Dictator: The Evolution of the Roman Dictatorship by Mark B. Wilson

Reviewed by: Dictator: The Evolution of the Roman Dictatorship by Mark B. Wilson Jeffrey Easton Dictator: The Evolution of the Roman Dictatorship. By Mark B. Wilson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2021. Pp. 470. Wilson's book chronicles the history and vicissitudes of Roman dictatorship, an institution that fascinates modern observers just as it did historians of the late republic, who sought retrospectively to schematize its features and define its potency.1 In this account, dictatorship may have represented a temporary bestowal of unfettered authority [End Page 171] to a man with no colleague, but it was hardly a "constitutional" aberration. It turns out that the institution of dictatorship, which consisted of enlisting the right man for the right crisis, was as fundamental as the senate or the assemblies to the proper functioning of the government, until it slipped into desuetude and was then reduced to a tool of autocracy by the first-century warlords. Wilson's excellent book belongs less to the technical genres of legal, administrative, or military history—although he skillfully navigates each area—than to a social history of the interactions between Roman society and the individual men to whom the office was entrusted. The book consists of sixteen chapters and five appendices that catalogue all the Roman dictators and address specific problems of scholarship ancillary to the main text. Within this organization, four cornerstones of Wilson's model emerge. The first (Chapters One and Two) tracks the disjointed, and mostly theoretical, later written traditions and the problematic epigraphic documentation of Roman dictatorship from its origins to its final transformation under Caesar. Wilson rightly argues that the most comprehensive portrayals reveal a discomfort with the one-man rule that became normalized in the first century and coalesced under the principate. The tendency was to project the disdain for Sulla and Caesar back onto the whole history of the office; the historian's job is to separate this ideological antipathy from the specific features that can be recovered from the narratives (28–30). This approach pays off in the second part of the book, which establishes Wilson's model of the "archaic" dictatorship that occurred eighty-five times from 500 to 202. Chapters Three, Four, and Seven form the core, while Chapters Five to Twelve detail technical issues such as the rituals of appointment, the character of the officeholders, the symbols of office, and the selection of the magister equitum. Working from exempla about the first three "primordial" dictators, Wilson offers a new interpretation of the conditions that made the appointment of a dictator palatable to the senators and the populace, as well as of the norms every archaic dictator was to embrace upon accepting his authority. When a problem emerged, the consuls had to be unable to confront it because of absence, illness, or lack of the necessary acumen, or because the task demanded a manager whose authority to act was unchecked by a consular colleague (intercessio) or by the appeal of a tribune of the plebs (provocatio). The thread that bound the whole arrangement was the all-important mandate by which the senate restricted the dictator's field of action to one task (causa). The earliest dictators were military fixers, equipped with the mandate rei gerundae causa (78). By the middle of the fourth century, dictators were increasingly assigned domestic tasks, proving effective in conflict resolution and discharging consular-level juridical, electoral, and religious duties throughout the third century (77–87). For Wilson, the second important dimension of the mandate was the dictatorship's defining feature. Completion of the assigned task could take as long as necessary, but the dictator was expected to abdicate immediately after its resolution. This model resolves a dissonance in later narratives on the dictator's authority, namely, that the consuls seemingly continued operating independently even after the appointment of a dictator. Some readers, however, may question the model's reliance on the benevolence of those who entered the office, which assumes that most of them were "men of character," who would strive to uphold some early version of Cicero's concordia ordinum and operate on behalf of all Romans rather than...

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