By Coyle Neal.
Since the beginning, we Americans have been concerned about the end of our republican freedoms at the hands of a tyrant. Whether colonists decrying George III, anti-Federalists staring suspiciously at the Constitution, or Whigs wringing their hands over King Andrew I, we have a long and proud tradition of gazing at the navel of freedom and wondering if it’s still there.
The reality, of course, is that you don’t really have to “wonder” if you’ve lost the republic—like being poor, everyone in the circumstance knows it. This is one of the lessons of the first few paragraphs of Tacitus’ Annals. In this dour, grumpy review of the first decades of the Roman Empire, Tacitus gives us seven signs that the republic is well and truly dead.
1. Honesty about the current government is not permitted.
Tacitus’ stated purpose in the Annals is to tell the truth about a time in Roman history when contemporary historians were either so terrified of a living tyrant or so furious at a recently deceased one that they couldn’t write accurately about events they had lived through. Because he lived over a century after the beginning of Augustus’ rule and at least a generation after the death of Nero, there was no one left to care if he wrote the unvarnished truth about the first generations of Roman Emperors.[1] Attempts to do so at the time did not end well for the writers in question.[2]
This gives us our first sign that a republic is dead: you cannot tell the truth about the governing regime. History might be safe enough if it concerns the distant past, but speaking freely about those currently in power carries dire consequences.
2. Great men are no longer tolerated.
The broad theme of Tacitus’ works involves exploring the role of a competent and moral man in the new imperial order. His writings are full of the kinds of men who, under the Roman Republic, would have entered lists of the great heroes of the past. Suetonius Paulinus, Germanicus, Corbulo, and, of course, Agricola all would have been remembered alongside Camillus and Scipio Africanus had they lived two centuries earlier.
Instead, their best-case scenario is being shuffled off to the far corners of the Empire to languish in obscurity. At worst, they are executed when their competence and decency begin to outshine the popularity of the Emperor. This was a feature of the Empire, not a bug.[3]
A second sign that the republic is dead is the fact that capable and ethical men must not stand too high above the crowd. They can do their jobs quietly in the background, but they are in danger from the autocrat at the top if they shine brightly.
3. Leadership increasingly focuses on the autocrat.
Every nation, democratic or otherwise, will have a class of people who do the day-to-day work of running the government. In the Roman Republic, this class was a combination of elected officials and the Senate (itself composed of former elected officials). Because they were elected, these officials had to keep one eye on the people and maintain at least a facade of public-minded independence.
After the transition into an Empire, those officials looked to the Emperor for everything.[4] The Senate especially was quick to bow, horrified even by the suggestion of independent action separate from the blessing of the Emperor.[5]
This is a third sign that the republic is dead: political leadership will not act without the permission of the autocrat.
4. Democratic culture increasingly focuses on the autocrat.
Under the Republic the people elected magistrates. Yes, elections were heavily tilted in favor of the wealthy (they used a weighted voting system). And yes, partisan politics crept in and ruined everything towards the end.[6] Yet the people did still get to choose. Who was going to win an election was never a foregone conclusion.
On his accession, Augustus began the process of chipping away at the people’s power by reserving the sole right of nominating candidates for office (sometimes allowing minor offices to have genuinely competitive races). Tiberius ended even the facade of popular choice by moving elections from the assemblies of the people to the Senate. And since the Emperor was in charge of nominating candidates for office and the Senate was made up of former officials, the Emperor was now calling the shots all the way down.
Having stated this fact, Tacitus then gives us a peek into the response of the common people to this imperial action: “Nor did the people complain of having the right taken from them.”[7]
This is both chilling to read and perfectly understandable—think for a second about everyone you know, online or in person. How many of us would genuinely complain in any meaningful way if they were told they never needed to bother voting again? The Roman people had already abdicated their power; in reality, the end of the form of freedom meant nothing to them.
We need not get into the weeds of Roman government here—though we should at least note how little the old Republican institutions mattered for Rome under the Empire. The election of Consuls, Praetors, and Quaestors is no longer a matter of any real public concern. Our point is that, like the aristocrats, the people are also looking to the Emperor for the day-to-day operations of the state. Democratic political culture is as focused on the Emperor as the leadership class.
5. Military culture is entirely focused on the autocrat.
Most importantly, and where Tacitus focuses most at the beginning of Book I, the military was well aware of who was in charge in Rome. Early in his reign, Tiberius sent his son to quell a mutiny on the northern border of the Empire. When Tiberius’ son told the mutineers that he would take their requests to the Senate,[8] the soldiers promptly rioted and demanded a hearing by the Emperor himself. They were not interested in either the Emperor’s son or the worthless Senate.[9] The mutiny ultimately went nowhere, but the point was clear—and this is the fifth sign that the republic is dead: the military cares only for the opinion of the autocrat.
6. Time and memory
Rome’s prior experiments with autocracy had been relatively brief—Sulla and Julius Caesar, for example, had each held sole power for less than five years. Even during their rule, there was active opposition to their decisions. After they retired or died, there were enough people who remembered how the Republic worked prior to the reforms of these Dictators to fill the offices of Rome and keep some kind of stability in the state.
Augustus, however, created a different situation:
He was wholly unopposed, for the boldest spirits had fallen in battle, or in the proscription, while the remaining nobles, the readier they were to be slaves, were raised the higher by wealth and promotion, so that, aggrandised by revolution, they preferred the safety of the present to the dangerous past.[10]
To his credit, Augustus was a brilliant administrator and established a bureaucratic apparatus that remained intact for nearly two centuries. When he finally died of extreme old age, so much time had passed that “there was a younger generation, sprung up since the victory of Actium, and even many of the older men had been born during the civil wars. How few were left who had seen the republic!”[11]
Our sixth sign that the republic is dead is that it does not return after time has passed. Reasons for this may vary from the experience of the Roman Republic. Of course, bloodshed and the age of the autocrat do not have to be the reason. Perhaps all the republic-minded individuals have fled, given up, or moved into the private sector. The point is, the passage of time establishes and reinforces the fact that the republic is dead.
7. The problem of succession
The final sign that the republic is dead is the big problem of the Roman Empire—and one which they never successfully solved: who takes over when the autocrat retires or dies? Over the next four centuries, numerous attempts were made to solve this problem. Through all these efforts, one thing remains very clear: the decision is not in the hands of the citizen body. We’ve seen the people lose the right to elect the lesser magistrates; time also reveals that they have no role in selecting the final authority in the Empire.
This is made clear when Augustus chooses Tiberius,[12] and it remains clear over the next several centuries. The military chooses the next four Emperors (Caligula through Vespasian), then there is an established biological succession (the Flavian Dynasty), then an adoptive succession (the “Five Good Emperors”), then biology again, then the military again, then biology again, then fifty years of chaos and civil war (the Crisis of the Third Century). The old Republican electoral institutions that gave voice to the people play no role in choosing the next head of state. This ultimately shows us that the republic is gone. “Thus the state had been revolutionized, and there was not a vestige left of the old sound morality.”[13]
This is the end of Tacitus’ introduction and the beginning of the Annals proper. It is also an overstatement—the Roman Republic wasn’t particularly moral, and the Roman Empire wasn’t particularly immoral (it did survive Tacitus by nearly three centuries; something a totally dissolute government could certainly not have managed). Instead, both the Republic and the Empire were incredibly well-structured systems that each managed to survive and thrive in ways that most nations have not, preserving and amplifying the strengths and weaknesses of the Roman people.
My point is not to argue with Tacitus on the morality of Rome (I’ll leave that to Augustine). My point is merely to highlight the fact that the Roman Republic was well and truly dead by the time Tiberius took the throne in 14AD, and every single Roman alive at the time knew it for all the reasons discussed above.
As Americans, until we come to that point, we do not yet need to eulogize our own Republic. It may be tottering in the hands of a succession of immoral geriatrics, we might be horrified at the incompetents we keep choosing to vote for, and we might be increasingly ignorant that how something is done is as important for republican freedom as what is done. Still, we have not yet checked the boxes that Tacitus identified in our Republican and Imperial predecessors. We can still speak the truth about our government with little fear of reprisal. Our various cultures (aristocratic, democratic, and military) still look to electoral processes as the basis of ultimate authority. And most importantly, time is still on our side. We do not know who will govern the nation, state, county, or city after the next election. We do, however, know that the choice is not yet in the hands of a single person. We may not be able to predict when this will happen, but if Tacitus is any use as a guide, we will certainly know once the moment has passed.
Coyle Neal has a PhD in Political Philosophy from Catholic University of America. He lives and teaches in rural Missouri and is the author of Echoes of Antiquity: Hellenistic Thought in a Politically Changing World.
[1] Annals, I.1; Histories, I.1
[2] Just ask Seneca, Petronius, Lucan, or Ovid.
[3] Tiberius, for example, began his reign with the execution of potential opponents. Annals, I.6
[4] Annals, I.7
[5] Annals, I.12-13
[6] One of Augustus Caesar’s claims about his legacy was that he had solved the problem of partisan politics for all time. See Res Gestae Divi Augusti.
To be fair, Rome under the Emperors did not in fact fight over elections ever again… See Charles Norris Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture for a thorough–very thorough–discussion of this point.
[7] Annals, I.15
[8] Augustus had upheld the facade of involving the Senate in military matters, so Tiberius’ son wasn’t out of line in making this offer.
[9] Annals, I.25-27
[10] Annals, I.2
[11] Annals, I.3
[12] Reluctantly, if Tacitus is to be believed. Annals, I.3
[13] Annals, I.4
Support the University Bookman
The Bookman is provided free of charge and without ads to all readers. Would you please consider supporting the work of the Bookman with a gift of $5? Contributions of any amount are needed and appreciated!
