Tribunicia potestas

Tribunicia potestas can be literally translated as the office of tribune of power and was claimed by Roman emperors which included the "lex sacrata" or sacred law, which had religious connotations. They could be confirmed for life.

It would be the Genius of the Caesars that guided the empire and maintained the viability of their system. Augustus Caesar originally called himself Divi filius the Latin phrase meaning literally "Son of the divine".

Dei filius Can be translated "son of a god". By declaring Caesar the Son of God made even speaking against him a violation of the "lex sacrata".

Public Religion which included a vast system of welfare which provided free bread through the government temples had become an essential element of Roman society.

• “Sacred laws are laws which have the sanction that anyone who broke them becomes accursed("sacer") to one of the gods, together with his family and property”.

As an office it was usually listed after the office of pontifex maximus and before the office of imperator or consul.

Tribunes were popular among the masses because they were to defend and support the plebs, which essentially formed a “state within a state” in the Roman Polis.

In 50 BC the Senate ordered Caesar to disband his army and return to Rome, where he was banned from running for a second consulship and would be on trial for treason and war crimes following his unlicensed conquests in Gaul.

In 36 BCE his adopted son Octavian seized upon the precedent in his struggles as triumvir; in the constitutional settlement of 23 BCE as Augustus he formalized his tenure of annually renewable tribunicia potestas, henceforth reckoning his years of rule by it. This assumption of tribunician power, alongside enhanced imperium, definitively established the legal basis of his principate, and that of subsequent emperors for at least the next three and half centuries. Augustus also secured grants of tribunicia potestas for his sons-in-law Tiberius.

The plebeian tribunes’ rights expanded, gradually extending beyond their core functions of assisting members of the plebs against patricians and magistrates evolving into a social welfare state feeding the indolent masses with free bread and circuses.

In the mid-2nd century BCE [[Polybius] observe that “the plebeian tribunes are always obligated to carry out the resolve of the people (demos), and especially regard their will,” and as such have earned the fear of the Senate (6.16.5). There was a power struggle in Rome as the generally unwritten constitution of Rome morphed in their appetite for power and benefits.

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In 81 BCE Sulla as dictator, as part of a more general reform of the Roman administrative system, sought definitively to deregularize and weaken the plebeian tribunate by (apparently) barring incumbents from further political office and limiting their ability to move legislation freely, perhaps insisting on the Senate’s prior approval for plebiscites (as was the situation before 287 BCE); significantly, he left their defensive power of intercessio intact, which he clearly viewed as vexatious but must have had no practical way to eliminate (sources in Broughton, MRR II 66). After Sulla’s death (in 78 BCE), his measures stirred up tribunes to mount fierce opposition, and by 70 BCE they saw their rights and powers fully restored by a consular law (see MRR ΙΙ‎ 127 for the sources). In the 60s and 50s BCE, the tribunes are notable for their willingness to use the full negative powers of their office in the service of the factional politics of the day, with relentless use of especially intercessio against the Senate’s decrees and legislation in all the assemblies, even the (largely ceremonial) lex curiata (see Cic. Fam. 1.9.25, 54 BCE).

From Late Republic to Early Principate Caesar, who in marching on Rome in 49 BCE had ostentatiously represented himself as a champion of tribunician sacrosanctity, on his victory received an extraordinary grant of tribunicia potestas without having to hold the office of the tribunate itself (48 BCE, awarded for life in 44 BCE: Cass. Dio 42.20.3, 44.5.3). It was a startling measure—Caesar himself was a patrician—that (misleadingly) made tribunicia potestas seem roughly analogous to imperium, which since 327 BCE could be extended or awarded to non-magistrates. Caesar’s adopted son and political heir Octavian (see Augustus) seized upon the precedent in his struggles as triumvir, procuring tribunicia potestas, or at least the tribunes’ sacrosanctity, for himself in 36 BCE, which was apparently renewed or somehow modified in 30 BCE (Cass. Dio 49.15.5–6, 51.19.6–7). Strikingly, in 35 BCE Octavian managed to have tribunician inviolability, which by this time extended beyond protection from physical assault to encompass also verbal defamation, granted also to his half-sister Octavia as well as to his wife Livia (Dio Cass. 49.38.1). It was a clear sign that he intended even then to establish a dynasty. A final and consequential stage came in the constitutional settlement of 23 BCE, when as Augustus he ostentatiously gave up his habit of holding consecutive consulships (an office which he had secured for each of the years 31–23 BCE) in exchange for tenure of full tribunicia potestas (Cass. Dio 53.32.5–6). In the event he had it renewed each year for the rest of his life, a total of thirty-seven times (see Res Gestae 10.1), and used it to date individual years of his reign, counting from 23 BCE. In addition to the sacrosanctity, this status gave Augustus the ability to convene and preside over the Senate, pass legislation in the assembly of the plebs (a privilege he exercised for his moral legislation of 18 BCE: see marriage law, Roman), and veto public actions; it also effectively established him in the tribunate’s customary role as protector of popular interests. It is generally agreed that Augustus’s assumption in 23 BCE of tribunician power, alongside enhanced imperium (established to command a super-province of all armed provinces, with the capability of intervening also in those nominally in the power of the Senate) definitively established the legal basis of his rule, and that of all subsequent emperors through the early 4th century CE. Tacitus in a capsule history of Augustus’s tribunicia potestas (Tac. Ann. 3.56) flatly considers it as a device for the emperor to assert his supremacy in the state without taking an invidious title such as king or dictator. The plebeian tribunate itself continued under Augustus and well into the imperial period (it is mentioned as late as the 5th century CE: Cod. Theod. 1.6.11 and 2.1.12), but it came firmly under the control of the emperors and already by the end of the 1st century CE the office could be deemed of little consequence (Plin. Ep. 1.23.1).

Significantly, after the settlement of 23 BCE, Augustus arranged to have extraordinary tribunicia potestas conferred also on his successive sons-in-law. Agrippa married Augustus’s widowed daughter Iulia in 21 BCE, and in 18 BCE received tribunician power for five years (renewed in 13 BCE), but died in 12 BCE (Cass. Dio 54.12.2 and 28.1). Augustus in 11 BCE then forced his stepson Tiberius to divorce and marry Iulia (Cass. Dio 54.35.4), and in 6 BCE procured for him tribunician power for five years (Cass. Dio 55.9.4)—shortly before removing him to Rhodes (where Tiberius seems to have employed the coercive aspects of that power: Suet. Tib. 11) until 2 CE. On the death in 2 and 4 CE respectively of Lucius Iulius Caesar and Gaius Iulius Caesar (sons of Agrippa and Iulia whom Augustus adopted as heirs but never offered tribunicia potestas), Augustus now adopted Tiberius and secured for him tribunician power for ten years as well as imperium as a proconsul, each renewed in 13 CE (Cass. Dio 55.13.1 and Vell. Pat. 2.103, Cass. Dio 56.28.1). The practical effect of these grants was clearly to designate Tiberius as the successor to the principate and facilitate his future transition to the role (see Tac. Ann. 1.3 and especially 3.56); when Augustus died on 19 August 14, Tiberius was immediately able to act as de facto emperor. Augustus’s actions served as a productive precedent for a long series of subsequent emperors; in this way the tribunician power became a central element in the Empire’s institutional history.

Imperial Practice after Augustus From the start, Tiberius as emperor stressed that tribunicia potestas provided a legal basis for his succession and rule (see Tac. Ann. 1.7); in inscriptions and coins that show his titulature. “Caligula,” Claudius, and Nero on their accessions each received from the Senate the tribunicia potestas, none saw fit to designate a partner in the honor.

Marcus Cocceius Nerva did the same for Trajan when adopting him in October 97, and Hadrian for both Lucius Aelius Caesar and (after his death) Antoninus Pius on their adoptions in 136 and 138, respectively.

The Senate long remained in control of granting tribunicia potestas to emperors on their accession, as is shown by the cases of the usurpers Gaius Pescennius Niger Iustus and Decimus Clodius Septimius Albinus in 193–194, neither of whom claimed to possess it. In principle, emperors held tribunician power for life, but still had to have it renewed each year. Writing in the 3rd century, Dio (53.17.10) states that renewal came at the same time the plebeian tribunes took office, that is, 10 December. The actual record, despite many problems of detail, in general tends to confirm this statement; standard practice starting with Trajan (in 102) through at least Alexander Severus (reigned 218–235) was for emperors to date their first tribunician year from the day of their acclamation (dies imperii) until 9 December, and then define each succeeding year as running from 10 December to the following 9 December. What principles informed the change of tribunician date after 235 are harder to divine, for by 247 Philip I was using 1 January, and in 253, Valerian and his son Gallienus in their joint reign employed a date that fell between 15 August and 10 September. The practice of routinely noting an emperor’s iterations of tribunician power, and perhaps conferment of the grants themselves, ended with Constantine I (reigned 311–337).