not to weaken but to temper her strength, and to quicken it to fresh achievements. But in this amazing development there had been no corresponding adjustment of her constitution.1 She still maintained the antique forms of the old city-state, forms continually transgressed or disregarded, but still in theory inviolate. A municipality attempted to govern half the world, and a most curious and delicately balanced municipality at that. The extension of her boundaries had been achieved rather by accident than by design, for it was her desire to be secure in Italy that had forced an empire into her reluctant hands. Her settled policy had always been anti-expansionist, which explains her slowness to revise her mechanism of government.
In that government the cardinal principle, since the Law of the Twelve Tables, was the sovereignty of the Roman people. But the people were only the ultimate authority, and they reigned rather than governed—inevitably, since in practice they meant only the half-million dwellers within the city boundaries. Their power lay in the choice of magistrates, and the actual work of government was in the hands of these magistrates, and of the Senate which represented the collective wisdom and the essential tradition of Rome. The old distinction of patrician and plebeian had now little meaning; the new aristocracy was a nobility of office, made up of those families which had held high posts in the state. The aversion of such a body to foreign conquests is intelligible enough when it is remembered that a new province meant an additional governor, and that an increase in magistrates by swelling its numbers diminished its exclusive pride and effective control.2
Destiny proved too strong for the Senate, and undesired conquests tumbled into its lap, for there was in Rome a fierce instinct of growth which defied limits. It made halting efforts to preserve its ancient prestige. The number of praetors was increased, and the system of promagistracies enabled it to give the existing officers double duties. But this did not solve the problem, for the number of foreign governorships soon exceeded the desired quota. If human ingenuity fails in an urgent task, fate may take a hand. There was still a residuum of power in the Roman Assembly, and in a crisis which seriously affected them the Roman people could insist on appointing some favourite general or politician to a special and overruling command. With this innovation the Republic in its strict sense came to an end. The new empire had grown too big and too difficult for the old machine. When the Senate or People appointed a great man to meet some urgent need and gave him an army, the ancient governance was sapped in its foundations. An emergency expedient, tacked on to the old forms, proved more potent than them all.
These were facts which every thinking Roman of the day admitted. A vast empire had been unwillingly won, an empire of which the natural frontiers were recognized as destined sooner or later to be the Atlantic, the African desert, the Euphrates, the Danube, and the Rhine. In the East there was the menace of Parthia, and the thunder-cloud of the Germanic peoples hung darkly in the North. Inside the Roman bounds many of the provinces were muttering volcanoes. No serious mechanism of provincial government had been evolved. There was no permanent civil service. The governors were changed annually, and it depended wholly on their individual characters whether their terms of office were equitable or oppressive. The revenues from the provinces, which were the chief source of Rome’s income, were farmed out to joint-stock companies of Roman capitalists. There was inadequate control by the Senate; indeed, the fact that money and men could be got from the provinces without the Senate’s authority was a direct peril to the Senate’s prestige. The Roman people had no craving for a dapper uniformity, and, being raw to the business, were content to accept any system that would work; “they value,” said one of their later historians, “the reality of empire and disregard its empty forms.”1 But some principles there must be, however elastic, and serious system there was none. “All the provinces are mourning,” Cicero told his countrymen; “all the free peoples are complaining. . . . The Roman people can no longer withstand . . . their complaints, their lamentations and their tears.”2
Rome herself had been for a century the arena of a struggle between the Optimates, the conservative nobility of office which desired to perpetuate the rule of the Senate, and the Populares, the radical reformers who sought change by the medium of the Assembly. Both claimed a constitutional warrant for their deeds; both consistently crashed through the fundamentals of the constitution. The chief weapon of both was the emergency appointment of a High Command, a special magistrate with dictatorial powers,3 a Sulla, a Pompey, a Caesar—always permissible in a crisis, but now a regular practice. The extreme medicine of the constitution, in Burke’s phrase, had become its daily bread. For four hundred years the centre of gravity had been in the Senate; now it was shifting no man could say whither. “The accretions of ages had changed a curious but comparatively simple type of polity into a jumble of constitutional law and custom, through which even the keen eyes of a Roman jurist could not pierce, and which even his capacity for fictitious interpretation and the invention of compromises could not reduce to a system.”4 But the theoretic anomaly mattered little compared with the practical breakdown. The Assembly could not govern at all, and the Senate, with the twin tasks of administering an empire and curbing the new democracy, failed in both. Slowly it was realized that the necessary reforms could only come from the quarter where the true power now resided—the High Command, the individual who had been given an overriding authority and had an army behind him.
It must come in the end to the sword—this the most pacific and legally-minded had been forced to admit. Between the conservatives who would not bow to the logic of facts, and the radicals who demanded changes which they did not clearly envisage, there was no hope of compromise. Armies, a new kind of army, had become the only arbiter. In old days every citizen had been a soldier, who served unpaid in the little wars. According to Livy, the protracted siege of Veii first compelled the payment of troops. The struggle with Carthage and the consequent Spanish wars inaugurated a long-service system; the defeat of Hannibal imposed on Rome the penalty of an empire, and grandiose campaigns for which the citizens were most unwillingly conscripted. Marius accordingly made the army a volunteer force, enlisted under a particular general for a particular campaign, and so fundamentally changed its character. The fortunes of the soldiers were now linked with those of their commander; he alone could procure them their due reward, and their loyalty was owed to him rather than to the state. A popular general who could raise men and attract their allegiance had a weapon so potent that it wholly upset the balance of the constitution. Rome had no standing army in Italy and only small forces in the provinces; when an emergency came an army had to be improvised; only a general of repute could get recruits, and for that service he could make his own terms. The Senate had no hold upon an army’s loyalty. The High Command, ever since distant wars began, had become a recognized part of the state machinery. Sulla, Pompey and Julius had revealed it as the major part. Was the ancient civic constitution destined to give way to a military satrapy?
Octavius—he was not for nothing the scion of banking stock—looked beyond the political conundrum to the economic problems of the land. These in the stress of wars and tumults had been forgotten, but they were there in the background, an eternal irritant. The Roman economy was unbalanced. The importation of cheap grain had ruined the old peasant proprietors. Some had turned successfully from wheat to olives and vines, but many had gone under, and what had once been arable land was now rough pasture, farmed by joint-stock companies or individual capitalists by means of slave labour. Rome was not self-supporting, and depended precariously for her food upon the continued command of the sea. The system of corn doles had pauperized her citizens. The city itself was a centre of world-wide financial operations—as a banker’s grandson he knew them well; the north side of the Forum was a nest of banks and stock exchanges; but her industrial life was meagre, and her commerce, at least in Roman hands, was on a narrow scale. The merchant had little purchase in the state, for he had never succeeded in getting the harbour at Ostia improved, and for his larger vessels was compelled to use Puteoli, a hundred and fifty miles away; while most people did not think him quite respectable. In a slave-owning society trade and industry are always at a discount. The public finance was grotesque. In Italy there was no direct taxation; the revenue came from the rents of public lands, the salt monopoly and one or two small duties: the bulk of the state income was provincial tribute collected on so preposterous a system that scarcely half of what the provincials paid came to the exchequer.
