Imperator

In ancient Rome, under the Roman Republic, it originally meant commander. Later, under the Roman Empire it was used solely to designate the emperor.

"We know how far-reaching were the consequences of the agrarian crisis in Italy towards the middle of the second century B.C., and what efforts were made by certain reformers to re-establish that class of peasants which had provided the foundation for the greatness of the Roman Republic. It is interesting, too, to detect an echo of the words of Praxagora in the famous speech which Plutarch (Tiberius Gracchus, 9) puts into the mouth of Tiberius Gracchus: 'The wild beasts that roam over Italy [he would say], have every one of them a cave or lair to lurk in; but the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy the common air and light, indeed, but nothing else; houseless and homeless they wander about with their wives and children. And it is with lying lips that their imperators exhort the soldiers in their battles to defend sepulchres and shrines from the enemy; for not a man of them has an hereditary altar, not one of all these many Romans an ancestral tomb, but they fight and die to support others in wealth and luxury, and though they are styled masters of the world, they have not a single clod of earth that is their own.'"

Claude Mossé, The Ancient World of Work

[translated by Janet Lloyd] (1969).