ABSTRACT
The assertion that constitutional dictatorship has always been an indispensable accessory to constitutional government finds convincing demonstration in the heroic history of republican Rome. The dictatorship is a phenomenon which has intrigued almost all ordinary readers of history and almost no students of law and politics. The logical origin of the dictatorship is to be found in the peculiar political conditions prevalent in the early years of the Roman Republic. The citizen selected as dictator had his Imperium, his sacred and absolute power, conferred upon him by a lex curiata, a matter of form only, but a constitutional procedure that gave the particular dictatorship its stamp of legality. The wars of aggression upon which Rome was now embarking had nothing to do with the maintenance of a republican constitution in a free state, the true purpose of the dictatorship. Emergency government of a legal nature had been replaced by emergency government in behalf of absolutism.
