Albino Garzetti - From Tiberius to the Antonines (Routledge Revivals): A History of the Roman Empire AD 14-192

THE
JULIO-CLAUDIAN
DYNASTY

The death of Augustus, after forty-five years of personal power and fifty-seven years from the day when he had accepted the legacy of Caesar, was not to pose any problem of succession from a practical point of view. The care he had taken during his lifetime, right from the earliest days of his principate, to put a member of his family constantly in the limelight, with the clear implication that this person was marked out to succeed him, shows how he himself regarded it as natural both that the system he had founded should continue notwithstanding the provisional character with which he deliberately endowed it by clothing it in legal fictions and in particular that the principate should remain in his own family. Moreover, it must have appeared natural to the Senate and people of Rome, to Italy and to the provinces. After almost half a century of the new rgime, the mere fact that people were now accustomed to it was sufficient to remove it from the realm of discussion, if only because it was a lesser evil than the troubled conditions prevailing previously. If we add to this the advantages of a peaceful life in an order of things in which the prestige and personal tact of Augustus had managed to overcome mistrust and satisfy sensibilities, it is easy to see why a solid base of universal consent henceforth sustained the Augustan principate, even in its evolution towards the revelation of its own true nature, that of an ever more clearly marked despotism. That the rgime should revert to a struggle between factions, thus renouncing the very element which had finally reduced the latter to silence, was quite unthinkable and far from anyones wish. We must not fall into the error of introducing into this context of facts and judgements the concept of freedom as we understand it today. Cicero (De Rep., II, 43) had said, it is true, that a people which is under a king lacks many things, in primis freedom, which does not consist in being under a just lord, but in being under no lord at all: but in Ciceros eyes Augustus would not have ranked as a king. In the political atmosphere officially promoted by Augustus, with its resurrection of republicanism and rehabilitation of Pompey, Catos freedom could be commemorated and honoured with impunity by anyone who wished to do so. The great families who now made their influence felt in the state by serving the monarchy, as they had made it felt before with bigger risks in the framework of the oligarchy, were not going to exchange the certainty of present dignity for the uncertain return to a situation which would have only been the starting-point of a new struggle for supremacy. As for the population of Rome and the empire as a whole, the problem did not even arise. The principate was henceforth firmly established, both in form and substance, as the product of the long process of development which had led it, under the shrewd and attentive eye of its founder, from the original usurpation of power to a de facto legitimacy founded in the unanimous view of all on the superhuman primacy of the auctoritas, and to the de jure legitimacy of the restoration of the republic. But apart from its constitutional characteristics the structure built up by Augustus was made to last because, realistically, its architect had seen it as an essentially administrative structure. The remote but fundamental cause of the Roman revolution, at any rate from the period of the great Mediterranean conquests onward, had been the inadequacy of the government of the city-state when confronted with the demands of a world empire. Hence the republics evolution governed by the needs that arose on the way, guided by the typically Roman law of empiricism and checked by the powerful rein of tradition into the principate and the rgime of Augustus, who, with his genius for practical organization, utilizing all the preceding experiences and devoting to the business of government a constant personal attention which to us seems wonderful and is in fact the principal aspect of his greatness, completed and concluded the long process after his final victory in the Civil War.