Overview
The dictatorship began as an emergency magistracy limited by custom and time. Sulla transformed it into an instrument for constitutional refoundation; Caesar later held dictatorial power in a different political context.
Importance
Dictatorship matters because it exposes the Republic’s dependence on exceptional power in moments of crisis.
In the Livarva Trilogy
The Dictatorship explores Sulla’s use of the office; The First Breach examines Caesar’s later and more controversial inheritance of extraordinary power.
Ancient Sources
Livy on the early republican dictatorship; Cicero, political works and speeches; Plutarch, Lives of Sulla and Caesar; Appian, Civil Wars; Cassius Dio.
Modern Scholarship
Andrew Lintott, The Constitution of the Roman Republic; Arthur Keaveney, Sulla: The Last Republican; studies of Caesar’s dictatorship by Matthias Gelzer and Christian Meier.