praerogativa The right to go first.
praetor This magistracy ranked second in the hierarchy of Roman magistrates. At the very beginning of the Republic, the two highest magistrates of all were known as praetors. By the end of the fourth century B.C., however, the term consul had come into being for the highest magistrates, and praetors were relegated to second best. One praetor was the sole representative of this position for many decades thereafter; he was obviously the praetor urbanus, as his duties were confined to the city of Rome, thus freeing up the two consuls for duties as war leaders outside the city. In 242 B.C. a second praetor, the praetor peregrinus, was created to cope with matters relating to foreign nationals and Italy rather than Rome. As Rome acquired her overseas provinces more praetors were created to govern them, going out to do so in their year of office rather than afterward as propraetors. By the last century of the Republic there were six praetors elected in most years but eight in some, depending upon the State’s needs. Sulla brought the number of praetors up to eight during his dictatorship, and limited duty during their year in actual office to his law courts.
praetor peregrinus I have chosen to translate this as “the foreign praetor” because he dealt with non-citizens. By the time of Sulla his duties were confined to litigation and the dispensation of legal decisions; he traveled all over Italy as well as hearing cases involving non-citizens within Rome herself.
praetor urbanus The urban praetor, whose duties by the late Republic were almost all to do with litigation; Sulla further refined this by confining the urban praetor to civil rather than criminal suits. His imperium did not extend beyond the fifth milestone from Rome, and he was not allowed to leave Rome for longer than ten days at a time. If both the consuls were absent from Rome he was Rome’s senior magistrate, therefore empowered to summon the Senate, make decisions about execution of government policies, even organize the defenses of the city under threat of attack.
primus pilus See centurion.
Princeps Senatus The Leader of the House. He was appointed by the censors according to the rules of the mos maiorum: he had to be a patrician, the leader of his decury, an interrex more times than anyone else, of unimpeachable morals and integrity, and have the most auctoritas and dignitas. The title Princeps Senatus was not given for life, but was subject to review by each new pair of censors. Sulla stripped the Leader of the House of a considerable amount of his auctoritas, but he continued to be prestigious.
privates Plural, privati. Used within the pages of this book to describe a man who was a senator not currently serving as a magistrate.
proconsul One serving the State with the imperium of a consul but not in office as consul. Proconsular imperium was normally bestowed upon a man after he finished his year as consul and went to govern a province proconsule. A man’s tenure of a proconsulship was usually for. one year only, but it was very commonly prorogued (see prorogue), sometimes for several years; Metellus Pius was proconsul in Further Spain from 79 to 71 B.C. Proconsular imperium was limited to the proconsul’s province or command, and was lost the moment he stepped across the pomerium into Rome.
proletarii Those Roman citizens who were too poor to give the State anything by way of taxes, duties, or service. The only thing they could give the State was proles—children. See Head Count.
promagistrate One serving the State in a magisterial role without actually being a magistrate. The offices of quaestor, praetor and consul (the three magistracies of the formal cursus honorum) were the only three relevant.
pronuba The matron of honor at a wedding. She had to be a woman who had been married only once.
propraetor One serving the State with the imperium of a praetor but not in office as a praetor. Propraetorian imperium was normally bestowed upon a man after he had finished his year as praetor and went to govern a province propraetore. Tenure of a propraetorship was usually for one year, but could be prorogued.
proquaestor One serving the State as a quaestor but not in office as a quaestor. The office did not carry imperium, but under normal circumstances a man elected to the quaestorship would, if asked for personally by a governor who ended in staying in his province for more than one year, remain in the province as proquaestor until his superior went home.
prorogue This meant to extend a man’s tenure of pro-magisterial office beyond its normal time span of one year. It affected proconsuls and propraetors, but also quaestors. I include the word in this glossary because I have discovered that modern English-language dictionaries of small or even medium size neglect to give this meaning in treating the word “prorogue.”
province Originally this meant the sphere of duty of a magistrate or promagistrate holding imperium, and therefore applied as much to consuls and praetors in office inside Rome as it did to those abroad. Then the word came to mean the place where the imperium was exercised by its holder, and finally was applied to that place as simply meaning it was in the ownership (or province) of Rome.
publicani Tax-farmers, or contracted collectors of Rome’s public revenues. Such contracts were let by the censors about every five years. Publicani formed themselves into companies, and were usually powerful senior knights.
Public Horse See Horse, Public.
pulex A flea.
Punic Pertaining to Carthage and the Carthaginians. It derives from the original homeland of the Carthaginians—Phoenicia.
quaestor The lowest rung on the senatorial cursus honorum. It was always an elected office, but until Sulla laid down during his dictatorship that in future the quaestorship would be the only way a man could enter the Senate, it was not necessary for a man to be quaestor in order to be a senator. Sulla increased the number of quaestors from perhaps twelve to twenty, and laid down that a man could not be quaestor until he was thirty years of age. The chief duties of a quaestor were fiscal. He might be (chosen by the lots) seconded to Treasury duty within Rome, or to collecting customs, port dues and rents elsewhere in Italy, or serve as the manager of a provincial governor’s moneys. A man going to govern a province could ask for a quaestor by name. The quaestor’s year in office began on the fifth day of December.
Quinctilis Originally the fifth month when the Roman New Year had begun in March, it retained the name after January New Year made it the seventh month. We know it, of course, as July; so did the Romans—after the death of the great Julius.
Quiris A Roman citizen.
Quirites Roman citizens. The term was apparently reserved for civilians; it was not applied to soldiers.
Republic The word was originally two words—res publica—meaning the things which constitute the people as a whole; that is, the government.
Rex Sacrorum During the Republic, he was the second-ranking member of the College of Pontifices. A relic of the days of the kings of Rome, the Rex Sacrorum had to be a patrician, and was hedged around with as many taboos as the flamen Dialis.
Rhenus River The modern Rhine. In ancient times, it was the natural boundary between Germania and its German tribes, and Gallia and its Gallic tribes. So wide and deep and strong was it that it was considered impossible to bridge.
rhetoric The art of oratory, something the Greeks and Romans turned into a science. An orator was required to speak according to carefully laid-out rules and conventions which extended far beyond mere words; body language and movements were an intrinsic part of it. There were different styles of rhetoric; the Asianic was florid and dramatic, the Attic more restrained and intellectual in approach. It must always be remembered that the audience which gathered to listen to public oration—be it concerned with politics or with the law courts—was composed of connoisseurs of rhetoric. The men who watched and listened did so in an extremely critical way; they had learned all the rules and techniques themselves, and were not easy to please.
Rhodanus River The modern Rhone. Its large and fertile valley, inhabited by Celtic tribes of Gauls, came early under Roman influence; after the campaigns of Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus in 122 and 121 B.C.
, the Rhone Valley up as far as the lands of the Aedui and Ambarri became a part of the Roman province of Transalpine Gaul—that is, of Gaul-across-the-Alps, or Further Gaul.
Roma The proper title in Latin of Rome. It is feminine.
Romulus and Remus The twin sons of Rhea Silvia, daughter of the King of Alba Longa, and the god Mars. Her uncle Amulius, who had usurped the throne, put the twins in a basket made of rushes and set it adrift on the Tiber (shades of Moses?). They were washed up beneath a fig tree at the base of the Palatine Mount, found by a she-wolf, and suckled by her in a cave nearby. Faustulus and his wife Acca Larentia rescued them and raised them to manhood. After deposing Amulius and putting their grandfather back on his throne, the twins founded a settlement on the Palatine. Once its walls were built and solemnly blessed, Remus jumped over them—apparently an act of horrific sacrilege. Romulus put him to death. Having no people to inhabit his Palatine town, Romulus then set out to find them, which he did by establishing an asylum in the depression between the two humps of the Capitol. This asylum attracted criminals and escaped slaves—which says something about the original Romans! However, he still had no women. These were obtained by tricking the Sabines of the Quirinal into bringing their women to a feast; Romulus and his desperadoes kidnapped them. Romulus ruled for a long time. Then one day he went hunting in the Goat Swamps of the Campus Martius and was caught in a terrible storm; when he didn’t come home, it was believed he had been taken by the Gods and made immortal.
rostra A rostrum (singular) was the reinforced oak beak of a war galley used to ram other ships. When in 338 B.C. the consul Gaius Maenius attacked the Volscian fleet in Antium Harbor, he defeated it completely. To mark the end of the Volsci as a rival power to Rome, Maenius removed the beaks of the ships he had sent to the bottom or captured and fixed them to the Forum wall of the speaker’s platform, which was tucked into the side of the Well of the Comitia. Ever after, the speaker’s platform was known as the rostra—the ships’ beaks. Other victorious admirals followed Maenius’s example, but when no more beaks could be put on the wall of the rostra, they were fixed to tall columns erected around the rostra.
Roxolani A people inhabiting part of the modern Ukraine and Rumania, and a sept of the Sarmatae. Organized into tribes, they were horse people who tended to a nomadic way of life except where coastal Greek colonies of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. impinged upon them sufficiently to initiate them into agriculture. All the peoples who lived around the Mediterranean despised them as barbarians, but after he conquered the lands around the Euxine Sea, King Mithridates VI used them as troops, mostly cavalry.
saepta ”The sheepfold.” The word was plural, and referred to the wooden partitions which were used to trans-form the open space of the Campus Martius wherein the Centuries or tribes met to vote into a maze of corridors.
Salii Colleges of priests in service to Mars; the name meant “leaping dancers.” There were twenty-four of them in two Colleges of twelve. They had to be patrician.
satrap The title given by the kings of Persia to their provincial or territorial governors. Alexander the Great seized upon the term and employed it, as did the later Arsacid kings of the Parthians and the kings of Armenia. The region administered by a satrap was called a satrapy.
Saturninus Lucius Appuleius Saturninus, tribune of the plebs in 103, 100 and 99 B.C. His early career was marred by an alleged grain swindle while he was quaestor of the grain supply at Ostia, and the slur remained with him throughout the rest of his life. During his first term as a tribune of the plebs he allied himself with Gaius Marius and succeeded in securing lands in Africa for resettlement of Marius’s veteran troops. He also defined a new kind of treason, maiestas minuta or “little treason,” and set up a special court to try cases of it. His second term as a tribune of the plebs in 100 B.C. was also in alliance with Marius, for whom he obtained more land for veterans from the German campaign. But eventually Saturninus became more of an embarrassment to Marius than a help, so Marius repudiated him publicly; Saturninus then turned against Marius. Toward the end of 100 B.C. Saturninus began to woo the Head Count; there was a famine at the time, the Head Count were restless. He passed a grain law which he could not implement, as there was no grain to be had. When the elections were held for the tribunate of the plebs for 99 B.C., Saturninus ran again, successfully. Stirred by the famine and Saturninus’s oratory, the Forum crowds became dangerous enough to force Marius and Scaurus Princeps Senatus into an alliance which resulted in the passing of the Senate’s Ultimate Decree. Apprehended after the water supply to the Capitol was cut off, Saturninus and his friends were imprisoned in the Senate House until they could be tried. But before the trials could take place, they were killed by a rain of tiles from the Senate House roof. All of Saturninus’s laws were then annulled. It was said ever after that Saturninus had aimed at becoming the King of Rome. His daughter, Appuleia, was married to the patrician Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. For a fuller narration of the career of Saturninus, see the entry in the glossary of The Grass Crown.
Seleucid The adjective of lineage attached to the royal house of Syria, whose sovereigns were descended from Seleucus Nicator, one of Alexander the Great’s companions, though not one of his known generals. After Alexander’s death he cemented a kingdom which eventually extended from Syria and Cilicia to Media and Babylonia, and had two capitals, Antioch and Seleuceia-on-Tigris, and two wives, the Macedonian Stratonice and the Bactrian Apama. By the last century B.C the Kingdom of the Parthians had usurped the eastern lands, and Rome most of Cilicia; the kingdom of the Seleucids dwindled to Syria alone. Pompey then made Syria a Roman province, which left the last of the Seleucids to occupy the throne of Commagene.
Senate Properly, senatus. Originally a patricians-only body which first contained one hundred members and then three hundred. Because of its antiquity, legal definition of its rights, powers and duties was nonexistent. Membership in the Senate was for life (unless a man was expelled by the censors for inappropriate behavior or impoverishment), which predisposed it to the oligarchical form it acquired. Throughout its history its members fought strenuously to preserve their pre-eminence in government. Until Sulla prevented access to the Senate save by the quaestorship, appointment was in the purlieu of the censors, though from the middle Republic down the quaestorship if held before admission to the Senate was soon followed by admission to the Senate; the lex Atinia provided that tribunes of the plebs should automatically enter the Senate upon election. There was a means test of entirely unofficial nature; a senator was supposed to enjoy an income of a million sesterces. Senators alone were entitled to wear the latus clavus on their tunics; this was a broad purple stripe down the right shoulder. They wore closed shoes of maroon leather and a ring which had originally been made of iron, but later came to be gold. Senatorial mourning consisted of wearing the knight’s narrow stripe on the tunic. Only men who had held a curule magistracy wore a purple-bordered toga; ordinary senators wore plain white. Meetings of the Senate had to be Held in properly inaugurated premises; the Senate had its own curia or meeting-house, the Curia Hostilia, but was prone also to meet elsewhere at the whim of the man convening the meeting—presumably he always had well-founded reasons for choosing a venue other than the Senate House, such as a necessity to meet outside the pomerium. The ceremonies and meeting and feast on New Year’s Day were always held in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Sessions could go on only between sunrise and sunset and could not take place on days when any of the Assemblies met, though they were permissible on comitial days if no Assembly did meet. Until Sulla reorganized this as he did so much else, the rigid hierarchy of who spoke in what turn had always placed the Princeps Senatus and consulars ahead of men already elected to office but not yet in office, whereas after Sulla consuls-elect and praetors-elect spoke ahead of these men; under both systems a patrician always preceded a plebeian of exactly equal rank in the speaking hierarchy. Not all members of the House were accorded the privilege of speaking. The s
enatores pedarii (I have used a British parliamentary term, backbenchers, to describe them, as they sat behind the men allowed to speak) could vote, but were not called upon in debate. No restrictions were placed upon the time limit or content of a man’s speech, so filibustering was common. If an issue was unimportant or everyone was obviously in favor of it, voting might be by voice or a show of hands, but a formal vote took place by a division of the House, meaning that the senators left their stations and grouped themselves to either side of the curule dais according to their yea or nay, and were then physically counted. Always an advisory rather than a true legislating body, the Senate issued its consulta or decrees as requests to the various Assemblies. If the issue was serious, a quorum had to be present before a vote could be taken, though we do not know what precise number constituted a quorum. Certainly most meetings were not heavily attended, as there was no rule which said a man appointed to the Senate had to attend meetings, even on an irregular basis. In some areas the Senate reigned supreme, despite its lack of legislating power: the fiscus was controlled by the Senate, as it controlled the Treasury; foreign affairs were left to the Senate; and the appointment of provincial governors, the regulation of provincial affairs, and the conduct of wars were left for the sole attention of the Senate.
senatus consultum See consultum.
senatus consultum de re publica defendenda The Senate’s Ultimate Decree, so known until Cicero shortened its proper title to Senatus Consultum Ultimum. Dating from 121 B.C., when Gaius Gracchus resorted to violence to prevent the overthrow of his laws, the Ultimate Decree meant that in civil emergencies the Senate could override all other governmental bodies by passing it. This Ultimate Decree proclaimed the Senate’s sovereignty and established what was, in effect, martial law. It was really a way to sidestep appointing a dictator.
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