Chapter XXIX: The Empire and the Provinces (2)

It is in the nature of every monarchical system of government to bring all conditions into congruity, to smooth over the diversities which prevail among its subjects, and to impress the stamp of uniformity upon the whole state. This was the case in the organisation of both provinces and municipalities, for in spite of modifications of legal status they were all cut upon the same pattern and organised according to definite classes. The same thing took place in financial affairs and taxation. During the republican period Rome and Italy had enjoyed a privileged position, and foreign countries had been exploited for the advantage of the dominant race. The principate, on the contrary, endeavoured to bring about an equalisation of duties and contributions as well as of privileges. The customs dues, which formerly applied only to subject countries, were extended to Italy under the monarchy, part of the proceeds being allotted to the public revenue and part to the Italian municipalities; the property tax, from which Italy had been exempt in the later days of the republic, was likewise introduced throughout the empire on the basis of the census or rating of property; an excise duty was levied for the fiscus (imperial privy purse) upon all articles imported into Italy for sale, amounting to one per cent. of the price, and two or even four per cent. in the case of slaves; the twentieth part of every inheritance which did not fall by right to the next of kin had to be paid into the military treasury, and a tax was imposed on the manumission of slaves.

If the revenues of the state were increased by these means under the empire the improvement was mainly due to sounder financial administration, to the abolition of revenue farming for the regular land tax and property tax in subject countries, and to the strict control exercised over the tax-gatherers; and according to Gibbon’s estimate the annual revenue secured must have amounted to at least fifteen to twenty million pounds sterling [$75,000,000 to $100,000,000]. Even if five million pounds were spent on the army and navy, if the distributions of corn to the poor of the city swallowed a few millions more, and the salaries of the imperial officials in Rome and the provinces and the police expenditure disposed of no inconsiderable sum, the surplus was none the less sufficient to provide for the erection of magnificent buildings, to cover the empire with a network of highroads, to satisfy the popular love of spectacles by gorgeous entertainments, and to rejoice the hearts of citizens and soldiers with gifts and feasts.

The public buildings and pleasure grounds, the splendid private houses and villas, with which the republic had begun to adorn the capital and its environs, grew from year to year, and became ever vaster and more elaborate. The Forum of Augustus, with the temple of Mars the Avenger, the sanctuary of Jupiter Tonans on the lower slope of the Capitoline Hill, the white marble temple of Apollo on the Palatine, the temple of Quirinus on the Quirinal Hill, and others of the same character, were among the most splendid edifices in the city. Magnificent colonnades perpetuated the names of the wife, sister, and grandsons of Augustus; the number of temples restored by him is estimated at eighty-two.

The imperator’s example was imitated by his wealthy and powerful friends; Agrippa, whose services to the health and cleanliness of the city in the construction of the huge vaulted sewers (cloaca) have already been mentioned, perpetuated his name by a succession of magnificent gardens for the use and embellishment of Rome. He had two new aqueducts constructed, and he repaired the older ones that had fallen into decay; so that no town in the world had such an abundant supply of pure spring-water as ancient Rome, an advantage which the city enjoys to this day. He completed and adorned the Septa Julia which Cæsar had begun on the Field of Mars, for public assemblies and entertainments, and surrounded the space with three colossal and splendid edifices--the portico of Neptune, the Baths, and the Pantheon, the magnificent circular building in honour of Jupiter the Avenger and of Venus and Mars, the ancestors of the Julian family. Beams of bronze supported the domed roof with its gilded tiles, the walls and floor were lined and paved with marble. Even now the church of S. Maria Rotunda is among the most remarkable buildings of the city. The Diribitorium--the most spacious building ever constructed under one roof--where the populace received their corn allowance and voting tablets and the soldiery their pay, was the work of Agrippa.

Such was the constitution of the world-wide empire over which Augustus ruled as an absolute monarch with unlimited powers for forty-four years after the day of Actium. The frontier provinces were protected by standing armies, the members of which, collected from all countries and nationalities, had forsworn their native land and national spirit, and obeyed no orders but those of their military lord; the coasts were guarded by a well-manned fleet. On the Rhine eight legions (each consisting of 6100 foot and 726 horse) quartered in permanent camps, formed a strong bulwark against the Germans and kept Gaul under control; Spain was garrisoned by three legions; two were quartered in Africa, and an equal number watched over the safety of Egypt. Four legions maintained the supremacy of Rome in Syria and on the Euphrates; the Danubian provinces were guarded by six legions distributed through Mœsia, Pannonia, and Dalmatia. The eastern frontier being thus sufficiently protected by an army of occupation of 50,000 men, the banks of the Danube by a similar force of 70,000, and the Rhine district by 100,000; the fleets stationed in the harbours of Misenum, Ravenna, Forum Julii (Fréjus) and elsewhere kept the islands and maritime states under control and insured protection and security for commerce and traffic.

(Based on De Montfaucon)]

A regular system of tolls and taxes brought the public revenue into good condition and filled the ærarium and fiscus; a vigilant police force and fire brigade, which Augustus distributed through the fourteen divisions of the capital, maintained tranquillity and order, protected life and property from evil-disposed and malicious persons, and curbed the outbreak of savage passions. Huge aqueducts, solidly constructed roads, stately buildings, temples and halls, aroused the admiration of contemporaries as of posterity. On the Field of Mars there arose a new and splendid city, composed of temples and halls, of public buildings for government purposes and for the amusements of the people, which excelled the glory of the City of the Seven Hills, “unique in character, unsurpassed in ancient or modern times,” so that Augustus could boast that he had found a city of brick and should leave a city of marble. In the provinces the improved government and administration of justice bred a condition of wealth and outward prosperity.

But with all these advantages imperial Rome suffered from grave moral defects. The love of liberty, the common patriotic sentiment, the vigour, and martial virtue of the republican period, were gone; in ease, tranquillity, and enervating pleasure, the arm of the citizen grew feeble, and the self-respect and manly pride of earlier days degenerated into servility and grovelling adulation. The city swarmed with foreign soldiers of fortune and with enriched freedmen. The old seats of culture in the East sent forth not scholars and artists only, but ministers of luxury, gluttony, and voluptuousness. Together with a few wholesome elements, all the evils and defects of human society flowed together here and preyed upon the scanty remnant of the old Roman morality and virtue. Rome became the meeting place of all nations on the face of the earth. Interest in public affairs grew steadily feebler since the offices and dignities had become empty honours void of power. The senators had often to be constrained by penalties to attend the sessions of the senate, although the latter had been reduced to two principal meetings a month; the office of ædile was shunned as a burden until the state took it upon itself to defray the cost of the public entertainments; candidates for the tribunate had often to be put forward by the emperor. The citizens were not ashamed to enrol themselves in the list of paupers and to share in the public distributions of corn and alms; nay, rather than apply themselves to any honest calling, many Romans, especially of the knightly class, preferred to take service for board and wages with the purveyors of gladiatorial combats, and to hazard their lives in a brutal popular amusement which gained ground steadily from that time forward, exercising an effect all the more demoralising on the minds of men, and rousing and stimulating their licentious instincts all the more keenly because the verdict of life or death was given by the humour of the crowd, at whose signal the victor spared or transfixed his prostrate opponent; a right of appeal even more inhuman than the old custom that the duel should end with the death of one of the combatants.

The degeneration of morals and the decay of domestic virtue kept pace with the passion for brutal spectacles. Strenuously as the emperor strove to raise the standard of family life and to curb immoderate expenditure on dress and food and the growing license of women by sumptuary and moral edicts, to enforce legal marriage and the procreation of legitimate offspring as a duty and honour by legal ordinances and curtailment of privileges, to render divorce difficult and to check the rampant vice of adultery, the state of indolent celibacy and the excesses of both sexes in connection with it spread more and more, in the upper classes out of liking for a licentious life and forbidden pleasures, in the lower from poverty and laziness. The corruption of morals, checked but ineffectually by Augustus, made rapid strides after his death; above all, when the rulers themselves tore away the veil which still shrouded shameful living under the first principate. But even Augustus could never disclaim his origin from Venus Aphrodite, the ancestress of the family of Julius.[b]

AUGUSTUS MAKES EGYPT HIS PRIVATE PROVINCE

[Sidenote: [30 B.C.]]

The day of Egyptian independence was over as a matter of course. Cæsar needed the country, with its corn and its riches, for his scheme of reorganisation.

The city of Rome capitulated to the grain fleet of the Nile and sold her ancient liberty for a supply of daily bread, and the price at least was paid her. By the Cæsar Egypt had been conquered and under the rule of the Cæsar she remained, like all countries which Cæsar was the first to unite with the Roman Empire.

It is obvious that a conquered province cannot at once be placed on exactly the same footing as older parts of the empire; a transition period is almost always necessary; but Egypt never took quite the same position as other subject countries. Before the partition of the empire into senatorial and imperial provinces was effected, Egypt had come to occupy a unique position with regard to the emperor; and after the partition the ties which bound it to him became even closer. Among the imperial provinces there was none more intimately related to the emperor than this, which surpassed all others in importance. Egypt was of much the same consequence to the Roman Empire as India is to the England of to-day.

The wise yet strict government of a foreign power may be a blessing to any country in comparison with the tyranny and extravagance of its native sultans; but the foreign rulers profit even more by it, and are therefore always striving to keep the rich country, with a population ignorant alike of war and politics, in a state of political tutelage, to perpetuate the gulf between the dominant and subject races, and to render all interference on the part of rivals impossible. In a word, they keep their most important province as the apple of their eye.

Nature and history assuredly conspired to give the country an exceptional position. Without being an island it possessed the advantages of an insular position; for it was bounded on two sides by the sea and on the other two by the desert or barbarous tribes whose raids and predatory incursions might incommode the province but could never become a menace to the existence of the empire. Thus the Egyptians could hardly be drawn into the political broils of the continent so long as they confined themselves within their natural frontiers; and for this reason the third Ptolemy Euergetes acted wisely when of his own free will he restored his conquests to Seleucus king of Syria. His military situation had nothing to lose by such a step, for Egypt proper was easy to defend and difficult to attack, and was accessible to a land force only by way of Pelusium. On the other hand any power that established itself in the country found there such an abundance of resources as was offered by hardly any other country of ancient times.

The fecundity of Egypt has passed into a proverb; even in a season of moderate harvests great quantities of corn could be exported every year, and after the country had been conquered by the Romans the grain tribute of Egypt was absolutely necessary for the sustenance of the capital. Whoever held Egypt could procure a famine in Rome and Italy at his pleasure; and for that reason pretenders of later times always secured Egypt first and then Italy. The wealth of the country was increased by commerce and trade, and it was therefore densely populated, even more so than at the present day.

The abundant resources of the fertile valley of the Nile were united and almost doubled by a homogeneous and strictly centralised administrative body; Egypt was ruled by a scribbling bureaucracy of a kind up to that time unknown to the ancient world; and its inhabitants, though wholly unaccustomed to arms by long disuse, were none the less hard to rule. A great proportion of the fertile land was the private property of the prince, as it has been down to our own times; but this very proprietorship, coupled with the excitable temper of the populace of a great city like Alexandria, placed great obstacles in the way of regular government, and would have rendered it absolutely impossible had not a military been quartered in the country in sufficient strength to maintain order. The presence of several legions in Egypt was in itself enough to give the Cæsar reason for excluding senatorial government; and the Cæsars always strove with jealous care to keep men of the senatorial class away from Egypt, because the consequences of an attempt at rebellion there might well have been most serious.

Cæsar the dictator had in his time been confronted with the question as to whether he should permit the continuance of the independence of Egypt, already forfeit in fact; and the motive that finally made him decide in its favour (apart from his love for Cleopatra) was that the most formidable rival to Rome there would be her own representative. The reasons that led the dictator to maintain the political existence of Egypt likewise induced his son to maintain the old state of things under certain limitations. As a ruler and organiser the latter is distinguished by his regard for historic continuity.

[Sidenote: [30 B.C.-14 A.D.]]

Now in Egypt, with its fertile soil and dense population, a strong monarchic government is in a manner prescribed by the character and history of the country; as is demonstrated by the whole course of its development from the earliest beginnings of human civilisation down to the present day. Cæsar therefore desired to make no more alteration in the peculiar and intricate conditions of Egypt than was absolutely necessary, and to leave the rest as it was. The Cæsar merely stepped into the place of the kings of the Ptolemaic dynasty, and thus brought Egypt into connection with Rome by a kind of personal union.

The most important change was that the sovereign no longer resided at Alexandria but at Rome, and that the great offices of the Egyptian court, the chief master of the ceremonies, the grand master of the household, and the chief forester, were not filled by fresh appointments; though the scholars of the famous Museum of Alexandria enjoyed the same patronage and encouragement as before. At the head of this richly endowed institution was a priest, formerly appointed by the king and in future to be appointed by the Cæsar. The latter regarded himself as in every respect the successor of the Ptolemies, and caused the Egyptian priests to do him honour with the very ceremonial that had grown up under his predecessors. It is true that the Roman emperors did not habitually reside in Alexandria, but their viceroys had to assist at all the religious rites in which the Ptolemies had formerly taken part, for the new ruler was wise enough to introduce no alteration whatever in matters of religion. The ancient gods of Egypt, which had survived the dominion of the Greeks, continued to exist as before, in peaceful association with the gods of Greece. The Egyptian gods were naturally wroth at the fall of the monarchy; their statues turned a gloomy gaze upon their worshippers, Apis bellowed hideously and even shed tears. But Cæsar was not disconcerted; he did indeed decline in his own person to visit the Apis of Memphis on his journey through Egypt, but he did not put the least hindrance in the way of his worship by the Egyptians, still less did he dream of starting a propaganda in Egypt on behalf of the state religion of Rome.

The position of the various classes of the population also remained what it had become in the course of historic development. The native Egyptians, the original lords of the soil, remained in the subjection to which they had been reduced by the conquests of the Persians and Macedonians; they constituted the population of the country districts and country towns, and had neither political organisation nor political rights. The foreign conqueror naturally had no inducement to give the vanquished rights that had been denied them by their own kings. Egypt was to be a province absolutely dependent upon himself, and that would have been impossible if the Roman element in Egypt had grown so strong and had so far intermingled with the natives that the sovereign was forced to take it into account. The Egyptian proper was therefore on principle precluded from acquiring the rights of Roman citizenship. For example, an Egyptian of ancient days could no more act on a Roman jury than a Bedouin could nowadays be elected to the English parliament. In later times this prohibition was occasionally evaded by first conferring the freedom of Alexandria upon the native and then admitting him to Roman citizenship as an Alexandrian. On the other hand the material condition of the Egyptian population improved under the judicious rule of the Cæsars.

The mechanism of government, administration, and taxation had been admirably organised through centuries of practice; it naturally discharged its functions as well under the new sovereign as under the old, and consequently became the type of the technics of imperial administration. In this respect the republic had left the empire much to do. The Romans were the first to appoint officers in the level land who had more to do than collect the taxes. Their epistrateges of upper, lower, and middle Egypt, their nomarchs and ethnarchs, had of course only a circumscribed sphere of action, but they saw to the maintenance of law and order and probably decided simple lawsuits among the natives.

Among the Egyptians, unlike the Hellenes, we find a simple division into nomes instead of a municipal organisation; and like many provincial cities under the Roman Empire, these nomes were allowed to strike their own coins, though only with a Greek superscription. A collective organisation was, however, denied to the natives. In the latter days of Augustus the various provinces of the Roman Empire had diets of their own, invested with very modest political rights; Egypt alone never had a provincial diet, in token that it was not really a province at all but was regarded as a great demesne of the sovereign.

Next above the Egyptians was the Græco-Macedonian population, which was practically if not entirely concentrated in Alexandria, and was separated from the natives by a great gulf. As members of the same race as the Egyptian kings the Greeks of Alexandria enjoyed political rights and communal autonomy; and these they retained in the main under the Romans. In like manner their language remained the official language of Egypt under the empire, Roman officials addressed Greeks and Egyptians in Greek; only in the Latin garrison of Alexandria, Latin was naturally predominant.

The Greeks of Alexandria possessed their own municipal officers, their high priest, chief magistrate, town-clerk, and chief of police; but on the other hand a genuine town council was denied them. The few other Greek cities in Egypt were similarly organised.

The whole province, with its population of Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, was committed by the Cæsar to a viceroy, who, though belonging only to the knightly class, ranked on an equality with the senatorial proconsuls in virtue of his position as the confidant and representative of the emperor, and surpassed them in authority in virtue of his command over the legions, although he lacked the insignia of this authority. C. Cornelius Gallus, famous as a poet and proven as a general and personal enemy of Antonius, was the first to be made viceroy of the new province; and on the whole he justified the confidence reposed in him by his master, for he succeeded in repressing with great vigour some local attempts at rebellion among the inhabitants of Heroöpolis and the Thebaid.

His subordinates, like himself, were men of no rank higher than knighthood and were the personal servants of Cæsar; the mechanism of government remained the same as had been perfected under the Ptolemies, only from this time forward the Greeks were superseded by the Romans. Among the higher offices were those of chief magistrate, administrator of the chest of the dominion of Egypt, prefect of Alexandria, or of certain districts in the capital; and one procurator fari Alexandriæ was certainly chosen from among the ranks of freedmen.

The taxes were no less high than before, but Cæsar saw to it that Egypt was placed in a position to pay her taxes every year. He had all the Nile canals, which had got choked or dried up under previous rulers, thoroughly cleansed and repaired by his soldiers; he completed the canal system where it required completion; and the beneficial results of these necessary measures were very soon apparent. The famous statue of the Nile is surrounded by sixteen _putti_, as a symbol that the river must rise sixteen cubits if Egypt is to hope for an abundant harvest; if it only rises half that height it means dearth and famine in the land. But after the restoration of the canal system under Augustus a rise of twelve cubits indicated a good harvest as early as the governorship of Petronius, and if the rise was only eight, it did not necessarily mean a bad one. In one of the latter years of Augustus the Nile must have risen to an extraordinary height, if we may trust the mutilated records of the Nilometer at Elephantine--probably twenty-four cubits.

The soldiers of Augustus were also employed in making roads and constructing cisterns at various places. Coptos is the point to which most of the roads which connect the Nile Valley with the Red Sea converge. Here an interesting inscription has recently been discovered, dating probably from the last years of the reign of Augustus, and bearing a long list of the names of the soldiers who had made cisterns at various points along these roads and laid out a fortified camp where they met.

The Indian trade rose rapidly to prosperity under Augustus. As early as the time when Strabo journeyed through Egypt he saw at the most diverse spots signs that the country was beginning to recover from the ruinous consequences of the system of government pursued by the last Ptolemies. In the latter years of Cleopatra’s reign barely twenty ships had ventured to put out from the Red Sea; under the rule of Augustus there was a stately fleet of Indiamen, which engaged in the African and Indian trade with great success, and brought in a substantial profit to the Egyptian government, which not only exacted import duties but afterwards charged a considerable export duty upon Indian goods. But it is hardly possible to estimate, even approximately, the revenue which Augustus drew from his newly acquired province.[c]

ADMINISTRATION OF THE PROVINCES

An explanation should be given of the general principles which were followed by the Romans in the administration of subject lands. The consecutive pursuit of these principles secured the result that provinces originally disparate in every particular, through the influence of Roman administration, were made into a single whole which was not only externally symmetrical but also internally harmonious--a whole in which the various nationalities with their political, civil, and social idiosyncrasies more or less disappear.

The word “provincia” is much older than those conquests outside Italy which we have hitherto designated with the name of provinces; it requires particular explanation. So long as the kingdom existed in Rome, the king was the sole exerciser of the imperium, that is to say, of unlimited military and judicial power. But with the beginning of the republic it was transferred to two consuls, from 367 B.C. it was in the hands of one prætor, from 247 B.C. in the hands of a second prætor; it therefore became necessary to define the limits of a power that was practically unbounded and was the appanage to each of these officials, to establish a definite sphere of action for each of them, the official designation of which is “provincia.” By provincia then we understand the area of activity specially assigned by law or by a _senatus consultum_ or also by lot or accord to a consul or prætor, the area within which he exercises his imperium. In this sense we say _consulibus Ligures provincia decernitur_, and in this sense we call the office of the prætor urbanus _provincia urbana_ and that of the prætor peregrinus _provincia peregrina_. No provincia is assigned to offices which do not possess imperium, for where there is mention of the provinces of the quæstors the provinces of the consul or of the prætor are meant to whom the quæstor acts as a subordinate official.

After the occupation of Sicily and Sardinia in the year 227 B.C. four prætors were appointed instead of two and the imperium was also geographically so marked out that in the newly defined districts two prætors received military and judicial powers, that is to say the old consular imperium, simultaneously, this moreover being shared by the remaining prætors and later on by the proconsuls and proprætors. From this time forward provincia becomes the designation for a governorship across seas and means first, in the abstract sense, command in a country outside Italy, secondly, in a concrete sense, the country subjected to the governor itself.

All provincial land is however distinguished from Italic land by the fact that it is subject to tribute, that is pays either vectigal or tributum; for at all events from the time of the Gracchi it is a recognised political maxim that property in a provincial dependency has passed to the Roman people, the original owners retaining only a right of user; so that the province is a _prædium populi Romani_ whose revenues pour into the state exchequer. Accordingly one may define the province as an administered district of the Roman Empire, geographically marked out, committed to the control of a permanent higher official and subject to taxation. The obligation to pay taxes is so important a feature in the conception of the province that the historians, in treating of every country actually subordinated and made subject to taxes by the Romans, include it with the provinces, even if it was not yet incorporated in the Roman system of administration; and the dynasties in Cilicia and Syria although not directly subject to governors, are regarded as an integral part of the empire on account of their obligation to pay duty.

The organisation of the province at the time of the republic was directed upon instruction from the senate by the victorious general himself with the subsidiary aid of a commission of ten senators appointed by the senate for this object. The fundamental law of the province thus established (lex provinciæ) determined the character of the administration from that time forward, laws affecting private relations being adopted partly through Roman laws and partly through the edicts of the governor. The duties of the commission were concerned with the following points: First, there was a fresh parcelling out of the whole province into definite districts of administration with one of the larger towns, where such were available, for a centre; of such town dioceses there were about sixty-eight in Sicily, sixty-four in the three Gauls, forty-four in Asia, eleven in the Ora Pontica, the part of Bithynia that became a province in 63 B.C., six in Pontus Polemoniacus, twenty-three in Lycia, seventeen in Syria, five in Cyrene. The magistrates and the senate of these towns, although appointed for the affairs of their commune, are at the same time of use to the government in taking over the gathering in of taxes in the district assigned to them.

For the purposes of jurisdiction the territorial divisions according to towns are reunited to form larger parishes of jurisdiction _conventus_, διοικήσεις, in the chief places of which the governor goes through the regular days of jurisdiction (assizes). Finally the religious festivals, associations in which the inhabitants of the provinces unite from time to time, take place in the favoured towns to which we allude. In provinces that were poor in towns instead of town dioceses we have country circuits. Here a policy was observed of breaking asunder the original connections of one people with another, so far as was found necessary, by dissolution of the existing state unities and by an arbitrary division and grouping of neighbourhoods; in some cases it was even found well to abolish the commercium between the single states, which had the effect of making it more difficult for the provincials to alienate their real estate and caused Roman landholders to emigrate into the province and concentrate in their hands large landed estates. Favoured towns had their area widened by the incorporation of towns and spots which thereby lost their separate existence; in this way the communes entrusted to the Romans were raised and enlarged and the rebellions completely annihilated. Mountainous and desert lands which yielded nothing valuable and were difficult to administer were left in the midst of the province under their native despots until, often after a long time, it was held safe to place these parts, too, directly under the governor.

The boundaries of the territories once established, the next step was to regulate their political and financial position. Towns conquered by force of arms were destroyed, their lands included in Roman domains and leased out to men of private enterprise by the censors at Rome in exchange for a proportion of the produce raised. Where royal domains were found, as in Syracuse, Macedonia, Pergamus, Bithynia, and Cyrene, they were taken possession of as _ager publicus Romani_ in the same way, and their working population was united into village communities in the manner used for the district of Capua after 211 B.C. Such communes, on the other hand, as had submitted by surrender without offering extreme resistance certainly yielded to the unbounded power of the victor (as was embodied in the terms of surrender), town and country, men, women and children, rivers, ports, and their holy possessions; but as a rule the citizens and their families were allowed to remain in possession of their liberty and their private fortunes and to the town was left its territory and its town rights. In return for this on all the farm lands whether of private persons or of the town was laid a natural impost (vectigal) or else a hard and fast tax (tributum, stipendium) and where advantageous, also a Roman toll (portorium).

This then is the class of _civitates vectigales_ or _stipendiariæ_ in which the majority of provincial towns are to be reckoned, and which are to be contrasted with a small number of particularly privileged communities, those for instance who had been guaranteed their freedom on the score of earlier alliances or well-attested fidelity, and secondly those which the Romans themselves had constituted as Roman colonies or municipia. Altogether then there are three main divisions of communities included within the provinces: towns with free native constitutions, towns substantially subject, and towns with Roman constitutions.[d]

ARMY AND NAVY UNDER AUGUSTUS

The higher career of an officer (militia equestris) was open to every Roman citizen possessed of the rank and fortune of a knight or senator. All young knights were not bound to serve, but every man who was ambitious of public career had to fulfil the obligations of military service for five years; after which he was given the command of a cohort or served as a military tribune. Hitherto there had been no separation between military and civil office as far as the upper classes were concerned, and it was the emperor’s intention that there should be none henceforth, otherwise the aristocracy would have almost given up going into the army. We cannot tell with certainty how these young aristocrats who entered the army as officers acquired the necessary technical knowledge, or whether they had to undergo any kind of apprenticeship.

The senator was excluded from the army on principle; the knight on the contrary was bound to render military service if he hoped to serve the state in peace or war. His promotion was, of course, in the emperor’s hands. In the time of the republic the people did not make all the appointments, but they had twenty-four posts to dispose of; in the reign of Augustus these _tribuni militum a populo_ were still elected by the people, but this emperor, who had deprived the senate of all means of influencing the army, also took from the people their practically obsolete privilege of electing officers, and about the time of his death the title of tribunus militum a populo ceases to appear in inscriptions.

In republican times the supreme command in war had been one of the official duties of the elective magistrates; but under the empire it became the duty and privilege of the imperator, who was represented by his legates in the several divisions of the army. Under Augustus each legion had a legatus legionis, so called to distinguish him from the governors of the imperial provinces (legati provinciæ). The officers of the imperial army were divided according to their social rank in the senatorial and knightly classes.

Many peculiarities of the army system of Augustus lose much of their singularity in the eyes of the modern observer by a comparison with corresponding conditions at the present time. The English army is the only contemporary force which can be compared with the Roman army under the empire.

In both nations the first duty of the army is not to defend the country, which is secured from the danger of invasion by its isolated situation, but to keep the provinces under control. Accordingly the country of the ruling race, Italy in the one case, England and Scotland in the other, has only insignificant garrisons of professional soldiers, who hardly suffice to supplement the police at need; while the bulk of the army is scattered all over the globe, wherever the interests of the ruling race appear to be imperilled. The troops are nowhere stationed in larger numbers than is absolutely necessary, because as a matter of fact their numbers are totally inadequate, and every serious incident shows that the aims of the state bear no proportion to its military resources.

The parallel is peculiarly apt in the non-enforcement of universal military service and the consequent lack of a sufficient reserve. The latter would be too heavy a financial burden for the state, as it has to treat its mercenary troops with consideration and grant them large donations of money. The England of to-day pays the bounty money on enlistment; imperial Rome bestowed considerable sums of money on her soldiers on their discharge.

The Roman soldiers were employed on peaceful tasks which were but remotely connected with the military uses of an army, in the same way as English soldiers nowadays. It has already been mentioned that Augustus had roads, canals, cisterns, and public buildings constructed by his legions. The demands made upon the English army in this respect do not go quite so far, but in the island of Corfu any one who drives from the capital to Palæocastrizza may see a bronze tablet let into the face of the rock to perpetuate the memory of the English regiment which constructed this difficult bit of road.

Led by young aristocrats more or less ignorant of the service when they enter it, both the Roman and English armies have generally attained the objects set before them and made up for the lack of organisation by the energy and capacity of their members.

As the Romans induced subject communities and states to furnish them with auxiliary troops, so England has enlisted Indian regiments officered by Englishmen, which are recruited only from among the warlike races such as the brave mountaineers of the Himalayas, the effeminate inhabitants of Bengal being scarcely represented amongst the Sepoys. This is in exact accordance with the principles on which Augustus acted in the formation of his auxiliary troops. Of course the military resources of those princes who still retained a show of independence were likewise at the disposal of the ruling power if the imperial troops had to be spared or were not sufficient to quell local disturbances.[c]

The permanent institution of the emperor’s proconsular authority naturally led to the perpetuation of the military establishment, or in modern phrase the standing army of the empire. Originally the legions had been raised for special services, and disbanded at the conclusion of each campaign. When the wars of the republic came to be waged at a greater distance from the city, and against the regular armies of Greek or Asiatic potentates, the proconsular levies were enrolled for the whole period of the contest in hand. In ancient times Rome secured every petty conquest by planting in the centre of each conquered territory a colony of her own citizens; but when her enemies became more numerous and her frontiers more extensive, it was necessary to maintain her communications in every quarter by military posts, and the establishment of permanent garrisons. The troops once enlisted for the war could no longer be discharged on the restoration of peace. The return of their imperator to the enjoyment of his laurels in the city only brought another imperator, whose laurels were yet to be acquired, to the legions of the Rhone and the Euphrates. The great armies of the provinces were transferred, with the plate and furniture of the prætorium, the baggage and materials of the camp, from each proconsul to his successor.

The legions came to be distinguished by numbers, indicating the order of enlistment in the eastern or western division of the empire respectively, or by special designations of honour, such as the martia, or the victrix. With their names or numbers the particular history of each was duly recorded, and some of them became noted perhaps for a peculiar character and physiognomy of their own. The principle of permanence thus established to his hand, Augustus carried it out systematically, and extended it from the provinces to Rome itself. He instituted a special service for the protection of his own person, in imitation of the select battalion which kept watch round the imperator’s tent. These prætorian guards were gratified with double pay, amounting to two denarii daily, and the prospect of discharge at the end of twelve years, while the term of service for the legionaries was fixed at sixteen. They were recruited from Latium, Etruria, Umbria, and the old Roman colonies of central Italy exclusively. They were regarded accordingly as a force peculiarly national, nor when reminded of this distinction were they insensible of the compliment. But the emperor did not entrust his security to these Italian troops only. Besides the prætorian cohorts he kept about his person a corps of picked veterans from the legions, a few hundred in number, together with a battalion of German foot soldiers and a squadron of Batavian horse. Cæsar had employed these barbarians, distinguished for their personal strength and courage, on the wings of his own armies, and his successor may have placed this confidence in them on account of their tried fidelity. In addition, however, to these household troops, the whole number of which did not exceed five or six thousand, Augustus first introduced a regular garrison into the city, consisting of four cohorts of fifteen hundred men each, which were also levied exclusively in Italy. He established no permanent camp or fortress to overawe the capital. The soldiers were billeted on the inhabitants or lodged in the public edifices; they were always at hand to repress tumults and preserve the peace of the city, when the stores of grain ran low and the prevalence of tempests on the coast menaced it with prolonged scarcity. But the ordinary police of the streets was maintained by an urban guard, named _vigiles_ or the watch, seven hundred of whom sufficed for the service. The whole armed force of every description employed in the city might amount to twelve or fifteen thousand men.

Augustus disbanded the unruly multitudes who had crowded into the service of the great military chieftains of the civil wars. He strained every nerve to gorge them with the largesses for which alone they would forego the periodical plunder of unoffending cities, in which their leaders had been compelled to indulge them. But while they were reposing upon their estates, or rioting with their profuse gratuities, he speedily remodelled his military establishment, and equipped a force of twenty-five legions for the defence of the empire. He fixed a reasonable scale of pay for every armed man in his service, from the rank and file of the cohorts to the “lieutenant of the emperor with proconsular rank.” The proconsular armies were maintained and paid by the machinery of the proconsular government in the provinces; so that the emperor, without being ostensibly the paymaster of the legions, did in fact, through his lieutenants, hold the purse upon which they depended. We have seen how incompetent we are to state the salary of the provincial governor; nor can we estimate the pay of the various grades of officers. We only know that the simple legionary received one denarius daily, a sum which may equal eightpence half-penny of English money. A part of this sum was stopped for his arms, implements, and accoutrements; but he retained perhaps a larger proportion of it than the pocket money of the British private, and the simple luxuries of the wine shop were cheap and accessible. Marriage was strongly discouraged, and generally forbidden in the Roman ranks, and the soldier’s allowance was perhaps chiefly expended in averting the blows of the centurion’s vine-staff, and buying occasional exemption from the fatigues of drill and camp duty. If we are justified in drawing an inference from the proportion observed in a military largess in the time of Cæsar, we may conjecture that the centurion received double, and the tribunes four times, the pay of the legionary.

The full complement of each of the twenty-five legions was 6100 foot, and 726 horse; and this continued with occasional variations, to be the strength of the legion for a period of four hundred years. The cohorts were ten in number; and the first, to which the defence of the eagle and the emperor’s image was consigned, was nearly double the strength of the others. These brigades became permanently attached to their distant quarters: in later times the same three legions occupied the province of Britain for two or more centuries. They were recruited ordinarily from the countries beyond Italy; in the first instance, from the Roman citizens in the provinces. But even while the rights of citizenship were extended, this restriction was gradually relaxed; and instead of being the requisite qualification for admission to the ranks, the freedom of the city was often bestowed on the veteran upon his discharge. Numerous battalions of auxiliaries, differently arrayed and equipped from the legionaries themselves, continued to be levied throughout the most warlike dependencies of the empire, and attached to each legionary division. It is generally computed that this force equalled in number that of the legions themselves, and thus we arrive at a total of 340,000 men, for the entire armies of the Roman Empire, exclusive of the battalions maintained in Rome itself.

Augustus may be regarded as the founder of the naval power of the great military republic. She had exerted indeed her accustomed vigour on more than one occasion in equipping powerful fleets, in transporting military armaments, and sweeping marauders from the seas; but the establishment of a permanent maritime force, as one arm of the imperial government, was reserved for the same hand which was destined to fix the peace of the empire on a firm and lasting basis. While the influence of Rome extended over every creek and harbour of the Mediterranean, she had no rival to fear on the more distant coasts of the Atlantic Ocean or the Indian Ocean. But experience had shown that the germ of a great naval power still continued to exist in the inveterate habits of piracy, fostered throughout the inland seas by centuries of political commotion. The Cilician corsairs had distressed the commerce and insulted the officers of the republic; the armaments of Sextus had taken a bolder flight and menaced even the city with famine; a conjuncture might not be distant when the commander of these predatory flotillas would dispute the empire itself with the imperator of the Roman armies. Augustus provided against the hazard of such an encounter by equipping three powerful fleets. One of these he stationed at Ravenna on the upper, a second at Misenum on the lower sea, a third at Forum Julii (Fréjus) on the coast of Gaul. The two former squadrons amounted to 250 galleys each, the third to about half that number. Besides these armaments he posted a smaller flotilla on the Euxine, and established naval stations on the great frontier rivers, the Euphrates, the Danube, and the Rhine.[e]

It was only to be expected that the victor of Actium should not neglect the fleet, to which he owed everything, to the same extent as the republic had done; and as matter of fact he made a permanent navy the counterpart of his standing army. Up to that time Rome had only fitted out a fleet, or caused her allies to fit it out, for some definite purpose, and had dismissed it at the conclusion of the war. Augustus realised that a change must be made in this respect now that the whole coast of the Mediterranean was Roman and the sea had become the centre of the empire.

His first care was to construct the requisite naval ports. The Adriatic coast of Italy is not rich in harbours, even leaving naval ports out of the question. Brundusium was too much of a trading mart to come into consideration as a possible naval station for the empire; while Ravenna, farther to the north, near the delta of the Po, appeared to answer the end the emperor had in view. The place was easy to defend on account of the marshes about it; the harbour, though none of the best, was capable of improvement; and by means of the imperial canal (Fossa Augusta) Augustus secured a communication between his new naval station and the southern mouth of the Po. This was an advantage as far as the provisioning of the forces was concerned, for the produce of the fertile basin of the Po could thus be shipped direct to Ravenna; on the other hand it probably accelerated the silting up of the harbour. The whole scheme seems to have been put in hand shortly after the battle of Actium, for we meet with what appears to be a reference to these works in the writings of Valgius Rufus in the first years of the empire.

During the civil wars the fleet had used the Julian harbour on the west coast of Italy, but its inconvenient entrance and deficient anchorage unfitted it for a regular naval station. It was therefore abandoned in favour of the neighbouring harbour of Misenum, which surpassed even that of Ravenna in importance.

From both stations small bodies of men used to be detached to Rome to protect the emperor and the capital. The marines naturally did not find much to do at Rome; when the emperor arranged a sea fight (naumachia) he counted, of course, upon their co-operation, at other times they were deputed to spread the awnings at the entertainments given to the people.

Of less importance and probably of briefer duration was a similar work of Augustus on the coast of Gaul. Forum Julii (Fréjus) was raised by him to the rank of a naval station soon after the battle of Actium, and may have attained a certain degree of importance during the Cantabrian War; in the latter days of the empire we find no mention of any such naval port.

In Spain itself Augustus thought that he could dispense with a naval station on the Mediterranean coast, and he never dreamed of commanding the ocean. A naval base in the vicinity of Lisbon would have materially contributed to the conquest of the Asturians and Cantabrians, but only on condition that the Roman warships had been adapted to ocean navigation. The oared galleys of ancient days would hardly have proved seaworthy in the Atlantic. In the Spanish War a Roman fleet occasionally appears in the Bay of Biscay, but it was probably composed of transports from the neighbouring harbours of Gaul. Under Drusus and Germanicus the Rhine flotilla occasionally ventured out into the North Sea, but its constant mishaps soon frightened it out of risking farther hazards.

The emperor devoted some attention to his Mediterranean fleet, but far less than he bestowed on the army. In his summary Augustus makes frequent mention of his legions, while he rarely mentions the fleet to which he owed the victory of Actium. The army stood in quite a different relation to the princeps than was occupied by the navy. In the _Monumentum Ancyranum_ the emperor invariably speaks of his navy: it is never styled the navy of the Roman people. The legions, on the contrary, belonged, in theory at least, to the state. The crews of the fleet and their officers were the personal servants of the princeps. The sailors, up to the grade of captain of a trireme, were slaves or freedmen, and were reckoned in law as belonging to the household of the emperor; and even the naval prefects, though free men, were not of Roman birth. Such were A. Castricius Myrio, and Sext. Aulienus, who worked his way up from the ranks to be a centurion and was then promoted to the rank of knight. An admiral of the imperial fleet (præfectus classis) ranked on the same footing with the imperial tax-collectors; a fact which speaks volumes for the position of the navy which had made Augustus an absolute monarch.

Augustus seems to have neglected the navy, especially in the latter years of his reign, from motives of economy. In the war with the Dalmatian rebels we hear nothing of the intervention of the Ravenna fleet when Bato was harassing the Adriatic shores as far as to Apollonia. The fact that the fleet at Misenum was in an equally melancholy state is proved by the insecurity of Sardinian waters, which was so great that no senator dared to land on the island; and it had to be administered by the emperor’s officers instead of by a regular governor.[c]