And if you asked back then whether Rome was a republic or a monarchy (using any commonly recognized word for the latter), to a Roman it would have sounded as laughable as if you gave the same question to a modern-day American.
I’m not sure about this. Caesar was murdered because of fears that he would become a king, and surely well-informed later Romans would have realized that the concentration of power under the emperors matched or surpassed the one under Caesar (plus hereditary succession, of course). And in fact Tacitus’ ‘Annals’ begin with a contrast between the “freedom and consulships” that started with Lucius Brutus and the “despotism” of Augustus and his successors. Perhaps a patriotic double standard (“we Romans are not slaves to a king like those Eastern barbarians”) would have prevented them from calling the Empire a monarchy, but if asked whether the actual organization of their government resembled more closely that of Rome in 200 BC or that of the Kingdom of the Parthians, they might have admitted to the latter.
Sure, with years the pretense became increasingly transparent—and of course, already in the time of Caesar, it was clear to any informed observer that things were very different from the heyday of the republican institutions. Still, I’m sure a second-century Roman would have been offended if one were to suggest that the proud republican “SPQR” inscriptions on public buildings and military standards were just a hypocritical sham, even if that claim would have been more or less correct.
Moreover, the imperial succession is one issue where it seems like the need to maintain the pretense had serious practical implications, since it was impossible to legislate clear succession rules that would recognize the imperial office as hereditary. In this regard, as much as the republican institutions had become increasingly irrelevant from Augustus on, there was still a deep and fundamental difference from explicit hereditary monarchies such as the Parthian Empire.
I’m not sure about this. Caesar was murdered because of fears that he would become a king, and surely well-informed later Romans would have realized that the concentration of power under the emperors matched or surpassed the one under Caesar (plus hereditary succession, of course). And in fact Tacitus’ ‘Annals’ begin with a contrast between the “freedom and consulships” that started with Lucius Brutus and the “despotism” of Augustus and his successors. Perhaps a patriotic double standard (“we Romans are not slaves to a king like those Eastern barbarians”) would have prevented them from calling the Empire a monarchy, but if asked whether the actual organization of their government resembled more closely that of Rome in 200 BC or that of the Kingdom of the Parthians, they might have admitted to the latter.
Sure, with years the pretense became increasingly transparent—and of course, already in the time of Caesar, it was clear to any informed observer that things were very different from the heyday of the republican institutions. Still, I’m sure a second-century Roman would have been offended if one were to suggest that the proud republican “SPQR” inscriptions on public buildings and military standards were just a hypocritical sham, even if that claim would have been more or less correct.
Moreover, the imperial succession is one issue where it seems like the need to maintain the pretense had serious practical implications, since it was impossible to legislate clear succession rules that would recognize the imperial office as hereditary. In this regard, as much as the republican institutions had become increasingly irrelevant from Augustus on, there was still a deep and fundamental difference from explicit hereditary monarchies such as the Parthian Empire.