Cursus honorum – selected aspects of Roman public law

Abstract

The cursus honorum is a Latin phrase which translates to “course of honour”. It refers to the sequential order of public offices that were held by aspiring politicians in the Roman Republic and Empire. It was the Roman idea about the order of public offices which were held by citizens. One of the requirements for taking office was the age of the candidate to hold it. Over the centuries, Roman law changed the age limits required to take up a specific office. Starting from republican times, there were regulations in Rome that required candidates for office to reach a certain age. The aim of this paper is to present the importance of the age criterion for holding offices in ancient Rome. For this purpose, the available source texts were analysed and the existing literature on the subject was examined and presented. The research used the historical method, which includes the analysis of source texts, and the dogmatic and empirical research method, which includes the critical analysis of legal sources and literature on the subject. Thanks to the research conducted, the available sources and literature on the age limits used in the cursus honorum were discovered and unified. As a result of the conducted research, the results were presented, which made it possible to identify the age limits required for a civil servant career in ancient Rome. Research in this area is of theoretical importance. Secondly, such an analysis is important for further comparative legal research. In modern legal systems, each country sets certain age requirements for participation in public life in the broadest sense (e.g., the age at which one may vote or run for office). Thanks to the ongoing research on Roman law, it will be possible to make comparative analyses and thus search for the Roman sources of contemporary laws. In this part, the research has a practical (comparative law) meaning.