Senators
Another problem that dogged the history of the fourteen emperors over the first two centuries CE, and one that preoccupied ancient writers above anything else, was the relationship between the men on the throne and the senators, and the question of how the senate was to operate under an autocracy. Senators were essential to the running of the empire. Among their number were most of the emperor’s friends, advisors, confidants, dinner guests and drinking partners – as well as the men who, second only to his own family, were likely to become his successful rivals, vociferous opponents and assassins. Augustus had attempted a careful balancing act, combining extra privileges for the senate and a parade of civilitas with an attempt to reconfigure the old Republican institution into something closer to an arm of administration in his new regime.
It was a fragile compromise, which left the political role of the senate under an all-powerful autocrat awkwardly ill defined. Soon after the first Augustus’ death, Tiberius exposed the problem when, in a surprise return to more old-fashioned ways, he attempted to get the senators to take decisions on their own, and they repeatedly refused to do so. According to Tacitus, when the emperor insisted on one occasion that they should all vote in an open ballot, himself included, one sharp senator summed up the issue with presumably mock deference: ‘Could you tell me in what order you will cast your vote, Caesar?’ he asked. ‘If you go first I shall have something to follow. If you go last of all, I fear I might find myself inadvertently on the wrong side.’ Tiberius is said to have interpreted all this as insufferable servility on the senate’s part, and every time he left their meetings he used to declare in Greek, ‘Men fit for slavery!’ If so, he failed to see that the free senate he claimed to want was incompatible with his own power.
Roman accounts of this period, largely written from a senatorial point of view, make much of the stand-offs or open hostility between emperor and senators. Gloomy tallies are recorded, accurately or not, of senators executed or forced to suicide under every emperor, and notorious examples singled out. Most reigns are supposed to have started off with conciliatory noises from the emperor to the senate before in several cases degenerating into open hostility between the ruler and some sections of the elite. In his first speech to the assembled senators, Nero insisted that they ‘would keep their ancient privileges’, a promise that to some looked decidedly hollow only a few years later. Hadrian began with fine words about having no senator put to death without trial, though it was not long before four ex-consuls were executed after no more than a rumour of a plot against the new ruler. Tacitus is not the only ancient historian to conjure up an atmosphere of deadly suspicion between the Palatine and the senate house.
Even the most discreet of the dissidents among the senators were always at risk from informers, who were said to have made their fortunes out of leaking to the emperor the names of those who were less than loyal. Others did not bother with discretion but publicly paraded their opposition to the fawning and the flattery of their class and to the ridiculous excesses of the emperor in power. In the reign of Nero, for example, the high-principled Publius Clodius Thrasea Paetus stormed out of the senate after listening to a letter from the emperor justifying the (eventually successful) murder of his mother, refused to take the annual votes of loyalty to the emperor and showed a definite disinclination to applaud Nero’s stage performances. As a result of these and other ‘crimes’, he was tried for treason in absentia, found guilty and forced to suicide. Tacitus had his doubts about how useful these self-advertising protests were. Of one of Thrasea’s gestures, he writes: ‘He managed to put himself in danger, without opening up the path to liberty for the others.’
In this political context, the image of Brutus and Cassius as the upholders of the free Republic and senatorial power, and as opponents of autocracy, could become a powerful symbol of dissidence. As we have seen, there was no realistic chance of turning the clock back to the ‘liberty’ (for some) of earlier times. The senate bungled their opportunity to gain some control in 41 CE. Almost thirty years later, in 69 CE, when Vespasian, who had just been declared emperor, was still abroad, they did not even make the attempt but (in Tacitus’ account, at least) sat down in the new emperor’s absence to settle old scores among themselves. By this point, anyway, the idea of the Republic had become for many little more than harmless nostalgia, a version of ‘the good old days’ and a source of famous anecdotes about traditional Roman virtues. Even as early as the rule of Augustus, the historian Livy could get away with being a well-known partisan of Pompey the Great, Julius Caesar’s eventual enemy; Augustus merely teased him.
Nevertheless, a public admiration for Caesar’s assassins could in some cases be a death sentence for a senator. Under Tiberius, in 25 CE the historian Aulus Cremutius Cordus starved himself to death after being tried for treason. His crime was to have written a history that praised Brutus and Cassius and to have called Cassius ‘the last of the Romans’. The book itself was burnt. The long poem on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey by Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (‘Lucan’), which presents them as both terribly flawed and recognises true virtue only in the diehard Republican Cato, escaped that fate, and still survives. But those views cannot have been entirely unconnected to the poet’s part in an alleged plot against Nero and his subsequent suicide.
The emperor’s power to humiliate as well as to harm was also a major theme of disapproval. Gaius’ ‘joke’ about being able to execute the consuls at the nod of his head and Commodus’ performance with the poor decapitated ostrich are only two of a string of stories about quixotic emperors terrifying or ridiculing senators in all kinds of ingenious ways.
The historian Lucius Cassius Dio, whose vast compendium covered the story of Rome from Aeneas until his own day in the early third century CE, described some of the most memorable incidents. As a senator under Commodus, he was an eyewitness to some of the emperor’s extravagant gladiatorial spectacles, but he also tells of one of the strangest exercises in imperial menace, dreamt up by Domitian in 89 CE. The story was that the emperor invited a group of senators and knights to a dinner party, where to their horror they found on arrival that the whole decor was black, from the couches to the crockery and the serving boys. Each guest’s name was inscribed on a slab like a tombstone, and all evening the emperor’s conversation never strayed from the topic of death. They were all convinced that they would not live to see the next day. But they were wrong. When they had returned home and the expected knock on the door came, instead of a killer they found one of the emperor’s staff laden with gifts from the party, including their own name slab and their own personal serving boy.
It is hard to know what to make of this story or where Dio picked it up. If it is based in fact, it is tempting to wonder whether a quirky fancy-dress party lies behind it (the spendthrift Roman elite are known to have enjoyed elegantly coloured-coded meals) – or even some philosophical display on the part of the emperor (‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die’ was a favourite theme in Roman moralising). But Dio certainly tells it as an example of the emperor’s sadistic games at the expense of the senate and of the endemic conflicts between the ruler and the rest of the elite. This is a classic tale of Roman fear, fed by paranoia, suspicion and distrust. The message was that no invitation to dinner with the emperor was ever likely to be quite what it seemed.
There is, however, a very different side to this picture of the relations between senate and emperor. After Cicero, the best-known Roman letter writer is Pliny the Younger, with ten books of surviving letters to his name: 247 letters in the first nine books and more than 100 in the tenth, all documenting his senatorial career under the emperors Nerva and Trajan, with some backward glances to Domitian. Books 1 to 9 are letters to various friends, much more crafted pieces of writing than Cicero’s, artfully ordered and probably extensively edited to hang together as a coherent self-portrait. Book 10 is a contrast, maybe not so much reworked, consisting entirely of letters between Pliny and Trajan. Most of them were exchanged after Trajan sent Pliny out in 109 CE as his special envoy to govern the province of Bithynia on the Black Sea. Pliny regularly wrote back home to consult the emperor on administrative queries or to keep him up to date, typically on such matters as local finances, overambitious building schemes or how Trajan’s birthday was to be celebrated in the province. That was an important piece of protocol, even where reputedly down-to-earth emperors such as Trajan were concerned.
Throughout the collection, Pliny presents himself as the kind of cultured and conscientious public servant that Augustus must have dreamed of in a senator. He was an orator and advocate, largely making his name in the court that specialised in disputed inheritances. His political career, which started under Domitian and continued under later emperors, included major administrative responsibilities – for army financing and the Tiber waterway – as well as the still standard sequence of political offices. It was when he formally entered his consulship, in 100 CE, that he made the speech to Trajan that covers, among many other things, the subject of children and adoption.
Pliny’s letters are not free from complaints and annoyance: he clashes with his fellow advocate Regulus, whose character he systematically assassinates throughout the correspondence, pouring scorn not least on the man’s eyepatch and make-up; and he gets cross in a rather humourless way when fellow senators start spoiling their senatorial voting papers with smutty jokes. But overall the letters offer a sunny, and slightly self-congratulatory, image of senatorial life. Pliny writes of his pleasure at taking dinner with the emperor (no tombstones here), his patronage of his home town in northern Italy, including the gift of a library, his support of his friends and clients, his literary pursuits and his amateur historical interests; his reply to a letter from his friend Tacitus in fact gives us the only eyewitness account to survive of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE (as a young man Pliny had been staying nearby at the time of the disaster, and years later the historian, researching that portion of his histories, asked him for his recollections). He was even on friendly terms with someone who cherished portrait busts of Brutus and Cassius, at no apparent risk to his own safety.
The most striking thing about Pliny’s career is its success, across different reigns and dynasties, from the assassinated Domitian, who first noticed and promoted him, through the elderly Nerva, to the adopted military man Trajan. This pattern was not unusual. In one of his letters he describes a dinner party held by Nerva, probably in 97 CE. Conversation fell to one of Domitian’s most vicious supporters, who had recently died. ‘What do you think he would be doing if he had survived?’ asked the emperor, with possibly faux naivety. ‘He would be dining with us,’ replied one of the clear-headed guests. The point was that it took only a little readjustment, and some appropriate vilification of the last man on the throne, to continue as a welcome guest at the new emperor’s dining table, still creeping up the ladder of senatorial power. Even Tacitus, a particularly vitriolic critic of Domitian, admitted that his own career had prospered under his hated rule. It is another sign that the characteristics of individual emperors did not matter so much as the biographical tradition tries to insist.
So how to explain the difference between these two images of senatorial life, between gentlemanly collegiality and an atmosphere of terror, between the relaxed and self-confident Pliny and those senators who found themselves the victims of the emperor’s cruel whims, or hit squad? Were there two very different types of senator: on the one hand an unlucky, and maybe tiresome, few who refused to go along with the system, took the emperor’s jokes and displays far too seriously, made their opposition known and paid for it; on the other, the largely silent majority of men who were grateful to serve and prosper in the limelight of the imperial court, whoever the emperor was, were prepared to vote for book burning when required and did not think celebrating the emperor’s birthday or overseeing the dredging of the Tiber beneath them?
In part, there probably were. Over the first two centuries CE, senators gradually changed anyway. Many more came, as Pliny did, from new or relatively new families, and increasingly from provinces abroad. They may have been far less invested in some fantasy of the Republican past, far less touchy about some of the more irritating examples of the emperor’s whim and happy to get on with the job. It is also clear that the most unbending opposition to emperors tended to run in families, a tradition of dissidence handed down from father to son, and sometimes to daughter. Thrasea Paetus’ son-in-law, Quintus Helvidius Priscus, followed in his footsteps and suffered much the same fate; he insisted, for example, on addressing the emperor Vespasian as just plain ‘Vespasian’ and on one occasion in the senate heckled him almost to tears.
It was not, however, quite as simple as that. Pliny was not blithely unaware of what had happened to some of the emperor’s opponents while he himself prospered during the rule of Domitian. In fact, his letters are carefully arranged repeatedly to highlight his close relationship with Domitian’s victims. One of these memorably records the grave illness of an old lady called Fannia (‘a constant fever and a cough that is getting worse’), who was none other than the daughter of Thrasea Paetus and the widow of Helvidius Priscus. It provides Pliny with the opportunity to praise her noble career among a family of senatorial dissidents and to emphasise his support for them (‘My services were theirs in good times and bad; I comforted them in exile and avenged them when they returned’). This does not entirely square with his success under Domitian, and an unflattering interpretation would cast Pliny as the guilty collaborator, back-pedalling under Trajan’s new regime and inventing a record of support for the opposition. But there was something more to it than that.
Most Roman senators chose a mixture of collaboration and dissidence, which the first Augustus’ awkward compromise between senatorial power and senatorial service made almost inevitable. The outspoken opponents of the regime were no doubt men and women of trenchant principles, but also blind – bloody-minded, we might say – to the careful balancing act and delicate choreography that in practice gave the relationship between emperor and senate its fragile stability. The majority of the senators were different: more realistic, less stubborn and less confident in their own moral judgement. In the evenings, among friends, they may well have entertained one another with those horror stories of humiliation and the abuse of power that we still read. They no doubt warmed to the heroic opposition of martyrs in the cause of freedom. But, by and large, like Tacitus and most other ancient historians, they fought their battles in the past, against emperors whom it was now safe to demonise. In the day, like Pliny, they got on with the job of being senators – as most of us would.