Promagistrate
In ancient Rome, a promagistrate was a person who was granted the power via prorogation to act in place of an ordinary magistrate in the field. This was normally pro consule or pro praetore, that is, in place of a consul or praetor, respectively. This was an expedient development, starting in 327 BC and becoming regular by 241 BC, that was meant to allow consuls and praetors to continue their activities in the field without disruption.
By allowing veteran commanders to stay in the field rather than being rotated out for someone who may not have had much experience in the theatre, the practice helped increase the chances of victory. Whether a commander, however, would be kept was largely decided politically and often motivated by commanders' ambitions. However, the effect of prorogation was to allow commanders to retain their positions as long as political support existed, weakening the republican check of the annual magistracy over commanders' activities.
Sometimes men who held no elected public office – that is, private citizens – were given imperium and prorogued, as justified by perceived military emergencies. This was most exemplified by Scipio Africanus and Pompey: the latter held a series of promagisterial commands before ever holding a magistracy or even joining the senate. With the expansion of the quaestiones perpetuae in the late republic, it became normal for the provincial governors not to be one of the annual praetors: instead, an urban magistrate would be assigned a province after serving his urban term and prorogued.
The titles "proconsul" and "propraetor" are not used by Livy or literary sources of the republican era. Those Romans did not view a promagistracy as a formal office in the republic. For example, one was not made a "proconsul" but rather assigned pro consule ; this instead specified the means by or status with which one took a task rather than a permanent office associated with that task. While during the middle republic it was common for praetors to be prorogued pro praetore and consuls pro consule, after the Sullan era essentially all promagistrates were pro consule, regardless of previous urban magistracy.
Legal effect
A provincia was originally a task assigned to someone, sometimes with geographic boundaries; when such territories were formally annexed, the fixed geographical entity became a "province" in modern terms, but in the early and middle Republic, the "task" was most often a military command within a defined theatre of operations with unclear geographic boundaries.Prorogation did not create a new commander or even class of general. It merely allowed a magistrate to continue performing duties beyond the expiration of the magistracy. While Livy implies that prorogation extended a magistrate's imperium, this is contradicted in that imperium was not time-limited. Cicero, for example, possessed imperium even after his governorship of Cilicia expired.
Because imperium did not expire, prorogation was simply an extension or reassignment of a commander's possession of a provincia, something feasible by senatorial decree. Previously, a provincia was coterminous with a magistrate's term: i.e. a magistrate was assigned some provincia but the task necessarily expired when he rotated out. Prorogation had the effect of severing this connection. While normally someone in the theatre or province was prorogued, one could also be prorogued by assigning a someone still possessing imperium to new provincia.
While modern scholars often suppose that prorogation was intended originally to ensure that an experienced commander with hands-on knowledge of the local situation could conclude a successful campaign, in practice the extension of command was subject to "unsteady ad-hoc politics". And "unusual political influence" was required for prorogations of longer than one year.
A Roman governor had the right, and was normally expected, to remain in his province until his successor arrived, even when he had not been prorogued. According to the lex Cornelia de maiestate, passed following Sulla's dictatorship, a governor was then required to give up his province within 30 days. A prorogued magistrate could not exercise his imperium within Rome.
The nature of promagisterial imperium is also complicated by its relation to the celebrating of a triumph as awarded by the Senate. Before a commander could enter the city limits for his triumph, he had to lay aside arms formally and ritually, that is, he had to re-enter society as a civilian. There are several early instances, however, of a commander celebrating a triumph during his two- or three-year term; it is possible that the triumph was held at the completion of his assignment and before he returned to the field with prorogued imperium.
History
Emergence
The literary sources of Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus name a number of commanders in the early republic as proconsuls or propraetors. Modern historians believe the use of these titles is largely anachronistic and also self-contradictory, as Livy notes that the first promagisterial appointment was in 327 BC. In the republic after 367 BC, only three types magistrates held imperium: dictators, consuls, and praetors. At first, the appointment of dictatores and magistri equitum filled the need for additional military commanders.The first recorded prorogation and promagistrate was that of the consul Quintus Publilius Philo in 327 BC. The senate ordered Philo, whose consulship was about to expire, to continue to perform his military duties as he was on the verge of capturing Palaepolis and completing his provincia. It "probably seemed imprudent to send a new consul to take over a command that would be completed within days". Livy reports that legislation was then moved by the tribunes that "when he should continue to manage the campaign pro consule until he should bring the war with the Greeks to an end". This innovation permitted Philo to hold the military authority and responsibility of a magistrate while not actually being one. The Romans did not seem to be too bothered by the legal innovation which occurred, as Philo's success was rewarded with a triumph even though his consulship had expired.
In the following decades, it became regular practice to prorogue consuls and praetors also started to be prorogued after 241 BC. During the Second and Third Samnite Wars, prorogation became a regular administrative practice that allowed continuity of military command without violating the principle of annual magistracies, or increasing the number of magistrates who held imperium. In 307, Quintus Fabius Maximus Rullianus became the second magistrate to have his command prorogued. But in the years 296–95, several prorogations are recorded at once, including four promagistrates who were granted imperium while they were private citizens. Territorial expansion and increasing militarization drove a recognition that the "emergencies" had become a continual state of affairs, and a regular system of allotting commands developed.
In this early period, prorogued assignments, like the dictatorship, originated as special military commands, they may at first have been limited in practice to about six months, or the length of the campaigning season.
During the Punic Wars
Commanders were often prorogued during the First Punic War. During the Second Punic War, Rome started to assign private citizens both imperium and assign them to provincia. These privati cum imperio were unable to triumph, probably due to their lack of an official magistracy. The legal authority for this emerged directly from the sovereign powers of the Roman assemblies who were then able "to select any man whether or not he had ever been elected to office and make him the commander of any provincia they wished". These privati cum imperio had titles pro consule or pro praetore, in place of regular magistrates.The first instance may have been in 215 BC after the losses at Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae when Marcus Claudius Marcellus was elected suffect consul in the place of Lucius Postumius Albinus, deceased. However, he was forced to resign when the augurs detected flaws in his election; even so, the people passed laws to invest him with imperium and assigned him to take a consular army regardless. Some scholars and argue instead that Marcellus' just-completed praetorship meant he was just prorogued.
The clearest instance is in the assignment of Publius Cornelius Scipio to Spain in 211 BC before he had held any magistracy. After the deaths of his father and uncle in Spain, no consul or praetor wanted to take up the province. The people invested Scipio with the command and the necessary imperium and auspicium militiae regardless. After Scipio's victory in 206 BC, two more privati cum imperio were dispatched to the peninsula, which continued under such command until the creation of two new praetors in 197 BC made it possible to send annual magistrates. Generally, prorogation became almost the norm for the provinciae of Sicily, Sardinia, Hispania, and the naval fleets due to the lack of sufficient annual magistrates.
The expansion of promagistracies shattered the connection between military command and magisterial office, allowing any aristocrat so empowered by law the power to exercise military authority without any official status within the city's normal civilian government. Another impact of this wartime expedience was separating "magisterial precedence" from the magistracy itself, creating something akin to a military rank, evident in the jockeying of magistrates over the specific status of their prorogation: eg, desire to attain the more prestigious pro consule status. The close of the wartime crisis and the return of annual governors also dampened the length of prorogations, allowing the senate to regain more granular control over provincial assignments.
At the beginning, there were two distinct forms of prorogation – per T. Corey Brennan's Praetorship in the Roman republic – a prorogatio before the people to determine whether a provincial command should be extended and a propagatio from the senate in other cases. But by the 190s BC, the senate stopped submitting decisions on prorogation of permanent provinciae to the people for ratification and eventually all extensions of imperium were called prorogatio. After this point, the term prorogatio became a misnomer, since no rogatio was involved. This likely emerged because the decision of whether to send commanders had been replaced to the question of who should be sent, and therefore became a routine staffing decision.