THE ORIGIN of ROMAN DICTATORSHIP by D. COHEN For

THE ORIGIN OF ROMAN DICTATORSHIP BY D. COHEN For important reasons, much interest has always been taken in Roman dictatorship by those occupying themselves with the history of the Roman constitution. Ihne, Schwegler i) , Lange, Herzog concerned themselves with it; Mommsen grappled with the problem in his Rom. Staatsrecht, partly also in his Rdm. Geschichte and his Rom. Chronologie, and in the last few years quite an amount of literature has been produced in which new courses have been struck out for approaching the problem 2). These authors, as, in fact, others had done before them, refer, for purposes of comparison, to other parts of Italy outside Rome, principally Latium, but also Etruria and the Oscan-Sabellic district. The functions of officials in these regions and in Rome are compared, and the possibility of a conformity between the Latin dictatoy (or dicator) and the Roman is considered. I do not intend, in the present article, to go into these matters, because in my investigation I want to proceed from the Roman dictator himself. This abstention does not imply any lack of respect, on my part, for the attempt made by others, but it seems to me that their investigations have not carried us any further to our aim. The magistrates who occur elsewhere exactly lack the remarkable feature of the Roman dictator which lies in the fact that this dictator gets appointed for discharging a special and specified function and resigns office when his task has been com- pleted, whereas elsewhere the dictator or allied official is an ordinary magistrate who is appointed for every year at a time and imme- diately gives way to his successor after his resignation. This differ- 1) Rom. Gesch. I (1856), 92-95. Schwegler regards dictatorship as the ,,Mittelstufe zwischen K6nigtum und Consulat" on account of the occur- rence of a praetoy maximus, and the dictatorship in Latium. Beloch, in his Rom. Gesch., 231ff., has adopted Schwegler's idea. 2) For a summary see E. Meyer, Römischer Staat und Staatsgedanke (Zurich 1948), 4278 ff.; A. Staveley, The Constitution of the Roman Republic, ig4o-i954, Historia 5 (1956), 74 ff. 301 ence, in my opinion, precludes any comparison, because the most striking characteristic of the Roman dictator is lacking with the officials elsewhere. There are those, however, who believe that an ordinary office can change into an extraordinary one 1), but in that case it must be presupposed that first the ordinary official has been transferred from elsewhere to Rome as an ordinary official (hence, the dictator for instance) and that next, in the course of time, he has made room for others (the consuls, for instance) and then has become an extraordinarius himself. The latter opinion is indeed held by many authors. This theory, therefore, completely upsets the picture of the evolution of the Roman constitution we have formed from the classic writers. For if one is to believe those scholars, the Roman consulate was not instituted in 509, after the expulsion of the kings, but in the middle of the 5th century, or in 367 in consequence of the leges Liciniae Sextiae, which, in their opinion, had a quite different intention from what tradition tells us. According to these scholars, it is impossible that such an unphilosophical people as the Romans should have been capable, after Tarquinius' overthrow, of devising such a "Paradepferd einer ausgeklugelten Staatsmannsweisheit" as the twin consulate with its collegiality and restriction to one year. Thus, Bernardi 2) looks upon the Rome of 509 B.C. as a "societa primitiva incapace ancora di reflessione critica". He arrives at this idea because a similar rapid adaptation does not occur in other primitive communities. Staveley 3), however, rightly observes: ,,The scholar, who is prepared to use anthropological arguments in order to discredit an entire written tradition is in danger of sacrificing history upon the altar of a preconceived philosophy of determinism. For the student of early Rome it is a matter of pecu- liar concern to discovei the secret of her greatness. If he proceeds by first dismissing all that Roman writers themselves have to impart and by then reconstructing her history without their aid, 1) See Ernst Meyer, op. cit., 38, who does not believe this himself, but mentions various authors who argue in favour of it, p. 4278. 2) Athen. 1952, 17.. 3) OP. cit., 100. .

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