#669 Dictatorship

Dictatorship is not a modern concept. Two thousand years ago, during the period of the Roman Republic, exceptional powers were sometimes given by the Senate to [1] dictators such as Sulla and Julius Caesar. The [2] was that the dictatorship would be temporary and that it would make it [3] to take swift and effective action to deal with an emergency. There is some [4] as how the term should be applied today. Should it be used in its original form to describe the temporary exercise of emergency powers? Or can it now be [5] in a much broader sense as common usage suggests?