The first group of Roman Emperors was the Julio-Claudian family of emperors (30 B.C.-A.D. 68). They consisted of Augustus and men related to him. As we saw, Augustus’s system was accepted partly because he disguised his enormous power. He kept all the old Republican political institutions and theoretically shared decisions with them. He used persuasion, influence, and patronage, instead of force, to get senators and other government leaders to support him. The wiser Julio-Claudians all relied on these methods, but two rulers of the family employed force openly to make others obey them. They were Caligula (37-41) and Nero (54-68).

Both men were very unstable, and they became bloodthirsty tyrants. They carried out purges of senators and other political leaders. This proved to be an extremely dangerous course of action. Members of the Roman upper class would support a ruler only as long as they felt safe from his power. They would not remain loyal indefinitely to a man who used his power against them. There was no legal way to remove an unpopular emperor, but he could die. And that’s what happened to Caligula and Nero. Both were assassinated. When Caligula was assassinated, his uncle was made emperor by the Praetorian Guards. In the case of Nero, several of his legates eventually revolted against him in 68. His death brought the Julio-Claudian family of emperors to an end.

With Nero removed, it was clear that one of his legates would have to be the new emperor. But several generals wanted the job, and they fought a civil war  for nearly a year with each other over the throne. In that time, four different men were able to seize control of the government at one point or another. Thus, the year 69 A.D. is called the Year of the Four Emperors. Finally, one general did succeed in ending the civil war and making himself the unchallenged emperor again. The new ruler’s name was Vespasian (69-79).

The second group of emperors consisted of Vespasian and his relations. They were the family of the Flavians (69-96). They were generally intelligent men, and at first, they were careful not to exercise their power unwisely or to excess. This changed with the last Flavian ruler, Domitian (81-96). Gradually, over the course of his reign, he became more and more arbitrary and ruthless. As he grew more despotic, he also became more unpopular. Finally, he too was assassinated, ending the Flavian family.

The Roman Empire reached its height ca. 119 A.D.

Fortunately, this time civil war was averted, and the last group of rulers came to power peacefully. They are usually called the “Good” Emperors (96-180). They do not have a family name because they were not related to each other at all. None of the Good Emperors had any close relations to pass the throne to, so before each of them died, he picked a popular general to adopt as his successor. These emperors were very capable men who ruled wisely and effectively. Under them, the Empire enjoyed the greatest prosperity in its history.

I hope that two general points will be clear from this sketch. First, Romans would not tolerate a bad ruler forever. Second, the only way to get rid of a tyrant was through violence of some kind. Now I want to consider some larger historical trends that took place roughly during the period that I have just sketched.

The greatest contribution of the Roman Empire to European history was the spreading of civilization to many lands in Europe which previously had no advanced institutions or culture. Let me start with that. Prior to the Empire, civilization in Europe was largely confined to numerous small city-states that were scattered around the coast of the Mediterranean. Except in Italy and Greece, areas further inland were inhabited by various uncivilized barbarian peoples. In her wars with Carthage and the Greeks, Rome brought all the city-states under her control, and in the Late Republic, her armies began to conquer barbarian tribes in the interior of Europe as well. You may recall that when Julius Caesar was proconsul in Gaul, he took over all the tribes there as far as the Rhine River. Augustus largely completed Roman expansion by conquering the barbarians who lived south of the Danube River in Eastern Europe.

The Rhine and Danube gave the Empire a visible natural line running almost continuously all across Europe to mark the imperial border clearly in the north. That was a very useful arrangement. Once the line was reached, later emperors rarely expanded beyond it. Ironically, under the Empire, imperial expansion largely stopped. The main exception to that policy was Britain. The emperor Claudius (41-51) did invade it during his reign.

As they were conquered, the barbarians began to acquire a more advanced, civilized Roman way of life. To begin with, they started to organize and live in what Romans called civitates, city-states. In the Empire, city-states still existed and functioned as they had in earlier times. Each had its own magistrates, council, and assembly to govern its territory as it did before the Roman takeover. The only change was that the cities were no longer independent. They were supervised by the imperial governor of their province. The barbarians previously had no cities or advanced institutions, but they took over this form of organization very quickly. Gaul had come to be divided into 64 civitates by the death of Augustus.

With more advanced political organization came other improvements. The cities themselves grew rapidly, and they began to create more developed economies based partly on industry and trade. The city governments also established schools to provide their citizens with a Roman education. Within two centuries, all the subjects of the Empire abandoned their earlier customs and came to dress, act, and talk like Romans. Latin replaced older languages almost everywhere. The only exception was the Greek lands of the eastern Mediterranean. Greeks did keep their own language and culture. But they were so similar to the Romans anyway that this did not make much difference.

The spread of civilization was linked to the second major trend of the Early Empire. This trend was the assimilation of imperial subjects into the Roman political system. I need to explain what I mean.

At the start of the Empire, all Italians were Roman citizens, but there were few citizens outside of the Empire. And, of course, citizens held all the positions in imperial government. Inhabitants of the provinces, lands outside Italy, were all subjects of Rome. They served in the governments of their own city-states, but they could not hold Roman offices like senator, proconsul, or legate. During the early Empire, more and more subjects were brought into the Roman political system.

Subjects did provide military units for the Roman army. The units were called auxilia (helpers). Subjects who served in the auxilia were made Roman citizens when they were discharged from the army. Emperors also gave citizenship to entire civitates, most commonly to those that had fully adopted Roman civilization. The extension of citizenship was finally completed in 212 by an imperial decree called the Antonine Constitution. It granted citizenship to all free persons in the Empire who did not have it already.

As citizenship spread to new areas, upper-class families from those areas began to enter Roman government. The makeup of the Senate provides a handy illustration of this. By the reign of Vespasian in the 70s, 17 percent of Roman senators came from the provinces. By 180, this figure had grown to 44 percent, almost half. Most remarkably, even the office of emperor itself reflects this trend. The Julio-Claudian family belonged to the traditional Roman nobility of the Republic. Later rulers did not. The Flavians were an Italian family that received citizenship only in the Late Republic. Four of the five Good Emperors were from provinces – three were from Spain and one from Gaul. So, as time passed, all of the peoples of the Empire not only came to act like Romans, but they essentially became Romans.

The last major trend in the Early Empire was a steady growth in the power of the emperor. Of course, Augustus had extensive power. But outside the army, he exercised most of his power indirectly by influencing the Senate and other institutions held over from the Republic. In the provinces, he ruled through governors, and even they had limited authority in civil matters. The local civitates handled most of the day-to-day business of the government for the Empire.

Yet, over time, later emperors took a more direct role in ruling. Some simply did not want to work with the Senate and Republican officials like proconsuls, but that is not the whole story. Local governments in the Empire often sought financial aid or other favors from the central, imperial government in Rome. Instead of going through the governor and the Senate, they usually asked the emperor directly for what they wanted since he had the power and resources grant their requests personally.

To handle such requests, the emperors had to create more and more new officials to help them to deal with local problems and also, inevitably, to exercise greater control over local administration. At Rome, they hired secretaries and clerks to receive and send out letters and to assist in keeping records. By 100, they had begun to dispatch officials to the provinces to take over duties previously discharged by governors or city-states. The new officials differed from older Republican officials like proconsuls in that the emperor appointed them himself. They were what we would call civil servants, or maybe bureaucrats. Thus, the Empire came to have a large bureaucracy controlled by the ruler, which took over the powers of the older political institutions.