2-2. Two Augusti, Two Caesars
Centralisation brought into existence with its growth a vast bureaucracy. The organisation of the Imperial side of the administration, as opposed to the Senatorial, became more and more complex, while the importance of the Senate in the administrative machinery continually lessened. The expansion and organisation of the executive engaged the attention of many emperors, particularly Claudius, Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, and Septimius Severus. When the chaos of the third century had been overcome, Diocletian and his successors were compelled to reconstruct the whole service of the Empire, and a great network of officials, bearing for the most part new titles and largely undertaking new functions, was spread over it.
Along with the development of absolutism and the extension of bureaucracy, and the unification of administration had gone certain tendencies which had cut deeply into the constitution of society at largo. The boundaries between class and class tended more and more to become fixed and impassable. As the Empire decayed society stiffened, and some approximations were made to the oriental institution of caste. Augustus had tried to give a rigid organisation to the circle from which senators were drawn, and had constituted it as an order of nobility passing down from father to son, only to be slowly recruited by imperial choice. Many duties owed to the State tended to become hereditary, and it was made difficult for men to rid themselves of the status which they acquired at birth. The exigencies of finance made membership of the local senates in the municipalities almost impossible to escape. The frontier legions, partly by encouragement and partly by ordinance, were largely filled with sons of the camp. Several causes, the chief of which was the financial system, gave rise to a kind of serfdom (colonatus) which at first attached the cultivators of the soil, and as time went on, approximated to a condition of actual slavery. The provisioning of the great capitals, Rome and Constantinople, and the transportation of goods on public account, rendered occupations connected with them hereditary. And many inequalities between classes became pronounced. The criminal law placed the honestiores and the tenuiores in different categories.
The main features of the executive government as organised by Diocletian and his successors, must now be briefly described. For the first time the difference between the prevalently Latin West and the prevalently Greek East was clearly reflected in the scheme of administration. Diocletian ordained in 286 that two Augusti with equal authority should share the supreme power, one making his residence in the Eastern, the other in the Western portion. The Empire was not formally divided between them; they were to work together for the benefit of the whole State. This association of Augusti was not exactly new; but it had never been before formalised so completely.
The separation of West from East had been foreshadowed from the early days of the Empire. In the first century it had been found necessary to have a Greek Secretary of State (a libellis Graecis) as well as a Latin Secretary (a libellis Latinis). The civilisation of the two spheres, in spite of much interaction, remained markedly different. The municipal life of the Eastern regions in which Greek influence predominated was fixed in its characteristics before the Romans acquired their ascendancy, and the impression they made on it was not on the whole great. But they spread their own municipal institutions all over Western lands. Although Diocletian's arrangement of the two Augusti was overthrown by Constantine, the inherent incompatibility between the two sections of the Empire continued to assert itself, and the separation became permanent in fact if not in form on the death of Theodosius. The establishment of Constantinople as the capital rendered the ultimate severance inevitable.
Another problem which Diocletian attacked was that of the succession to the throne, in 293. Each Augustus was to have assigned to him a Caesar who would assist him in the task of government and succeed him on his retirement or death. The transference of power would thus be peaceful and the violent revolutions caused by the claims of the legions to nominate emperors would cease. But in the nature of things this device could not prosper. The Empire followed the course it had taken from the beginning. The dynastic principle strove time after time to establish itself, but dynasties were ever threatened with catastrophe, such as had ensued on the deaths of Nero, of Commodus, and of Severus Alexander.
But new emperors frequently did homage to heredity by a process of posthumous and fictitious adoption, whereby they grafted themselves on to the line of their predecessors. Apparently even this phantom of legitimacy had some value for the effect it produced on the public mind.
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