Roman Senate

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Roman Senate outlasted emperors, invasions, and the fall of the city that created it. Founded according to tradition by Rome's first king, Romulus, with just 100 men, it endured in one form or another for nearly two thousand years. Its Latin name, Senatus, comes from the word senex, meaning elder. The body that began as an advisory council to a king would eventually become the last institutional refuge of the old Roman religion, a diplomatic lifeline for a besieged city, and a ceremonial ghost that haunted medieval Rome long after its real power had vanished. How did an assembly of clan elders become the governing engine of the ancient world's most powerful republic? And how does an institution die so slowly that historians still argue about exactly when it ceased to exist?

• 2. Elders and Kings

  ›

  Before Rome had walls or a name, the prehistoric peoples who settled the Italian peninsula organized themselves into tribal communities governed by boards of aristocratic elders. When these early Roman clans, called gentes, merged into a common community, the patriarchs of the leading families were selected to form a confederated council of elders. That council became the Senate. Each clan was led by a common male patriarch called a pater, and those patres from the most prominent gentes formed the original body. Over time, the patres came to see the need for a single leader and so elected a king, vesting him with sovereign power. When the king died, that power reverted to the patres.

  Romulus is credited with creating the Senate, initially with 100 men. The descendants of those founding members became the patrician class, a bloodline distinction that shaped Roman politics for generations. Rome's fifth king, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, added another 100 senators drawn from lesser leading families, who were called the patres minorum gentium. Then the seventh and final king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, reversed that growth by executing many of the leading senators without replacing them. After the Republic was established in 509 BC, the first and third consuls, Lucius Junius Brutus and Publius Valerius Publicola, recruited new men from the equestrian class, designating them conscripti, and brought the total membership up to 300.

  During the kingdom years, the Senate's most consequential function was choosing new kings. While the people technically held the vote, it was the Senate that selected the candidate in the first place. The Interrex nominated a successor, the Senate gave initial approval, the people ratified, and the Senate gave its final blessing. At least one king, Servius Tullius, bypassed the popular vote entirely and was elected by the Senate alone. That precedent of senatorial supremacy in selecting rulers would echo through Roman history for centuries.

• 3. The Republic's Engine

  ›

  When Lucius Junius Brutus overthrew Lucius Tarquinius Superbus in a coup and founded the Roman Republic, the Senate he inherited was still relatively weak. Executive magistrates held the real power, and those magistrates actually appointed senators for life. It took several generations before the Senate could assert itself as the dominant force in Roman governance. By the middle period of the Republic, however, it had reached what the historical record describes as the apex of its republican power.

  The Republican Senate was composed of 300-500 senators who served for life. Early on, only patricians could sit in its chamber. Plebeians were eventually admitted, though they were denied the most senior offices for longer. Senators wore a toga with a broad purple stripe, maroon shoes, and an iron ring that was later replaced with gold. These were not merely status symbols; they were signals of membership in Rome's most exclusive governing body.

  The Senate did not pass laws in the modern sense. Its formal output was the senatus consultum, which technically constituted advice to a magistrate rather than binding legislation. In practice, though, these decrees were almost always obeyed. When a senatus consultum conflicted with a law passed by a popular assembly, the law prevailed, but the Senate could still use its decrees to interpret existing law. The Senate directed the consuls in military campaigns, managed the treasury, supervised provincial administration, and oversaw the distribution of public funds for construction projects. No one else could authorize payments from the state treasury.

  Since the 3rd century BC, the Senate had held the power to name a dictator in emergencies, though this right technically rested with each consul. After 202 BC, the dictatorship fell out of regular use and was replaced by the senatus consultum ultimum, a decree authorizing consuls to use any means necessary to resolve a crisis. Senate meetings were public, began at dawn, and had to end by nightfall. A magistrate who wanted to convene the body had to issue a formal summons. The sessions were held only in places consecrated to the gods, and every meeting opened with a sacrifice and a reading of divine omens. Senators debated in order of seniority, and because every senator had the right to speak before a vote, a determined group or even a single senator could talk a proposal to death before the sun went down.

• 4. Power Without Authority

  ›

  Augustus, the first emperor, reduced the Senate's membership from 900 to 600, even though in practice only around 100 to 200 members were active at any given time. That reduction signaled the direction of things to come. Under the empire, the Senate retained its formal legal standing from the republican era, but real authority had shifted entirely to the emperor. People still sought senatorial rank, not because it conferred governing power, but because it brought prestige and social standing.

  The emperor Tiberius transferred all electoral powers from the popular assemblies to the Senate, which meant the Senate now officially chose magistrates. But since no candidate could stand for election without the emperor's prior approval, and since senators who disliked a bill typically expressed that disapproval by simply not showing up to the vote rather than risking open opposition, the Senate functioned less as a deliberative body than as a formal stage for imperial decisions. Senators who wanted to raise an extraneous concern could do so during meetings, and higher-ranking senators spoke before lower-ranking ones, but the emperor could speak at any time and sat between the two consuls when present.

  The Senate did acquire one genuine power it had not held before: during the early empire, senatorial decrees gained the full legal force of law, since the popular assemblies whose authority they had once merely supplemented were now largely inactive. Its legislative reach covered financial and administrative matters and some provincial governance. The Senate also inherited full criminal jurisdiction, with a consul presiding, the senators serving as jury, and verdicts issued as decrees. The emperor retained a pardon power through veto, but verdicts otherwise could not be appealed.

  One episode from this period stands apart from the standard narrative of imperial dominance. According to the Historia Augusta, the emperor Elagabalus permitted his mother or grandmother to participate in Senate proceedings as though she were a senator, the only emperor said to have done this. The same source records that Elagabalus established a separate women's assembly called the senaculum, which passed rules about clothing, chariot riding, and jewelry for Roman matrons. Before this, Agrippina the Younger, mother of Nero, had reportedly listened to Senate proceedings from behind a curtain, as recorded by Tacitus in the Annales.

• 5. Diocletian's Transformation

  ›

  Around 300 AD, the emperor Diocletian enacted a series of constitutional reforms that stripped away what remained of the Senate's symbolic authority. He formally asserted the emperor's right to take power without even the theoretical consent of the Senate, eliminating the fiction that supreme power resided in that body. The Senate's remaining legislative, judicial, and electoral roles were reduced to a narrow set of functions: it retained the power to govern public games in Rome, to oversee the senatorial order itself, to try treason cases, and to elect some magistrates, but only with imperial permission.

  When the seat of government was moved out of Rome, the Senate declined further to a municipal governing body. Constantine the Great deepened that decline by creating an entirely separate senate in Constantinople, giving the empire a second, fresher version of the institution in the city he had made his capital. The western Senate's last years were marked by political impotence and religious defiance. Several times its members attempted to restore the Altar of Victory to the senatorial curia after Constantius II first had it removed, making the chamber a symbol of resistance to the spread of Christianity. The Senate also occasionally tried to install its own emperor in those final years, as in the case of Eugenius, who was later defeated by forces loyal to Theodosius I.

  After Romulus Augustulus was deposed in 476, the Senate in the West continued to function under the Germanic chieftain Odoacer, who ruled from 476 to 489, and then under Ostrogothic rule from 489 to 535. Paradoxically, the Senate's authority actually rose during this period of barbarian leadership. The new rulers valued the institution and sought to protect it, allowing prominent senatorial families like the Anicii to rise to influence. The princeps senatus, the Senate's own leader, frequently served as the effective right hand of the barbarian ruler. In 498, the Senate even managed to install Laurentius as pope despite the opposition of both King Theodoric and Emperor Anastasius, who had backed the other candidate, Symmachus.

• 6. The Long Disappearance

  ›

  The Ostrogothic leader Theodahad, at war with Emperor Justinian I, took the senators as hostages. In 552, a number of senators were killed by Ostrogothic forces as revenge for the death of their king, Totila. When Byzantine armies retook Rome, Justinian restored the Senate to its official standing, but simultaneously abolished virtually all senatorial offices in Italy. The senators who had fled east during the fighting were encouraged to stay there by favorable imperial legislation. The institution had been mortally weakened.

  In 578 and 580, the Senate sent envoys to Constantinople carrying pleas for military help against the Lombards, who had invaded Italy roughly a decade earlier. The Senate that sent those desperate missions was described by Pope Gregory I in a sermon delivered in 593 as nearly completely disappeared. Gregory mourned the collapse of the senatorial order, suggesting that the body had effectively ceased to function as a governing institution by that point. The Gregorian register of 603 mentions the Senate in connection with ceremonies honoring Emperor Phocas and Empress Leontia, but scholars including Ernst Stein and Andre Chastagnol have argued the reference was ceremonial rather than institutional. In 630, Pope Honorius I converted the Curia Julia, the Senate's meeting house, into a church called Sant'Adriano al Foro, removing the physical space from which the body had long operated.

  In the medieval period, the word senator survived as a title of prestige. Crescentius the Younger, who died in 998, held it. Marozia, who died in 937, held its feminine form, senatrix. Neither pretended to represent a continuing institution. Then in 1144, the Commune of Rome attempted to revive the Senate in a more substantive way, constructing a new senate house on the Capitoline Hill in the mistaken belief that the ancient senate house had stood there. The revived body included 56 senators, which modern historians interpret as four senators for each of Rome's fourteen regiones. They elected as their leader Giordano Pierleoni, son of the Roman consul Pier Leoni, with the title patrician, since consul had by then been deprecated as a styling. In 1191, a popular uprising replaced the 56-member body with a single official called the Summus Senator. The first person to hold that title, Benedetto Carushomo, governed Rome for two years before the multi-member senate was restored once more, now composed mainly of nobles.

  The Eastern Senate in Constantinople survived longer and followed its own path. Designated in Greek as synkletos, it drew its membership from all current and former holders of senior ranks and their descendants. At its height in the 6th and 7th centuries, it represented the collective wealth and power of the Byzantine Empire and occasionally dominated the choice of individual emperors. In the second half of the 10th century, Emperor Nicephorus Phocas created a new office called the proedros as the senate's presiding head, a position restricted to eunuchs until restrictions were later lifted. The Eastern Senate held two types of meetings: the silentium, attended only by active magistrates, and the conventus, open to all senators. Its last recorded act was electing Nicholas Kanabos as emperor in 1204, during the Fourth Crusade, before the institution finally fell silent.