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Chapter 5 Political Ideas under the Empire When Augustus rose to power,Rome became a monarchy. This raises two important questions . Why had Republican solutions become obsolete after this time? And since a regression to a pre-civic form of “sacred monarchy” was impossible—among the elite at any rate—in a Greco-Roman world that was now deeply committed to a scientific and critical culture, what ideological justification could there have been for a monarchic constitution? As for the first question, the most likely hypothesis is that the Republican solutions the Greek cities and early Rome experimented with—oligarchy, democracy, and “mixed” constitutions— were probably no longer suited to the immense political bodies created by Hellenistic and Roman conquests. The constitutions of the “cities” and “republics” supposed a unified public opinion, expressing itself either in a popular assembly or in a “senate” (or in a mixed form of both), the decisions of which reflected the mind of a public opinion that accepted them as legitimate in a more or less harmonious and reciprocal system of “resonance.” The Hellenistic states and the Roman Empire, however, were largely multiethnic, nonhomogeneous polities. They were also geographic behemoths, and given the technical limitations of communication at the time, something like a public opinion would have had difficulty in shaping a response to the ebb and flow of social and political events at the time. Therefore, no assembly could be representative of so many dissimilar entities throughout the territory; any decisions taken by such an assembly would have inevitably faced the protestations and incomprehensions from other parts of the Empire (which is exactly what happened to the Roman Senate at the end of the Republic).1 1 This would explain, mutatis mutandis, why the civic-republican ideal reappeared in the modern era. Because the modern era is the age of the printed document (which appeared in the sixteenth century) and the printing press (which appeared shortly thereafter in the seventeenth century), only then did it become possible for “public opinion” to reemerge once again in large states. (And with electronic media and communication, it may even be possible for continentwide public opinion to emerge in Europe.) This might also explain the failure of federalism, the one viable alternative to monarchy (federalism appeared in the form of leagues and alliances among Greek states, for example, the Aeolian League and the Achaean League in the third and second centuries BC). Federalism was unable to build on a shared public opinion 307 Part Two: Rome 308 This, then, is the basic raison d’être of the monarchic form of government: in the absence of a coherent public opinion, it proposes another unitary principle—namely, a king and a system of government firmly under his command. The state is unified and coherent because it has one ruler, recognized by all, to whom anyone can appeal, and who guarantees the functional homogeneity—harmony (synarmoga)—of the different parts of the state in his person. Of course, this transmutation comes at a price. The new form of government cannot have the same legitimacy as one based on open discussion in the agora, that is, in the Senate or in the Forum, which is a form of rationality more or less admitted and internalized by all citizens. By definition, a monarchic power is more distant, less comprehensible. To establish itself on a solid footing, it must either spread a holy terror to disarm the opposition; that is, it must fit the mold of the ancient sacred monarchies (certain hard facts support this attitude: military victories signaling the favors of Fortune, remnants of archaic mentalities among the uneducated masses); or it must have—in the eyes of the enlightened segments of the population—a philosophical foundation that presents the monarchy as the incarnation of a superior, objectively grounded rationality , inaccessible to average citizens. Roman monarchy would enjoy both types of legitimation. Ideas on monarchy evolved significantly from the period of the Principate to the period of the Dominate. Under the Principate, the king exercised his authority over the people through his religious aura, acquired either by the glory of arms or transmitted by his supposedly divine lineage as a descendant of the gens Julia. The imperial cult carefully preserved his aura. Furthermore, in keeping with a true state ideology, the monarchy encouraged efforts, such as Virgil’s, to articulate this preeminence of the princely family with the ancient Roman legends in an original epic (see below). On the other hand, the jurists...

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