This unity of the Roman people, represented in the field of religion by the Roman Diovis, was in the field of law represented by the prince, and therefore his costume was the same as that of the supreme god; the chariot even in the city, where every one else went on foot, the ivory sceptre with the eagle, the vermilion-painted face, the chaplet of oaken leaves in gold, belonged alike to the Roman god and to the Roman king.  It would be a great error, however, to regard the Roman constitution on that account as a theocracy:  among the Italians the ideas of god and king never faded away into each other, as they did in Egypt and the East.  The king was not the god of the people; it were much more correct to designate him as the proprietor of the state.  Accordingly the Romans knew nothing of special divine grace granted to a particular family, or of any other sort of mystical charm by which a king should be made of different stuff from other men:  noble descent and relationship with earlier rulers were recommendations, but were not necessary conditions; the office might be lawfully filled by any Roman come to years of discretion and sound in body and mind.(4) The king was thus simply an ordinary burgess, whom merit or fortune, and the primary necessity of having one as master in every house, had placed as master over his equals—­a husbandman set over husbandmen, a warrior set over warriors.  As the son absolutely obeyed his father and yet did not esteem himself inferior, so the burgess submitted to his ruler without precisely accounting him his better.  This constituted the moral and practical limitation of the regal power.  The king might, it is true, do much that was inconsistent with equity without exactly breaking the law of the land:  he might diminish his fellow-combatants’ share of the spoil; he might impose exorbitant task-works or otherwise by his imposts unreasonably encroach upon the property of the burgess; but if he did so, he forgot that his plenary power came not from God, but under God’s consent from the people, whose representative he was; and who was there to protect him, if the people should in return forget the oath of allegiance which they had sworn?  The legal limitation, again, of the king’s power lay in the principle that he was entitled only to execute the law, not to alterit.  Every deviation from the law had to receive the previous approval of the assembly of the people and the council of elders; if it was not so approved, it was a null and tyrannical act carrying no legal effect.  Thus the power of the king in Rome was, both morally and legally, at bottom altogether different from the sovereignty of the present day; and there is no counterpart at all in modern life either to the Roman household or to the Roman state.

The Community