The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Next, Gibbon turns to the topic of Rome’s politics. Gibbon describes the Roman Empire by the second century CE as a monarchy. He remarks that monarchy inevitably turns into “despotism” unless there is a check on the monarchy, like a strong clergy, nobility, or a “stubborn commons” (59).

Rome had been a republic, but the empire essentially became a monarchy in all but name with the rise of Julius Caesar’s great-nephew, Octavianus, who became the first emperor, Augustus. The Senate of Rome voted to give Augustus significant powers over the government. Still, Augustus took absolute power while still maintaining the charade of restoring the republic after decades of civil war. Roman generals also generally had tremendous power over their soldiers. When Augustus came to power, he entrusted military responsibilities to his chosen lieutenants.

Still, Augustus adopted the powers of many of the old political offices of the republic, like the censor (who oversaw public morality and state finances), the consul (the executive office, like a president or prime minister), the tribune (who was the people’s representative), and the pontiff (the high priest). Nonetheless, elections continued to happen, and the old offices of the republic continued to exist, even retaining some of their old civic responsibilities. The Senate of Rome also stayed in place, but it lost much of its old legislative and judicial power.

While the emperors still took on the image of republican politicians, they were also deified. This was an adaptation of a custom of making kings into gods after their deaths that had developed in the Greek-speaking world. The Senate would deify popular emperors. However, this was more of a formality, and the treatment of their divinity eventually “sunk into oblivion” (70). The threat to the political system Augustus built was the army, which could have overturned the whole empire at any time. Gibbon argues that Augustus tried to solve this problem by using the “majesty of the senate” (72) as a barrier between the army and the emperor. Since Augustus, emperors were made legitimate by both the “authority of the senate and the consent of the soldiers” (73, emphasis Gibbon’s). Another problem with Augustus’s system was that there were no real rules of succession: Emperors would try to deal with this by nominating and sharing power with their preferred successor during their lifetime.

Gibbon recounts how the succession of emperors unfolded since the downfall of Nero, the last emperor from Augustus’s dynasty. After a civil war in which three separate emperors were propped up and killed in the course of a year, a general from the lower classes named Vespasian became emperor. With his son Titus, he established a new imperial dynasty, the Flavians. This dynasty soon came to an end with the assassination of Titus’s brother and successor, Domitian. The new emperor, an elderly man named Nerva, adopted a successor from outside his own family, Trajan. In turn, Trajan nominated a cousin to succeed him, Hadrian.

After Hadrian’s preferred successor and lover Aelius Verus died, Hadrian would choose as his successor Antoninus Pius, who was also prompted to adopt the then-teenager Marcus Aurelius as his son. Gibbon deems the era from the start of Nerva’s reign to the death of Marcus Aurelius as the peak of not only the Roman Empire, but the time when “the human race was most happy and prosperous” (78). Still, Gibbon argues that the imperial office also gave power to not just good rulers like Antoninus Pius, but also tyrants like Caligula and Nero.

Even though Gibbon argues that the culture of the Roman Empire held ideals concerning “the dignity of human nature and the origin of civil society” (80), he also argues that the Roman emperors had a tyrannical power with no equal in his own day. In the Europe of Gibbon’s time, people could escape a tyrannical government by fleeing to a neighboring country that would not be so different from their homeland. At the height of the Roman Empire, there was no such easy escape from the emperor’s authority.