On the various types of constitutional dictatorship during the Roman Republic

Abstract

The Dictatorship was the highest magistrature constitutionally permitted by the Roman Republic for dealing with exceptional conditions. Today it is also one of the hardest institutions to study. That is because whenever the dictatorship was invoked, sociopolitical conditions in Rome were no longer the same as before; also that position was occupied sequentially by different personalities; and finally, because the dictatorship was created as a way to deal with dissimilar crises, or to forestall imminent dangers to the Res publica. All of the above have turned the Roman dictatorship into a matter of great dispute amongst Roman Law scholars, with many internal issues still having no final explanation. To the above must be added that when scholars undertake the study of the emergency law on which the dictatorship is based, they do not reach scientific consensus on its various types.
We shall approach this institution by analysing first the text of Festus L. p. 216, which has been used, on the one hand, to elaborate hypotheses defending “minor or special dictatorships», and on the other, to reject such hypotheses by making the dictator the embodiment of one single attribute which consists in the supreme military command. There are no other sources besides Festus which deal with this distinction; therefore an accurate interpretation is of utmost importance for understanding its constitutional and even its historical existence. We shall go deeply into the semantics of expressions such as optima lege and imminuto iure, which will become unavoidable starting points for attempting to clarify as much as posible the various types of dictatorship, and to try to explain the legal nature of the magistrature under our purview.