The History of Rome: Rise and Fall of the Empire. John Bagnell Bury
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(5) Organization. The equestrian order was divided into turmae, six in number, each of which was commanded by one of the seviri equitum Romanorum. The seviri were nominated by the Emperor, and changed annually like the magistrates. They were obliged to exhibit games (ludi sevirales) every year. It is to be observed that the knights were not organized or treated as a political body, like the senate. They had no machinery for action; no common political initiative; no common purse.
(6) Privileges. In dress the Roman eques was distinguished by the military mantle called trabea, and the narrow purple stripe (angustus clavus) on the tunic. They also wore a gold ring, and this was considered so distinctively a badge of knighthood, that the bestowal of a gold ring by the Emperor became the form of bestowing knighthood. The children of a knight, like those of a senator, were entitled to wear the gold bulla. In the theatre special seats—“the fourteen rows”—were reserved for the knights, and Augustus (5 A.D.) assigned them special seats also at races in the Circus and at gladiatorial spectacles.
(7) Service of the knights as officers. The chief aim of Augustus in reorganizing the knights was military. He desired to procure competent officers in the army, from which posts he excluded senators entirely. Men of senatorial rank, however, who, as has been already mentioned, became knights before they were old enough to enter the senate, regularly served a militia, as it was called. The officer-posts here referred to are the subordinate commands—not the supreme commands of legions—and are of three kinds: (a) praefectura cohortis, or command of an auxiliary cohort, (b) tribunatus militum, in a legion, (c)praefectura alae, command of an auxiliary cavalry squadron. The Emperor, as the supreme military commander, made the appointments to these militiaeequestres. Service as officers seems to have been made obligatory on the knights by Augustus. As knights only could hold these posts, there was no system of regular promotion for soldiers into the officer class. But it often happened that soldiers who had distinguished themselves and had risen to the first rank of centurions—who corresponded somewhat to our “non-commissioned officers”—received the equus publicus from the Emperor, and thus wore able to become tribunes and prefects. As a rule the officers held their posts for several years, and it was considered a privilege to hold the tribunatus semestris, which could be laid down after six months.
(8) Service of knights as Jurymen. In 122 B.C., C. Gracchus had assigned the right of serving as iudices exclusively to the knights; forty years later (81 B.C.). Sulla restored it to the senate; then in 70 B.C., a compromise between the two orders was made by the law of L. Aurelius Cotta, whereby the list of jurymen was composed of three classes, called decuria, the first consisting entirely of senators, the second of knights equo publico, the third of tribuni aerarii. As the last class possessed the equestrian census and belonged to the equestrian order in the wide sense in which the term was then used, although they had not theequus publicus, this law of Cotta really gave the preponderance to the knights. The total number of iudices was 900, each class contributing 300. This arrangement lasted till 46 B.C., when Caesar removed the tribuni aerarii from the third class and filled it with knights in the strict sense. Augustus excluded the senators altogether from service as iudices, and while he preserved the threedecuriae filled them with knights. But he added a fourth decuria for service inunimportant civil trials, consisting of men who possessed more than half the equestrian income (ducenarii). Only men of at least thirty years of age were placed on the list of iudices, and, in the time of Augustus, only citizens of Rome or Italy.
(9) Employment of knights in state offices. By reserving the posts of officers and iudices for the knights to the exclusion of the senators, Augustus was carrying out the design of C. Gracchus and giving the knights an important political position, so that they were in some measure co-ordinated with the senate as a factor in the state. But he went much further than this. He divided the offices of administration and the public posts between the senators and the knights. The general principle of division was that those spheres of administration, which were more closely connected with the Emperor personally, were given to knights. The legateships of legions, however, were reserved for senators; as also the governorships of those provinces which had been annexed under the republic. But new annexations, such as Egypt, Noricum, and Raetia, were entrusted to knights, and likewise the commands of new institutions, such as the fleet and the auxiliary troops. Financial offices, the collection of taxes, and those posts in Rome and Italy which the Emperor took charge of, were also reserved for knights. The selection of the procurators Augusti, or tax-officers, in the provinces from the knights alone was some compensation to them for the loss of the remunerative field which they had occupied under the Republic as publicani. As the taxes in the imperial provinces were no longer fanned, but directly levied from the provincials, the occupation of the knights as middlemen, by which they had been able to accumulate capital and so acquire political influence, was gone. Under the Principate they are an official class. Those knights who held high imperial offices were called equites illustres.
(10) Elevation of knights to the senate. Knights of senatorial rank—that is, sons of senators—who had not yet entered the senate, formed a special class within the equestrian order, to which they, as a rule, only temporarily belonged, and wore the badges of their senatorial birth. They could ordinarily become senators on reaching the age of twenty-five. For knights who were not ofsenatorial rank there was no regular system of advancement to the senate. But the Emperor, by assuming censorial functions, could exercise the right of adlectio, and admit knights into the senate. It seems to have been a regular usage to admit into the senate the commander of the praetorian guards when he vacated that post.
Chapter IV.
The Family of Augustus and His Plans to Found a Dynasty
While Augustus was constructing the new constitution he had many tasks of other kinds—administrative, military, and diplomatic—to perform. He had to regulate the relations of the Roman state with neighboring powers in the East; he had to secure the northern frontier of the empire on the Rhine and the Danube against the German barbarians, and carry out there the work begun by Caesar his father. He had to improve the administration in Italy and Rome, and step in if the senate of the Empire failed to perform its duties; he had to reform the provincial administration which had been so disgracefully managed by the senate of the Republic. Besides this he had to make his own position safe by keeping his fellow-citizens content; he had to see that the nobles and the people were provided with employment and amusement. Finally he had to look forward into the future, and take measures to ensure the permanence of the system which he had called into being.
This last task of Augustus, his plans and his disappointments in the choice of a successor to his power, will form the subject of the present chapter. It is needful, first of all, to obtain a clear view of his family relationships.
Augustus was married three times. He had been betrothed to a daughter of P. Servilius Isauricus, but political motives induced him to abandon this alliance and marry Clodia, daughter of Fulvia, in order to seal a reconciliation with her stepfather M. Antonius. In consequence, however, of a quarrel with her mother, he put her away before the marriage was consummated. His second wife was Scribonia, twice a widow, whom he also married for political reasons, namely, in order to conciliate Sextus Pompeius, whose father-in-law, Scribonius Libo, was Scribonia's brother. By her one child was born to him in 39 B.C., unluckily a daughter; for, had it been a son, much anxiety and sorrow might have been spared him. Her name was Julia. He divorced Scribonia in order to marry Livia, the widow of Tiberius Claudius Nero (38 B.C.). Livia was herself a daughter of the Claudian house, for her father, M. Livius Drusus Claudianus, was, as his name shows, a Claudius adopted into the Livian gens. She was a beautiful and talented woman whom he truly loved; and it was a sore disappointment to him that they had no children.
Livia, however, brought her husband two stepsons: Tiberius Claudius Nero (born in 42 B.C.) and Nero Claudius Drusus, born in 38 B.C., after her marriage with Augustus, and suspected to be really his son.
Besides his daughter Julia and his wife Livia, another woman possessed great influence with the Emperor and played an important part in the affairs of the time. This was his sister