Mary Beard

They twig this and they start from really the end of the second century BC onwards to tinker a bit with that temporariness.

They would say, okay, we're going to have a system when if you're consul, you won't do what you traditionally did, which was put on your military kit straight away and go out.

You'll basically stay in Rome for your year of office.

But then we'll kind of extend it because you'll become a pro-consul, a kind of a stand-in consul.

And it's during your pro-consular year that you will go out and do your military campaigning.

But of course, what happens is that that opens floodgates in a way.

And you find that people, for good military reasons, I mentioned Pompey the Great, well, he would be one, saying, look, if you want me to deal with this now major military crisis in the East, you're going to have to give me more power for longer in order to do it.

That's right.

Or I'm going to, you want me to clear the sea of pirates, you know, pirates.

I mean, when we talk about the Romans having problems with pirates, we tend to think of Pugwash and people with pirates on their shoulders.

I mean, pirates in the ancient world are terrorists.

They are organised crime terrorists.

And Pompey is put in charge of trying to get rid of them in the Mediterranean.

But he can't just do it on the old-fashioned way.

So what happens is that the governmental institutions are

start to crumble or to be at least challenged by virtue of the success of the conquests that those governmental institutions underpinned.

So Rome is a victim of its own success.

It's a city-state government trying to run an empire that that city-state government had acquired.

And that becomes, by the time you get really from the end of the second century BC through to Julius Caesar at the middle of the first century BC, you find that there are a series of these guys who sort and break out of the traditional constraints.

They take power for longer.