Collections: The Afterlife of the Roman Republic
- WORDSWORTH WORDSMITHY
- Nov 8, 2024
- 23 min read
This week we are taking a look at what ended up being the ‘runner-up’ in the latest ACOUP Senate poll (we’ll also do the winner, “The Problem with Sci-Fi Body armor” before year’s end, worry not), the “Afterlife of the Roman Republic,” which is to say a look at the continued existence of the various institutions of the Roman Republic in the imperial period. There’s a lot to cover here, but I am going to focus on the major components of the Republic as we laid them out in our series on “How to Roman Republic:” the magistrates, the assemblies, the Senate and the courts. I think at some point in the not-to-distant future we may come back and do a second series on “How to Roman Empire” focused on the government of the principate (27BC-284AD) in more detail.
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(Bibliography Note: There is a tremendous amount of scholarship on the structure and function of Roman imperial governance. Here I have relied primarily on the two standard reference works: on the role of the emperor himself and government residing within the imperial household, F. Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World(31BC – AD 337) (1977) and on the continued role of the senatorial aristocracy, R.J.A. Talbert, The Senate of Imperial Rome (1984). For bibliography on how the Roman Republic functioned before the imperial period, see the bibliography note on our How to Roman Republic series.)
Octavian’s Republican Necromancy
Before looking at how the machinery of the republic continued to function in the imperial period, it is worth considering how the Roman Empire came to have to somewhat odd sort of monarchy it did. We call this system, from 31 BC to 285 AD the principate (the system that comes after it is the dominate and we ought to discuss it separately sometime). The name comes from the relatively republican-sounding title that Octavian/Augustus took for himself, that of ‘princeps,’ meaning the ‘first’ or ‘foremost’ of a group; it had a nice republican ring to it because the senior-most member of the Senate – which was now, by raw dint of power and influence (but not age), Octavian – was called the princeps Senatus and spoke first in status order of the Senate. For Octavian then, princeps as a title was useful: it sounded republican but served to confirm that he was first among ‘equals’ (not really equals) in the Roman aristocracy.
The defining feature of the principate was the continued operation of at least some of the mechanics of republican governanceand thus the continued maintenance of at least the appearance of a republic although as we’ll see often with substantial alterations, both additions and subtractions.
I think we can understand Octavian’s choices here if we view them in the context of a dilemma. Octavian had just taken power by dint of military force, having defeated the other alternatives (Sextus Pompey, Lepidus and Antony) and absorbed their armies. However, he needed the machinery of Roman provincial governance in order to extract the revenue necessary to pay those armies as he converted them into a long-standing, full-time professional force. Running that machinery requires administrators. This often comes as a surprise to folks in our modern high-literacy, high-education societies, but administrators are often in short supply for pre-modern states: you need literate, educated men with experience running large organizations and these societies do not produce a lot of those fellows.
And Octavian needs a lot of them. Every province needs both a governor (which will be either a pro-magistrate or a legatus Augustipro praetore) and a financial official (either a quaestor or a procurator). In addition, every legion is at last going to get its own commander (a legatus legionis), plus staff officers (military tribunes, traditionally six per legion, though only one of these in the imperial period will be from the senatorial order, generally). And then, of course, on top of that, officials are needed to run the machinery of the capital itself: manage the treasury, run the courts, and so on. As we’ll see, over time parallel non-senatorial career paths are going to emerge for some of these roles but initially Rome lacks any kind of professional civil service, making the Senate – a body of ex-magistrates – the only reliable source of such men.
Of course the other side of the dilemma was that as Julius Caesar’s assassination had demonstrated, the Senate was also potentially dangerous: a body of all of the most influential men in Rome was a potential focal point of dangerous discontent.
It’s not clear the degree to which Octavian ever considered the problem in precisely these terms. Indeed, his ‘solutions’ emerge not as a single program, but as a series of quite ad hoc band-aid fixes, broken into two larger sets of reforms we call the First Settlement (27 BC) and the Second Settlement (23 BC, with lingering changes as late as 19). It seems clear to me, given some of his other legislation and political choices, Octavian – soon to be Augustus – had a traditionalist streak in him, so keeping the machinery of the republic may well have been an ideological decision as well as a practical one. Even though we can see, I think, quite clearly, that Augustus’ claim to have ‘restored the Republic’ is essentially a lie, I suspect it was a lie that Augustus himself believed.
In any event, the solution was the principate, the illusion of republican governance: keep the Senate and keep Senators doing almost all of the normal ‘senate stuff’ – including governing the provinces and running the machinery of government. Only now this system would run ‘under management’ with Octavian/Augustus in overall control. On the one hand, that gave Augustus access to the senate’s pool of trained generals and administrators, while on the other hand the continued appearance of republican forms as well as the reality of a continued role in government for the senatorial elite would avoid the kind of lethal discontent that had killed Caesar.
At some point, we should probably do a complete look at the principate as a form of government as a matching set to our series on the Roman Republic, but for now let me very briefly summarize the results of Augustus’ two settlements:
Pageantry: In both settlements, Octavian/Augustus makes a grand show of returning power to the Senate and/or the People, with the Senate then, in a choreographed display, asking Augustus to take on at least some continued ‘responsibilities’ (read: powers) and also some honorific titles (usually at least one on the list precisely so Augustus can turn it down in a show of republican modesty).
Provinces: Augustus splits the provinces into two groups. The wealthier, stable, interior provinces he returns to the senate, putting them back into the machinery of traditional republican provincial administration. However, the provinces that continued to have a military presence, he was ‘given’ by the senate as his provinicae, allowing him to retain notional command of the armies.
Imperium: In order to facilitate that, Augustus was voted imperium maius (‘greater imperium‘) which allowed him to command legions, appoint legates (important, because he won’t be commanding these legions himself!) and eventually to give directives to other governors, including senatorial governors (because his imperium outranks theirs).
Tribunicia Potestas: In order to enable Augustus to control domestic affairs, he’s also voted the powers (potestas) of the tribunate, which as you will recall were vast. This enables Augustus to stop holding the consulship, as he has all of the consuls powers and more now. Emperors in the principate tend to date their reign through these grants of ‘trib. pot.’ because it has a nice, popular ‘for the people’ ring to it.
So with all of that stated, where does that leave the old machinery of Roman governance?
Assemblies and Magistrates
The first thing to note is that all of the existing magistracies continue to function, although many undergo a slow process of change. After all, those various magistracies were necessary both to run parts of Rome’s government (especially in the city itself) and also to provide the means with which senators – remember, the Senate is a council of ex-magistrates – are created on a regular basis. These offices also continue to function, to some degree, as a testing ground, sorting the competent from the incompetent. Emperors could surely promote their favorites, but the average quality of Roman leadership remained high, suggesting that the sorting system of the cursus honorum‘s elimination contest continued to function.
There were, however, some immediate reforms. The number of offices at each level had ballooned first under Sulla (dict. 82-80) and then under Caesar (dict. 49-44) and Augustus prunes these back to more manageable levels for the most part. The number of quaestors, bloated to 40, was pruned to 20; the number of praetors, bloated to 16, was pruned to 12.
The consulship had remained, as always, at 2 and here Augustus actually gets a bit clever: he actually wanted more consulships. The logjam of figures looking to be consul was a major source of senate unrest early in his reign (in the lead-up to the Second Settlement in 23), but Roman tradition that the number of consuls was always two and could not be increased was strong. Augustus could – and did – vacate one of those seats, but he both needs more ‘consulars’ (‘ex-consuls’) to run his empire and he needs to reduce the pressure of senators furious at being stuck, hopelessly, at the praetorship. The clever solution was suffect consuls (consul suffectus). An informal solution, Augustus arranged so that the regular consuls of the year (we’ll get through the shifting process of selection in a moment) would resign halfway through, allowing the appointment of two new consuls (suffectus, meaning ‘replacement’) allowing four men to hold the consulship in a year, even though there were only two slots. The prestige of being the consul ‘of the year’ (the first pair) was higher, which preserved some of the dignity of the office.
In terms of the responsibilities for these offices, we first have to remember (above) the imperial and senatorial province distinction: the power of regular senatorial offices is going to extend to Italy and to the senatorial provinces, but not the imperial provinces which are going to have their own parallel system in a moment. Even within that framework, of course, you’d have to be a very stupid quaestor or praetor or what have you to directly defy the emperor, though on matters where the emperor did not care (which were always going to be many, Rome is a very big machine at this point), you had a lot of discretion.
Under that proviso, the offices mostly keep doing what they had always been doing.
The quaestors remained important record-keeping and financial offices, but of course also very junior, as well as the entryway into the Senate. Each senatorial province continued to get a quaestor to manage its finances, while two more stayed in Rome to manage the central Roman treasury, the aerarium Saturni (but see below). In the 50s AD, those quaestors lost control of the treasury, which was moved into the parallel imperial bureaucracy, but remained as record-keeping officials. Next up, the Aediles (now six) continued to exist, supervising public works and keeping order in the city of Rome, as they had, though they lose control over the distribution of grain under Augustus, the job transferred to the emperor who in turn delegated it to equestrian (that is, non-senatorial) officials.
The tribunes of the plebs remained ten in number and continued to notionally function, although the emperor’s posession of tribunicia potestas and thus his presence as the 11th member of the 10 tribunes meant they had little real power. They could still potentially block the Senate, but only an idiot of a tribune would try to block the emperor. Citizens could also, in theory, appeal to the tribunes as before, but generally the tribune citizens appealed to was, of course, the emperor, a habit that becomes a citizen right to appeal to the emperor, something that we tend to remember from St. Paul’s use of it.
The praetors continued to manage the courts in Rome and will continue having the discretion to issue their praetorian edicts setting out how they will implement the law until the second century AD, when this power too is swallowed by the emperor. The consuls remain two (but with suffects), but no longer command armies, instead being effectively the administrators of Italy itself (as Italy is not a province). Consuls could also manage some of the courts and convene the Senate, though again the presence of the emperor limited their actual power.
Now if you are asking, “well, given all of this why on earth would anyone want to hold these positions, as they grow weaker,” the answer is three-fold. The first part of the answer is, of course, as much as these offices are fading, they do still carry real responsibility and power, albeit within what the emperor will permit. More broadly, of course, there’s also prestige in holding these offices, as there always was. But most importantly these offices remain the gateways to many of the really significant positions of authority within Rome’s government: emperors will continue to draw many of their key officials, especially provincial governors (of various forms, as we’ll see) from the ranks of the Senate and particularly from senators who have achieved either the praetorship or the consulship. Consequently a year as praetor or consul was the price of admission if you wanted to command an army (in the name of the emperor) or govern a province (either as a legate or a senatorial governor; we’ll come to this distinction in a moment).
In terms of selection, however, the system becomes much less democratic even than it was. During the Republic, at least through to the period of the Second Triumvirate, magistrates were elected in Rome’s popular assemblies, as we’ve discussed. Under Augustus, in 5 A.D., a law (the lex Valeria Cornelia) changed the procedure, by creating a new body of centuries (initially 10, later 15 and then 20) consisting of senators and equites eligable to sit as judges (the decuriae iudicum) on courts that required an equestrian jury; these new centuries voted first and the candidates they selected were termed destinati and almost assured a victory; it’s likely in most cases these elite centuries submitted to the assembly a complete ‘slate’ of candidates – one for each post.
This system must not have been wholly satisfactory, because in the first year of the reign of Tiberius (r. 14-37 AD), elections are then moved entirely into the Senate, with the assemblies only meeting to ratify the choices the Senate made. That is a significant change, as it made the Senate a self-selecting body, since electoral victory was, generally, the entry-condition for the Senate. The Senate’s discretion in choosing magistrates was non-zero; the emperor could declare his support for candidates, whose election by the Senate would then be assured, but it seems that emperors generally didn’t set out complete or even nearly complete slates, except sometimes for the consulship. Consequently, the Senate effectively had the job and the power of weeding out men from the lower offices, deciding who advanced and who didn’t, with the emperor intervening to make sure a few of his candidates advanced each year.410
The assemblies also lost their power to really legislate. As you will recall, under the Republic, magistrates proposed legislation, then the Senate recommended, but the final up-or-down went to the assemblies (usually the comitia tributa, as the comitia centuriata was too cumbersome). In practice, under Augustus, the senatus consulta acquired the force of law, although Roman legal writers are careful to note that this is merely the force of law and that creating an actual lex still requires the assembly. That said, the assemblies became, in effect, by the start of Tiberius’ reign, a mere rubber stamp: the Senate decided elections and passed senatus consulta and the assemblies merely approved what was put before them.
We’ll get back to the Senate’s corporate role in a moment, but before we do, I keep alluding to the parallel senatorial and imperial structures for the broader empire and that’s what we need to cover next.
Pro-Magistrates, Legati and the Imperial Bureaucracy
Now as noted above, this isn’t the place for a full run-down of the structure of the entire principate, but to understand the persistence of the Senate and its importance (and limits), we need to at least understand some of how the Roman government actually functions, which is to say how the provinces and armies are run (which is most of what the Roman state actually does).
In practice, the Roman Empire under the principate has two parallel systems of provincial governance. That divide is rooted in the split noted above, between imperial and senatorial provinces. Now, looking at a map, (as below) it appears at first blush that the division is extremely lopsided. And in respect to armies, it was: nearly any province with an assigned legion (and every province with an actual field army) ends up as an imperial province. The one notable exception, Macedonia, is ‘cleaned up’ by 10 BC with the creation of the provinces of Moesia Superior and Inferior as imperial provinces, moving the frontier (and the legions) beyond Macedonia. But with respect to wealth and population, the division was far more equal, because the senatorial provinces – all internal and coastal – are some of the richest and most densely peopled provinces in the empire. In terms of revenue, Asia and Africa (proconularis) were some of the richest; Baetica and Narbonensis, later made senatorial provinces, were also the wealthiest parts of Spain and Gaul, respectively. By contrast, the only imperial provinces with close to that kind of population and revenue were Syria and the unusual province of Egypt. Very roughly, the senatorial provinces and Italy, collectively, may have approached something like half of the actual population of the empire, even if they also held basically none of the armies.
As an aside, you can see how that arrangement works pretty well for Augustus (and later emperors) and for senators. Augustus gets to keep all of the armies, which means a firm hold on power and less fear of senatorial rivals. But on the other hand, the Senate continues to decide the administration of the most desirable provinces to govern: cultured, dense, urban and wealthy provinces with lots of creature comforts and abundant opportunities for lining one’s pockets. Though the senators themselves, as we’ll see, get to eat their cake and have it too: a military career is still an option for them.
For the senatorial provinces, the senate selected the governors, as they might have in the late republic. Following along the lines of Sulla’s ‘reforms’ (which restricted the consuls to Italy), these were governed by pro-magistrates: proconsuls for the important provinces (Asia and Africa, primarily) and propraetors for the less important provinces; the former group needed to have held the consulship, the latter group the praetorship in order to be eligible. As a result, even as some of the old republican offices lost many of their powers, they remained important as gateways to these more important and valuable postings. As before, each governor was assigned a quaestor to manage the province finances and records.
For the imperial provinces, the governor was notionally the emperor, who received all of the imperial provinces as his provincia as part of being emperor, thus giving him direct notional command of nearly all of Rome’s armies.411 But of course the emperor could not govern all of his provinces directly; indeed he generally governed none of them directly, but stayed in Rome. Instead, the emperor appointed legati – legates – who commanded under his auspices as his subordinates. Each imperial province thus had a governor-general who was a legatus Augusti pro praetore (‘pro-praetorian legate of Augustus’). These men were also senators who had gone through the cursus honorum and had achieved the rank of either praetor or consul (frequently just the praetorship), however, whereas the senatorial governors were selected by the Senate, the emperor hand-picked the legati Augusti. Consequently, even for the imperial provinces, the running of a province (at least, of the full-sized ones) remained the prerogative of senators.
Pliny the Younger’s (61-c.113) relatively well-attested career provides a decent sense of what a career in politics for an elite Roman in this period might look like. Pliny was born into the equestrian order and so initially held some equestrian offices, serving as a military tribune and one of the judges on the cetumviri court, before serving as quaestor in the late 80s; for his quaestorship, he was assigned as one of the two assigned to the emperor. After that, he spent a year as tribune in 91, before being elected praetor in 93 and holding a series of administrative prefect positions in the 90s. He held the consulship in 100 as one of the suffect consuls of the year. In the Senate, Pliny was a noted litigator and from his letters we know he frequently served both as prosecution and defense, though he preferred the latter.412 Unrest and administrative problems in the senatorial province of Bithynia et Pontus drew the emperor Trajan’s attention and in 110 he pulls Pliny to act, somewhat unusually, as the legatus Augusti in the province (which would normally have had a senatorial proconsul). Pliny’s status by that point, as a senior ex-consular, might have served to demonstrate that Trajan was serious about cleaning things up.
At the same time, the emperors swiftly developed a parallel bureaucracy beyond the Senate, which I don’t want to get too bogged down it, but it is worth discussing. Many of these offices were ‘equestrian’ in that they were held by members of the equites rather than men of the senatorial order.413 In the provinces, the key office here were the procuratores Augusti, imperial procurators that served the same role for the legati Augusti as a quaestor would for a senatorial promagistrate (but unlike the quaestors, these fellows are not senators!). In addition, sometimes smaller imperial provinces or sub-provinces would, instead of a full legatus Augusti get a prefect or simple a procurator414 to govern them; Egypt also got an equestrian prefect (the praefectus Alexandreae et Aegypti). Egypt was such a wealthy, valuable province that Augustus and subsequent emperors wouldn’t trust it to a senator (who might come to rival the emperor), thus the more ‘junior’ office here.
Alongside those provincial officials, slowly, in fits and starts, there emerged an imperial bureaucracy around the emperor himself, with some of these posts held by equites and some by the emperor’s own freedmen. Initially, this structure is basically an extension of the emperor’s own provincial command and his entourage. Just as a governor when he took control of a province would bring his own entourage of scribes, accountants and assistants (mostly slaves or freedmen), so too the emperor had his own ‘household staff.’ Likewise, each province in the Republic had its own sub-treasury, called a fiscus (the term for the box in a household where the money was kept) and so the emperor also had his own fiscus.
Even in the reign of Augustus the fiscus of the emperor – including both the revenue of his provinces, but also his personal revenue and funds – was large enough to function as effectively a parallel second treasury. This was superintended by a financial official, the a rationibus (‘from accounts’)415 who was an imperial freedman, although in the second century, this shifts to being an equestrian post.
Likewise, a lot of what the emperor did in running his provinces (and also exercising his oversight of senatorial governors) was through correspondence so voluminous that an office was required to manage it, the officium ab epistulis, run by the ab epistulis (eventually split into an ab epistulis Graecis and an ab epistulis Latinis for the two languages in which such correspondence might be sent), initially held by freedmen but at some point prior to Hadrian turned into an equestrian office. Alongside these, we have some somewhat more shadowy central offices related to the running of the army: we hear of an a copiis militaribus (‘from military supplies’) and in the second and third centuries both praefecti and praepositicopiarum or annonae (‘prefect/chief of supplies/grain’) though the relations of these positions are unclear. Finally, individual legions also finally got their own commanders, legati legionis, who were equestrians – so while an overall imperial province might have a senatorial governor-general, his direct subordinates were equestrian officers: a procurator and as many legatilegionis as he had legions.
As you might imagine, as this parallel imperial bureaucracy grows in size and sophistication and expands beyond just being the emperor’s household into a real part of government with equestrian officials, the function of the traditional magistracies diminishes, slowly over time. So for instance Nero, early in his reign, moves control of the treasury out of the hands of the urban quaestors, running it through his own financial official, the a rationibus. However, that process of slowly leeching the functions of the old offices is relatively gradual (and the quaestors, for instance, in the provinces retain financial functions into the third century).
But the key thing to note is that both senatorial and imperial provinces were governed by a man of senatorial rank who had held at least the praetorship. As a result in any given year, the emperor needed 20-something praetorian senators to serve as legati Augusti propraetore, while the senate needed at least two consulars (for Africa and Asia) and roughly 8 ex-praetors to serve as promagistrates in the senatorial provinces, plus assigning quaestors to those governors. The result was that even as the equestrian offices expanded, the emperor still needed the Senate to act as a supply of men prepared to undertake the administration of a province.
But that’s not all the Senate did.
The Persistence of the Senate
The great irony of the Imperial Senate is that while the Senate of the Roman Republic had no formal powers, it controlled the state, whereas the Imperial Senate finally gets formal powers, but controls very little.
We’ve already touched on some of these new formal powers when talking about the decline of the assemblies, because nearly all of the Senate’s new powers were carved out of the assemblies. Under Augustus, the Senate gained the power to legislate, with motions passing the Senate (senatus consulta, ‘the opinion of the Senate’) acquiring the force of law, although they didn’t become a lex without the rubber stamp of the assemblies. Under Tiberius, elections were also moved into the Senate, albeit with the emperor often choosing a decent number of the winners and holding the consulship in particular largely in his gift. Finally, the Senate also begins to function as a court, which it had not done during most of the Republic.
The drift of the Senate into function as a high court, with the senators acting as a jury, actually begins in the chaotic years of the Second Triumvirate – the Senate seems to have functioned this way in a few instances in 43 and 40, though it certainly seems like senatorial trials were rare early in Augustus’ reign: key cases in 23416 and 2 BC417 and 7 AD418 don’t seem to have gone through the Senate. But Cassius Dio also tells us that one of Augustus’ virtues was that he didn’t interfere with trials in the Senate and certainly in the last few years of Augustus’ reign we have a few. By the reign of Tiberius, the Senate as a court was well established.
As a court, the Senate came to hear corruption charges (repetundae, “things needing to be returned”) against Roman officials (particularly provincial governors); in particular it seems to have been a privilege of senators to have such cases heard before the Senate – equestrian officials generally went before the emperor instead. The other large category was maiestas – literally “majesty” but in this context, ‘an offense against the majesty of the Roman state’ which is to say, treason, which could include an offense against not only the dignity of the state but also, of course, the dignity of the emperor.419 Whereas the Senate seems, even under the empire, to have been essentially a fair court for repetundae, maiestas trials were deeply political and emperors generally made quite clear how they expected the Senate to vote on them.
In addition, the Senate under rare circumstances heard cases of falsum (fraud, perjury and counterfeiting), vis publica (public violence; the unauthorized use of force by an official), calumnia (malicious prosecution), and other miscellaneous crimes, usually in situations where either the individuals involved were of high rank or the case in question had attracted public attention or was particularly scandalous. The Senate also heard adultery cases – a serious charge in Roman law – involving members of the elite.
Finally, by law it was the Senate which invested the emperors themselves with their powers – delivered, throughout the principate, largely in the package described in the first section. This was generally a formality: either the new emperor was the obvious heir to the old one or else he had just arrived in Rome with a large army. But sometimes it wasn’t a formality and those moments of sometimes speak to the continued influence and importance of the Senate in the imperial period.
Discontent in the Senate was quite dangerous for an emperor, for one. Gaius Caligula (r. 37-41) was assassinated by a conspiracy of senators and his own Praetorian Guard, Nero (r. 54-68) committed suicide when his praetorians abandoned him and the Senate made him an outlaw, Domitian (r. 81-96) was assassinated in a conspiracy of non-senatorial officials generally thought to have been backed by at least a few senators (probably Nerva); Commodus (r. 180-192) was assassinated by his praetorian prefect in a move that was quickly ratified by the Senate, but not instigated by them. And Elagabalus (r. 218-222) was assassinated by his praetorian guard in a incident instigated by his own grandmother (Julia Maesa) who recognized that Elagabalus was growing so unpopular with the Roman elite that he was endangering the survival of the dynasty (you will note, even when the Senate doesn’t do the assassination, the assumption they’ll approve post facto is a significant factor); she thus orchestrated a fatal ‘trade out’ of Elagabalus for his young cousin Severus Alexander (r. 222-235).
The Senate also, rarely, made emperors. The most notable example of this is clearly Nerva (r. 96-98), swiftly elected to it after the assassination of Domitian, thus avoiding civil war. The Senate was less successful after the death of Commodus in 193 (the “Year of the Five Emperors”): it selected Pertinax as emperor but another senator, Didius Julianus, bribed the praetorian guard to support him instead, murdered Pertniax and was then promptly run over by Septimius Severus, the legatus Augusti on Pannonia, who returned to Rome with his legions to seize power.
The last really notable role of the Senate in making and breaking emperors as a corporate body is in 238, the “Year of the Six Emperors.” In 235, the army had mutinied and killed Severus Alexander, making Maximinus Thrax emperor. The Senate went along initially (but wasn’t happy about it), but when a tax revolt in Africa proclaimed the province’s senatorial governor, Gordian, emperor, the Senate opted to back him. What followed was a comedy of errors: by the time the Senate backed Gordian (and his son) they were both already dead, defeated by forces loyal to Maximinus, but by that point, the Senate’s course was chosen. So they elected two new emperors, Balbinus and the amazingly named Pupienus420 to try to resist Maximinus’ inevitable march into Italy. The populace of Rome, confused, rioted and when a relative of the two Gordians – who they were told, after all, had become emperor – was produced, they forced the Senate to name him emperor too; Gordian III (he’s 13 at the time). But, almost miraculously, Maximinus’ invasion of Italy fails as he ran out of supplies trying to take Aquileia by siege. Maximinus’ army mutinies against him and he’s killed, at which point Balbinus and Pupienus both successfully conspire to have parts of the praetorian guard assassinate the other, leaving just Gordian III as the last man standing. Hardly a virtuoso performance but the Senate had, for one last time, both made and broken an emperor (and also four other guys).
That tragicomic episode, however, marks the twilight of the real influence of Rome’s republican institutions, however. Following Gordian III’s short reign (r. 238-244), the empire falls into a period of repeated civil war we call the Crisis of the Third Century (235-284), during which the center of power moves permanently out of Rome and its old civic institutions and to generals commanding large armies on the frontiers. When stability is restored, by Diocletian (r. 284-305), the state that we see is much more explicitly a monarchy, with a more clearly centralized, professionalized bureaucracy – we call this new system of Roman government the dominate, for the emperors take instead of the friendly sounding title princeps the far more imposing title dominus, “master” (as of a slave).
That said, the Senate, while no longer at the center of Roman government, continued to exist even after Diocletian and in the fading days of the Roman Empire in the West. The Senate continued to meet and in the chaotic final decades of the Western Empire was frequently involved in efforts to assassinate or supplant emperors, effectively speaking for the Italian aristocracy. The Senate as an institution even persisted after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, being a useful tool in the reigns of some ‘barbarian’ kings in Italy, like Odoacer and Theoderic, though it once again enters a terminal decline in relevance in the mid-sixth century and – in Rome, at least – vanishes by the seventh. Constantine I (r. 306-337) and his son Constantius II (r. 337-361) had established a new senate in the Eastern capital of Constantinople and raised it to parity with the Senate in Rome. That Senate is its own story, but it persists at least into the 13th century.
Zooming back to the principate, however, I think the way to understand the fundamental change in the structure of Roman government in this period is that the Roman Republic had been not a democracy, but fundamentally a partnership of the Roman Senate (representing the aristocracy) and the People. Indeed, that is what the appellation SPQR – senatus populusque Romanus (“the Roman Senate and People”) – implies: the state is composed of two roughly equal entities, the People and the Senate. By contrast, I think the principate is best understood as a partnership between the Roman aristocracy, still represented by the Senate (but now with some important equestrians thrown in) and the emperor, with the People excluded.421 The Senate is surely the junior partner, but a partner nonetheless, as the emperor needs the Senate in order to actually run the empire.
There’s more to talk about concerning how both the principate and the dominate were run, especially the roles of non-republican institutions in them, but I think that will have to wait for another time and a full series on Roman imperial governance.
