At Rome the term imperium signified generally, in its earlier use, the sovereignty of the state over the individual, a sovereignty which the Romans had disengaged with singular clearness from all other kinds of authority. Each of the higher magistrates of the Roman people was The Roman empire. vested, by a lex curiata (for power was distinctly conceived as resident in, and delegated by, the community), with an imperium both civil and military, which varied in degree with the magnitude of his office. In the later days of the Republic such imperium was enjoyed, partly in Rome by the resident consuls and praetors, partly in the provinces by the various proconsuls or propraetors. There was thus a certain morcellement of imperium, delegated as it was by the people to a number of magistrates: the coming of the Empire meant the reintegration of this imperium, and its unification, by a gradual process, in the hands of the princeps, or emperor. The means by which this process was achieved had already been anticipated under the Republic. Already in the days of Pompey it had been found convenient to grant to an extraordinary officer an imperium aequum or majus over a large area, and that officer thus received powers, within that area, equal to, or greater than, the powers of the provincial governors. This precedent was followed by Augustus in the year 27 B.C., when he acquired for himself sole imperium in a certain number of provinces (the imperial provinces), and an infinitum imperium majus in the remaining provinces (which were termed senatorial). As a result, Augustus enjoyed an imperium coextensive indeed with the whole of the Roman world, but concurrent, in part of that world, with the imperium of the senatorial proconsuls; and the early Empire may thus be described as a dyarchy. But the distinction between imperial and senatorial provinces finally disappeared; by the time of Constantine the emperor enjoyed sole imperium, and an absolute monarchy had been established. We shall not, however, fully understand the significance of the Roman empire, unless we realize the importance of its military aspect. All the soldiers of Rome had from the first to swear in verba Caesaris Augusti; and thus the whole of the Roman army was his army, regiments of which he might indeed lend, but of which he was sole Imperator (see under Emperor). Thus regarded as a permanent commander-in-chief, the emperor enjoyed the privileges, and suffered from the weaknesses, of his position. He had the power of the sword behind him; but he became more and more liable to be deposed, and to be replaced by a new commander, at the will of those who bore the sword in his service.
The period which is marked by the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine (A.D. 284–337) marks a great transformation in the character of the Empire. The old dyarchy, under which the emperor might still be regarded as an official of the respublica Romana, passed into a new monarchy, Development under Diocletian and Constantine. in which all political power became, as it were, the private property of the monarch. There was now no distinction of provinces; and the old public aerarium became merely a municipal treasury, while the fiscus of the emperor became the exchequer of the Empire. The officers of the imperial praetorium, or bodyguard, are now the great officers of state; his private council becomes the public consistory, or supreme court of appeal; and the comites of his court are the administrators of his empire. “All is in him, and all comes from him,” as our own year-books say of the medieval king; his household, for instance, is not only a household, but also an administration. On the other hand, this unification seems to be accompanied by a new bifurcation. The exigencies of frontier defence had long been drawing the Empire towards the troubled East; and this tendency reached its culmination when a new Rome arose by the Bosporus, and Constantinople became the centre of what seemed a second Empire in the East (A.D. 324). Particularly Division of the Empire. after the division of the Empire between Arcadius and Honorius in 395 does this bifurcation appear to be marked; and one naturally speaks of the two Empires of the West and the East. Yet it cannot be too much emphasized that in reality such language is utterly inexact. The Roman empire was, and always continued to be, ideally one and indivisible. There were two emperors, but one Empire—two persons, but one power. The point is of great importance for the understanding of the whole of the middle ages: there only is, and can be, one Empire, which may indeed, for convenience, be ruled conjointly by two emperors, resident, again for convenience, in two separate capitals. And, as a matter of fact, not only did the residence of an emperor in the East not spell bifurcation, it actually fostered the tendency towards unification. It helped forward the transformation of the Empire into an absolute and quasi-Asiatic monarchy, under which all its subjects fell into a single level of loyal submission: it helped to give the emperor a gorgeous court, marked by all the ceremony and the servility of the East.[1] The deification of the emperor himself dates from the days of Augustus; by the time of Constantine it has infected the court and the government. Each emperor, again, had from the first enjoyed the sacrosanct position which was attached to the tribunate; but now his palace, his chamber, his charities, his letters, are all “sacred,” and one might almost speak in advance of a “Holy Roman Empire.”
But there is one factor, the greatest of all, which still remains to be added, before we have counted the sum of the forces that made the world think in terms of empire for centuries to come; and that is the reception of Christianity into the Roman empire by Constantine. That reception Influence of Christianity. added a new sanction to the existence of the Empire and the position of the emperor. The Empire, already one and indivisible in its aspect of a political society, was welded still more firmly together when it was informed and permeated by a common Christianity, and unified by the force of a spiritual bond. The Empire was now the Church; it was now indeed indestructible, for, if it perished as an empire, it would live as a church. But the Church made it certain that it would not perish, even as an empire, for many centuries to come. On the one hand the Church thought in terms of empire and taught the millions of its disciples (including the barbarians themselves) to think in the same terms. No other political conception—no conception of a πόλις or of a nation—was any longer possible. When the Church gained its hold of the Roman world, the Empire, as it has been well said, was already “not only a government, but a fashion of conceiving the world”: it had stood for three centuries, and no man could think of any other form of political association. Moreover, the gospel of St Paul—that there is one Church, whereof Christ is the Head, and we are all members—could not but reinforce for the Christian the conception of a necessary political unity of all the world under a single head. Una Chiesa in uno Stato—such, then, was the theory of the Church. But not only did the Church perpetuate the conception of empire by making it a part of its own theory of the world: it perpetuated that conception equally by materializing it in its own organization of itself. Growing up under the shadow of the Empire, the Church too became an empire, as the Empire had become a church. As it took over something of the old pagan ceremonial, so it took over much of the old secular organization. The pope borrowed his title of pontifex maximus from the emperor: what is far more, he made himself gradually, and in the course of centuries, the Caesar and Imperator of the Church. The offices and the dioceses of the Church are parallel to the offices and dioceses of the Diocletian empire: the whole spirit of orderly hierarchy and regular organization, which breathes in the Roman Church, is the heritage of ancient Rome. The Donation of Constantine is a forgery; but it expresses a great truth when it represents Constantine as giving to the pope the imperial palace and insignia, and to the clergy the ornaments of the imperial army (see Donation of Constantine).
- ↑ Bryce points out, with much subtlety and truth, that the rise of a second Rome in the East not only helped to perpetuate the Empire by providing a new centre which would take the place of Rome when Rome fell, but also tended to make it more universal; “for, having lost its local centre, it subsisted no longer by historic right only, but, so to speak, naturally, as a part of an order of things which a change in external conditions seemed incapable of disturbing” (Holy Roman Empire, p. 8 of the edition of 1904).
