particulars; even after the definite establishment of the Empire when
it had approached the modern conception, there were still survivals
from a previous state of things. It would not, for instance, occur to
a wealthy citizen of London to start from his residence in Park Lane
with a pack of hounds, and all the other paraphernalia of a hunting
expedition, in order to impress his fellow-citizens with a sense of
his importance as a territorial magnate; such a thing was possible
at Rome even in the reign of Domitian, or there would be no point in
one of Martial’s epigrams. The heads of the great Roman families were
not originally rich men who conducted their business in Rome, and
possessed houses in the country to which they went to enjoy sport and
the amenities of Nature; they were originally territorial magnates,
whose importance was due to the fact that they were such; it was a
later development which made them approach to the position of our
great commercial princes in London. The ancient city community was
not a thing enclosed within walls; it extended over a considerable
area. The land outside the city walls might be held under some form of
communal tenure and subdivided into small plots, but it might also be
occupied by large holders in positions analogous to our conceptions
of a tenant-in-chief, whose subtenants were free citizens with full
civic rights in the eye of the law, but who were also in many respects
vassals. Dionysius has a statement of the relations between patron and
client which may be inaccurate in the letter, but which in its spirit
at once suggests the feudal system. It is inevitable in certain stages
of social development that the small man should associate himself in
some way or other with the big man, in order to be able to render
effective the rights which the law gives him. The Roman noble took
charge of his client’s interests in the law courts, the client voted
as his patron directed at the polling booths. The free and independent
electors who swarmed in from the country to give their votes were
pledged to support the candidates and measures recommended to them by
their patrons; had they failed to do so, they would have been thought
deficient in a Roman virtue.
There was a third relationship of patron and client which was fairly
strictly defined by law; when a man emancipated a slave, the relations
between them were changed from those of master and slave to those of
patron and client. The slave did not always receive full citizenship on
emancipation, but all through the various degrees by which he passed
from the servile status to that of full citizen, he and his descendants
continued in the position of client to the original manumittor and his
descendants; the relationship was so close that the property of an
intestate freedman went to his patron or his patron’s representatives.
The legal statements on this subject are somewhat obscure, but enough
remains to show that the connection was recognized by the law as a
close one, and that there were rights on both sides; the relationship
was not purely a matter of personal choice nor readily dissoluble.
All these three ways in which the relation of patron and client might
be created tended even in the purest days of the Roman Republic to
make an election a struggle between big families and groups of big
families rather than a political struggle in which each elector formed
an opinion upon a question of policy and gave his vote independently.
The Senate, that is to say, the assembly of heads of houses, divided
into parties or groups, and each head of a house could bring so many
electors to vote at the polling booths with tolerable certainty. The
ultimate political unit for practical purposes was not the individual
but the group formed by a patron and his clients, who in their
different degrees voted as the patron directed.
A free Government controlled by an electorate, in which each individual
elector votes according to his own judgment, is a dream of political
theorists. It may have existed for a short time in some of the small
city states of antiquity, but in practice the individual elector is
too lazy to exert his own judgment; he votes, if it is made worth his
while to vote, either by the pressure of some extra constitutional
association to which he belongs, or by direct bribery, or by the more
insidious indirect bribery of party leaders who promise pecuniary or
sentimental satisfaction.
In political life the letter of the statute book is always in process
of modification by custom and convenience. No state which is expanding
can hope to keep the letter of its constitution up to date; the changes
are too rapid, too subtle. Constitution makers are thus commonly
disappointed in the results of their labours, partly because they are
not in possession of all the facts, and partly because the conditions
have changed even in the time required to frame a constitution. At Rome
the letter of the constitution was but slightly changed during the
two centuries preceding the Empire; there were the same magistrates,
the same Senate, the same electoral and legislative bodies, very
nearly the same methods of voting, and the same qualifications of an
elector, but the working of the constitution changed; the admission of
large numbers of fresh citizens expanding the mass of voters beyond
manageable numbers, the changed responsibilities of the magistrates,
the widened career open to successful politicians rendered the old
terminology almost meaningless in reference to the actual working of
the constitution.
There was a time when the extra constitutional organization of the
electors was entirely in the hands of the great families; this
arrangement broke down gradually before the influx of new citizens;
direct bribery took its place alongside of personal influence. Up to
the year 180 B.C. Rome had pursued a policy in relation to her allies
which, judged by the standards of antiquity, was liberal; she admitted
her immediate neighbours to a modified form of citizenship, she gave
the citizens of certain towns the right of voting in some of the Roman
elections, and she even gave those citizens of these towns who had held
the highest offices in their own towns, the right of standing for the
magistracies at Rome; she pursued a policy of expansion; at that date
her policy changed; she began to check the admission to citizenship,
which was afterwards only wrung from her by war, till the city
constitution was all but lost in the building of the Empire.
On the one hand, the great families discovered that they had entered
upon the possession of a magnificent property, which they were not
disposed to share with an indefinite number of partners; on the
other hand, they felt that owing to the influx of numbers they had
lost their grip of the electorate, for the men who came to vote from
outlying towns were often sheep without a shepherd. It proved, however,
impossible to keep the electorate restricted. Rome herself could not
supply the armies necessary to carry on the career of conquest upon
which she had embarked; she was forced to depend upon allies to supply
the men whom she organized, and she was forced in various ways to pay
the price. One form of payment was the citizenship, which enabled the
Samnite or other Italian soldier to come to Rome for the elections, and
extort extra payment for his military services; whether he was feasted,
or amused, or actually paid for his vote, he shared with his Roman
fellow-soldier in the spoil of the provinces which he had helped to
conquer. Every fresh concession of citizenship rendered the electorate
more unwieldy, till the Roman people of whose favours Cicero so often
boasts had become little better than a mob.
While the Roman Electorate was thus outgrowing all possible
organization, and the constitution of a city state was breaking down
in every direction under the weight of burdens which it was not
constructed to carry, the minds of liberal statesmen at Rome were
unhappily occupied largely with city constitutions. The enlightened
circle of the Roman nobility, which was represented by such men as
Scipio Æmilianus, studied the Greek political writers rather than the
events which were going on around them, and were tempted to see in
the creation of a really democratic constitution the remedy for the
disorders which were only too obvious. They were liberal in one sense,
but it was in terms of the city state, which no longer existed.
We have had an analogous process in our own history. The expansion of
England for a long time escaped the notice of men, who, frightened by
the French Revolution, were concerned in demonstrating the incomparable
merit of representative government, and of establishing the fact that
the English constitution had always contained in it the democratic
principle. One of these men rewrote for us the history of Greece in
terms of the praise of democracy; another proclaimed the merits of
liberty and representative government; a whole school of historians is
interested in showing the popular share in such events as the extortion
of Magna Charta from an unwilling King, and in the constitution of
the Parliament summoned in the King’s name by Simon de Montfort; as
the result of the labours of these and other men our attention was
drawn for many years exclusively to problems of domestic government;
the far greater problem, the relations of England to her colonies
and dependencies, and the necessary modifications in her internal
constitution, escaped notice.
At Rome the first important act of the new Liberal school was the
attempted agrarian legislation of Tiberius Gracchus; Rome was to deal
with her conquered territory in the terms of a city state; conquered
land was public land; in such states it had always belonged to the
whole people, and had been shared between them; Rome had neglected this
salutary arrangement; her public land had passed into the possession of
the wealthy few; it must be resumed, and redivided. The proposal was
about as practical as an attempt to restore all the common lands to the
English peasantry would be at present; it failed; the originator was
assassinated.
Ten years later his brother proposed further liberal schemes; he
was less of a dreamer; he looked forward rather than back; he saw
that Rome must provide for her time-expired soldiers, and must give
non-Roman Italians who had fought under her standards a larger share
in her conquests; but he was before his time, and was in his turn
assassinated; a similar fate befell a leader from the ranks of the
Conservative nobility, a Livius Drusus, who a few years later advanced
the same political programme. The expansion of Rome to include Italy
had thus become part of the policy of a definite party at Rome; but
this party was not always a popular party, for the men who idled about
the streets of Rome, living on the profits of citizenship, were no more
disposed than the great families to add to the number of the partners.
During the second century before the Christian era, the forms of
popular government were maintained at Rome ready to become more than
forms when an organization was also ready to use them. The most
important effect of the political work of the Gracchi was to breathe
fresh life into the popular assembly; but this was no sooner done
than the constitution proved to be unworkable; then followed a period
of anarchy in Rome itself, which lasted for seventy years; during
this period one party, the party of Greater Rome, steadily grew, and
eventually left the constitution so modified that the local politics
of the capital no longer had a predominant weight in the Empire. The
first great step towards this end was made in the period during which
C. Marius had an overpowering influence in Roman politics. Marius is
represented to us by the historians from an unfriendly point of view;
it is not easy to get at the real man through the mass of legend which
obscures his real story. We see him a capable general who reorganized
the Roman Army; we also see him incapable as a politician; he figures
as the rough brutal demagogue whose violence stands in unpleasing
contrast to the suave manners of Sulla; but whatever he may have been
personally he represented definite political tendencies. The Marian
party survived Marius, and found its most distinguished representative
in the great Cæsar, who was a nephew of Marius.
A significant fact about Marius is that he was not a Roman; he came
from the small town of Arpinum. Technically he was a Roman citizen,
for Arpinum was a community which had enjoyed for nearly a century the
privileges of Roman citizenship; but his connexion with Rome was not
the connexion of a Cornelius or an Æmilius. He was one of the many men
from Italian towns who used their Roman citizenship to push a career
at Rome; Cicero, also from Arpinum, and Pompeius from Picenum are
well-known examples of the same class of men.
Each of these three men failed as a politician at Rome, and in much
the same way each of them transferred to the wide arena of Roman
politics the limitations imposed by the traditions of a small city
state. Marius could not manage the Electorate nor the Senate; Pompeius
could not manage the Senate; Cicero saw in Rome a magnified Arpinum.
Of the three, Marius, in spite of the clumsiness which defeated his
own purposes, had grasped the one political idea which was to conquer
all others in the end; he saw that the men who fought in the armies
of the Empire must have a share in the government of the Empire; he
contributed to this end, perhaps unconsciously, by his reorganization
of the Army. The reforms of Marius in military organization were in
the first place technical, and unfortunately we cannot assign the
several details to their responsible authors. We do not know exactly
what was done by Marius himself, what by his successors; but we do
know that his administration marks the period at which the Roman Army
took the form of a professional standing army as distinct from a
militia. The change had been long in progress, military necessities
had imposed it; occasional service had been practically replaced by
continuous service. Marius substituted in fact, if not in every form,
a military organization in the army for a civil organization; the
change was forced upon the Roman by the dangerous invasions from the
north which had found the Government unprepared. Marius dispersed
the invaders; he stood forth as the saviour not only of Rome, but of
Italy, and he was able to reorganize the army in terms not of the Roman
constitution but of military necessities. The Roman Armies at this
date were not recruited exclusively or even in the greater proportion
from Rome herself; not only was each legion supported by auxiliaries,
such as cavalry and light armed skirmishers, drawn from non-Italian
territories, but the legion itself was recruited from the allies in
Italy as well as from Rome, and the balance of military strength was
against the capital.
The State at once found itself confronted with a difficult problem:
what was to be done with the professional soldiers when their time of
service had expired? Men who had served for a term of years found their
previous employments closed to them. Alongside with the expansion
of the Empire went the depression of Italian agriculture; the food
supplies of the capital were increasingly drawn from Sicily, Africa
and Sardinia; soldiers who had been free agricultural labourers found
their places taken by the captives whom they had themselves reduced
to slavery. The remedy that suggested itself was to assign lands to
the soldiers; they could either be sent to form military colonies in
conquered territory, or be provided with land in Italy confiscated on
various pretexts, or simply taken without further excuse. This remedy
was not in all respects successful. Men who had become used to the
excitements of war and the pleasures of looting, did not settle down
readily to the drudgery of farming; some parted with their farms,
others in cases where the farm had been one appropriated by the State,
allowed the proprietor who had been defrauded to retain possession
on condition of paying a rent; some of these men re-enlisted, others
went to swell the mob of the capital and enjoy its amusements. The
Roman people of Cicero’s days largely consisted of men drawn from
many parts of Italy, who had been, or still were, soldiers, and who
had no objection to being bribed to give their votes; if they had any
political convictions they were Italian rather than Roman; if they
resisted any further extension of the privileges of citizenship it was
from interested motives, and not because they loved the Conservative
party in the Senate. As Rome was the only place in which votes could be
given, the tendency was for all Italians possessing the status of Roman
citizens to drift into Rome, if they had no occupations to detain
them elsewhere. Men who aspired to be political leaders had to win the
favour of this increasing multitude.
The Roman people so constituted had no particular affection for
Rome, and none for the Senate of Rome as a body; its affections were
centred on those who could promote its own interests, on those who
were lavish in providing it with amusements and distributing doles,
on generals who promised large rewards to their soldiers, on orators
who flattered the vanity of the mob; if it had any genuine political
sympathies they were with the Army, and with Italy rather than with the
hierarchy at Rome. The greatness of the Roman statesmen lies in this,
that though nominally the magistrates were elected and laws passed by
this rabble, and the whole administration lay at its mercy, outside
Italy the Roman Government steadily grew in strength; the love of order
and faith in law were so deeply implanted in the Roman character that
the administration was not shattered by years of apparent anarchy,
in which the constitution seemed to have fallen into abeyance, and
the fate of the civilized world to depend upon the caprices of a mob
or the loyalty of soldiers to their leaders. The Roman resembled the
Englishman in being able to make the best of a bad government or no
government; disorder called his reserve of moral strength into action;
the executive was always superior to the constitution; however unruly
the city, the Roman citizen in the provinces preserved the qualities
which had made Rome the ruling power in the Mediterranean.
The character of the Roman people having changed, the mass of citizens
being no longer Romans and nothing else, the ruling classes at Rome
did their best to organize the numbers who filled the streets. All
the methods by which elections may be controlled were resorted to:
political clubs were formed, the great families looked up their
clients, some of them provided themselves with armed bands of
retainers, bribery was systematic and constant; but all efforts to
introduce order into the unwieldy body of the Roman people alike
failed. It is possible that if the popular assembly had had no
further voice in public affairs than to elect magistrates, a way
might have been found out of the difficulty; but the mob was not
only the electorate, it was also the legislative body, or rather a
legislative body. It could not only pass laws, but it could prevent
through its representatives, the tribunes, any laws being passed, or
any business being conducted. The rule of the Roman people under these
conditions was simply authorized anarchy, and the deeply lamented fall
of the Republic with which school histories are apt to close, was
the restoration of order. In fact just at the time when the history
of Rome became the history of the civilized world, there was no
longer any political meaning in the term “the Roman People”; it was
a survival from previous conditions. The attempt to call to life the
forms of popular government resulted, as it was bound to result, not in
government, but in anarchy.
III
The Senate
If the Roman people acquired a political significance in the later
days of the Republic only to show that it was an unmanageable part of
the constitution, the Roman Senate had always been an organized power.
Had it pursued the comparatively liberal policy which prevailed in
its councils immediately after the second Punic War, the Empire would
probably have come, but it might have come without the intervening
period of revolution; this, however, was not to be; the temptations of
wealth and power were too strong. While, however, we are at liberty
to condemn the Senate as it is revealed to us by the transactions
with Jugurtha and other scandalous incidents, we must not forget that
the same body which failed so deplorably at one period of its career
produced the men by whom the Empire was made. It was the embodiment
of all that was politically good in the Roman character, as well as
of much that was evil; its faults were the faults inherent to a close
corporation of nobles enjoying vast responsibilities which it did not
altogether comprehend; its virtues have impressed themselves upon
subsequent history.
A peculiarity of the Roman constitution in the later centuries of
the Republic is that it was practically unworkable even as a city
government, unless everybody was agreed to exercise forbearance,
and not to push constitutional powers to their legitimate extremes.
Two chief magistrates were elected every year, each of whom could
neutralize the work of the other; all public business could be stopped
at a moment’s notice on religious grounds; the magistrates elected by
the popular assembly could impose their veto upon the action of all
other magistrates. As long as the Senatorial families worked together,
and abandoned their mutual differences in the presence of external
pressure, the popular element in the constitution could be disregarded;
but when the Senate became divided against itself, or when individual
Senators chose to ignore the traditional checks by which the whole
body was enabled to work in the interests of the order rather than of
the individuals composing the order, it was possible to paralyze the
Government without departing from the strict letter of the constitution.
The Senate was a strictly aristocratical body, practically a
co-optative body, for every five years the Censor, himself a Senator,
revised the list of the Senate. It was in his power to remove members,
who had in various ways disgraced themselves, or who had fallen below
the property qualification demanded of a Senator; he could summon
new members, and though, after Sulla had passed a decree to that
effect, he was bound to summon all men who had held the elective
office of Quæstor, so long as the Senate was united, it could control
the elections, and take care that no undesirable politician should
in this way effect his admission to the order. This quality of an
Aristocratical Order still hung about the Senate in the early days of
the Empire; it was felt even then to be a public misfortune that a
Senatorial family should be unequal to maintaining its position, and
such families were occasionally subsidised by the Emperors.
The Senate was chiefly composed of men who belonged to an aristocracy
by birth, and it admitted new men very unwillingly; a Marius with the
power of the Army behind him could force his way into the Senate;
a useful advocate like Cicero, or general like Pompeius, could be
summoned to its ranks, but such men were unwelcome; they were accepted
as a disagreeable necessity; all three learned at different times by
bitter experience, that they were, at the best, tolerated.
An indication of the aristocratic nature of the Senate is afforded by
the fact that Senators were forbidden to engage in trade, a prohibition
which however they contrived to evade.
The school of writers which is interested in representing all forms
of government, which have been successful as democratic, has done its
best both in ancient and modern times to minimise the aristocratic
character of the Roman Senate no less than its legislative supremacy;
but the whole tone of Roman history is against them. A Roman Senator
was distinctly a nobleman. Inside the Senate rank went by office;
those Senators who had held the higher offices took precedence of
others according to dignity of office; those families were most highly
honoured who could show the greatest number of dignitaries among
their ancestors, but the qualification of birth co-existed with rank,
derived from office or a long ancestry of office holders. Long after
the distinction between patrician and plebeian had ceased to have
any meaning except in reference to certain priesthoods and religious
ceremonies, the distinction between patrician and plebeian families
was remembered, and occasionally reasserted itself practically; and
it was some time before the official rank of Senator conferred by an
Emperor was respected unless the recipient was entitled to Senatorial
rank by descent. Among the few acts of the early Emperors which win
the respect of contemporary historians, purgations of the Senate are
included. Julius Cæsar tried to make the Senate a council of the Empire
by enrolling in it non-Italians; but he was before his time, and his
astute successor acted in a contrary spirit.
During all the constitutional changes of the last centuries of the
Republic, the position of the Roman Senate remained unchanged in
two particulars: it was the fountain head of Roman religion and of
Roman law, and though the former might be held to be of transitory
importance, the latter was undeniably permanent in its effects.