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Full-Text Articles in History
The Needed Man: The Evolution, Abandonment, And Resurrection Of The Roman Dictatorship, Mark B. Wilson
The Needed Man: The Evolution, Abandonment, And Resurrection Of The Roman Dictatorship, Mark B. Wilson
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Despite being an integral institution of the Roman state, employed frequently and routinely from the Republic’s earliest crises to the last days of the climactic fight with Hannibal, the Roman dictatorship is profoundly misunderstood. Perplexed by the idea of the Roman Republic—a state born out of the rejection of the preeminence of any one man—nonetheless investing the power of the state in a single unelected individual, and reacting to the anomalous first-century BCE dictatorships of Sulla and Caesar, both late-Republic historians and modern scholars have consistently described the office in ominous and fundamentally mythological terms that are largely contradicted by …