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Now my knowledge of roman customs and traditions might be a bit rusty, but wasn't "Imperator" one of the titles granted to the emperor (ignoring for a moment, that those combined the positions of military supreme commander, head of the senate, high priest, primus inter pares -> what was the roman title for such a person)?

Now if we transfer this to SW and especially KDY and its ship-classes, shouldn't a ship classified "Imperator" be larger, more powerful ect. than a Praetor, Procurator and Mandator?

Or are we looking at Imperator as just a title for a sucessful general from the times of the roman republic? In SW the Imperator-Class might still be viewed as a design of the republic.

Could this explain the later change to "Imperial-Class", because Palpatine didn't wanted didn't wanted his "imperial dignity" connected to a "small" destroyer?

Your thoughts?

Or are we looking at Imperator as just a title for a sucessful general from the times of the roman republic? In SW the Imperator-Class might still be viewed as a design of the republic.

Yeah, I think Imperator is meant to be understood like this. It follows the Victory-class, which in turn was the result of the Victor Initiative Project , so it makes sense to connect it to a successful general in the Republic, after a victory. ;P

I also like your idea about Palpatine trying to distance himself from everything "Republic" even down to the name of the ships.

FTeik wrote:Now my knowledge of roman customs and traditions might be a bit rusty, but wasn't "Imperator" one of the titles granted to the emperor (ignoring for a moment, that those combined the positions of military supreme commander, head of the senate, high priest, primus inter pares -> what was the roman title for such a person)?

Such a person(Cäsar i.g.) was called Consul

Imperium, supreme power, was held by several magistrates of the Roman Republic, consuls, praetors and dictators. The meaning of Imperator in latin are listed in the Collins Latin Dictionary as: Commander-in-chief, general, emperor, chief, master.

Lex wrote:

FTeik wrote:Now my knowledge of roman customs and traditions might be a bit rusty, but wasn't "Imperator" one of the titles granted to the emperor (ignoring for a moment, that those combined the positions of military supreme commander, head of the senate, high priest, primus inter pares -> what was the roman title for such a person)?

Such a person(Cäsar i.g.) was called Consul

Always two there were ... Consuls, i mean. I'm talking about the position that we call roman emperor, which is occupied by a single person.

The problem that you will encounter in this subject is that, constitutionally speaking, there really was no single office for what we in the modern age call a Roman Emperor. The first acknowledged Emperor, Caesar Augustus, held the separate and distinct offices of pontifex maximus (chief priest of the Roman state religion), princeps senatus (something resembling a cross between a modern speaker of the house and father of the house), along with the powers and immunities of a consul (the de jure Roman chief of state, head of government, president of the Senate, and commander in chief) and tribunus plebis (a curious office created to prevent oppression of the plebeian class by the so-called 'optimates'). He did hold the title of imperator, but in that era the title was given to any conquering general whose troops proclaimed him thus after a smashing victory over the enemy (C. Marius, L. Cornelius Sulla, Cn. Pompeius Magnus, and C. Iulius Caesar were all imperatores). Prior to that a commanding general bore the title of dux (leader, and the root for the modern word "duke"). Only after the early years of the Principate did the word come to refer to the Emperor alone; e.g., during the reign of Tiberius Caesar Augustus, his nephew/adopted son Germanicus Iulius Caesar Claudianus – stepgrandson of the Tiberius's stepfather/adoptive father, as a taste of how baroque Imperial genealogy could be – was also an imperator, despite having been passed over for the succession to the purple.

As regards the suggestion that the Imperial class had been renamed to remove the title from what was initially a Republic-lineage ship, this does not seem likely; the two largest Star Destroyer designs, the Sovereign and Eclipse class Star Dreadnoughts, departed completely from the KDY tradition of Latin-based names; given that the Eclipse class was to provide his personal flagship, it seems unlikely that he would be so careful to remove the name Imperator from a lesser ship and then leave it aside from his personal command ship, a vessel of titanic proportions unmatched even by the Executor class.