The Empire: Succession and the Army

Sources

Flaw. One weakness of the “principate”—Augustus’s disguised monarchy—was that it did not deal well with the problem of succession. Officially, there was no emperor, just a man who happened to hold an extraordinary set of powers and offices. As a result, there could be no official rules for succession (contrast, for example, the elaborate scheme that can tell who is twelfth in line for the British throne today). Many emperors were able to choose a successor, usually a son, and have him granted a similar package of powers in advance. But what if there were no designated successor? Several emperors and would-be emperors were acclaimed by the Praetorian Guard (the imperial bodyguards) or various armies in the field. The candidates could be members of the existing imperial family or simply men who happened to be in charge of a large military force. When there were several competing factions, as in 68–69 and 193–195 c.e., fierce civil wars ensued. Occasionally, aspirants to the throne might not even wait for the death of the old emperor if they thought they had enough support to seize power. Whatever the case, it became crucial to political survival to pay the troops

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well and especially to give large bonuses at times of transition. The system, such as it was, broke down almost entirely during the middle half of the third century C.E. There was nearly constant struggle between potential emperors, both in the field and by assassination. Even in peaceful times the fluidity of the rules led to considerable intrigue (and rumors of even more). So, for instance, the emperor Claudius (possibly) and his son Britannicus (certainly) were murdered to ensure the succession of Claudius’s stepson Nero. One of the most stable periods of the Empire covered the first three-quarters of the second century c.e. This period required several fortunate trends. None of the emperors died young, whether naturally or otherwise, which required both luck and popularity. Each emperor but the last had no biological son and thus found and adopted a skilled man as son and heir.

Sources

Chris Scarre, Chronicle of the Roman Emperors: The Reign-by-Reign Record of the Rulers of Imperial Rome (London: Thames & Hudson, 1995).

Colin M. Wells, The Roman Empire (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1984).