historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

Chapter 7. The mistress of life
Augustus’s measurements assured that power now firmly rested in the hands
of the ‘princeps’.
With the succession of Tiberius the fall of the Republic saw its completion.
Contrary to Tiberius’s assertion in the beginning of his reign ‘that in a free
state minds and tongues should be free’, 161 this freedom rapidly disappeared
as Tiberius’s behaviour became more and more tyrannical, only to end in
a reign of terror and fear. With this last hallmark of the Republic gone, the
Roman Republic was no more. 162
As stated before, the sixteen dissertations on ‘the regal rule of the Romans’
are not a formal work of history. But there is a dominant feature that holds
these dissertations together, and that feature is the principle of causation. Boxhorn
presents us a picture of Roman history, in which almost every event is
somehow connected with, or the result of, events that happened before. 163 So,
although every dissertation is a separate unit, collectively they form a more
or less coherent narrative. 164 Only the 250 years gap between the institution
of the censors in the thirteenth dissertation and the fall of the Republic in the
fourteenth disseration constitutes a clear breach.
ut, si quidem patriam amaret, pro qua tanta jam gesserat bella & feliciter confecerat, veterem Reipublicae
formam mutaret, solusque ipse amplissimum imperium capesseret; ea potissimum usus ratione, quod
imperium Senatui & populo reddere jam aut permittere nihil esset aliud quam impotes mentis, datis jam
furoris utriusque plurimis documentis, gladio donare.’ Here Boxhorn follows Cassius Dio. See Cassius
Dio, The Roman History: The Reign of Augustus. Translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert. With an Introduction by
John Carter (Penguin Books; Harmondsworth, 1987), LII.14, pp. 98-99. ‘“… And so, if you care at all for
your country, for whose sake you have fought so many wars and would gladly lay down your very existence,
reform our life and order our affairs in the direction of greater moderation. The question concerns
the privilege of doing and saying exactly what one pleases. Now if you examine the matter carefully,
this freedom, if it is exercised by men of sound judgement, becomes a source of great benefit for all, but,
if exercised by the misguided, leads to disaster. Accordingly, the man who grants such a lincence to the
latter is in effect putting a sword into the hands of a child or a madman; if he offers it to the wise, he is not
only preserving their other privileges, but saving the incapable even in spite of themselves.”’
161 Ibidem, XVI.2, p. 344. ‘In civitate libera linguam mentemque liberas esse debere.’ This is a quotation
from Suetonius’s Tiberius. Suetonius, Opera, Vol. 1: De vita Caesarvm libri VIII. Recensvit Maximilianvs
Ihm (Teubner; Leipzig, 1908), Tiberivs, 28, p. 127. ‘… ac patiens subinde iactabat in ciuitate
libera linguam mentemque liberas esse debere …’ English translation quoted from Suetonius, Lives of
the Caesars. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Catharine Edwards (Oxford University Press;
Oxford, 1 st ed. 2000, 2008), Tiberius, 28, p. 113.
162 In the Metamorphosis Anglorum, p. 466, Boxhorn depicts the instalment of the three-men committee
in the new English Commonwealth ‘that shall have power to Imprison and Sequester all such
as shall actually adhere to any that shall raise or endeavour to raise Tumults and Insurrections; or shall
speak or publish anything reproachful to the Parliament or their proceedings’ as the end of England’s
freedom: ‘Vale Anglica Libertas.’ Walker, The History of Independency, pp. 90-91. See also chapter 5.
163 The dispostion of Tarquinius Superbus, for example, can only be fully understood against the
background of the first six dissertations, in which we see Rome being transformed from a patrimonial
principate into a legal principate.
164 A ‘grand design’, however, seems to be missing. The changes in Rome’s form of government are
not only the results of the conflict between the patricians and the plebs, although this conflict plays a
dominant part, which is not so surprising, since Boxhorn relies so heavily on Livy for the story told in the
first thirteen dissertations. Reactions to rulers who turn into tyrants and the demands that Rome’s foreign
wars made on its inhabitants and constitution also play an important role. These are more ad hoc causes.
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