least, ill-advised. It was only in the most trivial sense that Senate or People had invested Tiberius with 'such great discretionary power': his adoptive father had ensured that there
could be no genuine alternative. Gaius (Caligula), Claudius, and Nero-all three total strangers to the long and distinguished record of public service and high responsibilities of which
Tiberius could be proud on his accession-owed their elevation to factors over which the Senate had no control, and were duly voted en bloc the ever-growing powers and
prerogatives which went with the office of princeps. Thus it is no surprise to find the Senate, during the confused power struggle that followed Nero's demise, tamely decreeing 'all
the customary prerogatives of the princeps to each usurper in turn, nor Vespasian preferring to date his reign from the day six months earlier when he had been saluted as 'imperator'
by the legions at Alexandria.
The Emperor and the Senate
The organization of Rome's military forces under the Principate and their deployment, the growth and structure of an 'imperial secretariat' of equestrian officials and slave and
freedman servants of the imperial household, the administration of the provinces and the consolidation and extension of Rome's imperial domains, and the spread of the rights and
opportunities of Roman citizenship beyond the limits of Italy itself, all fall to be treated in Chapter 22. Here it must suffice to stress that in all these areas Augustus laid the solid
foundations on which his successors were to build. But in the end all roads led to Rome, where by the time of Augustus' death new attitudes and expectations had become
established. Ever since 5 B.C., when Augustus was again consul after a gap of almost twenty years, with the names of a Caesar and a Sulla adding lustre to the date, there had been
four consuls in nearly every year, holding office as successive pairs, a scheme regularly followed thereafter. This can be taken to mark the definitive 'arrival', a generation after
Actium, of the 'new Italians' and the steepening decline of the old republican nobility. By now the overriding influence of the princeps on the choice of the highest magistrates was
accepted, and in practice inevitable.
It was from among ex-praetors and ex-consuls that he was constrained to select his provincial governors and legionary legates, senatorial curators and prefects, so that no princeps
could fail to be vitally concerned about the stocking of the pool in which he must fish. Direct appointment to public magistracies was neither politic nor necessary: lip-service could
be paid to constitutional forms while indirect methods and the princeps's public and private support did their work- though in the less deftly sure hands of a Tiberius the legerdemain
lacked conviction. Tiberius indeed effectively transferred elections to the Senate in A.D. 15, leaving to the popular assemblies a mere ceremonial role. But those assemblies had by
then lost any effective role even in legislation, which became in practice the field of senatorial decrees and imperial edicts, rescripts, and constitutions. The free inhabitants of Rome
and its immediate environs had long ceased to constitute a representative cross-section of Rome's widely scattered citizens; and among the consequences of this eclipse was a
diminution of extravagant electoral expenditure and a decline in the influence of the political clement among the equites. The latter also suffered from judicial changes, for before
Augustus died cases of political importance had come regularly to be heard by the Senate sitting as a high court, instead of by the mixed courts of the late Republic and of the first
part of his reign, while by Claudius' time the supreme and independent jurisdiction of the princeps had come to be exercised frequently.
The de facto subordination of the Senate itself was exposed in its helpless nakedness when an ageing Tiberius removed himself from Rome to Campania and then to Capri for the
second half of his reign and ruled the world through his letters and the agents of his will. In the early books of his Annals Tacitus often underlines and castigates the servility, and
even sycophancy, of the members of the Senate. Lacking as they did the hereditary self-contained power-bases of later European nobles or any formidable 'constituencies', hopelessly
outgunned by the power and patronage of the Emperors themselves, and acutely aware that any 'dyarchy' was no more than a convenient fiction, they chose the line of least
resistance. Yet what other possible counterweight could men see to the potential or actual misuse or abuse of the imperial prerogatives? The Senate enjoyed an important place in the
constitution, and had gained a new role as a high court of justice; it handled much business of a routine nature from Italy and the public provinces; it numbered in its ranks nearly all
the highest officers of state, as well as their recent predecessors and expected successors, not to speak of the great 'friends' (amid principis) who had the ear and the confidence of the
Emperor; it had behind it half a millennium of independent history as Rome's great council of state and of imperial success. It is then not hard to appreciate that it remained a focus of
opposition dreams, even when criticism of a princeps had to be whispered 'at private parties and in intimate gatherings' (Tacitus, Annals 3. 54), or the repository of the hopes of
independents like Thrasea Paetus in the early years of Nero, until men finally reconciled themselves to the 'futility of long speeches in the Senate, when the best men were quick to
reach agreement elsewhere, and of endless haranguing of public meetings, when the final decisions were taken not by the ignorant multitude but by one man' (Tacitus, Dialogus 41).
For all that, the Empire relied chiefly on senators to run it, and so no Emperor could be really secure unless his rule was founded on their consent or acquiescence. The Senate never
lost its esprit de corps, and there was hostility to Emperors who were thought to abuse their great powers. As Tacitus expressed what was surely his own philosophy,
There can be great men even under bad emperors, and duty and discretion, if coupled with energy of character and a career of action, will bring a man to no less glorious summits
than are attained by perilous paths and ostentatious deaths, with no advantage to the Commonwealth. (Agricola 42)
It may be that the weakness of the Senate went beyond what Augustus had desired. On more than one occasion, he tried to reduce its size to a really effective level, but in the end
retired baffled from the task. He was probably well aware of the danger of distancing himself too far from average upper-class opinion. In the late Republic, the leading politicians
had relied on informal 'cabinets' of friends and associates for discussion of policy and practicalities, and thus the constantly changing mosaic of politics had ensured a variety of