INTRODUCTION

I

ANY ONE reading for the first time an account of Domitian's Reign of Terror must wonder how it happened that the citizens of a state that was mistress of the world should have endured such tyranny at home. Why was it that what appears to be the grinding despotism of the imperial government was for a moment tolerated? The answer to this question requires a brief survey of earlier Roman history. The earliest form of Roman government of which a tradition exists is the kingship. Towards the end of the sixth century B. C. the tyrannical conduct of one of these kings led to the abolition of this form of government and the establishment of a republic, the highest powers of which were vested in two yearly magistrates called consuls. The other magistracies, which were established one by one, with less supreme functions, were always in the same fashion given to more than one at a time and for a limited period. It was under this form of government that Rome developed from an obscure city-state into the head of an empire including the whole of the Mediterranean basin. The result of the constitutional device by which the evils of despotism were avoided by having yearly co-ordinate magistrates, each of whom acted as a check on the others, was to bring the real power into the hands of the Senate. The Senate originally was merely an advisory council, but as the one permanent factor in a system of administration where so much was transient, it gradually developed into a powerful oligarchy. Under the senatorial system one man after another had his

turn at the top. It became the practice for men to work up through the lower magistracies, and provinces were committed to ex-magistrates. If a man was rapacious, his province suffered, if he was incompetent, his army was defeated: but, speaking generally, there was a fair amount of good administrative work done. Romans, like Englishmen, seem, on the whole, to have had an instinctive respect for law. But after giving the Senate due credit for the good points in its administration, we must admit that by the first century B. C. it had shown itself unequal to the task. Henceforth men began more clearly to see that efficiency demanded more concentration of power. So throughout the first century B. C. we find experiments, more or less tentative, being made in the direction of monarchy. First Marius, by a series of consulships, aided by his prestige as the deliverer of his country from the Cimbri and Teutones, then Sulla by means of an extended form of the dictatorship, an extraordinary autocratic magistracy which in the earlier republican period had only been employed in case of urgent military necessity, then Pompey by means of special laws giving him power to supersede the ordinary provincial governors in his wars against the pirates in the Mediterranean, and against Mithradates in the East: each pointed out a different path by which despotism could be attained. It was actually attained, though perhaps not from the first intended, by Julius Caesar, who first got a ten years' term of government in his province of Gaul, and then, under provocation from the action of his political enemies in Rome, with the powerful army thus trained stepped at once across the Rubicon, the boundary line of his province, and across that other boundary line which separates a republican subject from the aspirant to a despotic monarchy. Three years of civil war brought Rome and her empire to Caesar's feet, and we then find him trying to disguise an actual kingship by the