The Emperor and his Advisers

Both in theory and in practice the later empire was an absolute monarchy. The emperor personally made all appointments down to provincial governor and regimental commander. He made war and signed treaties; he levied or remitted taxes at will. He had the power of life and death over his subjects and was the supreme source of law. There were some ghosts of the past, when the emperor had been a republican magistrate who owed his power to his people. ‘What the emperor decides has the force of law’, wrote Ulpian ¹ in the early third century, ‘because in the royal law, which is passed about his sovereignty, the people confers upon him all its sovereignty and power’; and this dictum is preserved in Justinian’s Digest and repeated in his Institutes. Since the people was deemed by one act to have made over to the emperor the plenitude of its power, and was incapable of recalling it, the doctrine did not have much practical importance except in a vacancy of the throne. From it, it was deduced that senatus consulta, decrees of the senate, had independent validity, ‘for when the Roman people was so greatly increased that it was difficult for it to be convened in one place to enact a law, it was deemed proper that the senate should be consulted instead of the people’. ² Ever since the first century A.D., however, the senate had never done more than register its assent to an imperial motion. It was also, no doubt, a survival of republican thinking that the emperor, though he was personally freed from the laws (legibus solutus) and could make new laws and alter the old at will, was expected to obey the law: as Ambrose ³ puts it, ‘the emperor enacts laws which he is the first to keep’. He was in fact an absolute but not an arbitary monarch: hence the distinction drawn by Gregory the Great: ¹ ‘This is the difference between barbarian kings and the Roman emperor, that barbarian kings are the lords of slaves, but the Roman emperor is the lord of free men.’