That the power of the Kings had somehow been transferred to the Consuls was a fable convenue, a part of the familiar panorama of Roman history as a recurrent translatio of power from one nomen to the next. It was not a serious analysis of this power, unless Greek philosophy was anticipated by Valerius Publicola. Polybius, on the analogy of the two kings of Sparta, had cast the consuls for the academic rôle of τὸβασιλικόν in a Mixed Polity of which no element was absolute. In Roman antiquarian theory, accordingly, the kingship is approximated to a limited magistracy, and the two consuls are jointly reduced to that due limit by the symbolic alternation of twelve fasces. Cicero can concede them the courtesy title of potestas regia while affirming, in the same breath, the supremacy of the Senate—as Livy concedes it while affirming the superiority of the Dictator. No inconsistency was felt. ‘Potestas tempore dumtaxat annua, genere ipso et iure regia’—in its context and in Roman minds—was a resonant but abstract cliché, connoting neither a real βασυλεία nor the regnum (antithetic to ius) of political rhetoric—still less the theoretically boundless Befehlsrecht attributed to imperium by Mommsen.