On Jul 30, 2011, at 10:25 PM, michael perelman wrote:
> ...In Rome, a dictator was
> somebody who took over during an emergency for a short period of time
> then left with no reward but society's gratitude.
In the myth. Cincinnatus back at his plow. Historically, dictatorship was something else entirely. In Republican Rome the office provided its holder absolute power in order *to reform the constitution* and dictatorship was *for life*. There were two such dictators: Lucius Cornelius Sulla and Gaius Julius Caesar. Both came to the office as a result of victory in a civil war, both were brave soldiers and brilliant generals, and both came from impoverished patrician families. Otherwise they were opposites. Sulla took power with the backing of the dominant reactionary Senatorial faction, solved the republic's financial crisis by proscribing, executing, and confiscating the wealth not merely of his opponents but of a great number of wealthy members of the equestrian (proto-bourgeois) class, and greatly reduced the legal powers of the people's tribunes. He voluntarily quit power and spent the (brief) rest of his life with his lover, an actor whom he was forced to be separate from for his whole political career. Caesar, a "popularis" leader, in contrast, won as a result of overwhelming popular support and enacted the initial steps in a broad program of populist reform. He proscribed no-one, confiscated no estates, and offered full clemency to his enemies. He sired a son by the greatest non-Roman ruler of the time. He was murdered by Senators the day before he was to set out on his decisive campaign to stabilize the empire's eastern border against the Parthians and go on to change the empire from the monopoly of a city- state's aristocracy into a coherent "oecoimenical" federation with a Senate in Rome representing the bourgeoisies of all the empire's cities.
Shane Mage
"scientific discovery is basically recognition of obvious realities that self-interest or ideology have kept everybody from paying attention to"