Lex Regia

Lex Regia properly LEX DE IMPERIO PRINCIPIS. The nature of the imperium, and the mode in which it was conferred, are explained under IMPERIUM Augustus united in his own person most of the republican powers and magistracies, though they were bestowed upon him by the populus separately and at different times. After holding the consulship for nine years in succession, he received the proconsulare imperium and the potestas consularis and tribunicia for life: the powers of the censorship were granted him at first for five years, but were periodically renewed without interruption: he was also Pontifex Maximus and Princeps Senatus, whence, according to some, he took the title Princeps by which the earlier emperors were known, and which personally he preferred to the style of Imperator, which, though it belonged to him, he never asserted within the city of Rome. [PRINCEPS] The practice of investing the emperor with these various powers or authorities by distinct leges was followed for a considerable time. The preservation of the Lex de imperio Vespasiani (which seems to have been only a senatusconsultum representing the old Lex Curiata de imperio) has led to the belief that in the time of that emperor all the powers enjoyed by Augustus were conferred on the sovereign by a single statute. The fragment which is extant (Haubold, Spangenberg, Monum. Legal. p. 221) empowers Vespasian to make treaties, originate senatusconsulta, propose persons to the people and the senate for election to magistracies, extend the pomoerium, and make edicts with the force of law: it releases him from the same laws from which Augustus, Tiberius, and Claudius had been released; and provides that all that he had done before its enactment should have the same effect as if it had been done by the people. But, sweeping as the form seems to be, it is clear that the senate continued even after Vespasian to dispense the various prerogatives of sovereignty, one by one, with affected hesitation. It was not really till the time of Alexander Severus that the whole of the imperial powers (including the proconsulare imperium, the principatus senatus, and the tribunicia potestas) were conferred on the emperor uno ictu, and Severus himself remarks upon this as a novelty ( quae omnia novo exemplo uno die in me contulistis, Lamprid. Alex. Sev. 1): but from his time the practice became usual, the formal imperium however being bestowed first by a separate resolution of the senate (cf. Capitol. Max. et Balb. 8; Vopisc. Prob. 2). For the meaning of legibus solutus as applied to the emperor, see Mommsen, Röm. Staatsrecht, ii. p. 728, and Merivale, Hist. of the Romans under the Empire, iii. p. 466 sq.

The Lex de Imperio is in the Corpus Juris of Justinian sometimes called Lex Regia, an expression which occurs in Dig. 1, 4, 1, pr. (Ulpian), transcribed in Inst. 1.2, 6, and in Cod. 1, 17, 1, 7. The title of Dominus was applied to the emperor as early as Trajan, but the phrase lex regia does not appear to occur before the third century, when to avoid the comparison between rex and imperator would have been mere affectation. For the whole subject, see D. C. 53.16-19; Tac. Hist. 1.47, 4.3, 6; and Merivale, Hist. chap. 31.