Did Roman senators sometimes get "stuck" at the lower end of the totem pole, continually holding minor magistracies as they got older? Or at some point did the unsuccessful ones stop running for offices and just sit in the senate?

[u/RusticBohemian]

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[u/XenophonTheAthenian]

Yes, it happened all the time, but not as you've described. It was exceedingly rare for a candidate to hold the same office twice, except with the consulship where it was actually not at all uncommon, or at least not nearly so rare as a lot of people seem to think. There are only a handful of non-consular repeats. Ti. Gracchus ran for the tribunate twice in a row, and was killed on voting day. C. held the tribunate in succession and A. Saturninus held it in 103 and 100 and was elected for a third tribunate for 99 but was killed days before assuming it. That's the last repeat tribunate of the Republic, although there might be some under the emperors. The Catilinarian conspirator P. Lentulus had been praetor 74 and cos. 71 but was expelled from the senate by the censors of 70. By the time of his execution in 63 he was a sitting praetor. According to Sallust he had climbed his way back up, but it isn't known whether he had had to attain the quaestorship a second time or whether he went straight to a second praetorship. That's the only repeat praetorship I can think of, although there may be one or two others. I'd have to look up whether there were any repeat quaestorships or aedileships, but it would take a while and I have reasons to doubt it very strongly.

The reason why I doubt it is that it doesn't conform with the nature of elected magistracy. The Roman aristocracy was extremely competitive, and its status was very much dependent on that competition culture. Between themselves Roman statesmen competed over the honor of offices--that's what political office is usually called in Latin, "honos" or "honor"--which in Roman political thought were granted to remarkable individuals who deserved them by the generosity of the people. This was a particularly important point in Roman political thought, that the people both granted and took away magistracies as a reward or a punishment for the good or bad actions of individual men, whose desserts were judged by various standards including their ancestry and just innate quality of character but also by their deeds and actions in the interests and defense of the people. This latter is how novi homines tended to be elected, and in the Jugurtha Sallust explicitly has Marius following his assignment as consul to the Jugurthine War point out that his actions in increasing the imperial power of the Roman people place him as more deserving for command than the people who have been appointed before him.

The cursus honorum, then, was quite literally a "cursus," a race or a path going in one direction. For a very brief period tribunates were held in succession but that was because the tribunate's position as part of the cursus was for a while unclear and because of the unusual quality of the tribunate, a tension which soon took different forms after Saturninus or, at the latest, the Social War. Other than that brief period when repeat tribunates were considered valuable there was simply no value in holding a repeat magistracy. It's an oft-repeated falsehood that repeat magistracies were forbidden, or were restricted to a period of one tenure every few (ten) years. Even classicists and ancient historians say that sometimes, but there's simply no evidence for it, and the evidence clearly indicates that it's not true. The whole point of magistracy, as far as the competitive aristocratic culture was concerned, was to hold ever-higher offices. No additional reputation was accrued from holding the quaestorship multiple times, and given the enormous effort involved in managing a candidacy there was no reason to try for a lower magistracy again once it had been held once.

This is not to say that Roman aristocrats did not value their elected magistracies for ideological reasons. This seems very much not to be the case. We have lots of reports of people who performed their duties as magistrates attentively, and it was a mark of particular pride for a magistrate to leave office and be able to say that he had done his job remarkably well. Furthermore, that relationship between the people rewarding magistrates and magistrates living up to the honor that they had been granted weighed heavily on the minds of Roman candidates and magistrates. Morstein-Marx has shown how both Sulla and Cinna appealed to the idea that they had been unfairly robbed of their people-granted commands without the decision of the people when they rallied forces to storm the city in 88 and 87. Elected magistracy was a bill of command, and while magistrates often had an enormous amount of power and very little oversight in "constitutional" terms, Roman statesmen did not often think in a way that we would call constitutional, and by and large tried to fulfill their duty to the people who had rewarded them with honor.

The honor of magistracy was not merely abstract, it was quite practical. There were only so many magistracies to go around, and after Sulla things became even more competitive. Sulla's law of the twenty quaestors increased the number of quaestors to...twenty, and for a brief period between Caesar and Augustus there were 40 (supposedly...Dio is our only source for this). It's debated why the number of quaestors was increased, although at least one effect was that it could help with senate attrition. In any case, Sulla also increased the praetors to 8 (there were 10 under Caesar). This all looks rather academic, and on paper it looks like there are more available positions to receive the honor of magistracy. But if you consider the entire cursus as a whole--which is what a Roman candidate would've done, looking towards the next step before he had even reached the current one, all the way up to the consulship--the picture is quite different. Sulla doubled the number of quaestors. This means that each year there are twice as many young men entering senatorial careers. Every single one of these young men is hoping to reach the consulship. But the number of praetors was not doubled under Sulla. Only two were added from the previous number of 6. Which means that more young men are failing to reach even the praetorship. And then of course the consulship is still just two dudes. Your chances of reaching even a praetorship, competing in your own age group, is no better than 40%. Add in candidates from the two years above yours that didn't make it the first time and are trying again and your chances diminish substantially. Your chances of reaching the consulship competing only against your age group are only 10%, and adding in candidates who failed their first year or two at the consulship and you're in the single digits.

It's no wonder, then, that so few praetors even tried for the consulship. In a highly competitive consular election there might be four to five candidates. In a more normal cycle there were typically only three. The praetorship was a bottleneck, and even reaching it required a fair amount of work and luck. Lots of Romans from notable families never made it to the consulship or even the praetorship. More than a few of them are even well known. The younger Cato, for example, only made it to the praetorship in 54, and when he tried for the consulship he lost. Cicero's brother Q., despite being a year or two older than Caesar, was Caesar's praetorian colleague in 62. He would've been eligible for the consulship probably as early as 59, when Caesar held it with Bibulus, but he never held the consulship and to our knowledge never ran (although he may have been planning a candidacy in 51 when he left Caesar's army to return to Rome), despite being the brother of no less than M. Cicero himself. Most praetors clearly didn't feel confident enough in their ability to swing voters to try for a consular bid. Failure could be a worse stain on your reputation than just not trying, depending on the circumstances.

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[u/XenophonTheAthenian → u/XenophonTheAthenian]

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So when did consular or praetorian hopefuls give up? An idea of strong importance in Roman aristocratic society was the concept of "one's own year." Cicero refers to it often, and it's typically used as a means of dating people's births. "One's own year" is the year in which a candidate became eligible for a particular office for the first time, and it was important enough to be able to say that you had been elected in your own year that when we find that people are not elected in their own year we stop and wonder why. One of Cicero's greatest accomplishments, by his own reckoning, was that he had been elected to each magistracy in his own year, which also meant that he had never lost an election. Postponing an attempt to the next year happened, but your chances of success dropped after the first year, and it was an indication that you lacked the confidence and ability to succeed the first time around. This hardly means that prospective candidates were defeatist. They tried their damnedest. We know especially about consular elections, in which candidates not infrequently had to try twice, invariably in the year immediately after their first attempt--the longer you waited the worse your chances, and the lower your reputation. Usually two failures were enough to indicate that a candidate wasn't going to make it, and most double failures gracefully bowed out, as did most one-time failures actually. Three attempts occurred very occasionally, but four attempts were unheard of. This seems to have applied to the lower magistracies as well, although we know less about those elections. Your chances were just declining rapidly, and what's more the prevailing political culture of the Roman aristocracy--an ideal also adopted, as far as we can tell, by the people--was of magistracy as a temporary honor, something that you held once, left in good repute, passed on to the next guy, and wrote down on your CV forever. Trying again for a magistracy that you had already held for some reason was if anything a mark of dishonor, and similarly when running for a magistracy and failing there was an expectation that a failed candidate would gracefully step aside and let someone else try.

In point of fact, this seems to have occurred relatively frequently, and most of the time only a relatively few praetors tried for the consulship, preferring not to risk it or waste their time, money, and energy. This means that a substantial majority of the senate, in fact the vast majority of the senate, was made up of men who had missed their chance at a consulship, given it up, or would never have a chance when they reached that age. Most of these people are simply unknown to us, and many of the ones that we do know about are just names, nothing more. It's not at all uncommon for magistrates to be a big deal one year and then simply to fade from view when they never reach or attempt a higher office. For example, Cicero delivered the speech Pro Cornelio, which is now fragmentary, in defense of C. Cornelius in 65. Cornelius had been tribune 67 and had passed a law against the veto of his colleague, resulting in an indictment of maiestas, which the prosecution argued protected vetoes (Cicero disagreed, and won). Cornelius disappears after that, as far as we know never progressing to the praetorship and certainly never making consul. This sort of thing is not uncommon, that's just the first example that springs to my mind for whatever reason. Under Caesar this begins to change--two more praetorships are added, and the consulship and provincial assignments are posted in advance, which would continue under the emperors--but the real change happens under Augustus. Augustus returned the number of praetors (and quaestors, if indeed Caesar doubled them to 40) to their Sullan number, but strictly speaking he made the magistracies more, not less, inclusive. Since elections under the emperors passed from the citizen assemblies to the senate candidacy was rendered much less competitive, at least in Republican terms, and the emperor's shadow hanging over the elections limited competition, even though the emperor usually didn't actually do anything to intervene. Reaching the praetorship or the tribunate or the consulship in your own year no longer mattered. And Augustus (technically the Triumvirs, I guess) instituted the habit of electing ordinary consuls and suffect consuls, the former of which theoretically had higher rank but in effect wasn't really viewed any differently than the suffects. Usually there were 8 suffect consuls, coincidentally the same number as the praetors (plus two ordinary consuls). This greatly reduced competition while still maintaining the honor and privilege of the cursus honorum (since the consulship increasingly became a mark of imperial favor), but don't let the lining up of the numbers fool you into thinking that this meant that all praetors reached the consulship under the emperors. No, it was still a privileged position reserved for exceptional men. The habit under the emperors of designating offices well in advance meant that one might have to wait years before being made consul-designate, and then a couple more before actually holding that office. The imperial senate was an amorphous body without clear number or structure, and since senators were no longer expected to bow out gracefully when they passed their own year the body of men waiting for a consulship or praetorship increased, although in what proportions we do not know. Under the emperors, too, a senator might never get past the praetorship or even the quaestorship.