320 HISTORY OF ROMAN LAW 



the United States help us rightly to understand the dramatic final 

 century of the Roman Republic. When we cease to view that period 

 through the eyes of European scholars, we shall recognize that its 

 salient characteristic was the appearance on a magnificent scale of 

 those political personages whom we call "bosses"; and we shall dis- 

 cover that the Latin word for boss was princeps. Princeps, Momm- 

 sen tells us, was a word commonly used in the later Republic to 

 designate the most prominent citizens. The definition might be 

 more exact. The citizens who were designated as printipes men 

 like Sulla and Pompey and Crassus and Julius Caesar were 

 prominent before all things in political management. They were 

 the men who controlled the machinery of the senatorial and popular 

 parties. The members of the first triumvirate a body which an 

 American politician would instinctively designate as "The Big 

 Three " - were described by Cicero as principes. In our federal 

 system of government, we have not developed any boss whose 

 authority reaches beyond the limits of a single state; we have no 

 national bosses; and if we had them, our constitutional and ad- 

 ministrative arrangements are such that even a national boss could 

 not readily put himself at the head of a large mercenary army in 

 New Mexico or in Alaska, and upset the government by marching 

 on Washington. These variations, however, do not affect the sub- 

 stantial identity in political science of our boss and the Roman 

 princeps; and this identification enables us to understand that the 

 official theory of Augustus and of his immediate successors the 

 theory that the free commonwealth was still in existence did not 

 seem to the Roman public to be a fiction. Augustus was not an 

 emperor in our sense of the word; he was simply the boss raised to 

 his highest terms; and that consuls and praetors and all the other 

 officers of government were elected on his nomination, and that the 

 Senate was filled with his henchmen these were the familiar ac- 

 companiments of boss rule. From this point of view, we can fully 

 understand Pliny's remark, that the very men who were most averse 

 to recognizing anything like monarchy (dominatio) had no objection 

 to the authority of a boss (princeps). 



The development of the Roman boss into an emperor was made 

 possible by his control of the army. For this development English 

 constitutional history affords no parallel, unless in the protectorate 

 of Cromwell; and here the evolution into monarchy remained in- 

 complete. To find any really parallel processes in modern constitu- 

 tional history we must turn to the Latin peoples. 



In the field of private law, however, the movement in the early 

 Empire was substantially a continuation of that in the late Republic; 

 and during both periods the processes by which the Roman law, civil 

 and praetorian, was developed, were fundamentally the same as 



