"Imperium – power, and essentially the power to command the people under arms – was the real basis of the Roman state. However it had come into conflict with the developing rights and liberties of the Roman people, and had accordingly been divided among two senior and four junior magistrates; and certain restrictions had been placed on their use of it, by custom and statute. Imperium, especially consular Imperium, was also the object of the legitimate ambition of the ruling class, which was unwilling to share it among a larger group of magistrates, and also unwilling to allow the same individual to hold it more than once or twice in a lifetime with the result that someone else, who as a member of the aristocracy had a prescriptive right to it, was excluded.
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