Rome Made You Wait Your Turn for Power

In 180 BC the Roman tribune Lucius Villius Annalis pushed through a law that wrote down what had been an informal rule: how old you had to be to hold each office in the Republic. The law gave its name to the system — the Lex Villia Annalis — and the system itself was called the cursus honorum, the course of honors. You started, after a decade of military service, by running for quaestor at thirty. Then aedile around thirty-six, then praetor at thirty-nine, then consul at forty-two. A gap of at least two years between offices. Ten years before you could hold the same office twice.

The ladder was not a suggestion. A young patrician who tried to skip a rung found the centuries refusing to vote for him. Sulla, dictator from 82 to 79 BC, codified Villius's ages into stricter penalties. The point of the system was less efficiency than friction: by the time someone was eligible for consul, he had managed an army, audited a temple, organized public games, and judged court cases. Romans called this generalist track a feature.

The most famous person who beat the law without breaking it was Cicero. He was a novus homo — a "new man," the first in his family to enter the Senate — from a country town called Arpinum. Patrician Rome did not give him friends. He did it the only way available: he hit each office at the youngest age the law allowed, which Romans called doing it suo anno ("in his year"). Quaestor at thirty, in 75 BC. Aedile at thirty-six. Praetor at thirty-nine. Consul at forty-two, in 63 BC, the first new man elected consul in over thirty years.

The republic that built this ladder did not survive Cicero by long. Caesar and Augustus dismantled it from the top by simply ignoring the spacing rules. Octavian was consul at nineteen.