TIBERIUS THE TYRANT
[Illustration:
_Art Repro Co._
_Tiberius._]
TIBERIUS THE
TYRANT
By J. C. TARVER
AUTHOR OF “LIFE AND LETTERS OF GUSTAVE FLAUBERT”
“SOME OBSERVATIONS OF A FOSTER PARENT”
ETC ETC
WESTMINSTER
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND CO LTD
2 WHITEHALL GARDENS
1902
BUTLER & TANNER,
THE SELWOOD PRINTING WORKS,
FROME, AND LONDON.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION:
THE EXPANSION OF ROME AND THE EQUESTRIAN ORDER 1
THE ROMAN PEOPLE 24
THE SENATE 42
SLAVERY 60
CHAPTER
I THE DEATH OF AUGUSTUS 79
II PARENTS AND CHILDHOOD OF TIBERIUS 85
III OCTAVIAN 106
IV AUGUSTUS 129
V THE EDUCATION OF TIBERIUS 143
VI THE FAMILY OF AUGUSTUS 164
VII THE FIRST RETIREMENT OF TIBERIUS 185
VIII THE RETURN OF TIBERIUS 197
IX THE CAMPAIGNS OF TIBERIUS 215
X THE LAST YEARS OF AUGUSTUS 245
XI THE ACCESSION OF TIBERIUS 253
XII THE MUTINIES IN PANNONIA AND ON THE RHINE 270
XIII TACITUS AND TIBERIUS 293
XIV THE CASE OF SCRIBONIUS LIBO 320
XV GERMANICUS AND PISO 331
XVI TIBERIUS AND THE SENATE 353
XVII SEJANUS 385
XVIII THE RETIREMENT AT CAPREÆ 418
Introduction
I
The Expansion of Rome and the Equestrian Order
Used as we are to the terminology and conditions of hereditary monarchy
and territorial sovereignty, we find it hard to appreciate, or even
to express in terms of modern politics the difficulties which beset
the statesmen of Rome at the death of Augustus; and we are further
tempted to read into the story of that critical period ideas, which
were only conceivable after the crisis was over; we can hardly avoid
seeing those days in the light of subsequent events, or speaking
of them in language which involves anachronism. Our information is
principally derived from historians, who wrote a century and a half
after the death of Julius Cæsar, when the Government of the Emperor
and the Senate was established; but the position of the Emperor of
those days was not the position of Augustus, and the Senate of Trajan
was not the Senate of Tiberius. The experienced officials who formed
the majority of the Senate of the Flavian Emperors were no longer the
hereditary oligarchy by whose capacity Rome had been brought to be
first among the city states of the world, but which was unequal to the
task of organizing the Roman empire. The change had, however, escaped
observation, and the warmest admirers of the Senate of the Republic
were men whose position had been won for them by the Emperors. Between
the death of Augustus and the death of Vespasian we have but few
contemporary historians; we have no letters of Cicero to throw light
on the inner life of the statesmen of those days; there were private
records, private letters, and private biographies; we can gather their
tone from the extracts that have been preserved for us, but we have no
opportunity of comparing them or checking them. Velleius Paterculus is
the only contemporary historian of the reign of Tiberius, a portion of
whose work still exists unabridged; and his narrative stops just at the
period when we require most light--at the conspiracy of Sejanus--where
there is also a gap in the annals of Tacitus. From the books of the
New Testament we may infer much as to how the Empire appeared at a
comparatively early period to the inhabitants of Greater Rome, much
also from Josephus, a little from Philo, but we cannot re-people the
Rome of Tiberius, as we can re-people the Rome of Augustus and the Rome
of Cicero. Two facts stand clear to us from the pages of Tacitus, and
in a less degree from those of Suetonius, that the Imperial Family was
divided, that the old Roman princely houses never forgave the Empire,
and that there was a Republican reaction in opinion at the centre of
the Empire. History has repeated itself; just as the Curia of to-day
cannot forgive the monarchy which represents the unity of Italy, so
the Curia of the first century of the Christian era was irreconcilable
to the monarchical constitution which represented the unity of the
Empire. The Roman princes who wrote the memoirs of their houses for
the edification of their children, and the delectation of their
friends never inquired into the authority of a story derogatory to
the Emperors, and the one Emperor, who was never spared was Tiberius;
it is no exaggeration to say that the madness of Caligula, and the
monstrous freaks of Nero are dealt with tenderly by the writers of the
silver age, if we compare the accounts of these with the deliberate
malignity which attends on every word and action of Tiberius; and yet
common sense tells us that only a very able man could have succeeded
Augustus without breaking up his work. At the death of Augustus it was
still possible that there would be no second Emperor; at the death of
Tiberius the Roman Emperor had become an institution, the pivot upon
which the whole machinery of civilized existence turned throughout
the world. Hence the peculiar bitterness against Tiberius; the Curia
felt that in his reign their last chance had gone, and more than this,
that he had been in some sense a traitor to his own caste. Neither the
Julian nor the Octavian families had been among the foremost houses
of Rome, till the genius of the first Cæsar raised them from their
comparative obscurity; but many of the most important events in the
history of Rome, no less than her buildings, her roads, her aqueducts,
and many of her public monuments, were associated with the Claudian
stock, and the Livian, with which it was inter-married, was only less
distinguished. Augustus had been tolerated, for his services to the
State could not be disregarded, but some day Augustus would die; he did
die; his power fell into the hands of the most prominent representative
of the old Roman nobility; the opportunity for a restoration of the
narrow oligarchy of the Republic came, and it passed away for ever. Two
years after the death of Tiberius his lunatic successor was stabbed by
a soldier whom he had insulted; the State was left a few days without a
head, and the Curia was so inanimate that it could neither restore its
own rule, nor provide a new Emperor; it had to accept apparently at the
dictation of the soldiers in the Prætorian barracks a man of letters
who had hitherto been the laughing stock of the Imperial family.
The contemporary history of the years during which the Roman Empire
took organic form is written in terms which tend to disguise the
real significance of the change; our attention is attracted almost
exclusively to the internal politics of the city of Rome; it is
withdrawn from the politics of the Empire; the long struggle which
ended by giving the whole civilized world one system of Government,
which welded together in orderly association Italians, Greeks, Syrians,
Africans, Egyptians, Spaniards, Gauls, Germans, and even Britons,
is represented to us as being little more than a constitutional
revolution inside the city; we see the external pressure, which forced
a revised constitution upon the Roman oligarchy, but we only see it
dimly; no Roman historian has been at the pains to trace out the
process by which the civil administration of the Roman Empire was
developed--surely no less wonderful an achievement than the conquests
of the Roman generals. We have seen other conquerors, and more
brilliant feats of arms than any Roman general achieved, but we have
not seen any other nation impress its language and its law upon the
populations of so wide an area or so permanently. Alexander did much,
but the effects of the conquests of Rome have been more lasting than
those of the conquests of Alexander; except in Asia there is not a
civilized people in the world which does not somewhere or other bear
the impress of Rome, or cannot trace the pedigree of its religion and
its law back to the Italian city. This great destiny was concealed
from the makers of the Empire, but the immediate possibility, the
consolidation of the conquests of Rome, and the permanent establishment
of order over the whole area which drains into the Mediterranean was
present to their minds; unfortunately the makers of the Empire have
been mostly silent, and the only voices which have reached our ears
are those of men who could only grasp the great idea intermittently,
if at all, or who were annoyed by its insistence. Under Augustus for
the first time the Empire became conscious, Virgil and Horace spoke in
terms of the larger conception, but the grip of the Roman oligarchy has
never relaxed its hold upon the imagination of educated men.
Conquest did not involve in ancient times any responsibility towards
the conquered; war was believed to be, and was, a profitable
investment; as Rome pushed her conquests, the organization which she
gave to the conquered peoples was one which suited her own purposes,
she did not consult their convenience, external pressure alone forced
her to modify the conditions of conquest which were universally
accepted by the ancient world; very gradually and very reluctantly she
broke down the barriers which surrounded the city state of antiquity,
and admitted first her immediate neighbours, and lastly the whole of
Italy to some sort of constitutional communion with her. For a long
time war had been forced upon Rome, the invasions of the Gauls, the
domination of Carthage in the Mediterranean, the invasion of Pyrrhus,
the invasion of Hannibal, and lastly the invasion of the Cimbrians
and Teutons involved her in a succession of defensive wars; the city
itself could not find a sufficient supply of soldiers, and the price
which Rome had to pay for being allowed to recruit over Italy was the
partial incorporation of the Italians in the State. Wars of defence
were accompanied and followed by wars of aggression; success encouraged
speculation; after the happy issue of the second war with Carthage the
Roman oligarchy began seriously to turn its attention to the Eastern
Mediterranean, and another century found it entering upon the heritage
of Alexander. This is the turning point of Roman history; from this
time onwards a new conception occupied the minds of ambitious Romans;
alongside of the ideal of the city State there existed the ideal of
an extended Empire, of a world-wide organization, of something more
permanent than conquest; alongside of the men who dreamed of Platonic
republics in which perfect justice would be realized, there grew up
men who formed a yet grander and no less civilized ambition. Pompey
triumphed over Mithridates wearing a robe which had been worn by
Alexander; Augustus used a head of Alexander for his signet ring; it
was by the example of Alexander that Cleopatra seduced Mark Antony.
Alexander was no vulgar adventurer; he solved a problem which had
hitherto baffled the most highly civilized race of the ancient world;
he combined the city state of the Greeks with the Imperial organization
of the Persians; and though, when the Romans came into close contact
with Alexander’s Empire it had fallen into fragments, each fragment
preserved the impress of the great whole, and Roman generals could
converse at Pergamus, at Antioch, or at Alexandria, with men trained
to administer states in terms of the wider conceptions derived from
Alexander and possibly through him from Aristotle; at the same time
many men accustomed to deal with financial problems on a large scale
passed into the service of the Roman conquerors as slaves or honoured
dependants.
While the possibility of a beneficent organization of the conquests
of Rome was thus presented to one order of mind, to another the same
events introduced another set of ideas; while some Romans studied
Alexander in the vestiges of his work, others entered into the full
possession of the Greek historians and philosophers; the ideals of the
Greek city state were replanted in a virgin soil, and the Romans for
the first time began to theorise about their own Constitution. The men
who were taken captive by Plato and Demosthenes did not see that Rome
had long outgrown the conditions under which the theories of these men
were applicable to her political life. The true liberal policy was the
policy of Alexander, the false liberal policy unintentionally gave a
new lease of life to the blind selfishness of the narrow oligarchy
which had governed Rome. The daggers which struck down Cæsar were aimed
by admirers of Verres no less than by students of Plato; and Cicero’s
effusions over the merits of the tyrannicides were effectively stopped
by the unforeseen but necessary emergence of Mark Antony, a tyrant of
the conventional type.
From the moment when a year’s office as Consul or Prætor in the city
of Rome was followed by a term of practically irresponsible government
in a dependency, the Civic Constitution was doomed; the magistracies
of Rome were now of minor importance compared with the career to
which they opened the way; it was impossible any longer to discuss
the politics of Rome in terms of the politics of Athens or Plato’s
Republic with any practical advantage, and indeed without inviting
anarchy; but it was highly convenient to the hereditary aristocracy
of Rome and its adherents that it should pose as representing the
principles of Harmodius and Aristogiton; it found a clever man of
letters and a skilled advocate, who had his own reasons for falling in
with this conception, and who perpetuated it long after the facts had
demonstrated its hollowness even to himself. Cicero as a politician
is alternately a tragic and a comic figure; he is comic because he
lived complacently in a world of his own imagining, which seldom
lost its hold on his imagination, in spite of the rudest shocks, for
it satisfied the promptings of his child-like vanity; he is tragic
because he had his moments of seeing the realities clearly, and because
combined with his vanity there was a genuine admiration for fine
conduct, which led him to face danger manfully in his old age, and in
some sense invite the death of a political martyr; he is yet further
tragic, because he became the father of an equally blind posterity of
politicians, who wasted their energies in spoiling the work of men of
greater enlightenment; it is perhaps due to Cicero, more than to any
other man, that the city of Rome has persistently filled a larger space
than that of the Roman Empire in the works of subsequent historians.
In an expanding community the actual facts of the administration are
seldom in exact correspondence with the forms; apparent rigidity,
real elasticity, enable business to be carried on in accordance with
the claims of new social factors without any sense of insecurity. The
Roman, like the Englishman, preferred making new laws to repealing
old ones; and when he made a fresh departure, he was at pains to
represent it as a development of something by which it had been
preceded; in both cases this profound respect for the historical
aspect of law has been the foundation of national greatness; it has
been extended beyond the races in which it originated, and in the case
of England, as in that of Rome, has resulted in an exceptionally
successful government of alien communities; laws and customs which
are sanctified by immemorial usage appeal to the sympathy of the
Englishman and command his respect; it was the same with the Roman.
England has had her periods of aberration when she has given way
to the proselytizing tendencies of sections of her population, but
the broad lines of her policy in dealing with subject nationalities
have followed the principle of accepting the existing conditions;
in the same way Rome accepted the laws and customs of the Eastern
Mediterranean and of Western Europe; she supplied a common law for
her Empire, which applied where the local law had no application; its
excellence was such that it became predominant, but she did not insist
on remodelling every community over which she held supreme power in
terms of her own constitution. This respect for antiquity and adherence
to established forms has resulted in a misrepresentation of some of
the facts of Roman constitutional development, and especially of those
which concern the development of the Empire, which is in the highest
degree embarrassing to the student of the period in which the change
took place. There was a time when the constitution of Rome and her
political history differed little from that of any other city state of
antiquity, but it would not be easy to state when that period began
or ended; of one thing we may be quite certain, viz., that after the
destruction of Carthage and the completion of the first great period
of conquest in the Eastern Mediterranean in 145 B.C., the political
life of the city of Rome was no longer comparable to that of any
other city state; the forms remained, and the faith in the forms
remained, but the substance was gone. There is for instance no term so
misleading as one which was seldom out of the mouth of Cicero, “the
Roman people”; there unquestionably was a time when the Roman people
was an organized part of the Roman constitution, when it voted in an
orderly fashion according to a property qualification for the election
of certain magistrates, and the ratification of certain laws; when
it voted according to a residential organization for the election of
other magistrates, and to pass other laws; but the forms of popular
government were maintained long after the reality of popular government
had departed. It suited the convenience of noble agitators, such as
the Gracchi, to see in the rabble of the streets the Comitia Tributa,
it was equally convenient to the princely houses to dignify their own
private arrangements with the forms of an election in the Comitia
Centuriata, it was particularly pleasing to the middle class Roman
to share in the spoils of the Empire by exacting direct or indirect
payment for his vote, and so the forms were maintained; an outward
deference to them answered everybody’s purpose, but the real political
power and the real political struggles lay outside and beyond them. The
Roman people, as a body of civilians, could riot, as the raw material
of the Roman army it could strike, it was necessary to keep it in good
humour, and to allow it to regard itself as an organized part of the
constitution, as a body of free and independent electors; but to accept
its own estimate of itself as an important factor in the politics
of the Empire is to misread history; popular Government in any sense
which would commend itself to the intelligence of an Englishman of
to-day, or of an Athenian who listened to Demosthenes, did not and
could not exist in the Rome which had begun to control the destinies of
the Mediterranean; it was a legal fiction which it was convenient to
maintain, the attempt to make it once again a reality resulted in the
revolutionary excesses which preceded the Empire.
The real government of Rome was in the hands of the Senate, an assembly
of nobles and capitalists, who shared between themselves the profits of
the Roman conquests. Like all such assemblies, the senators had their
good times and their bad; between the second and the third wars with
Carthage they so conducted themselves as to impress the imagination
of the civilized world; the successes of their armies, their fidelity
to engagements, their comparative moderation in conquest, were the
wonder of men; admiration for these qualities tempted Judas Maccabæus
to engage their assistance in checking the aggressions of the Greek
rulers of Antioch; their mediation was invited by the chieftains of
Gaul; it was recognized as an honour to them to be called friends of
the Roman people, and the honour was attended by practical advantages.
Success was followed by intoxication, and the time came when the sense
of responsibility was lost in the secure accumulation of riches, and
when the unscrupulous venality of the Senate became a by-word. Then
the power of Rome seemed to be tumbling to decay; Jugurtha defied her
in Africa, Mithridates in Asia, Spain threatened to organize itself
against her under a Roman general, the Cimbrians and Teutons swarmed
over her borders, her Italian allies made war upon her, she could
with difficulty suppress an organized revolt of her rural slaves, at
home she was at the mercy of the savage mob in her streets; out of
this confusion she emerged victorious, and greater than before. The
reason is a simple one; during her period of good behaviour Rome had
become the financial capital of the world; she was indispensable, and
when she could no longer help herself, others were ready to help her.
Left to itself the Roman Senate would have brought ruin on the Roman
Empire in the first half of the century preceding the Christian era;
but it was not left to itself; its incompetence involved the ruin of
too many other interests. We have the story of the Roman generals in
full, but nobody has yet written the story of the Roman bankers; we
are accustomed to think of the Romans as soldiers and lawyers, we
forget that they were also shrewd financiers; with the Romans, as with
ourselves, commerce usually preceded the flag; the soldier completed
the work begun by the capitalist. We are told that the first war
with Mithridates began with a massacre of 80,000 Roman citizens in
Asia Minor; the figures are probably exaggerated, but they are not
questioned by any Roman historians; it did not appear improbable to
them that the Roman residents in Asia should have been so numerous
at that comparatively early date; and though part of the country was
already a Roman province, and we may assume that the popular fury was
largely directed against collectors of taxes, even the rich towns of
Asia Minor can hardly have acquired the services of so large a body of
revenue officials.
The political genius of a nation is shown by nothing so much as the
success with which it supplements the deficiencies of its formal
constitution by informal but recognized agencies. Rome was provided
with a machinery for collecting and distributing her domestic revenue;
she had a treasury and a staff of clerks, but she had no separate civil
service for the Empire; the constitution of a city state did not admit
of such a thing, and the collection of the revenue of a province was
left to semi-private agencies, its taxes being farmed. At fixed periods
the right of collecting the taxes assigned to the public treasury
from the provinces was sold by public auction; the purchaser paid a
lump sum to the treasury, and made the best of his bargain in the
provinces; the speculation was an exceedingly profitable one, but its
profits threatened to disappear owing to excessive competition among
the farmers of taxes; in order to eliminate competition the farmers of
taxes formed themselves into a close corporation, the taxes were bought
in the name of an individual, but in fact by an association.
Alongside of the Senate there thus gradually grew an organized body
which formed the permanent civil executive of the provinces, the body
which was known as the Equestrian Order. As in our own history, so in
Roman history, the value of terms alters from period to period, almost
from year to year; it would therefore be rash to declare that at any
one period every titular Roman knight was an active member of the
Financial Corporation which farmed the taxes, or that the collection
of revenue was the sole business of the corporation as a whole, or
of its individual members. Again, that differentiation of functions
in the case of the individual, or the association, which is to us
almost a law of existence, was unknown to the ancients, or worked on
lines of division not readily comprehensible to ourselves; there was,
for instance, nothing absurd to Roman conceptions in sending out an
advocate like Cicero to govern a frontier province, and placing him on
active service in command of an army, for civil, military, and judicial
functions of the highest responsibility were exercised simultaneously
or successively by the same individual as a matter of course. But
though it is difficult to draw fixed lines, there is quite sufficient
evidence to warrant us in asserting that the Equestrian Order held a
recognized position in the State, that it practically formed the Civil
Service of the provinces, that its interests were repeatedly opposed
to those of the Senate, that it roughly represented Greater Rome, as
opposed to the city of Rome, that through all the disturbances of the
Civil Wars it kept the machinery of Government outside Italy in working
order, that it was the channel through which the leading provincials
gradually passed into the Civil Administration, and that eventually the
Imperial Executive was built up on the foundation, not of the Senate,
but of the Equestrian Order, and the Imperial Household.
The origin of the Equestrian Order is to be found in the Servian
Constitution; we may not altogether believe in the Servian
Constitution, which, as it is presented to us in the pages of Livy,
looks like the clever guess of an antiquarian who was familiar with
the Constitution provided for Athens by Cleisthenes, but we have no
difficulty in believing that there was a time, when every citizen
possessed of a certain amount of property was obliged to keep a horse
for the service of the State, and was expected to take the field as
a cavalry man; or that he was allowed certain distinctions of dress,
and other privileges indicating public consideration; it is also easy
to imagine the process by which the yeomanry force so constituted
was replaced by more efficient cavalry soldiers, and the military
significance of the Equestrian Order disappeared, while the name
remained; of the intermediate steps which followed we have no detailed
account; in theory every Roman citizen possessing more than a definite
amount of property was entitled to be enrolled in the list of the
Equestrian Order by the Censor, and if his property reached a yet
higher value to be similarly called to the Senate, but the practice
must have been different; not every man became a senator or a knight,
who had the necessary property qualification, though demonstrated want
of means might be a disqualification, and entail a loss of position
when the Censor was rigorous, or when an excuse was wanted for reducing
the numbers of the Senate or the Order, or setting aside an undesirable
personality. The time came when two political careers were open to the
ambitious Roman; he could become a candidate for Public Office, and
under the forms of public election eventually gain admission to the
Senate through the Quæstorship, or he could be enrolled on the lists
of the Equestrian Order. In the first case he might eventually become
Prætor, Consul, and then Viceroy of a Province; in the second he became
a member of the great financial corporation which supplied the Civil
Service of the Empire; in the first case he might command armies and
figure prominently before the eyes of men; in the second he might make
a large fortune, but would not enjoy some of the sweets of power which
attract ambitious men.
The relative positions are fairly comparable to those of an English
member of Parliament, and an English clerk in a Public Department in
the days before the Reform Bill; a young Englishman of good position
could be nominated in those days by an influential friend either to a
seat in the House of Commons, or to a subordinate place in one of the
Executive Departments; in the former case he might ultimately become
Prime Minister, in the latter Permanent Head of his department. In the
one case he would be widely known and possibly respected; in the latter
he might do work of the highest public utility, and never be heard of
outside official circles.
To be successful in a senatorial career was an expensive and arduous
process; it was necessary to pay a heavy initiatory fee in the form
of direct and indirect bribery to the electors; it was then necessary
to force a way into the inner circle, which distributed the honours
and emoluments; a new man could only do so by showing that he had a
very strong force of public opinion behind him, and that he could make
himself felt; admission to the Equestrian Order was less costly, and
there was less risk; in consequence the career was deliberately chosen
by large numbers of Romans, whose wealth and family connections might
have tempted them to enter the ranks of the Senate; further, admission
to the Equestrian Order was less jealously guarded; it probably had its
hierarchy, and its inner circle like all similar organizations; and the
summons of the Censor was possibly a mere formality, the nominations
made by him having been previously determined by others; but it was
much easier for an Italian, and eventually for a Provincial to become a
Roman Knight than a Roman Senator. A Provincial, who had once secured
the status of a Roman citizen, could secure the further dignity of a
Roman Knight by processes which we may surmise, but cannot definitely
prescribe; once a Roman Knight, he might look forward to a share in
the financial administration of the provinces during the reign of the
Senate, and to a Governorship under the Emperors.
It would be a mistake to assume that all Roman Knights were members
of the Civil Service, that is to say, that they all belonged to the
hierarchy which farmed the taxes and managed other business necessarily
connected therewith; there were doubtless many Equestrians whose
dignity was chiefly titular; others who as private financiers and
contractors only were connected with the Order, but the continued
allusions to the status of “Eques Romanus,” which multiply as the
Empire takes shape, forbid us to believe that this was in all cases
a purely honorary dignity, which could be assumed by any wealthy man
on application to the Censor. Were there no other evidence, the fact
that we find the Equestrian Order ranged formally against the Senate
at the beginning of the great constitutional struggle which ended in
the Empire, shows that we have to do with no haphazard collection of
wealthy individuals, distinguished from their fellow-citizens by an
honorary precedence.
Cicero made his first triumphant appearance as a public man at Rome,
when he conducted the case against Verres; whatever may have been the
misconduct of Verres, and it was undoubtedly very serious, the action
against him was not promoted by pure philanthropy; the case was a
test case, it was part of a campaign directed against the provincial
administration of the Senate by the Equestrian Order, whose interests
were imperilled by rapacious Viceroys. The only check upon the
proceedings of a Roman Proconsul lay in the possibility of bringing
an action against him for improper exactions; in the purer days of
the Senatorial administration such an action when instituted by the
provincials might be successful, and the possibility of its success
might be a deterrent, because though the offending Senator was in such
a case tried by his peers, those peers, even if influenced by no higher
motive, were interested in preventing the exhaustion of a province;
any one of them might succeed to the wasted estate; the Proconsul who
succeeded a Verres was not likely to make much out of his office, for
he found the estate stripped. As the Senate became reckless, having
found fresh and apparently inexhaustible pastures in the East, scant
attention was paid to the complaints of provincials till their cause
was taken up by the Equestrian Order.
The Roman Proconsul was supreme Judge and supreme executive authority
in his province; he imposed, sanctioned, and sometimes encouraged
public works, such as roads, harbours and buildings; he regulated the
mutual relations of the different independent communities within the
area over which his authority extended; he had ample opportunities
for indirect and direct extortion, but he did not collect the taxes;
the collection of revenue was in the hands of the farmers of the
taxes, that is to say, as time went on, of the Equestrian Order. A
divergency of interests soon declared itself: if the Proconsul harried
the province unmercifully, the tax gatherer found little or no revenue
to collect, and could not reimburse himself. The Proconsul had the
unfair advantage, that cases between the collectors of revenue and the
provincials were tried in his court; thus the farmers of the taxes
found that they had an interest in promoting appeals to Rome, and in
aiding the provincials to bring actions for extortion against the
provincial Governors at the end of their term of office. So long as
the Senate acted equitably no great harm was done, but as soon as the
Senate was found invariably to acquit its own members, the Equestrian
Order became ranged formally against it, and pressed for reforms;
it succeeded for a time in getting these case tried before a court
composed entirely of its own members; Sulla the reactionary gave back
the jurisdiction to the Senate. One consequence of the trial of Verres
was the establishment of a mixed court composed partly of Senators,
partly of Equestrians. The net result was that the Equestrian Order
formed an organized party, commanding enormous financial resources,
in sympathy with the provinces, and more thoroughly conversant with
the details of provincial business than the Senate. Thus eventually
the Equestrian Order came to represent the party of the Empire, as
opposed to the Senate which was the party of the ancient oligarchy of
the city; for with the internal politics of the city the Order was only
concerned so far as they affected or were affected by the standing
quarrel between itself and the Senate. There were men of high moral
standards at Rome both in the Senate and in the Order, who wished to
deal justly with the provinces; but they were few. Either party left to
itself would have plundered the provincials unmercifully; circumstance
ruled that the selfishness of the Equestrians should be enlightened,
that of the Senate unenlightened, while financial relations with men
of business in the provinces, with skilled Greeks and Jews, taught the
Order sounder views of political economy than were open to the average
Senator. However oppressive the methods of the Equestrian Order might
appear when judged by modern standards, they commended themselves to
the favour of antiquity; the Roman Civil Service worked better than
its predecessors, otherwise there would have been no Roman Empire. The
ultimate collector of taxes is never a popular character, and the
Roman Publicans enjoyed to the full the unpopularity which has been
the fate of their brethren at all times, and in all places; but the
revenues of the provinces were collected by the Roman Knights with less
friction, and less capriciously, than by the representatives of Perseus
of Macedon, or Mithridates, or Antiochus; and in their own interests
the Equestrian Order discountenanced other extortioners, whether
high-placed officials or private adventurers. When the Civil Wars came
the Order was interested in finding a counterpoise to the Senate,
and eventually in arresting the progress of anarchy. Cæsar backed by
the Order could confidently face the Senate and Pompeius; similarly
his nephew having once gained its confidence was a match for the
spendthrift Marcus Antonius. The Cæsars and the Order were of one mind
in putting an end to the Senatorial misgovernment of the provinces,
therefore Greater Rome recognized its champions in the Cæsars, and
supported the organization of which they were the head without stopping
to inquire whether the officials whom they employed were Freedmen or of
the purest Roman nobility.
In order not to form a mistaken conception of the process by which the
Roman Empire was built up, it is important to bear in mind that the
term “province” only gradually acquired the territorial significance
with which it is now inseparably associated. Any responsibility outside
the city of Rome and the domain governed directly by the annually
elected magistrates of the city might be called “a province.” The
“province” at one time assigned to Pompeius was the duty of repressing
piracy throughout the Mediterranean. The territorial aspect of a
“province” was in fact accidental. The first territorial provinces,
Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, happened to be islands, and a natural
limitation was thus fixed to the responsibilities of the Roman
Governors, whose duty was to maintain the Roman interests in Sicily
and the other islands against the aggressions of Carthage; the result
was the unification of Sicily, and the realization of a political
condition closely resembling though not absolutely identical with
the modern conception of a province. As the dominions of Alexander
successively passed into the hands of the Senate, it was convenient to
use previously existing boundaries for the delimitation of the several
spheres of influence for which the Roman Proconsuls were responsible,
and thus a territorial significance increasingly attached to the
words province and provincial. Similarly modern usage perverts the
significance of the word “provincial” as applied to the inhabitants of
those cities which passed under the protectorate of Rome. There was not
quite the same quality of disparagement in the ancient use of the words
as in the modern. The units of the Roman Empire were not originally
territories, but individual cities, then, as the conquests of the Roman
Generals extended to peoples not living under the city organization
of the Greeks, Italians and Phœnicians, tribes or nationalities. Rome
was first the universal peacemaker; only at a later time and by a
gradual process did she become the universal ruler, and the centre
of a hierarchy of officials. Such centralization of the details of
Government as we are now familiar with was never realized by the
Roman Empire; the inhabitants of the great cities of the East did not
consider themselves “provincial” in our sense of the word.
II
The Roman People
The official style of the Roman Government was that of the Senate
and the Roman people. It is not easy to form an estimate of what
constituted the Roman people at any particular date. In these days of
individual freedom and independence the term people has a definite
meaning; we know that for political purposes the English people means
every registered voter, and that the process by which any resident
within the limits of His Majesty’s dominions can acquire a vote are
comparatively simple for white men; but citizenship was not so simple
a matter in ancient times, and antiquarian research fails in some
measure to enlighten us, because the Romans had a habit of keeping the
old names and the old forms long after their original significance and
the powers implied had passed to new institutions or suffered complete
change.
The very phrase the Senate _and_ the Roman people is deeply
significant, for it excludes the Senate from the people. Whatever may
have been the original meaning of the word “Populus,” it was clearly
something distinct from the Senate, which was not _representative_ of
the people, but another power. The fusion between the two powers was in
fact never completed till the predominance of the Imperial Hierarchy
practically eliminated the Senate. There was a time in the history of
the Republic when this fusion seemed to be approaching completion, and
when the Senate moved in the direction of becoming a representative
body; but the Roman conquests threw such preponderating influence into
the hands of the Senate, that the constitutional position which had
been slowly won for the “people” became nominal rather than real. The
oligarchy of Rome was never in the Republican period disestablished as
the oligarchies of many Greek cities were disestablished.
The Roman historians have preserved for us a constitution based on
property qualifications, which might tempt us to imagine that there was
a time when a Government with something approaching to a democratic
organization controlled the destinies of Rome. It is possible that
there was a time when the Roman people was divided into classes
according to their assessed property, and when each class voted
separately; but it is exceedingly improbable that even in that golden
age of liberty there was anything approaching to free and independent
elections as we understand them.
The independence of the individual has always been tempered by the
necessity of belonging to some form of organization. In these days
a man belongs to a party, or a trades union or an association, and
sacrifices a portion of his independence to the advantages gained by
sharing in the strength of an organized coherent body; in ancient times
even a modified independence of this kind was not possible, and in
early times at Rome a man was expected to vote for his patron through
thick and thin. To us it would appear that a man lost personal dignity
by following blindly the fortunes of a greater man than himself; to a
Roman it would seem that the individual had no personal dignity, if he
were not recognizably attached to a patron.
Individual independence is only possible in a very highly civilized
society. Men may be technically equal in the eyes of the law long
before they are so practically; even in modern England it has been
found necessary to form associations whose members are bound to
mutual assistance in defending or instituting some actions-at-law.
The difference between ancient and modern society, and indeed between
modern society before and after the French Revolution, lies in this,
that the modern association is most commonly one of equal individuals
for certain definite purposes, while the ancient association was one of
inferiors of various degrees with a superior for all purposes. It would
be rash to attempt to define too closely, but the general statement
that in ancient Roman society there was no such thing as a free and
independent individual, except among the wealthiest or otherwise
most powerful, is near the truth. Numberless conditions unknown to
modern society contributed to produce the same result; among them the
following may be mentioned.
Residence as a means of acquiring political status was not recognized
by the ancients; a man might reside in the same town all his life, and
his children might succeed him, but neither he nor they could buy or
sell, plead in the law courts, intermarry with the citizens, acquire
real property, or in fact enjoy any of the benefits of civilized
society, without making special arrangements; the resident was an alien
until the authorities of the town in which he dwelt had conferred
upon him a political status. Towns such as Rome and Athens, which
admitted resident aliens comparatively readily to a modified form of
citizenship, expanded more quickly than other towns, and the history
of the expansion of Rome is from this point of view the history of
the processes by which she gradually admitted the stranger within her
gates, and then the stranger without her walls to the privileges of
citizenship.
The privileges of a citizen according to ancient ideas were separated
into two classes: they were private and public; to the first class
belonged the rights of buying and selling, intermarrying, making
valid contracts, and acquiring by various tenures real property; to
the second the right of voting in all or some elections, and, as the
climax, of standing for some or all magistracies. The various degrees
of citizenship might be conceded to individuals or to communities; Rome
might admit all full citizens of Arpinum to all or some of the rights
of Roman citizenship, and vice versâ, or similarly favour an individual
citizen of Arpinum. Long before an alien community or individual
received the benefits of citizenship business relations might be
necessary, and in order to get over the difficulty of conducting
business with persons who had no legal status, it was customary for
aliens to form private relations with full citizens through whom their
business was conducted; and here again the alien might be a whole
community or a single individual. At Rome the citizen who thus took
charge of an alien’s business was called his patron, and the alien was
called a client. The principal service rendered by the patron was to
appear on his client’s behalf in those law courts to which the client
had otherwise no access; the case was dealt with as the patron’s case
by a convenient legal fiction. The service rendered by the client was
not definitely prescribed in this case; it could not be, for he was
unknown to the Roman law; but we have no reason to suspect the Roman
patrons of not exacting a satisfactory equivalent for their services.
The same men who were clients at Rome would be patrons in their own
towns, and transact business for their Roman friend at Ephesus or
Alexandria in return for his services at Rome. In the same way aliens
resident at Rome, who for various reasons were unable or unwilling to
acquire rights of citizenship, enrolled themselves among the clients of
a patron. The system added enormously to the wealth and influence of
the powerful men at Rome; for much in the same way that the status of
citizen in its various degrees was personal and transmitted by descent,
only to be revoked by a solemn process, so the relation of patron and
client was personal and heritable on both sides. This combination of
personal with business relationships is one of the peculiarities that
make ancient society so difficult for us to understand.
Even after an alien had acquired the rights of citizenship the tie
between his family and the patron’s family would continue. It would
not be easy to prove that it was strictly obligatory in the eye of
the law, but it was recognized by sentiment, and ingratitude on the
part of the client, or neglect on the part of the patron, were severely
punished by the unwritten law, and in certain cases by the written law.
Thus one form of the relation of patron and client arose out of the
difficulties of intercourse between communities and individuals for
business purposes in a state of society which regarded citizenship as a
special personal qualification, and not as an incident of residence.
A second form was the relation between a Roman noble and his freeborn
dependants in various degrees.