcely in a position to introduce its. Nevertheless, if the legions, especially after Hadrian’s time, tended to become permanent garrisons, their higher officers were still regularly changed; and, since the men rarely moved unless they were incited from above, this custom, by discouraging undue devotion by the troops to their commanders, was powerful as a safeguard against coups de main.

Though the army might have been better for a still more drastic treatment, Vespasian’s measures beyond doubt were a success. Most valuable of all was his own firm method of dealing with the men; for without this the rest might have been impossible. But hardly less useful were the efforts to weaken the ties between auxiliary garrisons and civil population; and finally, though as an enduring policy it did violence to the sound principle of the Republic that a people which claims imperial position must take its full share in fighting such battles as imperial interest may demand, the increasing tendency to confine Italians to the Guards and to depend on the provinces for legionary recruits was above criticism as a temporary expedient to reduce the risk that the fighting which had followed Nero’s death would be repeated. When the politically-minded population of Italy had rare opportunity for military service outside the cohorts of Praetorians, so far as the rank and file were concerned the legionary forces, even if they were still recruited less from the country than the towns, would be composed of men reasonably likely to refrain from unwelcome interest in those questions of government which were the proper business of the civil authorities in Rome.

So much was done to eliminate the common soldier from politics; but the common soldier was not the only problem. Though in eighteen months of turmoil the legionaries and the Guards in Rome had developed sinister enthusiasms, it was only in the Upper German army that they had taken the initiative. Galba, Otho, Vitellius with the Lower German army, and finally Vespasian himself, had all owed their elevation to movements which they or their friends had instigated. Hard as it might be, once it had been begun, to stop military interference in affairs of State, recent experience went to show that a beginning was not likely to be effected unless senior officers gave a lead. In the higher command, as was often to be shown again, there was a danger at least as great as any from the rank and file. But, for Vespasian, measures to prevent ambitious generals from starting a new rising were less necessary than steps to secure their acquiescence in the ending of the old; for there were at least a few who might have seized an opportunity to challenge his position, as Hadrian’s was challenged by Trajan’s discontented marshals. Vespasian, however, was lucky in his contemporaries. Some, like the governors of the Danubian provinces, lacked ability; others, like Antonius Primus, were too small to command support commensurate with their military gifts; and others again, like Suetonius Paullinus, had sacrificed their chances to a losing cause. Thus there remained none but the momentous figure of Mucianus himself. To the loyalty of that complex character Vespasian owed the Principate. In the crisis of AD 68 and 69 Rome was well served by the two men who made the great refusal. Mucianus, like Verginius Rufus, had claims which could rival Vespasian’s, and in AD 70 the rapid return to conditions of peace was due not a little to the fact that the one obvious alternative to Vespasian was his staunch supporter. With his help, and mainly through his efforts, the morale of the army was restored, the legions went back to their stations on the frontier, the ambitions of individuals were restrained, and discipline, which Hadrian made the object of a cult, became again the praecipuum decus et stabilimentum Romani imperii. The lasting value of these measures it was for the future to reveal: when Domitian was murdered, neither the dangerous restiveness of the Praetorians nor such facts as may have justified the mysterious rumors from Syria needed force to make them innocuous. But whatever difficulties time might bring, the immediate results were good : for the present, at least, Rome had escaped the menace of military domination, and the new Princeps was free to do as he would—even, if so he were inclined, to renew the Principate of Augustus.

II.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE PRINCIPATE