The fall of Nero and the extinction of the “progeny of the Caesars” was followed by a war of succession which revealed the military basis of the Principate and the weakness of the tie connecting the emperor with Rome. Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian represented in turn the legions of Spain, the household troops, the army of the Rhine, and a coalition of the armies of the Danube and the Euphrates; and all except Otho were already de facto emperors when they entered Rome. The final survivor in the struggle, Vespasian (A.D. 69-79), was a man of comparatively humble origin, and as the Principate ceased to possess the prestige of high descent it became imperatively The Flavian and Antonine emperors. necessary to remove, as far as possible, the anomalies of the office and to give it a legitimate and permanent form. Thus we find an elaborate and formal system of titles substituted for the personal names of the Julio-Claudian emperors, an increasing tendency to insist on the inherent prerogatives of the Principate (such as the censorial power), and an attempt to invest Caesarism with an hereditary character, either by natural descent or by adoption, while the worship of the Divi, or deified Caesars, was made the symbol of its continuity and legitimacy. The dynasty of Vespasian and his sons (Titus, A.D. 79-81, Domitian, A.D. 81-96) became extinct on the murder of the last named, whose highhanded treatment of the senate earned him the name of a tyrant; his successor, Nerva (A.D. 96-98), opened the series of “adoptive” emperors (Trajan, A.D. 98-117, Hadrian, 117-38, Antoninus Pius, 138-61, Marcus Aurelius, 161-80) under whose rule the empire enjoyed a period of internal tranquillity and good government. Its boundaries were extended by the subjugation of northern Britain (by Agricola, A.D. 78-84; see Britain, § Roman), by the annexation of the districts included in the angle of the Rhine and Danube under the Flavian emperors, and by the conquest of Dacia (the modern Transylvania) under Trajan (completed in A.D. 106). Trajan also annexed Arabia Petraea and in his closing years invaded Parthia and formed provinces of Armenia, Mesopotamia and Assyria; but these conquests were surrendered by his successor, Hadrian, who set himself to the task of consolidating the empire and perfecting its defences. To him is due the system of permanent limites or frontier fortifications, such as the wall which protected northern Britain and the palisade which replaced the chain of forts established by the Flavian emperors from the Rhine to the Danube.[1] The construction of these defences showed that the limit of expansion had been reached, and under M. Aurelius the tide began to turn. A great part of his reign was occupied with wars against the Marcomanni, Quadi, Sarmatians, &c., whose irruptions seriously threatened the security of Italy. Henceforth Rome never ceased to be on the defensive. Condition of the provinces. Spread of the municipal systems. Within the frontiers the levelling and unifying process commenced by Augustus had steadily proceeded. A tolerably uniform provincial system covered the whole area of the empire. The client states had one by one been reconstituted as provinces, and even the government of Italy had been in many respects assimilated to the provincial type. The municipal system had spread widely; the period from Vespasian to Aurelius witnessed the elevation to municipal rank of an immense number of communities, not only in the old provinces of the West, in Africa, Spain and Gaul, but in the newer provinces of the North, and along the line of the northern frontier; and everywhere under the influence of the central imperial authority there was an increasing uniformity in the form of the local constitutions, framed and granted as Extension of the Roman franchise. they all were by imperial edict.[2] Throughout the empire again the extension of the Roman franchise was preparing the way for the final act by which Caracalla assimilated the legal status of all free-born inhabitants of the empire,[3] and in the west and north this was preceded and accompanied by the complete Romanizing of the people in language and civilization. Yet, in spite of the internal tranquillity and the good government which have made the age of the Antonines famous, we can detect signs of weakness. It was in this period that the centralization of authority in the hands of the princeps was completed; the “dual control” established by Augustus, which had been unreal enough in the 1st century, was now, though not formally abolished, systematically ignored in practice. The senate ceased to be an instrument of government, and became an imperial peerage, largely composed of men not qualified by election to the quaestorship but directly ennobled by the emperor.[4] The restricted sphere of administration left by Augustus to the old magistracies was still further narrowed; their jurisdiction, for example, tended to pass into the hands of the Greek officers appointed by Caesar—the prefect of the city and the prefect of the guards. The complete organization of Caesar's own administrative service, and its recognition as a state bureaucracy, was chiefly the work of Hadrian, who took the secretaryships out of the hands of freedmen and entrusted them to procurators of equestrian rank.[5] All these changes, inevitable, and in some degree beneficial, as they were, brought with them the attendant evils of excessive centralization. Though these were hardly felt while the central authority was wielded by vigorous rulers, yet even under Trajan, Hadrian and the Antonines we notice a failure of strength in the empire as a whole, and a corresponding increase of pressure on the imperial government itself. The reforms of Augustus had given free play to powers still fresh and vigorous. The ceaseless labours of Hadrian were directed mainly to the careful husbanding of such strength as still remained, or to attempts at reviving it by the sheer force of imperial authority. Among the symptoms of incipient decline were the growing depopulation, especially of the central districts of the empire, the constant financial difficulties, the deterioration in character of the local governments in the provincial communities,[6] and the increasing reluctance exhibited by all classes to undertake the now onerous burden of municipal office.
It is to such facts as these that we must look in passing a final judgment on the imperial government, which is admittedly seen in its best and most perfect form in the Antonine period. In our review of the conditions which brought about the fall of the Roman Republic, we saw that the collapse of the city state made Caesarism inevitable, since the extension of federal and representative institutions to a world-empire lay beyond the horizon of ancient thought. The benefits which Caesarism conferred upon mankind are plain. In the first place, the Roman world, which had hitherto not been governed in the true sense of the word, but exploited in the interests of a dominant clique, now received an orderly and efficient government, under which the frightful ravages of misrule and civil strife were repaired. The financial resources of the empire were husbanded by skilled and, above all, trained administrators, to whom the imperial service offered a carrière ouverte aux talents; many of these were Greeks, or half-Greek Orientals, whose business capacity formed an invaluable asset hitherto
- ↑ On the limes imperii, see Pelham, “A Problem of Roman Frontier Policy” (Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1906), and Kornemann, “Die neueste Limesforschung” (Klio, 1907, pp. 73 ff.). The limes connecting the Rhine with the Danube has been systematically excavated in recent years; for the results see Der obergermanisch-rätische Limes (Heidelberg, 1894- ), and Der römische Limes in Österreich (Vienna, 1900- ).
- ↑ Marquardt, i. 132 ff.; cf. especially the leges Salpensanae et Malacitanae; Bruns, Fontes Juris Romani (ed. 6, p. 142).
- ↑ Dio lxxvii. 9 (A.D. 212).
- ↑ For the use of adlectio see Mommsen, Staatsr. ii. 877.
- ↑ Vit. Hadr. 21. Besides Hirschfeld's Verwaltungsbeamten reference may be made to Liebenam, Die Laufbahn der Procuratoren (Jena, 1886), and Schurz, De mutationibus in imperio Romano ordinando ab imperatore Hadriano factis (Bonn, 1883).
- ↑ This led to the appointment of the curatores and correctores in the 2nd century. The younger Pliny was one of these imperial commissioners, and his correspondence with Trajan throws much light on the condition of the provinces.
