Praetorian Guard Under the Julio-Claudians QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES? The Praetori

This danger became most dramatically manifest toward the end of the second century, after the death (by assassination, not at the hands of the Praetorians) of Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius. In the wake of Commodus' ill-rule and death, the Senate chose a distinguished elder member, Pertinax, as Emperor. Within three months he had been overthrown and killed by the Praetorian Guard. At that point the Guard -- accustomed by tradition to ample gifts on the accession of a new emperor -- took this principle to its logical limit and put the throne up for auction to the highest bidder (Gibbon, pp. 89-90).

This spectacle sealed the enduring popular reputation of the Praetorian Guard, but it -- and indeed the whole career of th

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l round, Octavian against Antony, the Republican political questions had faded to insignificance; it was simply a matter of which Roman general would emerge to dominate the Roman world. The Augustan Solution What in retrospect is seen as victorious Octavian's transformation into the Emperor Augustus was at the time a series of stabilization measures. Octavian-turned-Augustus had no wish to rule by naked military power, surely not least because that would be an invitation to the next ambitious general. He sought instead to accomplish two things: to restore the appearance of constitutional normalcy in Rome (while reserving effective power for himself) and to render the army non-threatening to himself and to Rome. He did the former by nominally restoring the Senate's authority, while accepting a web of interlocking offices that ensured his power. He did the latter by sharply reducing the size of the army, completing its "regularization" (e.g., a standard term of enlistment) -- and by stationing the great bulk of it very far from Rome. The civil wars had indeed been fought the length and breadth of the empire, but the farther a general was from Rome, the less likely he was to be drawn directly into politics, and the greater
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Approximate Pages = 20 (250 words per page)