It is a professional deformation that ancient historians love to make analogies between contemporary events and those that occurred several thousand years ago.

The number of caveats you must provide to make these analogies actually work are so great that as a historian, I suspect that such analogies do not constitute “best practices.” Students, however, love them.

Comparing President Trump and Elon Musk to Rome’s “bad emperors” is fun, I’ll admit. Musk as Sejanus and Trump as Tiberius certainly springs readily to mind. Musk as Domitian. Trump as Caligula. You could do this all day long and sell tickets.

Even though such analogies should be treated very cautiously by professional historians, they are not entirely useless as thought exercises. I must confess that I feel that the last 10 years of American politics have illuminated the collapse of the constitutional system of the Roman Republic in a harsh and disturbing light.

Upon reflection, I think the best analogy for Trump and Musk is not a bad emperor, like Caligula and his henchmen, but a Roman politician who ruled a century before the emperors: Sulla.

He came to prominence in a Roman Republic whose ruling class was bitterly divided. One group felt that the state’s acquisition of an overseas empire in the 3rd century was simply not compatible with a constitution which had been forged in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.E., when Rome’s sway was limited to the Italian peninsula. Another group refused to yield any ounce of the privileges and power they enjoyed as senators for the sake of a more rational (and some might even argue a more just) constitutional order.

One of the problems Romans confronted was the extraordinary autonomy the Republic granted to military commanders. As the empire expanded, the ability of the Senate to oversee generals a thousand miles away deteriorated rapidly. A general’s authority was supposed to end at Rome’s city limits.

Sulla, however, ignored this restriction and led the soldiers under his command against the city he was supposed to serve. Having defeated the troops loyal to the Senate and People, Sulla established himself as a dictator and began a purge of his political enemies that caused Roman politicians to shudder at the memory of it decades later.

More importantly, Sulla took a very sharp gladius (a soldier’s sword that I suggest was the closest we can come to the metaphor of a chainsaw) to all the laws and reforms that his opponents had instituted over the previous generation. It took him three years to “make Rome great again.” To the amazement of all, he then retired to a quiet, but brief, retirement before his death.

It did not take Roman politicians very long to claim that any new laws they proposed were ones that Sulla would have wanted, whatever the content of the laws and however much they undermined Sulla’s efforts to return the Roman political class to the constitutional order he imagined was the one the maiores (we would say “Founders”) had devised.

In fact, there was no constitution left for the Roman Republic when Sulla put down his gladius. You cannot easily unring a bell that signals violence as the answer to a constitutional crisis. There were the habits and customs of generations, but when any politician felt too constrained by them, he ignored them — maiores be damned.

Think here of Julius Caesar. Think also of the current administration. As the struggle for political power grew more intense, the recourse to political violence was chosen more readily and more quickly. Eventually, the entire Roman world was consumed by a civil war that ended with Octavius (Caesar’s heir), a king who pretended he was merely a senator.

Trump is not a king. America will not be ready for kings until Americans see that the U.S. Constitution (which Trump swore to protect and defend; Musk too, when he became a citizen) is incapable of restraining the acts of politicians and parties. Before that happens, do not be surprised by the violence and bloodshed that might mark our politics.

Jan. 6, 2021 was only a beginning. As frightening as the events of our day may be, what is to come, should Trump and Musk succeed, could be far worse.

Margaret Imber is a retired professor of classical and Medieval studies at Bates College.