This study explores important polarities in senatorial promotion, using a new database of careers.Footnote ¹ What difference did it make to be aristocratic? How much did earlier experience matter in high promotion? Was army command professionalised? Did the career system carry men upward on its own? Did it help to have served overseas? Did senators from the provinces gain social standing through greater activity?

Aristocratic potency for a senator mainly lay in three things: birth, office-holding and wealth. Descent from a senatorial family – preferably old, and best of all patrician – conferred enormous prestige.Footnote ² But high office gave even greater standing, and the upper reaches of the Senate consisted of those who had reached the consulship or praetorship.Footnote ³ However, senators also needed considerable wealth, because without it they could not maintain a grand enough lifestyle, and might even lose their rank.Footnote ⁴ There were sometimes expulsions or resignations from the Senate.Footnote ⁵ Thus, when Pliny wrote to the Emperor to seek senatorial rank for a friend, he emphasised that his original resources of 4 million sesterces had been considerably enhanced by inheritance.Footnote ⁶ That was far above the nominal threshold of 1 or 1.2 million sesterces, but still below the amounts implied by the Emperors’ grants to deserving senators. These suggest a figure of roughly 8 million sesterces.Footnote ⁷ To be adequately provided for, the senator clearly needed much more than the basic amount.Footnote ⁸

Partly because of the high wealth requirements, the need for new senators could not be entirely met from within the Senate. In practice some fortunes ran down over time, and individual families died out or could only be maintained by adoption, while others might not wish for generations of costly office-holding and social display.Footnote ⁹ A single consulship was enough to make a family ‘nobilis’, and the point did not necessarily have to be proved again and again.Footnote ¹⁰ And in the background were acute shortages in the aristocracy at the start of the Principate, amounting to demographic crisis.Footnote ¹¹

Largely because of these problems, the Senate saw its recruitment progressively expanded by the Emperors to draw on local aristocracies all over Italy.Footnote ¹² And in a crucial second phase, the Senate was increasingly supplemented from the aristocracies in the provinces.Footnote ¹³ This no doubt welded the Empire more closely together. But it also represented a powerful net which trawled through concentrations of aristocratic wealth all over the Mediterranean in order to maintain the system as a whole (Chapter 6).Footnote ¹⁴

Since the wealth of Roman society was primarily agrarian, the senator was bound to be a substantial landowner.Footnote ¹⁵ Nevertheless, for much of the time he was confined to Rome and Latium by the obligations of his rank.Footnote ¹⁶ His estates were typically distant, either elsewhere in Italy, or in provinces overseas. The provinces that could be visited without special permission were Sicily and later Narbonensis.Footnote ¹⁷ But that still left most of the Empire effectively out of bounds. However, efforts to make candidates for office buy land in Italy showed that the Senate’s centre of gravity was shifting, and they began quite early.Footnote ¹⁸ The senatorial recess in September and October was convenient for retreats to pleasure spots such as Tibur or the coastal resorts in Campania. Ammianus’s picture of a great household on the move, with the different grades of servant drawn up by rank and marching in line like an army battalion, may reflect the seasonal migration from Rome. The weavers are close to the master in his carriage; they are followed by the cooks, then by ordinary slaves and their friends, with eunuchs young and old bringing up the rear.Footnote ¹⁹ But it is not clear whether senators went to distant estates during the recess. We know that Pliny, with strong roots in northern Italy and in Umbria, sometimes made personal visits there, but he may have been exceptionally mobile.Footnote ²⁰ The post of curator rei publicae took some career senators to towns in Italy, mainly after Pliny’s time.Footnote ²¹

The social make-up of the Senate can be studied in detail, largely through the vigintivirate, the most junior post held by senators.Footnote ²² The four colleges of vigintiviri incorporated a definite rank order, but patrician status outdid all college affiliation.Footnote ²³ The gradations amounted to a seven-point hierarchy, with patricians at the top, followed in a clear sequence by plebeian members of the four colleges, then by non-vigintiviri and senators from the militiae.Footnote ²⁴ The rankings provide an effective yardstick for assessing social standing. The final post in the career was equally important, and is likewise coded numerically.Footnote ²⁵ It provides a simple tool for assessing individual performance. The two scoring systems thus reflect social standing and career outcome.

The source material comes from a database of over 550 senatorial careers of the Principate. It includes virtually all holders of the vigintivirate, together with a large proportion of the known careers without a vigintivirate.Footnote ²⁶ All the careers are assigned to broad periods. More than half the evidence is evidently ‘Antonine’, with limited amounts in the first and third centuries.Footnote ²⁷ Only one-third of the careers can be assigned to consular dates, but their chronology is very striking (Figure 7.1).

Senatorial office-holding changed little in its essentials over the three centuries from Augustus to Diocletian. Thus, a host of positions familiar very early on are combined in a career recorded in the 280s, at the very end of our period: triumvir capitalis, sevir, quaestor candidatus, praetor candidatus, legatus provinciae Africae, consul, curator alvei Tiberis, proconsul Africae, praefectus urbi and salius Palatinus.Footnote ²⁸ Moreover, the few definite changes in the career system during the Principate came too late to figure significantly in the present material.Footnote ²⁹ Although the sample comes from random survivals, representation of several core offices is relatively consistent.Footnote ³⁰ This suggests a common survival factor, which makes it easier to extrapolate features of the senatorial career, as well as highlighting some anomalies in the surviving record.Footnote ³¹

Access to senatorial office depended overwhelmingly on the Emperor. Seneca, in a satirical illustration of the man who can never be satisfied, makes the Emperor the source of preferment at every turn:

Pliny too describes high office as being bestowed by the Emperor. He also speaks of praetorships, priesthoods and consulships being conferred by mighty freedmen under Trajan’s aberrant predecessors.Footnote ³³

Seneca’s words are symptomatic, and show the Emperor wielding absolute power over the upper reaches of the senatorial career. He was also responsible for naming vigintiviri and quaestors.Footnote ³⁴ In posts below the consulship he evidently put forward certain men as his own candidati, whose election was thus assured.Footnote ³⁵ But elections with an uncertain outcome show that the Emperor did not decide every name (see Section 3.1.1).

One of the most important issues in studying senatorial careers is whether advancement mainly depended on merit, or on birth and social connexions.Footnote ³⁶ There has been some readiness to interpret Roman careers as though they belonged to a modern meritocracy, rather than an ancien régime system where nobility effortlessly rises to the top.Footnote ³⁷ But the present analysis suggests that respect for aristocracy was often powerful and sometimes dominant.Footnote ³⁸ Nevertheless, the Senate also included strata whose members were especially active.Footnote ³⁹ And lack of aristocratic roots did not prevent provincials from contributing more than their share.Footnote ⁴⁰