I have come to believe that the "rule of law" had been in accelerating decline for many decades, starting with the Gracchi, then certainly during the purges of Sulla's indefinite dictatorship. There were then a few intervening decades where it appeared that maybe things were returning to some normalcy, between the 70s and early 50s. But that isn't really true either since one must acknowledge first that Catiline felt so aggrieved that he was able to convince a lot of other nobles adn commoners alike to take up arms agaisnt the Republic, and that during the first triumvirate the role of the Senate was more and more becoming that of a corrupt and irrelevant debating society. More and more the real power resided where the money and the soldiers were. The armed gangs in the streets of Clodius and Milo, aligned with various factions, makes rather clear that the rule of law was gone and everyone in Rome knew it. Caesar's march on Rome was, let's face it, not legal (not that the machinations of his enemies were either). Certainly Caesar packing the Senate house had not the slightest pretense of legality. The assassination of Caesar was, well, murder. The point is that by then no one had the slightest confidence in the legal mechanisms to protect or preserve civil liberties or the rule of law. Instead, what mattered was who your patrons/allies were and how well armed and financed they were. It therefore does not surprise me that the second triumvirs made little pretense at observing abstractions like "rule of law." "Law" was what the weak and the unaligned hoped for while the real powers used the armies of Rome to systematically eliminate enemies. The extermination of Brutus, Crassus, and company, was dressed up as lawful retribution for Caesar's murder, but really it was more elimination of not only rivals, but of rival ideas. By the time Octavian finds himself the last man standing there were no military rivals left. He gives lip service to "rule of law" as a palliative for the masses, but he was as ruthless a dictator as any of the others. The reason he is better remembered is that the common folk were glad by then to be done with the constant warfare and were more interested in getting on with business. Even in modern times one sees the same phenomenon. Even Saddam Hussein or Hitler kept a "parliament" around for stage dressing.