This week we are taking a look at what ended up being the ‘runner-up’ in the latest ACOUP Senate poll (we’ll also do the winner, “The Problem with Sci-Fi Body armor” before year’s end, worry not), the “Afterlife of the Roman Republic,” which is to say a look at the continued existence of the various institutions of the Roman Republic in the imperial period. There’s a lot to cover here, but I am going to focus on the major components of the Republic as we laid them out in our series on “How to Roman Republic:” the magistrates, the assemblies, the Senate and the courts. I think at some point in the not-to-distant future we may come back and do a second series on “How to Roman Empire” focused on the government of the principate (27BC-284AD) in more detail.
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(Bibliography Note: There is a tremendous amount of scholarship on the structure and function of Roman imperial governance. Here I have relied primarily on the two standard reference works: on the role of the emperor himself and government residing within the imperial household, F. Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (31BC – AD 337) (1977) and on the continued role of the senatorial aristocracy, R.J.A. Talbert, The Senate of Imperial Rome (1984). For bibliography on how the Roman Republic functioned before the imperial period, see the bibliography note on our How to Roman Republic series.)
Octavian’s Republican Necromancy
Before looking at how the machinery of the republic continued to function in the imperial period, it is worth considering how the Roman Empire came to have to somewhat odd sort of monarchy it did. We call this system, from 31 BC to 285 AD the principate (the system that comes after it is the dominate and we ought to discuss it separately sometime). The name comes from the relatively republican-sounding title that Octavian/Augustus took for himself, that of ‘princeps,’ meaning the ‘first’ or ‘foremost’ of a group; it had a nice republican ring to it because the senior-most member of the Senate – which was now, by raw dint of power and influence (but not age), Octavian – was called the princeps Senatus and spoke first in status order of the Senate. For Octavian then, princeps as a title was useful: it sounded republican but served to confirm that he was first among ‘equals’ (not really equals) in the Roman aristocracy.
The defining feature of the principate was the continued operation of at least some of the mechanics of republican governance and thus the continued maintenance of at least the appearance of a republic although as we’ll see often with substantial alterations, both additions and subtractions.
I think we can understand Octavian’s choices here if we view them in the context of a dilemma. Octavian had just taken power by dint of military force, having defeated the other alternatives (Sextus Pompey, Lepidus and Antony) and absorbed their armies. However, he needed the machinery of Roman provincial governance in order to extract the revenue necessary to pay those armies as he converted them into a long-standing, full-time professional force. Running that machinery requires administrators. This often comes as a surprise to folks in our modern high-literacy, high-education societies, but administrators are often in short supply for pre-modern states: you need literate, educated men with experience running large organizations and these societies do not produce a lot of those fellows.
And Octavian needs a lot of them. Every province needs both a governor (which will be either a pro-magistrate or a legatus Augusti pro praetore) and a financial official (either a quaestor or a procurator). In addition, every legion is at last going to get its own commander (a legatus legionis), plus staff officers (military tribunes, traditionally six per legion, though only one of these in the imperial period will be from the senatorial order, generally). And then, of course, on top of that, officials are needed to run the machinery of the capital itself: manage the treasury, run the courts, and so on. As we’ll see, over time parallel non-senatorial career paths are going to emerge for some of these roles but initially Rome lacks any kind of professional civil service, making the Senate – a body of ex-magistrates – the only reliable source of such men.
Of course the other side of the dilemma was that as Julius Caesar’s assassination had demonstrated, the Senate was also potentially dangerous: a body of all of the most influential men in Rome was a potential focal point of dangerous discontent.
It’s not clear the degree to which Octavian ever considered the problem in precisely these terms. Indeed, his ‘solutions’ emerge not as a single program, but as a series of quite ad hoc band-aid fixes, broken into two larger sets of reforms we call the First Settlement (27 BC) and the Second Settlement (23 BC, with lingering changes as late as 19). It seems clear to me, given some of his other legislation and political choices, Octavian – soon to be Augustus – had a traditionalist streak in him, so keeping the machinery of the republic may well have been an ideological decision as well as a practical one. Even though we can see, I think, quite clearly, that Augustus’ claim to have ‘restored the Republic’ is essentially a lie, I suspect it was a lie that Augustus himself believed.
In any event, the solution was the principate, the illusion of republican governance: keep the Senate and keep Senators doing almost all of the normal ‘senate stuff’ – including governing the provinces and running the machinery of government. Only now this system would run ‘under management’ with Octavian/Augustus in overall control. On the one hand, that gave Augustus access to the senate’s pool of trained generals and administrators, while on the other hand the continued appearance of republican forms as well as the reality of a continued role in government for the senatorial elite would avoid the kind of lethal discontent that had killed Caesar.
At some point, we should probably do a complete look at the principate as a form of government as a matching set to our series on the Roman Republic, but for now let me very briefly summarize the results of Augustus’ two settlements:
- Pageantry: In both settlements, Octavian/Augustus makes a grand show of returning power to the Senate and/or the People, with the Senate then, in a choreographed display, asking Augustus to take on at least some continued ‘responsibilities’ (read: powers) and also some honorific titles (usually at least one on the list precisely so Augustus can turn it down in a show of republican modesty).
- Provinces: Augustus splits the provinces into two groups. The wealthier, stable, interior provinces he returns to the senate, putting them back into the machinery of traditional republican provincial administration. However, the provinces that continued to have a military presence, he was ‘given’ by the senate as his provinicae, allowing him to retain notional command of the armies.
- Imperium: In order to facilitate that, Augustus was voted imperium maius (‘greater imperium‘) which allowed him to command legions, appoint legates (important, because he won’t be commanding these legions himself!) and eventually to give directives to other governors, including senatorial governors (because his imperium outranks theirs).
- Tribunicia Potestas: In order to enable Augustus to control domestic affairs, he’s also voted the powers (potestas) of the tribunate, which as you will recall were vast. This enables Augustus to stop holding the consulship, as he has all of the consuls powers and more now. Emperors in the principate tend to date their reign through these grants of ‘trib. pot.’ because it has a nice, popular ‘for the people’ ring to it.
So with all of that stated, where does that leave the old machinery of Roman governance?
Assemblies and Magistrates
The first thing to note is that all of the existing magistracies continue to function, although many undergo a slow process of change. After all, those various magistracies were necessary both to run parts of Rome’s government (especially in the city itself) and also to provide the means with which senators – remember, the Senate is a council of ex-magistrates – are created on a regular basis. These offices also continue to function, to some degree, as a testing ground, sorting the competent from the incompetent. Emperors could surely promote their favorites, but the average quality of Roman leadership remained high, suggesting that the sorting system of the cursus honorum‘s elimination contest continued to function.
There were, however, some immediate reforms. The number of offices at each level had ballooned first under Sulla (dict. 82-80) and then under Caesar (dict. 49-44) and Augustus prunes these back to more manageable levels for the most part. The number of quaestors, bloated to 40, was pruned to 20; the number of praetors, bloated to 16, was pruned to 12.
The consulship had remained, as always, at 2 and here Augustus actually gets a bit clever: he actually wanted more consulships. The logjam of figures looking to be consul was a major source of senate unrest early in his reign (in the lead-up to the Second Settlement in 23), but Roman tradition that the number of consuls was always two and could not be increased was strong. Augustus could – and did – vacate one of those seats, but he both needs more ‘consulars’ (‘ex-consuls’) to run his empire and he needs to reduce the pressure of senators furious at being stuck, hopelessly, at the praetorship. The clever solution was suffect consuls (consul suffectus). An informal solution, Augustus arranged so that the regular consuls of the year (we’ll get through the shifting process of selection in a moment) would resign halfway through, allowing the appointment of two new consuls (suffectus, meaning ‘replacement’) allowing four men to hold the consulship in a year, even though there were only two slots. The prestige of being the consul ‘of the year’ (the first pair) was higher, which preserved some of the dignity of the office.
In terms of the responsibilities for these offices, we first have to remember (above) the imperial and senatorial province distinction: the power of regular senatorial offices is going to extend to Italy and to the senatorial provinces, but not the imperial provinces which are going to have their own parallel system in a moment. Even within that framework, of course, you’d have to be a very stupid quaestor or praetor or what have you to directly defy the emperor, though on matters where the emperor did not care (which were always going to be many, Rome is a very big machine at this point), you had a lot of discretion.
Under that proviso, the offices mostly keep doing what they had always been doing.
The quaestors remained important record-keeping and financial offices, but of course also very junior, as well as the entryway into the Senate. Each senatorial province continued to get a quaestor to manage its finances, while two more stayed in Rome to manage the central Roman treasury, the aerarium Saturni (but see below). In the 50s AD, those quaestors lost control of the treasury, which was moved into the parallel imperial bureaucracy, but remained as record-keeping officials. Next up, the Aediles (now six) continued to exist, supervising public works and keeping order in the city of Rome, as they had, though they lose control over the distribution of grain under Augustus, the job transferred to the emperor who in turn delegated it to equestrian (that is, non-senatorial) officials.
The tribunes of the plebs remained ten in number and continued to notionally function, although the emperor’s posession of tribunicia potestas and thus his presence as the 11th member of the 10 tribunes meant they had little real power. They could still potentially block the Senate, but only an idiot of a tribune would try to block the emperor. Citizens could also, in theory, appeal to the tribunes as before, but generally the tribune citizens appealed to was, of course, the emperor, a habit that becomes a citizen right to appeal to the emperor, something that we tend to remember from St. Paul’s use of it.
The praetors continued to manage the courts in Rome and will continue having the discretion to issue their praetorian edicts setting out how they will implement the law until the second century AD, when this power too is swallowed by the emperor. The consuls remain two (but with suffects), but no longer command armies, instead being effectively the administrators of Italy itself (as Italy is not a province). Consuls could also manage some of the courts and convene the Senate, though again the presence of the emperor limited their actual power.
Now if you are asking, “well, given all of this why on earth would anyone want to hold these positions, as they grow weaker,” the answer is three-fold. The first part of the answer is, of course, as much as these offices are fading, they do still carry real responsibility and power, albeit within what the emperor will permit. More broadly, of course, there’s also prestige in holding these offices, as there always was. But most importantly these offices remain the gateways to many of the really significant positions of authority within Rome’s government: emperors will continue to draw many of their key officials, especially provincial governors (of various forms, as we’ll see) from the ranks of the Senate and particularly from senators who have achieved either the praetorship or the consulship. Consequently a year as praetor or consul was the price of admission if you wanted to command an army (in the name of the emperor) or govern a province (either as a legate or a senatorial governor; we’ll come to this distinction in a moment).
In terms of selection, however, the system becomes much less democratic even than it was. During the Republic, at least through to the period of the Second Triumvirate, magistrates were elected in Rome’s popular assemblies, as we’ve discussed. Under Augustus, in 5 A.D., a law (the lex Valeria Cornelia) changed the procedure, by creating a new body of centuries (initially 10, later 15 and then 20) consisting of senators and equites eligable to sit as judges (the decuriae iudicum) on courts that required an equestrian jury; these new centuries voted first and the candidates they selected were termed destinati and almost assured a victory; it’s likely in most cases these elite centuries submitted to the assembly a complete ‘slate’ of candidates – one for each post.
This system must not have been wholly satisfactory, because in the first year of the reign of Tiberius (r. 14-37 AD), elections are then moved entirely into the Senate, with the assemblies only meeting to ratify the choices the Senate made. That is a significant change, as it made the Senate a self-selecting body, since electoral victory was, generally, the entry-condition for the Senate. The Senate’s discretion in choosing magistrates was non-zero; the emperor could declare his support for candidates, whose election by the Senate would then be assured, but it seems that emperors generally didn’t set out complete or even nearly complete slates, except sometimes for the consulship. Consequently, the Senate effectively had the job and the power of weeding out men from the lower offices, deciding who advanced and who didn’t, with the emperor intervening to make sure a few of his candidates advanced each year.1
The assemblies also lost their power to really legislate. As you will recall, under the Republic, magistrates proposed legislation, then the Senate recommended, but the final up-or-down went to the assemblies (usually the comitia tributa, as the comitia centuriata was too cumbersome). In practice, under Augustus, the senatus consulta acquired the force of law, although Roman legal writers are careful to note that this is merely the force of law and that creating an actual lex still requires the assembly. That said, the assemblies became, in effect, by the start of Tiberius’ reign, a mere rubber stamp: the Senate decided elections and passed senatus consulta and the assemblies merely approved what was put before them.
We’ll get back to the Senate’s corporate role in a moment, but before we do, I keep alluding to the parallel senatorial and imperial structures for the broader empire and that’s what we need to cover next.
Pro-Magistrates, Legati and the Imperial Bureaucracy
Now as noted above, this isn’t the place for a full run-down of the structure of the entire principate, but to understand the persistence of the Senate and its importance (and limits), we need to at least understand some of how the Roman government actually functions, which is to say how the provinces and armies are run (which is most of what the Roman state actually does).
In practice, the Roman Empire under the principate has two parallel systems of provincial governance. That divide is rooted in the split noted above, between imperial and senatorial provinces. Now, looking at a map, (as below) it appears at first blush that the division is extremely lopsided. And in respect to armies, it was: nearly any province with an assigned legion (and every province with an actual field army) ends up as an imperial province. The one notable exception, Macedonia, is ‘cleaned up’ by 10 BC with the creation of the provinces of Moesia Superior and Inferior as imperial provinces, moving the frontier (and the legions) beyond Macedonia. But with respect to wealth and population, the division was far more equal, because the senatorial provinces – all internal and coastal – are some of the richest and most densely peopled provinces in the empire. In terms of revenue, Asia and Africa (proconularis) were some of the richest; Baetica and Narbonensis, later made senatorial provinces, were also the wealthiest parts of Spain and Gaul, respectively. By contrast, the only imperial provinces with close to that kind of population and revenue were Syria and the unusual province of Egypt. Very roughly, the senatorial provinces and Italy, collectively, may have approached something like half of the actual population of the empire, even if they also held basically none of the armies.
As an aside, you can see how that arrangement works pretty well for Augustus (and later emperors) and for senators. Augustus gets to keep all of the armies, which means a firm hold on power and less fear of senatorial rivals. But on the other hand, the Senate continues to decide the administration of the most desirable provinces to govern: cultured, dense, urban and wealthy provinces with lots of creature comforts and abundant opportunities for lining one’s pockets. Though the senators themselves, as we’ll see, get to eat their cake and have it too: a military career is still an option for them.
For the senatorial provinces, the senate selected the governors, as they might have in the late republic. Following along the lines of Sulla’s ‘reforms’ (which restricted the consuls to Italy), these were governed by pro-magistrates: proconsuls for the important provinces (Asia and Africa, primarily) and propraetors for the less important provinces; the former group needed to have held the consulship, the latter group the praetorship in order to be eligible. As a result, even as some of the old republican offices lost many of their powers, they remained important as gateways to these more important and valuable postings. As before, each governor was assigned a quaestor to manage the province finances and records.
For the imperial provinces, the governor was notionally the emperor, who received all of the imperial provinces as his provincia as part of being emperor, thus giving him direct notional command of nearly all of Rome’s armies.2 But of course the emperor could not govern all of his provinces directly; indeed he generally governed none of them directly, but stayed in Rome. Instead, the emperor appointed legati – legates – who commanded under his auspices as his subordinates. Each imperial province thus had a governor-general who was a legatus Augusti pro praetore (‘pro-praetorian legate of Augustus’). These men were also senators who had gone through the cursus honorum and had achieved the rank of either praetor or consul (frequently just the praetorship), however, whereas the senatorial governors were selected by the Senate, the emperor hand-picked the legati Augusti. Consequently, even for the imperial provinces, the running of a province (at least, of the full-sized ones) remained the prerogative of senators.
Pliny the Younger’s (61-c.113) relatively well-attested career provides a decent sense of what a career in politics for an elite Roman in this period might look like. Pliny was born into the equestrian order and so initially held some equestrian offices, serving as a military tribune and one of the judges on the cetumviri court, before serving as quaestor in the late 80s; for his quaestorship, he was assigned as one of the two assigned to the emperor. After that, he spent a year as tribune in 91, before being elected praetor in 93 and holding a series of administrative prefect positions in the 90s. He held the consulship in 100 as one of the suffect consuls of the year. In the Senate, Pliny was a noted litigator and from his letters we know he frequently served both as prosecution and defense, though he preferred the latter.3 Unrest and administrative problems in the senatorial province of Bithynia et Pontus drew the emperor Trajan’s attention and in 110 he pulls Pliny to act, somewhat unusually, as the legatus Augusti in the province (which would normally have had a senatorial proconsul). Pliny’s status by that point, as a senior ex-consular, might have served to demonstrate that Trajan was serious about cleaning things up.
At the same time, the emperors swiftly developed a parallel bureaucracy beyond the Senate, which I don’t want to get too bogged down it, but it is worth discussing. Many of these offices were ‘equestrian’ in that they were held by members of the equites rather than men of the senatorial order.4 In the provinces, the key office here were the procuratores Augusti, imperial procurators that served the same role for the legati Augusti as a quaestor would for a senatorial promagistrate (but unlike the quaestors, these fellows are not senators!). In addition, sometimes smaller imperial provinces or sub-provinces would, instead of a full legatus Augusti get a prefect or simple a procurator5 to govern them; Egypt also got an equestrian prefect (the praefectus Alexandreae et Aegypti). Egypt was such a wealthy, valuable province that Augustus and subsequent emperors wouldn’t trust it to a senator (who might come to rival the emperor), thus the more ‘junior’ office here.
Alongside those provincial officials, slowly, in fits and starts, there emerged an imperial bureaucracy around the emperor himself, with some of these posts held by equites and some by the emperor’s own freedmen. Initially, this structure is basically an extension of the emperor’s own provincial command and his entourage. Just as a governor when he took control of a province would bring his own entourage of scribes, accountants and assistants (mostly slaves or freedmen), so too the emperor had his own ‘household staff.’ Likewise, each province in the Republic had its own sub-treasury, called a fiscus (the term for the box in a household where the money was kept) and so the emperor also had his own fiscus.
Even in the reign of Augustus the fiscus of the emperor – including both the revenue of his provinces, but also his personal revenue and funds – was large enough to function as effectively a parallel second treasury. This was superintended by a financial official, the a rationibus (‘from accounts’)6 who was an imperial freedman, although in the second century, this shifts to being an equestrian post.
Likewise, a lot of what the emperor did in running his provinces (and also exercising his oversight of senatorial governors) was through correspondence so voluminous that an office was required to manage it, the officium ab epistulis, run by the ab epistulis (eventually split into an ab epistulis Graecis and an ab epistulis Latinis for the two languages in which such correspondence might be sent), initially held by freedmen but at some point prior to Hadrian turned into an equestrian office. Alongside these, we have some somewhat more shadowy central offices related to the running of the army: we hear of an a copiis militaribus (‘from military supplies’) and in the second and third centuries both praefecti and praepositi copiarum or annonae (‘prefect/chief of supplies/grain’) though the relations of these positions are unclear. Finally, individual legions also finally got their own commanders, legati legionis, who were equestrians – so while an overall imperial province might have a senatorial governor-general, his direct subordinates were equestrian officers: a procurator and as many legati legionis as he had legions.
As you might imagine, as this parallel imperial bureaucracy grows in size and sophistication and expands beyond just being the emperor’s household into a real part of government with equestrian officials, the function of the traditional magistracies diminishes, slowly over time. So for instance Nero, early in his reign, moves control of the treasury out of the hands of the urban quaestors, running it through his own financial official, the a rationibus. However, that process of slowly leeching the functions of the old offices is relatively gradual (and the quaestors, for instance, in the provinces retain financial functions into the third century).
But the key thing to note is that both senatorial and imperial provinces were governed by a man of senatorial rank who had held at least the praetorship. As a result in any given year, the emperor needed 20-something praetorian senators to serve as legati Augusti propraetore, while the senate needed at least two consulars (for Africa and Asia) and roughly 8 ex-praetors to serve as promagistrates in the senatorial provinces, plus assigning quaestors to those governors. The result was that even as the equestrian offices expanded, the emperor still needed the Senate to act as a supply of men prepared to undertake the administration of a province.
But that’s not all the Senate did.
The Persistence of the Senate
The great irony of the Imperial Senate is that while the Senate of the Roman Republic had no formal powers, it controlled the state, whereas the Imperial Senate finally gets formal powers, but controls very little.
We’ve already touched on some of these new formal powers when talking about the decline of the assemblies, because nearly all of the Senate’s new powers were carved out of the assemblies. Under Augustus, the Senate gained the power to legislate, with motions passing the Senate (senatus consulta, ‘the opinion of the Senate’) acquiring the force of law, although they didn’t become a lex without the rubber stamp of the assemblies. Under Tiberius, elections were also moved into the Senate, albeit with the emperor often choosing a decent number of the winners and holding the consulship in particular largely in his gift. Finally, the Senate also begins to function as a court, which it had not done during most of the Republic.
The drift of the Senate into function as a high court, with the senators acting as a jury, actually begins in the chaotic years of the Second Triumvirate – the Senate seems to have functioned this way in a few instances in 43 and 40, though it certainly seems like senatorial trials were rare early in Augustus’ reign: key cases in 237 and 2 BC8 and 7 AD9 don’t seem to have gone through the Senate. But Cassius Dio also tells us that one of Augustus’ virtues was that he didn’t interfere with trials in the Senate and certainly in the last few years of Augustus’ reign we have a few. By the reign of Tiberius, the Senate as a court was well established.
As a court, the Senate came to hear corruption charges (repetundae, “things needing to be returned”) against Roman officials (particularly provincial governors); in particular it seems to have been a privilege of senators to have such cases heard before the Senate – equestrian officials generally went before the emperor instead. The other large category was maiestas – literally “majesty” but in this context, ‘an offense against the majesty of the Roman state’ which is to say, treason, which could include an offense against not only the dignity of the state but also, of course, the dignity of the emperor.10 Whereas the Senate seems, even under the empire, to have been essentially a fair court for repetundae, maiestas trials were deeply political and emperors generally made quite clear how they expected the Senate to vote on them.
In addition, the Senate under rare circumstances heard cases of falsum (fraud, perjury and counterfeiting), vis publica (public violence; the unauthorized use of force by an official), calumnia (malicious prosecution), and other miscellaneous crimes, usually in situations where either the individuals involved were of high rank or the case in question had attracted public attention or was particularly scandalous. The Senate also heard adultery cases – a serious charge in Roman law – involving members of the elite.
The Senate also maintained some vestigial elements of its former control over foreign affairs: generals and emperors were expected to send reports to the Senate (and largely did) and the Senate might even debate matters of foreign policy, although it was well understood that the emperor, not the Senate, had the final say. That said, emperors continue to consult the Senate on these matters well into the second century.
Finally, by law it was the Senate which invested the emperors themselves with their powers – delivered, throughout the principate, largely in the package described in the first section. This was generally a formality: either the new emperor was the obvious heir to the old one or else he had just arrived in Rome with a large army. But sometimes it wasn’t a formality and those moments of sometimes speak to the continued influence and importance of the Senate in the imperial period.
Discontent in the Senate was quite dangerous for an emperor, for one. Gaius Caligula (r. 37-41) was assassinated by a conspiracy of senators and his own Praetorian Guard, Nero (r. 54-68) committed suicide when his praetorians abandoned him and the Senate made him an outlaw, Domitian (r. 81-96) was assassinated in a conspiracy of non-senatorial officials generally thought to have been backed by at least a few senators (probably Nerva); Commodus (r. 180-192) was assassinated by his praetorian prefect in a move that was quickly ratified by the Senate, but not instigated by them. And Elagabalus (r. 218-222) was assassinated by his praetorian guard in a incident instigated by his own grandmother (Julia Maesa) who recognized that Elagabalus was growing so unpopular with the Roman elite that he was endangering the survival of the dynasty (you will note, even when the Senate doesn’t do the assassination, the assumption they’ll approve post facto is a significant factor); she thus orchestrated a fatal ‘trade out’ of Elagabalus for his young cousin Severus Alexander (r. 222-235).
The Senate also, rarely, made emperors. The most notable example of this is clearly Nerva (r. 96-98), swiftly elected to it after the assassination of Domitian, thus avoiding civil war. The Senate was less successful after the death of Commodus in 193 (the “Year of the Five Emperors”): it selected Pertinax as emperor but another senator, Didius Julianus, bribed the praetorian guard to support him instead, murdered Pertniax and was then promptly run over by Septimius Severus, the legatus Augusti on Pannonia, who returned to Rome with his legions to seize power.
The last really notable role of the Senate in making and breaking emperors as a corporate body is in 238, the “Year of the Six Emperors.” In 235, the army had mutinied and killed Severus Alexander, making Maximinus Thrax emperor. The Senate went along initially (but wasn’t happy about it), but when a tax revolt in Africa proclaimed the province’s senatorial governor, Gordian, emperor, the Senate opted to back him. What followed was a comedy of errors: by the time the Senate backed Gordian (and his son) they were both already dead, defeated by forces loyal to Maximinus, but by that point, the Senate’s course was chosen. So they elected two new emperors, Balbinus and the amazingly named Pupienus11 to try to resist Maximinus’ inevitable march into Italy. The populace of Rome, confused, rioted and when a relative of the two Gordians – who they were told, after all, had become emperor – was produced, they forced the Senate to name him emperor too; Gordian III (he’s 13 at the time). But, almost miraculously, Maximinus’ invasion of Italy fails as he ran out of supplies trying to take Aquileia by siege. Maximinus’ army mutinies against him and he’s killed, at which point Balbinus and Pupienus both successfully conspire to have parts of the praetorian guard assassinate the other, leaving just Gordian III as the last man standing. Hardly a virtuoso performance but the Senate had, for one last time, both made and broken an emperor (and also four other guys).
That tragicomic episode, however, marks the twilight of the real influence of Rome’s republican institutions, however. Following Gordian III’s short reign (r. 238-244), the empire falls into a period of repeated civil war we call the Crisis of the Third Century (235-284), during which the center of power moves permanently out of Rome and its old civic institutions and to generals commanding large armies on the frontiers. When stability is restored, by Diocletian (r. 284-305), the state that we see is much more explicitly a monarchy, with a more clearly centralized, professionalized bureaucracy – we call this new system of Roman government the dominate, for the emperors take instead of the friendly sounding title princeps the far more imposing title dominus, “master” (as of a slave).
That said, the Senate, while no longer at the center of Roman government, continued to exist even after Diocletian and in the fading days of the Roman Empire in the West. The Senate continued to meet and in the chaotic final decades of the Western Empire was frequently involved in efforts to assassinate or supplant emperors, effectively speaking for the Italian aristocracy. The Senate as an institution even persisted after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, being a useful tool in the reigns of some ‘barbarian’ kings in Italy, like Odoacer and Theoderic, though it once again enters a terminal decline in relevance in the mid-sixth century and – in Rome, at least – vanishes by the seventh. Constantine I (r. 306-337) and his son Constantius II (r. 337-361) had established a new senate in the Eastern capital of Constantinople and raised it to parity with the Senate in Rome. That Senate is its own story, but it persists at least into the 13th century.
Zooming back to the principate, however, I think the way to understand the fundamental change in the structure of Roman government in this period is that the Roman Republic had been not a democracy, but fundamentally a partnership of the Roman Senate (representing the aristocracy) and the People. Indeed, that is what the appellation SPQR – senatus populusque Romanus (“the Roman Senate and People”) – implies: the state is composed of two roughly equal entities, the People and the Senate. By contrast, I think the principate is best understood as a partnership between the Roman aristocracy, still represented by the Senate (but now with some important equestrians thrown in) and the emperor, with the People excluded.12 The Senate is surely the junior partner, but a partner nonetheless, as the emperor needs the Senate in order to actually run the empire.
There’s more to talk about concerning how both the principate and the dominate were run, especially the roles of non-republican institutions in them, but I think that will have to wait for another time and a full series on Roman imperial governance.
- For more on this and procedure, see Talbert, op. cit., 341-5.
- I keep saying ‘nearly’ here because the senatorial province of Africa proconsularis generally had one legion in it, and sometimes other senatorial provinces might have small forces as well.
- It seems to have been sometimes difficult to find senators willing to prosecute their peers for corruption, but it was in the emperor’s interest that such prosecutions happen, so they might ‘tap’ a senator for the purpose.
- Note that the ordo Senatus, the senatorial order, was itself a creation of the principate. During the Republic, there were senators, but their census status was that of the equites (because they were rich); there was no distinct ‘order’ of senators, merely the senators themselves. By contrast in the Empire there is an ordo which encompasses the senators and their families.
- The difference is that a prefect is a military official, a procurator a civilian one
- I’ve not seen a clear grammatical explanation of why these posts use the ablative and a or ab (‘from’) instead of something like a genitive (‘of accounts’) or dative (‘for accounts’), but they all do.
- Primus and Caepio
- Julia
- Agrippa Posthumus
- Essentially identical to the French concept of lèse-majesté
- Pronounced exactly like you are hoping it is
- Notionally, the emperor, with his tribunicia potestas, ‘speaks for the people,’ but obviously that’s little more than fiction.
I always get a bit annoyed when my proposal for questions gets outvoted, and then that fades when I get a great article like this. Ah well, one of these days.
A question though. As I recall, a lot of the real power the senate had back in the Republic was that it was basically a closed circle with the rich and powerful families/people of Rome. And that they would use their influence to mobilize their clients or at least threaten to do so through their patronage networks. I assume the patron/client system didn’t just disappear as the principate got going. Did the emperors use their patronage networks to informally move things along the way they wanted? And if so, how? Would senators still mobilize their smaller clients to get things the way they wanted?
Firstly the “ruling” senatorial class wasn’t closed. New men appeared quite regularly, and aristocratic families (even Patrician ones) faded into obscurity at times. It was certainly far less meritocratic than anything we would stand for today and progress would be measured in generations (ie: slave -> freedman -> local duumvir -> senator), but it was still more open than other such systems in the ancient world. Even democratic ones like Athens that were “open” financially were far more “closed” ethnically and legally. Bret’s “Queen’s Latin” series covers this.
As for patronage, yes it continued, with the Princeps at the top of the pyramid. Networks of patronage continued to be used to get relatives or clients into important military-political jobs via letters of recommendation still as before. This was fundamentally how policy was decided and implemented anyway: based on who had the relevant job more than centralised diktat. They obviously stopped being important when it came to elections in Rome, but the question as to how dominant clientships were in winning elections during the Republic (compared to trading favours with social equals) is hotly contested.
the senate, and particularly the consulars, were the richest, most powerful and most respected people in rome. there was never a huge number of them, particularly of the consulars. . Everyone respected them, everyone owed them favors, they were hugely rich. It’s not surprising that such a small group could effectively dominate the state, not just through overt means but by setting norms and establishing the tone of everything.
But once sulla kicked over the whole thing and murdered a whole generation of senators, they were never the force that had been. the magic was broken and sulla couldn’t legislate it back into being.
A spicy framing might be that the Republic needed its oligarchy. Once the oligarchy was gutted, it became possible for a single man (or a trio) to fill the power vacuum.
exactly this. just saying “the senate is in charge” couldn’t make the senate be in charge, because the power of the senate was never its formal authority. Granted, power was already slipping or sulla wouldn’t have been able to do what he did, but he definitely accelerated the decline.
What makes you think the consulars were particularly rich, and richer than other senators? And in what time period are you making this claim anyway? It might be true in the 1st century BC (perhaps, some equestrian publicani were very rich indeed); but I’m very doubtful it would be true in the 3rd Century BC
they were, definitionally, the most successful of the roman aristocrats. maybe not exclusively the richest, but they had the most opportunities
I’m hoping “The Problem with Sci-Fi Body armor” will end looking at Warhammer 40k. Not a player myself, table-top or PC, of it myself, but what little I know of it seems super interesting. As insanely over-the-top as it is, people like Toby Capwell have had huge amounts of fun talking about it and discussing it’s historical inspirations and how it works both as armour and as art. Looking at things beyond their mechanical utility to include the impact of its imagery – both inworld and as it relates to us – makes these sorts of discussions far more wholistic.
So I have a specific set of ‘hardsuit’ armors in mind that are more Mass Effect and Dune (2021/2024), but I may discuss ‘power armors’ of both the Fallout and 40k variety, if only to note that they’re usually not really anatomically feasible (handwaved in 40k by making Astartes have different proportions) – the joints aren’t actually where a real human’s elbows and knees would go. You can actually tell this, as an aside, in Fallout 4 because of the amusing bugs that can cause the game to use the in-combat-armor character model at other times: it basically looks like a freakish slenderman.
We will get into historical influences, but mostly about their avoidance, rather than adoption.
40k would be great, if only touched on in extremis.
Personally, as someone into the INQ28 side of the hobby, I’d be much more interested to hear your take on some of the socio-political aspects of the 41st millennium. Taken through the lens that every single piece of information we’re presented is propaganda of one variety or other (everything you’ve been told is a lie), it leaves a lot of little loopholes for speculation as to what life is actually like.
‘Corpse-starch: How do they make it?’. That sort of thing.
Appreciate that it’s a huge undertaking to get into the background fluff if you’re not already in it though. It is rather extensive.
Any plan to consider Starship Troopers (the novel – the film is interesting, but not in a technological sense; the body armor there is purely decorative)?
One thing from the ST book is that the powered armor required huge amounts of maintenance. The unit fights for an hour and then spends weeks doing maintenance on the suits.
Making the Mobile Infantry rather more like carrier aviators than infantry. It seems odd that they don’t have the equivalent of ground crew, but I suppose there’s not much else to do on the long journeys from battlefield to battlefield, and they never seem to do more than one sortie.
ajay – November 14, 2024 at 12:18 pm
It’s been a while since I read it, but I recall part of the MI philosophy is “Everybody Fights.” They have an extreme aversion to having a low tooth-to-tail ratio, and try to have everything done by combat troops or offloaded to civilian support. Which I assume means there is a lot of swapping modules until the suit passes the self-test and shipping the bad modules (or the whole suit) back to the depot.
Which may be more unrealistic military idealism like the idea that everyone starts at the bottom and works their way up, and the Sky Marshal has to have done that twice, Army and Navy. (How close to that have any real world militaries gotten?)
I think I read somewhere that, in the U.S. Army, you can work your way up from private to lieutenant, or from lieutenant to general, but no one has ever done both because no one’s career lasts long enough. But sometimes someone starts as a private, skips ahead to lieutenant after just a couple of years, and works their way up from there.
If books are fair game, I’ll plug CJ Cherryh’s “Rimrunners”, which has a lot of detail on the powered armor used in “Downbelow Station” et al. Via a plot device of the protagonist having to repair a couple of damaged suits and then teach a neophyte officer to use them.
Yes, and the idea that it takes literally decades of practice to run the suit close to its design specs for greater strength and crucially speed.
I’m doubtful the Earther military ships would end up like they were described though in terms of social practices. Admittedly they were basically pirates at the end, but people don’t really interact like that, especially people with access to weapons.
They do make for reasonably good villains since they’re mostly hidden.
There are two parts to this question: Armor and power.
On the armor side, there is no armor that you can realistically carry that can withstand modern firepower. If an Abrams tank can’t do it you’re not going to, power or no. Armor can increase survivability against small arms, but most small-arms fire is cover fire anyway, not intended to actually HIT the person. That’s not to say that they aren’t being aimed and the shooter doesn’t intend to hit the person; it has to be a credible threat to work. But ultimately it’s not the guns doing the killing; you’re expected to miss more than you hit. Realistically you’re looking to protect against explosions (artillery, drones, missiles, air support), and we can blow up pretty much anything at this point.
Power is something else. Soldiers have to carry a bunch of stuff, after all, and the capacity to carry more is usually good. If you can carry more bullets you can shoot longer; if you can carry more grenades you can blow stuff up better; if you can carry rockets, even better. There are also benefits to agility and endurance in most sci-fi armors–Master Chief’s armor allows him to jump higher and move faster than the other marines. You can also add more tech, like the active camouflage of the Halo series.
There are a few problems here, however. First and foremost, we’re talking about complex and intricate systems. In a combat zone. Anything that CAN go wrong WILL go wrong, and once it does suddenly your power armor turns into a really, really attractive target. Further, you’ve significantly increased your logistical demands. This is POWER armor, which demands, well, power–fuel or electricity or something. This must be manufactured, transported, and installed, all of which are vulnerabilities. But even if it doesn’t, what role does it fill? Again, the largest killer on battlefields is explosives, and drones are a much, much cheaper way to deliver explosives than power armor. They are also much cheaper as scouts and as means to deliver suppression fire (see the thermite drones used in Ukraine).
As a weapons delivery system power armor doesn’t really do much either. It occupies a space between infantry and tanks, but realistically how useful is filling that space?
As part of the logistics train it’s got tremendous potential. Skid steers and forklifts are basically power armor already, after all. And they’re usually functioning in an area that’s relatively quiet and has ready access to supplies (they’re handling the supplies!). That said, no one ever seems to consider the logistical aspects of sci-fi armies. Everyone wants the cool space blasters, but no one wants to manufacture them. (The Star Wars novels pre-Disney actually do discuss this, and the X-Wing series involves a lot of defending or attacking supply lines.)
A situation like Fallout is a good use of power armor–not as armor, or a weapons delivery system, but as psychological warfare. You’re in a post-apocalyptic wasteland with very, very few resources and you’re up against someone with sufficient resources and technology to provide combat troops with that sort of getup. Even if the power armor isn’t functionally better than lighter armor, it says “We’re much, much, much stronger than you”, which matters. Remember, the goal isn’t necessarily to kill the enemy, it’s to break their will to fight, and it would take an incredibly strong-minded person to go up against that sort of enemy and stand their ground! This is, by the way, something discussed in the book “Starship Troopers”–the difference between bombing someone to oblivion and punching them in the face is huge and psychologically significant.
I’m afraid your analysis rather falls apart from the first paragraph.
Sure small arms fire is only meant to force you to take cover, not really kill you. But if you’re wearing armour that makes you proof against it, then it’s no longer forcing you to take cover! Sure the artillery might still kill you, but without pinned down by small arm covering fire, you’re going to be able to move much faster, much more aggressively. This makes it both harder for the heavy stuff to actually hit you, and greatly increases your ability to do all your own tasks (locate the heavy stuff, provide a screen for your own side, pin the enemy infantry, etc…).
“But if you’re wearing armour that makes you proof against it…”
And that’s the thrust of my argument: We CAN’T make armor that’s proof against small-arms fire. Or, more precisely, we can make small arms that will get through pretty much any armor that a person can wear. At the point where you’re proof against small arms you’re a tank, not infantry. (Now if we’re discussing using powered armor in place of tanks, that’s an entirely different conversation and boils down to what mode of transportation is more reliable and better able to handle blasted terrain. Mecha-suits may have a real advantage here, if they can operate in battle conditions.)
This is sci-fi we’re talking about. Blasters, laser rifles, plasma weapons, and the like are on the table here. Weapons technology will advance as fast as armor technology (roughly, obviously, with a lot of variance in both). And “small arms” covers a LOT of ground. Currently tanks aren’t proof against grenades (see Russian losses in Ukraine); the idea that you’re going to make an infantry immune to them is rather silly.
The issue isn’t simply bullets-vs-armor. It’s maneuverability vs armor as well. And frankly maneuverability can trump armor when it comes to ensuring survivability fairly easily. It doesn’t matter if you don’t wear armor proof against the arms the enemy is using if the enemy can’t hit you. One of the ways to ensure maneuverability is to increase your ability to lay covering fire. Plus better guns can kill more effectively (armor can’t, not by itself) and are a psychological advantage. So if you have the choice between “better armor” and “better guns” you get more bang for your buck (bad pun, sorry) developing advanced weaponry.
If you want to make armor, a focus on concealment is going to be more effective. Again, can’t hit what you can’t see, and if you have active camouflage you can avoid the whole “getting shot” business in the first place.
(Please note that I acknowledge this is going to be a discussion of emphasis; sending red shirts out without any body armor is also stupid, because even armor that can’t stop a direct hit can deflect an indirect hit, and it does offer psychological advantages as well.)
You may be right about being unable to make armour that can resist most small arms fire with current day technology. But for science fiction, we’re in the position of neolithic era people arguing that late medieval plate armoured men-at-arms won’t exist because it’s impossible to make any kind of leather / wood / fur based armour that can keep out arrows and spears.
If we’re adding blasters and plasma weapons, we also have to add the possibility of Dune or Halo style force fields. They are invulnerable to small arms, and IMHO we in the early 21st C cannot definitively say that they’re not possible.
Almost but not quite right. “The problem with infantry” is that, dismounted, it’s vulnerable to artillery filling the area with shrapnel (and also slow) — while mounted in its APC/IFV, that it cannot actually do its job of looking into every nook and cranny to make sure there are no enemy combatants remaining there. Power armor wishes to merge the armor and the situational awareness. And while it might tick the doctrinal checkboxes for “tank”, those vehicles are racing a correspondingly heavier set of weapons — the man-portable anti-tank rifle and the towed anti-tank gun were driven extinct! — and my impression is that sci-fi power armors don’t seem to challenge those (just like most APCs don’t, especially the wheeled ones).
Of course, this is pre-drone doctrine. It remains to be seen what the new equilibrium will be.
So, yes, “this is sci-fi we’re talking about.” Your analysis of the efficacy of body armor against fires *in science fiction* was out of date before Dune was published and completely ignores the last decade of hype for non-Newtonian solids.
While new guns will be invented as well as new armor there”s no rule that the relative effectiveness of armor will remain the same. It’s swung back and forth a lot.
In WH40k in particular, standard rifles haven’t advanced tremendously in killing power (well, technically they did then regressed) and don’t penetrate ceramite power armor. There’s man-portable weaponry that does, but it’s expensive and has a number of tactical drawbacks such as exploding. Thus it’s not standard.
“Your analysis of the efficacy of body armor against fires *in science fiction* was out of date before Dune was published…”
The issue with shield technology in Dune wasn’t that body armor became so effective that it made the wearer proof against bullets. The armor stopped high-speed projectiles, which is why knives worked against them. Further, they had the minor drawback of creating a pseudo-nuclear reaction if modern weaponry (laseguns) hit them. So it wasn’t terribly effective. Further, Herbert himself discusses this issue in “Heretics of Dune”, pointing out that static defenses ALWAYS fail, at ALL scales.
But really Herbert treated sci-fi technology quite frivolously. It was part of the background, not something he gave a great deal of thought to. That’s not to diminish the value of the work–Herbert’s focus was on human interactions, not technology, and he properly ignored those things that didn’t contribute to that.
If we’re allowed to simply make up whatever we wish, this argument becomes meaningless. It becomes a more verbose version of a schoolyard “Yeah? Well I’m going to bring the Hulk to the fight!” And even when we do allow for technology with no realistic connection to anything we know now, with a galaxy of resources to pull from, mobility still trumps armor.
“…and completely ignores the last decade of hype for non-Newtonian solids.”
Because I understand how armor works. Armor is governed by two equations: f=ma and stress=force divided by area. Ancient armors had two different components to handle this–cloth armor to change the acceleration of the weapon (acting as a cushion), and hard armor to spread the force. Non-Newtonian materials can combine those two aspects in a single entity, making things more efficient.
In contrast, a grain of sand traveling at an appreciable fraction of local light speed will rip apart the atoms that constitute the material, turning a non-insignificant portion of that matter into energy that will then destroy pretty much every single thing within a fairly large radius. Had a conversation with a physicist about this once (regarding the utility of hull plates on starships), and while I forget the total energy yield, it’s on the scale of modest nuclear weapons. Air becomes a barrier here, but as long as you’re firing within a city block of the person it really doesn’t matter very much. The real issue here is deploying such a weapon (it’d be suicide to fire it!), but drones quite neatly mitigate this issue.
Unless your non-Newtonian materials can survive ground zero of a nuclear explosion, complete with ablation of neutrons via gamma rays, my argument stands. Which, remember, is: The ability to destroy will usually exceed the ability to protect on the scale of individuals, in a military context. For my part, I think a device that can send small bits of matter at 0.9 c is going to be far easier to make available to an individual than armor that can defend against it.
All of which, of course, focuses only on the teeth. Once you get to the tail the problem becomes worse. Armor is, has always been, and will always be, expensive. This means complex manufacturing and supply lines, all of which will be vulnerable. You can have all the armor you want, but if it can’t get to the battle it’s irrelevant. Or they can simply refuse to engage with the power armor, focusing on raids and ambushes and the like to deny supplies to the armored units–super-impressive power armor doesn’t do much good if the fight’s going on elsewhere. Plus, the armor itself is going to have weaknesses. Remove the “power” from the power armor and it becomes a coffin. People are really creative, especially when it comes to making our enemies die, and we’ve got a LOT of experience in human history with how to deal with complex, sophisticated, expensive weapons systems.
Dinwar, the trouble I see with the proposition “science fiction guns will be powerful like nuclear weapons, so armor is useless against them” is that in many situations, this relies on the weapon itself being something that you couldn’t fire in an atmosphere because it would immediately start shedding that tremendous energy from the moment it was fired or launched and would blow the shooter to smithereens.
Nobody’s going to be firing relativistic mass driver projectiles in an atmosphere, no matter how hard-hitting they would be, because you’d blow up your own gun and create a sort of weirdly lopsided nuclear fire-‘ball’ centered on your own position if you tried.
The weapons it is practical to deploy for infantry combat (which, notably, must be controllable and capable of affecting targets without also affecting non-targets) may well not be quite so destructive as you imagine. To the point where reasonably conceivable material science, such as we would normally allow an SF author to imagine without breaking our suspension of disbelief, could possibly withstand them.
Has been discussed before
https://acoup.blog/2022/05/06/collections-when-is-a-tank-not-a-tank/comment-page-1/#comment-40844
and will be discussed again according to our pedantic host. Maybe not worth spending much time on powered armour this week?
Most cover won’t protect you against a direct hit by an artillery shell either. Just reducing the casualty radius by half would be significant, and more extreme examples might reduce the casualty radius by much more. Being effectively immune to covering fire from everything lighter than a HMG, or even just requiring full power rifle rounds to penetrate the joints, would also be huge.
The issues with power armor aren’t the lack of effectiveness, but the fuel, power generation, heat management, etc. which would be very difficult to fit into a backpack. Also, the precision motive mechanisms might degrade rapidly under fire even if the armor isn’t penetrated, counteracting the benefits of the armor. (Making a servo that is both miniaturized enough to fit into a suit of armor, powerful enough to move it, precise and responsive enough to function effectively, and durable enough not to fail when a shell explodes 10 yards away is rather difficult.)
Hence the need for the initial stages of power armor development to happen in outer space; a three-dimensional field with no ‘ground’ for shells to strike greatly reduces both direct and shrapnel hits, the negligible gravity ends the need for miniaturization which has subsidiary effects on fuel capacity and external durability, while the need for omnidirectional propulsion gives you a built-in system for cooling by venting superheated gas.
Once you’ve proven sufficient use-cases for a CAS fighter jet with arms and legs, development can go in all sorts of directions for deployment. Specialized models for targeted assassination and supply-line disruption, instigation and/or ablation of falling satellites, martial-arts fighting tournaments, who knows? Of course, you may discover the spatial-awareness needs of the armors create a structural incentive to conscript children for combat roles, but that’s really getting off-topic.
The micro/null gravity environment is an even greater logistics problem. Lines of communication are long, expensive, and probably vulnerable.
And the “suits” will need MORE power because any movement has to be cancelled; you can’t just stop pushing and come to a halt.
And batteries won’t do it, you’ll need reaction mass. Which means the designs which work in space won’t be anything like what works in a gravity field.
Space makes cooling even harder.
“The issues with power armor aren’t the lack of effectiveness, but the fuel, power generation, heat management, etc. which would be very difficult to fit into a backpack.”
Actually the issue seems to be biomechanics: we can’t design it in a way that makes it easier, not harder, to move when it’s turned on. That’s what did for HULC. The spec was to carry 200lb payloads at 10 mph for about 90 minutes, and that was achieved with contemporary batteries. No issues with heat management, fuel etc. The trouble is that it was exhausting to wear! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Universal_Load_Carrier
More modern versions might be better https://www.science.org/content/article/feature-can-we-build-iron-man-suit-gives-soldiers-robotic-boost
And it might even be a case of retraining people on how to walk. (Not impossible – we train people in different gaits all the time. Nordic skiing, snowshoes etc. )
@Dinwar, complex and intricate systems are not necessarily less reliable and have proven very effective throughout the era of industrial warfare.
Any modern assault rifle or machine gun, even the AK-47, is far more complex and intricate than a musket, and so is the ammo for the assault rifle or machine gun. But to steal an example from Simon_Jester in an earlier post about industrial warfare, 100 soldiers with muskets will be defeated by 10 soldiers with automatic weapons and 90 others providing logistics and technical support.
Or another example, jet aircraft in the 21st C, civilian or military, are far more complex than the aircraft of the 1950s. But they crash less often, not more.
Sure, it’s possible to make up scenarios where the simpler weapon actually is better. But looking around the world, I don’t see any modern military choosing to issue their soldiers with single shot rifles or their pilots with biplanes.
Complexity does matter for ergonomics and user interface. Robert Heinlein commented on this in Starship Troopers, that if power armour wasn’t easy to operate thanks to fantastically complex feedback controls, someone with a stone axe would bash the power armour trooper over the head while they were trying to figure out some dial readout meant.
I think most of the scenarios where power armor becomes common are also the scenarios where tanks end up being just too large and therefore too easy to target.
Rather like battleships in that way. Those became obsolete because their weapons ended up being too short-ranged for their cost.
So now you have carriers, with much longer ranged weapons (the carried aircraft).
And you have destroyers (which are getting pretty big), with the weapons that battleships used to carry, but they’re smaller and therefore (at least theoretically) cheaper. Or at least they have smaller crews.
Killing a suit of power armor kills at most one person. Killing a tank kills three or four people generally. The suit also costs less.
There was a wargame back in the 80s that came out of the Traveller science fiction universe called Trillion Credit Squadron. The idea was to build a fleet of ships with the trillion credits and have battles. They had planned a tournament. Unfortunately there was a team that had access to a computer, who simulated various fleets. They found that the winning formula was a large fleet of “flying cannons”. Basically a huge gun and minimal components to service it.
Now, part of the problem was obviously that they didn’t playtest the rules enough. And morale in that fleet would be pretty bad.
But it does point out the idea that if you have more or less unstoppable weapons, dispersal often does a better job than armoring up.
Notably, in Fallout, the collapse of industrial infrastructure means that the “every fighting force worth mentioning has enough heavy weapons to blow up anything up to and including tanks, so power armor can’t realistically stop anyone’s heavy firepower from killing you” is shaky- a lot of forces simply do not have squadrons of tanks or batteries of howitzers or something equivalent kicking around very often. Being immune or near-immune to small arms fire is thus even more of an advantage.
Ominous choice of topic, given recent news.
I think it worth remembering that the American Constitution is very similar to those of Latin America, and quite different from those of, say, central Europe.
If you are looking for guides to the future, therefore, it is probably best to look for analogies in Latin American history.
A nitpick: the Latin American constitutions were influenced by the US Constitution, rather than the other way around.
Also, as American nationalism is rooted in the Constitution – more than race or religion or land – a change in the nature of the government matters more in the USA than in other American states.
There has been at least one “revolution within the form”, with FDR: there may well be others I am unaware of. We will see in the coming years if there is another one, and if it expands or contracts liberty and the power of the state, including the President.
I rather question how much of a ‘revolution within the form’ FDR’s administration was. Yes, there was a sizeable expansion of government agencies to do things that had not previously been done, but the basic balance of power between Congress and the presidency didn’t shift that much, nor did the Supreme Court so much lose power as decide to be a bit more circumspect about wielding it.
A great deal happened during the Roosevelt years, and if you point at the timeframe 1932-1946 and use that before-and-after snapshot to conclude that FDR ‘revolutionized within the form’ the government system, well… you’d have to compare to other nations that had continuity of government throughout that time, such as Britain, and they had a lot of change too.
There are some caveats to keep in mind though.
On one hand, Latin America derives its republican tradition from the French Revolution, and therefore uses Civil Law instead of Common Law is the bedrock for the constitutions, laws and norms that are used in the region. One difference of note is that the countries of the region can and have changed their constitutions in the course of their shared history, with that impacting the economical regime that each country follows.
On the other, the administrative and cultural legacy of the Spanish Empire meant that the countries that succeeded the Viceroyalties were, essentially, transitioning from being Kingdoms under the Crown of Spain to outright Republics, forced to create a liberal republican tradition from scratch unlike in the Thirteen Colonies which at least had the precedent of the Parliament of England/Great Britain and, to some degree, the Dutch Republic.
And of course, there’s the fact that while the USA has the Democrats and the Republicans as umbrella groups for a variety of political ideologies, the countries of Latin America tend to let their parties operate and run on their own, only coming down to a binary for whenever a second round of elections has to be held. So for instance, while third party are basically powerless to win elections, in Latin America those third parties (or fourth, fifth, etc), could get seats in congress or have their candidates elected by the popular vote, and solely through that since the electoral college is an institution unique to the USA.
Now, this isn’t to say that there aren’t parallels one can make from the history of Latin American to what’s happening in the USA right (I’d argue there are far too examples for my liking), but also keep in mind that this is also uncharted territory to a degree.
>And of course, there’s the fact that while the USA has the Democrats and the Republicans as umbrella groups for a variety of political ideologies, the countries of Latin America tend to let their parties operate and run on their own
This is true of contemporary Latin America, but many (most?) Latin American countries have a Conservative/Liberal or Centralist/Federalist partisan dichotomy in their history.
In the 19th c, sure, but that seems to have become less the case with the rise of new ideological tendencies in the 20th c., and then after the end of the Cold War there was yet another realignment.
Well, the US has unique properties, but there’s nothing unique about being unique. Every country is in some way. The only way comparisons can help us is by looking for common factors.
If we look at countries in 1930s central Europe, they are countries in which quite large parts of the population, especially in powerful positions, explicitly want to, and consciously plot to, eradicate democracy and replace it with some more authoritarian system that can conquer their neighbours, or establish Actual Existing Socialism. Or both.
OTOH, if we look at Latin America we look at countries which have had electoral politics for centuries, but which have presidential democracies in which the average quality of government is a bit lower than in the average parliamentary democracy.
From that point of view the United States, as a presidential democracy with a high quality of government, has been something of an outlier. But it is the usual fate of outliers to revert to the mean.
This is not an entirely reassuring argument. But there is a big difference between the average country in Latin America, and the 1930s Country I Will Not Name.
The identifying characteristic of the American government is not a presidental democracy. It is a federal republic. The President wasn’t even the most powerful branch of government until Wilson and FDR created the modern administrative state. The key feature of the American constitution is the federal system and dualistic power structures with both popular and non-popular representatives. Until a progressive SCOTUS overturned the norms of American government with Reynolds v. Sims almost all states had a non-proportional system of representation designed to balance the power of the popular majority with other interests. (Most commonly this was done by systems similar to the Senate or Elector College with minimum and maximum numbers of votes being assigned to various political subdivisions, but there were a number of more exotic systems such as sizing districts based on tax receipts.) These structures are vastly different from anything based on the French Revolution and are still maintained within the Federal government.
I think it’s definitely correct to say that, other than GDP/capita, the US is more similar to a Latin American country than to a Central European country, and that more specifically we can say that the US has a lot longer and more deeply rooted liberal tradition (for better or worse) than Central/Eastern Europe have.
“The identifying characteristic of the American government is not a presidental democracy. It is a federal republic. ”
Like the Federal Republic of Germany, the Federative Republic of Brazil and the United Mexican States?
You haven’t named anything that makes America more like Germany than it is like Brazil and Mexico.
And saying that America was less democratic in the early 19th century than it is now doesn’t distinguish it from almost any country whatever.
So for instance, while third party are basically powerless to win elections, in Latin America those third parties (or fourth, fifth, etc), could get seats in congress or have their candidates elected by the popular vote,
Political parties in Lat-Am also seem to be weaker in general, you see a pretty common cycle in many countries where anti-establishment, revolutionary or insurgent parties (usually of the left but sometimes on the right or centre) come to power by displacing the existing parties, then they become more moderate once they’re in power and are displaced by another anti-establishment party in turn. America seems to be really unusual in terms of how *stable* the political party system has been over time.
This is a side effect of another thing that’s actually really unique about the USA: America doesn’t really have political parties the way other countries do. The institutions that call themselves national political parties in the US don’t have perfect analogues in any other system; the closest I’m aware of is the ad hoc practices coordinating between the parties in the two linguistic regions in Belgium.
The United States of America is like a couple-dozen Belgiums sewn into a sack together. Political parties in the sense that European political scientists would recognize exist at the state level, one step down from the Federal government; Members of the Federal Congress in America can owe dues to a coordinating campaign committee if they want to, but their actual political party membership, if they even have one, is to a state-level entity. It is unlikely that any Member of the US Congress knows how many political parties are represented in their chamber, and no one cares, but it is usually around 60 in the Senate and more than 80 in the House, IIRC.
State political parties do show variance and have even split and merged, only to be slowly brought back to national standards.
It would have been more timely in the 1930’s.
Yet not, I think, a coincidence.
I know this post is focused on the principate, so forgive me for the tangent. But the description of how the Senate’s influence dwindled and disappeared reminds me of H. A. Drake’s book Constantine and the Bishops (2000). It was obvious by Constantine’s time that the Senate could no longer serve as a source of legitimacy for the emperor, to counterbalance the legions (and hence any potential barracks emperor). So, Drake’s argument goes, Constantine looked for other sources of support and found Christian bishops.
Except that Christianity was very much a minority religion, and one of the lower and middle classes at that. Peter Brown argues that Constantine’s Christian belief was long-standing, but progressively made public as victories validated it to himself and onlookers. tl:dr Constantine made the bishops more powerful, rather than the reverse.
Not by this point. The explosive growth happened in the 3rd century. Sure, his prestige helped, but then Julian the Apostate was unable to reverse the situation.
A religion that is “very much a minority” is not going to trouble the stability of an empire with its internal disputes such as the Arian heresy, even if they riot over them, as, alas, they did. Yet the Council of Nicaea was held when Constantine asked the bishops if they couldn’t do SOMETHING about those riots, and the bishops turned to Acts for a model.
Heather argues – convincingly I think – that the growth happened under and post Constantine, not before, and as a result of imperial patronage.
The extent of the persecutions before points the other way.
Heather instances that Christianity was urban when 85-90% of the population was rural, that even in substantial urban centres the few numbers we have are of small congregations, archaeology likewise shows small meeting places, that bishops become scarce as one moves north and west and – on the maximum estimate – were present in only a third of the empire’s towns. Various forms of quasi-monotheism had become popular over the century before Constantine (Mithraism, Sol Invictus …); Constantine and his immediate successors gave Christianity a massive boost.
One plausible position that I could be convinced by seeing more evidence for is that the population of the Empire – or, at least, the politically relevant part of it (ie: relatively wealthy people mostly in towns and the military) – was mostly dissatisfied with paganism but no single monotheism was dominant. It’s possible that a lot of people held to a monotheism but did so relatively weakly and changed which monotheism held their allegiance two or three times in a lifetime.
In that environment, you can see how Imperial patronage for one of the monotheisms would rapidly consolidate that specific one into a dominant position as against the others, and also against the remaining more traditionalist pagans.
If they were monotheistic they were also atheists under Roman law. Do we have records of these others being persecuted for their atheism?
Re: Mary
“Monotheistic” in this context is a bit of a wiggly word, I would say. We tend to think of the Abrahamic religions with their very clear-cut “thou shalt have no other god before me” language.
But as I understand it, there have been quite a few ancient and to a lesser extent modern religions where nearly all veneration was focused on a single god, but where that didn’t necessarily mean you denied the existence of all other gods, or that you would refuse legally obligatory prayers or offerings to other gods. A Roman legionary who worshipped Sol Invictus or Mithra wasn’t likely to refuse whatever obeisance was necessary to “the genius of the Emperor” or to Jupiter and Neptune and so on… but he would be a lot closer to monotheism than the classically imagined Roman of 200 BC who straightforwardly worshipped the Roman pantheon.
The cult of Mithras/Sol Invinctus wasn’t monotheist at all. They were full participants in mainstream polytheism in addition to their special Mithraic stuff.
But you’re right about montheism not always being clear-cut.
In which case Christianity would not have been a monotheism among others.
In particular, none of the others would interfere if you panicked and worshipped other gods in a crisis. Therefore these “monotheists” are still on the other side of the gap you have to leap to be Christian.
I probably did an injustice to Drake’s argument by summarizing it so briefly. It’s not that he thinks the bishops were powerful enough in 313 to substitute for the Senate, but that Constantine was trying to build as broad a political base as possible. That included appealing to Christians, initially in addition to, not in place of, polytheists (Constantine purportedly had a vision of Apollo guaranteeing him victory in 310, and he invoked Sol Invictus on his coinage for years after Milvian Bridge). Over time, as Constantine leaned on the bishops for various reasons, they became integrated into the imperial power structure to an extent that Constantine probably never intended.
Of possible interest, one book review “The Rise of Christianity” and one post “The Early Christian Strategy” over at Astral Codex Ten.
https://www.astralcodexten.com
Peter Heather (The Rise of Christendom) argues that Constantine’s Christian belief was long-standing but revealed to the public in stages – usually following victories (seen by himself and others as validating his belief). Christianity was the religion of a small minority, largely in eastern cities and there among the lower and middle classes. Constantine and his successors empowered it – they made the bishops, not the reverse.
Interesting post, but I’m not sure that the conclusion is the most helpful way of viewing things. Is it really a partnership if one side dominated the other? Through the powers of the Censor and nominating candidates, the Princeps could shape the Senate to his will, while the Senate’s only recourse was extra-legal assassination (combined with the hope that army commanders will side with them). A partnership, even an unbalanced one, requires a little bit more symmetry in power and choice in participation in my books.
IMO, a better framing is that the Republican Senate was (broadly speaking) an executive body that decided policy and instructed magistrates to carry it out. In the Principate, however, the main power that Senators have is administrative, and even that progressively leaks to the Imperial staff over the first and second centuries. Note that this is really an individual power of Senators rather than a collective one of the Senate: collectively the Senate can only deliberate and advise the Princeps on topics that they are allowed to do (and hold trials for their own). Deliberating and administering is far from nothing but it’s fundamentally different in nature to executive authority.
Bureaucrats have oodles of power in modern governments despite being hired by politicians.
Of course. But it’s a very different type of power than elected officials have. Senators both saw a decrease in their power under Augustus, and a fundamental change in the nature of that power – both as individuals and even more collectively as the Senate.
Most bureaucrats aren’t even hired by politicians in the first place, but by HR departments within their respective bureaucracies.
Which is another point of similarity with the Principate Senate!
I think unequal partnerships are so frequent historically and contemporaneously that it’s almost a struggle to think of a way articulate the point or provide an example to somebody who has not noticed them. Maybe pointing to certain approaches to marriage as a baseline.
In any case, it seems apparent that it’s not just about the senators having no recourse other than assassination, but that the emperors initially relieve a lot of friction by the legitimacy derived from partnership with the Senate, and being able to smoothly draw officials from them. There’s a hypothetical in which emperors try to be done with the Senate much earlier in which the latter aren’t particularly likely to win in the struggle, but then the emperor is left with a big void to fill.
But how unequal does a collaboration have to be before “partnership” stops being a good word to describe it? Do you think government is a partnership of elected executives and the civil service? Is the army a partnership between officers and grunts? Is a slave plantation a partnership between the owners and the slaves? To take your example of marriage: if it’s the kind where the husband beats his stay-at-home-wife who can’t leave the house without his permission, while he’s screwing the secretary then, no, I wouldn’t call that a partnership. There’s a semantic argument about where we draw the line, but the Senate-Princeps arrangement that partnership (even unequal partnership) is not a very helpful name for it, and one that’s likely to confuse people. It also misses out that not only the amount of power Senators had decreased with Augustus, but so did the fundamental type of power they had.
I don’t mean to say that Senators got nothing out of the Principate, or were abused, or the whole thing was just a rubber stamping mirage. Only that the relationship between Princeps and a Senator was far closer to the employer-employee one than a partnership. Probably even more one-sided than that: the Senate collectively couldn’t force concessions out of the Princeps in the way that worker unions can negotiate on a relatively even footing with the bosses.
Lot of employees out there changing unsatisfactory bosses with murder.
Exactly. Yet that’s precisely what Senators could *not* do. Which is why the Princeps-Senate relationship is even less of a partnership than the employer-employee relationship.
Your response confuses me. Both on ambiguous syntax making it sound like you’re saying that employees actually do change their bosses by killing them (or at all) and appearing to contradict your own initial statement about the Senate having recourse through assassination.
The *primary* role of the Senate in the Republic was to be a retirement activity for people with the resources and prestige that they could upend the Republic if they got to feeling alienated (or even just bored). A bit like The Village from The Prisoner, even. This continued to be one of the main things the Emperors wanted the Senate for in the Principate. The Senate was never an executive; in the Republic the Senate was an advisory council that universally debriefed executives and then contained them upon retirement, and under the Principate they retained all of that except for the universality. I don’t know of any Emperor who retired into the Senate, nor much in the way of Senatorial debriefings of Emperors, and that loss is probably connected to the rise in assassinations.
While I think a degree of cynicism about powerful institutions is a good habit to have, I think looking at the Senate of the Roman Republic with that degree of cynicism is more distorted than insightful. Like, I wouldn’t necessarily see them as benevolent in any terms that contemporary Romans may have cast them, but I think there was still a degree of sincere civic duty and pragmatic necessity to having such a deliberative body and composing it of people with administrative experience.
That and I doubt any single person throughout much of the Roman Republic ever had such power to disrupt in their own right, for much the same reason as Bret argued the original dictatorship did not present a threat. They’d be outnumbered by people against it, and the term limits of public office and composition of Roman armies would limit the extent to which they could gain enough influence.
Is any of this related to how the word “consul”, many, many years later, ends up meaning a minor diplomatic official?
Should male pronouns be used to refer to Elagabalus?
Oh, also have you seen the game “Never Second In Rome”? I figure you’d enjoy it.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3169580/Never_Second_in_Rome/
The question of Elagabalus’s gender identity isn’t one that can be resolved with surviving evidence. The surviving sources are all hostile, and all operating in within ancient Rome’s complex patriarchal gender norms, which renders them pretty untrustworthy. Which isn’t to say that Elagabalus wasn’t trans, only that we really have no way of knowing for sure and thus not much of a basis for assigning him any pronouns other than the ones he officially used in public.
So first you say we can’t know, then you use male pronouns. See the problem?
Unfortunately, the English language only provides us with a limited list of options for pronouns for Elagabalus. All our choices are problematic in varying ways.
We can use “she/hers,” but we are then fundamentally accepting a narrative written entirely by Elagabalus’ enemies, on the grounds that the things they wrote about Elagabalus with intend to slander the emperor happen to coincide with the things that we, 1800 years later, may accept more sympathetically because our values have changed. An Elagabalus who was being lied about at the time, learning of this, might be rather displeased and feel misgendered.
We can use “he/his,” but then in the scenario where Elagabalus’ enemies were substantially telling the truth, we are, again, misgendering Elagabalus.
We can use “they/theirs” on the grounds that it is gender-neutral, but on some level this just highlights the fact that there were assuredly vast numbers of trans people throughout history who wound up living within the gender role they were assigned at birth, and we don’t know who they are or how to talk about them by the gender they might have preferred because the evidence simply isn’t there.
I’m not sure there’s a good answer, so being at each other’s throats about our choices seems unproductive.
Isn’t that still a matter of much debate and discussion?
I dont know, hence why I asked the historian.
As I understand matters, everyone at the time did.
Perhaps Elegabalus did not and wouldn’t they be the only authority on the matter?
Throughout history known to me, the vast majority of people described by others as male have described themselves as male. Doing anything else, after all, would likely make you look like a madman. It is therefore statistically likely that someone referred to by everyone else as male, referred to himself as such.
I gather it was not uncommon in the ancient world to buy a slave boy, emasculate him, dress him up as a girl and use him as your bitch. At least until he lost his youth.
That is not the kind of society in which men go around being “gender-nonconforming”, unless they really do want people to treat them as a frequently-raped eunuch slave. It’s a rare Emperor who wants to appear to his subjects in that way.
OTOH, I can understand why his enemies might want to portray him like that after he was safely dead. Especially if he died as a result of their treachery.
“Throughout history known to me, the vast majority of people described by others as male have described themselves as male.”
People were commonly referring to transgender people who had already had sex change operations by their assigned gender at birth a decade ago. Going by your logic, we can safely conclude that no transgender people over then the age of 10 exist.
…which incidentally no shortage of bigots attempt to do. Which is one of the many reasons that an actual historian would not approach the topic in the fashion you have.
Which is again, why I asked the ACTUAL HISTORIAN and didn’t ask for the peanut gallery.
“Going by your logic, we can safely conclude that no transgender people over then the age of 10 exist.”
I don’t see why: my logic is solely that of those people universally referred to as male, most refer to themselves as male. Therefore, if you find that someone is universally referred to as male, they will probably refer to themselves as male.
If, during his reign, Elgabalus had insisted that people refer to him as female, we might expect to see such references dating from his reign, and comments after his reign describing this requirement. It would have been something unusual, and worthy of note. If we had such descriptions, we would not be wondering what pronouns he used in life. We would know.
OTOH, if he made no such requirement, we would not expect to see anyone making the point that he insisted that people refer to him as a man. So although we do not have an explicit note as to what pronouns he used, we can reasonably conclude that he most probably picked the non-noteworthy option.
“It’s a rare Emperor who wants to appear to his subjects in that way.”
on the flip side, they’re the emperor, they have a certain freedom to do as they like and flout common moral norms, which other people don’t? (until they get murdered, which in this case of course they did).
also, don’t the sources (and yes, i know they’re hostile and dubious) say that elagabalus referred to himself by feminine terms like “wife” and “queen”?
The thing that makes this sticky is that we have no neutral sources on what Elagabalus actually DID. And we know the Romans had a massive and bizarre complex about ‘unmanly’ ‘oriental’ ‘decadent’ ‘effeminate’ behavior.
It is effectively impossible to tell whether the Romans who talk about Elagabalus (e.g. Cassius Dio) are simply slandering the former emperor, or are accurately depicting the behavior of a trans woman assigned male at birth who, knowing that she’d be flouting all Roman custom but thinking “I’m the Emperor now dammit,” decided to play the gender role she wanted rather than the gender role she’d gotten handed to her. We do not and can not definitively know.
In some cultures, I’d take the list of actions Elagabalus is said to have engaged in and go “no one could plausibly have made all this up, and anyone who did it is almost certainly trans.”
But the Romans are one of the few cultures I can think of who might have made all that up, entirely because in their framework, it was all ultra-horrible insult stuff they could use to justify assassinating an emperor they didn’t like..
Since correct pronoun usage is important to you, I should note that there is no evidence at all that Elagabalus went by they/them.
That becomes a point of grammar- did Latin at the time have gender-neutral pronouns in the first place?
I’d be interested in seeing our host dig into the Elagabalus gender argument. I’ve heard conflicting things, and I’m not historian enough to sort fact from theory from myth.
I think most historians will resolutely refuse to assign modern labels for identity to historical figures for the simple reasons of “It’s not meaningful to them” and “We can never know for certain because identity happens inside people’s heads”.
And frankly, we should accept that and just describe the facts without the need for labels. Elagabalus is described as gender-nonconfirming in hostile sources that use male pronouns, but claim a personal preference by the emperor to be called a woman. The rest is sophistry.
Even describing the facts is nontrivial. Might not be enough for a full post, but I would like to see someone competent list the available sources and explain exactly what each says.
I realise the sources aren’t super trustworthy (and are hostile), but how likely is it that they would just make stuff up instead of exaggerating things that elagabalus did? If even half or a third of what the sources say is true, then it seems reasonable to describe them as transgendered or at least some kind of gender nonconformist. The stories seem, like, too strange for anyone to just invent, especially in a culture that didn’t have a pre-existing concept of gender fluidity?
We have previously on this blog seen people inventing fantastical biographical information about a famous person (Alexander III of Macedon) *while some of their personal friends are still alive*. I don’t think Cassius Dio would so much as blink at the idea of telling tall tales if it meant ingratiating themselves with Severus Alexander.
Reasons they might make it up:
-Rome was an exceptionally patriarchal place even by ancient standards, such that their work for “personal excellence” (virtus) literally meant “manliness.” Public office was exclusively reserved for men, so “this guy’s not really a man” is an obvious way to attack the legitimacy of a political figure (sort of like how people in our century made up that Obama was ineligible for the presidency by virtue of being born overseas.)
It’s pretty common for hostile sources to attack bad emperors for their gender performance- you see similar things with Caligula and Nero, for instance.
-Elagabalus was from Syria, which according to Roman racial stereotypes was an inherently feminine sort of place
-Elagabalus was 14 when he became Emperor, and so presumably looked rather boyish compared to adult Roman elites
Again, none of this proves that there’s nothing here. It’s just a big leap to take modern ideas about gender nonconformity- including the understandable urge to find notable trans people in history- and project them onto a society where gender worked very differently.
Okay, I just want to give a blanket response to the knee jerk dismissive replies to this comment.
Historians *routinely* study unreliable and biased sources and decide hat judgements we can and can not make based on those judgements. One of the things that can inform that process is using modern knowledge about the way people and societies tend to behave.
This is an expert process and I am not a historian WHICH IS WHY I ASKED A HISTORIAN. So if our host or any other professional historians have anything to say in the matter I’d be extremely interested to know.
But to the armchair historians, please take a moment to consider that our host has at this point spent years pointing out the foolish conclusions that non historians have rashly leapt to regarding historical matters. So maybe can it?
If you want to talk to Dr. Devereaux exclusively, perhaps this is the wrong venue? The comments are designed to be an open space for polite peanut gallery types. There are other methods of reaching out that invite less 3rd party participation.
Also, if you’re eager for an expert take on this specific question, are you sure you’re in the right place to begin with? Our host is a military historian, not a historian of gender and sexuality. At best he can probably recommend a different historian you should ask instead of him.
Sorry for the double reply- I meant to delete this one, because it came out sounding more confrontational and less helpful than I intended. Apparently the “cancel reply” button doesn’t work as I thought. Please take my comment below as the “final draft” of my reply.
Questions are asked in public because other people might be interested in hearing the answer not because uninformed and frankly quite rude opinions are desired.
Any question asked somewhere that has a readily accessed “reply” button carries tacit acceptance that other people might opt to reply. And I think you have no firm basis for assuming that anybody else replying to you is uninformed.
Like, if people are reading and replying to a blog of this kind, they can probably be assumed to be fellow enthusiasts at the least.
The only one I see being rude here is you.
If you’re interested in talking to Dr. Devereaux exclusively, this is probably not the best space to be in. The comments here are mainly for reader discussion, and our host only replies directly to a minority of them. I’ve never reached out to our host directly so I’m not sure the best way to do so- email or Patreon, maybe?
Reddit’s askhistorians subreddit is also a decent shout for this kind of thing- they have an “experts only” reply policy similar to what you seem to be looking for here. In that venue you’d also have a good chance of getting a reply from a historian of ancient gender and sexuality, rather than a milhist guy like Dr. Devereaux who would be somewhat outside his lane on this one.
Also, if you didn’t want replies from anyone but the host, it would have been helpful to note this in your initial comment, rather than complain afterwards that other people engaged with the open-ended question you asked.
I hope that at some point we get a deeper discussion of the status of freedmen in Rome. It seems remarkable to me that a freedman would have such an important role as control of the imperial treasury.
Does this mean that the role of the a rationabus was less important than it would appear to me, or that it was normal for a freedman to have so much power?
The latter. Even outside of high politics, it seems quite common for people running large businesses or estates to use freedman in management positions, or to run franchises. (I mean common as in many of the rich would have multiple such freedman; the odds of any single slave making it that high were very slim).
Freedman were useful in three ways. Because they were close to the bottom of the social hierarchy, there was no chance of them usurping political power, and so couldn’t be a rival. This also meant that they were loyal, because their position, status, and even security depended entirely on the favour of their patron. Related to this, they could be promoted completely meritocratically, without regards to keeping a social elite happy (even which slaves were freed was done based on merit).
This is all very similar to the use of eunuchs in Eastern court. It’s a cadre of people that you choose based on skill alone, who have no source of support outside the Emperor. Very useful for Emperors, and rather resented by the aristocracy.
What do we know about the attempt by Caligula’s assassins to restore the Republic after his death? Was it ever genuine or serious, did they have a remote chance of succeeding even if that guard hadn’t found Claudius in hiding?
A better example is perhaps the extensive use of slaves in Middle Eastern armies and bureaucracies (Janissaries, mamluks …).
That’s certainly another example, but I’m not sure it’s a better one. The number of freedmen in the Imperial household was relatively small and they occupied senior positions. Not like the Janissaries and Mamluks where they filled out entire armies and made up the entirety of the bureaucracy.
Do note that sources tend to exaggerate their power and influence, because their influence is a handy scapegoat when you can’t blame their patron directly.
Keep in mind that a slave freed by their owner essentially becomes one of their owner’s clients automatically, so what’s really happening here is Octavianus drawing his most important servants from his network of personal clients.
I think “ab” would be better translated here as “by” rather than “from.”
The point of translating it as ‘from’ is that this is the basic meaning from which all other ablative meanings flow – the core of the ablative is ‘motion away.’ That said, with a/ab it could be an ablative of (personal) agent, but not means/instrument, so perhaps ‘a rationibus’ as ‘by accounts’ in the sense of a thing done ‘by the office of accounts,’ perhaps. In either case, Fergus Millar (op. cit. 73) even notes explicitly that the grammatical construction here and its origin is unclear, even as it is consistent, so I feel pretty good just translating it with the basic ablative ‘from’ and noting that its an odd construction.
For what it is worth, Millar prefers motion away from, “there is as yet very little evidence of the characteristic, and grammatically puzzling titles by which they came to be designated – a rationibus (literally ‘from the accounts’), ab epistulis and so forth.” (73).
Maybe it was the same reason that we say “Bob from accounting”.
That doesn’t quite work, though. Bob is a person who comes from (the Department of) Accounting. The *officium a rationibus* is the entire department.
“…From Accounting” is a relatively recent coinage, derived of “…from Accounts” which is almost certainly a calque in the first place (of “a rationabus”). Business English was originally created by people whose main claim to the legitimacy of their fortunes was not heritage, but that they could read Latin (and also sometimes French), so it tends to be replete with ostentatious loan words and calques.
I don’t speak as many languages as I’d like, but my experience in (trying) learn them is that which prepositions are used where is close to random, and trying to directly translate them futile.
I read an article which explained that in English, months are containers (“in January”), days are surfaces (“on Tuesday”), and times are places (“at 12:00”). I know French, and I’m learning Swedish now, and neither of them has those rules. (In Latin, a lot of time you can just use an ablative and not think about a preposition.) This might be one of the hardest things to learn in order to speak another language idiomatically.
Even in English it’s often not so clear cut. You can say “I’m in the train” or “I’m on a train” and nobody would bat an eyelid. Same thing for “I’m on / at / by the beach”. German has things like “an” which can’t be translated into English but is roughly “on a vertical surface” (like a picture hung on a wall), but is also used to describe the location of the beach relative to the sea. French is wild with the rules determining when to use “de / des / de la” depending on the word, the amount, if it’s negated, if it’s a question, and the phase of the moon. And this is just within 3 closely related European languages! There really are no rules, it’s just a fluid case-by-case
What did it mean for a law to have the force of law before it became a lex? Does that mean they were enforcing laws before they officially became laws?
What happened if the assembly failed to rubber-stamp a law? Would the guy counting votes falsify the count in order to make it pass?
It’s probably like the difference between the EPA passing a regulation and Congress passing a law: It both is “on the ground” the same for the people, meaning enforced with penalties, but it’s got different staying power. A regulation can be overturned easily by just saying something different later, while for a law, you need to get the votes to pass an explicit counter-law.
Sounds like it might be related to the edicta discussed in a previous post?
https://acoup.blog/2023/10/06/collections-how-to-roman-republic-part-v-the-courts/
I think it means that in the republican period the magistrates are making edicta that are supposed to conform to what the lex says, taking the law as a given. If you wanted to change the lex you’d need to build up public support among the people. But moving into the imperial period the emperor/senate are deciding what the lex should be and the assemblies just rubber stamp the changes to what the senate says.
The other replies are incorrect IMO. Saying it had the force of law but not a real law is just a facade. Part of the smoke and mirrors to make it look like a republican system was still active when it very much wasn’t. Imperial degrees were absolutely laws in every single sense, but jurists had to find language to square that with the appearance of democracy. That’s all it is, a trick of wording to hide the autocratic nature of the Principate.
Sure, things like the Praetor’s edicts during the middle republic and even some Senatus Consultum were edicts that were pseudo-laws that bear resemblance to things like Executive orders or regulations issued by a cabinet department. But that’s not what imperial degrees were – those were laws pure and simple.
>Finally, individual legions also finally got their own commanders, legati legionis, who were equestrians – so while an overall imperial province might have a senatorial governor-general, his direct subordinates were equestrian officers: a procurator and as many legati legionis as he had legions.
I’m hesitant to correct our host, but this is wrong. The legati legionis were Senators, with the office typically coming after the praetorship and before the consulship in the cursus honorum.
Only the two legions in Egypt had equestrian commanders (at least until the third century, when things start getting confusing).
Yeah, I did a double take when I read that. Doesn’t seem like a typo either but deliberate. Either my books on the Roman army are all wrong, or Brett is, or there’s some subtlety of distinction and periodisation I’m missing here. As an easy-to-access reference: Adrian Goldsworthy has a woeful under-appreciated YouTube channel, including a video where he goes in depth about Senatorial careers during the Principate.
If the legati legionis were senators and senators were equestrians then wouldn’t that make the legati legionis equestrians?
That’s an extremely pedantic take, and I’m not even sure it’s correct to say that Senators were Equestrians once the Ordo of Senators was created. More to the point, when people say an office was Equestrian, they always imply Equestrian but not Senatorial. The jobs that the two orders had in the administration were very deliminated during the Principate so none (AFAIK) were open to both.
“That’s an extremely pedantic take”
Well when in Rome…
Fascinating post as always! I’m reminded of something I read somewhere, that in movies crime bosses are always shooting their henchmen for failure, but in the real world loyal subordinates are so rare and precious that the bosses will tolerate a great deal of failure.
In some ways it feels to me that Roman Emperors operate more like modern mafia bosses than modern political leaders. They rely on personal loyalties and family connections. They have to do a delicate and perpetual balancing act of allowing their subordinates enough power and wealth to be useful, but not enough to be threatening.
You see it with province size too. They progressively shrink to make the governors less of a threat; until Diocletian comes around and creates 4 mega-provinces for the 2 Augustii and 2 Ceasars (and shrinks the provinces they’re made up of even more).
Diocletian also set up an intermediate level – the dioecesis (usually translated as diocese, from which the later ecclesiastical term derives), which were bigger than the old Republican provinces – just seven in the West and five in the East.
Only the Diocese of Britannia matched a Principate-era Province; the others were much larger, such as Hispania and Italia (and two in Gaul – note that the Diocese of Italia was the first time that Cisalpine Gaul was included in “Italy” rather than “Gaul”). The biggest of all was “Orientalis”, covering Egypt and Syria (and everywhere in-between)
The exact question of what the transition away from the assemblies looked like is particularly appreciated, since that’s been my biggest question since I learned more of their function in the Republic.
I have a suspicion that once they became just a rubber stamping body, the incentive to even bother to turn up largely evaporated, and after that it was possible to just let them wither away organically rather than do something as radical as formally abolishing them.
So mid-ranking Roman citizens would have been somewhere between satisfied with and resigned to delegating away the last of their actual input in Roman governance, so long as some of the formalities and cosmetics of the old traditions were maintained and the figure we call emperor maintained the fiction of acting on their behalf.
It’s always been a rather fascinating balancing act to me, this idea that people could have recognised that Augustus had become a singular commanding figure (and he himself being invested in the relevance of that enough to put a lot of effort into ensuring he had a successor), while still not explicitly becoming any kind of monarch.
(And then as the Principate bears on, they’re able to leverage both their formal and informal powers to accumulate ever greater amounts of wealth in their person, allowing them to conduct the kind of pageantry that would have been the norm for Roman elites but for the far greater scale of it, helping to create the kind of informal but apparent distinction that will become the basis for the grandeur of Dominate emperors, and indeed most future European monarchies.)
Although the business with the titles rather reminds me of this Terry Pratchett quote (from Lords and Ladies):
“Some people are born to kingship. Some achieve kingship, or at least Arch-Generalissimo-Father-of-His-Countryship. But Verence had kingship thrust upon him.”
I think there was an underlying ideological base that made the transition more acceptable – while also having unintended consequences. Republican Rome was a military republic, with the citizens as army as the basis of legitimacy – assembling at the Field Of Mars, requiring officials to have served their ten years, martial imagery and record everywhere. In the late Republic the base shifted from the Assembly in Rome to the Assembly in the field (the legions), and stayed there under the Principate and Dominate.
Kind of weird that the Roman emperors kept the Senate around for approximately the same reason that the Emperor in Star Wars kept the Senate around. When the Senate was dissolved in A New Hope, the first question that an Imperial officer asked was, “How will the Emperor maintain control without the bureaucracy?”.
“It’s like poetry, they rhyme”
I remember during the early Bush years when I thought about how weird it was that he was also copying the thing that had not shown up in a movie yet.
What’s the surprise? Star Wars was obviously ripping off the transition in the best traditions of SF. It produces interesting thoughts when you reflect on Sulla and the rest of the conflict of the last Republic.
—Isaac Asimov, “The Foundation of S.F. Success”
I often wonder what the people of the late Republic would think if they could have known how everything would turn out — the Assemblies becoming hollow shells and the Senate overshadowed by an Emporer. Not what any of them were striving for.
The sense I get is that by the end of the Republic people were pretty much up for anything that ended the civil wars.
It gives certain oddness to Star Wars because if the Republic fell for the same reason as its model, it would have meant an easier life for many.
They remembered Sulla. Who turned out to resign and die soon after.
What did the people who supported Pompeius or Catilina suppose they were going to do in case of victory? What did their opponents fear or allege they were going to do?
How did the (effectively 45 years) rule of Augustus compare to 5 years of Caesar or 2 years of Sulla, in terms of actual respect for tribunes, Senate and assemblies?
A classic case of slippery slope/ moving goalposts/ boiling the frog. A small change is proposed in the status quo, often for the best of reasons to address a serious problem; but a generation or two later the new status quo becomes subject to further revision. In the case of the Roman Republic, it probably began all the way back to the Punic Wars undercutting the Roman middle class of small farmers. When a shortage of men who met the property requirement to serve in the legions became critical, the Gracchi brothers tried to fix that and got assassinated for their trouble; so Marius fixed the problem by dropping the property requirement. With all that followed as a probably inevitable consequence.
I don’t think the dropped property requirement alone was the cause of all that followed. There’s other factors.
But also, in this case, it bears noticing that the problem isn’t just that a small change in the status quo inherently causes further changes. It’s that a status quo that evolved under one set of conditions inherently cannot survive under very different conditions unless it somehow adapts.
The rules of political affairs in the Roman Republic c. 300 BC or 200 BC simply did not fit the situation of 100 BC, with the massive expansion of territory, the effectively total consolidation of Italy into a single Roman-led superstate, and so on. We see the tension between the political structure and the needs of the changing society in many ways- the Gracchi brothers’ efforts towards land reform, the Social War, the civil wars, and so on.
So you might look at this and say “a small change here or there set off a profound destabilization.”
I look at this and say “A situation where the entire political superstructure is increasingly creaky and unstable and this keeps getting worse and manifesting in new ways leads first to small changes that don’t fix everything, then to bigger and bigger crises until the system is radically reformed, collapses, or both.”
Re: “The Problem with Sci-Fi Body armor”, RobinSwords on YouTube thinks the armor in Helldivers 2 is actually pretty good, and did a number of short videos about that. He seems quite knowledgeable about HEMA armor, so possibly of interest to the folks here. https://www.youtube.com/@robinswords/search?query=helldivers
“prefect or simple a procurator” – are you telling me that in a slightly different world we might have had “Procurator Percy”?
Somehow this got swallowed in a subthread, so I’ll repost here:
What do we know about the attempt by Caligula’s assassins to restore the Republic after his death? Was it ever genuine or serious, did they have a remote chance of succeeding even if that guard hadn’t found Claudius in hiding?
Generally speaking, was there ever a significant contingent of voices in support of restoring truly republican elements (voting assemblies, collegial rule by the Senate, competitive elections) in the principate?
There’s something I’ve been wondering about since your old series on Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings.
You contrasted, on the one hand, EU4, with its neo-realist framework that models states as “unitary actors with consistent interests”; and on the other hand, CK3, which emphasises the role of personal dynamics in an environment with less centralization of power, fewer / weaker institutions, and lower levels of resources and infrastructure.
Rome seems intermediate in many of these respects. I was wondering, do you know of any work toward building “conceptual bridges” which might be used to study such intermediate situations, or even the transition between more fragmented and unitary forms of political structure (in either or both directions)?
A large standing Army with the Centralisation of Power always comes with an expanded Bureaucracy back in those days.
Every Empire just doesn’t function without its parallel Army of Administrators to organise things. The Army of the Pen in addition to the Army of the Sword without which it’s very hard to scale up the Army of the Sword.
It’s not possible for Dark Lords to command an oppressive Evil Empire without them.
Possibly magic would help.
OTOH, an essay once compared 1984 to Lord of the Rings in terms of surveillance state and concluded LOTR was more accurate. The state often missed sources of information in the flood — witness the orcs grousing that their Watchers had been sensed what the Nazgul had, earlier — and failed to get the information to the orc on the spot to act in time.
Ah, I found it!
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/07/tolkien-v-orwell-who-understood-modern-surveillance-best.html
Interesting
I imagine that in the ‘reality’ underlying 1984, the Inner Party government ruling Oceania misses little details all the time. It’s just that they routinely cover for this with their ability to redact the media and force people to behave as if things were always in accordance with the redacted form.
The most striking power of the state in 1984, and the one that makes the government of that society most dangerous, is that it has largely mastered the art of erasing the knowledge that it has made a mistake. When people are indoctrinated to just see their ruler openly commit a crime or completely flub some basic factual proposition and then forget it ever happened or refuse to believe it when told that it happened, the ruler is nearly invincible.
…
Also, I’m not sure that Mordor really works as a ‘surveillance state’ in the modern sense. There are only a relative handful of individual entities that are capable of using assorted forms of ESP to do remote surveillance (the eye of Sauron himself and Sauron’s more impressive and magic-capable minions, of which we only see a dozen or so ‘on camera’)
The kind of breakdown of communication that Tolkein describes is as old as history itself- even when institutions rely entirely on what is personally visible to humans and don’t have what we’d call surveillance equipment, they will still miss things because Person A saw it and forgot to tell Person B, or because the messenger didn’t get through, or whatever.
1984 captures the feeling of surveillance very well, but it portrays it as unreasonably accurate. In reality, a lot more gets through, except what you hear about is the successes, where the failures are where you personally witnessed it, and don’t talk, because they might catch you when you talk, instead.
Going back to your discussion of tyranny vs. monarchy, would you say that Octavian/Augustus was an example of a tyrant who successfully made the jump to monarch?
Gordian III kinda gives me speedrunner vibes. Somehow made the AI for every major NPC bug out so that he could claim to be the emperor and nobody would stop him.