Amongst the powers of the Senate, that which was formally the greatest was the creation and deposition of the Princeps. We have already seen how this right was limited in practice;[1] but its nominal exercise was an expression of the view that the sovereignty of the Roman people now found its chief exponent in the ancient council. The same idea is expressed in the senatorial power of dispensation from laws—whether in favour of the Princeps and members of his house,[2] or in administrative matters such as the right of forming associations.[3] The elective power which the Senate enjoyed from the beginning of the reign of Tiberius[4] is also a sign of its perpetuating the powers of the people.
Over foreign administration, once the great bulwark of its power, the Senate has now but little control. Although it still receives messages of the victories of the Princeps, and grants him a triumph,[5] it has lost all independent rights of war, peace, and alliance. But it receives envoys from the provinces which are under its control,[6] and from the towns of Italy,[7] and, at least in the first century of the Principate, it may act as the advising body of the Princeps in spheres which pertain wholly to him. Tiberius consulted the Senate on military questions;[8] Vespasian waived an embarrassing offer of help from the Parthians by urging them to send an embassy to the Senate; and Decebalus, after his conquest by Trajan, obtained his final terms of peace by the same means.[9] Such concessions were doubtless acts of grace on the part of the Princeps, but they also represent a constitutional principle which finally disappeared—the principle of consulting the representatives of the people on questions that were of paramount interest to the state.
The other powers of the Senate, which express its sovereignty or its partnership of administration with the Princeps, we must
- ↑ p. 359.
- ↑ p. 350.
- ↑ The formula for the formation of a collegium legitimum runs 'quibus senatus c(oire) c(onvocari) c(ogi) permisit e lege Julia ex auctoritate Augusti" (C.I.L. vi n. 4416).
- ↑ p. 372.
- ↑ Dio Cass. lxviii. 29.
- ↑ Tac. Ann. iii. 60; xii. 62.
- ↑ ib. xiii 48.
- ↑ "de legendo vel exauctorando milite, ac legionum et auxiliorum descriptione" (Suet. Tib. 30).
- ↑ Tac. Hist. iv. 61; Dio Cass. lxviii. 9, 10. In 49 A.D. during the reign of Claudius we also read of a reception of Parthian envoys in the Senate (Tac. Ann. xii. 10).
