The title's date of establishment is unknown, but it first appears in inscriptions of the
Late Republic, from around 80 BC onwards. Previously, the official name of the Roman state, as evidenced on coins, was simply
ROMA. The abbreviation last appears on coins of
Constantine the Great (ruled 312–337 AD), the first Roman emperor to support
Christianity. This signature continued in use under the
Roman Empire. The emperors were considered the
de jure representatives of the people even though the
senātūs consulta, or decrees of the Senate, were made at the
de facto pleasure of the emperor.
Populus Romanus in Roman literature is a phrase meaning the government of the People. When the Romans named governments of foreign states, they used
populus in the singular or plural, such as
populi Priscorum Latinorum, "the governments of the Old Latins".
Romanus is the established adjective used to distinguish the Romans, as in
civis Romanus, "
Roman citizen". The Roman people appear very often in law and history in such phrases as
dignitas,
maiestas,
auctoritas,
libertas populi Romani, the "dignity, majesty, authority, freedom of the Roman people". They were a
populus liber, "a free people". There was an
exercitus, imperium, iudicia, honores, consules, voluntas of this same
populus: "the army, rule, judgments, offices, consuls and will of the Roman people". They appear in early Latin as
Popolus and
Poplus, so the habit of thinking of themselves as free and sovereign was quite ingrained. The Romans believed that all authority came from the people. It could be said that similar language seen in more modern political and social revolutions directly comes from this usage. People in this sense meant the whole government. The latter, however, was essentially divided into the aristocratic Senate, whose will was executed by the
consuls and
praetors, and the
comitia centuriata, "committee of the centuries", whose will came to be safeguarded by the
Tribunes. , c.1400 One of the ways the emperor
Commodus (180–192) paid for his donatives and mass entertainments was to tax the senatorial order, and on many inscriptions, the traditional order is provocatively reversed (
Populus Senatusque...). ==Medieval use==