So in pleb layman terms, Roman History is divided into KANGZ,

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>>3093379
In Roman historiography, the Empire is divided into The Principate (Rule of the Princeps) and the Dominate (Rule of the Dominus).

The Principate is basically Rome keeping up the image of the democratic Republic. With the Emperor merely being the "first among equals." The Dominate, which came much later, is the one where they quit pretending the Emperor was just a first-among-equals guy.

However the non-Romans were more brutal in their assessment of the Roman Empire. For example: the Greeks and the Hellenized East called the Roman Emperor outright as "Basileus." Meaning "King/Monarch." Fuck whatever farce the Romans were playing at.

>>3093379
Just to attach a follow up question for anyone answering OP:

Were there class divides in the way Romans saw themselves? During the reign of Augustus perhaps the plebs saw him as preserving the Republic while the elites knew full and well that he had made himself king in all but name?

>>3093436
How butthurt were the Greeks in general? I've never seen it addressed.

>>3093501

Very.

Greeks are never not butthurt about anything happening west of them.

>>3093470
Plebs cared more about food, protection, sanitation and their wealth than they cared about the sanctity of the republic. Whatever 'equality' there was between citizens of Rome died off when the big families bought most of the land and used their wealth to try and control the senate. By the time of the late republic there'd be very few commoners on the senate floor or at the heads of armies, your average pleb was aware Rome was an aristocracy and not an egalitarian republic.

Now the elites hated the plebs because they demanded food, land and jobs while the slaves couldn't demand shit because they were slaves and the plebs hated the elites because they employed so many fucking slaves, they took all the good land and were keeping the senate for themselves. Both the elites and the plebs were scared shitless of a tyrant, because a tyrant can ignore the cries of both classes and can do whatever he wants with impunity. This fear came out of Sulla who did just that, but the guys that wanted to become Monarchs like Antony, Octavian and Caesar knew that they couldn't fuck over the classes so instead of being brutal they had to show lots and lots of mercy and give to charity and all that shit. The plebs knew Augustus was monarch but they liked all the food and water Augustus provided. The elites knew that as well but they liked prosperity, stability and safety for themselves and their families.

>>3093379
also another follow up question
I'm aware that the senate was never dissolved and existed up into the late stages of the east roman empire (byzantines). Were the late senators during this period of any prominence / had any influence in the running of the state?

>>3093640
Or east of them, they're basically in a permanent state of anger about something

>>3093640
>>3094664
And the reason behind this is that through out the years East and West were nothing but enemies trying to fuck us up.
East:Persians, Arabs, Turks
West: Italians, Normans, Germans.
I won't count the Romans.
Even today everybody hates us, East, West, South, North.
Greeks did respect the Romans.
As a Greek I appreciate the Romans occupying us and ending the stupid city-state system that dominated and unifying us under one banner, the one of the Roman and later byzantine empire.

>>3093379
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Latin

The shift from "Old Latin" to "Classical Latin" was certainly noticed.

"Although the differences are striking and can be easily identified by Latin readers, they are not such as to cause a language barrier. Latin speakers of the empire had no reported trouble understanding Old Latin, except for the few texts that must date from the time of the kings, mainly songs. Thus, the laws of the Twelve Tables from the early Republic were comprehensible, but the Carmen Saliare, probably written under Numa Pompilius, was not entirely (and still remains unclear).

An opinion concerning Old Latin, of a Roman man of letters in the middle Republic, survives: the historian, Polybius,[8] read "the first treaty between Rome and Carthage", which he says "dates from the consulship of Lucius Junius Brutus and Marcus Horatius, the first consuls after the expulsion of the kings." Knowledge of the early consuls is somewhat obscure, but Polybius also states that the treaty was formulated 28 years after Xerxes I crossed into Greece; that is, in 452 BC, about the time of the Decemviri, when the constitution of the Roman Republic was being defined. Polybius says of the language of the treaty "the ancient Roman language differs so much from the modern that it can only be partially made out, and that after much application by the most intelligent men".

There is no sharp distinction between Old Latin, as it was spoken for most of the Republic, and Classical Latin, but the earlier grades into the later. The end of the republic was too late a termination for compilers after Wordsworth; Charles Edwin Bennett said, "'Early Latin' is necessarily a somewhat vague term ... Bell, De locativi in prisca Latinitate vi et usu, Breslau, 1889,[9] sets the later limit at 75 BC. A definite date is really impossible, since archaic Latin does not terminate abruptly, but continues even down to imperial times."[10]"