Senate Grants Vespasian 'All That Is Usual for Emperors'

Rome needed more than a victor; it needed a framework. When Vitellius’ support collapsed in December AD 69, the Forum still smelled of smoke and fear. Senators gathered in the Curia under the shadow of the Capitoline Hill to do something daringly conservative: make the Principate procedural again [1][16].

Tacitus gives the sentence that mattered: “senatus cuncta principibus solita Vespasiano decernit”—“the Senate decreed to Vespasian all that is usual for princes” [2]. In those nine Latin words, the post-Neronian vacuum closed. The Senate did not invent new rights; it recognized customary ones and placed them, formally, in Flavian hands.

What did that mean in practice? The decree authorized convening the Senate, proposing candidates, negotiating with foreign powers, and managing Rome’s sacred boundaries. It also acknowledged the reality that soldiers had already made: one man would shepherd the state’s many levers [1][16]. The clink of styluses on wax tablets, the scrape of curule chairs on marble—these sounds said stability more loudly than any shout.

This vote also glanced forward. As Tacitus notes elsewhere, magistracies and powers were simultaneously conferred on Titus and Domitian, the emperor’s sons, making the settlement both personal and dynastic. The Palatine and Capitol were in dialogue: a family in the palace, a set of powers on the books [2].

The colors of December were not triumphant. Grey winter sky over the Capitoline. Purple in the Senate only as a legal metaphor, not yet a pageant. But that restraint mattered. After a year of improvisation by legions, Rome’s governing class chose continuity as a weapon.

In the weeks that followed, scribes and jurists gathered clauses that would appear soon on bronze. The Senate’s vote was the breath; the Lex de imperio would be the body. The curial choice to use accustomed formulas created the legal footprint Vespasian needed to turn acclamation into authority [9][1][16].