ABSTRACT
The Roman literary tradition incorrectly assumes that executive authority in the state transferred seamlessly from a monarchy to the consulship. The Republican concept of military authority (imperium) was not extracted from the monarchy, but rather developed gradually out of the period of oligarchy that existed after the removal of Rome’s last rex. Two stages to this process are suggested by the surviving evidence. First, in the mid-fifth century BC, the Roman people asserted a prerogative to select or approve which men could exercise military authority over them. This included developing a legal definition of the authority to command (imperium), which was conferred by the vote of the people. The second stage occurred only in the mid-fourth century BC, when the people gained complete control over military authority through a series of reforms that strictly limited the total number of men who received imperium each year. Thus, the origins of the military authority did not rest in the transfer of monarchical authority to two annual consuls, but in the gradual negotiations between the developing Republican state and powerful Roman gentes.
