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"The principle of mediation was not permitted in the Roman Republic: experts, objects of distrust, had a low and unnoticed position. The elite, on its part, had access to large fields of savoir-faire, learned by experience: that of civic memory (institutions, traditions, religion . . . ), and that of law, military experience, or oratory. At the end of the Roman Republic, most of this savoir-faire became sciences and escaped more and more from these elites; they belonged to specialists coming from new social strata and linked to an imperator, and soon to the Emperor. Thus, intellectual transformations, which concerned the transmission of civic memory, reveal the emergence of new political practices and the rise of personal power in Rome. "