Book 2 — CHAPTER XXXIX. A HALF CENTURY OF DECLINE: COMMODUS TO ALEXANDER SEVERUS (continued 2)

It is true that the representatives of this new dynasty are not to be compared to the great emperors of the second century. Even Alexander Severus, who equals Antoninus and Marcus in kindliness, is very inferior to them in intelligence and greatness of soul. The principles of the government are detestable; men outbid one another for the favour of the legions; a price is set on mutiny; none approaches the soldier except with purse in hand. Military despotism never took a more shameless form; but military despotism can be long-lived.

Side by side with hideous spectacles, under the Syrian emperors, what reforms do we find! What progress in legislation! What a day was that when, under Caracalla, all free men dwelling within the empire attained equal rights!

We must not exaggerate the advantages offered by such equality; yet in politics words are never wholly void of meaning. Many excellent things had been inherited. The philosophers of the school of Marcus Aurelius had disappeared, but their place was taken by the masters of jurisprudence. Papinian, Ulpian, Paul, Gaius, Modestinus, Florentinus, Marcian, during years of execrable evil, created masterpieces and actually brought the law of the future into being. The Syrian emperors, though far inferior to Trajan and to the Antonines as far as political traditions are concerned, inasmuch as they were not Romans and had none of the Roman prejudices, often give proof of an openness of mind which would have been impossible to the great emperors of the second century, all of whom were intensely conservative. They permitted and even encouraged colleges or syndicates. They went to extreme lengths in this matter, and they would have organised the trade guilds as castes with a distinctive garb. They flung the doors of the empire wide open. One of them, that noble and pathetic figure Alexander Severus, the son of Mamæa, almost equalled in his plebeian goodness the patrician virtues of the great age; the loftiest ideas pale before the honest effusions of his heart.

It was in religion above all that these Syrian emperors inaugurated a liberality of mind and a tolerance unknown before.[46] The Syrian women of Emesa, Julia Domna, Julia Mæsa, Julia Mamæa, Julia Soæmias, beautiful, intelligent, venturous to the point of utopianism, are hampered by no tradition or conventionality. They dared to do what no Roman woman had ever done; they entered the senate, took part in its deliberations, and practically governed the empire, dreaming of Semiramis and Nitocris. It was a thing that such a woman as Faustina would not have done for all her frivolity; she would have been checked by tact, by the sense of absurdity, by the rules of good Roman society. The Syrian women hesitated at nothing. They had a senate of women, which enacted every sort of absurdity. The Roman religion seemed to them cold and meaningless. They had no family reasons for attachment to it, and being more in harmony, imaginatively, with Christianity than with Italian paganism, they delighted in the tales of the travels of gods upon the earth. Philostratus enchanted them with his Apollonius; perhaps they had a secret leaning towards Christianity.

During this time the last noble ladies of the older society, such as the elderly daughter of Marcus Aurelius, honoured by all men and put to death by Caracalla, lived in obscurity, looking on at an orgy which formed so strange a contrast to the memories of their youth.

The provinces, and those of the East more particularly, which were far more active and enlightened than those of the West, gained a decided ascendency. Elagabalus was certainly a madman, but nevertheless his chimerical idea of a central monotheistic religion, established in Rome and absorbing all others, shows that the narrow circle of Antonine conceptions had been to a great extent broken through. Mamæa and Alexander Severus were to go further; whilst the jurisconsults continued to transcribe their old and ferocious maxims against liberty of conscience with the calmness of habit, the Syrian emperor and his mother studied Christianity, and manifested sympathy with it. Not content with granting security to the Christians, Alexander, with touching eclecticism, introduced the name of Jesus among his household gods. Peace seemed made, not, as under Constantine, by the abasement of one party, but by a generous reconciliation. In all this there was certainly a daring attempt at reform, inferior in rationality to that of the Antonines, but more likely to succeed because it was much more popular and took the provinces and the East more into account.

In such a democratic work, people with no ancestors, such as these Africans and Syrians, had more chance of success than rigid men of irreproachable bearing, like the aristocratic emperors. But the innate viciousness of the imperial system revealed itself for the tenth time. Alexander Severus was assassinated by the soldiers on the 19th of March, 235. It was clear that the army would tolerate none but tyrants. The empire had fallen successively from the Roman aristocracy to provincial officers, now it passed to subordinate officers and military assassins. Whereas, until the time of Commodus, the murdered emperors are intolerable monsters, it is now the good emperor, the man who desires to restore some kind of discipline and represses the crimes of the army, who is inevitably marked for death.j Still, it cannot be denied that there was need of strong, able commanders on the eve of the barbarian invasions. With all his virtues, Alexander was a weakling, unfit to rule at such a time. With his death the military revolution entered upon a third stage. It became more than ever necessary to strengthen the imperial office, because, it having been decided that the emperor should be a soldier, the choice of the soldiers, rival claimants of the office were threatening, by their civil strife, to break up the Roman world into a multitude of warring states.a

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