Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/100

76 meet with; for there is no Homeric word which can be regarded as such politically. It marks the power of the king as distinguished from the power of the head of a family or a village community; it expresses the supreme power of the chief magistrate in an organised State. The imperium of the Rex was technically unlimited, both in peace and war; the idea of State authority is fully expressed in the word, and had therefore been fully realised. All power exercised by any individual beside the Rex is delegated to its holder by the Rex, and emanates directly from his imperium. To him alone belonged the regal insignia, and above all the rods and axes carried before him, symbol of a power which could punish the disobedient with instant death. And this power, we must notice, was not his by hereditary right, but was given him by a formal vote of the citizens; whatever might be the mode of his appointment or election, it is certain that he only became supreme after this vote had been passed. Here, then, we plainly have a fixed constitution, expressed in formal procedure and in technical terms; and the leading feature of it is the concentration of political power in the king, and the remarkable clearness with which that power is conceived.

But all this was by no means incompatible with a customary limitation to the absolutism of the Roman king. In the Roman mind there was an instinct, which was never lost, to define, and at the same time to check authority; to make the clearness of legal definition itself assist the