From Tiberius to Vespasian

2. The Reality of Empire
(IV) From Tiberius to Vespasian: AD 14–70

The fifty years after Augustus’s death saw the empire, in terms of the personal rule of the emperor, both consolidated and threatened. Consolidated, in that after a few years of Tiberius’s rule the old republican ways of checks and balances and properly elected magistrates were all too obviously hollow (they may have been fairly hollow under Augustus, but appearances were better kept up), while real power lay precisely with the emperor and anyone with whom he chose to share it. Threatened, in that Tiberius’s successor, Gaius Caligula, was quickly turned by illness from being an apparently sane man on whom high hopes had been placed to someone quite obviously mentally unfitted for the position. Since there was no arranged succession at the time of his assassination in AD 41, the whole structure which Augustus had so carefully built up could have come crashing down. Several senators, in fact, suggested after Caligula’s death that the state might no longer need a princeps.36 This proposal did not go down well with the Roman people as a whole, who successfully supported Caligula’s uncle Claudius (who may well have been involved in the assassins’ plot)...