ABSTRACT
The subject of opposition and resistance within the senate in the Early Principate is one which has only received piecemeal treatment, usually in imperial biographies, such as those by Barrett (1989; 1996), Jones (1984a; 1992), and Levick (1976a; 1990; 1999). The purpose of the following chapters (4 through 7), is to examine the various forms of opposition and resistance the emperor faced, and the delator’s role in meeting the threats and the difficulties such opposition posed through an examination of individual prosecutions. An investigation of this sort is not without its problems. First and foremost, we need to define what we mean by opposition, and what shape such opposition could take. As Raaflaub (1987: 1-3) has noted in his study on the intent of opposition in the Early Principate, the Latin vocabulary has no word which is equivalent to our word for “opposition” or “opponent”; it included, rather, several types of behavior which were at times readily recognizable to a Roman, and which assumed various forms. Such behavior could range from the lone individual prosecuted for desertion of public office or for consulting astrologers, to those factions within the senate which, through a nexus of familial ties, potentially provocative behavior, personal enmity, political ideologies, or any combination of these, posed a threat to the stability and security of the regime.1 Factionalism however, such as it was, was something which appears to have developed only after the reigns of Tiberius and Gaius, when family enmities and loyalties against the emperors began to take a recognizable shape and solidify.2 As it developed, such factionalism will have been entirely recognizable, on a certain level, to an imperial senator’s republican forebears, but it would be erroneous to think that the same dynamics were at work for a prosecutor under the Principate as during the Republic, or that factionalism, as it had existed in the Republic, took the same form under the Empire.3 Men who wanted to climb the
political ladder set their sights on the princeps, or those close to him, clustering around those, such as Sejanus, who controlled access to office, or around members of the imperial family, who, they believed, had a solid claim on succession. The Principate had introduced a major paradigm shift, representing the victory of a faction that numerous senators clamored to support and protect against opponents who challenged it.4 Driving the ambitious senator was the ancient desire for dignitas, fama, and auctoritas, though he could not exceed the princeps in any of these. He could, however, outshine his fellow senators as much as his abilities would permit. We would be wrong to see delatores as driven only by a systemic sea change; instead ancient dynamics accommodated themselves to a new political reality. These dynamics, set in their changed political context, tended to work in the princeps’ favor. There was now only one “party,” that of the princeps, arrayed against lone individuals or small groups that were perceived to work contrary to imperial interests. We have divided these groups into three distinct categories to be dealt with individually in the following four chapters.
