The great majority of senators were new-comers to the political aristocracy. Or looked at from another perspective, and as in modern political elites, most Roman politicians came from families which sent representatives into politics for only one generation. Complementarily, and this for our present purposes is most important, there was a rather large pool of rich land-owners spread across the empire, some of whom occcasionally sent a son as its representative into central politics. These provincial families subsequently profited for generations in their home localities from the hereditary honorary status which their exceptional representative's political success had secured through senatorial membership or consular status, without incurring again the huge expense, risk - or profits - which a political career involved. The Roman aristocracy, broadly understood, had a small semi-hereditaruy core, a fluid and porous outer ring of politically and administratively active representatives (albeit with no explicit representative functions), and a broader pool of potential senators, who politically active, if at all, only at the local level.
By tradition, senatorial aristocrats were the wealthiest men at Rome. Under the Republic (until 31 BCE), they were the generals and governors who benefitted most from the booty and plunder of wars and provincial administration. Under the Principate, emperors controlled senatorial aristocrats (at least according to history books written by senators and their allies) by a whole array of divisive tactics. I list them without being able to assign them relative weights: capricious and terrorizing persecution, imprisonment, murder, strict adherence to the old-fashioned rules of oligarchic power-sharing (short tenure of office, collegiality, gaps between offices, age-related promotion, prosecutions for corruption), cutting the ties between political careers and popular election, the Roman plebs was disfranchised early in the first century CE, supplementing collective senatorial decisions (senatus consulta).
with individual decisions made by the emperor himself (decreta), sometimes in consultation with friends (consilium), denying the most prestigious aristocrats military experience, increasing the status costs of being an aristocrat at court in Rome (many were bankrupted), promoting provincial newcomers to senatorial rank ( which diluted hereditary hold). The cumulative impact of these devices was to weaken the collective and institutional power of the Senate as a consultative, policy-making body. The Court, and its corridors, displaced the Senate as the power-house of the Roman state.
Nevertheless, under cover of repeated attack by successive emperors, the land¬owning aristocracy broadly understood, increased in aggregate prosperity. The monarchy, for all the aristocratic complaints, provided a carapace for aristocratic enrichment.15 The basic reason for this is clear. In Republican times, nearly all senatorial wealth was concentrated in Italian land-holdings and investment in town-housing, supplemented by investment through agents in collective enterprises, such as oveseas trade and tax-collection.
Expert scholars will know the slender evidential base for generalizations of this type; but my reasoning is simple enough. The larger the investment needed (eg in Roman housing or in overseas trade), the more likely was senatorial involvement. After all, a single 400-tonne ship laden with wheat arriving in a port near Rome was worth 1 million HS, the minimum qualifying fortune for a senator; one luxury cargo arriving in Alexandria from India is known from a recently discovered papyrus fragment to have been valued at 7 million HS16 If no senators were involved in such ventures (to say nothing of silver-mines, of which more later), we have to posit the existence of a class of equally wealthy non-senators. These were presumably the ascendants of future senators. And I have already argued for the existence of a wider group of basically land-owning senatorands - families capable of sending a representative into aristocratic politics occasionally. Under the emperors, aristocratic wealth was no longer concentrated in Italy.
Under the emperors, aristocrats increasingly owned estates spread over the whole empire. In the second century they were legally required to own first 1/3, later reduced to 1/4 of their estates in Italy - in itseelf an index of their continuing provincialization.17 Over time, aristocrats collectively owned a significant share not just of Italy, but of the whole Mediterranean basin. In the middle of the first century CE, six senators were reputed (of course it was an exaggeration, but a straw in the right wind) to own all Tunisia. Aristocrats’ aggregate wealth increased, as did the fortunes of individual aristocrats. A few illustrative figures will suffice. Cicero in the middle of the last century BCE wrote that a rich Roman needed an annual income of 100 -600,000 HS; in the late first century, Pliny a middling senator, had an annual income of about 1.1 million HS per year. In the fourth century, middling senators in the city of Rome were said to enjoy incomes of 1333 - 2000 Roman pounds of gold a year, equivalent to 6-9 milllion HS per year. In sum, aristocratic fortunes, on these admittedly vulnerable figures, had doubled or trebled in the first century of the Principate and had again risen more than sixfold between AD 100 and 400.18 Monarchy and the politico-economic integration of the whole empire, however superficial, had enabled aristocrats to become very much richer.
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