Senate of Rome

“ But the headlong fall of the Roman power was owing not to the fault of Quintus Fabius or Gaius Varro, but to the distrust between the government and the governed—to the variance between the senate and the burgesses. If the deliverance and revival of the state were still possible, the work had to begin at home with the re-establishment of unity and of confidence. To have perceived this and, what is of more importance, to have done it, and done it with an abstinence from all recriminations however just, constitutes the glorious and imperishable honour of the Roman senate. ”

“ The real government of Rome was in the hands of the Senate, an assembly of nobles and capitalists, who shared between themselves the profits of the Roman conquests. Like all such assemblies, the senators had their good times and their bad; between the second and the third wars with Carthage they so conducted themselves as to impress the imagination of the civilized world; the successes of their armies, their fidelity to engagements, their comparative moderation in conquest, were the wonder of men ”

“ It is incredible that the Roman senate should have left to accident an election of such importance in this meeting of the Comitia which it had itself suggested, and equally incredible that ambition and patriotism should have so died out in Rome that no tried officer presented himself for the important post. ”

“ We cannot trace the widening of the other powers of the Senate; but we must assume that it took up a more independent position in face of the consuls than it had done in that of the king. Perhaps the establishment of a treasury and of financial quaestors, who may have been selected from the council, led to its first connexion with finance. The new importance that foreign affairs assumed, in the constant wars in which Rome was engaged with the nations of Italy, must certainly have strengthened its control of this department. ”

“ No person was above the authority of the laws; no one class could subvert the liberties and prerogatives of another class,--even the senate could not override the constitution. The consuls, elected by the centuries, presided over the senate and over the assemblies of the people. There was no absolute power exercised at Rome until the subversion of the constitution, except by dictators chosen by the senate in times of imminent danger. Nor could senators elect members of their own body; the censors alone had the right of electing from the ex-magistrates, and of excluding such as were unworthy. ”

“ At the very outset of Roman history we see the Senate existing as an aristocratic body, embodying in itself both the oligarchical principles upon which the Roman government was based, and also the patriarchal basis upon which the Roman family organization and later the organization of the Roman state itself had been built. ”

“ And, conjointly with the rest of the senators, it formed the greater council. Thus classic traditions were identified with new republican usages, and the commonwealth of Rome resembled those in other parts of Italy. But, of course, every republic had special local customs of its own. So the Roman senate had judicial as well as political attributes, and there was a curia senatus composed of senators and legal experts.
As was easily to be foreseen, the agreement with the pope was of short duration. The revolution could not be checked ”

“ The senate, accordingly, as is usual in any perilous emergency, decreed that THE CONSULS SHOULD MAKE IT THEIR CARE THAT THE COMMONWEALTH SHOULD RECEIVE NO INJURY. This is the greatest power which, according to the practice at Rome, is granted by the senate to the magistrate, and which authorizes him to raise troops; to make war; to assume unlimited control over the allies and the citizens; to take the chief command and jurisdiction at home and in the field, rights which, without an order of the people, the consul is not permitted to exercise. ”

“ Hence it was, and from this original precedent of Augustus, aided by the constitution which he had given to the office of imperator, that up to the era of Dioclesian, no prince had dared utterly to neglect the senate, or the people of Rome. He might hate the senate, like Severus, or Aurelian; he might even meditate their extermination, like the brutal Maximin. ”

“ The state of things at Rome is this: the senate is a perfect Areopagus. You cannot conceive anything firmer, more grave, or more high-spirited. For when the day came for proposing the bill in accordance with the vote of the senate, a crowd of our dandies with their chin-tufts assembled, all the Catiline set, with Curio's girlish son at their head, and implored the people to reject it. Moreover, Piso the consul, who formally introduced the bill, spoke against it. Clodius's hired ruffians had filled up the entrances to the voting boxes. ”

“ Rome is preserved from cleaving in the midst by the virtues of the state, the reverence for the political majority which pervades both contending parties. The senate averts the last evil by the timely concession of the tribunitian power first, and then by sacrifice of a favourite champion of their own order, rather than civil war shall break out and all go to ruin in quarrel for the privilege and supremacy of a part. ”

“ The senate, though forced year after year to listen to the mutual recriminations and complaints of rival communities and factions, contented itself as a rule with intervening just enough to remind the Greeks that their freedom was limited by its own paramount authority, and to prevent any single state or confederacy from raising itself too far above the level of general weakness which it was the interest of Rome to maintain. ”

“ Such a crowd of enemies is not only within the walls, but in the citadel, commanding the forum and senate-house: in the mean while meetings are being held in the forum; the senate is in the senate-house, just as when perfect tranquillity prevails; the senator gives his opinion, the other Romans give their votes. Would it not behove all the patricians and commons, consuls, tribunes, citizens, and all classes of persons, to bring aid with arms in their hands, to run into the Capitol, to liberate and restore to peace that most august residence of Jupiter, the best and greatest? ”

“ During the republic the Senate had been the actual center of the administration and Augustus intended that it should continue to be so for the greater part of the empire. Through the ordinary magistrates it should govern Rome and Italy, and through the promagistrates the senatorial provinces. Furthermore, the state treasury, the aerarium saturni, supported by the revenues from Italy and the Senate’s provinces, remained under the authority of that body. ”

“ The republican institutions, with the partial exception of the senate, lose all semblance of authority outside Rome, and even as the municipal institutions of the chief city of the empire they retain but little actual power. The real government even of Rome passes gradually into the hands of imperial prefects and commissioners, and the old magistracies become merely decorations which the emperor bestows at his pleasure. ”

“ Even in the time of the proud Innocent III. the city was still governed "by the Senate and people of Rome," and when the Romans again tired of their Senate—as tradition says they had done when they made Numa king—they created in its place a supreme magistrate who was designated "the Senator," [Pg 15] one of whose duties was to maintain the pontiff in his See, and to provide conveniently for his safe conduct and that of the Sacred College when journeying within his jurisdiction. ”

“ No one represents to the Senate that Italy requires supplies from abroad, and that the very existence of the people of Rome is daily at the mercy of uncertain waves and storms. And unless masters, slaves, and estates have the resources of the provinces as their mainstay, our shrubberies, forsooth, and our country houses will have to support us. Such, Senators, are the anxieties which the prince has to sustain, and the neglect of them will be utter ruin to the State. The cure for other evils must be sought in our own hearts. ”

“ As Mr Froude says, the Senate was "in theory" a real aristocracy. But we must remember that it had not always been so "in theory" alone. During the most brilliant period of Roman history it had been a real aristocracy in fact. Government by the Senate was the result of the struggle between patricians and plebeians; and it was the Senate that ruled Rome from the end of the Samnite wars to the conquest of Macedonia—that is, during the earlier and more arduous part of her progress from Italian supremacy to universal empire. ”

“ He was dictator for ten years and consul for five, and was also imperator or commander of an army he was not made to disband, so that he nearly was as powerful as any king; and, as he saw that such an enormous domain as Rome now possessed could never be governed by two magistrates changing every year, he prepared matters for there being one ruler. The influence of the Senate, too, he weakened very much by naming a great many persons to it of no rank or distinction, till there were nine hundred members, and nobody thought much of being a senator. ”

“ Throughout this period the actually sovereign authority in Rome was that of the senate, and behind the senate stood an order of nobles (nobiles) , who claimed and enjoyed privileges as wide as those which immemorial custom had formerly conceded to the patriciate. The ascendency of the senate, which thus arrested the march of democracy in Rome, was not, to any appreciable extent, the result of legislation. ”

“ I desired that the senate of Rome might appear before me, in one large chamber, and a modern representative in counterview, in another. The first, seemed to be an assembly of heroes and demi-gods; the other, a knot of pedlars, pick-pockets, highwaymen, and bullies. ”

“ Up to the time of Tiberius Gracchus, near the close of the second century before Christ, Rome was under a parliamentary government, not unlike the government of France or Italy in its essential characteristics. Under the constitution of 1875, for instance, the chief executive of France is brought under the control of the legislative body, just as the Roman Consul was made subject to the Senate. All his acts of every kind, to be valid, must be countersigned by one of his ministers, and it is always within the power of the Chamber of Deputies to overthrow a ministry. ”

“ In fact, the people was then not only Sovereign, but also magistrate and judge; the senate was only a subordinate tribunal, to temper and concentrate the government, and the consuls themselves, though they were patricians, first magistrates, and absolute generals in war, were in Rome itself no more than presidents of the people. ”

“ The Senate formed the real governing body of the republic.
"AN ASSEMBLY OF KINGS" The Senate proved not unworthy of its high position. For two centuries, while Rome was winning dominion over Italy and the Mediterranean, that body held the wisest and noblest Romans of the time. To these men office meant a public trust—an opportunity to serve their country with distinction and honor. The Senate, in its best days, was a splendid example of the foresight, energy, and wisdom of republican Rome. An admiring foreigner called it "an assembly of kings." ”

“ But in Rome, and Italy, and all quiet and long-settled parts, the senate was to rule; and Augustus' effort, and especially Tiberius' effort, was to make it do so. But by this time, you may say, there was nothing resembling a human ego left among the senators: when the Manasaputra incarnated, these fellows had been elsewhere. They simply could not rule. Augustus had had constantly to be intervening to pull them out of scrapes; to audit their accounts for them, because they could not do the sums themselves; to send down men into their provinces to put things right whenever they went wrong. ”

“ Never was a state represented in its external relations more firmly and worthily than Rome in its best times by its senate. In matters of internal administration it certainly cannot be concealed that the moneyed and landed aristocracy, which was especially represented in the senate, acted with partiality in affairs that bore upon its peculiar interests, and that the sagacity and energy of the body were often in such cases employed far from beneficially to the state. ”

“ A Roman element had penetrated into the army, which was already possessed of considerable political importance. The prefect of Rome loses authority and seems almost a nullity compared with the magister militum. Hardly anything is heard of the senate. “Quia enim Senatus deest, populus interiit,” exclaims Gregory in a moment of despair. The popes now make common cause with the people against the Lombards on the one hand and the emperor on the other. But they avoid an absolute rupture with the empire, lest they should have to face the Lombard power without any prospect of help. ”

“ Augustus, being now the emperor of Rome, sought to win the affections of his people. He lived with republican simplicity in a plain house on the Palatine Hill, and educated his family with great strictness and frugality. His public conduct was designed to conceal his unbounded power. He rejected all unworthy members from the Senate, and limited the number of the Senators to six hundred. The Comitia of the Centuries was still allowed to pass laws and elect magistrates, but gradually these powers were taken away, until, in the reign of Tiberius, they are mentioned no more. ”