Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/783

Rh every measure and every sentence, i. e., of putting his will in opposition to the laws and magistrates; of summoning the senate or the people, and presiding over it, i. e., of directing the electoral assemblages as he thought tit. And these prerogatives he will have not for a single year, but for life; not in Rome only. . . but throughout the empire; not shared with ten colleagues, but exercised by himself alone; lastly, without any account to render, since he never resigns his office.

Along with these changes went an increase in the number and definiteness of social divisions. The Emperor

placed between himself and the masses a multitude of people regularly classed by categories, and piled one above the other in such a way that this hierarchy, pressing with ail its weight upon the masses underneath, held the people and factious individuals powerless. What remained of the old patrician nobility had the foremost rank in the city;. . . below it came the senatorial nobility, half hereditary; below that the moneyed nobility, or equestrian order—three aristocracies superposed. . . . The sons of senators formed a class intermediate between the senatorial and the equestrian order. . . . In the second century the senatorial families formed an hereditary nobility with privileges.

At the same time the administrative organization was greatly extended and complicated.

Augustus created a large number of new offices, as the superintendence of public works, roads, aqueducts, the Tiber-bed, distribution of corn to the people. . . . He also created numerous offices of procurators for the financial administration of the empire, and in Rome there were one thousand and sixty municipal officers.

The structural character proper to an army spread in a double way: military officers acquired civil functions and functionaries of a civil kind became partially military. The magistrates appointed by the Emperor, tending to replace those appointed by the people, had, along with their civil authority, military authority; and while "under Augustus the prefects of the pretorium were only military chiefs, . . . they gradually possessed themselves of the whole civil authority, and finally became, after the Emperor, the first personages in the empire." Moreover, the governmental structures grew by incorporating bodies of functionaries who were before independent. "In his ardor to organize everything, he aimed at regimenting the law itself, and made an official magistracy of that which had always been a free profession." To enforce the rule of this extended administration, the army was made permanent, and subjected to severe discipline. With the continued growth of the regulating and coercing organization, the drafts on producers increased; and, as was shown by extracts in a previous chapter concerning the Roman régime in Egypt and in Gaul, the working part of the community was reduced more and more to the form of a permanent commissariat. In Italy the condition eventually arrived at was one in which vast tracts were "intrusted to freedmen, whose only consideration was how to cultivate the land with the least