Tribune
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
in Roman antiquities, properly the chief-magistrate of a tribe. There were several kinds of officers in the Roman state that bore the title. (1) The plebeian tribunes, who were first created after the secession of the commonalty to the Mons Sacer (A. U. C. 260), as one of the conditions of its return to the city. They were especially the magistrates and protectors of the commonalty, and no patrician could be elected to the office. At their first appointment the power of the tribunes was very small, being confined to the assembling of the plebeians and the protection of any individual from patrician aggression; but their persons were sacred and inviolable, and this privilege consolidated their other powers, which, in the later ages of the republic, grew to an enormous height, and were finally incorporated with the functions of the other chief magistracies in the person of the emperor. The number of the tribunes varied from 2 to 10, and each of these might annul the proceedings of the rest by putting in his veto. (2) Military tribunes were first elected in the year A. U. C. 310, in the place of the consuls, in consequence of the demands of the commonalty to be admitted to a share of the supreme power. The number of the military tribunes was sometimes six and sometimes three. For above 70 years sometimes consuls were elected and sometimes military tribunes; at last the old order was permanently restored, but the plebeians were admitted to a share of it. (3) Legionary tribunes, or tribunes of the soldiers, were the chief officers of a legion, six in number, who commanded under the consul, each in his turn, usually about a month; in battle each led a cohort Also, a bench or elevated place; a raised seat or stand. a sort of pulpit or rostrum where a speaker stands to address an audience.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's account of 1921 still describes the Roman offices accurately, and the dating by A.U.C. simply converts to familiar figures: the secession to the Mons Sacer at A.U.C. 260 is 494 BC, and the first military tribunes with consular power at A.U.C. 310 are dated 444 BC. What has moved is scholarly confidence rather than the facts: historians since the mid-twentieth century have treated Livy's circumstantial account of the early tribunate as a later reconstruction, arguing that the office's sacrosanctity and the number ten were fixed only gradually, and that much of the fifth-century detail was written back by annalists centuries afterwards. The last sense Collier's gives — a raised platform for a speaker — remains standard in French and other continental usage, where a tribune is also a grandstand, while in English the word survives mostly in newspaper titles and in the rhetorical figure of the "tribune of the people".
Written for this edition, 2026.