The Great Dictator something curiously appropriate about the little tramp impersonating the dictator, for by 1939 Hitler and Chaplin were perhaps the two most famous men in the world. The tyrant and the tramp reverse roles in "The Great Dictator", permitting the eternal outsider to address the masses". In "The 50 Greatest Jewish Movies" (1998), Kathryn Bernheimer writes, "What he chose to say in "The Great Dictator", however, was just what one might expect from the Little Tramp. Film scholars have often noted that the Little Tramp resembles a Jewish stock figure, the ostracized outcast, an outsider." Several reviewers of the late 20th
Roman dictator there was already a dictator in the field. Like the dictator, the magister equitum was a curule magistrate, entitled to the "toga praetexta" and the "sella curulis". His "imperium" was equivalent to that of a praetor (in the later use of the term), in that he was accompanied by six lictors, half the number accorded to the consuls. But like the dictator, he could summon the Senate, and probably also the popular assemblies. His authority was not subject to recall, although if the dictator were compelled to resign due to a fault in the auspices, the magister equitum was also