eans of new laws; that it should be left to his own judgment to
determine when he had fulfilled his task and might deem it time to
resign this extraordinary magistracy; and, in fine, that during its
continuance it should depend on his pleasure whether the ordinary
supreme magistracy should subsist side by side with his own or should
remain in abeyance. As a matter of course, the proposal was adopted
without opposition (Nov. 672); and now the new master of the state,
who hitherto had as proconsul avoided entering the capital, appeared
for the first time within the walls of Rome. This new office derived
its name from the dictatorship, which had been practically abolished
since the Hannibalic war;(1) but, as besides his armed retinue he was
preceded by twice as many lictors as the dictator of earlier times,
this new "dictatorship for the making of laws and the regulation of
the commonwealth," as its official title ran, was in fact altogether
different from the earlier magistracy which had been limited in point
of duration and of powers, had not excluded appeal to the burgesses,
and had not annulled the ordinary magistracy. It much more resembled
that of the -decemviri legibus scribundis-, who likewise came forward
as an extraordinary government with unlimited fulness of powers
superseding the ordinary magistracy, and practically at least
administered their office as one which was unlimited in point of
time. Or, we should rather say, this new office, with its absolute
power based on a decree of the people and restrained by no set term
or colleague, was no other than the old monarchy, which in fact just
rested on the free engagement of the burgesses to obey one of their
number as absolute lord. It was urged even by contemporaries in
vindication of Sulla that a king is better than a bad constitution,(2)
and presumably the title of dictator was only chosen to indicate
that, as the former dictatorship implied a reassumptionwith various
limitations,(3) so this new dictatorship involved a complete
reassumption, of the regal power. Thus, singularly enough,
the course of Sulla here also coincided with that on which Gaius
Gracchus had entered with so wholly different a design. In this
respect too the conservative party had to borrow from its opponents;
the protector of the oligarchic constitution had himself to
come forward as a tyrant, in order to avert the ever-impending
-tyrannis-. There was not a little of defeat in this