What is the meaning and history of the word Imperator?

Question

As most people with historical interests know, the English word "emperor" is derived from Old French empereor which is derived from Latin imperator. IMHO it seems more correct to refer to a Roman Emperor by the full phrase imperator caesar augustus than as a plain imperator.

Anyway, during the later Roman Republic victorious generals were acclaimed by their troops with the title of imperator which gave them the right to a triumph in Rome, if the Senate agreed. I read once that the title was first used by Scipio Africanus in Spain, when Spanish leaders called him king and he said no, call him imperator, but I don't know if this is true.

Since the first Romans to say imperator probably didn't just string together random sounds, it probably had some literal meaning in ancient Latin. So what did imperator mean in ancient Latin before the beginning of the empire?

Answer 1

Imperātor originally meant "commander" in Latin—a high-ranking military officer, what we would call a commander-in-chief or a general. It comes from imperō, meaning "I command", the same root as the English word "imperative", as in "imperative mood", the grammatical form of a verb used as a command, and "categorical imperative", a moral precept without conditions, a sort of moral command. And originally imperium meant the region under a commander's or magistrate's authority, not an empire.

Here's my understanding of how imperator came to mean emperor. (Nota bene: I'm not an expert on Roman history, and I had to hit Wikipedia several times to check what follows, so take this cum grano salis.)

During the Roman Republic, the Romans were proud that they had a republic—something like the way Americans today are proud to have a republic rather than a kingdom. A position of leadership, such as Consul, had to be earned, on the basis of merit, and chosen (somewhat) democratically by the Senate, and only for a one-year term. When that came to an end with Julius Caesar's accession to perpetual dictatorship, the Romans didn't rename the nation. They continued saying that they had a republic. They kept making flags that said SPQR. Caesar styled himself imperator to retain the fiction that he was just a military commander, not a monarch. It was a bit like Qadafi calling himself a mere "Colonel" in Libya even as he held ultimate political power. Imperator, as you said, was a title bestowed on military leaders in honor of an important victory, and was often an important credential for someone running for Consul. So, calling the monarch imperator helped the Romans pretend that they still had a republic. De jure it still was a republic, de jure the (rubber-stamp) Senate still held ultimate authority, but de facto it was a monarchy.

In the years after Octavian got the, er, empire on a solid footing, imperator came to be used less and less to mean military commander and more and more to mean the person who held the position of de facto monarch of Rome. When Charlemagne started the Holy Roman Empire in 800 A.D., he styled himself imperator to establish continuity with the Roman emperors. This time it was de jure, even invested with Papal authority. That anchored the word's meaning in "top monarch" to the present day, whence English "imperial", "empire", and "emperor".

Answer 2

Very literally, imperātor comes from imperāt-, fourth stem of imperō, "to give a command". Compare English "imperious". So the original straightforward meaning was "commander, one who commands".

Originally it was a military term, equivalent to "general": the one who gives commands to the soldiers. Later this meaning spread to encompass the people in charge of all sorts of other things. But the original and overall most common meaning was military.

Caesar, in particular, was imperātor of his troops in Gallia. When he came back to Rome and won the civil war, he insisted on keeping this title rather than becoming rex, a king (because Rome had a bad history with kings). Augustus followed his example, and it eventually became a standard title: hence, "emperor".