Roman Empire: From Republic to Principate and Golden Age

**Augustus** created his new political system gradually. He succeeded because he reinvented government, guaranteed the army’s support, did not hesitate to use violence to win power, and built political legitimacy by communicating an image of himself as a dedicated leader and patron.

Members of the social elite competing for power after **Caesar’s** assassination in 44 B.C.E. started a civil war that lasted until 30 B.C.E. The main competitors were Caesar’s friend **Mark Antony** and Caesar’s eighteen-year-old grandnephew and adopted son, **Octavian**. Octavian won over Caesar’s soldiers by promising them money from their murdered general’s wealth, which he had inherited.

After distributing land to army veterans and creating colonies in the provinces, in 27 B.C.E., Octavian, in his own words, “gave back the state from his own power to the control of the Roman Senate and the people” and announced they should decide how to preserve it. Augustus changed Rome’s political system, but he kept up the appearance and the name of government under a republic. Citizens elected consuls, the Senate gave advice, and the assemblies met. Augustus occasionally served as consul, but mostly he let others hold that office. While making himself sole ruler, he concealed his monarchy by referring to himself not as a “king” but only with the honorary title *princeps*, meaning “first man”. *Princeps* is thus the position we call emperor and the Romans described as a principate. Each new *princeps* was supposed to be chosen only with the Senate’s approval, but in practice, each ruler chose his own successor, like kings with a royal family, for example. Augustus made the military the foundation of his power by turning the republic’s citizen militia into a professional, full-time army and navy. He established regular lengths of service and substantial retirement benefits, changes that made the emperor the troops’ patron and solidified their loyalty to him. To raise money for the added costs, Augustus imposed Rome’s first inheritance tax on citizens, angering the rich. Augustus never revealed his motives for establishing the principate, but his challenge was the one every Roman leader faced: balancing his own ambition with Rome’s need for peace and its traditional commitment to its citizens’ freedom of action. Augustus’s solution was to employ traditional values to justify changes, as with his reinvention of the meaning of the word *princeps*.

Peace and prosperity in Rome’s Golden Age depended on defense by a loyal military, service by provincial elites in local administration and tax collection, common laws enforced throughout the empire, and a healthy population reproducing itself. The empire’s vast size and the small numbers of soldiers and imperial officials in the provinces meant that emperors had only limited control over these factors. In theory, Rome’s military goal remained perpetual expansion because conquest brought land, money, and glory. The long period of peace supported the Golden Age’s prosperity and promoted long-distance trade to import luxury goods, such as spices and silk, from as far away as India and China.

In the third century C.E., military expenses provoked a financial crisis that fed a political crisis lasting from the 230s to the 280s C.E. Invasions on the northern and eastern frontiers had forced the Roman emperors to expand the army for defense, but no new revenues came in to meet the additional costs. The emperor’s desperate schemes to finance defense costs damaged the economy and made the population angry. This anger at the regime encouraged generals to repeat the behavior that had destroyed the republic: commanding client armies to seize power. They created a civil war that lasted fifty years. Earthquakes and regional epidemics added to people’s misery. By 284 C.E., this combination of troubles had destroyed the *Pax Romana* of the early empire.

When financial ruin, natural disasters, and civil war combined to create a political crisis for the principate in the mid-third century C.E., the emperors lacked the money and the popular support to solve their problems. Not even persecutions of Christians helped. Threatened with the loss of peace, prosperity, and territory, the empire needed a political transformation to survive.