<p> Despite myriad causes given to the end of Republican Rome and the beginning of Imperial Rome, there still remains a basic truth: the form of political rule and the institutions that structured this rule changed in the span of about a hundred years, from Sulla&rsquo;s first armed takeover in 88-87 B.C. to Augustus&rsquo;s death in 14 A.D. After Sulla, the political institutions of Republican Rome became a fa&ccedil;ade; within a couple of generations they were a farce. I argue in this paper that the effect of the individual on this loss of institutional inviolability is vital to understanding both how it happened and what came after.</p>