THE PRINCIPATE AND THE ADMINISTRATION

I.

THE ARMY AND THE STATE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE PRINCIPATE

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 uniusfamiliae quasi hereditas, and the successors of Augustus enjoyed
opportunities which could be claimed by none but the heads of what Tacitus
describes as fundatalongoimperiodomus.

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 HelvidiusPriscus 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

Vespasian owed the principate to his troops—a
fact which his forthright honesty so far confessed that, instead of following
the example of Vitellius and dating his rule from the
day of his acceptance by the Senate, he frankly admitted that it had begun when
he was first acclaimed at Alexandria. It was, indeed, no new experience for the
Senate to be confronted with a princeps of the
soldiers’ choosing; but the Senate alone could give legality to what without it
would remain a usurpation, and Vespasian, faced with the task of establishing a
new Imperial house, was in no position to despise the help which he could get
from that influential quarter. Accordingly he acted with deference; and the
Fathers, with less misgiving than when the same grants were made to Otho and Vitellius, voted him the
customary prerogatives as soon as Vitellius was dead,
when he and Titus were also designated for the ordinary consulships of the
following year and Domitian was offered a praetorship,
together with consulareimperium.
Thenceforward he held his position by legal right, and about his accession
there would be no more to say were it not for the fortunate survival of a
fragment from a series of bronze tables on which his powers were set out at
length.

The famous document set up by Cola di Rienzi
in the Basilica of St John Lateran, and now to be seen in the Capitoline
Museum, moots questions of the first importance about the nature of the FlavianPrincipate. Nothing now
remains but the end of a text which when complete must have been long, and in
what survives there are no more than seven final clauses, with part of an
eighth, followed by what describes itself as a ‘sanctio’
giving indemnity to all who in obeying this measure might infringe some other
statute or legal enactment. Short as it is, however, this scrap has much to
reveal. Despite lapses in grammar and orthography, the impressive lettering can
prove that its contents were of more than ephemeral interest: it is not a draft
but a statute. Yet its form is ambiguous; for though it is twice described by
its own wording as a ‘lex’, all except the final sanctio is
phrased in the way appropriate, not to a law, but to a decree of the Senate.
Nevertheless, its nature is not in doubt. From the middle of the principate of Augustus popular assemblies at Rome had
fallen into rapid decline. Their approval of such proposals as were submitted
to them became more and more of a formality, and in this law we have a measure
of the length to which the decline had gone by the beginning of the Flavian age. Despite the solemnity of an occasion on which
a new princeps was to be made, the formulation of the proposals in the preliminary senatorial
decree was allowed to stand unaltered when they were submitted to the People
for passage into law.

Though it is clear that the measure was what Rome of those days was
content to accept as a lexrogata, in
the absence of its most important sections the significance of the enactment as
a whole is open to dispute. From the minutes of the Arval Brotherhood, whose activities during the first five months of 69 are known in
detail, it appears that at this time the creation of a new Princeps involved repeated
reference to the People: on separate occasions they conferred the tribuniciapotestas and
elected him first to his priesthoods and then to the office of PontifexMaximus. And, besides
these, from some source or other he had to receive the all-important imperium. That
this could be legally conferred by either Army or Senate, as Mommsen had
supposed, is a view which can no longer be defended since it was demonstrated
that of these two the Senate alone was concerned; and it is only slightly less
probable that Mommsen was mistaken, too, in maintaining that the imperium was
granted by a process in which the People had no part. According to the theory
of the Republic it was in the People alone that imperium had its origin; and, if
ever this doctrine was respected when the creation of a princeps was in question, it may
well have been observed at the accession of Vespasian. For he was the first of
a new line, in need of support from every quarter; and that his friends did not
despise such help as could be won by deference to the traditions of the
constitution is suggested by the emphasis which numismatic records lay on Libertas.

Nevertheless, the various attempts made to prove that the extant clauses
come from a measure which in its earlier part conferred on Vespasian one or
other of his main constitutional powers cannot be regarded as successful. Any
such theory conflicts with Roman practice by which, when an individual was
invested with authority by the State, the ways in which he should exercise it
were not specified but left to his discretion; and this difficulty is not to be
removed by the suggestion that after the death of Vitellius the Senate, by a bold innovation, formulated a detailed definition of the
manner in which the princeps might use his rights in order to prevent a repetition of Nero’s final tyranny.
The Senate was then in no condition to impose checks on a man who had fought
his way to power; and the measure itself, so far from reducing his authority,
in fact leaves it almost limitless. At most it may be said that, if either the imperium or the tribuniciapotestas was
bestowed in the missing sections, the claims of the former might be supported
by the nature of the grants set out in the extant part; for two of them at
least—the right to conclude treaties (and probably to declare war) and to
change the course of the pomerium—cannot
be brought into constitutional relation with the tribunician power.

There is, however, much to commend another view, which would see in this
law a consolidated grant of miscellaneous rights additional to those which
formed the main basis of the Imperial positions. Supplementary powers of this
sort had from time to time been given to Augustus; for instance, the clause
with which the extant fragment begins—if it is rightly assumed when complete to
have authorized Vespasian to declare peace and war as well as to make treaties
with whomsoever he would—to some extent repeats a grant which there is good
reason to believe that Augustus had formally received. Thus, when the
inscription mentions Augustus, Tiberius and Claudius as predecessors who had
enjoyed this particular right, it may be agreed that the right had been given
them by law. Elsewhere, however, the nature of the precedent is more doubtful.
Vespasian is permitted to extend and advance the limits of the pomerium when he
shall think it in the interests of the State, as was permitted to Tiberius
Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus; but it is by no means certain that
Claudius had received any express authority to change the pomerium when he did so in AD 49. The surviving evidence would
rather suggest that Claudius justified himself by a half-forgotten tradition of
the Republic and that, such was his auctoritas, no objection was raised. But, if this is
doubtful, it is harder still to believe that Augustus had been explicitly and
formally given the constitutional right and power to do all such things as he
may deem to serve the interests of the State and the dignity of all things
divine and human, public and private; and yet for this too he is adduced as a
precedent, together with Tiberius and Claudius. And to these considerations may
be added the fact that two of the rights here granted are supported by no
precedent at all.

Throughout its history the Principate was in
course of development. Gradually its holders increased their powers, not so
much by securing formal authorization for acts from which their predecessors
had been debarred as by using the opportunities afforded by their prestige
quietly to assume new functions, which thereafter were regarded as part of the
imperial prerogative. This process had gone far even before the death of Nero,
when supremacy suddenly passed to a new and undistinguished family. Until the Flavians had acquired the pre-eminent influence of their
predecessors it was, if not necessary, at least desirable that every act of the princeps should be plainly justified by law. Accordingly the past was searched, and
precedents were collected in a single act which conferred on Vespasian the
right to do both those things to which earlier emperors had been empowered by
special enactment and those other things which their auctoritas had allowed them to do
without fear of challenge. And finally, to provide for those emergencies in
which the princeps might be required to take action of a kind not contemplated even in this
exhaustive code, an attempt was perhaps even made to formulate the use to which auctoritas itself had been put. For such may well have been the intention of the
remarkable clause which formally empowers Vespasian to take any action of
whatever kind which he may deem to be in the general interest.

If such an interpretation is justified, it may well be no mere accident
that the only law now partly extant about the prerogatives of the princeps is a law
for the benefit of Vespasian. The extinction of the line which traced its
descent from Julius Caesar and Augustus produced problems of a kind which had
not arisen since the first establishment of the Principate,
and it would not be a matter for surprise if one result of the transition to a
new regime had been the codification of customs created by the old. In its turn
this legal formulation of what in the past had been no more than common
practice cannot have been without consequences of its own. To concentrate in
Vespasian’s person explicit authority to perform every act for which Augustus,
Tiberius or Claudius supplied a precedent by itself was to give him powers
greater than any single princeps had exercised before; but the attempt to find a legal substitute for the auctoritas which
the upstart lacked went farther and did all that law could do towards turning
the Principate into an autocracy. Nevertheless, the Principate survived for more than a hundred and fifty
years, and for that reason the effects of the changes made on Vespasian's
accession are easy to exaggerate. Henceforward it was not the constitution
which stood between Rome and absolutism: as will be seen, however, there were
other barriers not wholly ineffective.

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 praenomenimperatoris;
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 divifilius Augustus’ was its
model. Yet even so Vespasian was at a disadvantage: he was not himself ‘divifilius’, 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 ... paenetitulotenusgessit’; and it was the
title which the Flavians sought. The number of their
consulships, and the number of the years to which, as consulesordinarii, 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 ‘PrincipesJuventutis’,
and both became sacerdotescollegiorumomnium. 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 tribuniciapotestas, 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 praenomenimperatoris;
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 particepsatqueetiam 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 Divifilii. 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 PorticusDivorum,
which he erected on the Campus Martius in their honor,
and the TemplumGentisFlaviae, 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 PisoLicinianus, 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 eligidebet 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 carrièreouverte 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 tribuniciapotestas. 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 AnniaLucilla, 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 PontifexMaximus, 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

The various expedients by which succession to the Principate was protected from the hazards of war did nothing to increase the freedom of
choice exercised by the Senate; but, though the constitutional power of that
body to confer his powers on the princeps came to be expressed in formal votes for the
benefit of a candidate to whom there was no alternative, the Senate played a
leading part in determining the nature of the government. During the first
three centuries of the Empire the lot of the Senate was cast in hard places: at
best it enjoyed a precarious freedom, at worst it was the victim of something
near to persecution. Yet all the time its thankless fortitude was exercising a
decisive influence on the character of the Imperial regime. It was among the
senators that the public opinion of Rome and Italy found reflection, if not
open expression; and, even though the House might fawn on a Domitian with its
resolutions, its members did not fail to resent a lack of civilitas in the princeps.
Impotence did not reconcile it to treatment which outraged its dignity, and dignity
demanded that the princeps should show it the deference due to a body whose history entitled it to regard
the Principate itself as something new and whose
individual members, filling as they did most of the chief administrative posts,
could claim an experience of affairs which entitled them to a judgment of their
own. Moreover, powerless as the Senate might be to impose its will on the princeps by
formal process, its hostility remained a formidable danger. Gaius, Nero and
Domitian had all given it offence; and, though the Senate was not directly
responsible for their ends, it was a sobering reflection that all three had met
their deaths by violence. To fall foul of the Senate was dangerous not because
the Senate habitually used the knife against its enemies, but because its ill-will
was reserved for those who had forfeited their popularity with that large class
of educated citizens who were the strength of Italy and the Empire. Thus an
emperor’s relations with the Senate supplied a measure of the degree to which
his conception of the Imperial duties harmonized with those ideals of
government which distinguished Principate from
Autocracy. Between the accession of Vespasian and the death of Marcus it was
only during the last decade of Domitian’s rule that the Senate and princeps were
dangerously estranged. Vespasian himself, indeed, had been drastic in his
treatment of HelvidiusPriscus,
and Hadrian in the last years of his life had lost the friendship which he had
enjoyed for the greater part of his career; but it was not till Commodus
returned to the ways of Domitian and advanced towards the destination which he
reached when he became invictusRomanus Hercules that the Senate, now said even to have been called SenatusCommodianus, found itself confronted again with the threat of despotism.

If collaboration with the Senate served to keep the princeps in touch with opinion
which was quick to resent signs of autocratic ambition, the emperor exercised
an even more powerful influence on the Senate. Like other institutions in the
Roman world, the Senate was threatened with atrophy by the mere presence of the princeps,
whose superior information about the needs of government combined with his
oppressive prestige to encourage the Fathers in a lazy reliance on his judgment
and that of his advisers. The ‘homines ad servitutemparati’, whom Tiberius
had tried to stir into some show of independence and Claudius had rated for
their acquiescence in a procedure so perfunctory as to be unworthy of the
tradition of the House, were always ready to make fresh surrenders of their
rights and then to regret the loss. Their submissiveness to Nero and their
silence in the ‘curia trepida et elinguis’
of Domitian’s time may indeed have been part of prudence; nor was it strange
that, despite the urgings of HelvidiusPriscus, the House should have shrunk from a serious
decision about public expenditure in AD 70 until Vespasian had been consulted. But it was a sign of alarming weakness
that, when judicial corruption defied the laws and its own decrees, the Senate,
so far from taking the action which was its undoubted right, confessed its own
incompetence by putting the whole problem in the hands of Trajan; and even its
best friends might pardonably have despaired when the secret ballot for
elections, which Trajan had apparently introduced in order to protect the
freedom and increase the dignity of the proceedings, was seized by some of the
Fathers as an opportunity to dishonor the House by writing ribaldries and
obscenities on their votes. There was, indeed, no lack of evidence to prove
that the Senate had learnt little and forgotten much since the end of the
Republic. Nerva himself, whose sympathy was beyond
dispute, found himself forced, like Mucianus before
him, to restrain the Fathers from neglecting their proper duties to open a
vindictive campaign against the agents of the late oppression; and these
reminders are only two among many which survive to show how readily the Senate
would have relapsed into the futile bickering of the late Republic if once the
firm hand of the princeps had been withdrawn.

Nevertheless, under Imperial control the Senate was cast for an
important part, and its responsibilities were enough to stir an active interest
in its composition. In the choice of its members the influence of the emperor
was increased by the growing use to which the censorship was put. Like Claudius
before him, Vespasian assumed this office, and, though he and his colleague
Titus seem only to have exercised its functions for the traditional period of
eighteen months, they associated it so closely with the Imperial position that
it was no great innovation when Domitian in AD 85 had himself made sole censor for life, or when Trajan took the final step
and acted as if the rights of a censor, even though not expressly conferred,
were latent in the powers of the princeps. The result was important. The Senate needed new
blood to maintain its vitality, whether from Italy or from the provinces, and
the addition of a member like Agricola’s father was an indisputable gain. But
in the first century of the Empire there had been no permanent means by which a
man of middle age could enter the Senate with a status appropriate to his years:
such a one, if he was to become a member at all, could normally expect no
relief from the necessity of competing for a quaestorship with young men of
twenty-four born of senatorial stock and having them as his equals for the rest
of his career. But the censorship opened a better way: with its help a man
could be exempted from the earlier stages of the senatorial career and enrolled
in the House with the immediate seniority which became his age and qualified
him for a post of the sort for which he was suited by experience.

The policy which this device was meant to serve would be a matter of
dispute, even if it could be assumed that the intentions of all emperors who
admitted men to the Senate by adlectio were the same. One plausible suggestion—that
Vespasian called in large numbers of recruits from the romanized provinces to make good the failings of what had been an essentially Italian
body—is not confirmed by the extant evidence. If it were true, the members whom
he created would have been predominantly, if not wholly, of provincial origin,
whereas more than half of those recorded are Italians. Nor again is it likely
that even Trajan and Hadrian, who were more generous than their predecessors in
opening the Curia to Greeks, sought provincial senators in order to send out as
governors natives of the regions to be controlled. Such men were, indeed,
freely employed in the provinces, but cases where a man is found engaged in the
region of his home are too rare to justify the suggestion that what the
government sought was a degree of local knowledge which only a native could
possess. What may more reasonably be suspected is that men of provincial origin
were welcomed in the Senate because they formed a supply of potential officials
who could bring to the problems of administration in the Empire at large a
general appreciation of the aims and aspirations of the provincial communities
and some sense of the silent opinion which prevailed about Rome. Even if this
be not the explanation, there can be no doubt about the fact that, though it
was an exaggeration to suggest that Trajan was surrounded by ‘unholy Jews’,
early in the second century provincial members of the Senate had become
numerous; for Trajan thought it necessary to encourage an Italian patriotism in
men of this class by ordering them to invest a third of their property in Italian
land—a rule which Marcus modified only so far as to make the fraction a
quarter.

But it was not for this reason alone that the powers of the censors were
invoked. The use of adlection has a wider explanation: it was an inevitable result of the importance attained
by the equites in public service. The more freely they were employed, the more probable it
became that the equestrian career would reveal occasional men whose proved
ability might profitably be employed in posts for which senators alone were eligible;
and this need for easy transfer of equites to the Senate was met by that process of adlection which
the censorship allowed the princeps to perform. The cost might be high; for censorial
powers gave the emperor a still stronger hold over the Senate, even if they
encouraged the plebeian Fathers to hope for the honor of the patriciate, which Claudius had made it the prerogative of
censors to bestow. But, at whatever price, another victory had been won by the
principle for which the populares of the Republic had fought, and the highest office was open to the merits even
of those whose service in equestrian posts had been long.

VI.

SENATE AND MAGISTRATES

The duties of the Senate whose composition was thus carefully controlled
scarcely call for any long examination. As the Principate grew older, the independence of the Senate declined; and, though it remained an
important part in the machine of government, its most valuable functions were
to focus that educated opinion which was the strongest protection against
autocracy and to maintain a supply of persons duly qualified to hold some of
the highest posts in the administration. The Empire now owed more to senators
than to the Senate. A friendly princeps could coax the Senate into a hesitant self-confidence;
but gratitude for the good-will of a Trajan was hardly less potent than the
fear inspired by a Domitian in moving it to that ready acceptance of Imperial
guidance which sapped its vitality as a deliberative council.

The old forms, indeed, were retained. With Hadrian’s codification of the
Edict, senatusconsulta,
which since Augustan times had been producing ius honorarium, came to be a source of Civil Law itself, even if the
true source of its inspiration is revealed both by the reluctance of the Senate
to act without the emperor’s advice and by the custom, which appears in Hadrian’s
time, of quoting as the law, not the decree of the Senate, but the oratio in which
the princeps had submitted the proposal to the House. In matters of the private law this was,
indeed, a natural outcome of the increasing control exercised by the legal
advisers of the court over the growth of the IusCivile­ a control in itself desirable;
but the professional jurists who sat on the emperor’s consilium were only a section of these
experts in all the varied aspects of government whose services the emperor
controlled and whose superior knowledge made any action difficult without
reference to the man who was their master and their mouthpiece. And even in
matters where no technical issue was involved a diffident Senate was content to
leave decisions to the princeps: Pliny’s attack on PubliciusCertus produced a
memorable debate, but no trial followed because Nerva ignored the whole affair.

Again, though the Senate was nominally responsible for the election of
magistrates, the freedom of its choice was somewhat circumscribed. The frequent
canvassing which Pliny undertook is evidence enough that in filling junior
posts the House still enjoyed a wide discretion; but the consulships, perhaps
since the time of Nero, were regularly bestowed, even under the most
enlightened regimes, by what was virtually Imperial patronage. Indeed the
magistracies themselves were ceasing to be posts of governmental importance and
becoming, with some exceptions, mere honors whose only other significance was
the qualifications they conferred for service in the Empire. In a letter to PompeiusFalco, Pliny makes it
plain that he himself was slightly peculiar in refusing, as tribune, to treat
the office as ‘inanis umbra, sine honorenomen’, and despite the extravagances of gratitude
expressed by those who became consuls it is not surprising that, when few could
hope to hold it longer than two months, the consulship itself was regarded as
an irksome distinction. Fronto, in AD 143, “stuck”, as he says, “in Rome
and bound by golden bonds”, was not afraid to tell Marcus that he looked
forward to his release as eagerly as a Jew to the end of a fast. The consuls,
indeed, had a tedious task; for their first business was with the Senate, and
the shortness of their office unsuited them for routine of a kind which took
time to learn.

Praetors, however, were in better case. It is true that their ancient
functions were being curtailed. Hadrian’s concern for the ius honorarium deprived the praetor urbanus of the proud right to shape the ‘viva voxiuriscivilis’,
and it is probable that the praetor inter cives et peregrinos likewise lost his power of making law. So too the praetors in charge of the iudiciapublica were
slowly yielding ground to Imperial officials in the administration of criminal
justice. Yet the machinery of the iudiciapublica which Sulla had constructed was still in active
work; and even though cases in increasing numbers were heard elsewhere, in this
connection praetors still had their old duties to perform. Moreover, it was to
the praetorship that more than one princeps turned
when a new task of responsibility needed competent discharge. In AD 70 members of this college are found
again in control of the aerarium, as had been the
custom from 23 BC to AD 44, though their restoration was
brief and praefecti of the type instituted by Nero in AD 56 seem soon to have been re­instated. But at the end of the first century,
after Titus had suppressed one of the two praetorships which Claudius had created to deal with cases arising out of fideicommissa, Nerva restored the number of praetors to eighteen by
appointing one, who does not indeed seem to have long survived, to take charge
of suits between private individuals and the fiscus;
and possibly it was when this office became superfluous through the growing
activities of the advocates fisci at Rome that Marcus used it to meet the need for
a special magistrate to relieve the consuls of the difficult questions about tutela by
converting its holder into the praetor tutelaris.

Despite the decay of the magistracies and the strength of Imperial
influence on its proceedings, both legislative and electoral, the Senate still
retained duties of the first importance, and these it was generally the aim of
the princeps to stress. Though they were almost certainly empowered to declare peace and
war, the emperors even showed deference to the ancient concern of the Senate
with the foreign relations of Rome. Meaningless as the form might be, it
doubtless flattered the Fathers’ conceit and strengthened their good-will when
Trajan consulted them about Dacian affairs, when Hadrian
did the same about Parthia, and Marcus about military arrangements in the East
and on the Danube. But the significance of the Senate’s part in government is
to be discerned rather in its discharge of the functions with which it had been
entrusted when the Principate was first established.
One of its cares was the finance of that part of the Empire for which it was immediately
responsible, though since the time of Augustus the financial system had
undergone a change. Within what was at first a single organization, the
finances under Imperial control had grown by the time of Claudius into a
separate department, and this—the fiscus—had been made independent of the senatorial aerarium, which
in the end it was to absorb. But the time for that did not come until the third
century, and throughout the Antonine age the two
treasuries existed side by side, as they are revealed by the younger Pliny. The princeps could, indeed, call on resources of the AerariumSaturni at will, but if he cared for the friendship of the
Senate, when its aid was needed he asked it formally to vote supplies, as
Marcus did in AD 178; and even
Commodus is said so far to have followed his father’s example in this respect
as to use trickery instead of force to secure a grant from this quarter. Again,
though his maiusimperium enabled the emperor to override or ignore the proconsuls in the public
provinces, the Senate retained its immediate responsibility for the control of
their administration; and even when, under Trajan, the Imperial government
began its well-meant efforts to reduce the inefficiency which the Senate was
unable to repress, the emperors were still content to represent their
interference as exceptional and to act towards the Senate and its officials
with the same regard as had been shown by Augustus and Vespasian.

In general, however, it is clear that even under friendly emperors the
proceedings of the House were tending towards that banality which in days of oppression
was a matter for complaints; and against the loss of its former power the
Senate had nothing to set except its increasing activity as a court of justice.
The cases of Baebius Massa, CaeciliusClassicus, Marius Priscus,
Julius Bassus and Varenus Rufus, in all of which the younger Pliny was engaged, are enough to show that
not a little business of this sort was provided by the governors of the public
provinces; and it was on the occasion of great trials like theirs that the
House was more clearly conscious of its own importances than at any other time save when there was a vacancy in the Principate.
The judicial functions of the consular-senatorial court were not, however,
confined to the hearing of such causes célèbres. The tribunal was competent to take civil as
well as criminal cases from regions under its own controls; it exercised a wide
discretion in interpreting, and even modifying, the law; and the finality of
its decisions, which may have been in doubt during the first century of the Principate, was expressly guaranteed by a constitutio of
Hadrian. One claim made for it, though without complete success before the time
of Severus, deserves special notice—the claim that it alone should have the
right to condemn a senator to death. According to Dio, the demand was refused
by Domitian, but Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian are said
to have promised that they would refrain from passing such sentences themselves;
and Marcus, who is not recorded to have committed himself on this matter, seems
to have had difficulty in restraining the Fathers from a bloody revenge on
those of their colleagues who had been involved with Avidius Cassius. Mommsen observed with truth that the claim of senators facing capital
charges to be tried by their peers was only respected in this period at times
when they could be sure of impartial justice in a trial before the emperor
himself. As a High Court the Senate was not, indeed, alone; for the court of
the emperor was by its side. But the equal partnership of princeps and Senate was nowhere
more fully established than in the judicial sphere, and the consular-senatorial
court was doing work of value by giving some relief to the princeps in that legal business which,
for all its importance, could easily make excessive claims on the time of the emperor.

The decline of the Senate and the steady increase of the emperor’s
prestige brought with it a change in the means by which princeps and Senate were kept in contact. In the days when memories of the Republic were
fresh Augustus had been cautious in his dealings with the House, and business
in fact inspired on the Palatine had only been submitted after consideration by
a cabinet which was formally constituted, regularly changed, and chosen, not by
Imperial nomination, but by lot.

Such a body might command the respect due to representative members of
the Senate itself, and its support was doubtless of value: indeed, in the last
year of Augustus’ life it was empowered in a slightly altered form to act in
the Senate’s name. But by Tiberius its character was changed, and thenceforward
the princeps relied for advice about political affairs on any of his friends whose opinion
he valued. Counselors of this kind were certainly drawn from the class of amiciaugusti,
which in the early days of the Empire included that large body of leading
citizens who had acquired the right of entry to the daily levee; but in course
of time the amicitiaprincipis acquired a narrower sense to describe the relation between the emperor and
those for whose personal service or advice he had a special use. Tiberius took
with him to Capreae a carefully chosen entourage, and
Claudius was accompanied to Britain by at least one comes who held rank of legatus without special duties—an appointment of a kind
which soon became more commons. Under the Flavians the amici grew in political importances; in Trajan’s time, if
not before, their leisure was secured by exemption from certain public duties;
and the historian of Pius speaks as if by the middle of the second century amicus had come to mean an imperial counsellor. Such advisers were of two kinds—those whom the princeps consulted on issues of general policy, and the more technical experts on law
who sat in the consilium which, after a history which began with the Principate,
was formally constituted by Hadrian; but, though some individuals doubtless
served in both capacities, the two bodies were always as distinct as the ends
they had to serve, and it is in the former that we may see a link of value
between emperor and Senate. Neither of these boards was composed of senators
alone: indeed, it was counted for righteousness in Hadrian and Marcus that,
when a senator was on trial, equestrian members of the judicial council were
excluded. But senators were naturally numerous among those whom the princeps consulted from day to day, and in them, if their advice had been freely taken,
he had spokesmen to commend their proposals to the Senate and to remind the
House that they had not been framed without reference to that public opinion
which senators were peculiarly qualified to express.

VII.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CIVIL SERVICE

The declining vitality of the Senate was in part both cause and result
of the growing responsibilities of the officials under direct Imperial control.
It had been among the first tasks of the Principate to supply that adequate civil service which the Republic had lamentably lacked
Julius Caesar, trying to develop the existing machine, failed before the
refusal of the Senate to acquiesce in the first essential—the increase of its
own numbers; and Augustus, with his unfailing deference to public opinion, had
proved his loyalty to what passed as the Republic by restoring the Senate to
its old dimensions. The problem thus remained, and the Augustan solution was to
concentrate the public service of senators on selected kinds of office which
there were senators enough to fill, and then to seek recruits among the equites for those
of the remaining posts which were of too public a character to be held by freedmen
of the imperial households. In the fifty years which followed, the influence of
the freedmen increased, but with the fall of Nero signs of a change appeared.
Vespasian, the sturdy burgher of Reate, knew the
value of the Italian bourgeoisie from which he came, and the bourgeoisie itself
was eager to accept service under a princeps of its own class.

Little need be said of equestrian encroachment on senatorial posts; for
this was no more than a consequence of the Senate’s surrender of its functions
to the princeps.
The process had begun in Julio-Claudian times, and
the contemporaries of Claudius or Nero would not have been surprised when Titus,
whose Commissioners for the Devastated Area in Campania had been ex-consuls,
chose equites to organize rebuilding in Rome after the fire of AD 80, or when Trajan—if he
was the first—started the custom by which men of this class took the place of
senators as census officers in the provinces. But the ousting of freedmen by equites is of
more significance. The exceptional conditions of the time make it impossible to
argue that a new policy is to be seen in Otho’s choice of an equestrian secretary or in Vitellius’ behaviour at Cologne, when he appointed Knights to a
variety of posts customarily held by freedmen; but a change became plain when
Domitian, by whom freedmen were still indeed employed, gave the great office of abepistulis to an eques.
Trajan, it is true, again had freedmen among his secretaries, though he treated
his freedmen in a way which became their station; but in his time an even greater
prize was re-captured by the Knights when an eques was chosen to fill the
office of Minister of Finance, long held by the famous father of Claudius Etruscus—who himself had risen to the ordoequester from slavery. Thus, though
there was a libertus a rationibus again even under Marcus, the way was prepared for that change in the
recruitment of the emperor’s civil service which is particularly associated
with the name of Hadrian. His biographer, indeed, is in error when he claims
that Hadrian was the first to have Knights as abepistulis and alibellis,
but there is evidence in plenty to prove that he moved far towards substituting equites in
all the posts of prominence which had been held in the past by freedmen. The
historian Suetonius, abepistulis at
the beginning of the reign, and T. Haterius Nepos,
probably the a libellis,
are typical of the class from which, not only great imperial secretaries, but
an increasing majority of those employed by the princeps in administration were
now regularly drawn.

The number of these was large; for they were needed not merely for the
immediate business of the Palatium or in central
offices at Rome but in various capacities throughout the Empire. In Rome itself
their greatest influence was still to come; for the Praetorian Prefects, who
were in the end to be something like deputies of the princeps (when they were not his
masters), had not yet brought the civil service at large under their
supervision, nor had they acquired those great judicial responsibilities which
increased their power and compelled them to enlarge their staffs. Marcius Turbo, indeed, like Bassaeus Rufus after him, had business to do in court, but it was not till the time of
Septimius that the appointment of Papinian to the Prefecture
marks the beginning of its greatness as a court of civil appeal and brings the
office to its full development. In other departments, however, expansion came
earlier. The praefectusvigilum had a subpraefectus by the time of Trajan, and before the end of the second century an equestrian subpraefectusannonae seems
to have superseded the freedman who served as adiutor in earlier days. But it
was outside Italy, in the corn-bearing provinces of the Empire, that the
Ministry of Food most notably increased its activities. The government’s care
for the food-supply of the capital, commemorated in Rome itself by the rebuilding
of the HorreaGalbae and by
the HorreaNervae, is
freely attested by the records of new officials in this service abroad. Even
more widespread were the agents of the new department charged with the
collection of the Succession Duty. When this tax was first imposed under
Augustus, despite the obvious difficulties of such a method, publicani seem to
have been employed to fix the sums due and to receive them; and, though there
was a certain amount of detailed supervision by the government, this system was
maintained in essentials throughout the first century. But the extension of the
Roman citizenship continually increased the numbers of estates to be taxed, and
in Trajan’s time equestrian procurators are found apparently presiding over a
central bureau in Rome, and soon afterwards subordinates in charge of various
regions in Italy and the provinces. Since Hadrian is recorded to have concerned
himself with the regulations about this tax, it is not improbable that some
part of the responsibility for these developments belongs to him; and it is
certain that with them came the introduction of direct collection by the State.

Rome was now generally abandoning the use of publicani, and it is clear that
the old system had fallen too deep into disfavor for it to be adopted in any
new developments. Even the customs­dues—the largest
source of revenue controlled by the tax-farmers in Imperial times—were being
slowly reorganized in a way which would make difficult abuses of the kind which
had moved Nero to the drastic proposal of AD 58. In the first century there was a tendency to give contracts for collection
no longer to large companies but to individual conductores of a type early used
on Imperial estates; and these were at first supervised, and later superseded,
by procurators of the permanent civil service. In Hadrian’s time there was a
procurator of the quadragesimaGalliarum, as
of the quattuorpublicaAfricae, and though the latter were still let out to
contract in the time of Pius, conductores are not found after the Antonines.
In practice this change, which was in progress throughout the Empire, seems
often to have been made by means which are attested in Illyricum, where
individuals found first as publicani appear later to have become paid members of the
administration and to have been transformed into procurators.

The high ideal of efficiency shown by the government before Commodus was
not the only cause of the growth in the public services: business itself was
increasing. Bequests to the princeps, which had been continuous since the time of
Augustus, not only moved Trajan—if it was he who took this step—to appoint a procurator hereditatum independent of the procurator patrimonii, who had probably been in charge of these
matters hitherto, but also produced a steady accumulation of property for which
the emperor was responsible. All this demanded a larger staff, as did the
constant additions, made by purchase or penal expropriation or by the operation
of the legescaducariae,
to the already vast assets of the fiscus. The importance of these accessions was recognized by
the creation of advocatifisci,
officers who in fiscal matters seem to have done work not unlike that of the procuratoreshereditatum for the patrimonium in the days before they too began to serve the fiscus. The institution of these advocati is
ascribed to Hadrian, and though it is possible that at first there was only a
single functionary of this kind, having his office in Rome, before long there
are signs of advocatifisci, as of procuratoreshereditatums,
in the provinces as well. The list of departments thus developed might be
prolonged, but here it will be enough, by way of final illustration, to mention
the Imperial Post. The cursuspublicus,
introduced to the Roman world by Augustus to provide rapid communication with
officials in the provinces, was at first a charge on the communities through
whose territories it ran, and as early as Claudius the burden was resented.
Claudius had sought remedies in vain, and the first unmistakable relief
recorded was given when Nerva, if such be the meaning
of the evidence, transferred the cost of the service in Italy to the State.
Perhaps as a result of this a small office was opened in Rome, and this soon
had at its head an equestrian praefectus, whose duties were doubtless a result of
Hadrian’s decision to put the whole organization under Imperial control.
Thereafter, while complaints from the provinces still demanded notices,
subordinates of this office spread outside Italy, and their numbers became
large when Septimius carried Hadrian’s policy to its logical conclusion by
making the government, temporarily at least, responsible for the cost of an
organization which it already managed and which it alone could uses.

Though freedmen were still employed for humble tasks, it was to the ordoequester that
the Empire turned more and more to provide the higher officials in this growing
bureaucracy. New posts were freely filled by equites; Knights ousted freedmen
from the old; and the importance of the part they played was marked by various
signs to show that they were no longer casual servants of the princeps, but
members of an organized civil service. Already in the first century procurators
were roughly graded by salary, but it was not before the time of Hadrian or the Antonines that they were divided into the four
sharply defined classes of trecenarii, ducenarii, centenarii, and sexagenarii, the
members of which each received 300,000, 200,000, 100,000 and 60,000 sesterces a
year respectively. Even by the death of Commodus this differentiation had not
reached its limits; for the rationalis, formerly known as procurator a rationibus, seems
still to have been the only trecenarius. But evidence from the beginning of the third
century makes it plain that the developments under the Severi were only an elaboration of a scheme inherited from their predecessors. The
dignity of equestrian officials was also marked by formal titles, inspired
perhaps by the phrase virclarissimus which had been appropriated by senators as their special appellation early in
the second century. Every eques could be addressed as ‘vir egregious’,
but, perhaps already in the second century, some of the more distinguished came
to be known as ‘viriperfectissimi’,
and the most important of all as’virieminentissimi’— a title which after slightly wider use was
soon confined to the Praetorian Prefects.

The class which thus obtained so prominent a place in the system of
administration was one which could provide talent of the most varied kinds.
Lack of traditions gave it strength; for, unlike the Senate, the ordoequester had
no corporate conceit to be outraged when soldiers, provincials and even
freedmen were added to its ranks. So, besides substantial citizens from Rome
and Italy, it could absorb a centurion of humble ambition or one like Bassaeus Rufus who was to become Praetorian Prefect, an
Egyptian Jew like Tiberius Julius Alexander, a Smyrniote slave like the father of Claudius Etruscus, or the
Greek paedagogueNicomedes,
who was first tutor to the young Verus and then
advanced by stages to the second place in the Ministry of Finance. From this
source the administration could draw recruits whose distinction had been earned
by ability and whose status gave them qualities of value which the freedmen of
earlier days had often lacked.

When large parts of the Imperial business were transacted by the emperor’s
household, the posts which these functionaries held belonged rather to the
private establishment of the princeps than to the public service of the State. Gratitude
for work well done was a less certain claim to advancement than the capricious
favor of an individual; and the freedmen, whose fortunes rested on the good-will
of their master, could count on flattery to protect them against the healthy
opinion which was outraged by the audacity of their pursuit of money, their one
ambition. When Knights took their place, mere servants gave way to men with a
rank and honor to maintain, and at the same time what had in some degree
retained its original character as the household of the first citizen became
more obviously part of a public administration. In appearance at least, and
perhaps in fact, this substitution of equites for freedmen was a success for the Republican ideals
of government against the menace of autocracy. Nevertheless, the removal of
freedmen from high responsibility did not mean that Rome confessed to error.
Freedmen were employed by nobles of the Republic because there were many
purposes best served by the peculiar gifts of Greeks, and for the same reason
freedmen had been used by Julio-Claudian emperors.
Pallas was doubtless a peculator; but Claudius had no ground for complaint
about the state of the Exchequer. To the Greek capacity for organization and
finance Rome had cause to be grateful, and the government did not deny itself
the use of Greek ability when freedmen were discarded. Tacitus, writing of AD 56, asserts that even then the
majority of the equites and many senators were not without servile blood; and, though epigraphic
evidence suggests that this is an exaggeration, it is clear that both by direct
recruitment from the East and by the absorption of men descended from freedmen
in Italy the equestrian order in the second century was well supplied with
members whose descent enabled them to put the shrewd competence of Greeks at the
disposal of the administration.

In the salutary development of the civil service one feature may be
discerned less laudable than the rest. It had been a practice of the Republic
that men who sought to serve the State should be qualified to hold either
military command or civil office as occasion might demand, and this custom
Augustus had observed in his incipient organization of the equestrian career no
less than in the use he made of senators. Whatever the defects of a system
which did nothing to encourage the specialist, its merits were beyond dispute.
With Claudius, however, came a change, when the tenure of the military tribunate was in some cases allowed to become a formality.
In itself the concession was trivial, but it deserves notice as a step towards
a dangerous practice which Hadrian seems to have made common. The historian
Suetonius may well belong to a group of several equestrian officials at this time
who appear to have served in no military capacity at all, and they are the
forerunners of the purely civil functionaries who later found themselves at the
mercy of the war-lords of Rome. The separation of the civilian from the
military career was dangerous, not because it deprived men engaged in
administration of some slight acquaintance with the army, but because, if
specialized service were allowed, a bureaucracy of civilians was likely to be
confronted before long with a more formidable body of men whose occupation was
wholly military. And so it befell. In the conflict which began before the end
of the second century the civilians were helpless before the army; power passed
to men whose distinction in war was their only fame; and to its lasting harm the
Empire found itself in the hands of soldiers whose humble origins and warlike
occupations left them strangers to the arts of civil government. The needs of
the frontiers in the third century gave the army that influence which is normal
in time of war, and it was the conditions of the time which both enabled and
constrained Gallienus and Diocletian to make a final
division between civil and military services. But when at length they acted in
the way which, if it saved the Empire, destroyed the Principate,
their work completed a change to which Hadrian’s enthusiasm for efficiency had
made a small but gratuitous contribution.

Great as was the value of the equites, it did not move the Principate to despise the service which could be rendered by the Senate. The House
contained ability and experience, increased by judicious reinforcement from the equites themselves, which still was enough to fill the urban magistracies and the great
provincial commands and to leave men available for new posts required by the
demands of government. Equites were adequate for any
administrative routine, but when work of special responsibility had to be done
abroad, like that of Pliny in Bithynia, it was in the first place to senators
that the princeps turned. Senators again played a large part in the control of the Social
Services in Italy; for the alimentary system, which was sedulously tended
throughout the second century, despite its foundation by Trajan with money from
the Imperial treasury, had senatorial officials to supervise its complicated
operations; and even when this department was centralized, perhaps by Marcus, a
consular was still retained at its head.

The intervention of Marcus has been plausibly connected with another act
of his which involved the employment of senators in new appointments, and one
which raises questions about the relation of the princeps to the Senate and its
responsibilities in Italy. By a measure of a kind which would benefit a
government with the interests of the country population at heart, Hadrian had
chosen four ex-consuls to administer justice in those parts of Italy beyond
easy reach of Romeo. Their duties in detail are obscure; but it is clear that
their business was to free litigants of the necessity to travel far for
justice, if not at the same time to relieve pressure on the courts in Rome.
Such evidence as has survived suggests that it was the consuls (and later the praetor tutelaris) the praetor in charge of fideicommissaand the praefectusurbi who lost some of their business to these officials; but
there isno reason to believe that, even if it was criticized,
their institutionhad been inspired
by hostility towards the older magistrates or toargue that their presence reduced Italy to a level with
the provinces.Their purpose was to make justice both cheaper
and more expeditious—a purpose in accord with the spirit of the governmentand one well attested by the judicial arrangements of the Antonines. They were suspended by Pius, though he had
himselfbeen one, but were established again by Marcus,
with thedifference that they were now, not consulars, but ex-praetors, andit was by him that they may possibly have been given someresponsibility for the alimentary system.

The Principate of the
second century did, indeed, concernitself with Italy more closely than the Principate of the first.The contemporaries of Augustus might have been surprised
if,when war was remote, a praetorian legate had been
appointed tothe regioTranspadana; and the four iuridici themselves were doubtlesschosen by the princeps. Nevertheless, their revival by Marcus,whose friendship to the Senate was pronounced, is enough
toprove that their institution by Hadrian was no
deliberate insult totradition, and
their senatorial status is rather to be taken asevidence of respect for the past. But their creation is
one amongmany signs of that restless passion for
efficiency which was responsiblefor the invocation of the equites and for the steady expansionof the civil service which in the end gave the princeps control ofa powerful bureaucracy with great possibilities for good
or ill.The servants of the State, both high and low, were
picked withhonorable care; promotion was a reward for work
well done;and the standard of competence was high. If the
sphere ofgovernment was to extend, its agents could scarcely
have beenbetter chosen. But still the one question worth
the asking remainedto answer. What
would the State, with all its bureaucrats, contributeto the well-being of the Empire and its inhabitants?Would they be the better for its activities, or the worse?
The third and fourth centuries supplied the answer.