Augustus. Buchan John
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could not govern at all, and the Senate, with the twin tasks of administering an empire and curbing the new democracy, failed in both. Slowly it was realized that the necessary reforms could only come from the quarter where the true power now resided—the High Command, the individual who had been given an overriding authority and had an army behind him.
It must come in the end to the sword—this the most pacific and legally-minded had been forced to admit. Between the conservatives who would not bow to the logic of facts, and the radicals who demanded changes which they did not clearly envisage, there was no hope of compromise. Armies, a new kind of army, had become the only arbiter. In old days every citizen had been a soldier, who served unpaid in the little wars. According to Livy, the protracted siege of Veii first compelled the payment of troops. The struggle with Carthage and the consequent Spanish wars inaugurated a long-service system; the defeat of Hannibal imposed on Rome the penalty of an empire, and grandiose campaigns for which the citizens were most unwillingly conscripted. Marius accordingly made the army a volunteer force, enlisted under a particular general for a particular campaign, and so fundamentally changed its character. The fortunes of the soldiers were now linked with those of their commander; he alone could procure them their due reward, and their loyalty was owed to him rather than to the state. A popular general who could raise men and attract their allegiance had a weapon so potent that it wholly upset the balance of the constitution. Rome had no standing army in Italy and only small forces in the provinces; when an emergency came an army had to be improvised; only a general of repute could get recruits, and for that service he could make his own terms. The Senate had no hold upon an army’s loyalty. The High Command, ever since distant wars began, had become a recognized part of the state machinery. Sulla, Pompey and Julius had revealed it as the major part. Was the ancient civic constitution destined to give way to a military satrapy?
Octavius—he was not for nothing the scion of banking stock—looked beyond the political conundrum to the economic problems of the land. These in the stress of wars and tumults had been forgotten, but they were there in the background, an eternal irritant. The Roman economy was unbalanced. The importation of cheap grain had ruined the old peasant proprietors. Some had turned successfully from wheat to olives and vines, but many had gone under, and what had once been arable land was now rough pasture, farmed by joint-stock companies or individual capitalists by means of slave labour. Rome was not self-supporting, and depended precariously for her food upon the continued command of the sea. The system of corn doles had pauperized her citizens. The city itself was a centre of world-wide financial operations—as a banker’s grandson he knew them well; the north side of the Forum was a nest of banks and stock exchanges; but her industrial life was meagre, and her commerce, at least in Roman hands, was on a narrow scale. The merchant had little purchase in the state, for he had never succeeded in getting the harbour at Ostia improved, and for his larger vessels was compelled to use Puteoli, a hundred and fifty miles away; while most people did not think him quite respectable. In a slave-owning society trade and industry are always at a discount. The public finance was grotesque. In Italy there was no direct taxation; the revenue came from the rents of public lands, the salt monopoly and one or two small duties: the bulk of the state income was provincial tribute collected on so preposterous a system that scarcely half of what the provincials paid came to the exchequer. The total Roman income was perhaps three million pounds, and the meagreness of the result was commensurate with the crudity of the methods. Octavius was enough of a financier to have little respect for Rome’s financial apparatus.
He was enough of a moralist and philosopher, too, to be uneasy about less ponderable things. In the lower classes the old Roman stock was nearly extinct, and the men who voted in the Assembly were a conglomerate of all races. It has been calculated that some ninety per cent. were of foreign extraction,1 and their source of origin was largely the East. The poorer citizens were little more than parasites, fed with free state bread, amused, by free state shows, superb material for the demagogue. The middle classes were rarely industrialists or merchants in the honourable sense; the rich among them made their fortunes chiefly by farming the state rents and taxes, by army contracts, by dealing in slaves, and by a kind of banking which might be better described as speculative money-lending.1 The aristocrats by birth had either joined the “new men” in the race for wealth, or had become stiff relic-worshippers and pedants of ancestry. As sprung himself from the bourgeoisie, Octavius had suffered from their loutish arrogance. Except in the rural districts and a few old-fashioned city homes the traditional Roman “gravitas” and “pietas” had become things of the past.
It was not a pleasing picture to contemplate for a young man, country-bred, gravely educated, a lover of a life that seemed to be vanishing and of a past separated by a great gulf from the present. One thing was clear. The elaborate checks and balances of the constitution had resulted only in the loss of all responsibility. That constitution was “the chaotic result of attempts to arrest internal revolution, and of feeble and undirected efforts to adjust the relation of outworn powers. A state in which three popular assemblies has each the right of eliciting the sovereign will of the people, possesses no organization which can satisfy the need for which constitutions exist—the ordered arrangement of all the wants of civic life by means of a series of acts possessing perpetual validity.”2 The position of the Senate was no less anomalous and impotent. The power of the holders of successive High Commands was a return to barbarism. The whole of Rome’s government had broken down, and what was to replace it? Could it ever be replaced? Could a people that had failed to rule a city rule the world? Had not Rome’s success been her ruin?
He had heard the Senate’s defence, put magisterially by Cicero and angrily by the ordinary conservative. It was simply that the Republic had worked well enough till the machine was put out of gear by the triumvirate of Julius and Pompey and Crassus. The constitution was a balanced thing, as the Greek Polybius had long ago argued, an adroit mingling of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. The magistrates, with their right of initiative in Senate and Assembly, had ample executive powers, which were tempered by the Senate’s authority in matters of policy. The veto of the tribunes protected the individual. The Senate represented the embodied ability and experience of the state, while the popular election of magistrates gave public opinion a constitutional means of expressing itself.1 Let Rome return to the beaten track, to the old ways, and all would be well. But to the young man’s clear mind it was plain that there could be no such returning. The traditional machine had been cranky for a century and was now damaged past repair. So long as there was an empire the High Commands must remain, and with them the dictatorial armies with whom the power lay. Was there any solution? Must the choice lie between the dynasts and the bombasts, between barbarism and muddle?
These were academic meditations, Octavius suddenly reminded himself, for he had forgotten Julius. The dynast, who was his great-uncle, had driven all others from the field, and had the Senate awed into stillness by his shadow and the world quiet under his hand. This man had a new way of life for Rome. Octavius had heard him expound it during late watches in the camp, in his quiet reedy voice, when the eyes in the lean face seemed in the lamplight to have the masterful luminosity of Jove’s eagle. He had heard the matter discussed by Julius’s friends. Word had come during later weeks to Apollonia of edicts which were the first steps in the new policy. He tried to piece the fragments into a body of doctrine.
Law and order must be restored. The empire must be governed, and there must be a centre of power. The Roman world required a single administrative system. This could not be given by the People, for a mob could not govern. It could not be given by the Senate, which had shown itself in the highest degree incompetent, and in any case had no means of holding the soldiers’ loyalty. Only a man could meet the need, a man who had the undivided allegiance of an army, and that the only army. A general without an army was a cypher, as Pompey had found, and, since an army was now a necessity, he who controlled it must be the master of the state. The idea of a personal sovereign, which had come from Greece and the East and had long been hovering at the back of Roman minds, must now become a fact, for it was the only alternative to anarchy.
This was Julius’s cardinal principle. It followed from it that the old autocracy of the Optimates and the Senate must disappear. That indeed had happened. Julius had always denied—it was one of the few charges which annoyed him—that he had destroyed the Republic; he had only struck at the tyranny