Collaborators Amongst the Opposition?: Deconstructing the Imperial Cursus Honorum

In the conclusion to his study on Tacitus and the principate, David Shotter writes (1991.3327):

Republican, pessimist, Stoic; none of these is at all a fitting description of Cornelius Tacitus. He was raised by the principate and had enjoyed a career in its service; it was a natural progression that he should seek in retirement to present its development to as wide an audience as possible. It was natural too that he should do this in terms that he understood; not a negative attempt at denigration, but a positive attempt to appreciate the present by understanding the past.

Shotter’s eagerness to read Tacitus’s literary production and political thought through the lens of his biography is shared with a formidable cohort of scholars.¹ The general line of interpretation is that if Tacitus held high political office and served the principate and its principes, then the range of Tacitus’s political and historical thought is limited by those experiences. The same notion is generally presumed about Pliny the Younger.² Thus Pliny and Tacitus are generally viewed as accepting the legitimacy of the principate and its principes, both good and bad, because they held high political office and furthered their careers under the Flavians, Nerva, and Trajan. Whether or not Tacitus and Pliny accepted the legitimacy of the principate is not the question here. Rather, I want to assert that if there is evidence either way for settling such a question, it must be found in their writings and not their political careers.

The holding of high political office under the principate has often been regarded as evidence for collaboration with, or at least acceptance of, the imperial regime. Conversely, Dylan Sailor interprets the refusal to hold high political office or to seek to advance one’s political career as the highest mark of defiance and autonomy. In Writing and Empire in Tacitus, he asks (2008.24): “If proving your autonomy is the surest route to prestige, and if autonomy can best be proved by demonstrative, significant noncompliance, then is not the man who pursues the cursus honorum sacrificing all hopes of prestige, in the sense that success in the cursus could easily be construed as a badge of total compliance and therefore perhaps utter servility?”

The answer to Sailor’s question is an emphatic no. For the historical record clearly shows that pursuing the cursus honorum was not a badge of compliance and servility. The political careers of dissidents, many of whom held high offices under the emperors they opposed, and collaborators, many of whom despite their high offices eventually ran afoul of the regime, reveal that there is little to no correlation between political offices and political thought or behavior.³ In fact, dissidents could actively use the cursus honorum as a means of opposition. I will examine the careers of dissidents and collaborators briefly as indicative of career patterns that turn out to be quite similar to each other and to the careers of Tacitus and Pliny. The evidence presented by these careers challenges the assumption that a Roman’s cursus somehow represents the individual’s political leanings—much less his independence or servility. In sum, such an assumption is a fallacy.

THE DISSIDENTS

The evidence reveals that from the beginning of the principate, opposition came from the elite. Who else? By looking at the political careers of dissidents, one can make the case that high office was a requisite for political dissent. Of course, not everyone who held high office was a dissident, and political offices were often the rewards of compliance. Yet those who did dissent generally had reached the highest rungs of the cursus honorum, for it was prominence, not obscurity, after all that led to conflicts with the regime. For the circle around Thrasea Paetus (PIR² C 1187), the sources show that Thrasea, his father-in-law Caecina Paetus (PIR² C 103), Barea Soranus (PIR² B 55), Arulenus Rusticus (PIR² I 730), and Helvidius Priscus the Younger (PIR² H 60) all reached the consulship. Helvidius Priscus the Elder...