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'people.' It was different, we are told, under Nerva :-' Hitherto, 'the idea that the primacy was due to the most excellent man ' in the Commonwealth, which easily led to the notion of the emperor's divine character and origin, had, except in the 'transient usurpations of Otho and Vitellius, been faithfully 6 preserved. But the election of Nerva was avowedly mere matter of political convenience. The Senate, at last, was master of the situation, and it rejected pointedly the flimsy ' notion with which the nation had so long suffered itself to be 'amused. . . . They were very sure that no drop of celestial blood had ever flowed in the veins of any one of his ancestors.' One great objection to this theory of the principles on which a Julius, or an Augustus, was deified, is undoubtedly the clear title, on such a hypothesis, to celestial honours, in the opinion of the people, not merely of a Caligula or a Nero, for whom our author appears to have a certain admiration, but even of Domitian. There Mr. Merivale draws the line. But why so low? Or, if so low, why not lower still? Let alone Galbafor he gives up of his own accord Otho and Vitellius-what title to divinity, above Nerva and Trajan, did antecedents and character give to Vespasian, the plebeian emperor, the head of the Flavian firm'? And if absence and military honours dazzled the eyes of the Roman people (as we know they did not), and enabled them to perceive a halo round the vulgar face of that abnormis sapiens, the Ofella of the Palatine, how could they have blotted out their recollections of the scandalous debaucheries of the town-bred Domitian? Yet it is for Domitian, in his lifetime, that Mr. Merivale appears to believe that the nation felt a most real and awe-stricken veneration; to such a degree, indeed, that he represents the feeling as communicated from the breasts of the people, where it had sprung up, to that of its object, the prince. As we have already quoted, he is described as unable to avoid remarking, that none of their deities was so present to their minds as an object of regard and veneration.' Surely there could never have been a doubt, that, if the deification arose from the idea that the primacy was due to the most excellent man of the Commonwealth,' Nerva and Trajan had an equal title to it with Domitian, the man of a loose youth, followed without a break, by a loose and cruel maturity. But if, rather, it was the feeling of awe attached to the living principle of empire transferred to and embodied, as it were, in the empire's actual chief (a feeling, indeed, to which we allow a certain influence), then how could the choice by the Senate of Rome of the best of their members weaken this belief, while the empire was still whole and intact?

We believe that really the principle and faith, such as it was,

survived the reign of Domitian, though having been continually in process of losing its reality and vigour since the epoch when it originated-the reign of Augustus. Our hypothesis of its origin is different from the two grounds set forth by Mr. Merivale. It appears to us to have been the Roman substitute for the Divine Right of some despotic governments; for the theory of an original compact between prince and people, on which writers on Government rest the title of other monarchs to obedience; and, lastly, for the theory of the right to the crown being a piece of hereditary property, descending to the heir, as an estate may descend to a private owner. Now, the emperor assumed power under no supposed authority from a Providence which his subjects did not believe in; on the ground of no compact with his subjects, for his prerogative had no limits and he required no election; by no right of private ownership, for the empire in one sense was never hereditary. He might be consul or censor by the imaginary choice of the people; he would take his father's goods by the municipal law of Rome; but he was emperor by a higher title.

In fact, though brought into clear relief, at the period beginning with Nerva, he, through the accident common to so many emperors of his time, being without male heirs, the principle of designation to the imperial succession by the reigning princean act which, in the case of a man not the sovereign's son, took the form of adoption-had been always the received theory of a title to the throne. It was directly the title of Augustus, of Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero; in the case of Claudius, bloodrelationship and the absence of competitors might well be held a substitute for actual nomination, while in that of Titus and of Domitian the real title to the throne was not so much the right of kindred, as an actual designation by the preceding sovereign. Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, and Nerva, had no such claim as the rest; but they, too, assumed the name of Cæsar, implying thereby that, in the absence of any one with a more clearly legitimate title, they too were to be considered as adopted to the empire by the already deified members of the Julian House.

It is in this circumstance of the sovereignty passing, as a rule, through the direct designation thereto of the successor by the reigning prince, that we discover the clue to the mystery of imperial apotheoses. The Roman constitution was still, in idea, republican; even an emperor had to be elected to its various offices. But the whole of this republican constitution had long been overridden by an undefined power, which nullified the constitution, without being provided for by it, and yet which maintained that constitution in its death-in-life. A Nero, or a

Titus, as a consul, a tribune, a censor, or even as a dictator, had certain rights and powers, and a limit in the duration of his authority clearly defined by the law of the State. But, as imperator, he was above all law, and yet was compelled by the proud conservatism of the Roman nation, and even by the prejudices of the provinces, to recognise the original Roman system as still existing. He was not strong enough, he, a Roman citizen, would seldom even wish to declare himself a despot ruling by the brute force of his legions; the Senate, even if they had sunk so low as to be willing to abnegate their theoretical self-government, had no constitutional power to create him a despot and yet he was one. The inconsistencies

of his position were attempted to be reconciled by the hypothesis of a celestial nature, now revealed in his predecessor, of a divine wisdom and infallibility, which the nation now recognised, and by which that prince had been entitled to name, for the rule and guidance of the cherished state he had at length left, a successor and a perpetual dictator. The Senate might recognise the authority of the new prince; but the authority itself, being beyond the constitution, could be granted by no constitutional assembly. The deification of the predecessor thus became itself the ratification of the successor's title. On this hypothesis many circumstances, inexplicable on the theory of the imperial apotheosis being the embodiment of the awe at that huge mass of territories appearing to be permeated throughout by one same spirit, are naturally accounted for. On this hypothesis it is nothing strange, as it would be on the other, that not the living master of the machinery, but the dead lord, was deified; for, as we take it, it was the discovery, the revelation, as it were, to the world of the last emperor's divinity, which made the manifestation of his will as to the succession to that vague, overruling control, which he had himself previously swayed, so potent and invincible. The people might occasionally choose, by a new flight of adulation, to detect in the living emperor the signs of divinity, and, as a consequence, to accept at once his nomination of a successor. But this was not the principle of the new prince's title; his subjects saw they were right only when the perfectness of the last sovereign's judgment was confirmed by his death and ascription among the gods.

In this same habit of deifying the deceased emperor, the Roman people found also an apology for that practical abeyance of their political liberty. No form of their ancient constitution had disappeared; they could veil from their own eyes their shame at the emptiness of these forms, under the pretence that he whose prerogative made them nugatory held an authority derived from one whose right to nominate a superintendent of

the complicated organism of their political system they had themselves expressly acknowledged, in consenting to his apotheosis. When, in the course of time, the most successful captain of the period seized the supremacy as the natural right of the master of the strongest army, without even the show of assuming the government in the interest of national rights, when the people no longer disguised from themselves that an imperial despotism was the normal state of things, and craved a regular and hereditary monarchy as the only refuge from a series of bloody civil wars, then the apotheosis of an emperor became a mere form without a meaning, instead of being, as formerly, a mere form indeed, but one in the very hollowness of which lurked a real and understood significance.

In Mr. Merivale's pages, with the accession of the Flavian dynasty, or, at all events, with the fall of Domitian (for he often invests the latter prince with a certain sacred and mysterious character), we seem to emerge into an entirely different era. The establishment of the monarchy,' we are told, ‘had kindled ' the imagination of the Romans. Hard, selfish, prosaic, as they 'naturally were, they had been roused to enthusiasm by the greatness of Julius, the fortune of Augustus, the wild mag'nificence of Caius, the grace and accomplishments of Nero. In 'their fond admiration of the glorious objects thus presented to 'them, they had invested the men themselves with the attributes ' of divinity, their government with a halo of immortality. They 'were persuaded that the empire itself, under the rule of the 'celestial dynasty, was an effluence from the divine regimen ' or the world, and they consented to regard the freaks of caprice ' and madness from which, as from the disturbances or the 'elements, they occasionally suffered as mysterious, but ne'cessary evils.' Regarded by this light, the imperial dignity of Nerva, the conqueror-spirit of Trajan, Hadrian's accomplishments, and the heroic magnanimity of the first two Antonines, secured them no veneration from their subjects. But why imagine a fond admiration of Caligula and Nero, which is denied to have been evoked by the generosity of Titus, 'delicia humani generis,' the stately old age of Nerva, 'qui res olim dissociabiles miscuerit, principatum et libertatem? believe that much of the difference between the mystery enveloping the authority of the Claudian line, and the light of common day' of the subsequent series, is entirely imaginary. What residuum of real difference there is must be referred, not to the diminished, but to the more defined and substantial prerogative of the later emperors. It was not so much the fact of the monarchy in the earlier period being nearer its origin which had kindled the imagination of the Romans'-it was not

We

the personal grandeur or frantic folly of the first rulers'glorious objects,' forsooth!-which had roused their fond admiration,' and made them invest the men themselves with the 'attributes of divinity-their government with a halo of immor'tality.' On the contrary, at that time, they still looked to the revivification of the republic as a possibility, and on this system of government as a mere temporary accident. It was because they viewed it as an unnatural thing-a shadow, which, however, might at any time become a substance-a power, which they were under no natural obligation to obey, but which tyrannically might avenge itself in some irregular way for an offence against it-that it has been handed down to the modern world as no glorious providence, but a horrible mystery, in what Mr. Merivale so well describes as the long organ-peals of the sounding declamation' of Tacitus.

We believe that the restrained rage, or calculated despair, underlying every sentence of that great historical satirist is really accountable, in a great measure, for the distinction embodied in Mr. Merivale's pages between præ-Flavian and postFlavian periods. It is allowed that Tacitus did indeed write, under influences hostile to truth and sobriety, as a theorist, as one who would willingly mould truth to his own prejudices; who saw, in the fall of the oligarchy, the source of the future national calamity; whose works bear the impress of a rooted disregard for the rights and feelings of human nature apart 'from his own class and order;' as, lastly, a man whose wrath against a political foe overflowed at last in bitterness towards the age with which he has identified him, and the tendency of whose writings it is to confirm their readers in a cynical contempt for mankind and a gloomy despair of virtue.' But Mr. Merivale does not, we confess, appear to us to have taken sufficient advantage of his own insight into the suspicious origin of the great Roman historian's vehemence against the earlier princes. We think he might have been less ready, in his former volumes, on the authority of authors all members or clients of the fallen aristocracy, and capable, on his own showing, of ignoring the truth from the force of prejudices, to describe Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero, as monsters of utter profligacy and cruelty. He might, too, have cast back a glance on the banquets of Lucullus and his contemporaries of the republic, and hesitated to trust so far to the anecdotes of chroniclers, who, without ever looking back, traced, as of course, every vice of the age to the imperial policy, as to ascribe, in his present volume, to one same origin the mad luxury of the noblesse and the imperial discountenance of the then fashionable habit of suicide, that is, tracing both back to the emperor's fear that the