The Roman Revolution by Ronald Syme

Author:Ronald Syme
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 1960-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

XXVI. THE GOVERNMENT

THOUGH by no means as corrupt and inefficient as might hastily be imagined, the governing of all Italy and a wide empire under the ideas and system of a city state was clumsy, wasteful and calamitous. Many able men lacking birth, protection or desperate ambition stood aloof from politics. They could hardly be blamed. The consulate was the monopoly of the nobiles: after the consulate, little occupation, save a proconsulate, usually brief in tenure. The consulars became ‘senior statesmen’, decorative, quarrelsome and ambitious, seldom useful to the Roman People. Within the Senate or without it, a rich fund of ability and experience lay idle or was dissipated in politics.

The principes of the dying Republic behaved like dynasts, not as magistrates or servants of the State. Augustus controlled the consulars as well as the consuls, diverting their energies and their leisure from intrigue and violence to the service of the State in Rome, Italy and the provinces. The Senate becomes a body of civil servants: magistracies are depressed and converted into qualifying stages in the hierarchy of administration.

In a sense, the consulars of the Republic might be designated as the government, ‘auctores publici consilii’. But that government had seldom been able to present a united front in a political emergency. Against Catilina, perhaps, but not against Pompeius or Caesar. When it came to maintaining public concord after the assassination of Caesar the Dictator, the consulars had failed lamentably, from private ambition and personal feuds, from incompetence and from their very paucity. In December of 43 B.C. there were only seventeen consulars alive, mostly of no consequence. By the year of Pollio, at the time of the Pact of Brundisium, their total and their prestige had sunk still further—except for the dynasts Antonius, Octavianus and Lepidus, only four of them find any mention in subsequent history.1

The years before Actium filled up the gaps. The Senate which acclaimed Augustus and the Republic restored could show an imposing roll of consulars, perhaps as many as forty. For the future, the chief purpose of these principes was to be decorative. Except for Agrippa, only six of them are later chosen to command armies, as legates or proconsuls.1 There were good reasons for that.

Rome and Italy could be firmly held for the Princeps in his absence by party-dynasts without title or official powers. In 26 B.C. Taurus was consul, it is true; but the authority of Agrippa, Maecenas and Livia, who ruled Rome in secret, knew no name or definition—and needed none. The precaution may appear excessive. Not in Rome but with the provincial armies lay the real resources of power and the only serious danger. It was not until a century elapsed after the Battle of Actium, until Nero, the last of the line of Augustus, had perished and Galba assumed the heritage of the Julii and Claudii, that the great secret was first published abroad—an emperor could be created elsewhere than at Rome.2 Everybody had known about it.

After the first settlement Augustus

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.