After Lucius and Gaius died (2 and 4 ce), Augustus adopted a rehabilitated Tiberius and by degrees brought him to a position of equal power (imperium, tribunician power). Yet, in his first meeting with the Senate after Augustus’ death, Tiberius refused to acknowledge that he had ‘‘succeeded to his father’s station’’ (Veil. Pat. 2.124.2), and senators took turns trying to get him to confess his supremacy. Three long senatorial decrees from the years 19-20 ce show how the Senate actually extended its competence under the emperors (Brunt 1984; Talbert 1984). One shows the Senate taking part in elections, senators casting the first votes for consuls and praetors (EJ 94a). Another shows the Senate upholding its dignity by condemning ‘‘those who contrary to the dignity of their order appeared on stage or at games or pledged themselves to fight as gladiators, as forbidden by senatorial decrees passed on the subject in previous years, employing fraudulent evasion to the detriment of the majesty of the Senate’’ (Levick 1983; AE 1991 no. 515; see Potter, this volume). The third decree shows the Senate sitting as a court, trying the Syrian governor Gnaeus Piso for insubordination, and directing soldiers’ future loyalties:
The Senate hopes that the soldiers will forever display the loyalty and devotion they displayed to the Augustan house, since they know that the safety of our empire reposes in the guardianship of that house. Greatest authority should belong to commanders who have with the most devoted loyalty worshipped the name of the Caesars, which protects this city and the empire of the Roman People. (AE 1996 no. 885, 163-5)
Above all, the Senate began decreeing honors to the imperial family, thus preserving a place for itself in the new order. In one of the decrees the Senate commissions memorials to Germanicus Caesar, including marble arches in Rome, on the Rhine, and in Syria, inscribed: ‘‘The Senate and Roman People dedicated this monument to the memory of Germanicus Caesar.. .he died serving the Republic’’ (RS 37, fr. i, lines 9-21).
Yet when Tiberius retired to Italy and Capri (25-6 ce), power in Rome devolved not on the Senate, but on the prefect of the praetorian guard (the urban garrison), Sejanus (Syme 1956), a man whose career in many respects resembles that of Agrippa, Augustus’ chief lieutenant. Like Agrippa, Sejanus began his career a knight, one of the Roman aristocrats traditionally distinguished from senators by not holding public office, but now appointed to prefectures as powerful as any senatorial office (grain, Egypt, the praetorian guard). Again like Agrippa, Sejanus then received powers from the republic (imperium, the consulship, tribunician power). But unlike Agrippa, Sejanus never married into the imperial family. And when Tiberius told the Senate that Sejanus had been clearing a path to the imperial succession for himself by killing rivals, the Senate arrested Sejanus, tried him, and had him strangled. Typically, contemporary writers ascribe both his rise and his fall to the republic. In the beginning, Velleius Paterculus writes, ‘‘the Senate and the Roman People... were ready to summon for the preservation of its security the man they regarded as the most useful instrument’’ (Vell. Pat. 2.128.4). In the end, Valerius Maximus writes, ‘‘all crimes are surpassed by the thought of a single parricide.... He who essayed to subvert all,
B
A
Figure 6.1a-e The Julio-Claudian house: (a) Augustus (RIC Augustus 208; editor’s collection, photo by Ivory Photo, Ann Arbor MI); (b) Tiberius (RIC 30; ANS 1935.117.357) (courtesy of the American Numismatic Society); (c) Caligula (RIC Gaius 33; courtesy of Yale University); (d) Claudius (RIC Claudius 116; editor’s collection); (e) Nero (RIC Nero 47; editor’s collection)
Violating the bonds of friendship, was trampled down with all his race by the might of the Roman People’’ (Val. Max. 9.11, ext. 4).
Tiberius was succeeded by Germanicus’ son Gaius (Caligula), who was 24 at his accession. Different emperors had different ruling styles. The older emperors of the period (Augustus, Tiberius, Vespasian) all partially retired, shared power with younger men, and died naturally; the younger emperors (Gaius, Nero, Domitian) tested the limits of autocracy, humiliated senators, and died early. Gaius, for example, murdered his co-heir Gemellus, built a palace stretching from the Capitol through the Roman Forum to the Palatine that used the Temple of Castor as an entrance, and tried to have his cult-image installed in the Temple in Jerusalem, setting off a Jewish revolt. But all emperors ruled in the context of the republic. This included participating in rites of the state religion. Thus, on May 29, 38 ce, ‘‘Gaius Caesar Augustus, president of the college of Arval Brothers, sacrificed in the company of the flamen Appius Silanus a fat ewe to dea Dia and gave the starting signal for the chariot-racers and acrobatic riders,’’ according to recently-discovered portions of the Arval Brothers’ Acts (Scheid 1998: no. 12). Yet the landscape and calendar in which the Arval Brothers operated were conspicuously imperial. The same year, the Arvals performed sacrifices on behalf of the Roman people at the emperor’s home, the New Temple of Divus Augustus, the Theater of Marcellus before the statue of Divus Augustus, and the Ara Providentiae Augustae in the Campus Agrippae. They marked the birthdays of Julia Augusta, Antonia Augusta, Germanicus, and Gaius, and the days when Gaius entered Rome and was named imperator by the Senate and pater patriae by the Roman people. And on May 24, 38 ce, they co-opted a new Brother ‘‘in place of Tiberius Caesar, son of Drusus’’ - that is, Gemellus, Gaius’ murdered co-heir.
But real power remained with the armies. The praetorian guard assassinated Gaius and installed his uncle Claudius. Between the assassination and the installation was an interregnum during which the republic was briefly restored. According to the eyewitness Cluvius Rufus, as transmitted by Josephus, while the Senate was decreeing honors to the assassin, and the people were ‘‘proud to have regained their sovereignty,’’ the soldiers seized the initiative. The guard considered whether a republic would be workable and in their interest, proclaimed Claudius, and conveyed their choice to the Senate and the people (Jos. AJ 19.157-89). Thus the principate continued on the military basis on which it had been founded, surrounded by the same republican apparatus.
Under Claudius Roman expansionism was renewed (Levick 1990: 137-61). Rome conquered Britain and annexed the two Mauretanias, Lycia, and Thrace, encircling the Mediterranean completely. The Roman Empire grew, Roman citizenship spread, yet Roman institutions - both old republican and new imperial ones - remained tied to the capital. One example was subsidized grain underwritten by the emperors, which seems to have been a privilege for all Roman citizens, not just the capital’s denizens - at least that is the implication of an epitaph from Interpromium, across the Apennines from Rome, that links a Roman citizen residing locally with the Roman ‘‘corps of juniors’’ for distributing grain (AE 1992, no. 323). Another institution that remained tied to the capital was the courts, where four generations of Puteolan moneylenders, whose wooden-tablet records have been found near Pompeii, continued to settle disputes - although the praetor’s tribunal had moved from its traditional place in the Forum Romanum to the Forum of Augustus, and although the moneylenders now swore oaths by Divus Augustus and the Genius of the living emperor in addition to Jupiter Optimus Maximus (Camodeca 1999: no. 68).
Under Claudius freed slaves of the emperor exercised their greatest power and both determined public policy and received public recognition. Pallas, the freedman in charge of Claudius’ private accounts, drafted a revenue-enhancing senatorial decree and received senatorial recognition: an award of 15 million sesterces from the public treasury (which Pallas declined) and a statue with the inscription, ‘‘To him the Senate decreed this in return for his loyalty and devotion to his patrons,’’ which still aroused the younger Pliny’s indignation two generations later (Pliny Ep. 7.29; 8.6). But the administrators of the emperor’s wealth, the fiscus, had already become a permanent second state alongside the republic.
The republic-emperor tandem reappears in an important document from the reign of Claudius’ successor Nero, the 150-line customs law for the province of Asia (SEG 39 no. 1180). The core of the document is republican (an underlying law perhaps from the 120s bce reconfirmed in 75 and 72 bce), as is the core of the financial administration (revenue collection by private contractors, or publicani). But the legislative core is extended through imperial additions, and the financial administration also receives an imperial overlay: Augustus joins Senate, people, and plebs as legislative entities granting exemptions; Augustus apparently grants immunity to ships on their way to a festival of the imperial cult; and ‘‘the procurator of Nero Augustus who is in charge of the province,’’ appearing in the document’s last fragmentary lines, seems to assume jurisdiction over disputes between provincials and publicans (see Ando, this volume).
Nero was 16 years old at his accession and at first was reportedly guided by a regency comprising his mother Agrippina, the praetorian prefect Burrus, and the senator Seneca. Then Nero had his mother killed, built his Golden House on the ashes of the 64 ce fire, ruthlessly purged the Senate after the Pisonian conspiracy, and began singing on stage. Why did anyone put up with it? In part because imperial loyalists were abundantly rewarded by the republic. A nonagenarian timeserver who died under Nero, for example, received a public funeral and eight commemorative statues:
To L. Volusius Saturninus... who died at age 93, the Senate decreed on the motion of Nero Claudius Germanicus, that he be buried in a public funeral, and that triumphal statues be set up to him in the Forum of Augustus, a bronze statue in the New Temple of Divus Augustus, two marble consular statues, one in the Temple ofDivus Julius, a second on the Palatine in the Tripylum, a third in the Area of Apollo in view of the Senate-House, an augural statue in the Regia, an equestrian statue near the Rostra, and one sitting on a curule bench in the Pompeian Theatre in the Portico of the Lentuli. (EJ 367)
World History
