There was no king in the Roman Republic, and the politics was basically to be carried out by two consuls with a one-year term, with the advice of the Senate.
Many important positions, including the consul, have come to do it unpaid, and the career advancement course leading up to the Consul was called the "Cursus Honorum" and was considered an honorable course.
Prestigious course
What is the career advancement course in modern Japan?
Whether it's close to becoming a bureaucrat and vice-minister in the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo, or close to becoming a politician and prime minister, neither may be very close to Cursus Honorum.
The Latins who formed the Roman Republic were, first and foremost, a people of honor. The sense of responsibility was so strong that it was hard to believe that it was an ancestor of the Italians today, and in the early days of the republic, all of them were devoted to the country of Rome, which could be called a private service.
At the beginning of his career, he often started with an inspector called Ediris or a finance minister called Quaestor.
These are decided by elections, and in the early days of the republic, the prestigious aristocratic class Plebeians dominated, but the power of the Plebeians became stronger through the Licinius-Licinian law and the Hortensian law. In addition to being able to eventually become a consul even in the Plebeian class, the status of a Plebeian's own tribune has also been prepared.
If you win Ediris or Quaestor, you will be able to have a seat in the Senate, and the first member of the Senate is called "Homo Nobiles". It seems that it is an emerging aristocratic class Nobiles.
Examples of such Nobiles include Cicero, who was active at the end of the republic, and even the ordinary people could have a seat in the Senate, and even freed slaves could have Roman citizenship from their children's generation. It was possible to get on this prestigious course.
In republican Rome, anyone with talent can enter the Senate class, which is the top class of Rome, and it can be said that it is an open society where anyone can become a consul, which gives vitality to the society. It can be said that it was.
Its vitality led to patriotism, and all Roman citizens were eager to defend, as evidenced by the fact that no city turned to Carthage when Hannibal invaded the Italian peninsula.
The fall of Cursus Honorum
Even in imperial Rome, the Senate had a strict power.
From Augustus, who became the first emperor, to the emperors called the Five Good Emperors, he had a politics of respect for the Senate, but the situation became strange from Commodus, who succeeded Emperor Aurelius. The power of the sword begins to decline rapidly, and it becomes a mere ghost when the Dominatorus (dominant politics) is started by Emperor Diocletian.
Even if the Western Roman Empire was deposed in 476 AD, the Senate and Cursus Honorum remained, but when Rome was occupied during the time of Justinian, the emperor of the Byzantine Empire, the Senate itself disappeared and Cursus Honorum also disappeared. did.