On the Roman Dictatorship: Emergency Power and Republican Order

Today we’ve come to see the word dictator as one of the darkest in politics. It often suggests unchecked power often maintained through oppression, but to the Romans a dictator was something very different. So why would a republic that was founded on the hatred of kings place its trust in a single man? And why did this system last so long?

We start at the fall of the Tarquins, the last kings of Rome. A group of Roman noblemen led by a certain Lucius Junius Brutus convinced the aristocracy and people to rise up in revolt against the tyranny of the kings and expel them once and for all, establishing the res publica, the Roman Republic. To replace the kings, the Romans divided authority between two annually elected consuls who became Rome’s highest ordinary magistrates. This was known as collegiality. To restrict and prevent the return of a king, each consul would use intercessio to block the actions of the other, what we might call a veto. A Roman citizen also had the right to appeal a consul’s judgement to the Roman people through a process known as provocatio.

If Rome had consuls, why would it need a dictator? Well, apart from a consul being prevented from acting by his colleague, he might be absent on campaign, leading armies, incapacitated or even dead, and in moments of crisis the sitting consuls might simply not be the men Rome needed. Around a decade after the expulsion of the kings, that problem became impossible to ignore.

Rome had faced war and sedition, and so the Romans appointed one of the sitting consuls, Titus Larcius, as dictator. And the effect of this appointment was immediate. The Sabines, hearing of this development, believed he had been appointed specifically to wage war against them, so they immediately sent ambassadors to negotiate peace. Once Larcius had brought the immediate crisis under control, he relinquished his authority without any abuse of power.

For the Romans, the story established the founding ideal of dictatorship. A man received extraordinary authority to answer a specific public need and surrendered that authority once the need had passed.

So what stopped a dictator from holding on to power and effectively becoming another king? Well, the answer lies in how he was appointed and the purpose for which he was chosen. A dictator was not normally elected in the way that a consul was. The process began with the recognition of a problem.

Military defeat, domestic unrest, a religious crisis, or even the inability to conduct elections could create the need for extraordinary action. This demand might emerge from the Roman people, but it was normally the Senate calling upon the consuls to name a dictator. Only consuls had the authority to appoint a dictator. This is the first important distinction.

The appointment was also surrounded by religious ritual. According to Livy, a consul would take the auspices and name the dictator during the stillness of the night, usually in the hours before dawn. Once named, the dictator’s power was formally confirmed through popular assembly. He would then appoint a magister equitum as one of his first actions. The title is usually translated as Master of the Horse, but this is somewhat misleading. To keep it simple, the function was to serve as the dictator’s chosen lieutenant, subordinate to him.

Finally, a dictator was appointed for a particular reason. In the surviving Roman lists of magistrates, a dictator’s name was followed by the word causa, for the purpose of, or on account of there being a need for. Many early dictators were given the broad formula rei gerundae causa, roughly for the purpose of taking charge of affairs. Later appointments could be much more specific, to hold elections, conduct games, or perform religious ritual. Thus, a clear principle emerges. A dictator was appointed because Rome faced an identifiable problem, and his authority was directed towards resolving that problem.

This is best illustrated by the dictatorship of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. In 458 BC, a Roman army led by the consul Lucius Minucius became trapped by the Aequi. The other consul was recalled to Rome but was judged inadequate to the emergency. The Romans turned to Cincinnatus; a delegation crossed the Tiber and supposedly found the former consul working a small farm ploughing.

After putting on his toga to hear the mandate of the Senate, Cincinnatus was saluted. As dictator, he returned to Rome and selected Lucius Tarquitius as his magister equitum. Cincinnatus then raised an army, marched to Mount Algidus, defeated the enemy and relieved the trapped consul.

Having completed the task for which he had been appointed, he returned to Rome and resigned his dictatorship after just 16 days. Although the story reveals the Roman conception of dictatorship more securely than it proves exactly what happened in 458, it distils in Cincinnatus the Roman ideal, one that would be admired and remembered by the Romans for centuries to come.

So how much authority had Rome actually placed in the dictator’s hands? Polybius gives us this description:

A dictator differs from the consuls in that each consul is followed by 12 victors, the dictator by 24. Moreover, the consuls frequently have to refer to the Senate to carry out their proposed designs, but the dictator is supreme commander, and on his appointment the magistrates are all in consequence deprived of power at Rome, except the plebeian tribunes.

But this did not mean that every other Roman magistrate ceased to exist.

The consuls, praetors, and other officials continued to perform their normal duties as long as they did not interfere with the dictator’s mandate. The dictator’s relationship with legal appeal, tribunician intervention, and subsequent accountability is less straightforward.

Polybius specifically excluded the plebeian tribunes from the magistrates subordinated to him. Wilson summarises this distinction particularly well.

A dictator was legally, but not socially, unanswerable.

The clearest demonstration of this came during one of the greatest catastrophes in Roman history. In 217 BC, Hannibal destroyed a Roman army at Lake Trasimene and killed the consul Gaius Flaminius. The other consul was far from Rome, and a force of 4,000 cavalry sent to reinforce Flaminius had also been intercepted.

With no consul available to make the normal appointment, the Roman people invested Quintus Fabius Maximus with the dictatorial authority through an exceptional popular procedure. Fabius refused to give Hannibal the decisive battle he wanted. Instead he followed the Carthaginian army, restricted its movements, and waited for Rome to recover from its earlier defeats.

The Fabian strategy preserved Rome’s remaining army, but it soon became deeply unpopular. To Fabius’s opponents, his refusal to fight looked less like patience than cowardice. When his magister equitum Marcus Minucius achieved a limited success during Fabius’s absence, the victory was exaggerated in Rome and used to attack the dictator’s leadership.

The Roman people responded by granting Minucius authority equal to that of Fabius. Minucius soon launched a reckless attack and was nearly destroyed by Hannibal. Fabius intervened and rescued his army. Afterwards Minucius voluntarily surrendered his equal authority and returned to his position as Fabius’s subordinate.

Thus, a dictator may possess superior legal authority, but he still required soldiers to obey him, citizens to cooperate, and the wider Roman community to recognise the legitimacy of his decisions.

Plutarch later places the same political anxiety in the mouth of the consul Aemilius Paullus. Before Cannae, Fabius warned him that he would have to restrain the recklessness of his colleague Varro. Paullus supposedly replied,

It is better for me to encounter the spears of the enemy than to face the votes of my fellow-citizens.

Paullus would die at Cannae.

In the aftermath, with much of the Senate killed, Marcus Fabius Buteo was appointed a dictator for the narrow purpose of restoring its membership. His appointment was highly irregular. Another dictator was already commanding an army.

Buteo received no magister equitum and he was supposedly given authority for six months. He then selected 177 new senators, immediately resigned, dismissed his lictors, and descended from the rostra as a private citizen. His task had been completed. Rather than retain his authority for the remainder of the six months, Buteo voluntarily surrendered it.

This brings us to the term of office of the Roman dictator. Livy says that Cincinnatus received the dictatorship for six months, while Cicero and Dionysius also describe six months as the maximum length of office. Wilson argues that the surviving narratives do not support a universal rule under which a dictator’s authority automatically expired after six months. Some dictatorships appear to have continued for longer, while many ended after only a few days.

The more consistently observable limitation was therefore not a fixed period of time, but the completion of the dictator’s assigned task. On this interpretation, the decisive limitation was the dictator’s mandate. Rome therefore did not ordinarily appoint a dictator to govern in general. It selected a particular man to address a particular need for as long as that need remained. Then, after 202 BC, Rome stopped appointing dictators completely.

After the final conventional dictatorship, the office was not formally abolished. It simply fell out of use for the next 120 years.

Rome had not stopped facing emergencies; rather, the expanding republic had developed new ways of responding to them. Proconsuls and other pro-magistrates could command distant wars beyond a single annual term, while the Senate increasingly managed religious and domestic crises through ordinary magistrates. When exceptional danger demanded extraordinary action, Rome now tended to extend existing offices or to empower its current magistrates rather than appoint a dictator.

It was only in 82 BC, after civil war had shattered Rome’s ordinary government, that Lucius Cornelius Sulla judged it necessary to revive the dictatorship. With both consuls gone, and interrex Lucius Valerius brought a law before the people, naming Sulla dictator for making laws and reconstituting the republic. The traditional language of a specific mandate remained, but the circumstances were radically different.

Sulla had entered Rome at the head of an army, defeated his political enemies, and arranged his own appointment. He effectively defined both the crisis and its solution. His seizure of power had already been accompanied by prescriptions, executions, and confiscations.

Yet Sulla eventually resigned. By 79 BC he had returned authority to the consuls, meaning that his dictatorship, however violent and partisan, retained one ancient principle. Extraordinary power was surrendered once the dictator judged his work of restoration complete.

However, Caesar, a victim of Sulla himself, moved beyond even this. His first dictatorship in 49 BC lasted only 11 days and was used principally to conduct elections. After defeating Pompey, however, Caesar received the office for one year, then for 10 consecutive years, and finally in 44 BC became dictator perpetuo, dictator for life, with no further appointment required.

The transformation was not merely that Caesar held the office for longer. His mandate no longer possessed an external endpoint. Caesar’s continuing rule had itself become the condition of political order. Sulla attempted to construct a new republic in his vision, while Caesar made his own supremacy the new normal.

Following Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, the dictatorship was formally abolished. An office originally created to restore republican government had become inseparable from monarchy, and indeed led to the creation of the Principate, an absolute autocracy under Augustus.

Modern Political Thought

For centuries European political thinkers, returned to Rome in search of an answer. Machiavelli argued that the Roman dictatorship had never done anything but good for the republic. The danger was not extraordinary power itself, but extraordinary power exercised outside the established constitution. A Roman dictator was appointed through recognised procedures for a limited purpose and could not use his authority to make laws or alter the constitution. For Machiavelli, republics that lacked such an institution might be forced to break their own laws whenever a crisis arose.

Montesquieu also regarded dictatorship as a legitimate emergency institution. Although his interpretation was more aristocratic, he believed the office had allowed the Senate temporarily to restrain the people and restore balance to the Roman constitution.

Rousseau offered a different interpretation. His dictator was not sovereign. Sovereignity remained with the people. The dictator could temporarily silence the laws, but he could not create new laws or replace the existing constitution. He was merely a temporary agent of the people, appointed to preserve their political order when the ordinary machinery of government could no longer protect it.

In December 1776, as British forces threatened Philadelphia, the Continental Congress granted George Washington “full, ample, and complete” powers to raise troops, requisition supplies, and arrest those considered hostile to the revolutionary cause. The commission was granted for six months unless Congress revoked it sooner, which is an unmistakable echo of the traditional Roman term. Congress made a second, narrower delegation to Washington in September 1777, limited to 60 days and to the area surrounding his army.

Some contemporaries and newspapers openly described these grants as dictatorial. Others, including John Adams, disputed the comparison. Yet, when the constitution was written in 1787, no formal dictatorship was included.

Thomas Jefferson condemned Virginia’s earlier proposal for a dictator as an unauthorised act of legislative despotism. Alexander Hamilton believed that reliance on emergency magistrates exposed the weakness of a constitution. He warned,

Establish a weak executive and you must at times overleap the bounds.

John Adams instead interpreted the Roman dictatorship as an aristocratic weapon used to suppress plebeian demands. Their solution was not necessarily to reduce executive power; it was to place substantial authority in a permanent independent president capable of acting during crises without requiring the temporary suspension of ordinary government.

Some anti-federalists reached the opposite conclusion. Patrick Henry argued that a temporary dictator whose authority visibly ended with the emergency might be safer than a president who possessed executive power throughout his term.

In France, the same Roman inheritance underwent a very different transformation. During the revolution itself, “dictator” became an accusation. Lafayette, Mirabeau, Danton, and Robespierre were all accused of seeking dictatorial power. Each accusation implied that its target intended to replace popular sovereignty with personal rule.

The major exception was Jean-Paul Marat. Marat proposed a brief popular dictatorship lasting only a few days to purge the revolutionary government of counter-revolutionaries.

The dictator would supposedly remain subordinate to the people and could be removed at any moment, but the proposal proved politically poisonous. It allowed the Girondins to accuse the Jacobins of conspiring against the national convention. Danton even proposed that anyone advocating dictatorship should be punished by death.

The Jacobins therefore rejected the title while developing other forms of emergency government: the revolutionary tribunal, the committee of public safety, and the authority of the convention itself.

Today, modern democracies still face the same dilemma. Ordinary government is not always equipped to confront extraordinary circumstances. But that is for another day, thank you.