A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors by Anthony Blond

because the upper classes were far from philoprogenitive – which led Augustus, as part of his campaign to restore ‘old-fashioned values’, to give tax concessions to
citizens who produced three or more children, rather like the almost free rail travel and state benefits for large families in present-day France.
    The original Roman
paterfamilias
was the incarnation of the law. There was one law for the patricians and none for anybody else. Between these patricians – who belonged to a
gens
(like the
gens Julia
of our first five Emperors), of which there were 300, which was in turn one of the thirty
curiae
making up the three tribes of Ancient Rome –
there was at first no need for complicated laws of contact, because a Roman’s word – to another Roman – was his bond.
    Each was a legal personality with a lot of land in the centre of Rome – his
heredium
– to which the family clung throughout the generations; and as they grew with Rome, so
they attracted a
clientela,
a group of dependents – poorer citizens and freedmen – whom they protected in return for votes or willingness to participate in a claque in court.
    Freedmen and ‘foreigners’, which were soon the majority in Rome, could only sue in the courts via a Roman
paterfamilias,
so it was essential to belong to a
clientela
right up until Caracalla – he of the Baths – enfranchised all free men in the Empire. Roman lawmakers moved in great strides to deal with the problems, and the benefits, of increasing
population and prosperity. At first one of the magistrates, called a
praetor,
interpreted the tables of the law in Rome; after theconquest of Sicily there were four,
with Spain six; Sulla the Dictator made eight and Caesar, sixteen; they began to create case law with their decisions, which were posted on a white board
(album)
displayed in the Forum.
    More through the influence of Seneca than of Christianity, Roman Law softened with time, until even slaves gained certain rights. A creditor could no longer seize the son of a debtor and put him
in irons. Debt, and the means of its recovery, often by a patrician from a small farmer, had been the cause of the greatest riots in early Rome. At that time it was not only legal, but a religious
duty to revenge murder of a kinsman with another death. This law is now only observed by the Mafia. However, a citizen could still kill a thief if he came by night or, in the daylight, carried
arms.
    Laws like this, which came from the original twelve tables, could be chanted by schoolboys, but later legislation regulating, say, repossession of mortgaged property or restitution for damage
done by a slave to another citizen’s mule or alienation by a trustee of a minor’s fortune had to be studied, together with the art of rhetoric, in law schools throughout the Roman
world. Cicero studied under Scaevola, who was an
augur
(one of twelve interpreters of Roman religion) and was, more to the point,
the
expert on Civil Law. He went on to take
instruction under Philo the Academician, then attended the lectures on rhetoric of Apollonius Molon in Rhodes, and finally he toured Greece, improving his lung power. His subsequent successes in
political trials gave him (a
novus homo,
without family connections) enough support among the electorate – the knights, the country grandees, the smart young men about town – to
become a consul. So success at the bar, like success on a military campaign, was the first step in the
cursus honorum,
which led to the top of the Roman state.
    Our five Emperors all, in their fashion, respected the laws of Rome. Augustus, who had, as Octavian, proscribed 2,000 knights and 300 senators in 43 BC , became the benign father of the state, whose mission it was to restore the institutions of the Republic, so battered by the civil wars in which he was the only winner. He followed
the forms of the Republic and in being elected consul thirteen times demonstrated that his authority came from the