>>>As you no doubt know, Augustus “re-established” the Republic in form while continuing to hold the real power himself.<<<
Which has always scared me, and that fear has remained with me even after learning it more than 35 years ago. I can easily see the tyrant killing the republic while cooing softly about his (or her) love of the old civic virtues.
>>>Augustus did quite a good job<<<<
And so the people forgot the republic and embraced the tyrant.
Maybe the American experiment, like the Roman one and the Athenian one, has certain elemental flaws which lead to its demise, and two thousand years from now a group of geniuses will make improvements. Either that, or we’re on the road to empire. I guess we’ll see.
A good tyrant is indeed a greater threat than an obviously vile evil one.
My point was that the rebirth of the Republic as a viable government was not a possibility. Thus the success of Octavian and the eventual birth of the Empire was the least bad of a host of lousy options at the time.