("protectors") for certain actions. Thus, auctoritas characterizes the auctor: The pater familias authorizes – that is, validates and legitimates – his son's wedding in prostate. In this way, auctoritas might function as a kind of "passive counsel", much as, for example, a scholarly authority. Traditional imperial Roman exception to declare any legalistic concept and rule of law null and overrule prior decision making, in some military and political circumstances overrule fundamental body of law within a constitution, whether it is or isn't codified. Imperial prerogative is to protect the state from harm and its peoples. During the overruling of Roman Constitution body of fundamental laws and rule of law, a dictator may be chosen by the senate in Imperial Rome. Auctoritas principis After the fall of the Republic, during the days of the Roman Empire, the Emperor had the title of princeps ("first citizen" of Rome) and held the auctoritas principis – the supreme moral authority – in conjunction with the imperium and potestas – the military, judiciary and administrative powers. That is to say, there is a non-committal to a separation of powers, some civil rights, constitutionalism, codified constitutional state and legalist concept of law. Middle Ages The notion of auctoritas was often invoked by the papacy during the Middle Ages, in order to secure the temporal power of the Pope. Innocent III most famously invoked auctoritas in order to depose kings and emperors and to try to establish a papal theocracy. Hannah Arendt Hannah Arendt considered auctoritas a reference to founding acts as the source of political authority in ancient Rome. She took foundation to include (as augeō suggests), the continuous conservation and increase of principles handed down from "the beginning" (see also pietas). According to Arendt, this source of authority was rediscovered in the course of the 18th-century American Revolution (see "United States of America" under Founding Fathers), as an alternative to an intervening Western tradition of absolutism, claiming absolute authority, as from God (see Divine Right of Kings), and later from Nature, Reason, History, and even, as in the French Revolution, Revolution itself (see La Terreur). Arendt views a crisis of authority as common to both the American and French Revolutions, and the response to that crisis a key factor in the relative success of the former and failure of the latter. Arendt further considered the sense of auctor and auctoritas in various Latin idioms, and