The tendency towards dictator in highly stratified and highly stressed societies is a pronounced one. In the oligarchic Roman Republic, there was a clear set of fixes that would navigate the ailing society through its cascade of crises - land redistribution being chief among them - but the creditor class would repeatedly veto those varying threats to their power, no matter how minor the reform, with the eventual workaround being the military reforms eventually carried out by Marius, which would accelerate the unraveling of the Republic.
Part of the problem, as we've touched on before, is that the vetos were easier than just fixing things, as the fixes had to be spearheaded by ambitious individuals, and part of what made up that engine of expansion and innovation in Roman society was individual ambition and the driving need to outdo one's predecessors, so there was a constant and universal fear that any one individual fixing too much would concentrate too much power and become king, an old taboo established far in early Rome's past. Besides, the logic of monarchy would necessarily displace the prevailing political and economic system, which made the fortunes of many a powerful elite, and shut down those burbling pathways of political ascension in favor of a hereditary line of rulers and their chosen supporters.
This political gridlock formed a bottleneck that would prove to be explosive, and as the assassinations, mob violence, and civil wars unfurled from that explosive and frustrated energy, it appeared that the Republic was shaking itself apart. It took the seizure of power by Julius Caesar that would set in motion a series of catastrophic civil wars and purgative proscriptions, including famously the assassination of Caesar himself, finally winding down that explosive energy and settling upon a longer term dictator who would emerge from the chaos, that of Augustus as emperor.
Fascinatingly, Augustus himself, having learned from Julius' fate, worked carefully to conceal the nature of his reign, adopting more humble titles and allowing the Senate to continue to function as a body of figureheads, choosing instead to quietly gut the political machinery of the dead Republic and replace it with that of the Empire without arousing too much suspicion initially. Amazingly, a desire for dictator is reported to have been a popular one among a populace sick and tired of the dysfunctional fleecing of themselves, and that the Roman Empire itself would arise stable and powerful out of the ashes of the Republic, to expand to its greatest heights in territorial holdings in the coming centuries.
It took the careful renovation of the innermost political machinery right underneath the ruling classes noses, so that they were deposited from oligarchy into figurehead aristocracy, gradually isolated from the levers of power as the emperor quietly took power. This process was aided certainly by an early emperor with the instincts to navigate such a transition, instinctually sensitive to the moving parts of the greater political system, and manipulating them with such a broader vision in mind. Later emperors would be more self-aggrandizing, bringing attention to themselves, losing sight of that greater vision and its many working parts.
It appeared that much of the dysfunction of the earlier Republic consisted of the deterioration of a specific political and economic form over a period of time, that it was a teeming mass of frustrated people, and that violently broken apart and reconstituted in a new form, would burst forth with its existing infrastructure and labor force and enjoy a multiple centuries long resurgence in the ancient world.
However, we should take care to notice that the process of forging emperors and cultivating and maintaining their families was a brutal and costly one, and that succeeding dynasties would progressively deteriorate under these pressures, producing increasingly dysfunctional emperors before breaking down into troubled periods of revolt and assassination before being reconstituted again with new blood. We know that the Empire eventually disintegrated more completely, with the Western half breaking apart and the Eastern half standing for another thousand years. The dynamics of this process, both within long arc of the Republic and Empire themselves, and the shifting powers of the empires outside of them, are infinitely complicated but fascinating, which we'll have to return to at another time.
