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Senatus consultum ultimum
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Senatus consultum ultimum
Senatus consultum ultimum ("final decree of the Senate", often abbreviated to SCU) is the modern term given to resolutions of the Roman Senate lending its moral support for magistrates to use the full extent of their powers and ignore the laws to safeguard the state.
The decree has been interpreted to mean something akin to martial law, a suspension of the constitution, or a state of emergency. However, it is generally accepted that the senate did not have power to make or provide exceptions to laws. No laws were actually suspended; the senate merely lent its moral authority to defend a magistrate's extra-legal acts.
First used against Gaius Gracchus in 121 BC to suppress a violent protest against repeal of a colonisation law and accepted thereafter, recourse to the decree accelerated over the course of the last century of the republic. Its use was politically disputed, although usually in terms of whether a decree was justified by the challenges facing the state rather than in terms of its overarching legality.
The decree does not have a specific name in the sources, where it is usually mentioned "by quoting what was obviously its opening advisory statements to the magistrate who had it passed". Rather, it is a modern term that emerges from Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Civili, in which he writes:
Recourse is had to that extreme and final decree of the senate...
Caesar coined the term from his tendentious claim that it was passed as a last resort when, in Caesar's words, "the city of Rome itself was already practically in flames and there was despair over the safety of everyone in the state". Since this is the shortest mention of the decree available, "the label... seems to have stuck". The specific phraseology of the senatorial resolution was much longer:
That the consuls, praetors, tribunes of the people, and proconsuls in the city, should take care that the state received no injury.
Earlier versions of the decree may have, however, mentioned only the consul presiding. A minority of modern scholars prefer the name senatus consultum de re publica defendenda rather than Caesar's coinage.
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Senatus consultum ultimum
Senatus consultum ultimum ("final decree of the Senate", often abbreviated to SCU) is the modern term given to resolutions of the Roman Senate lending its moral support for magistrates to use the full extent of their powers and ignore the laws to safeguard the state.
The decree has been interpreted to mean something akin to martial law, a suspension of the constitution, or a state of emergency. However, it is generally accepted that the senate did not have power to make or provide exceptions to laws. No laws were actually suspended; the senate merely lent its moral authority to defend a magistrate's extra-legal acts.
First used against Gaius Gracchus in 121 BC to suppress a violent protest against repeal of a colonisation law and accepted thereafter, recourse to the decree accelerated over the course of the last century of the republic. Its use was politically disputed, although usually in terms of whether a decree was justified by the challenges facing the state rather than in terms of its overarching legality.
The decree does not have a specific name in the sources, where it is usually mentioned "by quoting what was obviously its opening advisory statements to the magistrate who had it passed". Rather, it is a modern term that emerges from Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Civili, in which he writes:
Recourse is had to that extreme and final decree of the senate...
Caesar coined the term from his tendentious claim that it was passed as a last resort when, in Caesar's words, "the city of Rome itself was already practically in flames and there was despair over the safety of everyone in the state". Since this is the shortest mention of the decree available, "the label... seems to have stuck". The specific phraseology of the senatorial resolution was much longer:
That the consuls, praetors, tribunes of the people, and proconsuls in the city, should take care that the state received no injury.
Earlier versions of the decree may have, however, mentioned only the consul presiding. A minority of modern scholars prefer the name senatus consultum de re publica defendenda rather than Caesar's coinage.
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