14 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
The Younger Pliny is often taken as representative of a new breed of
senator who set the tone of Roman senatorial politics at the end of the fi rst
century and beyond. Coming from remote regions of Italy and, increasingly,
from cities in the provinces, they made up for their lack of distinguished
birth by wealth and meritorious service.^29 Their basic political ideal was not
libertas , the freedom of the senate to exercise a leading role in government,
but obsequium , obedience to the one by whose favour and patronage they
had risen in station. They blended easily with new men of earlier intakes,
who had gradually come to predominate in the senate and found no diffi culty
in accepting the impotence of that body.
Their advance was the quicker because senators of higher pedigree and
more independent values retired from public life, while others who had the
birth and wealth required of senators chose to follow the alternative careers
that were opening up in the (still fl edgling) equestrian ‘civil service’.^30 Yet
other senatorial families failed to reproduce themselves,^31 or were
progressively eliminated. Every reign made inroads into this group. Usurpers-
turned-emperors (Vespasian, Septimius Severus) speeded up the process:
they had scores to settle and partisans to promote. Some rulers (Tiberius,
Nero, Domitian) lapsed into tyranny. In the fi rst century the main instrument
of the destruction of aristocrats was the treason law.^32 Originally designed
to protect the maiestas , the might or dignity, of the Roman people, this law
proved capable of extension to take in any political charge involving the
emperor or his family. According to Tacitus, Tiberius’ Republican act fell
apart when he ‘brought back’ the treason law ( Ann. 1.72). Nero’s revival of
the law in 62 was seen as confi rmatory evidence that his rule was sliding
into tyranny. It came to be regarded as the mark of a ‘good’ emperor that he
refused to consider maiestas charges and swore an oath at his accession that
he would have no senator put to death. The fi rst such oath was sworn by
Nerva, reacting to the purge of the last years of Domitian. Coming from an
emperor such as Septimius Severus it was worthless.^33
The oath by itself could not be effi cacious, and in any case it arrived too
late to save the core of the ‘opposition’ to the emperors. This was made up
of a few aristocratic families that, because of their ancestry and connections,
and sometimes beliefs and actions, had fallen foul of a succession of
suspicious and persecuting emperors. Among the victims were Stoics, men
like Thrasea Paetus (died 66), who tolerated ‘good’ emperors and provoked
the ‘bad’ by passive opposition and protest. They were neither conspirators
nor Republicans.
Augustus had broken the back of active Republicanism by a combination
of tough political management and violence. Thereafter few of those who
moved against emperors were genuine Republicans. The motives of the
conspirators of 65 led by Piso against Nero are exposed in Tacitus’ detailed
account ( Ann. 15.48ff): not one of them was seeking to restore the Republic.
The senate, then and subsequently, was largely made up of men content with
their status and having no higher ambition than to secure a measure of