We noticed not only that Vespasian was born outside of Rome, but also that he was of lowly birth. Perhaps the latter fact accounts in part for the hostility which the senate showed toward him, and for the effort which it made in the early part of his reign to assert its authority. The movement was short-lived. The prince and the senate were partners of unequal strength in the dyarchy which Augustus had established, and Vespasian soon made this fact clear to the senate. It came out still more clearly in the reign of his younger son Domitian, who had himself made censor for life, and by virtue of this authority drew up the lists of senators to suit his own pleasure. The tradition of the city-state had been violated and the prestige of the senate had been lowered when Julius Caesar admitted provincials to the senate. This revolutionary precedent was freely followed by emperors during the second half of the first century. This transformation of the Roman senate into a body made up of representatives drawn from all parts of the empire was part of the larger change of the Roman _imperium_ into an international world-state. The senate was still allowed to elect the emperor, but the election meant nothing more than the formal ratification of a choice made by the candidate’s predecessor or by the army, and “Caesar’s candidates” for the magistracies were always elected by the senate. The senate’s legislative powers had almost disappeared, because the senate had given up to the emperor almost entirely its right of initiative. We have already observed the importance which the “discourses of the prince” had acquired in the field of legislation. Through the opportunity which they gave him of declaring his will, and by the issuance of edicts, decrees and other “constitutions,” as they were called, the emperor took the lawgiving power almost completely into his own hands. The one real power which the senate exercised under the empire, long after its legislative and electoral functions had lost most of their meaning, was its right to sit as a court, especially in important political cases. In this capacity it had authority to impose the penalties even of banishment, deportation, and death, but by the beginning of the third century this jurisdiction, except where senators were charged with crimes, had passed to the emperor. By the close of this century the Roman senate had completed the cycle and come back to the status which it had held in the primitive city-state, that of a municipal council.