Curule seat

Its status in early Rome as a symbol of political or military power carried over to other civilizations, as it was also used in this capacity by kings in Europe, Napoleon, and others.

This includes dictators, magistri equitum, consuls, praetors, curule aediles, and the promagistrates, temporary or de facto holders of such offices.

Livy writes that the three flamines maiores or high priests of the Archaic Triad of major gods were each granted the honor of the curule chair.

The destruction of the chair as a means to disrupt or attack a magistrate’s rule did not actually prevent the owner of the curule seat from exercising his power.

[11] According to Cassius Dio, early in 44 BC a senate decree granted Julius Caesar the curule seat everywhere except in the theatre, where his gilded chair and jeweled crown were carried in, putting him on a par with the gods.

[16] In Rome, the curule chair was traditionally made of or veneered with ivory, with curved legs forming a wide X; it had no back, and low arms.

It developed a hieratic significance, expressed in fictive curule seats on funerary monuments, a symbol of power which was never entirely lost in post-Roman European tradition.

These chairs were called hu chuang ("barbarian bed"), and Frances Wood argues that they came from the Eastern Roman Empire, since the cultures of Persia and Arabia preferred cushions and divans instead.

[20] A poem by Yu Jianwu, written about 552 AD, reads: By the name handed down you are from a foreign region coming into [China] and being used in the capital With legs leaning your frame adjusts by itself

With limbs slanting your body levels by itself...[21]In Gaul the Merovingian successors to Roman power employed the curule seat as an emblem of their right to dispense justice, and their Capetian successors retained the iconic seat: the "Throne of Dagobert", of cast bronze retaining traces of its former gilding, is conserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

[25] With their Imperial Roman connotations, the backless curule seats found their way into furnishings for Napoleon, who moved some of the former royal pliants into his state bedchamber at Fontainebleau.

Further examples were ordered, in the newest Empire taste: Jacob-Desmalter's seats with members in the form of carved and gilded sheathed sabres were delivered to Saint-Cloud about 1805.