Marcus Antonius and his camp.21 It was their adhesion to his cause, with the famous oath of allegiance sworn by ‘tota Italia’ in 32, which ensured the victory of Actium. It is significant that each of the three civil wars which determined the fate of the Republic followed the same geographical pattern: they were all won by the side which controlled the West, and lost by the party based on the East, despite its much greater wealth and resources. Pharsala, Philippi and Actium were all fought out in Greece, the advance-post of the defeated hemisphere. The dynamic centre of the Roman imperial system was shown once again to be in the Western Mediterranean. But whereas Caesar’s original territorial base had been the barbarian provinces of Gaul, Octavian forged his political bloc in Italy itself – and his victory proved in consequence less praetorian and more lasting.
The new Augustus garnered supreme power by uniting behind him the multiple forces of discontent and disintegration within the later Republic. He was able to rally the desperate urban plebs and weary peasant conscripts against a small and hated governing elite, whose opulent conservatism exposed it to ever greater popular contumely: and above all, he relied on the Italian provincial gentry who now sought their share of office and honour in the system which they had helped to build up. A stable, universal monarchy emerged from Actium, because it alone could transcend the narrow municipalism of the senatorial oligarchy in Rome. The Macedonian monarchy had been suddenly superimposed on a vast, alien continent and had failed to produce a unified ruling class to govern it post facto, despite Alexander’s possible awareness that this was the central structural problem it faced. The Roman monarchy of Augustus, by contrast, punctually arrived when its hour struck, neither too early nor too late: the critical passage from city-state to universal empire – the familiar cyclical transition of classical Antiquity – was accomplished with signal success under the Principate.
The most dangerous tensions of the later Republic were now lowered by a series of astute policies, designed to restabilize the whole Roman social order. First and foremost, Augustus provided allotments of land for the thousands of soldiers demobilized after the civil wars, financing many of them out of his personal fortune. These grants – like those of Sulla before them – were probably mostly at the expense of other small-holders, who were evicted to make room for home-coming veterans, and hence did little to improve the social situation of the peasantry as a whole or alter the general pattern of agrarian property in Italy;22 but they did effectively pacify the demands of the critical minority of the peasant class in arms, the key section of the rural population. Pay on active service had already been doubled by Caesar, an increase maintained under the Principate. More important still, from A.D. 6 onwards, veterans received regular cash bounties on discharge, worth thirteen years’ wages, which were paid out of a specially created military treasury financed by modest sales and inheritance taxes on the propertied classes of Italy. Such measures had been resisted to the death by the senatorial oligarchy, to their undoing: with the inauguration of the new system, discipline and loyalty returned to the army, which was trimmed from 50 to 28 legions, and converted into a permanent, professional force.23 The result was to make possible the most significant change of all: conscription was lifted by the time of Tiberius, thereby relieving the Italian small-holders of the secular burden that had provoked such widespread suffering under the Republic – probably a more tangible benefit than any of the land allotment schemes.
In the capital, the urban proletariat was calmed with distributions of corn that were allowed to rise again from their Caesarian levels, and which were now better assured since the incorporation of the granary of Egypt into the Empire. An ambitious building programme was launched, which provided considerable plebeian employment, and the municipal services of the city were greatly improved, by the creation of effective fire-brigades and water-supplies. At the same time, praetorian cohorts and urban police were henceforward always stationed in Rome to quell tumults. In the provinces, meanwhile, the random and unbridled extortions of the Republican tax-farmers – one of the worst abuses of the old regime – were phased out, and a uniform fiscal system composed of a land-tax and poll-tax, and based on accurate censuses, was instituted: the revenues of the central state were increased, while peripheral regions no longer suffered the pillage of publicans. Provincial governors were henceforward paid regular salaries. The judicial system was overhauled to expand its appellate facilities against arbitrary decisions very greatly, both for Italians and provincials. An imperial postal service was created to link the far-flung provinces of the Empire together for the first time with a regular communications system.24 Roman colonies and municipalities and Latin communities were planted in outlying zones, with a heavy concentration in the Western provinces. Domestic peace was restored after a generation of destructive civil strife, and with it provincial prosperity. On the frontiers, the successful conquest and integration of the critical corridors between East and West – Rhaetia, Noricum, Pannonia and Illyria – achieved the final geo-strategic unification of the Empire. Illyria, in particular, was henceforward the central military link of the imperial system in the Mediterranean.25
Within the new borders, the advent of the Principate meant the promotion of Italian municipal families into the ranks of the senatorial order and upper administration, where they now formed one of the bastions of Augustus’s power. The Senate itself ceased any longer to be the central authority in the Roman State: it was not deprived of power or prestige, but it was henceforward a generally obedient and subordinate tool of successive emperors, reviving politically only during dynastic disputes or interregna. But while the Senate as an institution became a stately shell of its former self, the senatorial order itself – now purged and renovated by the reforms of the Principate – continued to be the ruling class of the Empire, largely dominating the imperial state machine even after equestrian appointments became normal to a wider range of positions within it. Its capacity for cultural and ideological assimilation of newcomers to its ranks was remarkable: no representative of the old patrician nobility of the Republic ever gave such powerful expression to its outlook on the world as a once modest provincial from Southern Gaul under Trajan, Tacitus. Senatorial oppositionism survived for centuries after the creation of the Empire, in quiescent reserve or refusal of the autocracy installed by the Principate. Athens, which had known the most untrammelled democracy of the Ancient World, produced no important theorists or defenders of it. Paradoxically yet logically, Rome, which had never experienced anything but a narrow and oppressive oligarchy, gave birth to the most eloquent threnodies for freedom in Antiquity. There was no real Greek equivalent to the Latin cult of Libertas, intense or ironic in the pages of Cicero or Tacitus.26 The reason is evident from the contrasting structure of the two slave-owning societies. In Rome, there was no social conflict between literature and politics: power and culture were concentrated in a compact aristocracy under the Republic and the Empire. The narrower the circle that enjoyed the characteristic municipal freedom of Antiquity, the purer was the vindication of liberty it bequeathed to posterity, still memorable and formidable over fifteen hundred years later.
The senatorial ideal of libertas was, of course, suppressed and negated by the imperial autocracy of the Principate, and the resigned acquiescence of the propertied classes of Italy to the new dispensation, the alien visage of their own rule in the epoch to come. But it was never altogether cancelled, for the political structure of the Roman monarchy that now encompassed the whole Mediterranean world was never that of the Hellenistic monarchies of the Greek East which preceded it. The Roman imperial state rested on a system of civil laws, not mere royal caprice, and its public administration never interfered greatly with the basic legal framework handed down by the Republic. In fact, the Principate for the first time elevated Roman jurists to official positions within the State, when Augustus selected prominent jurisconsults for advisers and conferred imperial authority on their interpretations of the law. The Emperors themselves, on the other hand, were henceforward to legislate by edicts, adjudications and rescripts to questions or petitions from subjects. The development of an autocratic public law through imperial decretals, of course, rendered Roman legality much more complex and composite than it had been under the Republic. The political distance travelled from Cicero’s legum servi sumus ut liberi esse possimus (‘We obey laws in order to be free’) to Ulpian’s quod principi placuit legis habet vicem (‘The ruler’s will has force of law’) speaks for itself.27 But the key tenets of civil law – above all, those
