Roman senators invented the filibuster because every meeting had to end by nightfall
The Roman Senate's decrees were technically only advice, yet magistrates nearly always obeyed them. Every senator could speak before a vote, and sessions had to close at dusk, so a determined speaker could simply talk a proposal to death. The institution itself outlived the western empire by more than a century.
The word comes from senex, old man, so a senate is literally an assembly of elders. Tradition says Romulus founded it with 100 heads of leading clans, whose descendants became the patricians; a later king added another 100 from lesser families, and the last king, Tarquinius Superbus, executed many members without replacing them. When the Republic began in 509 BC, the first consuls enrolled new men and brought the total to 300. Under the kings, its most important job had been choosing each new monarch, with the people's vote largely a formality.
In the Republic, senators served for life, controlled the treasury, assigned provincial governorships, guided war policy and handled diplomacy. Their decrees, the senatus consulta, could be overridden by laws passed in the popular assemblies but usually carried the day. In emergencies the Senate could back a dictator, and after 202 BC it relied instead on an ultimate decree authorising consuls to do whatever the crisis required. Senators wore a broad purple stripe and maroon shoes, and by the age of Augustus needed property worth a million sesterces. They were barred from banking, public contracts and owning large merchant ships.
Procedure was bound up with religion. A sacrifice and a reading of omens came before any session, meetings could only be held in consecrated places no more than a Roman mile beyond the city boundary, and debate began at dawn. Senators spoke in order of seniority, and contested votes were settled by physically walking to either side of the chamber.
Its power peaked in the middle Republic and slid after the reforms of the Gracchus brothers, then again under the emperors. Diocletian's reforms made it irrelevant and Constantine created a rival senate in Constantinople. The western body kept meeting under Odoacer and the Ostrogoths, and its last recorded public act dates to 603; the eastern one lasted into the early 13th century.
Source: Roman Senate
