Roman Senate - Senate of The Roman Kingdom

Senate of The Roman Kingdom

The Senate of the Roman Kingdom was a political institution in the ancient Roman Kingdom. The word senate derives from the Latin word senex, which means "old man"; the word thus means "assembly of elders". The prehistoric Indo-Europeans who settled Italy in the centuries before the legendary founding of Rome in 753 BC were structured into tribal communities, and these communities often included an aristocratic board of tribal elders.

The early Roman family was called a gens or "clan", and each clan was an aggregation of families under a common living male patriarch, called a pater (the Latin word for "father"). When the early Roman gentes were aggregating to form a common community, the patres from the leading clans were selected for the confederated board of elders (what would become the Roman Senate). Over time, the patres came to recognize the need for a single leader, and so they elected a king (rex), and vested in him their sovereign power. When the king died, that sovereign power naturally reverted to the patres.

The Senate is said to have been created by Rome's first king, Romulus, initially consisting of 100 men. The descendants of those 100 men subsequently became the patrician class. Rome's fifth king, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, chose a further 100 senators. They were chosen from the minor leading families, and were accordingly called the minorum gentium.

Rome's seventh and final king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, executed many of the leading men in the senate, and did not replace them, thereby diminishing their number. However, in 509 BC Rome's first consuls, Lucius Junius Brutus and Publius Valerius Publicola chose from amongst the leading equites new men for the Senate, these being called conscripti, and thus increased the size of the senate to 300.

The senate of the Roman Kingdom held three principal responsibilities: It functioned as the ultimate repository for the executive power, it served as the council to the king, and it functioned as a legislative body in concert with the People of Rome. During the years of the monarchy, the Senate's most important function was to elect new kings. While the king was technically elected by the people, it was actually the Senate who chose each new king.

The period between the death of one king, and the election of a new king, was called the interregnum, during which time the Interrex nominated a candidate to replace the king. After the senate gave its initial approval to the nominee, he was then formally elected by the people, and then received the Senate's final approval. At least one king, Servius Tullius, was elected by the Senate alone, and not by the people.

The Senate's most significant task, outside of regal elections, was in its capacity as the king's council, and while the king could ignore any advice offered to him by the Senate, the Senate's growing prestige helped make the advice that it offered increasingly difficult to ignore. Technically the Senate could also make new laws, although it would be incorrect to view the senate's decrees as "legislation" in the modern sense. Only the king could decree new laws, although he often involved both the senate and the Curiate Assembly (the popular assembly) in the process.