Divers find Caesar bust that may date to 46 B.C.

Caligula’s horse wasn’t made a Senator.

The Roman system was all about separation of powers, and that was rooted in the oligarchic nature of the “Republic”. The Senators weren’t elected, so they established or altered various other popular bodies to meet some expediency. The Emperor had dictator-for-life powers, but the Senate controlled legislation.

The Emperor Claudius revived the pre-imperial office of Censor in order to remove unfit Senators from office. That the office had lapsed indicates just how out of control the senatorial oligarchy had become. They were, in Voltaire’s phrase, an assembly of despots.

The Senate didn’t always appoint the Emperors, sometimes it merely put its imprimatur on a fait accompli, such as when crazy or otherwise ineffective Emperors were deposed / murdered, for example when the Praetorian Guard (which was established by the Senate) snuffed Caligula and the famous and probably false “found me hiding behind the curtain” selection of Claudius occurred. But the authority to appoint Emperors lay with the Senate.

Claudius was one of the more conscientious Emperors. If the Empire had figured out an orderly system of succession (for that matter, if the so-called Republic had), the great duration of it might have been even longer. Had the Empire — which began over a century before Julius Caesar was born — developed an elective system of government, it might still be around today.

The problem wasn't just “orderly succession”; it was that there was any succession at all for a “Dictator for Life”/ “Emperor”/ “First Citizen”. Ancestry is a piss poor way of determining who will be leader, and a lifetime appointment to absolute power is a rather bad policy for many reasons.

I think any sane person would rather live under the rule of two elected Consuls and the Senate. Although election was a mixed blessing. One Consul decided to try to “force” a military victory against Hannibal Barca in order to ensure an electoral victory. It was a bad mistake. Military campaigns shouldn't be run with an election timetable/ political concerns in mind.

I think any sane person would rather live under the rule of two elected Consuls and the Senate.

The unelected Senate was made up entirely of people who literally owned nearly all the land in Italy, and that was the source of their great wealth and power. Half or (often) more of the people living under the so-called Roman Republic were slaves, most of whom were owned by the same patrician families who owned all the land.

The Senators regarded everyone else -- slaves, freedmen, and plain citizens -- as inferiors to be ruled by the great and glorious patrician families. I don't call wanting to live under an assembly of despots and a couple of window-dressing Consuls a form of sanity, I call it living in a fantasy world to equate what the "Roman Republic" was to what we have due to the Framers. I think any sane person would prefer to live here and now.

I thought implicit in that statement, considering the two systems we were comparing, was that “rather” referred to the Imperial system. Of course our system is preferable to any other ever devised by men.

In other words my statement was meant to be read as... “I think any sane person would rather live under the rule of two elected Consuls and the Senate than the absolute rule for life of an Emperor”.

The same social stratification existed under the Emperor that existed under the Consuls. The Emperor played lip service to the masses because they, and the Praetorian Guard, usually determined the length of his reign. So rather than being accountable to an electorate like the Consuls, he was accountable to the mob. As witnessed by the “Bread and Circuses”, accountability to the mob was a step down from accountability to those who have a financial stake in the order and stability of the Empire.

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