Tribune (Themiclesia)

The Tribunes (御史, ngjah-srje') are officials in Themiclesia with a range of duties relating to the maintenance of law and order in official business.

Etymology

The first character 御 has the primary meaning of "steer", and the second character 史, that of an official of records. The first character has later been extrapolated to mean "royal" by semantic shift.

History

Tribunes (御史) are an ancient office in Menghean history. Officials of record (史) are attested as early as the bronze age, where the profession was hereditary and of significant stature. In the later bronze age, officials of record have borne descriptive titles such as "inner recorder" (內史) and "great recorder" (太史), but the term Tribune was not attested until the end of the Warring States period, in the pre-unification Meng state, where it indicated a group of officials with supervisory power over the transaction of state business. Tribunes were heavily associated with the legalist state dogma of the Meng state. The head of the Tribunes was the President of Tribunes (御史大夫), who not only possessed supervisory power over the state bureaucracy but also acted as deputy to the head of government, often invited from a foreign state. Recent research suggested that the head of government, often titled Chancellor (相國 sjangs-kwek or 丞相 gljing-sjangs), was typically associated with overseeing the implementation of transformative policies, while the President of the Tribunes was the professional head of the state bureaucracy.

President of Tribunes

The President of Tribunes (御史大夫) is the leader of the Tribunes and the statutory deputy for the Chancellor or Vice Chancellor. Compared to the leaders of other organizations, the President of Tribunes has little power over his subordinates, who are distributed across a number of settings to accept reports of and investigate breaches of the law. It seems from the earliest days of the institution of Tribunes, there was a degree of independence between members of the organization and its leader. In Themiclesia, the leadership of the President was further weakened, as individual tribunes were sent on lengthy journeys to enforce the law and then report independently to the court; the President's oversight was pro forma.