Page:EB1911 - Volume 23.djvu/683

EMPIRE: 27 - 284] This almost complete effacement of the comitia was largely due to the fact that they had ceased to represent anything but

the populace of Rome, and the comparatively greater vitality shown by the old magistracies is mainly attributable to the value they continued to possess in the eyes of the Roman upper class. But, though they were eagerly sought (Plin. Epp. ii. 9, vi. 6), and conferred on their holders considerable social distinction, the magistrates ceased, except in name, to be the popularly chosen executive officers of the Roman state. In the administration of the empire at large they had no share, if we except the subordinate duties still assigned to the quaestor in a province. In Rome, to which their sphere of work was limited, they were overshadowed by the dominant authority of the princeps, while their range of duties was increasingly circumscribed by the gradual transference of administrative authority, even within the city, to the emperor and his subordinate officials. And their dependence on the princeps was confirmed by the control he exercised over their appointment. For all candidates the approval, if not the commendation, of the princeps became the indispensable condition of success, and the princeps on his side treated these ancient offices as pieces of preferment with which to reward his adherents or gratify the ambition of Roman nobles. The dignity of the office, too, was impaired by the practice, begun by Caesar and continued by Augustus and his

successors, of granting the insignia to men who had not held the actual magistracy itself. The consulship was still the highest post open to the private citizen, and consular rank a necessary qualification for high office in the provinces; but the actual consuls have scarcely any other duties than those of presiding in the senate and occasionally executing its decrees, while their term of office dwindles from a year to six and finally to two months. In the age of Tacitus and the younger Pliny, the contrast is striking between the high estimate set on the dignity of the office and the frankness with which its limited

powers and its dependence on the emperor are acknowledged. The praetors continued to exercise their old jurisdiction with little formal change down at least to the latter half of the second century, but only as subordinate to the higher judicial authority of the emperor. The aediles retained only such petty police duties as did not pass to one or another of the imperial prefects and commissioners. The tribunate fared still worse, for, by the side of the tribunicia potestas wielded by the princeps, it sank into insignificance. The quaestorship suffered less change than any other of the old offices. It kept its place as the first step on the ladder of promotion, and there was still a quaestor attached to each governor of a senatorial province, to the consuls in Rome, and to the princeps himself.

The senate alone among republican institutions retained some importance and influence, and it thus came to be regarded

as sharing the government of the Empire with the princeps himself. It nominally controlled the administration of Italy and of the “public provinces,” whose governors

it appointed. It is to the senate, in theory, that the supreme power reverts in the absence of a princeps. It is by decree of the senate that the new princeps immediately receives his powers and privileges, though he is still supposed to derive them ultimately from the people. After the cessation of all legislation by the comitia, the only law-making authority, other than that of the princeps by his edicts, was that of the senate by its decrees. Its judicial authority was co-ordinate with that of the emperor, and at the close of the 1st century we find the senators claiming, as the emperor's “peers,” to be exempt from his jurisdiction. But in spite of the outward dignity of its position, and of the deference with which it was frequently treated, the senate became gradually almost as powerless in reality as the comitia and the magistracies. The senators continued indeed to be taken as a rule from the ranks of the wealthy, and a high property qualification was established by Augustus as a condition of membership; but this merely enabled the emperors to secure their own ascendancy by subsidizing those whose property fell short of the required standard, and who thus became simply the paid creatures of their imperial patrons. Admission to the senate was possible only by favour of the emperor, both as controlling the elections to the magistracies, which still gave entrance to the curia, and as invested with the power of directly creating senators by adlectio, a power which from the time of Vespasian onwards was freely used. As the result, the composition of the senate rapidly altered. Under Augustus and Tiberius it still contained many representatives of the old republican families, whose prestige and ancestral traditions were some guarantee for their independence. But this element soon disappeared. The ranks of the old nobility were thinned by natural decay and by the jealous fears of the last three Claudian emperors. Vespasian flooded the senate with new men from the municipal towns of Italy and the Latinized provinces of the West. Trajan and Hadrian, both provincials themselves, carried on the same policy, and by the close of the 2nd century even the Greek provinces of the East had their representatives in the senate. Some, no doubt, of these provincials, who constituted the great majority of the senate in the 3rd century, were men of wealth and mark, but many more were of low birth, on some rested the stain of a servile descent, and all owed alike their present position and their chances of further promotion to the emperor. The procedure of the senate was as completely at the mercy of the princeps as its composition. He was himself a senator and the first of senators; he possessed the magisterial prerogatives of convening the senate, of laying business before it, and of carrying senatus consulta; above all, his tribunician power enabled him to interfere at any stage, and to modify or reverse its decisions. The share of the senate in the government was in fact determined by the amount of administrative activity which each princeps saw fit to allow it to exercise, and this share became steadily smaller. The jurisdiction assigned it by Augustus and Tiberius was in the 3rd century limited to the hearing of such cases as the emperor thought fit to send for trial, and these became steadily fewer in number. Its control of the state treasury, as distinct from the imperial fiscus, was in fact little more than nominal, and became increasingly unimportant as the great bulk of the revenue passed