Roman Senate

The Roman Senate appears in Rousseau’s account as an institution whose political meaning depends on its place in the balance between popular sovereignty and government. It was not the sovereign power of the Roman people: at the Republic’s democratic stage, it served as a subordinate body, while later the Senate itself became a location of aristocratic rule. Rousseau’s history uses that change to show how a republic can drift from popular government even when its institutions retain familiar names.

The Senate in Rome’s Early Political Divisions

Rousseau describes Rome’s founding population as an army assembled by Romulus from Albans, Sabines, and foreigners, organized into tribes, curiae, and smaller divisions. The account emphasizes that these arrangements were initially military in character, but that Rome’s early organization anticipated the political needs of a city destined to become powerful. The Senate belongs to the later institutional history Rousseau traces through this changing Roman order; the founding divisions supply the setting for the development of a larger political structure.

Subordinate to the Sovereign People

In Rousseau’s interpretation, the expulsion of the Tarquins marks the true birth of the Republic, but did not immediately establish a settled republican form. The patriciate remained, leaving the new order divided between hereditary aristocracy and democracy. He identifies the establishment of the tribunate as the point at which Rome acquired a true government and a genuine democracy. At that stage, the people were not only sovereign but also magistrate and judge; the Senate, by contrast, was merely a subordinate tribunal, intended to temper and concentrate the work of government. The consuls, despite their patrician status and command in war, were in Rome no more than presidents of the people.

That arrangement defines the Senate’s initial constitutional limit in Rousseau’s account. It could contribute to the conduct of government, but it did not displace the people as sovereign or claim the people’s authority as its own. Its subordinate status matters because Rousseau distinguishes the power that makes law from the institutions that administer political affairs: the Senate’s place in government did not make it the source of the people’s sovereignty.

From Tribunal to Aristocratic Power

Rousseau argues that the Roman government thereafter followed its natural tendency toward aristocracy. The patriciate, he says, effectively abolished itself as the defining aristocratic body; aristocratic power was located instead in the Senate, which included both patricians and plebeians. It also appeared in the tribunes when they began to usurp an active governing function. Institutional labels could not alter the political substance: whenever rulers governed on behalf of the people, Rousseau considered the government aristocratic, whatever names those rulers bore.

This change makes the Senate part of a broader movement away from the popular arrangement Rousseau associates with the Republic’s genuine democratic stage. The Senate’s membership was no longer reducible to the old patrician order, but that broader composition did not, in his analysis, make its governing role popular. The decisive question was where effective rule lay, not which social groups or titles an institution formally contained.

Civic Rights and the Limits of the Senate

Rousseau also presents the Senate as evidence of the limits placed on state power over individual citizens. He contrasts Roman practice with the example of Macedon, where Alexander the Great would not put a Macedonian criminal to death without a defense before fellow citizens and their judgment. At Rome, Rousseau says, a citizen’s life was so sacred that condemnation required an assembly of the whole people: neither the Senate nor even the consuls possessed that right. The crime and punishment of a citizen were treated as a public calamity, not as a matter that the Senate could settle on its own authority.

The Lex Porcia further illustrates this solicitude: for those willing to survive the loss of their country, it commuted the death penalty to banishment. Rousseau links such protections to Roman fellow-feeling and respect for the civic name. In this argument, the Senate’s lack of power to condemn a citizen is not incidental. It marks the difference between public authority exercised within limits and a ruling body that treats citizens as disposable instruments of state power.

The Senate in the Republic’s Decline

Rousseau reads the Senate’s rise as part of the Republic’s movement toward aristocracy, not as proof that Rome escaped the tendency of governments to degenerate. He traces the abuse of aristocracy to civil wars and the triumvirate, followed by the effective monarchies of Sulla, Julius Caesar, and Augustus, and finally the dissolution of the state under Tiberius. The Senate’s evolving role therefore belongs to a political history in which popular sovereignty can be displaced by governing bodies and concentrated power. For Rousseau, Rome confirms the danger he identifies: a state’s institutions may persist in name while the location and character of rule change beneath them.