Читать книгу Tiberius the Tyrant - John Charles Tarver - Страница 5

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If the Roman people acquired a political significance in the later days of the Republic only to show that it was an unmanageable part of the constitution, the Roman Senate had always been an organized power. Had it pursued the comparatively liberal policy which prevailed in its councils immediately after the second Punic War, the Empire would probably have come, but it might have come without the intervening period of revolution; this, however, was not to be; the temptations of wealth and power were too strong. While, however, we are at liberty to condemn the Senate as it is revealed to us by the transactions with Jugurtha and other scandalous incidents, we must not forget that the same body which failed so deplorably at one period of its career produced the men by whom the Empire was made. It was the embodiment of all that was politically good in the Roman character, as well as of much that was evil; its faults were the faults inherent to a close corporation of nobles enjoying vast responsibilities which it did not altogether comprehend; its virtues have impressed themselves upon subsequent history.

A peculiarity of the Roman constitution in the later centuries of the Republic is that it was practically unworkable even as a city government, unless everybody was agreed to exercise forbearance, and not to push constitutional powers to their legitimate extremes. Two chief magistrates were elected every year, each of whom could neutralize the work of the other; all public business could be stopped at a moment’s notice on religious grounds; the magistrates elected by the popular assembly could impose their veto upon the action of all other magistrates. As long as the Senatorial families worked together, and abandoned their mutual differences in the presence of external pressure, the popular element in the constitution could be disregarded; but when the Senate became divided against itself, or when individual Senators chose to ignore the traditional checks by which the whole body was enabled to work in the interests of the order rather than of the individuals composing the order, it was possible to paralyze the Government without departing from the strict letter of the constitution.

The Senate was a strictly aristocratical body, practically a co-optative body, for every five years the Censor, himself a Senator, revised the list of the Senate. It was in his power to remove members, who had in various ways disgraced themselves, or who had fallen below the property qualification demanded of a Senator; he could summon new members, and though, after Sulla had passed a decree to that effect, he was bound to summon all men who had held the elective office of Quæstor, so long as the Senate was united, it could control the elections, and take care that no undesirable politician should in this way effect his admission to the order. This quality of an Aristocratical Order still hung about the Senate in the early days of the Empire; it was felt even then to be a public misfortune that a Senatorial family should be unequal to maintaining its position, and such families were occasionally subsidised by the Emperors.

The Senate was chiefly composed of men who belonged to an aristocracy by birth, and it admitted new men very unwillingly; a Marius with the power of the Army behind him could force his way into the Senate; a useful advocate like Cicero, or general like Pompeius, could be summoned to its ranks, but such men were unwelcome; they were accepted as a disagreeable necessity; all three learned at different times by bitter experience, that they were, at the best, tolerated.

An indication of the aristocratic nature of the Senate is afforded by the fact that Senators were forbidden to engage in trade, a prohibition which however they contrived to evade.

The school of writers which is interested in representing all forms of government, which have been successful as democratic, has done its best both in ancient and modern times to minimise the aristocratic character of the Roman Senate no less than its legislative supremacy; but the whole tone of Roman history is against them. A Roman Senator was distinctly a nobleman. Inside the Senate rank went by office; those Senators who had held the higher offices took precedence of others according to dignity of office; those families were most highly honoured who could show the greatest number of dignitaries among their ancestors, but the qualification of birth co-existed with rank, derived from office or a long ancestry of office holders. Long after the distinction between patrician and plebeian had ceased to have any meaning except in reference to certain priesthoods and religious ceremonies, the distinction between patrician and plebeian families was remembered, and occasionally reasserted itself practically; and it was some time before the official rank of Senator conferred by an Emperor was respected unless the recipient was entitled to Senatorial rank by descent. Among the few acts of the early Emperors which win the respect of contemporary historians, purgations of the Senate are included. Julius Cæsar tried to make the Senate a council of the Empire by enrolling in it non-Italians; but he was before his time, and his astute successor acted in a contrary spirit.

During all the constitutional changes of the last centuries of the Republic, the position of the Roman Senate remained unchanged in two particulars: it was the fountain head of Roman religion and of Roman law, and though the former might be held to be of transitory importance, the latter was undeniably permanent in its effects.

The Roman Senate did not alone make law, though it alone through the Prætors interpreted law. As a legislative body it shared its functions with the popular assemblies; its decrees were rather administrative than legislative, but it has never been rivalled, except, perhaps, by the English judges, in its power of expanding the application of existing laws and creating a legal system. This peculiarity of the Roman mind, its conservatism combined with a capacity for readjustment, gave us the Roman Empire; without it the Roman conquests would have gone for nothing. The Greek, far quicker witted than the Roman, was ready to change his laws at a moment’s notice. It was to him an open question whether his state should be democratic or oligarchic; the question could be settled according to convenience, by voting or by force; a new constitution could be framed to suit new emergencies. The Roman mind worked differently; with the Roman the new had, if possible, to be read into the old. The Roman did not become a constitution maker till he had passed under Greek influence, and he was remarkably unsuccessful in the task. He soon abandoned it, but he never failed in his casuistry; there was no conceivable adjustment of human relations which the Roman jurisconsult could not refer back to the Twelve Tables; he never troubled himself as to what was to the advantage of the greatest number, or as to the precise definition of justice; he simply took his law, his precedents, his authorised interpretations, and worked the new circumstances into line with the old forms.

Till the Greek influence modified Roman habits the education of the young Roman noblemen was largely legal; while the Greek youth was discussing morality speculatively, the Roman youth was being instructed in the application of law. He sat at the feet of some Mucius Scævola, and heard his solutions of knotty entanglements; the oratory in which he was trained was not the florid rhetoric, which may be addressed successfully to a mob, but forensic oratory addressed to trained intelligence.

With the legal temperament, the Roman combined the religious temperament, the habit of looking to authority rather than to speculation as a guide for his actions. The Sibylline books continued to be consulted in form, if not in fact, on occasions of emergency, long after the cultivated Roman had become familiar with the rationalistic speculations of the Greeks and the mathematicians.

The Senate might under these influences have easily degenerated into a futile subservience to stereotyped forms and habits which would have rendered expansion impossible; it might have opposed a Chinese rigidity to necessary innovations; but the destinies of Rome had ordained that from the beginning the principle of modification should exist alongside with a strong conservative tendency. It may be left to the antiquaries to decide exactly how much truth survives in the legends which form the chief part of early Roman history, but even if it were not demonstrable that the population of Rome was a composite population at a very early time, the fact would remain that the Romans themselves believed it to be composed of three elements: they believed that Latins, Sabines and Etruscans had been welded together under the Kings, and that the titular distinction between patrician and plebeian families survived from a further process of incorporation of aliens; thus there was ancient authority for innovation in such an important matter as the admission of new citizens. Athens was in this respect more conservative than Rome; the citizens of the most democratic state of the ancient world boasted of their pure native descent, while the conservative Roman found in his history a continuous process of immigration to the hills by the Tiber, repeated coalition, continued absorption.

While the Roman Senate was in one aspect a body of trained lawyers, in another it was a body of priests. The evolution of the priesthood as a separate profession is a comparatively modern process. In the history of Rome we see the first step in the process, the changes by which the men appointed to maintain the state religion or to conduct the ceremonial observances paid to particular gods became elected officials, after having been the representatives of certain families upon whom those obligations rested. The duties of religion which had previously been family duties became state duties; but this change did not relieve the Senate of its charge of the national religion. Just as the Senator was an expert in law, so he was an expert in ritual; he did not discuss questions of faith, but he decided points of ceremonial. Though the Colleges of Pontiffs and Augurs were not in the later days of the Republic necessarily drawn from the Senators, and though for a short period a restricted form of public election was applied to the former, practically the Senatorial families held these offices in their own hands, and the power which they thus wielded could only be taken from them by the expedient of combining in the person of the chief of the State the functions of chief Pontifex and chief Augur. Any public business could be suspended by the declaration of a Pontifex or Augur, that it was contrary to established ritual, or that the gods had by means of recognized signs and omens signified the occasion to be unfavourable.

The Senate was also an assembly of heads of families; when a Roman youth of Senatorial descent came of age, his father presented him to the Senate. Though inside his family the father was omnipotent, the Senate decided what actually was the family law; and in this respect the Senate dealt with the family, not with the individual. If the head of the family failed to rule his family properly, and thereby occasioned scandal, he might be marked by the Censor and degraded from his rank. In the family were included many persons whom we consider to be outside the family; slaves, freedmen and certain clients had rights as well as duties; the father of a family who contravened the regulations of the Senate in his relations with such persons caused a scandal, no less than in irregular relations with his wife or children. We are frequently surprised in reading the history of the early Emperors by the freedom with which they appeal to the Senate for commiseration in their private misfortunes, by their habit of assuming that the Senate is interested in their family affairs, but in this they were only acting as any other Senator would act. The point of view may be well illustrated from the procedure in divorce; divorce was a purely family affair with the Romans; a wife guilty of misconduct was divorced by her husband without any appeal to a law court. With ourselves a man is at liberty to apply for a divorce; if under certain circumstances he does not do so, we may admire his forbearance or despise his laxity, but there is no constituted authority which can force him to start an action; whereas a Roman Senator who permitted flagrantly scandalous conduct on the part of his wife could be, and sometimes was, degraded by the Censor, the good order of the State being imperilled by the irregularities in his family; cruelty to slaves or neglect of freedmen and clients were in the same way matters that came under the observation of the Senate, and of the Emperors as the leaders of the Senate.

These characteristics of the Roman Senate, that it was broadly speaking an assembly of lawyers, priests and heads of families, of which any individual might and often did combine all three functions in his own person, were most strongly marked in the period during which it commanded the respect of Polybius and Judas Maccabæus; the policy of Augustus was to restore these characteristics; they were partly in abeyance during the period of the greatest prosperity of the Republic, when the attention of the individual Senator of Rome was irresistibly drawn to the administration of her conquered territories, and to the regulation of her relations with potentates on the confines of her Empire.

At the beginning of the first century before the Christian era, the Senate was divided into parties evolved by the new responsibilities, and the changes in opinion caused by the influx of Greek ideals. The most important problem was the administration of the provinces, but along with it there had to be considered the organization of the internal constitution of the city itself. Thus there were two groups of reformers, those who were chiefly concerned in the adjustment of the relations between the city and the Empire, and those who were more actively interested in the reorganization of her local constitution. The questions which presented themselves to the individual Senator were three in number: first, were the provinces to be governed rigorously as conquered territories, or were they to be admitted to a share in their own government and the government of the Empire? secondly, if they were to be governed by Rome and for Rome, was the administration to continue to be exclusively in the hands of the Senate? thirdly, whatever might be Rome’s relations with her provinces, was it not necessary to give reality to those germs of popular government which existed in the Roman constitution, and to make the Senate directly or indirectly an elected assembly of notable men?

Thus a Senator might be Conservative with reference to the provinces, but liberal with reference to the city, or he might hold that the Senate must be the centre of government, and yet be capable of such internal reforms as to make it the best protector of provincial interests; or he might say that the rule of the Senate was good for the city, but unworkable in the provinces.

Outside the Senate there was the Equestrian Order representing both the Civil Administration of the Empire, and non-Roman as well as Roman financiers, supporting any man or group in the Senate which seemed favourable to its interests; there was also the body of Roman citizens partly composed of men who were still bound by various ties to individual members of the Senate, and partly of men who had served in the Roman armies, and supported the policy of distinguished generals by whom they were organized and in various ways paid for their help.

A peculiar quality of the Roman Senate was the romantic affection with which it was regarded by its members and adherents; it was no mere house of representatives; it was a dynasty. Men not only in Rome, but in the provinces, tolerated its scandalous misgovernment after the third Punic War, as men have tolerated the government of a bad King without losing their faith in monarchy and their affection for the institution. Hard-headed politicians may see in the suicide of Cato at Utica nothing but contemptible weakness; to them the Roman Senate is only one of many political organizations; but Cato’s act was otherwise regarded in antiquity. To find a parallel we have to search among those adherents of the Stuart Dynasty in England and Scotland, to whom the cause for which they fought was not merely a political cause, but a religion. We do not condemn men who committed political suicide after 1715, and abstained from public affairs, or even left their country; we feel that, for men believing as they did, no other course was open; it was precisely in this light that the death of Cato appeared to his contemporaries.

The resistance of the Senate to the various reforms pressed upon it from 131 B.C. onwards has been represented as simply a resistance of vested interests; that it was so in some measure even at first, and increasingly so as time went on, is indisputably true, but Cato did not kill himself as a martyr to the cause of vested interests. The Senatorial position was that of a monarch by divine right; the Senate could not accept reforms in deference to external pressure without in a measure abdicating; it was in itself both Church and Crown; it could no more make terms with a Gracchus or a Livius Drusus than could Charles I. with a Pym or a Cromwell.

This point has been largely concealed from us by the Greek influences under which the history of Rome has been written; we are tempted to think of the Roman Senate as of the Athenian Boulé, as of an Upper House, whose powers and privileges could be curtailed or prescribed at the will of a popular assembly; but to concede that point was to concede everything. The bad faith of the Roman Senate, its desperate expedients to maintain its position alike against the rising power of the Army, the organization of the Equestrians, the body of Roman citizens, or the reformers within its ranks, become in a measure respectable when we reflect that the Senate believed itself to rule by divine right.

Similarly faith in the detestation of monarchy ascribed to the Senate is the result, in some measure, of giving undue weight to Greek prejudices, and to the words of men who were unconsciously enthralled by them.

The Senate so arranged matters that no member of the oligarchy should acquire a preponderant position, and disturb the equality which in theory prevailed between individual Senators; hence various enactments as to the intervals between holding the Consulate twice over, the limited period of a provincial appointment and the disbanding of a Consul’s army outside Rome. In the decadence of the Senate piracy was not quelled in the Mediterranean, and inadequate provision was made to repel the Teutonic invasion from the North, because the immense power wielded by the man to whom either of these enterprises was entrusted threatened to overbalance the constitution. The Senate felt, and rightly felt, that its greatness had been achieved by the relatively unselfish co-operation of its members; when the sentiment, which had rendered that unselfish co-operation possible, had given way before the immense opportunities offered by provincial governorships and the successful command of Roman armies, the Senate endeavoured to restore the effects of that sentiment by insisting more and more strongly upon regulations which tended to equality; but this was something different from the Greek antipathy to the tyrant. Equality between its members was a fundamental theory of the Senate, but it had so little antipathy to monarchy as to provide for the rule of one man in the event of great dangers. The Dictatorship, so long as it lasted, was an absolute monarchy; to the Greek a Dictator was the negation of civil order; hence in a Greek town the assumption of the supreme power by one man, however great the emergency, was a revolutionary proceeding; at Rome the appointment of a Dictator was a recognized constitutional expedient.

Thus the divine right of the Senate did not exclude the possibility of making one of their own number supreme executive magistrate; and monarchy was abhorrent to the Senator, not because it was a thing contrary to nature, as some Greek philosophers held, but because it disturbed the balance of the Senatorial constitution.

By laying undue stress on the Senatorial objection to the rule of one man, writers of the school of Cicero have concealed the real position of an orthodox Roman Senator. Cæsar was hated by the old Senatorial party, less because he was in fact King than because he had changed the constitution of the Senate, and endeavoured to make it a council of the Empire by inviting provincials to its ranks.

There is this essential difference between the suicide of Cato and the subsequent suicide of Brutus: the former was a legitimist, to whom the defeat of his cause meant the destruction of all that was holy, the final collapse of law and order and religion; the latter, if an honest man at all, was a fanatical doctrinaire who had been disappointed in his expectation of regenerating society; Cato died because he could not live under the new conditions, Brutus partly because he was disgusted with his failure, partly because he preferred death by his own hand to death at the hands of the ruffians of Antonius.

The conservative Senator objected to a King, it is true, but he objected no less and perhaps even more to such a reconstitution of the Senate as commended itself to Cicero and other reformers, who wished to remodel the political arrangements of Rome in terms of the Athenian Constitution or of some less extravagant ideal republic than that imagined by Plato.

While the Senate contained a party of irreconcilables whom we may call the Legitimists, it also contained a party who believed in the possibility of a genuine reform, and adaptation of the Senatorial constitution to the needs of the Empire; there was a liberal tradition as well as a conservative tradition inside the Senate; the men who had gradually broken down the barriers between Patrician and Plebeian in the early days of the Republic, and who had gone some distance in admitting the allies to a place in the constitution, had been succeeded by the men who had recognized the claims of the Equestrian order, and saw that some equitable distribution of the rewards of victory among the rank and file of the army was necessary to the well being of the State. The names of the men who took the lead in forcing reforms upon the Senate are Senatorial names, Glaucia, Fimbria, Saturninus, Livius Drusus, Cinna, no less than the Gracchi were Senators; and though they were ill advised in mistaking the Roman mob for a constitutional party, they were not demagogues in the sense that Danton was a demagogue; they belonged to the body which they wished to reform; their methods were injudicious, as was proved by the result, but it is not easy to see what other methods were open to them. After Cicero had pledged himself to the cause of the Conservative party in the Senate, he spoke of these men and other men who had proposed and passed measures of reform in terms of unmeasured reprobation, but we are no more bound to accept his condemnation as historically accurate than we are at liberty to accept the current terminology of political abuse in our own day as indicating anything more than the malignity of the speaker. Even the moderate reformer is stigmatized as a demagogue by those who object to his reforms.

Had Marius been as capable a politician as he was a general, it is possible that the reform party in the Senate might have brought about a gradual transition from the rule of the Senate to the inevitable monarchy, but the incapacity of Marius gave the reins to violence, and brought on the proscription of Cinna to be followed by the reaction and yet more violent proscription of Sulla.

Constitutional reform failed, but the breed of constitutional reformers was not extinguished even by the second proscription. Sulla had recognized this party, and had adopted two of its projects of reform; he had, in a measure, unified Italy, and he had provided for a quasi-representative constitution of the Senate by ordaining that men who had held the elective office of Quæstor should after their term of office pass into the Senatorial ranks; this did not exclude other means of admission to the Senate, but it partly broke down the exclusive system of co-optation through the Censor, and it gave a capable and pushing man from an Italian municipality, such as Cicero, a better chance of attaining the highest position at Rome.

The party of moderate reform was divided into two sections, the section which recognized the Empire, and the section which thought in the first place of the city; the former became the mainstay of Cæsar, the latter soon ceased to have any practical weight except in literature. When the great crisis came, it ranged itself for the most part with the Pompeians; but the former section was not able to accept Cæsar’s radical reforms, and became after his death anti-Cæsarian, till after being frightened by the extravagance of Antonius and the brigandage of Sextus Pompeius, it was won over by the moderate and cautious policy of Octavian. These were the men who fought beside Brutus and Cassius, and joined Lucius Antonius in the Perusine war, but when they saw that the choice was between anarchy and Octavian, gave their adhesion finally to his cause; the reign of Augustus bears the impress of their influence throughout. Among them were two men of note, Livius Drusus, father of Livia and grandfather of Tiberius, and Tiberius Nero, the father of the future Emperor.

The reign of Augustus did not finally conclude the reign of the Senate, but it removed from practical politics the party who could not see beyond the city State, and it definitely concluded the pretensions of the rabble of the streets to act in the capacity of the Roman people. It was only gradually that the Senate became an advisory council to the Emperors, recruited from the distinguished officials of the Empire, or from the legal profession; it retained for a long time its hereditary and domestic character.

It might have been anticipated that there would be a clear division of functions between the officials of Greater Rome and of the city itself, that the Emperor with his staff would manage the concerns of the Empire, and the Senate would govern the city; but it was long before the Government of the city sank to the position of an ordinary municipal Government. The division of the provinces into Senatorial and Imperial ultimately broke down, and was indeed from the beginning formal rather than real; it was a compromise by which the old nobility was conciliated, but the honours conceded to the old aristocracy became more and more titular as time went on; the Roman Senate could not step down, and it refused to accept the position of the city Council of Rome, or even of the Council of Italy. It was never formally disestablished, but it was eventually crowded out, though it was still sufficiently self-conscious, when Tacitus and the younger Pliny were writing, to resent the predominance of the Imperial Household, and to worship the traditions of an omnipotence which it believed to have been the realization of those dreams of liberty so dear to the Greek philosophers. So long as Rome continued to be the centre of the administration of the Empire, the Senate of Rome was always something more than a municipal council, and the name of the body which had once governed the Empire was always dignified by associations which could attach to no other assembly.