“betters” and for heredity, which was one of the reasons for the longevity of the Roman Empire. When the Julio-Claudian line ended with Nero, after a three-fold hiccup a new dynasty of the Flavians was briefly established by Vespasian and then from the accession of Nerva in 96 until the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 a succession of “good emperors” was attainable thanks to adoption. None of these “good emperors” had sons of their own, but Marcus Aurelius was succeeded by his son Commodus, who unfortunately was not in his father’s mould. Commodus’s assassination in 192 was followed, after two more brief hiccups, by the Severan dynasty, which remained in power until 235. The next half century saw a large number of emperors taking power until the accession of Diocletian in 284, which introduced what modern historians call the “Dominate.”
Here is a bird’s-eye view of some major developments leading from the Principate to the Dominate (See Arnheim 1972, p. 21 ff.):
Before long, consuls appear to have been directly appointed by the emperor. (Tacitus, Histories, 1.772, 2.71.3);
Starting in the early Principate, the Senate’s financial control was gradually eliminated. As an institution, the Senate was a mere cipher, happy to humor the emperor’s every whim. But the same does not apply to senators as individuals. For, though some important posts were now held by equestrians or even by freedmen (especially under Claudius), the great majority of high imperial appointments continued to be reserved for senators until the second half of the third century. But senatorial status was in the emperor’s gift, and emperors continually brought new blood into the Senate as we have seen. So the fact that most provincial governors were senators did not mean that these posts were reserved for the scions of old families;
In the course of the third century, the old traditional framework was gradually abandoned, until by the end of the century, only very few posts of importance were open to senators. The tendency now was to bypass the Senate by appointing non-senators directly to a governorship without bothering to make them senators first;
An ambiguous passage in Aurelius Victor has given rise to the belief that senators were deprived of military commands from the reign of Gallienus (260–68) onward (Aurelius Victor, 33 f., 37.5–6);
Be that as it may, a number of non-military provinces also experienced a change from senatorial to equestrian governors;
But while equestrians moved into the erstwhile preserves of senators, there was no movement the other way to produce Lambrechts’s fabled “fusion” of the two orders (Lambrechts 1937, 107ff);
This process culminated in the reign of Diocletian, who may justifiably lay claim to the title “Hammer of the Aristocracy”, as I dubbed him in my book, The Senatorial Aristocracy in the Later Roman Empire (Arnheim 1972);
The powers of the emperor are neatly summarised by Cassius Dio, who agrees with Ulpian that the emperor was above the law (Cassius Dio, 53.17.1, 18.1);
Imperial trappings became increasingly grand. Nero was shown in his lifetime wearing the radiate crown of the sun, a symbol of divinity, on some of his coins. In the late third century, this gave way to the jewelled diadem of the sun-god;
By the third century, an oath by the emperor’s genius was considered more binding than one by the gods;
Everything connected with the emperor was given the epithet sacrum (sacred or holy); and
Under Diocletian, the imperial court was well and truly decked out in Oriental trappings and an aura of cool aloofness on the one hand and abject self-abasement on the other pervaded everything.
Section B. Two Disquieting Tendencies
There are two disquieting opposite tendencies current among writers on ancient history. One tendency is of undue negativity, what may be called the pooh-pooh mindset, dismissing out of hand ancient evidence, sometimes relating to whole periods. The danger here is that one may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The opposite tendency is one of excessive uncritical acceptance of certain ancient evidence. The danger here is even greater, resulting as it may in a distorted or even completely false image of the period concerned. Though this tendency is the diametric opposite of the pooh-pooh tendency, the two tendencies sometimes coexist, surprisingly enough, even in the works of the same writer.
“The Fourth Century and the ‘Conflict of the Orders’ Belong in the Realm of Myth.”
Much of the early history of Rome is based on tradition. But does that entitle us to dismiss it out of hand? T.J. Cornell’s The Beginnings of Rome (1995), covering the period down to 264 BCE, has been criticized for adopting a “too trusting and overly optimistic” attitude to the ancient source material. (Forsythe 2005, p. 4.) At the opposite extreme from Cornell is Fergus Millar, who opines, “So far as ‘real’ history goes, we should forget the earlier Republic, and begin where contemporary evidence begins, in the time of Hannibal.” (Millar 2002, p. 85 f.) Hannibal lived from 247 to about 182 BCE and fought Rome in the Second Punic War, which lasted from 218 to 203 BCE. Millar continues, “The fourth century and the ‘conflict of the orders’ belong in the realm of myth. Yet so apparently purist a decision will not really do either.”—and so, he charitably stretches the period of “real” history two or three generations further back to allow for “collective memory.”
Conflict of the Orders
Millar condemns as a “circular” definition this conclusion by Christian Meier as quoted by Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp (2010) about the aristocratic monopoly of office in the Republic: “Whoever played a part in politics belonged to the aristocracy, and whoever belonged to the aristocracy played a part in politics.” (Millar, Ibid., 94.) In fact, it is not circular at all. A parallel would be to say something like this: Any animal with a single horn on its head is a unicorn, and every unicorn has a single horn on its head. In other words, the class of animals with a single horn is closed. If you come across an animal with a single horn, you know that it must be a unicorn. And, if you come across a unicorn, you know it must have a single horn on its head. In other words, the two classes, that of unicorns and that of single-horned animals are coextensive.
This is not at all illogical. In fact, there are two aristocratic models that contrast with it. It is quite possible, for example, to have a society where political office is reserved to only certain aristocratic families or individuals while other aristocrats are left outside the magic circle. It is also possible for an aristocracy to be open, so that, while all or most of its members are engaged in politics, outsiders are not excluded. This latter model is actually a better fit for the Roman Republic than Meier’s closed model because novi homines, or “new men,” were able to gain admission to the dominant elite from an early date.
According to persistent tradition, at some time in the early Republic, a protracted Conflict of the Orders broke out between the patricii (patricians) and the plebeii (plebeians). Some modern writers have suggested an ethnic distinction between the two orders. Livy more plausibly identifies the patricians, the dominant elite in the early Republic, as descendants of the original senators appointed by Romulus. (Livy 1.8.) In the absence of evidence, it would be idle to speculate on the origins of the two groups.
But that should not prevent us from accepting the historicity of a conflict between the ruling elite and an element of the population excluded from power. It would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater to agree with Fergus Millar in consigning the fourth century (BCE) and the Conflict of the Orders to the realm of myth, as cited above. (Millar
