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The last person to bear that title, Constantine

Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2025 8:11 am
by samiaseo75
Self-description of the semi- divine (and apparently now to be hereditary) autocracy of North Korea, in which all power resided with Kim & Son (trading as "Great Leader"and "Dear Leader", respectively, the latter having now seemingly inherited Daddy's job) as a "Peoples' Democracy". One wonders what the Athenian demos would have made of that! Or, for that matter, of the nominally elective media-manipulated oligarchy of institutionalised rival factions of internationalist Capitalists which also calls itself "democracy" in many Western states. Let alone bizarre oxymoronic Newspeak such as "peoples' democratic dictatorship" and so on.

Thus also did the term "Empire" - from the Latin imperium- mean very different things to very different people throughout the history even of one "Empire", the one whence the term entered phone number list English, that of Rome. Imperium originally meant, roughly, "power of command", "rule", as applied to an individual the right to command a Roman army and inflict, subject originally to a right of appeal, the death penalty on Roman citizens. Imperator -Emperor - was originally simply the acclamation given a victorious Roman general by his troops. The first "Emperor" of the Roman Empire, Octavianus Augustus Caesar, preferred to be known simply as princeps.

First Citizen. it was not until almost a century later, in AD 69, that Vespasian assumed the title Imperator Romanorum, in the modern sense "Emperor of the Romans".IX Paleologus in 1453, did not rule any Romans at all, but was the Greek-speaking autocrat of one city and a bit of coastline in Asia Minor, although with an Italian mother, he was a bit more Roman than his predecessors in the job had been for the previous thousand years. The term Imperium Romanum, which we translate as "Roman Empire", was applied to itself by societies ranging from a farmers' republic in Central Italy ruled by an elected assembly through an Italian-dominated.