Rome's Enlightenment: the Antonine Golden Era

A History of Mankind (270)

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Amid the sound and fury of border campaigns and Jewish insurrections, the Roman Empire was slowly evolving. The populist principate of Augustus and Tiberius, in which the emperor became a sort of protector of the people against the oligarchic senate, was turning into something less Caesarian and more bureaucratized, in the Chinese style.

Flavian reforms of the civil service had taken a stab at making meritocratic officialdom a permanent fixture of a state that had for centuries relied on the senate to handle the nuts and bolts of governance. Trajan was mostly too distracted with his own aggrandizement to make any impact on this front, but Hadrian had other interests and needed loyal officials to keep an eye on things while he was traveling around the empire.

Thus, Hadrian reinforced the power of praetors, elected by the senate under the emperor’s guidance, and made the emperor’s inner council – the “consilia principis” – a permanent body staffed by learned officials, the sort of arrangement that any visiting Chinese would have found perfectly understandable and indeed sensible. At the same time, this conservative philhellene, forever suspicious of the hoi polloi, codified the customary legal privileges of upper-class citizens who were exempt from physical punishments and the worst ways of execution, including the crucifixions, burnings and mauling by beasts that Christians and other nobodies were sometimes regaled with¹.