The Historians' History of the World 06

Undoubtedly, however, the senate furnished the longest list of victims to the tyrant’s barbarity. The greatest and noblest were the most exposed to the prince’s evil eye, which lighted upon them equally at public ceremonials and private receptions, and marked them for immolation at every fresh burst of ill-humour. The proscriptions to which this body was subjected under the four Claudian Cæsars reduced its numbers considerably, more, indeed, it may be imagined, than was replaced by the ordinary sources of replenishment. Claudius, among his other reforms, sought to restore the balance by a special measure, and such was probably the object of his revision of the senate, the last of the kind we read of; but the decline must have been accelerated under Nero, without check or counteraction. Nero, reckless equally of the past and future, felt no anxiety to maintain the numbers of that historic assembly; and the various causes, besides the emperor’s tyranny, which were always at work to extinguish the oldest families, must have acted with terrible force on the effete branches of the ancient aristocracy. But if its numbers were reduced, no less were its employments also diminished.

Under the lax discipline of Nero and of Tigellinus appointments to office abroad would be the prize of interest and favour, guided neither by routine nor by discretion; at home the boards and commissions established by Augustus would fall into disuse. Pensions and sinecures, though such corruptions are not known to us at Rome by name, would doubtless abound, but of real business there would be less and less. Intrigue and peculation would flourish in a soil protected from the air of public opinion, and the strong hand of central control.

The passive endurance which marked the conduct of the senate under the imperial persecutions seems to bespeak a consciousness of its own guilt towards the state, and it compounded for its monopoly of unquestioned abuses by bowing to the yoke of a jealous and domineering master. We discover in Seneca no reliance on the senate. He never speaks of it as a living guardian of the virtues of Roman society. And yet, notwithstanding this abandonment of its high prerogative, it still exercised a moral power. Its mere title could awaken associations which thrilled from pulse to pulse. It was still regarded by the men of ancient name and blood as the true head or heart of the empire, rather than the upstart Claudius or Domitius, who might wear the purple and wield the sword. To the men of words and phrases the emperor was still an accident,—the senate was an eternal fact,—at a time when rhetoric might make revolutions, though it could not regenerate society. To them it was still the symbol of liberty, at a time when liberty and Cæsar were regarded as two gladiators sword in hand, pitted against each other in mortal combat. This venerable image of its ancient majesty was preserved to it by the proscriptions themselves by which it suffered; for as often as a murdered Scribonius or Pompeius was replaced in the chairs of office by a Rubellius, a Lollius, or a Vitellius, the principle of its vitality was in fact invigorated by the infusion of new plebeian blood.

As fast indeed as the tyrant’s exigencies required the confiscation of the great estates of nobles, and the overthrow of great families, his caprice and favour were elevating new men from the inferior orders to succeed to their distinctions, and to rival them in their vast possessions. Nero never kept his money. All he robbed, all he extorted, was squandered as abruptly as it was acquired, and shrewd Roman money-makers were always waiting upon his necessities, and sweeping the properties of his victims into their stores for a small part of their value in specie. Of the vast sums amassed by the freedmen of Claudius and his successors some records have been preserved to us; but the freedmen were a class peculiarly obnoxious to remark, and it is probable that knights and senators were at the same time, and by similar compliances, raising fortunes not less enormous, who have escaped the designating finger of history. Though the grinding processes to which the colossal properties of the nobles were subjected must on the whole have broken down the average amount of their revenues far below the rate at which it figured under the republic and the first Cæsars, we must not suppose that the current set all in one direction, or that the age of Claudius and Nero was not also a period of great private accumulations. The wealth of individuals and of the upper ranks at Rome generally reached perhaps its greatest height at this culminating epoch.