What it was
Two consuls were elected annually and held the senior imperium of the Republic. They convened the Senate and the assemblies, proposed legislation, and commanded armies.
The year was named after them, and the consular lists are the backbone of Roman chronology.
How it worked
The two held equal power, and each could veto the other. In the city they alternated the fasces monthly, so that only one at a time was attended by lictors.
Election was by the comitia centuriata, an assembly weighted heavily toward the wealthier property classes, which is why the consulship remained in practice the preserve of a small number of families.
A man who reached the consulship without consular ancestors was a novus homo, a new man. Cicero was one, and made a great deal of it.
Powers and limits
Inside the city the consul's imperium was constrained by the citizen's right of appeal and by the tribunes' veto. On campaign it was close to absolute.
The office was limited by its annual term and by the requirement of an interval before holding it again — a rule repeatedly suspended in the late Republic.
How it changed
The plebeians gained access to the consulship by the Licinio-Sextian laws of the mid-fourth century BCE, on the traditional account, after which one consul was normally plebeian.
Under the Principate the consulship became an honour rather than a power. Terms were shortened so that several pairs held it in a year, which distributed the prestige and diluted the office.
What the evidence supports
Consular lists survive and structure Roman chronology.
The fasti consulares, preserved in inscriptions and in the literary tradition, name the pairs year by year.
Access to the consulship was in practice restricted to a few families.
Demonstrable from the fasti themselves: the same names recur across centuries, and new men are rare enough to be remarked on.
The office's early history is reconstructed.
The traditional date of 509 BCE and the earliest consular pairs come from a tradition written down centuries later.
Primary sources
Polybius, Histories 6.12
The consuls' powers within the mixed constitution.
Roman state, Fasti Consulares inscribed lists
The annual record of consular pairs, preserved in part on stone.
Cicero, Letters and speeches
The perspective of a new man who reached the consulship in 63 BCE.
Covered elsewhere
- Military command and the officer corps is treated in the warfare encyclopedia: Command structure. Who commanded on campaign, on what authority, and what happened when a constitution put two men in charge of one army — covered there, including the alternating consular command at Cannae.
How to read the evidence labels
- Evidence level: Documented
- Supported by a named primary text or by excavated material evidence.
- Evidence level: Probable
- Supported by strong inference that most specialists accept.
- Evidence level: Disputed
- Substantial specialist disagreement exists; competing readings are stated.
- Evidence level: Literary
- Belongs to poetic or mythological construction rather than to history.
- Evidence level: Mythological
- Belongs to shared religious or mythic tradition rather than to any single text.
- Evidence level: Unknown
- The available evidence is insufficient to decide.
These labels describe the status of the evidence, not our confidence in a conclusion. A claim marked Literary is not a claim we doubt; it is a claim about what kind of thing a poem is.