What it was
Tribunes were officers of the plebeians rather than magistrates of the whole people, created on the traditional account after a plebeian secession in 494 BCE. There were ten, elected annually.
Their persons were sacrosanct: an oath sworn by the plebeians made anyone who harmed a tribune accursed. That sanction, religious rather than legal, is the foundation of everything else the office could do.
How it worked
A tribune could veto any act of any magistrate, any decree of the Senate and any bill before an assembly, by physical presence and a word of prohibition. He could also rescue a citizen from a magistrate's hands.
He was required to keep his door open and to remain in the city, because the protection he offered was only useful if he could be reached.
Tribunes convened the plebeian assembly and legislated through it. From 287 BCE its resolutions bound the whole people, which turned the office from a defensive shield into a legislative instrument.
Powers and limits
The veto could be blocked by another tribune, and it usually was. Ten colleagues with equal power meant the office normally checked itself.
The limit was ultimately the sacrosanctity, and when that failed the Republic's mechanism for peaceful conflict failed with it. Tiberius Gracchus was killed in 133 BCE and his brother Gaius in 121, both while holding or having held the office.
How it changed
Sulla stripped the tribunate of most of its powers in his dictatorship; they were restored within a decade.
Augustus took tribunician power without holding the office — he was a patrician and could not — and it became one of the two constitutional pillars of the Principate, renewed annually and used to date imperial reigns.
What the evidence supports
The tribune's sacrosanctity rested on a collective oath, not on statute.
Attested in the tradition of the office's origin. Its religious basis is what made it effective and what made its violation so grave.
Tribunician power became a pillar of imperial rule.
Emperors dated their reigns by successive grants of tribunicia potestas, recorded on coins and inscriptions across the empire.
The origin story of 494 BCE is a tradition.
The secession narrative comes from authors writing four centuries later and is not independently corroborated.
Terms
- intercessio
- The veto.
- sacrosanctitas
- Inviolability guaranteed by collective oath and religious sanction.
- tribunicia potestas
- Tribunician power, held by emperors without the office and used to number their years.
Primary sources
Polybius, Histories 6.16
The tribunes' power to obstruct the Senate and the consuls.
Plutarch, Life of Tiberius Gracchus
The tribunate used for a land law, and the killing that followed.
Augustus, Res Gestae Divi Augusti 10
Augustus on receiving tribunician power.
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.