Let us study this principate government in some detail, for in many ways it was one of the subtlest political achievements in history.
The powers of the prince were at once legislative, executive, and judicial: he could propose laws or decrees to assemblies or Senate, he could administer and enforce them, he could interpret them, he could penalize their violation. Augustus, says Suetonius, regularly sat as a judge, sometimes till nightfall, “having a litter placed upon the tribunal if he was indisposed. . . . He was highly conscientious and very lenient.”1 Bearing the duties of so many offices, Augustus organized an informal cabinet of counselors like Maecenas, executives like Agrippa, generals like Tiberius, and an incipient clerical and administrative bureaucracy chiefly composed of his freedmen and slaves.
Caius Maecenas was a wealthy businessman who devoted half his life to helping Augustus in war and peace, in politics and diplomacy, at last, unwillingly, in love. His palace on the Esquiline was famous for its gardens and its swimming pool of heated water. His enemies described him as an effeminate epicurean, for he flaunted silks and gems and knew all the lore of a Roman gourmet. He enjoyed and generously patronized literature and art, restored Virgil’s farm to him and gave another to Horace, inspired the Georgics and the Odes. He refused public office, though he might have had almost any; he labored for years over principles and details of administration and foreign policy; he had the courage to reprove Augustus when he thought him seriously wrong; and when he died (8 B.C..) the Prince mourned his loss as beyond repair.
Perhaps it was on his advice that Augustus—himself of middle-class origin, and free from the aristocrat’s contempt of trade—named so many businessmen to high administrative posts, even to provincial governorships. To a Senate offended by this innovation he made amends by many obeisances, by giving exceptional powers to Senatorial commissions, and by gathering about him a concilium principis of some twenty men, nearly all senators. In the course of time the decisions of this council acquired the force of senatusconsulta, or decrees of the Senate; its powers and functions grew as those of the Senate waned. However he might lavish courtesies upon it, the Senate was merely his highest instrument. As censor he four times revised its membership; he could, and did, eject individuals from it for official incompetence or private immorality; most of its new members were nominated by him; and the quaestors, praetors, and consuls who entered it after their term of office had been chosen by him or with his consent. The richest businessmen of Italy were enrolled in the Senate, and the two orders were in some measure brought together in that concordia of united domination which Cicero had proposed. The power of wealth checked the pride and privilege of birth, and an hereditary aristocracy checked the abuses and irresponsibility of wealth.
At the suggestion of Augustus the meetings of the Senate were confined to the first and fifteenth of each month and usually lasted but a day. As the princeps senatus presided, no measure could be submitted without his consent; and in fact all measures presented had been prepared by himself or his aides. The judicial and executive functions of the Senate now outweighed its lawmaking. It served as a supreme court, governed Italy through commissions, and directed the performance of various public works. It ruled those provinces which required no extensive military control, but foreign relations were now controlled by the Prince. Shorn in this way of its ancient authority, the Senate grew negligent in even its limited functions, and yielded ever more responsibility to the Emperor and his staff.
The assemblies still met, though with decreasing frequency; they still voted, but only on measures or nominations approved by the Prince. The right of the plebs to hold office was practically ended in 18 B.C.. by a law restricting office to men having a fortune of 400,000 sesterces ($60,000) or more.2 Augustus ran for the consulate thirteen times and canvassed for votes like the rest; it was a gracious concession to dramatic technique. Corruption was hindered by requiring every candidate to deposit, before election, a financial guarantee that he would abstain from bribery.3 Augustus himself, however, once distributed a thousand sesterces to each voting member of his tribe to make sure that its vote would be correct.4 Tribunes and consuls continued to be elected till the fifth century A.D.; 5 but as their major powers had fallen to the Prince, these offices were administrative rather than executive and finally became mere dignities. The actual government of Rome was placed by Augustus in the hands of salaried regional officials, equipped with a force of 3000 police under a praefectus urbi, or municipal police commissioner. Further to assure order of the desired kind, and support his own power, Augustus, seriously violating precedent, kept six cohorts of a thousand soldiers each near Rome and three cohorts within it. These nine cohorts became the Praetorian Guard—i.e., guard of the praetorium, or headquarters of the commander in chief. It was this body that in A.D. 41 made Claudius emperor and began the subjection of the government to the army.
From Rome the administrative care of Augustus passed to Italy and the provinces. He conferred Roman citizenship, or the limited franchise of “Latin rights,” upon all Italian communities that had borne their share in the war against Egypt. He helped the Italian cities with gifts, embellished them with new buildings, and devised a plan whereby their local councilors might vote by mail in the assembly elections at Rome. He divided the provinces into two classes: those that required active defense, and those that did not. The latter (Sicily, Baetica, Narbonese Gaul, Macedonia, Achaea, Asia Minor, Bithynia, Pontus, Cyprus, Crete and Cyrene, and north Africa) he allowed the Senate to rule; the others—“imperial provinces”—were governed by his own legates, procurators, or prefects. This pleasant arrangement allowed him to keep control of the army, which was mostly quartered in the “endangered” provinces; it gave him the lush revenue of Egypt; and it enabled him to keep an eye on the Senatorial governors through the procurators whom he appointed to collect the tribute in all the provinces. Each governor now received a fixed salary, so that his temptation to mulct his subjects was moderately reduced; furthermore, a body of civil servants provided a continuing administration and a check upon the malfeasance of their temporary superiors. The kinglets of client states were treated with wise courtesy and gave Augustus full allegiance. He persuaded most of them to send their sons to live in his palace and receive a Roman education; by this generous arrangement the youths served as hostages until their accession, and then as unwitting vehicles of Romanization.
In the flush aftermath of Actium, and possessed of an enormous army and navy, Augustus apparently planned to extend the Empire to the Atlantic, the Sahara, the Euphrates, the Black Sea, the Danube, and the Elbe; the pax Romana was to be maintained not by passive defense but by an aggressive policy on every frontier. The Emperor in person completed the conquest of Spain and so ably reorganized the administration of Gaul that it remained at peace for nearly a century. In the case of Parthia he contented himself with the return of the standards and surviving captives taken from Crassus in 53; but he restored to the throne of Armenia a Tigranes favorable to Rome. He sent abortive expeditions to conquer Ethiopia and Arabia. In the decade from 19 to 9 B.C.. his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus subjugated Illyria, Pannonia, and Raetia. Agreeably provoked by German invasions of Gaul, Augustus ordered Drusus to cross the Rhine, and rejoiced to learn that the brilliant youth had fought his way to the Elbe. But Drusus suffered internal injuries from a fall, lingered in pain for thirty days, and died. Tiberius, who loved Drusus with all the intensity of a restrained but passionate nature, rode 400 miles on horseback from Gaul into Germany to hold his brother in his arms in the final hours; then he conveyed the body to Rome, walking before the cortege all the way (9 B.C.). Returning to Germany, Tiberius in two campaigns (8-7 B.C., A.D. 4-5) forced the submission of the tribes between the Elbe and the Rhine.
Two disasters, coming almost together, changed this fever of expansion into a policy of peace. In A.D. 6 the lately won provinces of Pannonia and Dalmatia revolted, massacred all the Romans in their territory, organized an army of 200,000 men, and threatened to invade Italy. Tiberius quickly made peace with the German tribes and led his depleted forces into Pannonia. With patient and ruthless strategy he captured or destroyed the crops that could supply the enemy, and by guerrilla warfare prevented new plantings, while he saw to it that his own troops were well fed. For three years he persisted in this policy despite universal criticism at home; at last he had the satisfaction of seeing the starving rebels disband, and of re-establishing the Roman power. But in that same year (A.D. 9) Arminius organized a revolt in Germany, lured the three legions of Varus, the Roman governor, into a trap, and killed every man of them except those who, like Varus, fell upon their own swords. When Augustus heard of this he was “so deeply affected,” says Suetonius, “that for several months he cut neither his beard nor his hair; and sometimes he would dash his head against a door, and cry out, ‘Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!’”6 Tiberius hastened to Germany, reorganized the army there, stood off the Germans, and, by Augustus’ orders, withdrew the Roman boundary to the Rhine.
It was a decision costly to the Emperor’s pride but creditable to his judgment. Germany was surrendered to “barbarism”—i.e., to a nonclassic culture—and was left free to arm its growing population against Rome. However, the same reasons that had argued for the conquest of Germany would have demanded the subjection of Scythia—southern Russia. Somewhere the Empire had to stop; and the Rhine was a better frontier than any other west of the Urals. Having annexed northern and western Spain, Raetia, Noricum, Pannonia, Moesia, Galatia, Lycia, and Pamphylia, Augustus felt that he had sufficiently earned his title of “the increasing god.” At his death the Empire covered 3,340,000 square miles, more than the mainland of the United States, and over a hundred times the area of Rome before the Punic Wars. Augustus advised his successor to be content with this, the greatest empire yet seen; to seek rather to unite and strengthen it within than to extend it without. He expressed his surprise “that Alexander did not regard it as a greater task to set in order the empire that he had won than to win it.”7 The Pax Romana had begun.