Comment by joebob42

Even the fall of the republic to "tyranny" / dictatorship took a pretty long time. You could pick a number of different starting points I guess but I think it'd be hard to argue it wasn't in progress post Sulla, which is like 30 or 40 years before Caesars whole thing. I guess on the scale of history that's pretty short but that's still multiple lifetimes for most people back then.