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The Principate is, according to its etymological derivation from the Latin word princeps, meaning chief or first, the political regime dominated by such a head of state and government. The title, in full princeps senatus / princeps civitatis, was first adopted by Octavian Caesar Augustus (r. 27 BC-AD 14), the first Emperor, who chose - like the murdered dictator for life, Julius Caesar, who had formally refused the crown - not to (re)introduce a legal monarchy, but to establish the political stability desperately needed after the exhausting civil wars by a de facto regime within the constitutional framework of the republic, which had been devised precisely as an alternative to the hated early kingdom. Although dynastic pretences crept in from the start, this remained constitutionally unthinkable.
- Often, in a more limited and precise chronological sense, the term is specifically applied the earlier of the two phases of 'imperial' government in the ancient Roman Empire prior to its collapse in the West (fall of Rome) in 476, leaving the Byzantine empire sole heir.
Under this 'Principate stricto sensu', the political reality of autocratic rule by the Emperor was still scrupulously masked by forms and conventions of oligarchic self-rule inherited from the political period of the 'uncrowned' Roman Republic (509 BC-27 BC) under the motto SPQR.
- This first phase was to be followed by, or rather evolved into, the so-called dominate, in which the emperor became styled dominus ('master'), so the constitutionally sovereignty-sharing citizens became regarded as his subjects, more like the oriental tradition within hellenism.
This process is often seen as starting with the emperor Domitian, when oriental type of styles like dominus (Lord, Master) became current (though not legal), but there could by definition never be a clear, constitutional turning point, so this appreciation remains subjective, the reality is gradual development. After the Crisis of the Third Century almost resulted in the Empire's political collapse, the Emperor Diocletian replaced the one-headed Principate with the tetrarchy, in which the remaining pretense of the old Republican forms was largely done away with (he no longer used the style Princeps) as well as the territorial unity of the empire.
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