and as the adjacent provinces gradually imbibed the softer manners of Rome, the levies were extended to Macedonia, Noricum, and Spain. In the room of these elegant troops, better adapted to the pomp of courts than to the uses of war, it was established by Severus, that from all the legions of the frontiers the soldiers most distinguished for strength, valor, and fidelity should be occasionally drafted, and promoted, as an honor and reward, into the more eligible service of the guards." By this new institution the Italian youth were diverted from the exercise of arms, and the capital was terrified. by the strange aspect and manners of a multitude of barbarians. But Severus flattered himself that the legions would consider these chosen Prætorians as the representatives of the whole military order; and that the present aid of fifty thousand men, superior in arms and appointments to any force that could be brought into the field against them, would forever crush the hopes of rebellion, and secure the empire to himself and his posterity. The office of Prætoriau præfect. The command of these favored and formidable troops soon became the first office of the empire. As the gov ernment degenerated into military despotism, the Prætorian præfect, who in his origin had been a simple captain of the guards, was placed not only at the head a a 67 Dion, 1. lxxiv. [c. 2] p. 1243. Although the Prætorian præfect was at first only the commander of the guards, and far inferior to the Præfectus Urbi, yet from his very position he had from the first great power and influence. To guard against the misuse of this power, Augustus took two precautions-first, by dividing the command between two præfects; and, secondly, by choosing them exclusively from the equestrian order. The wisdom of the first precaution was shown by the peril to which Tiberius was exposed by intrusting to Sejanus the sole command; and the second continued to be observed till the reign of Alexander Severus, when all danger to the monarchy from the influence of the senate had entirely disappeared. Lamprid. Alex. Sever. c. 10. After the reign of Tiberius there were generally two præefects, though occasionally we find only one, as in the case of Plautianus under Septimius Severus, and sometimes even three. See c. 4, note 26. The power of the præfects was extended, first, by placing all the troops in the empire under their authority, and, secondly, by giving them jurisdiction in all civil and criminal cases. They appear to have obtained civil jurisdiction for the first time under Hadrian. As the præfects were regarded as the representatives of the emperors, they came to exercise all the functions of the emperors. Thus they possessed not only the supreme military and judicial authority, but even legislative powers, and the control of the finances and the provinces. Hence the office lost its exclusively mili of the army, but of the finances, and even of the law. In every department of administration he represented the person, and exercised the authority, of the emperor. The first præfect who enjoyed and abused this immense power was Plautianus, the favorite minister of Severus. His reign lasted above ten years, till the marriage of his daughter with the eldest son of the emperor, which seemed to assure his fortune, proved the occasion of his ruin. The animosities of the palace, by irritating the ambition and alarming the fears of Plautianus, threatened to produce a revolution, and obliged the emperor, who still loved him, to consent with reluctance to his death." After the fall of Plautianus, an eminent lawyer, the celebrated Papinian, was appointed to execute the motley office of Prætorian præfect. The senate oppressed by military despotism. 68 Till the reign of Severus, the virtue, and even the goodsense, of the emperors had been distinguished by their real or affected reverence for the senate, and by a tender regard to the nice frame of civil policy instituted by Augustus. But the youth of Severus had been trained in the implicit obedience of camps, and his riper years spent in the despotism of military command. His haughty and inflexible spirit could not discover, or would not acknowledge, the advantage of preserving an intermediate power, however imaginary, between the emperor and the army. He disdained to profess himself the servant of an assembly that detested his person and trembled at his frown; he issued his commands where his request would have proved 68 One of his most daring and wanton acts of power was the castration of a hundred free Romans, some of them married men, and even fathers of families, merely that his daughter, on her marriage with the young emperor, might be attended by a train of eunuchs worthy of an Eastern queen. Dion, 1. lxxvi. [c. 1] p. 1271. 69 Dion, 1. lxxvi. [c. 4] p. 1274. Herodian, 1. iii. [c. 12] p. 122, 129. The grammarian of Alexandria seems, as is not unusual, much better acquainted with this mysterious transaction, and more assured of the guilt of Plautianus, than the Roman senator ventures to be. tary character, and was frequently held by civilians. See Drakenborch, Da Officio Præfecti Prætorio, Traj. ad Rhen. 1707; Marquardt, in Becker's Handbuch der Römischen Alterthümer, vol. ii. pt. ii. p. 286 seq.-S. as effectual; assumed the conduct and style of a sovereign and a conqueror, and exercised, without disguise, the whole legislative as well as the executive power. New maxims of the impe rial preroga tive. The victory over the senate was easy and inglorious. Every eye and every passion were directed to the supreme magistrate, who possessed the arms and treasure of the State; whilst the senate, neither elected by the people, nor guarded by military force, nor animated by public spirit, rested its declining authority on the frail and crumbling basis of ancient opinion. The fine theory of a republic insensibly vanished, and made way for the more natural and substantial feelings of monarchy. As the freedom and honors of Rome were successively communicated to the provinces, in which the old government had been either unknown or was remembered with abhorrence, the tradition of republican maxims was gradually obliterated. The Greek historians of the age of the Antonines" observe, with a malicious pleasure, that although the sovereign of Rome, in compliance with an obsolete prejudice, abstained from the name of king, he possessed the full measure of regal power. the reign of Severus the senate was filled with polished and eloquent slaves from the Eastern provinces, who justified personal flattery by speculative principles of servitude. These new advocates of prerogative were heard with pleasure by the court, and with patience by the people, when they inculcated the duty of passive obedience, and descanted on the inevitable mischiefs of freedom. The lawyers and the historians concurred in teaching that the imperial authority was held, not by the delegated commission, but by the irrevocable resignation of the senate; that the emperor was freed from the restraint of civil laws could command, by his arbitrary will, the lives and fortunes of his subjects, and might dispose of the empire as of his private patrimony." The most eminent of the civil lawyers, and particularly Papinian, Paulus, Appian in Procem. [c. 6]. In "Dion Cassius seems to have written with no other view than to form these opinions into an historical system. The Pandects will show how assiduously the lawyers, on their side, labored in the cause of prerogative. and Ulpian, flourished under the House of Severus; and the Roman jurisprudence, having closely united itself with the system of monarchy, was supposed to have attained its full maturity and perfection. The contemporaries of Severus, in the enjoyment of the peace and glory of his reign, forgave the cruelties by which it had been introduced. Posterity, who experienced the fatal effects of his maxims and example, justly considered him as the principal author of the decline of the Roman empire. CHAPTER VI. The Death of Severus.-Tyranny of Caracalla.-Usurpation of Macrinus.-Fol lies of Elagabalus.-Virtues of Alexander Severus. - Licentiousness of the Army.-General State of the Roman Finances. Greatness and discontent of Severus. THE ascent to greatness, however steep and dangerous, may entertain an active spirit with the consciousness and exercise of its own powers: but the possession of a throne could never yet afford a lasting satisfaction to an ambitious mind. This melancholy truth was felt and acknowledged by Severus. Fortune and merit had, from an humble station, elevated him to the first place among mankind. "He had been all things," as he said himself, "and all was of little value." Distracted with the care, not of acquiring but of preserving an empire, oppressed with age and infirmities, careless of fame,' and satiated with power, all his prospects of life were closed. The desire of perpetuating the greatness of his family was the only remaining wish of his ambition and paternal tenderness. His wife the Like most of the Africans, Severus was passionately addicted to the vain studies of magic and divination, deeply versed in the interpretation of dreams and omens, Empress and perfectly acquainted with the science of judicial astrology; which, in almost every age except the present, has maintained its dominion over the mind of man. He had lost his first wife whilst he was governor of the Lyonnese Gaul. In the choice of a second he sought 1 Hist. August. p. 71. Dion Cassius, 1. lxxvi. [Spart. Sever. c. 18.] "Omnia fui, et nihil expedit." 3 About the year 186. M. de Tillemont is miserably embarrassed with a passage of Dion, in which the Empress Faustina, who died in the year 175, is introduced as having contributed to the marriage of Severus and Julia (1. lxxiv. [c. 3] p. 1243). The learned compiler forgot that Dion is relating, not a real fact, but |