make haste slowly'. He appreciated, consciously or instinctively, that to close the wide rift which had opened up between loyalty to the state and loyalty to the government must call
not just for skill, but for a great deal of patience.
'Res publica' connoted constitutional government, the operation of recognized rules, as opposed to what the Romans called 'regnum', absolute and arbitrary domination. In that sense,
the claim that Augustus 'restored the res publica was not altogether hollow. By defining his formal powers, he necessarily delimited them, making it clear in which areas he would
exercise direct and open authority and in virtue of what precedents and conventions; simultaneously, he advertised in which areas he did not seek to exercise open authority. There
were going to be rules, and the rules themselves were not new. Stable government and long-term policies demanded that he free himself effectively from those two fetters with which
the Republican nobility had sought to restrain over great ambition: collegiality and limitation of tenure of powers. In practice, Augustus had no colleagues with equal power save for
Agrippa and Tiberius, whom he himself chose to be his destined successors; and all his formal powers were his for life, although some-his provinces, for example-were renewed
periodically, while others-like his influence over elections and his control of public finance- burgeoned gradually with the development of convention and interpretation. Augustus
had come to power young, and time was on his side. Even in 23 B.C., nobody much under sixty had been even a freshman member of the pre-Caesarian Senate; by AD 14 a man had
to be over sixty even to have been born before Caesar crossed the Rubicon.
None of the foregoing is to be taken to imply that the sheer power of Augustus-his immense patronage, his 'party' following, his stupendous wealth, his control of the army-was not
the ultimate guarantee of the stability of his new order. Had any rival been able to use the army against him, his formal prerogatives would have been of little or no avail. But in
civilized societies rule is more than the possession of the biggest club to hit people on the head with. We do not take it amiss that modern governments can count on the loyalty and
obedience of their military and police forces: it would be a sorry state of affairs if they could not. What worries us is the spectacle of a government which uses army and police to
dominate a populace which otherwise would not tolerate it. There is no evidence at all that that was true of Augustus' government; quite the contrary, since we have good reason to
believe that, apart from a very few ambitious men whose notions of what constituted 'liberty' were anything but egalitarian or democratic, the mass of the inhabitants of Italy and the
Empire welcomed the peace and stability, material prosperity, and increased administrative efficiency which came with the Principate. Augustus took the army out of politics; but we
may legitimately question whether his security and that of his regime would have been very long lived had he not also done much to remedy actual or potential social and economic
distress and disaffection. For all its ambiguities, Augustus devised a system far more acceptable than the autocracies and anarchies which were the only practical alternatives. It was
his achievement that what the Elder Pliny was to call 'the immense majesty of the Roman peace' gave to the Roman world a freedom from war and the fear of war unmatched in its
duration, and that freedom under the law, one of the ideals of classical Greece and republican Rome, was still an ideal of the Principate; it grew gradually more remote, but survived
to be transmitted to modern Europe. Thus, when the Emperor Claudius wanted to marry his own niece, he did not assume that he was above the law, but had the law changed so that
any man could do the same: the distinction may appear slight, but on reflection can be seen to be of profound significance.
It was once accepted that one could talk of a 'dyarchy', a system in which power and executive responsibility were shared between two parties, princeps and Senate. That is now
frowned upon, but it was certainly long accepted as the principle behind Augustus' new order. In his 'programme speech' to the Senate on his accession in A.D. 54, the young Nero
declared his intention of abandoning the centralizing practices of his predecessor Claudius and returning to the true Augustan pattern:
he would not set himself up to be the judge in every case or issue, for a powerful few to grow fat behind the closed doors of one man's home at the expense of prosecutors and
defendants alike; nothing in his household would be bought by money or open to intrigue; his private self and his public self would be kept quite separate from each other. The
Senate would keep its traditional prerogatives, Italy and the public provinces should take their stand before the tribunals of the consuls, who would bring their business before the
Senate for a hearing; he, the Emperor, would answer for the armies entrusted to his care. (Tacitus, Annals 13.4)
And earlier Augustus' immediate successor, Tiberius, had been quite explicit about the Senate's role:
I say now what I have said often before on other occasions, conscript fathers: a good and healthful princeps, whom you have invested with such great discretionary
power, ought to be the servant of the Senate, and often of the whole citizen body, sometimes even of individuals. Nor do I regret having said this; I have found you,
and I still find you, good and fair and kind masters. (Suetonius, Tiberius 29)It is indicative of a very important change in attitude that, while both Augustus and Tiberius are on record as having steadfastly refused to allow themselves to be addressed as
'dominus' ('master'), by Trajan's day at latest 'dominus' had become the customary form of addressing the princeps, as can be seen from Pliny's letters to that Emperor.
Between appearance and reality there was, however, a great gulf set. Although Augustus owed his formal powers to the granting of Senate and People, powers theoretically and
constitutionally revocable by their grantors, Senate and People had in fact simply 'rubber-stamped' Augustus' own wishes, public opposition to which would have been, to say the