No you missed my point,just because it says republic on a tin can doesnt make it so,rome was just the emperor attached to a "retirement home".
The senate could never hope to get rid of the emperor and be a proper republic(yet still conquered and ran an empire spanning a continent)
You do realize that Rome was a Republic, a true functioning though increasingly corrupt Republic during the conquest of Italy, during the Punic wars and the conquest of North Africa and Spain, during the takeover of Greece and Anatolia, during the Conquest of Gaul and Egypt. Caesar was never an Emperor. He was just a very successful General who was assassinated because he got too big for his britches.
The Roman Republic ended with the civil wars in which Octavian became a Dictator and called himself Emperor. Following that, the Roman Empire staggered this way and that under the rule of various dynastic strongmen, with little in the way of sustained territorial expansion. Rome's Emperors were a late development.
They are strongman pure and simple,sure their motives are scetchy but the method is the important thing here,republics have commited attrocities as well.
So what?
Again, I'll refer you to Chile vs Peru, or if you wish, early twentieth century Paraguay vs Bolivia. In both cases, you had two very similar latin American countries. In each case, it was a relatively corrupt democracy (Chile and Paraguay) versus a caudillo/strongman ruled autocracy (Peru and Bolivia). In each case, the corrupt democracy won the wars and economically outperformed its rival.
This whole 'Reforming Strongman' shtick is very attractive and appealing. But let's face it: It's miracle based governance. The overwhelming history of strongmen is that they occupy the territory from disastrous to sub-mediocre. It doesn't work.
Once in a while, someone talks about some fluke = a strongman that actually improved their country and left things better off. Well 1) It's a fluke, not the rule, and miraculous flukes are not a good recipe for governance, ever. 2) The more we look at and carefully examine these flukes, quite often, the worse they turn out to be, their positives turn out to be either illusory or fabrications, pre-existing them, the work of successors, exaggerated, actually substandard in terms of what might have been achieved, and meanwhile a whole host of disturbing negatives show up, cronyism, kleptocracy, mass murder, all sorts of brutality, long term toxic effects on society.
After a while, I just gave up on the strongman as a viable model of governance.