d him with axes and
rods on all occasions when he appeared officially. He alone had
the right of publicly addressing the burgesses, and it was he who
kept the keys of the public treasury. He had the same right as a
father had to exercise discipline and jurisdiction. He inflicted
penalties for breaches of order, and, in particular, flogging
for military offences. He sat in judgment in all private and in
all criminal processes, and decided absolutely regarding life and
death as well as regarding freedom; he might hand over one burgess
to fill the place of a slave to another; he might even order
a burgess to be sold into actual slavery or, in other words, into
banishment. When he had pronounced sentence of death, he was
entitled, but not obliged, to allow an appeal to the people for
pardon. He called out the people for service in war and commanded
the army; but with these high functions he was no less bound, when
an alarm of fire was raised, to appear in person at the scene of
the burning.

As the house-master was not simply the greatest but the only power
in the house, so the king was not merely the first but the only
holder of power in the state. He might indeed form colleges of
men of skill composed of those specially conversant with the rules
of sacred or of public law, and call upon them for their advice;
he might, to facilitate his exercise of power, entrust to others
particular functions, such as the making communications to the
burgesses, the command in war, the decision of processes of minor
importance, the inquisition of crimes; he might in particular, if
he was compelled to quit the bounds of the city, leave behind him
a "city-warden" (-praefectus urbi-) with the full powers of an
-alter ego-; but all official power existing by the side of the
king's was derived from the latter, and every official held his
office by the king's appointment and during the king's pleasure. All
the officials of the earliest period, the extraordinary city-warden
as well as the "leaders of division" (-tribuni-, from -tribus-,
part) of the infantry (-milites-) and of the cavalry (-celeres-)
were merely commissioned by the king, and not magistrates in the
subsequent sense of the term. The regal power had not and could
not have any external check imposed upon it by law: the master of
the community had no judge of his acts within the community, any
more than the housefather had a judge within his household. Death
alone termin