CONCLUSION
I have tried to demonstrate two ways in which the concept of res publica was extended in the aftermath of the Constitution of Caracalla - the one spatial, res publica Romana being mixed up with the imperium Romanum; the other temporal, with regard to the imprescriptibility of the crime of state.
Both developments provoked resistance, because at stake was not the definition of a political regime, but the very possibility of politics. These two extensions reinforced the idea of the continuity and the limitless character of public power, independently of persons (both for the criminal and for the judge and thus for the princeps), closely bringing together the imperium and the res publica, up to the point of melting the one into the other, and in the process institutionalizing war against the political adversary, rendering it without limits. This allowed the advancing of arguments based on a sort of state interest, of raison d’etat. It is not in the expressions themselves (utilitas publica or utilitas omnium, “public utility” or the “utility” or “advantage of all”) that we can discern the appearance of any state interest, because the vocabulary is yet again of a despairing continuity, but in the relationship to the institution, to space, and to time. Cicero had begun its theoretical construction; the Flavians certainly contributed to it; but it is in the third century that the princes brought this development to fulfillment.The age of Caracalla, which saw the extension of citizenship so much admired in later centuries up to and including our own, was certainly one of the least “political” moments of all, which explains the silence imposed on the res publica in the official discourse of the period. If we understand by “political space” the place where one can impose his power or his truth in making the other stay quiet without killing him, in other words, the place where men speak and which, in Jean-Claude Milner’s terms, excludes the individual death penalty, a phenomenon related to the legal domain, then we see clearly what is happening here. While nearly every emperor declared upon his rise to power that he would not put a senator to death without a trial, and strengthened the penalties for crimes of state, to wit, legal forms of the death penalty, none ceased to enact political executions.
Two discourses; two practices.One infallible criterion of this slippage from one to the other is the relationship of each to the individual body: politics is, so to speak, the place of a dynamic body in common space; the “impolitic” is that of the oppressed, decapitated, trampled body. Nothing expresses this separation better than two images: the one, on the coins of Caracalla in 199, represents Securitas, personified “Security,” in the form of a woman lying halfway down, desirable, serene, almost lascivious, and defenseless. The other, in the text of Herodian, recounts the fate that Septimius Severus imposed on the dead body of Clodius Albinus (SHA, Sev. 11.6-9; trans. Magie): “And then, when Albinus’ body was brought before him, he had him beheaded while still half alive, gave orders that his head should be taken to Rome, and followed up the order with a letter. Albinus was defeated on the eleventh day before the Kalends of March. The rest of Albinus’ body was, by Severus’ order, laid out in front of his own home, and kept therefore a long time exposed to view. Furthermore, Severus himself rode on horseback over the body, and when the horse shied, he admonished it and loosed the reins, that it might trample more boldly.”