THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 013
The Reorganization of the Empire
2-1. The Reorganization of the Empire
It is natural to think of Diocletian as the projector and of Constantine as the completer of a new system of government for the Roman Empire, which persisted with mere changes of detail until it was laid in ruins by the barbarians. But in reality the imperial institutions from the time of Augustus onwards had passed through a course of continuous development. Diocletian did but accelerate processes which had been in operation from the Empire's earliest days, and Constantine left much for his successors to accomplish. Still these two great organisers did so far change the world which they ruled as to be rightly styled the founders of a new type of monarchy. We will first sketch rapidly the most striking aspects of this altered world, and then consider them one by one somewhat more closely. But our survey must be in the main of a general character, and many details, especially when open to doubt, must be passed over. In particular, the minutiae of chronology, which in this region of history are specially difficult to determine, must often be disregarded.
The ideal of a balance of power between the Princeps and the Senate, which Augustus dangled before the eyes of his contemporaries, was never approached in practice. From the first the imperial constitution bore within it the seed of autocracy, and the plant was not of slow growth. The historian Tacitus was not far wrong when he described Augustus as having drawn to himself all the functions which in the Republic had belonged to magistrates and to laws. The founder of the Empire had studied well the art of concealing his political art, but the pressure of his hand was felt in every corner of the administration. Each princeps was as far above law as he chose to rise, so long as he did not strain the endurance of the Senate and people to the point of breaking. When that point was passed there was the poor consolation of refusing him his apotheosis, or of branding with infamy his memory. As the possibility of imperial interference was ever present in every section of the vast machine of government, all concerned in its working were anxious to secure themselves by obtaining an order from above. This anxiety is conspicuous in the letters written by Pliny to his master Trajan.
Even those emperors who were most citizen-like (civiles as the phrase went) were carried away by the tide. Tacitus exhibits the Senate as eagerly pressing Tiberius to permit the enlargement of his powers — Tiberius who regarded every precept of Augustus as a law for himself. The so-called lex regia Vespasiani shews how constantly the admitted authority of the emperor advanced by the accumulation of precedents. Pliny gave Trajan credit for having reconciled the Empire with "liberty"; but "liberty" had come to mean little more than orderly and benevolent administration, free from cruel caprice, with some external deference paid to the Senate. Developed custom made the rule of Marcus Aurelius greatly more despotic than that of Augustus. Even the emperors of the third century who, like Severus Alexander, made most of the Senate, could not turn back the current.
It was long, however, before the subjects of the Empire realised that the ancient glory had departed. Down to the time of the Emperor Tacitus pretenders found their account in posing as senatorial champions, and rulers used the Senate's name as a convenient screen for their crimes. But the natural outcome of the anarchy of the third century was the unveiled despotism of Diocletian. He was the last in a line of valiant soldiers sprung from Illyrian soil, who accomplished the rescue of Rome from the dissolution with which it had been threatened by forces without and by forces within. To him more than to Aurelian, on whom it was bestowed, belonged by right the title "restorer of the world."
For three centuries the legions had been a standing menace to the very existence of Graeco-Roman civilisation. They made emperors and unmade them, and devoured the substance of the State, exacting continually lavish largess at the sword's point. One hope of Diocletian when, following in the steps of Aurelian, he hedged round the throne with pomp and majesty, was that a new awe might shield the civil power from the lawless soldiery. In place of an Augustus, loving to parade as a bourgeois leader of the people, there comes a kind of Sultan, with trappings such as the men of the West had been used to associate with the servile East, with the Persians and Parthians. The ruler of the Roman world wears the oriental diadem, the mere dread of which had brought Caesar to his end. He is approached as a living god with that adoration from which the souls of the Greeks revolted when they came into the presence of the Great King, though Alexander bent them to endure it. Eunuchs are among his greatest officers. Lawyers buttress his throne with an absolutist theory of the constitution which is universally accepted.
From Augustus to Diocletian the trend of the government towards centralisation had been incessant. The new monarchy gave to the centralisation an intensity and an elaboration unknown before. In the early days of conquest, whether within Italy or beyond its boundaries, the Roman power had attempted no unification of its dominions. As rulers, the Romans had shewn themselves thorough opportunists. They tolerated great varieties of local privilege and partial liberty. Their government had followed, almost timidly, the line of least resistance, and had adapted itself to circumstance, to usage, and to prejudice in every part of the Empire. Even taxation had been elastic. Before the age of despotism, few matters had ever been regulated by one unvarying enactment for every province. To this great policy the Romans chiefly owed the rapidity of their successes and the security of their ascendancy. The tendency towards unity was of course manifest from the first. But it sprang far less from the direct action of the central government than from the instinctive and unparalleled attraction which the Roman institutions possessed for the provincials, particularly in the West.
In part by the extension of Roman and Italian rights to the provinces, in part by the gradual depression of Italy to the level of a province, and in part by interference designed to correct misgovernment, local differences were to a great extent effaced. Septimius Severus by stationing a legion in Italy removed one chief distinction between that favoured land and the subject regions outside. Under his successor, Caracalla, all communities within the Empire became alike Roman. By Diocletian and by Constantine, control from the centre was made systematic and organic. Yet absolute uniformity was not attained. In taxation, in legal administration, and in some other departments of government, local conditions still induced some toleration of diversities.
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I thought this was supposed to be medieval history.