{"id":76414,"date":"2024-09-05T01:00:48","date_gmt":"2024-09-05T05:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=76414"},"modified":"2024-09-04T10:09:52","modified_gmt":"2024-09-04T14:09:52","slug":"qotd-common-misunderstandings-about-the-title-of-dictator-in-the-roman-republic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2024\/09\/05\/qotd-common-misunderstandings-about-the-title-of-dictator-in-the-roman-republic\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Common misunderstandings about the title of “Dictator” in the Roman Republic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The first important clarification we need to make is that there are, in a sense, two Roman dictatorships. Between 501 and 202 BC, the Romans appointed roughly 70 different men as dictator for about 85 terms (some dictators served more than once) through a regular customary process. Then, between 201 and 83 BC, a period of 118 years, the Romans appoint no dictators; the office dies out. Then, from 82-79<\/a> and from 49 to 44<\/a>, two dictators are appointed, decidedly not<\/em> in keeping with the old customary process (but taking the old customary name of dictator) and exercising a level of power not traditionally associated with the older dictators. It is effectively a new office, wearing the name of an old office.<\/p>\n

The nearest equivalent to this I can think of would be if Olaf Scholz<\/a> suddenly announced that he was reviving the position of Deutscher Kaiser<\/em> (German Emperor) for himself, except without the legal structure of that title (e.g. the Prussian crown acting as the permanent president of a federation of monarchs) or the constitutional limits it used to have. We would rightly regard that as a new<\/em> office, using the title of the old one.<\/p>\n

This point is often missed in teaching Roman history because Roman history is very long<\/em> and so gets very compressed<\/em> in a classroom environment. Even in a college course focused entirely on the history of Rome, the gap between the end of the old dictatorship and the start of the new one might just be a couple of weeks, so it is easy for students to accept the new dictators as direct continuations of the old ones, unless the instructor goes out of their way to stress the century-long discontinuity. This is, of course, all the more true if the treatment is in a broader European History (or “Western Civ”) course or in a High school World History course \u2013 which might be able to give the Roman Republic as a whole<\/em> only a week of class time, if even that much. In that kind of compressed space, everything gets mushed together. Which in turn leads to a popular view of the Roman dictatorship that this office was always<\/em> a time-bomb, ready to inevitably “go off” as soon as it fell into the hands of someone suitably ambitious, because the differences and chronological gap between the old, customary dictatorship and the new irregular one are blurred out of vision by the speed of the treatment.<\/p>\n

Just as a side note, this is generally<\/em> a problem with the Roman Republic. Popular treatments of how the Republic worked \u2013 much less pop-culture representations of it \u2013 are almost always badly flawed<\/strong> […] The opening minutes, for instance, of the Crash Course<\/em> video on the Romans is a series of clear errors<\/a>, one after another, in describing how the Republic functioned as a matter of law and practice. If for some reason you want to not be wrong<\/em> about the structure of Roman government, the book to read \u2013 though it is more than a bit dry and quite pricey \u2013 is A. Lintott, The Constitution of the Roman Republic<\/em> (1999). I keep thinking that, as a future series, I might take a look at the basic structures of Greek and Roman civic government (“How to Polis<\/em>, 101″ and “How to Res Publica<\/em>, 101″) \u2013 especially if I can talk a colleague into providing a companion treatment of medieval Italian commune government \u2013 both as a historical exercise but also for the world builders out there who want to design more realistic-feeling fictional pre-modern governments that aren’t vassalage\/manorialism<\/a> systems.<\/p>\n

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Roman Dictatorship: How Did It Work? Did It Work?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry<\/em><\/a>, 2022-03-18.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first important clarification we need to make is that there are, in a sense, two Roman dictatorships. Between 501 and 202 BC, the Romans appointed roughly 70 different men as dictator for about 85 terms (some dictators served more than once) through a regular customary process. Then, between 201 and 83 BC, a period […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,84,7,41],"tags":[1457,715,1345],"class_list":["post-76414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-government","category-history","category-quotations","tag-bretdevereaux","tag-constitution","tag-romanrepublic"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-jSu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76414"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91346,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76414\/revisions\/91346"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}