This is an outstanding study of the genesis and evolution of the dictatorship from the Early Republic to Caesar. Its value lies not only in its detailed study of the sources (of which Wilson is suitably critical, while avoiding the hyper-revisionism into which some scholars have fallen) and in the very complete review it gives of the development of the institution, but also for its new and suggestive ideas. W. rightly nuances the traditional image of the dictatorship, both in general and of certain episodes such as the Sullan dictatorship. Another great virtue of the work is that it does not reduce the analysis to the two dictatorships most studied by specialists (those of Sulla and Caesar), but provides an overall view of a history to which Sulla and Caesar constitute a peculiar epilogue. Not in vain do Sulla's and Caesar's dictatorships make up only two chapters (the last) of a book of over 400 pages, of which almost 100 are devoted to appendices. Perhaps the main criticism that can be levelled at the work is precisely the fact that it is unnecessarily voluminous. Some arguments are somewhat repetitive and certain sections are redundant (Appendices B and C, for instance) or could have been integrated into the main text (E, on Mommsen's dictatorship). Nevertheless, the structure is coherent and well laid out.
The work is structured in three main sections. The first (‘Haec imperiosa dictatura’) deals, by way of a broad introduction, with the study of the sources and the problems they raise, as well as the remote origins of the dictatorship after the fall of the monarchy. One of the major challenges in the study of the dictatorship is precisely the nature of the sources, which tend to be very late, and which usually project a very distorted image of the magistracy, mostly conditioned by Sulla's and Caesar's dictatorships. Much of the author's work is devoted to dismantling this image and attempting to draw a coherent and reliable portrait of the dictatorship in the first two centuries of its existence. This is the purpose of the second and main part of the work (‘Et homo et potestas’), which deals with the various aspects of the institution: from the type of situations that required the invocation of a dictator to his renunciation, including the selection procedure and the definition of his powers in the institutional framework of the Roman Republic. We cannot dwell on each and every one of the points raised, but W.'s approach leads us to believe that the smooth functioning of the dictatorship was determined in particular by need and trust. On the one hand, it was need that motivated the appointment of the dictator and which, in turn, defined the choice of one person or another, since the consul chose the person who was considered most capable of meeting that need, not the one best positioned by reason of nomen, rank or prestige. The dictator was in turn bound to that need, whether it was a war or the holding of a ceremony, and once that need was met the dictator renounced his powers. The dictator's summa potestas was only such to the extent that it responded to that need; and the duration of his mandate depended on how long that need lasted, not on supposed time limits. At the same time, much of the success of the dictatorship was based on trust: the people and the senate trusted the consul to appoint the necessary man; the consul trusted his choice; the dictator trusted his magister equitum; and the entire Roman community trusted, in turn, that the dictator and his magister would solve the problem, restore order to the res publica and finally renounce their powers, as tradition dictated. But this confidence, according to Wilson, was not plausibly founded on any lex, but was based on custom, which was a more decisive guideline than any legal precept in Republican Rome. When Caesar (not so much Sulla, who, as the author points out, was quite faithful to the traditional patterns of dictatorship) broke that trust, he ended more than the dictatorship; if Wilson's approach is anything to go by, there is no doubt that the demise of the dictatorship is perhaps one of the most obvious symptoms of the collapse of the Republic.
By then, however, the dictatorship had already lost its place in the Republican institutional system because of the changes that Rome underwent after the outcome of the Second Punic War. The third and final part of the book (‘Aἱρετὴ τυρανννίς’) highlights among the causes of the desuetude of the dictatorship the growing willingness of the Senate directly to manage situations that, in the past, had led to the appointment of a dictator, such as the controversial Bacchanalia of 186 b.c. Without disregarding the empowerment of the Senate, perhaps even more decisive was the increasing prominence that the consuls acquired in political life. As other authors have pointed out, from the second century onwards it became increasingly common for the consuls (or at least one of them) to spend a good part—if not all—of their terms of office in Rome, which probably made it unnecessary to resort to another magistrate to solve problems that could be dealt with by a consul or even a praetor (duly supervised, moreover, by the senate). When Spartacus put Rome on the ropes, threatening the urbs itself, no one apparently appealed for a dictator, but it was praetors, consuls and promagistrates who successively took charge of the war by decision of the Senate. As W. points out, the problems that had prompted the appointment of dictators in previous decades did not disappear or change; what changed were the solutions available and the responses applied.
Beyond certain minor details (the author resorts to the much-discussed concept of ‘proconsular’ imperium, for example) and some gaps in the bibliography (e.g. L. Garofalo (ed.), La dittatura romana (2017)), this is a notable contribution not only to the study of a magistracy as misunderstood as the dictatorship, but also to the knowledge of Roman institutions as a whole. W.'s interpretation of the dictatorship as a dynamic, malleable institution, capable of adapting to the needs of the res publica and of providing solutions to the problems that arose, is undoubtedly applicable to the rest of the Roman institutional system and raises new lines of study that allow us to abandon once and for all the corseted and legalistic visions of the Roman Republic.
