- The Arts Of Government
(By Nicholas Purcell)The Principate from Nero to Gallienus
In A.D. 193 the military and political crisis of A.D. 69 was repeated; the commanders of provincial armies contended for the position of princeps. The
balance of power of the armies had shifted east from the Rhine, but in almost every respect the conflicts were very similar. The crisis of 193 exchanged
Commodus, the last of the Antonines in a succession of adoption and blood which had been continuous since the accession of Nerva in 96, for Septimius
Severus, nominal heir to that tradition and founder of a similar sequence of succession which lasted until 235. Many have seen this disturbance as the
harbinger of the chaos of the middle of the third century. Nothing could be further from the truth. In its resemblance to the turmoil of 69 the war of 193 is
one of our most striking indications of the stability of the high principate.
In this period, to a large extent an 'age without history' in the normal sense, the narrative of events (accessions, usurpations, battles, deaths) actually
obscures the tendencies and evolutions on which the historian, whose job it is to explain, must concentrate. And stability and peace challenge explanation
much more than destruction and disaster. This stability had been created above all by the Flavian Emperors Vespasian and Domitian (69-79 and 81-96).
Three achievements in particular may be emphasized, though we should be wary of asserting that they were brought about by design or policy rather than
by accidental development. First, the revenues of Empire were organized to a high enough specification for expenditure over several years to be planned
ahead; this had never before been the case. In the process some degree of administrative organization had to be fostered (but it is argued in this chapter
that this should not be mistaken for a bureaucracy). Second, the last client kingdoms were subjected to the process of provincialization which had been
emerging for sixty years, and at last the Empire became a tessellation of provincial units within clearly demarcated boundaries.
The armies were now permanently fixed on similarly clear frontiers which divided an increasingly self-conscious empire from the non-provinces beyond.
Third, the Flavian Emperors, largely disembarrassed of the remnants of the republican high aristocracy by the political chaos of Nero's reign, and of
municipal Italian origins themselves, regularized the recruitment and replacement of the upper classes at Rome and advanced the process by which,
through an ever more refined set of public positions in the gift of the Emperor, the elites of the cities of the Empire increasingly came to feel part of the
establishment. This was the process, recognized by Tacitus in its early stages in one of the most perceptive and sophisticated historical discussions in Latin
(Annals 3.55), that completed the transformation of the conqueror of the world into its capital. The Flavian Emperors came from the municipal elites of
rural Italy. While they lacked the luxurious sophistication and amoral superiority of the ancient aristocracy which supplied and continued to flourish under
the Julii and Claudii, they failed also to maintain the ceremonious constitutionalism which had characterized the wiser of their predecessors. Their
impatience with the forms of Roman political life rapidly led them into autocratic manners which in the end brought down their dynasty with the
assassination of Domitian.
But it was too late to return to before the Civil War. The safely respectable senator Nerva was replaced, perhaps not wholly voluntarily, by Trajan, a
second-generation senator whose origin was from the Italian diaspora in the provinces. Recruitment to the Roman governing class was becoming wider all
the time. Men like Trajan, native Latin speakers of Italian stock who spent all their formative years in Roman public life, were less surprising newcomers
than the increasingly numerous magnates from the cities of the Hellenic East, often the descendants of the client kings through whom that area had been
ruled a century before. Greek and Latin mixed on more equal terms than ever before; the new cosmopolitanism was expressed by Trajan's successor
Hadrian in the style of his personal appearance and the assiduity with which he travelled in every part of the Empire.