Roman consul

• 1. Introduction

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  Roman consuls stood at the apex of the Republic for nearly five centuries, from around 509 BC to 27 BC. Every year, without exception, the Roman people elected two of them to share the highest executive power in the known world. They commanded armies, presided over the Senate, negotiated with foreign ambassadors, and gave their names to the calendar year itself. What made the consulship extraordinary was not the concentration of power it represented, but the deliberate, structural limits built into it. Two men. One year. And each one able to cancel the other out entirely. How did such a carefully divided office hold together the Roman Republic for so long, and what happened when it finally ceased to matter?

• 2. Origins of the Office

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  After the Romans expelled their last king, Tarquin Superbus, they faced a problem. Kingship had given Rome order, but it had also made tyranny possible. The solution was to split the king's authority into two offices, with short terms and built-in veto power. Originally, the men who held this authority were not called consuls at all. They were called praetors, a word meaning leaders, reflecting their primary role as military commanders. The title consul only became standard by at least 300 BC.

  Ancient writers traced the word consul to the Latin consulere, meaning to take counsel. Modern scholarship leans toward a different etymology, rooted in the Latin con- and sal-, suggesting the idea of getting together, or perhaps con- and sedl-, meaning to sit down together with. In Greek, the office was first rendered as strategos hypatos, meaning the supreme general, and later simply hypatos.

  The consulship was not always continuous. During the 5th century BC, the office was periodically replaced by a board of consular tribunes, elected when military needs grew too large for just two leaders. That arrangement lasted until 367 BC, when the consulship was permanently restored.

  For much of the Republic's early history, only patricians could hold the consulship. That changed in 367 BC with the Licinio-Sextian rogations, which required that at least one of the two consuls each year be plebeian. The first plebeian consul was Lucius Sextius, elected the year after the law passed. Yet the historical record complicates the traditional story. Modern historians have noted that roughly thirty percent of consuls listed before Sextius bore plebeian names, not patrician ones. It is possible that the chronology was distorted, or that one of Rome's earliest consuls, Lucius Junius Brutus, was himself from a plebeian family.

• 3. Power and Its Limits

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  Twelve lictors accompanied every consul in every public appearance. Each lictor carried a fasces, a bundle of rods enclosing an axe, the ancient symbol of military command. Inside the city boundary known as the pomerium, the lictors removed the axes. That small ritual said everything about how the Republic understood itself: even at the summit of power, a citizen could not be executed without a trial.

  Beyond the city walls, the rules changed. On campaign, a consul could impose any punishment he saw fit on soldiers, officers, citizens, or allies alike. He commanded armies typically two legions strong, with about 20,000 men in a standard consular force. All soldiers swore their oath of allegiance personally to the consuls. If a consul won an overwhelming victory, his troops could hail him as imperator, and he could request the honor of a triumph through Rome's streets.

  Inside the city, the consuls held wide civil authority as well. They presided over the Senate, introduced foreign ambassadors, conducted elections, and put legislation to the vote. In great emergencies, they could act on their own authority. They also served as the primary diplomats of the Roman state, the first point of contact before any foreign delegation reached the Senate.

  Yet the office was designed around limits as much as around powers. Between 443 BC and 366 BC, the consuls lost two of their largest functions. The census was detached in 443 BC and given to the new office of censor. Judicial authority was transferred to the praetors in 366 BC. Consuls thereafter served as judges only in extraordinary criminal cases, and only when the Senate called upon them. After leaving office, former consuls could also be prosecuted for how they had used their power. Scipio Africanus, one of Rome's most celebrated generals, faced exactly such an accounting when Cato brought charges against him in 205 BC.

• 4. The Patrician Monopoly and the Cursus Honorum

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  Cicero's election to the consulship in 63 BC was counted a genuine rarity. Up to that point, only about fifteen novi homines, men without consular ancestry, had ever won the office. The consulship remained tightly held by a small circle of families across the centuries, even after plebeians formally gained access to it.

  By the late Republic, the consulship had become the expected endpoint of the cursus honorum, the formal ladder of public offices that ambitious Romans climbed in sequence. When Lucius Cornelius Sulla regulated the cursus honorum by law, he set the minimum age for the consulship at 43 or 42 years old. A man who reached the consulship had already served in lower offices, built a military reputation, and spent years cultivating political allies.

  There was a distinction within the consulship itself. A consul ordinarius was elected at the start of the year and gave his name to that year in Roman dating. A consul suffectus, or suffect consul, was elected to fill a vacancy caused by the death or removal of an ordinary consul. The ordinary consulship carried more prestige, simply because Roman years were named after ordinary consuls. If a sitting consul died in battle, which happened often enough that the sources remark on it, the comitia centuriata elected a suffect consul to complete the term.

  A period of ten years was normally expected between consulships. After leaving the office, former consuls were assigned by lot to govern a province, transferring their consular imperium into proconsular imperium. As proconsuls, their authority was limited to a single province; exercising it anywhere else was illegal, and no proconsul could leave his province before his successor arrived.

• 5. Consuls Under the Emperors

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  Augustus, the first Roman emperor, was consul thirteen times. His successor Domitian held the office seventeen times. Theodosius II accumulated eighteen consulships. These numbers alone reveal how fundamentally the office had changed after 27 BC.

  Under the Principate, consuls were still formally elected by the centuriate assembly, but in practice they were nominated by the emperor. Augustus also expanded the suffect consulship to create a larger pool of former consuls, because only men who had held the office could become consular legates, the governors of the provinces of Africa and Asia, or the urban prefect of Rome. The ordinary consulship under the early Empire still carried genuine prestige. It was one of the few offices that a private individual could share with the emperor. Patricians typically held it in their early thirties; others in their early forties.

  Emperors treated the minimum-age requirements as flexible. Caligula once threatened to appoint his horse Incitatus to the consulship, a remark the source calls a probable joke aimed at belittling the Senate's authority. Children and teenagers received the office as well: the sources name Varronianus, Valentinianus Galates, Olybrius Junior, and the children of various emperors among those appointed at very young ages.

  Over time the suffect consulship was granted at earlier and earlier ages. By the 4th century, men in their early twenties, and sometimes younger, held it without the significant political careers that had once been considered essential. By the final decades of the 3rd century, holding an ordinary consulate was occasionally omitted from a man's career inscriptions altogether, and by the early 4th century, suffect consulships were rarely recorded at all. The breakaway Gallic Empire, which existed from 260 to 274, maintained its own pairs of consuls as a gesture toward Roman legitimacy, though the list of those consuls survives only in fragments drawn from inscriptions and coins.

  One reform of Constantine I, who reigned from 306 to 337, assigned one consul to Rome and one to Constantinople. When Theodosius I died in 395 and the Empire split definitively, each half-empire gained the right to appoint one of the consuls. In the Western Empire, powerful generals such as Stilicho sometimes prevented Eastern consuls from being recognized at all.

• 6. The Last Consuls

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  In the 6th century, Justinian I allowed the consulship to quietly expire. The western consulship lapsed in 534, its final holder being Decius Paulinus. The eastern consulship ended in 541 with Anicius Faustus Albinus Basilius. Consular dating itself had already been abolished four years earlier, in 537, when Justinian replaced it with the emperor's regnal year and the indiction cycle.

  In the eastern court, the consulship survived in a different form. From the reign of Justin II, who ruled from 565 to 578, appointment to the consulship became part of the formal ceremony of proclaiming a new emperor. The last known instance of this practice dates to 632, when the future Constans II was named consul. In the late 9th century, Emperor Leo the Wise, who reigned from 886 to 912, formally abolished the office in Novel 94 of his Basilika. By that point, the Greek terms for consul and ex-consul, hypatos and apo hypaton, had drifted far from their original meaning and had become relatively minor honorary titles.

  In the west, the Papacy occasionally bestowed the rank of consul as an honorary distinction. In 719, Pope Gregory II offered the title of Roman consul to Charles Martel, who refused it. Around 853, Alfred the Great, then a child of four or five years old, was made a Roman consul by the Pope, a gesture with no political force behind it but considerable symbolic weight.

• 7. The Year Named After You

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  Romans did not number their years the way later Europeans would. They named each year after the two ordinary consuls who took office at its start. The year 59 BC was called the consulship of Caesar and Bibulus, after Gaius Julius Caesar and Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus. Caesar dominated that year so completely that contemporaries mockingly called it the consulship of Julius and Caesar, as if one man had held both seats.

  The date on which consuls took office shifted across the centuries. Between 222 BC and 153 BC, they assumed office on the 15th of March. The Second Celtiberian War forced a change, and from 153 BC onward the consuls entered office on the 1st of January, a date that has structured the Western calendar ever since.

  In formal Latin documents, the consular dating formula appeared as an ablative absolute construction. Caesar's own account of the Gallic wars, De Bello Gallico, uses the formula, recording dates as, for example, with Marcus Messalla and Marcus Pupius Piso being the consuls. The Latin word consul was also abbreviated in inscriptions, and the disappearance of the letter N reflected the classical pronunciation, /konːsul/, in which the N before a fricative was either dropped or simply nasalized the preceding vowel. In antiquity the word was sometimes spelled cosol. Subsequent consulships held by the same man were marked with a trailing Roman numeral, a small epigraphic detail that survives on stone monuments across the former Roman world.