What is the difference between narratives of dominance and narratives of dominance and inferiority? It is the difference between a narrative that stresses the activities of the powerful as opposed to the negotiation of power between the powerful and the less powerful. It is to stress that the exercise of power was not straightforward, that what often seem to be straightforward relationships are, on further reflection, bound by complex rules of engagement between different groups and individuals within them.
The importance ofseeing relationships between different groups as existing outside ‘‘the external structures of law and economy,’’ was stressed in a crucial article on the Life of Aesop by Keith Hopkins in 1994 (Hopkins 1994: 27). Hopkins argued that the Life of Aesop, the only work to preserve a slave’s perspective, revealed that ‘‘each master and slave had some freedom of maneuver to act in accord with his or her capacities, opportunities and interests’’ (Hopkins 1994: 27). Hopkins’ observation crystallized thinking about the negotiation of power relationships that had begun to have a significant place in scholarship during the previous decade, as evidenced in a brilliant study of slaves in the Roman family by Richard Saller, of literary patronage by Jasper Griffin, or analyses of political patronage and client choice by Peter Brunt and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (Saller 1987; J. Griffin 1984; Brunt 1988: 351-81, 382-442; Wallace-Hadrill 1990). Many of the chapters in this volume offer a sense of discourse about power, or the structures that distinguished the obviously powerful from the less obviously so.
In traditional terms, it is established that a person who pursued a senatorial career would follow a set path, established in the course of the reign of Augustus. A young man who desired to do this would have to come from a family with property valued at either 1 or 1.2 million sesterces, with his landed property divided up into a number of different estates, consisting, as Dennis Kehoe shows, of a central villa staffed by slaves set amidst a group of tenant farms. These estates guaranteed family status, and the protection of that status often dictated a rather conservative economic outlook: the primary concern of the largest landholders was to preserve what they had. If they sought to increase their wealth, they would most likely do so through marriage to another wealthy family in their home district, a pattern illustrated in Evans Grubbs’ discussion of the multiple marriages of the younger Pliny. These links were extremely important in creating a nexus of relationships that drew the local aristocracies, both eastern and western, into direct relationship with the governing class and helped shape the ambitions of these classes. Even though, as the chapters by Jonathon Edmondson and Maud Gleason show, the history of urbanization in the eastern and western parts of the empire was very different, there was a powerful urge for local magnates to ensure that their cities were felt worthy of respect in the imperial system. To do so the members of these elites sought private links with members of the imperial aristocracy, and at the same time sought to make their cities worthy of those links by enhancing the urban space.
If a young man chose to enter the Senate, and the emperor felt that he was worthy, he would be given the right to wear the latus clavus, or broad stripe, with his toga, and would be expected to hold a preliminary position, one of a group of 20 minor officeholders on one of four boards. These included the board of three for overseeing the mint, the board of four for overseeing the streets of Rome, the board of ten for judging inheritance cases, or the board of three for overseeing executions. He might also be expected to serve as a military tribune (this seems certainly to have been the case prior to the mid-second century). At age twenty-five all members of one year’s class of minor magistrates would be entitled to hold one of the 20 quaestorships that were available. In the next five years, the majority of ex-quaestors would hold further office, either as tribune of the plebs (there were still ten of these, the number inherited from the republic) or the aedileship (of which there were six under the Augustan dispensation), and possibly command a legion as a legate of the emperor. At the end of the five year period after the quaestorship, a man could hold one of the 12 available praetorships (as of 14 ce; there were 18 by the end of the century). The years after the quaestorship were plainly the ‘‘make or break’’ point in a career. Even though it might be expected that one in a class of 20, given ancient conditions of mortality, would not live to age 30, there were too few offices to go around. Forty percent of the men who entered the Senate could not rise to the praetorship After the praetorship, there was even greater attrition. A man of patrician standing might expect rapid preferment and a consulship; if he did not achieve this, there was a further ten-year gap before he could hope for the office that traditionally marked the culmination of a successful public life. Although Augustus had begun the practice of appointing replacement (suffect) consuls so that four men might attain the office in one year, a number that expanded to six by the time of Nero and seven under the Flavians, the majority of praetors would still never ascend so high. Only a third could do so under the Augustan dispensation, and still usually fewer than half in later periods. In the interim, ex-praetors were the backbone of the administration in jobs ranging from road commissioner to treasury officer or even general. These jobs were not easy, and determination of success or failure resided with the emperor alone.
In light of the emperor’s control over the markers of aristocratic success, it is not surprising that we may detect various efforts to control his reactions. As both Greg Rowe and Michael Peachin show, there was enormous pressure from below to define the imperial state and exercise control of the broad outlines of its development. The idea of the ‘‘good emperor’’ who took his responsibilities towards the senatorial class seriously and showed respect for the traditions of the Senate, remained a powerful force from the first century to the end of the second. The space between the emperor’s needs and those of senators, keen to preserve their status, was a matter for constant negotiation. Thus, for instance, Asinius Gallus asked Tiberius to nominate 12 candidates for the praetorship five years in advance of the time that they would hold office, at the time in which they were assigned legionary commands. Tacitus said that there was no doubt but that this proposal went deeper than the surface and probed the secrets of imperial power. The point that Tacitus was making - and presumably Gallus as well - was affirmed by Tiberius in his response:
It was a matter disagreeable to his modesty to reward and disappoint so many. It was scarcely possible to avoid offense in a single year, even though one year’s disappointment could be made good the next: how much greater would the offense be to men who were put off beyond the five year period? How was it possible to foresee what the mental capacity, family situation and fortune of each man would be so far in advance? Men became arrogant even when they were designated for office a year in advance: what would happen if they had the office for five years? The number of magistrates would be quintupled, the laws stipulated the time for exercising the industry expected of candidates for soliciting or enjoying preferment would be subverted. (Ann. 2.36.2-3)
Tiberius was being rather more clear than Tacitus allows (he said that Tiberius was concealing the secret of power through his refusal of the proposal). An emperor was bound by his word, just as Tiberius says. Once he had made an appointment he was expected to live up to it. To grant favors so far in advance would do precisely what Tiberius said it would do: it would enable people to take preferment for granted. As Gallus realized, the Augustan system meant that members of the aristocracy had to compete for the emperor’s favor in order to gain further office. The point of the Augustan creation of a host of new positions reserved only for senators of a certain rank was to transfer the arbitration of senatorial success from the Roman people to the emperor. Members of the Senate plainly found the long periods between offices in which they would be expected to prove themselves, over and over again, tedious. In 16 CE when Gallus made this motion, Tiberius was only in the third year of his reign, and men may already have been finding it difficult to discern what his mood would be. His managerial style was different from that of Augustus, who was notably accessible to members of the upper class. Tiberius was less open, and seemed prone to take offense. It was also the case, in the wake of the massive disaster that the Roman army under Varus had suffered in Germany at the end of 9 ce, that any job as a legionary legate was likely to be especially dangerous. The danger was compounded by the fact that Germanicus Caesar, the emperor’s adoptive son was, with erratic success, commanding a third of the army in Germany, an army that had mutinied two years before; another significant portion of the army, now commanded by the emperor’s biological son, Drusus, had mutinied at the same time. By appointing young men to legionary commands, Tiberius was asking a great deal of them, and Gallus was simply asking that he recognize this by relieving them of the additional fear that some failure would not end their careers. What Gallus was asking was typical of what the slaves in the Life of Aesop asked of their masters: that they set reasonable expectations, that they establish clear rules, and that they abide by them. It was true in an even broader way that these slaves might share with their masters (tacitly) an understanding that their sense of self-worth and future prospects were out of their control if these rules did not exist.
The speech that Tacitus attributes to Tiberius gets at the heart of senatorial selfunderstanding in yet another way, for the Tacitean Tiberius seems aware that office holding and preferment define the self-worth of the individual. Disgruntled men who are passed over were no figment of the imagination. For some, of course, a career that ended with the praetorship could be a very fine thing. It seems to have been so for Velleius Paterculus who saw the joint nomination of himself and his brother to that office in 14 ce by Augustus as a great moment (Vell. Pat. 2.124.4). For others, as Werner Eck has shown in a masterful treatment of the evolution of senatorial selfunderstanding, inscriptions commemorating a career through detailed enumeration of offices attested to the importance of each rung on the ladder (Eck 1984). Such texts were unknown in the republic; their style might have been inspired by the elogia that Augustus had inscribed on the bases of the statues of the ‘‘greatest men’’ in Roman history with which he decorated his forum. But the Augustan decision to inscribe memorials of the dead in this way can only go so far in explaining the habit of the living to make sure that the same was done for them. There could be no greater disgrace than to have one’s name removed from records of one’s accomplishments. Thus it was that erasure, virtually unknown to the republic, became a regular feature of penalties stemming from the declaration of the condemned as an enemy of the state. The point of an erasure was not simply to eliminate a monument - this could more readily be done by destruction and/or reinscription without the offending name. It was rather to leave a memorial of the fact of the disgrace in public places.
To the senatorial mind the holding of offices, if successfully accomplished, should necessarily entail imperial respect. The virtues of the senator were hard work and frugality. They earned their offices by working at the jobs that were necessary to learn their craft. There was something wrong if they did not. Dio notes that Avidius Cassius, who briefly led a revolt against Marcus Aurelius, was a good man in every way, save that his father, Heliodorus, had achieved the prefecture of Egypt (one of the highest posts available to an equestrian) as a reward for his oratorical talent alone (72.22.2). Contrast the brothers Quintilius Condianus and Quintilius Maximus who ‘‘had the greatest fame for learning, military skill, mutual affection and wealth’’ (73.5.3). He admired Clodius Pompeianus, a man so respected by Marcus that he allowed him to marry his widowed daughter Lucilla, formerly wife of Marcus’ co-emperor, Lucius Verus. Even Commodus at his worst had to respect him. Pompeianus alone refused to attend the ludi Romani in which Commodus acted the part of both a beast hunter (venator) and gladiator on the grounds that he could not bear to see a son of Marcus act that way (73.21.1). Cassius Dio did go to the games and noted a colossal breakdown in the mutual respect owed the Senate by the emperor and vice-versa. Commodus waved the head of an ostrich at the portion of the stands occupied by the Senate, suggesting that he could do to them what he had done to the ostrich. Disgraceful as the emperor’s conduct may have been, it would have been wrong - dangerous in Dio’s view - to laugh at him (73.21.2). When Commodus was murdered, his successor, Pertinax, himself a senator whose ability enabled him to rise to the highest rank despite the fact that his grandfather had been a slave, displayed the appropriate conduct. He brought Clodius Pompeianus to the
Senate - Dio records that this was the only time that he actually saw the great man in the flesh - and treated him with honor (74.3.2-4). Just as Commodus had to allow Pompeianus to offer him a moderate insult (Pompeianus did at least send his sons to the ludi Romani to avoid a total rupture in the relationship) because of his standing, so too were all emperors supposed to be governed by the collective judgment of merit. Tacitus tells of a moment in 21 CE when Sextus Pompeius, consul in 14 CE, tried to have Manius Lepidus removed from the lottery for the provinces of Africa and Asia on the ground that his personal life made him unworthy of the office - but the Senate opposed him because the majority took a different view (Ann. 3.32.2). Tiberius respected the view of the Senate and let Lepidus stand for Asia. Lots for these provincial offices were now cast for only one man at a time: the rank of the province was supposed to match the collective judgment of the worth of the man.
The issue of one’s right to office remained important for centuries after Tiberius. In the brief reign of Macrinus (217-18 ce), Dio tells of Domitius Florus, ‘‘who should by right have been appointed aedile’’ and was deprived of all hope because he had been too close to Plautianus. Plautianus had been praetorian prefect and chief advisor to Severus, before he was suddenly deprived of his office and life on a bogus charge of conspiracy. In 217, 12 years after the fall of Plautianus, Florus finally achieved the next rank on the ladder of preferment - a tribunate of the plebs. Both he and the men who supported his claim clearly cared deeply about this (79.22.2). Severus’ judgment was felt to have been unfair. In another case, however, Severus’ judgment plainly conformed to the general opinion. Severus had passed over a man named Anicius Faustus when he was eligible to become governor of Asia. Dio says that Macrinus offered a terrible affront to Julius Asper when he appointed Faustus in Asper’s place. Asper had been twice consul and previously governed the province of Africa. Since two emperors had judged him worthy of the highest offices, and his peers agreed that he deserved them, Macrinus had no business demoting him. Furthermore, since he had so fouled up the appointment process, he allowed Faustus a second year to make up for the short term. This meant that he had to deny the office to Aufidius Fronto, who had been appointed to the post by Caracalla. Worse still, he tried to mollify Fronto by offering him the salary that would have gone with the job, a million sesterces, to stay at home. Fronto refused, saying that he wanted the office rather than the money (79.22.3). Equestrian offices - Macrinus had never been a senator - were graded by salary, and Macrinus clearly thought that the gift of the salary would stand for the office. This was a clear sign to Dio that Macrinus simply did not understand how senators thought.
To achieve distinction was no easy thing. Dio makes it plain that a senator needed both to be respected by his peers and to have that respect recognized by the ruler. Their lives were filled with constant testing, and occasionally desperate balancing acts between the interests of class and those of the ruler. To prosecute another senator on a potentially capital charge was a very dangerous thing. It could gain the favor of an emperor who was interested in making sure that his subjects were well ruled, but it could alienate colleagues who realized that the government of a province was fraught with social peril. The jurist Ulpian, who wrote a handbook on how to govern a province, quoted the emperor Septimius Severus as advising that a governor should not remain aloof from his subjects, but that he should be careful when taking gifts: neither everything, nor all the time, nor from everyone (D. 2.6.3). Ulpian elsewhere stresses both that the governor is second only to the emperor in the province, and that he is constrained to respect his subjects in a wide range of official and semiofficial interactions. If a man put his foot wrong too many times, he could be ruined. As Maud Gleason suggests, ‘‘mutual suspicion and the power imbalance tended to poison relations between the governors and the governed.’’ Furthermore, as Clifford Ando shows, mutual suspicion was compounded by the tendency of local elites to try and draw the imperial authorities into disputes where they had very little background, and where the support staff would be totally inadequate to find out everything that needed to be known.
The issues for locals who felt that they were being oppressed, and for senators who had to adjudicate their complaints, were often very different. For senators, trials raised questions not only of proper moral behavior, but also of the standing of the body as a whole. Even in the case of a man whom all could see was guilty, senators had to be careful not to be seen to be ‘‘piling on,’’ lest it look like they were currying favor rather than doing their job: if a man was guilty it was sufficient simply to make the case; people need not line up to acquire credit by adding their redundant voices to the prosecution. This would seem to be the point that Tacitus made in describing the trial of Gaius Silanus, a former governor of Asia. The man was plainly guilty of brutality and corruption, ‘‘but many things were piled on that would have been dangerous even to an innocent man’’ (Ann. 3.67.2). Tacitus’ point was not that Silanus should have been released, but that the feeding frenzy was excessive. Tacitus knew well of what he spoke: he was the prosecutor in the case of Marius Priscus, a notoriously corrupt governor of Africa (Pliny Ep. 2.11).
The danger inherent in overstepping the bounds of propriety are evident in a letter that the younger Pliny wrote about his prosecution of Caecilius Classicus for corruption as governor of Baetica. Pliny goes to great lengths to show that he was not a willing participant in the action. First of all the province, remembering his service as prosecutor of Baebius Massa, a previous governor, whom Pliny claimed was even worse than Priscus, asked him to serve. Pliny’s colleagues in the prefecture of the treasury, a post-praetorian office he was then holding, told him not to touch the case. Although Pliny does not say as much, this would have been three prosecutions in three years, possibly giving the impression that he liked this sort of thing. Then, however, the Senate passed a decree saying that Pliny should be prosecutor, which got him off the hook for being too willing. Finally, he adds, there were two other considerations. One was that having been a patron of the province he had to continue doing so, ‘‘for it is well known that you undercut earlier favors, if you do not add new ones to them. For, no matter how often you are asked, if you deny just one request, the only thing people remember is what you refused to do’’ (Ep. 3.4.6). Finally, Pliny notes that there was an advantage in that the defendant was dead, ‘‘and thus was removed that which is most pitiful in cases of this sort: the peril of a senator’’ (Ep. 2.4.7).
Pliny’s comments reflect yet another concern that afflicted senators in the struggle to maintain reputation and influence. They were expected to act as patrons for people coming up behind them. Patronage was anything but a one act show. As Pliny says, once you start doing favors, you have to continue to do so, or your clients will complain that you aren’t doing your job. People had to be seen to be supporting other good people. It was through the process of recommendation that a record of senatorial opinion was constructed. In some cases we know that efforts at patronage failed. We have, for instance, a letter of the younger Pliny asking Trajan to grant the latus clavus to an equestrian named Voconius Romanus. He had previously asked this favor of Nerva and been turned down on the ground that Voconius was not rich enough. Nerva had noted that he would agree once Voconius had received an inheritance of 400,000 sesterces from his mother. This had come through and Pliny was trying again (Ep. 10.4). Pliny also asked that Trajan grant Alexandrian citizenship to his masseur, a man to whom Trajan had already granted Roman citizenship (Ep. 10.6). Trajan responds that he will do this once Pliny follows the proper form (Ep. 10.7; 10). When he was governor of Bithynia, Pliny asked an old friend of equestrian rank to join his staff because he was keen to have the help of experienced men in a province with a long history of prosecuting its governors. In repayment for the favor, this friend appears to have asked Pliny to see if he could speed up his son’s promotion to the rank of military tribune, enabling him to aspire to a senatorial career. Pliny writes to Trajan that he is not alone in supporting this young man, that the man’s commanders when he was prefect of a cavalry cohort thought he was a good officer (Ep. 10.87). In another case, Pliny asks Trajan to grant the privileges accorded the father of three children to Suetonius Tranquillus, the future biographer of the Caesars (for the technical aspects of this request see Evans Grubbs, this volume). Pliny is quite specific that Suetonius has married, but that he and his wife have been unable to have the requisite number of children. As Trajan makes plain in granting the request, this is not something that he usually does, and it is clear that if Suetonius had not met the minimum qualification of having been unfortunate in his efforts to have a family, this would have been a non-starter (Ep. 10.94-5). In each case therefore we can see that favors could only be asked within reason, that a person could ordinarily hope only to advance a certain distance with each request and that he had to have preliminary qualifications if the request were to be successful.
Pliny’s relationship with Suetonius raises a further complexity in the business of patronage. Years earlier, Pliny had sought a military tribunate for Suetonius from Neratius Marcellus when the latter was governor of Britain in 103. The request was granted, but Suetonius decided that he did not want the office and asked Pliny to get it transferred to a man named Caesennius Silanus (Ep. 3.8). In other words, Suetonius was using Pliny’s connections to build his own patronage network. But Suetonius would not stop there. In the first years of the reign of Hadrian he became the emperor’s secretary in charge of answering letters in Latin, a far more influential position than Pliny would ever hold. It looks very much as if Pliny’s patronage of Suetonius was a relationship that could potentially have benefited Pliny more than it benefited Suetonius, since the latter would some day be in a position to do greater favors for Pliny. As soon as we cease to assume that promotion within the empire was governed by rules, and assume instead that it was part of a process of establishing reputations for both patron and client, we begin to gain further insight into the dynamic process by which members of the upper class acquired status. The interest in procedure and precedent that is evident in these relationships is very much a feature of the cast of mind that Matthews detects in the officials who created Roman law. As Gleason, Edmondson, and Ando all show in their very different ways, these relationships affected not only individuals, but whole communities. We might extend this analogy somewhat further to the literary studies contributed to this volume by Sara Myers, Rowland Smith, and Joseph Rife, for they all show us how imperial authors and their audiences dealt with existing traditions to create something new. The interest in the creative handling of precedent enabled the creation of fresh visions of the past, and new forms of pleasure, as discussed by Garrett Fagan and myself in our contributions on leisure and spectacle. It is by seeing connections between modes of conduct in areas that often seem quite distinct from each other that the subject is now advancing. In a sense the history of the governing class is not so much fading away as changing to allow us to visualize broader forms of social and intellectual relationships within the empire.
World History
