Names offices and political language

Term	Meaning in these dossiers
Imperium	Lawful authority to command and exercise jurisdiction. Its scope depended on office, grant, time, and setting. It is not identical to unlimited personal power.
Consul	Senior Republican magistrate holding annual and collegial office; under the empire the title remained prestigious while its political setting changed.
Dictator	An extraordinary Republican magistrate. Early traditional appointments and the dictatorships of Sulla and Caesar must be distinguished in duration, purpose, and political foundations.
Tribune of the plebs	A magistrate with powers including protection, obstruction, and the presentation of measures. Tribunician powers later became part of the emperor's authority without making the emperor an ordinary tribune.
Censor	Magistrate associated with the census, status, and supervision of public morals and contracts. Censorial claims were also instruments of political competition.
Princeps	Literally the leading citizen. In the imperial setting it expressed preeminence while preserving a vocabulary of civic rank rather than declaring a conventional monarchy.
Augustus and Caesar	Names and honorifics that became ranks and titles. Under later collegial systems Augustus normally designated the senior imperial rank and Caesar a junior imperial ruler. Context decides the meaning.
Imperator	A commander acclaimed in connection with victory, and later an element of imperial nomenclature. Its meaning is not exhausted by the modern English word emperor.
Triumph	A highly regulated victory procession and political honor. A triumphal account presents a claim about success; it is not an impartial operational report.
Proscription	Public designation of targeted persons, associated especially with killing, confiscation, reward, and exclusion in the Sullan and triumviral settlements.
Provincia	Originally an assigned sphere of responsibility; increasingly a territorial unit of government. The territorial sense must not be projected without qualification onto every early command.
Legate	A delegated representative or commander. The meaning varies between Republican armies, imperial provincial government, and individual command arrangements.
Praetorian prefect	A senior official whose responsibilities and influence changed over time. Command of the guard in the early empire differs from the largely civilian administrative prefectures of later centuries.
Magister militum	A high military command of the later empire. Control of troops could make the office politically decisive without turning its holder into an emperor.
Comes	A companion or title of rank and service, used in several later imperial offices. Count in these dossiers is a conventional translation, not a medieval hereditary title.
Dux	A leader or commander; in later imperial contexts often a defined military responsibility. It must not automatically be translated into a modern national rank.
Foedus and foederati	Treaty and people or forces associated with treaty arrangements. Terms, obligations, recruitment, and practical relationships varied across periods and cases.
Client king	A modern shorthand for a ruler in an asymmetrical relationship with Rome. Such rulers still possessed local interests, dynastic obligations, and some capacity for independent action.
Romanization	A broad modern label for changing practices and identities. Adoption, resistance, negotiation, coercion, and local adaptation should be specified rather than presumed to follow one uniform process.
Pagan	A broad later designation for varied traditional religious practices. It does not identify one unified church, doctrine, or political constituency.
Nicene and Chalcedonian	Terms linked to specific formulations and councils. Christian disagreements changed over time and cannot be reduced to an unchanging contest between two fixed parties.
Byzantine	A modern conventional name for the later eastern Roman world. The rulers and many inhabitants understood their state as Roman.

The other guides to figures