Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/277

Rh If we are left in ignorance of the historical connections of this important event, we are fortunately in possession of clearer light as to the nature of the change which was made in the constitution. The royal power was by no means abolished, as is shown by the fact that, when a vacancy occurred, a "temporary king" (interrex) was nominated as before. The one life-king was simply replaced by two year-kings, who called themselves generals (prætores), or judges (judices), or merely colleagues (consules). The collegiate principle, from which this last (and subsequently most current) name of the annual kings was derived, assumed in their ease an altogether peculiar form. The supreme power was not intrusted to the two magistrates conjointly, but each consul possessed and exercised it for himself as fully and wholly as it had been possessed and exercised by the king; and, although a partition of their functions probably took place from the first (the one consul for instance undertaking the command of the army, and the other the administration of justice), that partition was by no means binding, and each of the colleagues was legally at liberty to interfere at any time in the province of the other. Thus, where supreme power confronted supreme power and the one colleague forbade what the other enjoined, the consular commands neutralized each other. This peculiarly Roman, or at any rate Latin, institution of co-ordinate supreme authorities (which in the Roman commonwealth on the whole approved itself as practicable, but to which it will be difficult to find a parallel in any other considerable state), manifestly sprang out of the endeavour to retain the regal power in legally undiminished fulness. This motive led them not to break up the royal office into parts, or to transfer it from an individual to a college, but simply to double it, and by that course, if necessary, to neutralize it through its own action.

A similar course was followed in reference to the termination of their tenure of office, for which the earlier interregnum of five days furnished a legal precedent. The ordinary presidents of the community were bound not to remain in office longer than a year, reckoned from the day