The three books and a half of the Annals which contain the principate of Nero are not occupied with the portraiture of a single great personality, nor are they full, like the earlier books, of scathing phrases and poisonous insinuations.
In the first place, the principate was expressed in constitutional forms, or veiled under constitutional fictions; the tyrant stood altogether outside the constitution.
Between the tyrant and the Italian despot there is indeed a real analogy; but between the Roman principate and the Greek tyrannis there are two essential differences.
During the whole twenty years of civil war, in which the Roman republic perished and ultimately the principate was established, the state of war between the Romans and Parthians continued, and not seldom the two struggles became intermixed.
With this great-kingdom organised after the Oriental fashion[23] he thought to combine the principate over the West.
But the standard remained; and the Augustan principate alongside of the rule of the senate was nothing but the intermarriage of the Lagid government with the old urban and federal development.
The senate had recently in Galba's principate passed a resolution authorizing the prosecution of informers.
He was as weak as his brother, though during the principate he showed himself less indolent.
His intention was to write a history of the Principate from Augustus to Trajan.
He was a man of quiet and blameless life, with no ambition for the principate or, indeed, for any sudden distinction, but he could not escape the danger of being considered worthy of it.
All she had got out of her son's principate was sorrow and a good name.
Of Augustus' constitution of the principateand of Rome's 'present happiness' under Trajan, Tacitus did not live to write.
The best known names in the Greek literature of the principate are Plutarch and Lucian.
However, with the advent of the principate the government of the empire aimed to secure the welfare and not the spoliation of its subjects, and hence a new era dawned for the provinces.
But before the close of the principate this loose organization had been completely changed as a result of separatist tendencies among the Christians themselves and the increasing official oppression to which they were exposed.
But, like the literature, the Roman art of the principate in time experienced a loss of creative power.
The conflict between the principate and the Senate resulted, as we have seen, in the exclusion of members of the senatorial order from all offices of state.
The effect of Hadrian's reform is well illustrated by a comparison of the various racial elements in the legions stationed in Egypt under the early principate with those in the same legions in the time of Marcus Aurelius.
And to judge of the actual impotence of philosophy in the century ending with the principate of Claudius, we must rest a moment on this second fact.
And this rescript being repeated to several places, amounted to an assurance that Christians should be left in tranquillity during the principate of Pius.
It is evident that the question of penance and that of rebaptisation touched the whole Christian society, and here accordingly we find the superior Principate of the Roman Church exert itself.
If the Augusta would but make her choice, the people would perhaps be ready to accept her lord now as Consort Imperii, with the ultimate hope that a just and brave man would succeed to the principate in due course.
It was useless to demand that a man be proclaimed to the principate if that man be dead.
Was it due mainly to the evil influence of the principate or to more subtle and deep-rooted causes?
On the other hand, the indirect influence of the principate was beyond doubt evil.
With Nerva and Trajan the happiest epoch of the principate set in.
But there are considerations which have inclined editors to place it later, in the reign of Nero, or in the opening years of the principate of Vespasian.
The principate had been denounced as the fons et origo mali.
We learn from the evidence of the poems themselves that they were written in the principate of a youthful Caesar (i.
He first appears in the unpleasing guise of a 'delator' in the reign of Nero, in the last year of whose principate he filled the position of consul (68 A.
The Decumani of Asia would represent the heart and brain of the mercantile body; they would form a senate and a Principate amongst the Publicani.
It belonged to the essence of the principate not to accentuate outwardly the subject-relation, and especially not against the Greeks.
In Thrace, south of the Haemus, the old principate remained under Roman supremacy.
Since the establishment of the Principate in our Republic many men, even an uncountable horde of men, have incurred Imperial displeasure.
Worse than this, he said, Perennis was plotting the Emperor's assassination and the elevation to the Principate of one of his two sons.
It was inevitable, just as the principate of Augustus and the sultanate of Diocletian were inevitable; but there is nothing specially divine or glorious about any of these phases of human evolution.
At any rate (in his latter years) it must have seemed still possible that the Principate should continue: there was absolutely no one to follow him in it.
There was that clique in high society of men who hated the Principate because it had robbed them of the spoils of power.
Against the first two of these Flavians nothing is to be said except that the rise of their house to the Principatewas by caprice of the soldiery.
On the death of Farnese, Valditaro was created a principate by the emperor and passed to Agostino Landi whose ancestors had once held it.
That decree defines the Principate to be an episcopal power of jurisdiction, which is immediate, over the whole Church.
And we beseech our God and Saviour Jesus Christ to preserve you long and peacefully in this true religion and unity, and veneration of the Apostolic See, whose principate you, as most Christian and pious, preserve in all things.
How, then, is it lawful to incriminate the Principateof the whole Church?
It was only seven years after that event when St. Augustine and the two great African Councils acknowledged his Principatein the amplest terms.
One result of the establishment of the Principate was the consolidation of the public domain.
We know Domitian only from the narrative of men steeped in senatorial traditions and prejudices,(309) and, some of them, intoxicated by the vision of a reconciliation of the principate with the republican ideals.
There were many pretenders to the principate in the reign of Nero, and even some in the reign of Vespasian.
But the ceremony linked the principate with the most venerable traditions of Latium, and with Romulus the first master of the college.
Carefully disguised under ancient forms, the principate of Augustus was really omnipotent, through the possession of the proconsular imperium in the provinces, and the tribunician prerogative at home.
Within a few months, full of joy and hope, which were now at last well founded, they were voting all the customary honours of a new principate to Vespasian.
Professor Pelham has given a luminous account of the Principate in Encycl.
The hereditary succession, which had been grafted on theprincipate of Augustus, had inflicted on the world a succession of fools or monsters.
The influence of Egypt and Persia lent its force to stimulate native and original tendencies to king-worship, and to develop the principate of Augustus into the theocratic despotism of Aurelian and Diocletian.
The when was in the principate of Tiberius Caesar, the how was by the mouth of His only-begotten Son, the where was in Palestine.
