Consular tribune

Roman sources used a variety of names to refer to consular tribunes. Livy called them tribuni militum (tribunes of the soldiers) or tribuni militares (military tribunes) consulari potestate (with consular power), but also as tribunes pro consulibus or pro consule, as well as simply tribuni consulares (consular tribunes). The emperor Claudius and Aulus Gellius called them tribunes consulari imperio (with consular imperium).^[1]

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Livy

Livy

Titus Livius, known in English as Livy, was a Roman historian. He wrote a monumental history of Rome and the Roman people, titled Ab Urbe Condita, ''From the Founding of the City'', covering the period from the earliest legends of Rome before the traditional founding in 753 BC through the reign of Augustus in Livy's own lifetime. He was on familiar terms with members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and a friend of Augustus, whose young grandnephew, the future emperor Claudius, he exhorted to take up the writing of history.

Claudius

Claudius

Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was the fourth Roman emperor, ruling from AD 41 to 54. A member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, Claudius was born to Drusus and Antonia Minor at Lugdunum in Roman Gaul, where his father was stationed as a military legate. He was the first Roman emperor to be born outside Italy. Nonetheless, Claudius was an Italian of Sabine origins.

Aulus Gellius

Aulus Gellius

Aulus Gellius was a Roman author and grammarian, who was probably born and certainly brought up in Rome. He was educated in Athens, after which he returned to Rome. He is famous for his Attic Nights, a commonplace book, or compilation of notes on grammar, philosophy, history, antiquarianism, and other subjects, preserving fragments of the works of many authors who might otherwise be unknown today.

Imperium

Imperium

In ancient Rome, imperium was a form of authority held by a citizen to control a military or governmental entity. It is distinct from auctoritas and potestas, different and generally inferior types of power in the Roman Republic and Empire. One's imperium could be over a specific military unit, or it could be over a province or territory. Individuals given such power were referred to as curule magistrates or promagistrates. These included the curule aedile, the praetor, the consul, the magister equitum, and the dictator. In a general sense, imperium was the scope of someone's power, and could include anything, such as public office, commerce, political influence, or wealth.

Under Roman tradition, starting in 444 BC,^[2] consular tribunes were elected in place of consuls as chief magistrates in fifty-one elections between 444 and 367 BC (seventy per cent of the time) and even more commonly between 408 and 367 BC.^[3] Livy offered two explanations: that increased demands for military leadership meant more magistrates were necessary or that it was a political tactic related to the Conflict of the Orders in which patricians prevented plebeians from holding the consulship by substituting this tribunate.^[4][5]

Livy states then that the choice whether a collegium of consular tribunes or consuls were to be elected for a given year was made by a decree of the Senate, producing an annual dispute as to which set of magistrates ought to be elected.^[6] The number of consular tribunes varied between three and six, and because they were considered colleagues of the two censors, there is sometimes mention of the "eight tribunes".^[7]

Originally patrician office holders, they were referred to as military tribunes and were responsible for leading the armies into battle. It was only much later that they were given the anachronistic addition of "with consular power", in an attempt to distinguish them from the military tribunes who were the legionary officers of the middle and late Republic.^[8]

The tribunes, like their consular predecessors, exercised consular potestas,^[9] indicating they must have been elected by the comitia centuriata, and that the current needs of the state could not be served by the previous consular system. From their initial number of three, the consular tribunes were increased to four for the first time in 426 BC in response to the military situation which saw the Roman state capture and annex Fidenae.^[10]

Then in 405 BC, the number of consular tribunes was increased to six for the first time; following that, various sources report show normal election – when tribunes were elected rather than consuls – of six consular tribunes except in 380 and 376 when nine and four were elected, respectively.^[11] The increase was due to the need for the consular tribunes to not only handle the military affairs of Rome, but also the administrative needs of the city as well.^[12] The Roman state was led by six consular tribunes for almost every year down to the dissolution of the office and the reintroduction of the consulship and the creation of the praetorship with the Sextian-Licinian Rogations.^[13]

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Conflict of the Orders

Conflict of the Orders

The Conflict of the Orders, sometimes referred to as the Struggle of the Orders, was a political struggle between the plebeians (commoners) and patricians (aristocrats) of the ancient Roman Republic lasting from 500 BC to 287 BC in which the plebeians sought political equality with the patricians. It played a major role in the development of the Constitution of the Roman Republic. Shortly after the founding of the Republic, this conflict led to a secession from Rome by Plebeians to the Sacred Mount at a time of war. The result of this first secession was the creation of the office of plebeian tribune, and with it the first acquisition of real power by the plebeians.

Collegium (ancient Rome)

Collegium (ancient Rome)

A collegium, or college, was any association in ancient Rome that acted as a legal entity. Following the passage of the Lex Julia during the reign of Julius Caesar as Consul and Dictator of the Roman Republic, and their reaffirmation during the reign of Caesar Augustus as Princeps senatus and Imperator of the Roman Army, collegia required the approval of the Roman Senate or the Emperor in order to be authorized as legal bodies. Such associations could be civil or religious. The word collegium literally means "society", from collega (‘colleague’). They functioned as social clubs or religious collectives whose members worked towards their shared interests. These shared interests encompassed a wide range of the various aspects of urban life; including political interests, cult practices, professions, trade, and civic services. The social connections fostered by collegia contributed to their influence on politics and the economy; acting as lobbying groups and representative groups for traders and merchants. Some collegia were linked to participating in political violence and social unrest, which resulted in the suppression of social associations by the Roman government.

Military tribune

Military tribune

A military tribune was an officer of the Roman army who ranked below the legate and above the centurion. Young men of Equestrian rank often served as military tribune as a stepping stone to the Senate. The tribunus militum should not be confused with the elected political office of tribune of the people (tribunus plebis) nor with that of tribunus militum consulari potestate.

Fidenae

Fidenae

Fidenae was an ancient town of Latium, situated about 8 km north of Rome on the Via Salaria, which ran between Rome and the Tiber. Its inhabitants were known as Fidenates. As the Tiber was the border between Etruria and Latium, the left-bank settlement of Fidenae represented an extension of Etruscan presence into Latium. The site of the arx of the ancient town was probably on the hill on which lies the contemporary Villa Spada, though no traces of early buildings or defences are to be seen; pre-Roman tombs are in the cliffs to the north. The later village lay at the foot of the hill on the eastern edge of the high-road, and its curia, with a dedicatory inscription to Marcus Aurelius by the Senatus Fidenatium, was excavated in 1889. Remains of other buildings may also be seen.

The traditional account of the early Republic has come under substantial attack that "it was a literary creation of the late Republic" with little value for reconstructing the actual history of the early republic.^[14] As to the consular tribunes specifically, the traditional account in Livy may be reflection of his reliance on Licinius Macer, a previous annalist "fond of finding political motives where none had existed in the earlier historical tradition".^[6] Moreover, the early history of Roman military command may reflect annalists "massaging their evidence to make it fit their preconceptions about the structure of Rome's early government",^[15][16] reflecting Romans' common anachronistic and unhistorical treatment of the past.^[17]

The specific chronology in Livy also is questioned: "according to a tradition found in Eutropius, the first consular tribunes did not hold office until as late as 389 [BC]".^[1] Scholars also question whether tradition has confused cases where two consular tribunes were elected (due to fluctuation in numbers) with election of "consuls".^[18] All in all, it appears "suspiciously like these [traditional] explanations are simply inferences made from the most obvious differences between the two magistracies [the consular tribunate and the consulship]".^[19]

Military need

Scholars also have rejected the emergence of the consular tribunate from the Conflict of the Orders: "Long ago [i.e., 1924], Meyer rejected Livy's assertion that the consular tribunate was a product of the Conflict of the Orders and instead suggested that increasing competition among patrician families drove up the annual number of commanders".^[20] The explanation that the consular tribunate was created to provide plebeians with access to the highest magistracy by a different name also is unconvincing insofar as those plebeians elected are few and late in this tribunate's history.^[19] In fact, after the institution of the consular tribunate, no plebeians appear in the fasti for 43 years from 444 to 401 BC.^[21]

Some modern scholars hold that the selection of consular tribunes reflected Rome's expanded military and administrative needs:^[22] that the consular tribunes, elected from the three ancient tribes of the Titienses, Ramnenses, and Luceres, were part of an overall redesign of the military structure of the Roman state to maximise military efficiency, which included the creation of the censorship (responsible for taking the census to identify the numbers of men capable of military duty) and the quaestorship (responsible for the supply of money and goods for the armies).^[13] Their appointment coincides with Roman expansion into central Italy; election of larger boards of consular tribunes may have been driven by military necessity.^[23] This explanation, however, is also somewhat incompatible with the continued appointing of military dictators, election of consular tribunes at time of peace, and their general lack of success in the field.^[19][24]

Private aristocrats

More recently, some authors have argued that consular tribunes may have merely been aristocrats leading their own clients and retainers as private warbands or raiding parties before the Roman state developed its monopoly on military activity.^[25][26] R. Ross Holloway suggests that individual warlords, whose names and deeds (whether real or fictitious) would have been preserved in family traditions and records, were later anachronistically labeled "tribunes" (or consuls) by compilers who lived in a time when public office and military command went hand in hand.^[27]

Fred Drogula argued that consular tribunes and fictitious proconsulships were imputed into the early republic by historians like Livy and Dionysius (or their sources) to rationalise the number of reported officeholders with their preconceived notion of a permanent two-man consulship.^[26] Holloway, who is of the view that early Roman history was built upon synchronisms with Greek history – eg the fall of the monarchy being dated to around the same time as the expulsion of the tyrant Hippias from Athens, c. 509 BC – and that the number of consuls was not enough to match the number of years from the supposed beginning of the Republic, believes that consular tribunes were invented to fill the empty spaces in the records of yearly magistrates.^[28]

The end of the consular tribunate in 367 BC with the Sextian-Licinian rogations also is "undoubtedly" rejected as being caused by the Conflict of the Orders, attributed instead as reflecting increased demands for Roman government^[29] and institutionalisation of military command over a previous system without a fixed number of annual magistrate-commanders.^[30]

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Roman censor

Roman censor

The censor was a magistrate in ancient Rome who was responsible for maintaining the census, supervising public morality, and overseeing certain aspects of the government's finances.

Quaestor

Quaestor

A quaestor was a public official in Ancient Rome. There were various types of quaestors, with the title used to describe greatly different offices at different times.

Roman dictator

Roman dictator

A Roman dictator was an extraordinary magistrate in the Roman Republic endowed with full authority to resolve some specific problem to which he had been assigned. He received the full powers of the state, subordinating the other magistrates, consuls included, for the specific purpose of resolving that issue, and that issue only, and then dispensing with those powers forthwith.

Hippias (tyrant)

Hippias (tyrant)

Hippias was the last tyrant of Athens, ruling from 527 to 510 BC. He was one of a group of tyrants known as the Peisistratids, which was a group of three tyrants in Ancient Greece. Pisistratus first, and then his son, Hippias, followed after him by Hippias' illegitimate son, Hegesistratos. He was deposed when Cleomenes I of Sparta successfully invaded Athens and forced him to flee to Persia.

Conflict of the Orders

Conflict of the Orders

The Conflict of the Orders, sometimes referred to as the Struggle of the Orders, was a political struggle between the plebeians (commoners) and patricians (aristocrats) of the ancient Roman Republic lasting from 500 BC to 287 BC in which the plebeians sought political equality with the patricians. It played a major role in the development of the Constitution of the Roman Republic. Shortly after the founding of the Republic, this conflict led to a secession from Rome by Plebeians to the Sacred Mount at a time of war. The result of this first secession was the creation of the office of plebeian tribune, and with it the first acquisition of real power by the plebeians.