History of the Roman Constitution
The reorganization was revolutionary, however, because the ultimate result was that Octavian ended up with control over the entire constitution, which itself set the stage for outright monarchy.
[1] The period of the kingdom can be divided into two epochs based on the legends, handed down to us principally in the first book of Livy's Ab urbe condita ("From the City Having Been Founded", or simply "History of Rome").
[5] To acquire legal and economic standing, these newcomers adopted a condition of dependency toward either a Patrician family, or toward the king.
[7] While it is not known exactly what concessions were made, the fact that they were not granted any political power[7] set the stage for what history knows as the Conflict of the Orders.
[8] After the monarchy had been overthrown, and the Roman Republic had been founded, the people of Rome began electing two Consuls each year.
[9] In the year 494 BC, the Plebeians (commoners) seceded to the Aventine Hill, and demanded of the Patricians (the aristocrats) the right to elect their own officials.
[23] Farmers became bankrupted, and soon masses of unemployed Plebeians began flooding into Rome, and thus into the ranks of the legislative assemblies, where their economic status usually led them to vote for the candidate who offered them the most.
[24] In 88 BC, an aristocratic senator named Lucius Cornelius Sulla was elected Consul,[25] and soon left for a war in the east.
While he thought that he had firmly established aristocratic rule, his own career had illustrated the fatal weakness in the constitution: that it was the army, and not the senate, which dictated the fortunes of the state.
[29] In 70 BC, the generals Pompey Magnus and Marcus Licinius Crassus were both elected Consul, and quickly dismantled Sulla's constitution.
In January 49 BC, the senate passed a resolution which declared that if Caesar did not lay down his arms by July of that year, he would be considered an enemy of the republic.
[34] By 48 BC, after having defeated the last of his major enemies, Julius Caesar wanted to ensure that his control over the government was undisputed.
Caesar held the office of Roman Dictator, and alternated between the Consulship (the chief-magistracy) and the Proconsulship (in effect, a military governorship).
When Octavian deposed Mark Antony in 32 BC, he resigned his position as triumvir, but was probably vested with powers similar to those that he had given up.
The Senate then granted Octavian a unique grade of Proconsular command power (imperium) which gave him the authority over all of Rome's military governors, and thus, over the entire Roman army.
[40] In 23 BC, Augustus (as Octavian now called himself) gave up his Consulship, and expanded both his Proconsular imperium and his tribunician powers.
Therefore, Tiberius assumed command of the Praetorian Guard, and used his Proconsular imperium to force the armies to swear allegiance to him.
[48] In the decades after the death of Augustus, the Roman Empire was, in a sense, a union of inchoate principalities, which could have disintegrated at any time.
Domitian's reign marked a significant turning point on the road to monarchy,[52] as he made himself Censor for life, and unlike his father, used these powers to further subjugate the Senate.
[52] Domitian, ultimately, was a tyrant with the character which always makes tyranny repulsive,[53] and this derived in part from his own paranoia, which itself was a consequence of the fact that he had no son, and thus no obvious heir.
M. Cocceius Nerva succeeded Domitian, and although his reign was too short for any major constitutional reforms, he did reverse some of his predecessor's abuses.
[55] He was succeeded by Trajan in 98, who then went further than even Nerva had in restoring the image of a free republic,[55] by, for example, allowing the senate to regain some independent legislative abilities.
By far, his most important constitutional alteration was his creation of a bureaucratic apparatus,[56] which included a fixed gradation of clearly defined offices, and a corresponding order of promotion.
The most significant constitutional development that occurred during the reign of Marcus Aurelius was the revival of the republican principle of collegiality,[57] as he made his brother, L. Aelius, his co-emperor.
Commodus' tyranny revived the worst memories of the later Julian emperors,[58] as he was more explicit than any of his predecessors in taking powers that he did not legally have, and in disregarding the constitution.
[60] The only development of any significance was the continuing slide towards monarchy, as the constitutional distinctions that had been set up by Augustus lost whatever meaning that they still had.
[60] Starting in 235, with the reign of the barbarian Emperor Maximinus Thrax, the Empire was put through a period of severe military, civil, and economic stress.
[62] When Diocletian became Roman emperor in 284, the military situation had recently stabilized,[62] which allowed him to enact badly needed constitutional reforms.
[1] One important consequence of these reforms was the fact that the image of a free republic had finally given way, and the centuries-old reality of monarchy now became obvious.
[64] While the Emperor Constantine the Great did enact some revisions to this constitution, the most significant change over the centuries was in the abolition of the Caesares.
