Roman consul

Based on Wikipedia: Roman consul

Imagine holding the most powerful office in the ancient world—but only for twelve months. And you have to share it with someone who can veto everything you do. That was the Roman consulship, a brilliant and slightly paranoid solution to a fundamental problem of governance: how do you give someone enough power to lead effectively while preventing them from becoming a tyrant?

The Romans had lived under kings. It didn't end well.

When they finally expelled the last one—a particularly unpleasant ruler named Tarquin Superbus, or "Tarquin the Proud"—around 509 BCE, they faced a question that has haunted every republic since: what do you do with all that concentrated power? Their answer was elegant in its simplicity. Split it in half. Make it temporary. And give each half the ability to stop the other.

The Architecture of Shared Power

The consulship wasn't just the highest office in the Roman Republic—it was the culmination of an entire political career. Romans who pursued public life followed what they called the cursus honorum, literally "the course of honors," a ladder of increasingly prestigious positions. The consulship stood near the top, second only to the censorship, and that office was itself reserved for former consuls.

Every year, the comitia centuriata—an assembly organized by wealth and military function—elected two consuls to serve jointly for a single year. When both were present in Rome, they literally took turns leading, alternating month by month who carried the fasces, the bundle of rods that symbolized their authority. It's worth pausing on that image: two men, supposedly equals, passing the symbol of supreme power back and forth like a ceremonial baton.

But here's where the Roman genius for balanced power really showed itself. Each consul possessed imperium, the full military and civil authority of the state. Yet each could also veto the other's actions. If Consul A wanted to march an army north, Consul B could simply say no. This meant that for anything significant to happen, both consuls either had to agree or one had to stay out of the way.

The system had obvious inefficiencies. But that was the point.

What Did Consuls Actually Do?

The scope of consular power was staggering by modern standards. In peacetime, consuls headed the government, supervised the state's internal machinery, and wielded executive, legislative, and judicial authority. They could summon citizens, arrest them, and punish even lower magistrates. All other officials—with one crucial exception we'll get to—were subordinate to them within Rome's sacred boundary, the pomerium.

In wartime, consuls often commanded Rome's armies personally. This wasn't ceremonial generalship from the rear—consuls led from the front, which explains why quite a few died in battle. When that happened, the assembly would elect a replacement, called a consul suffectus, to serve out the remainder of the year. But the original consul, the consul ordinarius who started the year, always held more prestige. That's because Romans dated their years by who held the consulship—the year we might call 63 BCE, a Roman would call "the consulship of Cicero and Gaius Antonius Hybrida."

The consuls also served as Rome's chief diplomats. No foreign ambassador reached the Senate without first meeting with the consuls. They introduced envoys, conducted negotiations, and managed relations with the kingdoms and peoples beyond Rome's borders. They convened the Senate and presided over its meetings, alternating that duty monthly as well. They could summon any of Rome's three popular assemblies.

And they performed essential religious functions. Before any army marched to war, the consuls read the auguries—interpreting the flight of birds and other signs to determine whether the gods approved. Roman religion was deeply intertwined with the state, and the highest civil officers necessarily had sacred duties that couldn't be delegated.

The Long Fight for Access

Here's something that might sound familiar: for the first century and a half of the Republic, the consulship was effectively closed to most Romans.

Roman society was divided between patricians—aristocratic families who traced their lineage to the city's founding—and plebeians, everyone else. The patricians held a monopoly on the consulship. Plebeians could serve in the army, pay taxes, and die for Rome, but they couldn't hold its highest office.

This changed in 367 BCE with legislation known as the Licinio-Sextian rogations, which mandated that at least one consul each year must be plebeian. The following year, Lucius Sextius became the first plebeian consul. In theory, the doors were now open.

In practice, they remained mostly closed.

Even after plebeians could legally hold the consulship, the office remained concentrated among a handful of families. Between 367 BCE and Cicero's election in 63 BCE—a span of more than three centuries—only about fifteen novi homines, "new men" with no consular ancestors, managed to win election. Cicero himself was intensely proud of being one of them, and never let anyone forget it.

Modern historians have complicated this traditional story. Some point out that roughly thirty percent of the consuls before Sextius had names that look plebeian, not patrician. One of the very first consuls, Lucius Junius Brutus—famous for leading the revolt against Tarquin—apparently came from a plebeian family. The traditional timeline of plebeian emancipation may be distorted, a story the Romans told themselves that was tidier than reality.

Who Could Become Consul?

During wartime, the primary qualification was military skill. Romans wanted proven commanders leading their armies. But the selection was always political as well—generals needed allies in the Senate, supporters among the voters, and often considerable personal wealth to fund their campaigns.

Eventually, the cursus honorum became formalized. When the dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla reformed the system in the 80s BCE, he set a minimum age of 42 or 43 for consular candidates. By then, a man would typically have held lower offices: quaestor, praetor, perhaps aedile or tribune. The consulship was the destination, not the starting point.

This age requirement mattered because it ensured that consuls had experience. A man in his early forties would have spent decades in Roman public life, building networks, understanding institutions, commanding troops. He wouldn't be learning on the job.

Unless, of course, an emperor decided otherwise.

The Imperial Consulship: Shadow of a Republic

When Augustus transformed the Roman Republic into an empire after 27 BCE, he faced a delicate problem. Romans revered their republican traditions. The consulship symbolized everything they believed about balanced power and citizen governance. Augustus couldn't simply abolish it—that would make him look exactly like the tyrant he claimed not to be.

So he kept the consulship but hollowed it out.

Formally, consuls continued to be elected by the popular assembly. In reality, the emperor nominated them, and the assembly rubber-stamped his choices. The emperor himself often served as consul when it suited him—Augustus held the office thirteen times, Domitian seventeen times, Theodosius II eighteen times. The consulship became a gift the emperor could bestow, a mark of favor rather than a prize won through competitive politics.

Caligula, who delighted in mocking senatorial pretensions, once joked that he would make his horse Incitatus a consul. It was probably meant to humiliate the Senate by suggesting the office had become so meaningless that even a horse could hold it.

But the consulship still mattered in one crucial way: it remained a prerequisite for the empire's top administrative jobs. Only former consuls could become governors of the most important provinces, command certain armies, or serve as urban prefect of Rome. For ambitious aristocrats, the consulship was still essential—just no longer powerful in itself.

Augustus also multiplied the number of consuls. The traditional two "ordinary" consuls who began the year would resign partway through, and "suffect" consuls would take their places. This allowed more men to hold the title, building a larger pool of ex-consuls for administrative positions. During the Flavian and Antonine periods, ordinary consuls typically resigned after just four months.

The distinction between ordinary and suffect consuls remained significant. Ordinary consuls gave their names to the year—that prestige couldn't be shared. The ordinary consulship remained a rare honor, often held by patricians or men with consular ancestors. Being ordinary consul was one of the few positions you could hold alongside the emperor himself as a co-equal, at least symbolically.

The Long Decline

By the third century, the consulship was fading into irrelevance. Senators no longer had the significant pre-consular careers they once did. Men held suffect consulships in their early twenties—sometimes younger—without any real political experience. The office that once crowned a lifetime of public service became something handed out almost routinely.

Emperor Constantine I, who ruled from 306 to 337 CE, assigned one consul to Rome and one to the new capital he was building in the East, Constantinople. When the empire formally split after Theodosius I's death in 395 CE, each half appointed its own consul—though sometimes one emperor would let his colleague name both, as a diplomatic gesture.

The Western Empire grew weaker. Powerful generals like Stilicho manipulated puppet emperors. Some Eastern consuls were simply never recognized in the West. The consulship, now completely ceremonial, still carried great prestige—but also enormous expense. The consul was expected to fund elaborate public celebrations, especially chariot races, and while the state covered some costs, much came from the consul's own pocket.

Sometimes the honor went to teenagers or even children. It had become a title to bestow on imperial relatives, not a position requiring any actual governing ability.

The End of a Thousand-Year Tradition

In the sixth century, the consulship quietly disappeared.

The last consul in the West was Decius Paulinus, who held office in 534 CE. The Eastern consulship survived a few more years until 541 CE, when Anicius Faustus Albinus Basilius became the last man to hold the office in the traditional sense. Emperor Justinian I had already abolished consular dating in 537 CE—years would now be counted by the emperor's reign and the indiction cycle, a fifteen-year taxation period.

For a time, being proclaimed consul remained part of the ceremony when a new emperor took the throne. This practice continued until at least 632 CE, when the future Constans II was made consul as part of his imperial proclamation. But by then, it was purely ritualistic, disconnected from any actual office or function.

In the late ninth century, Emperor Leo the Wise—called "the Wise" for his scholarly interests, not necessarily his political judgment—formally abolished the consulship altogether. By that point, the Greek titles "hypatos" (consul) and "apo hypaton" (ex-consul) had devolved into relatively minor honorary distinctions, a thousand years removed from the power they once represented.

The title occasionally resurfaced in medieval Europe as a papal gift. In 719 CE, the Pope offered to make Charles Martel—the Frankish leader who would later stop the Muslim advance into Europe at Tours—a Roman consul. Martel declined. About 853 CE, Alfred the Great, then a small child of four or five who would later save Anglo-Saxon England from Viking conquest, was made a Roman consul by the Pope. What exactly this meant to anyone involved is unclear.

A Curious Survival

If you visit San Marino today—that tiny, ancient republic perched on a mountain in northeastern Italy—you'll find two Captains Regent serving simultaneously as heads of state for six-month terms. It's the same basic structure the Romans invented: shared executive power, brief tenure, mutual accountability.

San Marino claims to be the world's oldest surviving republic, founded in 301 CE. Whether or not that's literally true, its governing structure preserves something the Romans would have recognized immediately: the conviction that concentrated power is dangerous, that authority must be divided and temporary, that even the highest office should have a built-in check.

The Roman consulship lasted, in one form or another, for over a thousand years. It began as a practical solution to the problem of monarchy, became the prize of an entire political system, declined into an imperial bauble, and finally vanished into ceremony and then oblivion. But the idea at its heart—that executive power can be shared, checked, and rotated—echoed through the centuries that followed, shaping political experiments from the Renaissance Italian city-states to the Constitution of the United States.

The consuls are long gone. Their insight endures.