CHAPTER X

IV.

 THE IMPERIAL HOUSE AND THE TRANSMISSION OF THE PRINCIPATE

After the settlement, as before, the character of the government was determined, not by the powers with which the princeps had been invested, but by the use to which these powers were put. From the outset it was clear that Vespasian turned for guidance to the past, and more particularly to those of his predecessors whose outlook was least monarchical. Claudius had made Augustus his model, and Vespasian so far respected Claudius as to insist on his divinity and rebuild the temple in his honor on the Caelian. But he could not have been content to emulate one whose reputation was so controversial as that of Claudius, and there is evidence enough to show that it was Augustus himself whom Vespasian sought to take as his example. Not only does his coinage hark back at times to Augustan themes, but in the far more significant matter of the imperial title there is a return to Augustan usage. By a decision which was not challenged while the Principate survived, he reverted to the praenomen imperatoris; and when he chose to follow this immediately with the name ‘Caesar’, Imperator Caesar Vespasianus Augustus bore a style which had its justification and its value in the fact that ‘Imperator Caesar divi filius Augustus’ was its model. Yet even so Vespasian was at a disadvantage: he was not himself ‘divi filius’, and there was still a need for measures which would increase, not his constitutional powers, but the distinction of the princeps in the eyes of the Roman world. To this end, like Vitellius before him, he seems to have employed the consulship. After the settlement of 23 BC Augustus had only twice been consul again, on each occasion for a special reason; and his successors had abstained from any frequent tenure of the office, once they had held it more often than the three times which were the most that any but a princeps could expect. Tiberius had been consul five times before his death, though only twice since his accession; Gaius took the office four times, and Claudius and Nero five times each. But during the ten years of Vespasian’s Principate the emperor and his two sons held twenty-one consulships between them; and Domitian, though he seems to have found less value in the office towards the end of his life, so far followed his father’s practice as to be consul in ten out of the fifteen years of his own supremacy.

This exploitation of the consulship is not difficult to interpret. That the powers it brought with it were of no account is clear from the fact that the princeps did not retain office throughout the year: Domitian, indeed, often abdicated on the Ides of January and his longest tenure ended on the first of May. Nor again can it be regarded as an attempt to exclude senators from the highest magistracy; for there is strong evidence to suggest that suffect consulships now began almost regularly to be reduced from four months’ duration to two, so that, even if the Imperial house had monopolized the office until the end of April, it would still have been possible for eight members of the aristocracy in general to obtain consular rank from a place in one of the four colleges which would follow between May and December. Suetonius says of Domitian ‘[consulatus] omnes ... paene titulo tenus gessit’; and it was the title which the Flavians sought. The number of their consulships, and the number of the years to which, as consules ordinarii, they gave their names , marked them off from the rest of the nobility and so helped to gain them the unquestioned eminence which it was their urgent business to attain. But when at length the position of the house was secure and Domitian’s grim consciousness of his unique responsibilities still sought titles adequate to his more autocratic conception of the Principate, a mere magistracy ceased to satisfy. After the revolt of Saturninus in 89 Domitian’s consulships became less frequent, and the reason is easy to conjecture: to be consul for a few weeks and to give his name to a year were matters almost of indifference to one whose conception of his station allowed him to be addressed as dominus et deus. But when Domitian fell and the hatred of his memory provoked violent reaction towards a government of the Augustan type, in a Rome which the Flavians had made familiar with the idea that the Principate could pass from one house to another there was no need for his successors to glorify themselves by collecting titles. Trajan became consul only four times as princeps, Hadrian twice, Pius three times, Marcus not at all (having entered his third and final consulship nine weeks before Pius died), and Commodus only five times in the twelve years and more by which he survived his father.

If Vespasian used repeated consulships to raise his family above the rest of the aristocracy at Rome, by themselves they did not exhaust the expedients which might be invoked to serve his end. The catastrophe which had followed Nero’s death was warning enough that the Flavian house must be put beyond reach of challenge, not only while Vespasian was alive, but after he had gone; and the new princeps found himself faced with the problem which Augustus had spent over thirty years in solving. His successor must be marked so clearly that a position still in theory elective would pass with the same certainty as under an hereditary monarchy. The choice of candidate was easy, for Titus was worthy of his father; and if his matrimonial enterprise had so far failed to produce a son, his younger brother Domitian, despite his conceit, could well be made the second string. It is not without point that Mucianus in urging Vespasian to seek the Principate is made by Tacitus to stress the value of these youths. Accordingly, while Domitian was given honors with a generosity reserved for members of the Imperial house, Titus received distinctions which marked the heir apparent. Both took the name of Caesar, both at first were ‘Principes Juventutis’, and both became sacerdotes collegiorum omnium. But already in AD 70 after the capture of Jerusalem Titus had been hailed as imperator, and, though he was denied the independent triumph which the Senate is said to have proposed, he was allowed to share the honor with Vespasian in June, 71. In the following month he began his tenure of the tribunicia potestas, and from that time not only did he keep pace with his father in the numbering of its years, as in the reckoning of imperatorial salutations, but he was the inseparable colleague of the princeps in all the offices, whether of consul or of censor, which Vespasian thought fit to take. Nevertheless, the principate of Titus had not begun. He was not called ‘Augustus’, nor was he officially given the praenomen imperatoris; and even his appointment to the sole command of the Praetorians, complimentary as it was to his filial devotion, emphasized his concern not with the whole army but with a single corps and put him in a position which, however powerful, had never been given to a man of senatorial rank before AD 70. But though he was not the equal of the first, Titus was now beyond dispute the second citizen of Rome: without exaggeration he could be called particeps atque etiam tutor imperii.

The work of Vespasian had its reward. In AD 79 Titus stepped into his place unchallenged, and at once the Imperial house gained new solidity. Its head, and his brother, were now Divi filii. Thus the Flavians moved nearer to the position which Augustus and his successors had enjoyed, and the move is made important by the use to which it was turned by Domitian; for of Vespasian and Titus it cannot be said that they exploited their opportunities of worship. There was no doubt, indeed, of Vespasian’s determination to retain the Principate in his own family, even if he was not above strengthening his position by marriage ties with the nobility: not only were his sons kept prominently in the public eye, but, by a practice for which precedents were plentiful and which became normal in the second century, the distinction of the Imperial house was stressed still further by the honors bestowed on its ladies. Vespasian’s only daughter, though she was almost certainly dead before he became princeps, was called ‘Augusta’ and was later deified, as were Julia, the daughter of Titus, and Domitian’s infant song; and the name ‘Augusta’, which may have indicated some political authority when it was borne by Livia and the younger Agrippina, was given by Domitian to his wife, as it had been by Nero to Poppaea, as a title appropriate to the consort of the princeps. Before long this usage was extended. Marciana, Trajan’s sisters, and her daughter Matidia the Elders were both called ‘Augusta’ when alive, and were both, like Trajan’s father, deified when dead; and their honors were not peculiar.

But for Domitian titles were not enough. With him the dignity of the Flavians was an obsession, and the knowledge that his father, his brother and his sister had been added to the number of the gods can scarcely have failed to affect the new conception which he formed of his own position. The Porticus Divorum, which he erected on the Campus Martius in their honor, and the Templum Gentis Flaviae, built on the site of the house in which he had been born, were expressions of an outlook which found the existing accommodation on the Palatine inadequate. Though the palace was not a temple, there was a great and significant difference between the unpretentious house with which Augustus had long been content and the imposing home of one who called his bed by the name proper to the couches of the gods and who could allow himself to be described as dominus et deus. Such was Domitian’s interpretation of the high prestige which the efforts of Vespasian had secured—efforts which were wasted when Domitian died at the age of forty-four, leaving none to follow him but two grand-nephews, whom he had, indeed, adopted but who were still no more than boys.

With the accession of Nerva, the idea that the Principate should become the possession of a natural family fell into intelligible disrepute, and Rome, whether from conviction or because chance brought the childless to power, had recourse to a principle which it had been one of the great achievements of the Republic to establish. The populares of the last two centuries BC had fought with success to secure that office should be filled by the best candidates to be found, and this doctrine had in general been accepted by Augustus. But in one most vital connection he had compromised with his ideal : the overwhelming difficulty of ensuring an unquestioned succession to himself had forced him to make use of the prestige which he had communicated to his relatives and to look for an heir only among those who were in some sense members of his family. Such was the system which, well as it had worked in AD 14, was condemned when it gave the Empire first to Gaius and then to Nero; but, though Galba had hinted at a better way in his adoption of Piso Licinianus, the task of establishing a line drove Vespasian back on the same expedients as it had compelled Augustus to adopt, and the Principate was reserved for a single family even more strictly than before. When Domitian had followed Nero and a second house became extinct, change came at last. Imperaturus omnibus eligi debet ex omnibus are words which mark the triumph of the populares; for they mean that the system which, to its great advantage, had made the administration a carrière ouverte aux talents had now been extended to the Principate itself.

The result was a sequence of rulers without parallel in Roman history. Trajan, Hadrian, Pius and Marcus maintained for more than eighty years a level of efficiency, devotion and common-sense, which, except in a few periods both rare and brief, had not been known since the death of Augustus. Of them the first three had all passed forty when they were designated heirs, even though Trajan had shown interest in Hadrian since his marriage to Sabina in AD 100; and Marcus, though he was chosen young, was trained for his high destiny from the age of sixteen. It is true that even now relationship with the princeps may still have been a commendation; for, though Nerva and Trajan were unconnected, as probably were Hadrian and Pius, Hadrian himself was son of a first-cousin of Trajan and his nephew by marriage, as Marcus was of Pius. Yet, even so, with Trajan at least family considerations counted for so little that he did nothing to secure the claims of Hadrian until his last short illness had begun—if then.

What told was merit, which the princeps recognized by adopting the man who showed it. The political consequences of this act must be distinguished from its effects in law. At a time when birth had fallen into disfavor as a claim to the Imperial place it was natural that a step which revealed the emperor’s views on the succession should not be allowed to establish remoter claims in those who might now become his grandsons. The significance of adoption was confined to the adopted son alone, and no promise was made to his children. To put this beyond doubt, the name ‘Caesar’ was turned to the use which is normal in later history. At first a cognomen of the Julii, since the extinction of the Julian line it had commonly been borne by the princeps and his agnatic descendants, without regard to their prospects of political power; but when Hadrian adopted first L. Ceionius Commodus and then the future Emperor Pius, though each of these in turn was called ‘Caesar’, Commodus, who alone had a surviving son, was not allowed to pass on the name, and the youth remained without it until he was made Caesar and Augustus simultaneously in AD 161. Thus it happened that only the princeps and his intended successor were Caesars; and, since the princeps himself was distinguished as Augustus—the appellation which he shared with none—Caesar, now no longer a name but a title, came in practice to be the mark of the heir-presumptive. It may, indeed, even be said that the heir was not completely designated until his adoption had been followed by the grant of this title; for though Marcus and Verus had both been adopted by Pius in AD 138, when Pius became emperor in the following year, Marcus was made Caesar and Verus was not; and only then was Marcus indicated as the next Augustus. The title, however, like the adoption, did no more than reveal the hopes of the princeps. If the Caesar was to have constitutional powers, they must still be constitutionally conferred, and this step was not necessarily an immediate sequel to the creation of a Caesar. Marcus was Caesar for seven years before he received imperium and tribunicia potestas. In his case, however, his youth was a reason for delay, and he provides no exception to the practice by which a Caesar was invested as soon as might reasonably be with the authority which Augustus had used to mark his destined successor.

Despite the skill with which earlier practice was thus adapted to the needs of an age when the Principate had ceased to be the possession of a single family, the enlargement of the field in which candidates might be sought inevitably increased the number of those who might seek to press their own claims, possibly by force. The only security against disputes over the succession was the personal prestige of the princeps who had made the choice and the reputation of the man on whom it fell; but this security was greatly strengthened when Marcus for the first time made the Principate continuous. A socius was what Marcus chose to have, and a partner in the fullest possible sense. As soon as Pius was dead he caused Verus to be appointed colleague of himself as Augustus, constitutionally not his adjutant but his equal. It is true that, by the marriage of Verus to Annia Lucilla, Marcus acquired the superior position of a father-in-law, and that it was left for Pupienus and Balbinus in AD 238 to duplicate the office of Pontifex Maximus, which Marcus retained for himself; but in their secular powers both were alike and the Roman world had two Augusti at once.

The motives of Marcus in taking a colleague are not recorded. The correspondence of Fronto contains ample proof that, even without the complications of war, business which ordinary routine brought before the princeps by now was enough to occupy the time of twos. Nevertheless, though this consideration may have been cogent, the functions of the two Augusti were not formally specified or distinguished, and nothing was done to make it necessary that for the future two should always be in office. So, when Verus died in AD 169, Marcus was left as sole ruler; and though in AD 166, by bestowing the title ‘Caesar’ on his two sons, he had given a sign that the new system was more than temporary, he remained without a colleague until AD 177, when Commodus became Augustus—in his seventeenth year. Three years later Marcus died, and so far as it provided for continuity of control his plan proved good. Commodus was left supreme, freed from the necessity of seeking further powers because his powers were already complete. The perils of a vacant Principate were avoided and succession was no longer hazardous, because there was no succession; for now the future government was determined, not when an Augustus died, but when he secured the appointment of his colleague. As a safeguard against dangers like those of AD 68-9 the new system proved sound: that it left Rome in the hands of Commodus was due to the indifference of Marcus towards the methods which had chosen Trajan, Hadrian and Pius. Commodus had been promoted because he was his father’s son, and Rome was to have another lesson, though not the last, in the risks to be run when holders of unrestricted power are chosen by the accident of birth.

V.

PRINCEPS AND SENATE: THE CENSORSHIP