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Updated: June 10, 2025
To such a pitch of meanness were the Roman senators arrived, that when the emperor's letter arrived, the senators, thinking it contained orders for bestowing on Sejanus the tribunitial power, crowded around him, each striving to be foremost in congratulating him on his new dignity; but they no sooner learned the real contents of the fatal letter than all forsook him; even those who sat near him removed to another part of the house, lest they should be accounted his friends.
However, they could devise nothing to decree, but "statues to the two Princes, altars to the Gods, arches," and other usual honours: only that Marcus Silanus strove to honour the Princes by the disgrace of the Consulship: he proposed "that all records public and private should, for their date, be inscribed no more with the names of the Consuls, but of those who exercised the Tribunitial power."
It never was; for even this parliament broke up with the cries of "some tribunitial orators," as James designated the pure and the impure democratic spirits. Smollett remarks in his margin, that the king endeavoured to cajole the Commons. Had he known of the royal tears, he had still heightened the phrase. Hard fate of kings!
The establishment, after the secession of the plebs, of the tribunitial veto, which gave the plebeians a negative power in the state, there was an incipient division of the powers of government; but only a division between the positive and negative powers, not between the general and the particular.
The late tribunitial ministry has transmitted to us as its monument little beyond the disclosure of a chronic disposition to tyranny and periodical fluctuations of preponderance. The so-called chair of Attila at Torcello is supposed to have been the seat where the officer presiding over that district long held his court sub dio.
Retain the dictatorship for a time, strengthen the plebeian element by ruthless proscriptions of patricians and by recruits from the provinces, unite the tribunitial, pontifical, and military powers in the imperator designated by the army, all elements existing in the constitution from an early day, and already developed in the Roman state, and you have the imperial constitution, which retained to the last the senate and consuls, though with less and less practical power.
Subsequently to the entrance of the dux, duke, or doge on the scene, and the shrinkage of the tribunitial power to more departmental or municipal proportions, the master of the soldiers, whatever he may have been before, became a subordinate element in the administration.
But all these magistrates were in possession of the supreme power, were kings in everything save the name; and the interesting suggestion presents itself that in the case of Venice the master of the soldiers had been part of the tribunitial organization, if not of the consular one, and that one of the tribunes officiated by rotation, bearing to the republic the same sort of relationship as the bretwalda bore to the other Anglo-Saxon reguli.
Tiberius having gained the fame of moderation; because, by rejecting the project for reforming luxury, he had disarmed the growing hopes of the accusers; wrote to the Senate, to desire the Tribunitial Power for Drusus.
The possessors and a considerable part of the patricians complaining that a person at the head of the state was recommending himself by his tribunitial proceedings, and that he was making himself popular by giving away other persons' property, had transferred the odium of the entire affair from the tribunes to the consul.
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