LITMIR.BIZ

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was lifted by the time of Tiberius, thereby relieving the Italian small-holders of the secular burden that had provoked such widespread suffering under the Republic – probably a more tangible benefit than any of the land allotment schemes.

      In the capital, the urban proletariat was calmed with distributions of corn that were allowed to rise again from their Caesarian levels, and which were now better assured since the incorporation of the granary of Egypt into the Empire. An ambitious building programme was launched, which provided considerable plebeian employment, and the municipal services of the city were greatly improved, by the creation of effective fire-brigades and water-supplies. At the same time, praetorian cohorts and urban police were henceforward always stationed in Rome to quell tumults. In the provinces, meanwhile, the random and unbridled extortions of the Republican tax-farmers – one of the worst abuses of the old regime – were phased out, and a uniform fiscal system composed of a land-tax and poll-tax, and based on accurate censuses, was instituted: the revenues of the central state were increased, while peripheral regions no longer suffered the pillage of publicans. Provincial governors were henceforward paid regular salaries. The judicial system was overhauled to expand its appellate facilities against arbitrary decisions very greatly, both for Italians and provincials. An imperial postal service was created to link the far-flung provinces of the Empire together for the first time with a regular communications system.²⁴ Roman colonies and municipalities and Latin communities were planted in outlying zones, with a heavy concentration in the Western provinces. Domestic peace was restored after a generation of destructive civil strife, and with it provincial prosperity. On the frontiers, the successful conquest and integration of the critical corridors between East and West – Rhaetia, Noricum, Pannonia and Illyria – achieved the final geo-strategic unification of the Empire. Illyria, in particular, was henceforward the central military link of the imperial system in the Mediterranean.²⁵

      Within the new borders, the advent of the Principate meant the promotion of Italian municipal families into the ranks of the senatorial order and upper administration, where they now formed one of the bastions of Augustus’s power. The Senate itself ceased any longer to be the central authority in the Roman State: it was not deprived of power or prestige, but it was henceforward a generally obedient and subordinate tool of successive emperors, reviving politically only during dynastic disputes or interregna. But while the Senate as an institution became a stately shell of its former self, the senatorial order itself – now purged and renovated by the reforms of the Principate – continued to be the ruling class of the Empire, largely dominating the imperial state machine even after equestrian appointments became normal to a wider range of positions within it. Its capacity for cultural and ideological assimilation of newcomers to its ranks was remarkable: no representative of the old patrician nobility of the Republic ever gave such powerful expression to its outlook on the world as a once modest provincial from Southern Gaul under Trajan, Tacitus. Senatorial oppositionism survived for centuries after the creation of the Empire, in quiescent reserve or refusal of the autocracy installed by the Principate. Athens, which had known the most untrammelled democracy of the Ancient World, produced no important theorists or defenders of it. Paradoxically yet logically, Rome, which had never experienced anything but a narrow and oppressive oligarchy, gave birth to the most eloquent threnodies for freedom in Antiquity. There was no real Greek equivalent to the Latin cult of Libertas, intense or ironic in the pages of Cicero or Tacitus.²⁶ The reason is evident from the contrasting structure of the two slave-owning societies. In Rome, there was no social conflict between literature and politics: power and culture were concentrated in a compact aristocracy under the Republic and the Empire. The narrower the circle that enjoyed the characteristic municipal freedom of Antiquity, the purer was the vindication of liberty it bequeathed to posterity, still memorable and formidable over fifteen hundred years later.

      The senatorial ideal of libertas was, of course, suppressed and negated by the imperial autocracy of the Principate, and the resigned acquiescence of the propertied classes of Italy to the new dispensation, the alien visage of their own rule in the epoch to come. But it was never altogether cancelled, for the political structure of the Roman monarchy that now encompassed the whole Mediterranean world was never that of the Hellenistic monarchies of the Greek East which preceded it. The Roman imperial state rested on a system of civil laws, not mere royal caprice, and its public administration never interfered greatly with the basic legal framework handed down by the Republic. In fact, the Principate for the first time elevated Roman jurists to official positions within the State, when Augustus selected prominent jurisconsults for advisers and conferred imperial authority on their interpretations of the law. The Emperors themselves, on the other hand, were henceforward to legislate by edicts, adjudications and rescripts to questions or petitions from subjects. The development of an autocratic public law through imperial decretals, of course, rendered Roman legality much more complex and composite than it had been under the Republic. The political distance travelled from Cicero’s legum servi sumus ut liberi esse possimus (‘We obey laws in order to be free’) to Ulpian’s quod principi placuit legis habet vicem (‘The ruler’s will has force of law’) speaks for itself.²⁷ But the key tenets of civil law – above all, those governing economic transactions – were left substantially intact by this authoritarian evolution of public law, which by and large did not trespass upon the inter-citizen domain. The possessing classes continued to be juridically guaranteed in their property by the precepts established in the Republic. Beneath them, criminal law – essentially designed for the lower classes – remained as arbitrary and repressive as it had always been: a social safeguard for the whole ruling order. The Principate thus preserved the classical legal system of Rome, while superimposing on it the new innovatory powers of the Emperor in the realm of public law. Ulpian was later to formulate the distinction which articulated the whole juridical corpus under the Empire with characteristic clarity: private law – quod ad singulorum utilitatem pertinet – was in particular separate from public law – quod ad statum rei Romanae spectat. The former suffered no real eclipse from the extension of the latter.²⁸ It was, indeed, the Empire which produced the great systematizations of civil jurisprudence in the 3rd century, in the work of the Severan prefects Papinian, Ulpian and Paulus, that transmitted Roman law as a codified body to later ages. The solidity and stability of the Roman imperial State, so different from anything the Hellenistic world produced, was rooted in this heritage.

      The subsequent history of the Principate was largely that of the increasing ‘provincialization’ of central power within the Empire. Once the monopoly of central political office enjoyed by the Roman aristocracy proper had been broken, a gradual process of diffusion integrated a wider and wider ambit of the Western landed classes outside Italy itself into the imperial system.²⁹ The origin of the successive dynasties of the Principate was a straightforward record of this evolution. The Roman patrician Julio-Claudian house (Augustus to Nero) was followed by the Italian municipal Flavian line (Vespasian to Domitian); succession then passed a series of Emperors with a provincial Spanish or Southern Gallic background (Trajan to Marcus Aurelius). Spain and Gallia Narbonensis were the oldest Roman conquests in the West, whose social structure was consequently closest to that of Italy itself. The composition of the Senate reflected much the same pattern, with a growing intake of rural dignitaries from Transpadane Italy, Southern Gaul and Mediterranean Spain. The imperial unification of which Alexander had once dreamed appeared symbolically accomplished by the epoch of Hadrian, the first Emperor to tour his whole immense domain from end to end in person. It was formally consummated by Caracalla’s decree of A.D. 212 granting Roman citizenship to nearly all free inhabitants throughout the Empire. Political and administrative unification was matched by external security and economic prosperity. The Dacian kingdom was conquered and its gold mines annexed; the Asian frontiers were extended and consolidated. Agricultural and artisanal techniques slightly improved: screw presses promoted oil production, kneading-machines facilitated the manufacture of bread, glass-blowing became widespread.³⁰ Above all, the new pax romana was accompanied by a buoyant surge of municipal rivalry and urban embellishments in virtually all the provinces of the Empire, exploiting the architectural discovery by Rome of the arch and the vault. The Antonine epoch was perhaps the peak period for city construction in Antiquity. Economic growth was accompanied by the flowering of Latin culture in the Principate, when poetry, history and philosophy blossomed after the relative intellectual and aesthetic austerity of the early Republic. To the Enlightenment

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