This is part of a larger series I am working on.
Tacitus wrote his Annals in the hope of reforming the Roman system and staving off collapse and disaster. Though he lived during Rome’s period of on-man-rule, he felt the republican period had been far better for the empire than an emperor had. Taking advantage of living under a “good” emperor, Tacitus wrote his book investigating how bad things had been under the “bad” emperors and pointed out just how much more frequently those occurred than you were blessed with someone competent being in charge. He lamented that earlier Romans had sold away their liberty in exchange for security and hoped that the republic could be reborn and disaster for the Roman empire could be averted.
Julius Caesar’s march on Rome in 49 BC ushered in a thirty-year period of fratricidal conflict that engulfed almost every portion of the Roman empire and led to the collapse of the Roman republic. What started as a war between Caesar and the Senate, under the protection of their own strongman, Pompey, ended as a dispute between Caesar’s chosen heir, Octavius, and one of Caesar’s subordinate generals, Antony. All sides utilized personalist armies which sought to put their leading financial backer in charge of the empire. While in the Caesarian conflict there were some nods to “law” and “the republic” by both sides, by the time the Octavian and Antonian forces clashed, the thin veneer of legitimacy had largely worn off.
Thirty years of conflict drained Italian manpower resources, decimated the agricultural heartlands of the peninsula, and ushered in both civic complacency and cynicism. The Roman citizens were tired and wanted an end to conflict. When Octavius defeated Antony at Actium in 31 BC, the people of Rome felt they finally had their chance for some stability. Octavius, now the self-styled Augustus, seemed like a decent enough man, he certainly was a better choice than the hedonistic and Orientalized Antony, and so when Augustus sought to consolidate more and more power under himself, the Romans made a choice.
Augustus became in effect the monarch of the Roman empire, and the people let him, but both sides engaged in a legal fiction that he was merely acting out the regular democratically elected offices that Romans had always placed their leaders into. Sure, the architects of the Roman republic had been wary of letting those offices be carried out by a single person, but Augustus was competent, why shouldn’t he hold multiple. Besides, what was anyone going to do about it? Augustus controlled an army loyal to him, its financial backer, not to the constitution of the republic, and there was little public interest in yet more conflict. The Romans chose to trade their liberty for the sake of peace and security.
As Tacitus deftly highlights, however, one-man personalist regimes can have many drawbacks. The biggest of which is what do you do if the leader isn’t an Augustus, careful to engage in a legal fiction of continuity with the old republican system of government, reasonably competent, and relatively moderate in his approach to governance. One-man regimes can be highly efficient with a good leader, but also ridiculously lethargic and horribly despotic under and bad leader. And while hereditary succession leaves you at the whims of genetic chance, non-hereditary rule encases the government in a constant turmoil of succession politics, crippling any gained efficiencies from one-man rule.
Augustus’ successors were constantly paranoid about usurpers to their power. This meant that the government, and the society it served, often drew from an artificially limited talent pool and that promising leaders did not get the chances for advancement that a more democratic form of government provides.
According to his heir, Tiberius, Augustus had cautioned him not to try and expand the empire, that its borders were large enough as is and expansion was not only unnecessary but dangerous to the stability of the empire. There was some truth in this in the sense that the empire’s borders at the ascension of Tiberius did largely rest on natural features, relatively easy to defend, such as the Rhine, Danube, and Euphrates rivers.
However, there were regular opportunities for expansion and taking the strategic offensive against Rome’s more militant neighbors. Indeed there were times where the risk would have been heavily mitigated by previous failed offensives against Rome. Energetic Roman generals frequently pleaded with the emperors for permission to counterattack, confident that there could be little opposition left in front of them after their enemies had wasted themselves of Roman defensive positions. Despite this, emperors habitually refused such requests. The Emperor determined when there would be an expansion of the empire and generals successful at military campaigns might also find themselves at the heads of political campaigns, as had been famously the case with Caesar.
This trickled down all the way to how emperor’s dealt with their own successors. Some emperors, such as Tiberius, waited until the last moment to appoint a successor, lest that person become a rallying point for opposition and get ideas in their head about speeding up when they would succeed to the throne.
Others limited the successes of their chosen successors, such as Tiberius and his relationship with Germanicus, who Tiberius worried was getting a little too popular with the army along the Rhine and so transferred him to the Syrian frontier, where he remained a competent general, but less effective because of his inexperience with local knowledge. This was not an attempt by Tiberius to better prepare his heir with more knowledge of the empire, but to get him away from soldiers that might feel more loyalty to Germanicus than to Tiberius.
Emperors like Nero and Caligula became so worried about vectors of dissent that they regularly engaged in purges of the government and army, denying those organizations of talent, limiting the professional growth of the government’s servants, and stifling initiative and a diversity of thought that the empire could take advantage of.
For many of the ineffective emperors that followed Augustus, this obsession with control created a feedback loop of bad governance. Emperors, ever more fearful of deposition considering what had happened to their predecessors, maybe at their own direction, increasingly consolidated decision-making power and authority into their own person. Taking on more and more functions of government meant that, at best, they could spend less and less time giving thought to each particular issues, and, at worst, meant that that issue or aspect of government fell completely by the wayside.
This alienated the population in multiple ways. For starters the emperor possibly created antagonism by removing people from government, with the deposed or their families becoming sources of dissent. Second, consolidating these offices into the person of the emperor limited the opportunities for patronage that the emperor could take advantage of. Lastly, there were the constituents or beneficiaries of the work the offices used to do, that was now less efficiently run because it was embodied in the sole figure of the emperor. All of these became possible nurseries for direct action against the emperor.
Many of the emperors were aware of these issues, but the egos (or madnesses) of the types of men that sought to be the Emperor of Rome were often confident enough in their capacity to govern without more help. After all, many of them could count on being deified upon their death, if not before, so they had a reason to believe in their infallibility and the omnipotence of their powers.
However, the mortal portions of their brain were well aware of the list of people they were angering and fueled a constant paranoia for who might come after them and launch the next coup. Emperors like Tiberius kept their paranoia in relative check and just let it manifest in lack of attention to his plan for succession, but emperors more prone to probable mental illness like Caligula and Nero became consumed by their paranoia, ruled with extreme brutality, and created the seeds of their own destruction and the sources of the coups against them.
The personalist nature of the Roman imperial system also had grave concerns for foreign policy and national defense and the reaction to external affairs was often entirely subordinated to the needs of the contemporary internal dynamics.
When the emperor Claudius ascended to the throne, he was not who anyone thought would become emperor, including the most recent emperor, Caligula. Claudius was only alive because his physical ailments had prevented a career in the Roman military and more robust participation in government, making him less of a threat to Caligula. However, this meant that Claudius had a credibility gap with the Roman army following the Praetorian Guard making him emperor. To alleviate this, Claudius embarked on a military operation that had stymied Julius Caesar, now deified as a god: a successful invasion of Britain.
Normally imperial policy would have argued against the expansion of the empire, but in this case, it came at the personal direction of the emperor and to solidify the position of the emperor. Consequently, multiple Roman legions and probably more than a dozen cohorts of auxilia crossed what would become the English Channel and brought southern England into the Roman empire. The expedition actually added little of value to the empire, but it did improve Claudius’ position in Rome.
Part of what made the capture of Britain a poor addition to the empire was the amount of resources that had to be expended holding on to it by Claudius and his successors, none of them wanting to face disrepute for its abandonment. Separated from the rest of the empire, and reinforcement in time of need, Britain’s garrison had to be disproportionately large. Add to that the distance from the imperial throne and the possibility of ministers assigned there to take increased advantage of more difficult oversite and Britain became a hotbed for insurrection both from the abused native population and also scheming Roman officials.
Indeed, Britain was somewhat of an outlier in terms of a provincial governor having such a military force under his command. In most of the rest of the empire during the time Tacitus examines, the emperors tried increasingly to guard the frontiers of the empire with as few troops as possible and with the legions spread out as much as possible. This meant that garrisons became very careful about taking advantage of localized opportunities, both because the emperor might censure their action thinking they were trying to make a name for themselves but also because the destruction of that commander’s force in a failed offensive would lead to a gapping hole in the imperial defenses. This was of limited importance in the period Tacitus documents but would be of immense importance a few centuries later as Rome’s borders were hit with multiple waves of migrants coming from more eastern Eurasia.
Indeed while Tacitus’ Annals only documents up to the reign of Nero, the problems with the imperial system that he highlights never really went away, despite his efforts to use the Annals as a method to call for reforms. Constant fear of coups, overuse of foreign-born allies for national defense, disaffection among the officer corps, all of these things are documented by Tacitus in the first century AD Roman army and all of them would play a part in the western empire’s destruction four centuries later. In fact, its less surprising that the Roman empire fell than it is surprising it did not fall sooner.
When an organization or government is tightly controlled by a competent leader, that may seem like a good thing, but as Tacitus’ Annals highlights, more often than not, one-man-rule generates bad leaders, which precipitates a death spiral.
One-man-rule has numerous weaknesses, but even the most competent leader in that type of system struggles to create dynamic perpetuation of the system. The functioning of one-man-rule encourages organizational conservatism. It worked for Augustus, so it should work for Tiberius too, and so on down the line. This diminished the ability of Rome to take advantage of new opportunities, innovate to face challenges visible on the horizon, and discouraged new ideas and new leaders to refresh the organization. And all of that was true even under good emperors.
Tacitus’ Annals recounts the reigns of only three emperors, but the same pattern generally held for all of them. Paranoid rulers overwhelmed by domestic concerns and intrigues, struggling to maintain the borders of their existing empire even when under only moderate external pressure, unable to strategically respond to even near-peer adversaries, especially if the response required theatre-level offensive action. This was not the Roman empire of Scipio Africanus, it was not even the empire that Julius Caesar had been born into.
The Roman empire had been highly successful, but its adoption of emperors was the beginning of the end.
The History Doctor 
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