Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/92

Rh could afford to treat them with a signal clemency, which seems to have secured him from any further attempts. The serenity and placability which he displayed in his latter years forms a marked contrast to his jealousy and ferocity at an earlier period; and the character of the Emperor Augustus Caesar has been a problem to historians in consequence. The life of the emperor was prolonged to the year He died at Nola in his seventy-fifth year, after holding supreme power in the state for nearly half a century.

During the years which had intervened between his accepting the inheritance of Caesar, and his attaining to Cæsar's undivided sovereignty, the young aspirant had been meditating how to secure the retention of his power. At first, excited by fears for his own personal safety, and urged by the examples of party leaders around him, and of others who had gone before him, he plunged into a career of wholesale bloodshed, and cut off without scruple every public man from whose principles or whose passions he might have cause of apprehension. A large proportion, perhaps, of the senators and nobles had perished in the proscriptions and bloody wars of the triumvirate. Still it could not be expected that the germs of republican sentiment would ever be wholly eradicated. The sense of patriotism and the sense of interest would not fail to raise up enemies to the sovereign ruler of the Roman commonwealth. The conqueror s first object was to protect himself by force of arms, his next to soothe the passions of the class from whose resentment he had most cause of fear, and after that to raise up another class in direct sympathy with himself to balance the power which the first must necessarily retain in a well-ordered government. It was to the attainment of these three objects that Octavianus directed his organisation of the commonwealth.

The powers of the imperator or commander of the Roman army ceased on his return to the city. He then became once more a plain citizen. If war again arose he must seek his reappointment to command with the usual forms. Caesar had not trusted his countrymen so far. He had claimed from them the title of imperator in per petuity. With this title prefixed to his name, he continued to be still the commander of the legions, whether in the city or in the provinces. With this power his successor dared not dispense. On his arrival at Rome from the East he at once required the senate to accord it to him, as to his uncle before him; but he pretended only to ask it for a limited period of five years. At the expiration of that term, however, he assumed it again and again, though each time for ten years only, but never actually relin quished it to the end of his career. He thus received authority to command the whole force of the state in chief, and the officers who acted under him became simply his lieutenants. If they gained victories, the honours of the triumph were reserved for the imperator &quot; under whose auspices&quot; they were reputed to have served. It followed that all the provinces on the frontiers, or in which armies were maintained, were placed under the emperor s direct authority, while it was only the central and peaceful por tions of the empire that were handed over to the govern ment of the senate. The imperial provinces were adminis tered by the legati Caesaris, the senatorial by proconsuls. The person of the emperor was thus secured as far as the power of the sword could secure it. But he was anxious that the source of this power should not be too apparent. The second Caesar wished to maintain the appearance at least of government by the constitutional powers of the republic. The senate had once been practically the ruling power, as far as it was not actually controlled by the masters of the legions. He would not degrade it in its own estimation, or in the estimation of the people, any further, at least, than might be necessaiy for his main object. He caused himself to be appointed censor, not for one but for five years, in order to give him full time to revise the list of senators, to supply the fearful gaps in the ranks of the old nobility, and to expel such members, and many they were, who seemed unworthy, from their foreign ex traction, their low birth, their scanty means, or their bad character, to have a place in that august assembly. The irregularities of the epoch which he hoped now to close had filled its benches with personages who degraded the order in the eyes of genuine citizens. The nobles and good citizens generally hailed this revision with deep satisfaction. It accorded with the national taste as well as with historical traditions. From the individual resentments it provoked, it was an act of some personal danger to the censor ; but the danger was more than repaid by the popularity attend ing upon it, which was enhanced to the utmost by the liberality with which provision was made for raising sonic of the poor but honourable members of the order to the standard of property now to be required of them.

The emperor placed himself at the head of this reconstituted body, by assuming the office and title of Princeps Senatus. The office was indeed little more than nominal; it gave the right of proposing measures and of speaking first in the highest legislative assembly of the state, and having been borne in earlier times by some of the most distinguished of Roman patriots, it carried with it the re spect and affection of the people. The titular precedence it gave was all the more valuable, inasmuch as it might be conceded without a blush by the sturdiest republican in the senate. But it was the consul who possessed practically the chief authority in the assembly. Octavianus had been already five times consul, and he shrank from seizing in perpetuity an office which, according to Roman ideas, differed in nothing from royalty, except that it was elective, and that it was limited to the tenure of a single year. Yet he could hardly afford to yield it to the citizen whom the people might at any time elect to thwart or to rival him. What should he do? He took what was certainly a bold step. It was a manifest innovation upon the forms of the free state when he required from the citizens the perpetual &quot; potestas,&quot; or power of the consulship, at the same moment that he resigned the office itself, and suffered consuls to be annually elected to sit, one on each side of him, in the senate. The potestas which was thus conceded to him rendered him the head of the state, both in its legis lative and executive departments. When he quitted the city he carried with him into the provinces a proconsular authority, and became to all intents and purposes king for life of the Romans and of their subjects. Even in the senatorial provinces he was now recognised as supreme ; and thus it was that in him were centred all the great political functions which had been hitherto divided by the great assembly of the Roman magnates. But the emperor did not limit his views to becoming the chief of the nobles. It was the part of a wary statesman to associate himself not less intimately with the opposite faction, which, under the name of the plebeians, had aimed at securing co-ordinate power with the patricians. The original meaning of these designations had indeed long been lost. The plebeians could boast many families as eminent both for honours and possessions as their haughty rivals. Step by step they had won an equal share with them in political privileges. But the class which still bore the title of plebeian was much more widely extended, and embraced the great mass of the knights and men of business in the city, and also of the citizens settled throughout the provinces. This large class had for more than a century contended with the nobles for the perquisites of office, and their mutual rivalry had 