By: Jesse Schmidt and Erika Schmidt
As Mace Windu and his companions announced their intent to arrest him following the death of General Grievous, Chancellor Palpatine growled a somewhat curious response: “I am the Senate.” His sentiment is one that ties Star Wars lore to an ancient Empire here on Earth, in more ways than one. The rise and fall of the Roman Senate bears striking similarity to the fate of the Galactic Republic, down to the very scene of Master Windu’s ill-fated arrest. While there may not have been as many lightsabers involved, the history of the Roman Senate was undoubtedly a tremendous influence on Lucas as he wrote the story behind the prequel trilogy.
The Roman Republic (a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them) lasted nearly 500 years. Roman Citizens - adult males living within the borders of Rome - elected two consuls to a one-year term. The consuls were responsible for appointing Senators, who made up the several-hundred strong Senate. The consuls would rotate acting as the head of the Senate and were also responsible for the administration and campaigns of the military. Those appointed to the Senate, then, were almost all high-profile Romans already. Most of them were Patricians, or upper-class, though as the Republic aged a growing percentage of appointed members were Plebians, or laborers. The Senate was in charge of most day-to-day considerations for average Romans. Elections, criminal trials, administration/ taxes and municipal funds were all controlled by the Senate. Furthermore, while consuls were in charge of military campaigns, they were directed on what campaigns to wage by the Senate. In some ways, it’s similar to the modern US system of having the President serve as Commander in Chief of the Department of Defense while the Legislative Branch (Congress) retains the power to declare war. However, the analogy falls apart in the latter half of the 20thcentury with the creation of “police actions” and unitary executive theory subsuming the balance of the coequal branches.
Representative Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones . Photo courtesy of StarWarz.com
A scene in “Attack of the Clones” shows Representative Jar Jar Binks introducing a bill to grant Supreme Chancellor Palpatine “emergency powers” to handle the growing threat of the Separatist Alliance. Sadly, we don’t have the exact text of the Constitution of the Republic, so we can’t know precisely what those powers entail. But judging by the reaction of Yoda and Mace Windu, they are dramatic enough to warrant concern for the very core of the Republic’s democratic ideals. To give them the benefit of the doubt, they probably intended to address those concerns with the Senate after they returned from a quick little rescue mission to Geonosis. But that quick rescue mission turned out to be the first battle of many in the Clone Wars, and the Jedi failed to get back to the matter of Senate authority until it was far too late. Unlike the Coruscanti-based government, we do have access to the Roman Constitution, and more importantly, we have an example of what these emergency powers might have looked like.
The sculpture of Cincinnatus in Vienna's Schönbrunn Garden. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia
Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus (more commonly known as Cincinnatus) was a former Roman consul that, after his one-year term in 460 BCE, retired to a modest 4-acre farm on the outskirts of the city. The Aequi, a neighboring tribe, broke a negotiated peace treaty and threatened to lay siege to Rome. The consuls at the time, at the direction of the Senate, marshalled armies to defeat the threat, but quickly their efforts turned into a debacle. With little standing between Rome and the Aequi aggressors, members of the Senate approached Cincinnatus and asked him to return to save the Republic. He was elected dictator, which was a specific position outlined by the Roman Senate. A dictator was elected by the Senate in times of emergency, primarily military ones, to protect and uphold the Republic by almost any means necessary, and once the crisis was overcome, would relinquish those powers. Cincinnatus is the most famous of these dictators for defeating the Aequi threat in fifteen days and returning only to immediately give up all of his power and return to his modest farm.
Bust of Julius Caesar, posthumous portrait in marble, 44–30 BC, Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican Museums Photo courtesy of Wikipedia
Cincinnatus wasn’t the only Roman dictator, and not all dictators were paragons of moral character. Julius Caesar began his career as a Roman General, leading armies to tremendous victories across Gaul and Brittania. His former allies in the Senate, fearing how popular his victories had made him with the plebians of Rome, ordered him to return home and give up his military rank. His response was to march his armies to Rome itself, starting and eventually winning a civil war that ended with him virtually unchallenged as Rome’s dictator. His rule was characterized by a number of dramatic and populist reforms, including the creation of the Julian Calendar and expansion of citizenship rights to more groups than just males living within the city of Rome. He brought much of the bureaucracy of the Republic under his central authority and established pensions and land ownership rights for veterans. The Roman patricians weren’t particularly pleased with these reforms, which did little to lessen their already considerable concern with the amount of power Caesar had amassed. On the Ide of March (March 15th), a day traditionally used by Roman citizens to settle debts, a group of Senators ambushed Caesar as he entered the Senate building, stabbing him 23 times.
Antony and Cleopatra (1883) by Lawrence Alma-Tadema depicting Antony's meeting with Cleopatra in 41 BC Photo courtesy of Wikipedia
Caesar’s death sparked yet another civil war. Mark Antony and Caesar’s nephew Octavian defeated the forces of the treacherous Senators Brutus and Cassius, establishing a Triumvirate to rule Rome along with Lepidus, one of Caesar’s closest allies. This Triumvirate split shortly thereafter, as Octavian warred against
Mark Antony and his wife Cleopatra for ultimate rule of the Roman Republic. His defeat of Antony at the Battle of Actium made Octavian the first Roman Emperor, enshrining him as Caesar Augustus and establishing officially that the Roman Republic was dead and the Roman Empire (a group of nations or peoples ruled over by an emperor, empress, or other powerful sovereign or government) had been born.
Caesar Augustus (Ocatvian) maintained the outward appearance of a democratic republic. The Roman Senate still existed, but was forced to grant him supreme executive power over the military, and permanently named him “censor”, which was another sort of executive role like Consul. He was additionally named Princeps Civitatis, of “First Citizen”. He focused much of his ambition outward, conquering numerous satellite states that served as buffers between the heart of the Roman Empire and the barbarian hordes beyond its borders. These satellite states owed allegiance, taxes, and troops to the Roman Empire when called on, but otherwise were left to handle daily affairs themselves.
Palpatine’s Galactic Empire did much the same thing… for the human worlds it ruled over. Alien planets were widely discriminated against and plundered, as seen in the exploitation of Kashyyyk in “Jedi: Fallen Order,” the subjugation of the Salient System in “Catalyst: A Rogue One Story,” and the enslavement of the Bodach’I in “Lost Stars.” These excesses were a large reason for the founding of the Rebellion to restore the Republic, in keeping with Mon Mothma and Bail Organa’s principles. But most denizens of the Roman Empire would have shared a considerable amount of political opinions with an average human member of the Galactic Empire.
Supreme Chancellor Sheev Palpatine becomes Emperor of the First Galactic Empire
Photo courtesy of StarWars.Fandom.com
The rise and fall of the Roman Senate doesn’t precisely match the fate of the Galactic Republic, but it's close enough to clearly serve as a historical counter-example. Cincinnatus is an example of what we might see coming up in the “High Era of the Republic'' while the experience of an average Roman citizen might not have been all that different, politically speaking, from a subject of Emperor Palpatine. Palpatine’s fight with Mace
Windu is a fuzzy historical reflection of the Roman Senators that plotted to arrest and kill Julius Caesar. Who knows what might have happened if Mark Antony had arrived in time to stop the conspirators as Anakin did? In this analogy, Cleopatra is Padme, which makes Naboo into Egypt, I guess. Which explains why Anakin hates sand.