And then the dictatorship sleeps, for 119 years. The Romans don’t appoint any dictators at all during the second century, despite appointing, on average, one roughly every four years for the first three centuries of the republic. And then in 82, L. Cornelius Sulla Felix “revives” the dictatorship.
Now, precisely because we are now talking about the irregular dictatorship, there really is no way to lay out its features except to go through its uses. Fortunately, there aren’t that many.
In the spring of 83 BC, Sulla, who had been notionally serving in a proconsular command in the East to fight Mithridates, landed in Italy with his army; Rome had effectively come under the control of a military junta initially led by Gaius Marius (cos.107, 104-100, 86) and after his death by L. Cornelius Cinna, Gn. Papirius Carbo and Gaius Marius the younger (son of the former). Sulla openly fought the consuls of 83 (Gaius Norbanus and L. Cornelius Scipio), pushing towards Rome. As the year shifted over into 82, Carbo and Marius the Younger had themselves elected consuls. Marius was killed in 82 during the siege of Praeneste; Carbo fled to Sicily after Sulla took Rome (where he’d eventually be captured and killed by Pompey in 81).
Now this posed a problem, constitutionally: there were always to be two consuls and consular elections had to be presided over by a consul … but one consul was dead and the other fled. The customary solution to this problem was the appointment of an interrex, a five-day-long office which essentially only had the authority to hold elections for new consuls in the absence of consuls or an already appointed dictator. Prior to 82, the last confirmed interrex we know of was in 216, but there may have been another in 208, in either case this also a long-unused office. All the interrex is supposed to do is hold an assembly of the comitia centuriata which can elect new consuls; they did not have any further authority.
Sulla, sweeping into Rome, convened the Senate and directed them to select an interrex; one wonders if this was the same meeting of the Senate Sulla convened within hearing distance of his soldiers in the process of butchering six thousand captured Romans who had sided against him, in case the Senate imagined they were being given a choice (Plut. Sulla 30.1-3). In any event, the Senate selected Lucius Valerius Flaccus (its oldest member, App. BCiv 1.98) on the assumption he would hold elections; instead, Sulla directed him (with the obvious threat of violence) to instead convene the comitia centuriata and instead of holding elections, propose a law (the lex Valeria) to make Sulla dictator with the remit of rei publicae constituendae causa, “for reforming the constitution of the Republic” – an entirely new causa never used before. Of course with Sulla’s army butchering literally thousands of his political opponents, the assembly knew how they were to vote.
This is, to be clear, a thing that customarily the interrex cannot do. This is also not, customarily, how dictators are selected. The appointment of a dictator had not been recommended by the Senate and in any case has also chosen the wrong voting assembly (the comitia centuriata instead of the comitia curiata) and also the interrex doesn’t have the authority to nominate a dictator or propose a law that nominates a dictator. You may begin to see why I see this as a new political innovation and not a clear extrapolation from previous practice. None of this is how the customary dictatorship had ever worked.
The law also gave Sulla a lot of powers, which was important because most of these powers were not things that customarily a dictator could do. He could legislate by fiat without an assembly, something dictators could not do before. He was given the ability to alter the number of senators as well as choose new senators and expel current senators; a dictator had once been named, Fabius Buteo in 216, to enroll new senators, but had (according to Livy) openly noted he did not consider himself to have the authority to remove senators enrolled by the previous Censors (Liv. 23.23). Sulla rendered his authority immune to the acts of the tribunes, whereas that office had previously been the only office to exist outside of the dictator’s authority. Finally, his appointment had no time limit set to it, whereas previously all dictators had six months and no more.
What Sulla has done here is used new legislation (remember, Rome has no written constitution which could invalidate any new law) to create what was is effectively an entirely new office, which shared neither an appointment procedure, term limit, or set of authorities and powers with the previous version.
Sulla then made a lot of very reactionary changes to the Roman Republic we need not get into here, got himself elected consul in 80, and then resigned his dictatorship (after rather a lot longer than six months, making Sulla, by the traditional criteria, the worst dictator Rome had up until that point, though I doubt he saw it that way), and after that retired from public life. Sulla seems to have imagined the office he created out of thin air in 82 would be a thing sui generis, a unique office to him only, to that moment only. Which was incredibly foolish because of course once you’ve created the precedent for that kind of office, you can’t then legislate away your own example.
And so Caesar utilized the same procedure. M. Aemilius Lepidus (later to be triumvir with Octavian and Antony), the praetor in 49, put forward the legislative measure – once again, proposed as a law rather than through the normal process – to make Caesar dictator for that year (Dio 41.36.1-3), with the same sweeping powers to legislate by fiat that Sulla had. One of the first things Caesar did was openly threaten the tribunes with violence if they interfered with him; as noted the tribune’s powers were not at the discretion of the dictator in the customary system and tribunes were held to be sacrosanct and thus legally immune to any kind of coercion by other magistrates, so this too represented a continuation of Sulla’s massive increase in the dictator’s absolute authority (App. BCiv 2.41, Plut. Caes. 35.6-11).
Caesar’s dictatorship, rather than initially being without time limit, was renewed, presumably every six months, from 49 through February 44, when Caesar had himself instead appointed dictator perpetuo rei publicae constieundae causa, “Dictator forever for the reformation of the Republic”, at this point (if not earlier) reusing Sulla’s made-up causa and now making explicit his intention to hold the office for life. He was assassinated a month later, on March 15, 44 BC, so perpetuo turned out to not be so perpetual.
As an aside, Julius Caesar is sometimes given a rosy glow in modern teaching materials, in part because he got such a glow from the ancient sources (one could hardly do otherwise writing under the reign of his grand-nephew, Augustus, who had him deified). That glow was often reinforced by (early) modern writers writing with one eye towards their monarch – Shakespeare, for instance. This may be a topic for another time, but I think a fair assessment of Caesar strips away most of this glow (especially his “man of the people” reputation), except for his reputation as a gifted general, which is beyond dispute. Julius Caesar’s career was a net negative for nearly everyone he encountered, with the lone exception of Augustus.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Roman Dictatorship: How Did It Work? Did It Work?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-18.
