CHAPTER X

II.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE PRINCIPATE

The Augustan principate was a system so subtle that its essence even now is hard to recapture. That its foundations were laid in the law of the constitution is a fact beyond dispute. Augustus himself was an Italian, and a champion of those Italian traditions which in his day enshrined the Hellenic conviction that law should be supreme more faithfully than did the Hellenistic world itself. Whatever may have happened in the century which lay between them, Augustus would have taken as a compliment the words in which the younger Pliny praised the age of Trajan as one when men could say not ‘Princeps super leges’ but ‘Leges super principem’. The large general powers which Augustus received in 27 and 23 BC had even been supplemented by various minor grants, and it cannot be denied that for most of the acts which government involved he had express legal authorization. Nevertheless, by legal categories alone the rule of Augustus cannot be explained. The princeps had, indeed, been grafted onto, if not into, the body of the Republican State; but when, as happened at the start, he began to exert control, his control expressed itself in something more than the mere exercise of this legal right and that.

Throughout the first three centuries of the Empire the fundamental powers of the princeps were unchanged, their constitutional formulation was essentially unaltered. Yet even during the Julio­Claudian age these powers had been made to justify governments of the most varied types. The unpretentious guidance of the first citizen, Augustus; the sombre rule of Tiberius, trying to emulate his stepfather and earning the name of tyrant in his own despite; the open autocracy of Gaius, whose unstable mind was fired by its own conceit and a shallow acquaintance with the forms of Hellenistic kingship; Claudius’ attempted return to the ways of Augustus, an attempt which the work of Tiberius and Gaius had frustrated before it was made; and finally the crude despotism of Nero’s reckless end—all these were alike in their legal basis, and in little else. Public law by itself cannot explain the Principate as it worked from day to day; for behind it lay subtler factors exercising a powerful influence on the government. Not only could every princeps form his own conception of his rôle, but that conception could be modified or exaggerated by the interpretations of those who for reasons of their own welcomed an opportunity to stress this aspect or that of what they regarded as a monarchy; and even the imperial cult in its provincial form could react on the outlook of the princeps and his neighbors in Italy. Thus there were times when a princeps seemed to approach the king­ship which is hedged with divinity, though the legal foundations of the Principate remained unchanged; and even in the first century AD, while these foundations still hold firm, there could be temporary anticipations in outward form of what was to be permanent reality when the Empire became an absolutism confessed and undisguised.

The varying conceptions of the Principate which successive rulers sought to spread, and the changing attitude towards the princeps adopted by the population at large, are both reflected by the material evidence—whether in official documents like the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum, or in objects of purely private origin. The interpretation of these is rarely easy; and many of the conclusions they yield concern matters commonly treated as religion, in connection with which they will be discussed. But here it must be emphasized that, though the constitution itself was always in essence purely legal, its working is now revealed to have been deeply affected by the influence of that popular sentiment to which monuments of all kinds give a long neglected clue. The method which yielded to Mommsen almost all its valuable results is indispensable, indeed, but still inadequate; and if a later age can in some part make good the lack, its ability is due to an advantage which the previous generation was denied. Since Mommsen’s day the experience of mankind has grown, and its knowledge of the place which the theory of a constitution may take when a nation has given itself up to the guidance of an accepted hero can yield a new understanding of Augustus’ meaning when he wrote auctoritate omnibus praestiti. Augustus captured the imagination of Italy, and his reward was a position in which with increasing confidence he could count on securing the adoption of his views, not by the issue of commands in a form which might remind men of the constitutional powers in the background, but merely by indicating the course which seemed to him most suitable. In speaking to provincials he could be forthright enough: “I order all persons from the province of Cyrene who have been honored with citizenship to bear their public burdens”. But when he was dealing with senatorial officials—and it is in the relations between princeps and the Senate that the view of the Principate held by its various occupants is most clearly revealed—the tone is different and the language clearly inspired by the forms which the Senate itself employed in offering advice to a holder of imperium: “in my opinion governors of Crete and Cyrene will in future act rightly and as the circumstances demand if they put on the jury-panel in the province of Cyrene as many Greeks of the highest property assessment as Romans . . .”  

A suggestion from Augustus was enough; for it may safely be assumed that he would not have embodied a suggestion in a mandatum addressed to a provincial government if there had been any likelihood that nothing less than a direct command would gain obedience. And if a hint sufficed, the reason is to be found in his auctoritas—that influence which made men respond to his wishes because they were his, without asking questions, either of themselves or him, about his legal right to enforce his will by commands which their own enthusiasm made unnecessary.

So in the Roman mind the princeps ceased to be regarded in the first place as the holder of constitutional powers, issuing orders which the law required to be obeyed, and became instead the foremost figure in the State, the guardian of a system which had saved Rome from threatening destruction and the embodiment of such accumulated prestige that his actions passed unscrutinized because men lacked the desire to challenge them.

The prestige with which Augustus endowed his own position had consequences which reached far. It was this which enabled his successors, as it had enabled him, to make what they would of the Principate itself. Gaius could put his own unprecedented interpretation on his office because, being princeps, he had inherited the auctoritas of his place; and when his end had shown that auctoritas was still something less than omnipotence, Claudius for the same reason could attempt to make Augustus his model and in doing so produce yet another version of the imperial role. Finally, the immunity from legal checks which the emperors enjoyed in fact, though not in theory, provoked a gradual extension of their activities. That increase passed almost without question. The Roman world, as Galba is made to say, had become unius familiae quasi hereditas, and the successors of Augustus enjoyed opportunities which could be claimed by none but the heads of what Tacitus describes as fundata longo imperio domus.

With Nero the house became extinct. Its prestige was dissipated; and, if it could be recaptured at all, so much of it as clung to the imperial position must be fostered with all care in order that the new rulers might acquire that pre-eminence among the great families in Rome which was essential to the stability of the Principate itself. It was the auctoritas of Augustus which had exalted the office of the princeps: now the office itself must exalt Vespasian and his kin; and if at the outset something was done to make good the lack by his miracles of healing, a subtler method was needed to win the allegiance of those whose opinion was most valuable in Rome. For one who was regarded as a parvenu to array himself in the trappings of royalty and to act the god would have been disastrous, even if it had not been a course for which by character and training Vespasian was singularly unfitted. Its inevitable results must have been to alienate the Senate, to attract the resentful ridicule of Italy, and—worst of all—to throw the princeps back for support on that army which it was his foremost care to exclude from the business of government. He chose a better way: the power of the Flavian house was to rest on the foundations which Augustus himself had laid. Circumstances, indeed, had changed since AD 14; the later Julio-Claudians had left their marks; and after Gaius, Claudius and Nero civilitas in a princeps could no longer be carried to the lengths which it had reached under Augustus. Nevertheless Vespasian made Augustus his model. Even before he reached Rome, in his letters to the Senate, and when he came to face the task of gaining that unrivalled eminence in the State which had been the prerogative of his predecessors, his method in its attainment was not to command obedience but to win respect. Above all in his dealings with the Senate, though that body had greatly changed in the days of the Claudian emperors, and though Vespasian himself was to change it still more, he showed throughout the consistent consideration which alone could enlist its good will.  

To talk of Flavian absolutism is to mislead; for, despite their differences, in the most essential quality of all the principate of Vespasian and the principate of Augustus were indistinguishable. The essence of the Augustan principate was that a man equipped with powers which in theory were great and in fact were overwhelming exercised them, not in the arbitrary manner of an autocrat, but in a way which took account of public opinion. For that reason the system of government which he devised was the nearest approach made by the ancient world to a constitutional monarchy. In it the princeps was the first servant of the State, holding a position near enough to that of the Stoic king for lapses to invite comparisons and for philosophy to take on some slight political significance. Indeed when Marcus brought sentimental Stoicism to the throne, though the outlook of the princeps was affected, the form of the Principate was not. The system was a monarchy in which the monarch, not of compulsion but of choice, exposed himself to the force of educated opinion and so guided his actions that it should not be outraged. Of that opinion the foremost organ was the Senate, and the relations between Senate and princeps are consequently the measure of the extent to which this emperor or that was departing from the Augustan version of the Principate in the direction of Autocracy. Of friction under Vespasian there was little or none (for Helvidius Priscus brought his fate upon himself), and in his rule may be seen a restoration of the Principate in a form as near to the Augustan as the circumstances of his age allowed. Nor was that all. The work of Vespasian had effects of long duration. For though the Imperial powers continued slowly to increase, as they had increased in the days of the Julio-Claudians, the Principate retained the essential character with which Vespasian had left it until it was changed in the chaos of the third century. The Flavian conception of government is no more to be inferred from the rule of Domitian than is the Antonine from that of Commodus. Domitian and Commodus were not typical: they were aberrations from the type which Vespasian chose to make the norm. That choice was inspired by Augustus, and thus it was that Vespasian, by extending its life for a century and a half, made the Augustan Principate not an episode in history, but an epoch.

III.

THE PRINCEPS AND THE CONSTITUTION