The Roman world was a monarchy and history was being made in bedrooms. But you have to remember that we have the benefit of hindsight and for the significant proportion of Roman imperial history, they were pretending that they didn’t have a monarchy. They most highly praised those emperors who pretended the hardest and put on a really good performance of letting the Senate believe that they had any impact on anything, and they most highly condemned those emperors who couldn’t be bothered pretending and just acted like monarchs.
