Chapter XI

The Old Republic and the New Monarchy

Character of Caesar

The new monarch of Rome, the first ruler over the whole domain

of Romano-Hellenic civilization, Gaius Julius Caesar, was in his

fifty-sixth year (born 12 July 652?) when the battle at Thapsus,

the last link in a long chain of momentous victories, placed

the decision as to the future of the world in his hands. Few men

have had their elasticity so thoroughly put to the proof as Caesar--

the sole creative genius produced by Rome, and the last produced

by the ancient world, which accordingly moved on in the path

that he marked out for it until its sun went down. Sprung from one

of the oldest noble families of Latium--which traced back its lineage

to the heroes of the Iliad and the kings of Rome, and in fact

to the Venus-Aphrodite common to both nations--he spent the years

of his boyhood and early manhood as the genteel youth of that epoch

were wont to spend them. He had tasted the sweetness as well as

the bitterness of the cup of fashionable life, had recited and declaimed,

had practised literature and made verses in his idle hours,

had prosecuted love-intrigues of every sort, and got himself

initiated into all the mysteries of shaving, curls, and ruffles

pertaining to the toilette-wisdom of the day, as well as

into the still more mysterious art of always borrowing and never paying.

But the flexible steel of that nature was proof against even

these dissipated and flighty courses; Caesar retained both

his bodily vigour and his elasticity of mind and of heart unimpaired.

In fencing and in riding he was a match for any of his soldiers,

and his swimming saved his life at Alexandria; the incredible rapidity

of his journeys, which usually for the sake of gaining time

were performed by night--a thorough contrast to the procession-like

slowness with which Pompeius moved from one place to another--

was the astonishment of his contemporaries and not the least

among the causes of his success. The mind was like the body.

His remarkable power of intuition revealed itself in the precision

and practicability of all his arrangements, even where he gave orders

without having seen with his own eyes. His memory was matchless,

and it was easy for him to carry on several occupations simultaneously

with equal self-possession. Although a gentleman, a man of genius,

and a monarch, he had still a heart. So long as he lived,

he cherished the purest veneration for his worthy mother Aurelia

(his father having died early); to his wives and above all

to his daughter Julia he devoted an honourable affection,

which was not without reflex influence even on political affairs.

With the ablest and most excellent men of his time, of high

and of humbler rank, he maintained noble relations of mutual fidelity,

with each after his kind. As he himself never abandoned

any of his partisans after the pusillanimous and unfeeling manner

of Pompeius, but adhered to his friends--and that not merely

from calculation--through good and bad times without wavering,

several of these, such as Aulus Hirtius and Gaius Matius, gave,

even after his death, noble testimonies of their attachment to him.

If in a nature so harmoniously organized any one aspect of it

may be singled out as characteristic, it is this--that he stood aloof

from all ideology and everything fanciful. As a matter of course,

Caesar was a man of passion, for without passion there is no genius;

but his passion was never stronger than he could control.

He had had his season of youth, and song, love, and wine had taken

lively possession of his spirit; but with him they did not penetrate

to the inmost core of his nature. Literature occupied him long

and earnestly; but, while Alexander could not sleep for thinking

of the Homeric Achilles, Caesar in his sleepless hours mused

on the inflections of the Latin nouns and verbs. He made verses,

as everybody then did, but they were weak; on the other hand

he was interested in subjects of astronomy and natural science.

While wine was and continued to be with Alexander the destroyer of care,

the temperate Roman, after the revels of his youth were over,

avoided it entirely. Around him, as around all those

whom the full lustre of woman's love has dazzled in youth,

fainter gleams of it continued imperishably to linger;

even in later years he had love-adventures and successes with women,

and he retained a certain foppishness in his outward appearance,

or, to speak more correctly, the pleasing consciousness

of his own manly beauty. He carefully covered the baldness,

which he keenly felt, with the laurel chaplet that he wore in public

in his later years, and he would doubtless have surrendered

some of his victories, if he could thereby have brought back

his youthful locks. But, however much even when monarch

he enjoyed the society of women, he only amused himself

with them, and allowed them no manner of influence over him;

even his much-censured relation to queen Cleopatra was only contrived

to mask a weak point in his political position.(1) Caesar was thoroughly

a realist and a man of sense; and whatever he undertook

and achieved was pervaded and guided by the cool sobriety

which constitutes the most marked peculiarity of his genius.

To this he owed the power of living energetically in the present,

undisturbed either by recollection or by expectation; to this

he owed the capacity of acting at any moment with collected vigour,

and of applying his whole genius even to the smallest

and most incidental enterprise; to this he owed the many-sided power

with which he grasped and mastered whatever understanding can comprehend

and will can compel; to this he owed the self-possessed ease

with which he arranged his periods as well as projected his campaigns;

to this he owed the "marvellous serenity" which remained

steadily with him through good and evil days; to this he owed

the complete independence, which admitted of no control by favourite

or by mistress, or even by friend. It resulted, moreover,

from this clearness of judgment that Caesar never formed to himself

illusions regarding the power of fate and the ability of man;

in his case the friendly veil was lifted up, which conceals from man

the inadequacy of his working. Prudently as he laid his plans

and considered all possibilities, the feeling was never absent

from his breast that in all things fortune, that is to say accident,

must bestow success; and with this may be connected the circumstance

that he so often played a desperate game with destiny, and in particular

again and again hazarded his person with daring indifference.

As indeed occasionally men of predominant sagacity betake themselves

to a pure game of hazard, so there was in Caesar's rationalism a point

at which it came in some measure into contact with mysticism.

Caesar as a Statesman

Gifts such as these could not fail to produce a statesman.

From early youth, accordingly, Caesar was a statesman in the deepest

sense of the term, and his aim was the highest which man is allowed

to propose to himself--the political, military, intellectual,

and moral regeneration of his own deeply decayed nation,

and of the still more deeply decayed Hellenic nation intimately akin

to his own. The hard school of thirty years' experience changed

his views as to the means by which this aim was to be reached; his aim

itself remained the same in the times of his hopeless humiliation

and of his unlimited plenitude of power, in the times when as demagogue

and conspirator he stole towards it by paths of darkness,

and in those when, as joint possessor of the supreme power

and then as monarch, he worked at his task in the full light of day

before the eyes of the world. All the measures of a permanent kind

that proceeded from him at the most various times assume their

appropriate places in the great building-plan. We cannot

therefore properly speak of isolated achievements of Caesar;

he did nothing isolated. With justice men commend Caesar the orator

for his masculine eloquence, which, scorning all the arts

of the advocate, like a clear flame at once enlightened and warmed.

With justice men admire in Caesar the author the inimitable simplicity

of the composition, the unique purity and beauty of the language.

With justice the greatest masters of war of all times have praised

Caesar the general, who, in a singular degree disregarding routine

and tradition, knew always how to find out the mode of warfare

by which in the given case the enemy was conquered, and which

was thus in the given case the right one; who with the certainty

of divination found the proper means for every end; who after defeat

stood ready for battle like William of Orange, and ended the campaign

invariably with victory; who managed that element of warfare,

the treatment of which serves to distinguish military genius

from the mere ordinary ability of an officer--the rapid movement

of masses--with unsurpassed perfection, and found the guarantee

of victory not in the massiveness of his forces but in the celerity

of their movements, not in long preparation but in rapid

and daring action even with inadequate means. But all these were

with Caesar mere secondary matters; he was no doubt a great orator,

author, and general, but he became each of these merely because

he was a consummate statesman. The soldier more especially

played in him altogether an accessory part, and it is

one of the principal peculiarities by which he is distinguished

from Alexander, Hannibal, and Napoleon, that he began his political

activity not as an officer, but as a demagogue. According

to his original plan he had purposed to reach his object, like Pericles

and Gaius Gracchus, without force of arms, and throughout eighteen years

he had as leader of the popular party moved exclusively amid

political plans and intrigues--until, reluctantly convinced

of the necessity for a military support, he, when already forty years

of age, put himself at the head of an army. It was natural

that he should even afterwards remain still more statesman

than general--just like Cromwell, who also transformed himself

from a leader of opposition into a military chief and democratic king,

and who in general, little as the prince of Puritans seems to resemble

the dissolute Roman, is yet in his development as well as

in the objects which he aimed at and the results which he achieved

of all statesmen perhaps the most akin to Caesar. Even in his mode

of warfare this improvised generalship may still be recognized;

the enterprises of Napoleon against Egypt and against England

do not more clearly exhibit the artillery-lieutenant who had risen

by service to command than the similar enterprises of Caesar exhibit

the demagogue metamorphosed into a general. A regularly trained

officer would hardly have been prepared, through political

considerations of a not altogether stringent nature, to set aside

the best-founded military scruples in the way in which Caesar did

on several occasions, most strikingly in the case of his landing

in Epirus. Several of his acts are therefore censurable

from a military point of view; but what the general loses,

the statesman gains. The task of the statesman is universal

in its nature like Caesar's genius; if he undertook things

the most varied and most remote one from another, they had all

without exception a bearing on the one great object to which

with infinite fidelity and consistency he devoted himself;

and of the manifold aspects and directions of his great activity

he never preferred one to another. Although a master of the art of war,

he yet from statesmanly considerations did his utmost to avert

civil strife and, when it nevertheless began, to earn laurels

stained as little as possible by blood. Although the founder

of a military monarchy, he yet, with an energy unexampled in history,

allowed no hierarchy of marshals or government of praetorians

to come into existence. If he had a preference for any one form

of services rendered to the state, it was for the sciences and arts

of peace rather than for those of war.

The most remarkable peculiarity of his action as a statesman

was its perfect harmony. In reality all the conditions

for this most difficult of all human functions were united in Caesar.

A thorough realist, he never allowed the images of the past

or venerable tradition to disturb him; for him nothing was of value

in politics but the living present and the law of reason, just as

in his character of grammarian he set aside historical and antiquarian

research and recognized nothing but on the one hand the living

-usus loquendi- and on the other hand the rule of symmetry.

A born ruler, he governed the minds of men as the wind drives the clouds,

and compelled the most heterogeneous natures to place themselves

at his service--the plain citizen and the rough subaltern, the genteel

matrons of Rome and the fair princesses of Egypt and Mauretania,

the brilliant cavalry-officer and the calculating banker.

His talent for organization was marvellous; no statesman has ever

compelled alliances, no general has ever collected an army

out of unyielding and refractory elements with such decision,

and kept them together with such firmness, as Caesar displayed

in constraining and upholding his coalitions and his legions;

never did regent judge his instruments and assign each to the place

appropriate for him with so acute an eye.

He was monarch; but he never played the king. Even when absolute

lord of Rome, he retained the deportment of the party-leader;

perfectly pliant and smooth, easy and charming in conversation,

complaisant towards every one, it seemed as if he wished to be

nothing but the first among his peers. Caesar entirely avoided

the blunder into which so many men otherwise on an equality with him

have fallen, of carrying into politics the military tone of command;

however much occasion his disagreeable relations with the senate

gave for it, he never resorted to outrages such as was that

of the eighteenth Brumaire. Caesar was monarch; but he was never

seized with the giddiness of the tyrant. He is perhaps the only one

among the mighty ones of the earth, who in great matters and little

never acted according to inclination or caprice, but always

without exception according to his duty as ruler, and who,

when he looked back on his life, found doubtless erroneous calculations

to deplore, but no false step of passion to regret. There is nothing

in the history of Caesar's life, which even on a small scale(2)

can be compared with those poetico-sensual ebullitions--such as

the murder of Kleitos or the burning of Persepolis--which the history

of his great predecessor in the east records. He is, in fine,

perhaps the only one of those mighty ones, who has preserved

to the end of his career the statesman's tact of discriminating between

the possible and the impossible, and has not broken down in the task

which for greatly gifted natures is the most difficult of all--

the task of recognizing, when on the pinnacle of success,

its natural limits. What was possible he performed, and never left

the possible good undone for the sake of the impossible better,

never disdained at least to mitigate by palliatives evils

that were incurable. But where he recognized that fate had spoken,

he always obeyed. Alexander on the Hypanis, Napoleon at Moscow,

turned back because they were compelled to do so, and were indignant

at destiny for bestowing even on its favourites merely limited successes;

Caesar turned back voluntarily on the Thames and on the Rhine;

and thought of carrying into effect even at the Danube and the Euphrates

not unbounded plans of world-conquest, but merely well-considered

frontier-regulations.

Such was this unique man, whom it seems so easy and yet is so infinitely

difficult to describe. His whole nature is transparent clearness;

and tradition preserves more copious and more vivid information

about him than about any of his peers in the ancient world.

Of such a personage our conceptions may well vary in point

of shallowness or depth, but they cannot be, strictly speaking,

different; to every not utterly perverted inquirer the grand figure

has exhibited the same essential features, and yet no one

has succeeded in reproducing it to the life. The secret lies

in its perfection. In his character as a man as well as in his place

in history, Caesar occupies a position where the great contrasts

of existence meet and balance each other. Of mighty creative power

and yet at the same time of the most penetrating judgment;

no longer a youth and not yet an old man; of the highest energy of will

and the highest capacity of execution; filled with republican ideals

and at the same time born to be a king; a Roman in the deepest essence

of his nature, and yet called to reconcile and combine in himself

as well as in the outer world the Roman and the Hellenic

types of culture--Caesar was the entire and perfect man.

Accordingly we miss in him more than in any other historical personage

what are called characteristic features, which are in reality

nothing else than deviations from the natural course of human development.

What in Caesar passes for such at the first superficial glance is,

when more closely observed, seen to be the peculiarity

not of the individual, but of the epoch of culture or of the nation;

his youthful adventures, for instance, were common to him

with all his more gifted contemporaries of like position,

his unpoetical but strongly logical temperament was the temperament

of Romans in general. It formed part also of Caesar's full humanity

that he was in the highest degree influenced by the conditions

of time and place; for there is no abstract humanity--

the living man cannot but occupy a place in a given nationality

and in a definite line of culture. Caesar was a perfect man

just because he more than any other placed himself amidst

the currents of his time, and because he more than any other possessed

the essential peculiarity of the Roman nation--practical aptitude

as a citizen--in perfection: for his Hellenism in fact was only

the Hellenism which had been long intimately blended with the Italian

nationality. But in this very circumstance lies the difficulty,

we may perhaps say the impossibility, of depicting Caesar to the life.

As the artist can paint everything save only consummate beauty,

so the historian, when once in a thousand years he encounters

the perfect, can only be silent regarding it. For normality admits

doubtless of being expressed, but it gives us only the negative notion

of the absence of defect; the secret of nature, whereby

in her most finished manifestations normality and individuality

are combined, is beyond expression. Nothing is left for us

but to deem those fortunate who beheld this perfection, and to gain

some faint conception of it from the reflected lustre which rests

imperishably on the works that were the creation of this great nature.

These also, it is true, bear the stamp of the time. The Roman hero

himself stood by the side of his youthful Greek predecessor

not merely as an equal, but as a superior; but the world had meanwhile

become old and its youthful lustre had faded. The action of Caesar

was no longer, like that of Alexander, a joyous marching onward

towards a goal indefinitely remote; he built on, and out of, ruins,

and was content to establish himself as tolerably and as securely

as possible within the ample but yet definite bounds once assigned

to him. With reason therefore the delicate poetic tact

of the nations has not troubled itself about the unpoetical Roman,

and on the other hand has invested the son of Philip with all

the golden lustre of poetry, with all the rainbow hues of legend.

But with equal reason the political life of the nations has during

thousands of years again and again reverted to the lines

which Caesar drew; and the fact, that the peoples to whom the world

belongs still at the present day designate the highest of their monarchs

by his name, conveys a warning deeply significant and, unhappily,

fraught with shame.

Setting Aside of the Old Parties

If the old, in every respect vicious, state of things was to be

successfully got rid of and the commonwealth was to be renovated,

it was necessary first of all that the country should be

practically tranquillized and that the ground should be cleared

from the rubbish with which since the recent catastrophe it was

everywhere strewed. In this work Caesar set out from the principle

of the reconciliation of the hitherto subsisting parties or,

to put it more correctly--for, where the antagonistic principles

are irreconcilable, we cannot speak of real reconciliation--

from the principle that the arena, on which the nobility and the populace

had hitherto contended with each other, was to be abandoned

by both parties, and that both were to meet together on the ground

of the new monarchical constitution. First of all therefore

all the older quarrels of the republican past were regarded as done away

for ever and irrevocably. While Caesar gave orders that the statues

of Sulla which had been thrown down by the mob of the capital

on the news of the battle of Pharsalus should be re-erected, and thus

recognized the fact that it became history alone to sit in judgment

on that great man, he at the same time cancelled the last remaining

effects of Sulla's exceptional laws, recalled from exile those

who had been banished in the times of the Cinnan and Sertorian troubles,

and restored to the children of those outlawed by Sulla

their forfeited privilege of eligibility to office. In like manner

all those were restored, who in the preliminary stage of the recent

catastrophe had lost their seat in the senate or their civil existence

through sentence of the censors or political process, especially

through the impeachments raised on the basis of the exceptional laws

of 702. Those alone who had put to death the proscribed

for money remained, as was reasonable, still under attainder;

and Milo, the most daring condottiere of the senatorial party,

was excluded from the general pardon.

Discontent of the Democrats

Far more difficult than the settlement of these questions

which already belonged substantially to the past was the treatment

of the parties confronting each other at the moment--on the one hand

Caesar's own democratic adherents, on the other hand the overthrown

aristocracy. That the former should be, if possible, still less

satisfied than the latter with Caesar's conduct after the victory

and with his summons to abandon the old standing-ground of party,

was to be expected. Caesar himself desired doubtless on the whole

the same issue which Gaius Gracchus had contemplated; but the designs

of the Caesarians were no longer those of the Gracchans.

The Roman popular party had been driven onward in gradual progression

from reform to revolution, from revolution to anarchy, from anarchy

to a war against property; they celebrated among themselve

the memory of the reign of terror and now adorned the tomb

of Catilina, as formerly that of the Gracchi, with flowers

and garlands; they had placed themselves under Caesar's banner,

because they expected him to do for them what Catilina

had not been able to accomplish. But as it speedily became plain

that Caesar was very far from intending to be the testamentary

executor of Catilina, and that the utmost which debtors might expect

from him was some alleviations of payment and modifications

of procedure, indignation found loud vent in the inquiry.

For whom then had the popular party conquered, if not for the people?

And the rabble of this description, high and low, out of pure chagrin

at the miscarriage of their politico-economic Saturnalia began first

to coquet with the Pompeians, and then even during Caesar's absence

of nearly two years from Italy (Jan. 706-autumn 707) to instigate there

a second civil war within the first.

Caelius and Milo

The praetor Marcus Caelius Rufus, a good aristocrat and bad payer

of debts, of some talent and much culture, as a vehement

and fluent orator hitherto in the senate and in the Forum

one of the most zealous champions for Caesar, proposed to the people--

without being instructed from any higher quarter to do so--

a law which granted to debtors a respite of six years free of interest,

and then, when he was opposed in this step, proposed a second law

which even cancelled all claims arising out of loans and current

house rents; whereupon the Caesarian senate deposed him from his office.

It was just on the eve of the battle of Pharsalus, and the balance

in the great contest seemed to incline to the side of the Pompeians;

Rufus entered into communication with the old senatorian

band-leader Milo, and the two contrived a counter-revolution,

which inscribed on its banner partly the republican constitution,

partly the cancelling of creditors' claims and the manumission of slaves.

Milo left his place of exile Massilia, and called the Pompeians

and the slave-herdsmen to arms in the region of Thurii; Rufus made

arrangements to seize the town of Capua by armed slaves.

But the latter plan was detected before its execution and frustrated

by the Capuan militia; Quintus Pedius, who advanced with a legion

into the territory of Thurii, scattered the band making havoc there;

and the fall of the two leaders put an end to the scandal (706).

Dolabella

Nevertheless there was found in the following year (707) a second fool,

the tribune of the people, Publius Dolabella, who, equally insolvent

but far from being equally gifted with his predecessor,

introduced afresh his law as to creditors' claims and house rents,

and with his colleague Lucius Trebellius began on that point once more--

it was the last time--the demagogic war; there were serious frays

between the armed bands on both sides and various street-riots,

till the commandant of Italy Marcus Antonius ordered the military

to interfere, and soon afterwards Caesar's return from the east

completely put an end to the preposterous proceedings.

Caesar attributed to these brainless attempts to revive the projects

of Catilina so little importance, that he tolerated Dolabella in Italy

and indeed after some time even received him again into favour.

Against a rabble of this sort, which had nothing to do with

any political question at all, but solely with a war against property--

as against gangs of banditti--the mere existence of a strong government

is sufficient; and Caesar was too great and too considerate

to busy himself with the apprehensions which the Italian alarmists

felt regarding these communists of that day, and thereby unduly

to procure a false popularity for his monarchy.

Measures against Pompeians and Republicans

While Caesar thus might leave, and actually left, the late democratic

party to the process of decomposition which had already in its case

advanced almost to the utmost limit, he had on the other hand,

with reference to the former aristocratic party possessing

a far greater vitality, not to bring about its dissolution--

which time alone could accomplish--but to pave the way for

and initiate it by a proper combination of repression and conciliation.

Among minor measures, Caesar, even from a natural sense of propriety,

avoided exasperating the fallen party by empty sarcasm;

he did not triumph over his conquered fellow-burgesses;(3)

he mentioned Pompeius often and always with respect, and caused

his statue overthrown by the people to be re-erected at the senate-

house, when the latter was restored, in its earlier distinguished place.

To political prosecutions after the victory Caesar assigned

the narrowest possible limits. No investigation was instituted

into the various communications which the constitutional party

had held even with nominal Caesarians; Caesar threw the piles of papers

found in the enemy's headquarters at Pharsalus and Thapsus

into the fire unread, and spared himself and the country from political

processes against individuals suspected of high treason. Further,

all the common soldiers who had followed their Roman or provincial

officers into the contest against Caesar came off with impunity.

The sole exception made was in the case of those Roman burgesses,

who had taken service in the army of the Numidian king Juba;

their property was confiscated by way of penalty for their treason.

Even to the officers of the conquered party Caesar had granted

unlimited pardon up to the close of the Spanish campaign of 705;

but he became convinced that in this he had gone too far,

and that the removal at least of the leaders among them was inevitable.

The rule by which he was thenceforth guided was, that every one

who after the capitulation of Ilerda had served as an officer

in the enemy's army or had sat in the opposition-senate, if he survived

the close of the struggle, forfeited his property and his political

rights, and was banished from Italy for life; if he did not survive

the close of the struggle, his property at least fell to the state;

but any one of these, who had formerly accepted pardon from Caesar

and was once more found in the ranks of the enemy, thereby

forfeited his life. These rules were however materially modified

in the execution. The sentence of death was actually executed

only against a very few of the numerous backsliders. In the confiscation

of the property of the fallen not only were the debts attaching

to the several portions of the estate as well as the claims

of the widows for their dowries paid off, as was reasonable.

But a portion of the paternal estate was left also to the children

of the deceased. Lastly not a few of those, who in consequence

of those rules were liable to banishment and confiscation of property,

were at once pardoned entirely or got off with fines, like the African

capitalists who were impressed as members of the senate of Utica.

And even the others almost without exception got their freedom

and property restored to them, if they could only prevail

on themselves to petition Caesar to that effect; on several

who declined to do so, such as the consular Marcus Marcellus,

pardon was even conferred unasked, and ultimately in 710

a general amnesty was issued for all who were still unrecalled.

Amnesty

The republican opposition submitted to be pardoned;

but it was not reconciled. Discontent with the new order of things

and exasperation against the unwonted ruler were general.

For open political resistance there was indeed no farther opportunity--

it was hardly worth taking into account, that some oppositional

tribunes on occasion of the question of title acquired for themselves

the republican crown of martyrdom by a demonstrative intervention

against those who had called Caesar king--but republicanism

found expression all the more decidedly as an opposition of sentiment,

and in secret agitation and plotting. Not a hand stirred

when the Imperator appeared in public. There was abundance

of wall-placards and sarcastic verses full of bitter and telling

popular satire against the new monarchy. When a comedian

ventured on a republican allusion, he was saluted with the loudest

applause. The praise of Cato formed the fashionable theme

of oppositional pamphleteers, and their writings found a public

all the more grateful because even literature was no longer free.

Caesar indeed combated the republicans even now on their own field;

he himself and his abler confidants replied to the Cato-literature

with Anticatones, and the republican and Caesarian scribes

fought round the dead hero of Utica like the Trojans and Hellenes

round the dead body of Patroclus; but as a matter of course

in this conflict--where the public thoroughly republican in its feelings

was judge--the Caesarians had the worst of it. No course remained

but to overawe the authors; on which account men well known

and dangerous in a literary point of view, such as Publius

Nigidius Figulus and Aulus Caecina, had more difficulty

in obtaining permission to return to Italy than other exiles,

while the oppositional writers tolerated in Italy were subjected

to a practical censorship, the restraints of which were all the more

annoying that the measure of punishment to be dreaded

was utterly arbitrary.(4) The underground machinations

of the overthrown parties against the new monarchy will be more fitly

set forth in another connection. Here it is sufficient to say

that risings of pretenders as well as of republicans were incessantly

brewing throughout the Roman empire; that the flames of civil war kindled

now by the Pompeians, now by the republicans, again burst forth brightly

at various places; and that in the capital there was perpetual

conspiracy against the life of the monarch. But Caesar

could not be induced by these plots even to surround himself

permanently with a body-guard, and usually contented himself

with making known the detected conspiracies by public placards.

Bearing of Caesar towards the Parties

However much Caesar was wont to treat all things relating

to his personal safety with daring indifference, he could not possibly

conceal from himself the very serious danger with which this mass

of malcontents threatened not merely himself but also his creations.

If nevertheless, disregarding all the warning and urgency

of his friends, he without deluding himself as to the implacability

of the very opponents to whom he showed mercy, persevered

with marvellous composure and energy in the course of pardoning

by far the greater number of them, he did so neither

from the chivalrous magnanimity of a proud, nor from the sentimental

clemency of an effeminate, nature, but from the correct statesmanly

consideration that vanquished parties are disposed of

more rapidly and with less public injury by their absorption

within the state than by any attempt to extirpate them by proscription

or to eject them from the commonwealth by banishment. Caesar could not

for his high objects dispense with the constitutional party itself,

which in fact embraced not the aristocracy merely but all the elements

of a free and national spirit among the Italian burgesses;

for his schemes, which contemplated the renovation of the antiquated

state, he needed the whole mass of talent, culture, hereditary,

and self-acquired distinction, which this party embraced;

and in this sense he may well have named the pardoning of his opponents

the finest reward of victory. Accordingly the most prominent chiefs

of the defeated parties were indeed removed, but full pardon

was not withheld from the men of the second and third rank

and especially of the younger generation; they were not, however,

allowed to sulk in passive opposition, but were by more or less

gentle pressure induced to take an active part in the new administration,

and to accept honours and offices from it. As with Henry the Fourth

and William of Orange, so with Caesar his greatest difficulties began

only after the victory. Every revolutionary conqueror learns

by experience that, if after vanquishing his opponents he would

not remain like Cinna and Sulla a mere party-chief, but would

like Caesar, Henry the Fourth, and William of Orange substitute

the welfare of the commonwealth for the necessarily one-sided programme

of his own party, for the moment all parties, his own as well as

the vanquished, unite against the new chief; and the more so,

the more great and pure his idea of his new vocation. The friends

of the constitution and the Pompeians, though doing homage

with the lips to Caesar, bore yet in heart a grudge either

at monarchy or at least at the dynasty; the degenerate democracy

was in open rebellion against Caesar from the moment of its perceiving

that Caesar's objects were by no means its own; even the personal

adherents of Caesar murmured, when they found that their chief was

establishing instead of a state of condottieri a monarchy equal

and just towards all, and that the portions of gain accruing to them

were to be diminished by the accession of the vanquished.

This settlement of the commonwealth was acceptable to no party,

and had to be imposed on his associates no less than on his opponents.

Caesar's own position was now in a certain sense more imperilled

than before the victory; but what he lost, the state gained.

By annihilating the parties and not simply sparing the partisans

but allowing every man of talent or even merely of good descent

to attain to office irrespective of his political past, he gained

for his great building all the working power extant in the state;

and not only so, but the voluntary or compulsory participation of men

of all parties in the same work led the nation also over imperceptibly

to the newly prepared ground. The fact that this reconciliation

of the parties was for the moment only externaland that they were

for the present much less agreed in adherence to the new state of things

than in hatred against Caesar, did not mislead him; he knew well

that antagonisms lose their keenness when brought into such outward union,

and that only in this way can the statesman anticipate the work of time,

which alone is able finally to heal such a strife by laying

the old generation in the grave. Still less did he inquire who hated him

or meditated his assassination. Like every genuine statesman he served

not the people for reward--not even for the reward of their love--

but sacrificed the favour of his contemporaries for the blessing

of posterity, and above all for the permission to save

and renew his nation.

Caesar's Work

In attempting to give a detailed account of the mode in which

the transition was effected from the old to the new state of things,

we must first of all recollect that Caesar came not to begin,

but to complete. The plan of a new polity suited to the times,

long ago projected by Gaius Gracchus, had been maintained

by his adherents and successors with more or less of spirit and success,

but without wavering. Caesar, from the outset and as it were

by hereditary right the head of the popular party, had for thirty years

borne aloft its banner without ever changing or even so much

as concealing his colours; he remained democrat even when monarch.

as he accepted without limitation, apart of course from the preposterous

projects of Catilina and Clodius, the heritage of his party;

as he displayed the bitterest, even personal, hatred to the aristocracy

and the genuine aristocrats; and as he retained unchanged

the essential ideas of Roman democracy, viz. alleviation of the burdens

of debtors, transmarine colonization, gradual equalization

of the differences of rights among the classes belonging

to the state, emancipation of the executive power from the senate:

his monarchy was so little at variance with democracy,

that democracy on the contrary only attained its completion

and fulfilment by means of that monarchy. For this monarchy

was not the Oriental despotism of divine right, but a monarchy such as

Gaius Gracchus wished to found, such as Pericles and Cromwell founded--

the representation of the nation by the man in whom it puts

supreme and unlimited confidence. The ideas, which lay

at the foundation of Caesar's work, were so far not strictly new;

but to him belongs their realization, which after all is everywhere

the main matter; and to him pertains the grandeur of execution,

which would probably have surprised the brilliant projector himself

if he could have seen it, and which has impressed, and will

always impress, every one to whom it has been presented in the living

reality or in the mirror of history--to whatever historical epoch

or whatever shade of politics he may belong--according

to the measure of his ability to comprehend human and historical

greatness, with deep and ever-deepening emotion and admiration.

At this point however it is proper expressly once for all to claim

what the historian everywhere tacitly presumes, and to protest

against the custom--common to simplicity and perfidy--of using

historical praise and historical censure, dissociated

from the given circumstances, as phrases of general application,

and in the present case of construing the judgment as to Caesar

into a judgment as to what is called Caesarism. It is true

that the history of past centuries ought to be the instructress

of the present; but not in the vulgar sense, as if one could simply

by turning over the leaves discover the conjunctures of the present

in the records of the past, and collect from these the symptoms

for a political diagnosis and the specifics for a prescription;

it is instructive only so far as the observation of older forms

of culture reveals the organic conditions of civilization generally--

the fundamental forces everywhere alike, and the manner of their

combination everywhere different--and leads and encourages men,

not to unreflecting imitation, but to independent reproduction.

In this sense the history of Caesar and of Roman Imperialism,

with all the unsurpassed greatness of the master-worker,

with all the historical necessity of the work, is in truth

a sharper censure of modern autocracy than could be written

by the hand of man. According to the same law of nature in virtue

of which the smallest organism infinitely surpasses the most artistic

machine, every constitution however defective which gives play

to the free self-determination of a majority of citizens infinitely

surpasses the most brilliant and humane absolutism; for the former

is capable of development and therefore living, the latter is what it is

and therefore dead. This law of nature has verified itself

in the Roman absolute military monarchy and verified itself

all the more completely, that, under the impulse of its creator's genius

and in the absence of all material complications from without,

that monarchy developed itself more purely and freely

than any similar state. From Caesar's time, as the sequel will show

and Gibbon has shown long ago, the Roman system had only an external

coherence and received only a mechanical extension, while internally

it became even with him utterly withered and dead. If in the early

stages of the autocracy and above all in Caesar's own soul(5)

the hopeful dream of a combination of free popular development

and absolute rule was still cherished, the government of the highly-

gifted emperors of the Julian house soon taught men in a terrible form

how far it was possible to hold fire and water in the same vessel.

Caesar's work was necessary and salutary, not because it was

or could be fraught with blessing in itself, but because--

with the national organization of antiquity, which was based on slavery

and was utterly a stranger to republican-constitutional representation,

and in presence of the legitimate urban constitution which in the course

of five hundred years had ripened into oligarchic absolutism--

absolute military monarchy was the copestone logically necessary

and the least of evils. When once the slave-holding aristocracy

in Virginia and the Carolinas shall have carried matters as far as

their congeners in the Sullan Rome, Caesarism will there too

be legitimized at the bar of the spirit of history;(6)

where it appears under other conditions of development, it is at once

a caricature and a usurpation. But history will not submit

to curtail the true Caesar of his due honour, because her verdict

may in the presence of bad Caesars lead simplicity astray

and may give to roguery occasion for lying and fraud. She too

is a Bible, and if she cannot any more than the Bible hinder the fool

from misunderstanding and the devil from quoting her, she too will

be able to bear with, and to requite, them both.

Dictatorship

The position of the new supreme head of the state appears formally,

at least in the first instance, as a dictatorship. Caesar took

it up at first after his return from Spain in 705, but laid it down

again after a few days, and waged the decisive campaign of 706

simply as consul--this was the office his tenure of which was

the primary occasion for the outbreak of the civil war.(7)

but in the autumn of this year after the battle of Pharsalus

he reverted to the dictatorship and had it repeatedly entrusted to him,

at first for an undefined period, but from the 1st January 709

as an annual office, and then in January or February 710(8)

for the duration of his life, so that he in the end expressly dropped

the earlier reservation as to his laying down the office and gave

formal expression to its tenure for life in the new title of -dictator

perpetuus-. This dictatorship, both in its first ephemeral

and in its second enduring tenure, was not that of the old constitution,

but--what was coincident with this merely in the name--the supreme

exceptional office as arranged by Sulla;(9) an office,

the functions of which were fixed, not by the constitutional ordinances

regarding the supreme single magistracy, but by special decree

of the people, to such an effect that the holder received,

in the commission to project laws and to regulate the commonwealth,

an official prerogative de jure unlimited which superseded

the republican partition of powers. Those were merely applications

of this general prerogative to the particular case, when the holder

of power was further entrusted by separate acts with the right

of deciding on war and peace without consulting the senate

and the people, with the independent disposal of armies and finances,

and with the nomination of the provincial governors. Caesar could

accordingly de jure assign to himself even such prerogatives

as lay outside of the proper functions of the magistracy and even

outside of the province of state-powers at all;(10) and it appears

almost as a concession on his part, that he abstained from nominating

the magistrates instead of the Comitia and limited himself to claiming

a binding right of proposal for a proportion of the praetors

and of the lower magistrates; and that he moreover had himself

empowered by special decree of the people for the creation of patricians,

which was not at all allowable according to use and wont.

Other Magistracies and Attributions

For other magistracies in the proper sense there remained alongside

of this dictatorship no room; Caesar did not take up the censorship

as such,(11) but he doubtless exercised censorial rights--

particularly the important right of nominating senators--after

a comprehensive fashion.

He held the consulship frequently alongside of the dictatorship,

once even without colleague; but he by no means attached it permanently

to his person, and he gave no effect to the calls addressed to him

to undertake it for five or even for ten years in succession.

Caesar had no need to have the superintendence of worship

now committed to him, since he was already -pontifex maximus-.(12)

as a matter of course the membership of the college of augurs

was conferred on him, and generally an abundance of old and new

honorary rights, such as the title of a "father of the fatherland,"

the designation of the month of his birth by the name which it

still bears of Julius, and other manifestations of the incipient

courtly tone which ultimately ran into utter deification.

Two only of the arrangements deserve to be singled out:

namely that Caesar was placed on the same footing with the tribunes

of the people as regards their special personal inviolability,

and that the appellation of Imperator was permanently attached

to his person and borne by him as a title alongside of

his other official designations.

Men of judgment will not require any proof, either that Caesar

intended to engraft on the commonwealth his supreme power,

and this not merely for a few years or even as a personal office

for an indefinite period somewhat like Sulla's regency,

but as an essential and permanent organ; or that he selected

for the new institution an appropriate and simple designation;

for, if it is a political blunder to create names without substantial

meaning, it is scarcely a less error to set up the substance

of plenary power without a name. Only it is not easy to determine

what definitive formal shape Caesar had in view; partly because

in this period of transition the ephemeral and the permanent buildings

are not clearly discriminated from each other, partly because

the devotion of his clients which already anticipated the nod

of their master loaded him with a multitude--offensive doubtless

to himself--of decrees of confidence and laws conferring honours.

Least of all could the new monarchy attach itself to the consulship,

just on account of the collegiate character that could not well

be separated from this office; Caesar also evidently laboured

to degrade this hitherto supreme magistracy into an empty title,

and subsequently, when he undertook it, he did not hold it

through the whole year, but before the year expired gave it away

to personages of secondary rank. The dictatorship came practically

into prominence most frequently and most definitely, but probably

only because Caesar wished to use it in the significance which it had

of old in the constitutional machinery--as an extraordinary presidency

for surmounting extraordinary crises. On the other hand it was

far from recommending itself as an expression for the new monarchy,

for the magistracy was inherently clothed with an exceptional

and unpopular character, and it could hardly be expected

of the representative of the democracy that he should choose

for its permanent organization that form, which the most gifted champion

of the opposing party had created for his own ends.

The new name of Imperator, on the other hand, appears in every respect

by far more appropriate for the formal expression of the monarchy;

just because it is in this application(13) new, and no definite

outward occasion for its introduction is apparent. The new wine

might not be put into old bottles; here is a new name for the new thing,

and that name most pregnantly sums up what the democratic party

had already expressed in the Gabinian law, only with less precision,

as the function of its chief--the concentration and perpetuation

of official power (-imperium-) in the hands of a popular chief

independent of the senate. We find on Caesar's coins,

especially those of the last period, alongside of the dictatorship

the title of Imperator prevailing, and in Caesar's law

as to political crimes the monarch seems to have been designated

by this name. Accordingly the following times, though not immediately,

connected the monarchy with the name of Imperator. To lend

to this new office at once a democratic and religious sanction,

Caesar probably intended to associate with it once for all

on the one hand the tribunician power, on the other

the supreme pontificate.

That the new organization was not meant to be restricted merely

to the lifetime of its founder, is beyond doubt; but he did not succeed

in settling the especially difficult question of the succession,

and it must remain an undecided point whether he had it in view

to institute some sort of form for the election of a successor,

such as had subsisted in the case of the original kingly office,

or whether he wished to introduce for the supreme office

not merely the tenure for life but also the hereditary character,

as his adopted son subsequently maintained.(14) It is not improbable

that he had the intention of combining in some measure the two systems,

and of arranging the succession, similarly to the course

followed by Cromwell and by Napoleon, in such a way that the ruler

should be succeeded in rule by his son, but, if he had no son,

or the son should not seem fitted for the succession, the ruler should

of his free choice nominate his successor in the form of adoption.

In point of state law the new office of Imperator was based

on the position which the consuls or proconsuls occupied

outside of the -pomerium-, so that primarily the military command,

but, along with this, the supreme judicial and consequently

also the administrative power, were included in it.(15)

But the authority of the Imperator was qualitatively superior

to the consular-proconsular, in so far as the former was not limited

as respected time or space, but was held for life and operative also

in the capital;(16) as the Imperator could not, while the consul could,

be checked by colleagues of equal power; and as all the restrictions

placed in course of time on the original supreme official power--

especially the obligation to give place to the -provocatio-

and to respect the advice of the senate--did not apply

to the Imperator.

Re-establishment of the Regal Office

In a word, this new office of Imperator was nothing else

than the primitive regal office re-established; for it was

those very restrictions--as respected the temporal and local

limitation of power, the collegiate arrangement, and the cooperation

of the senate or the community that was necessary for certain cases--

which distinguished the consul from the king.(17) There is hardly

a trait of the new monarchy which was not found in the old:

the union of the supreme military, judicial, and administrative authority

in the hands of the prince; a religious presidency over the commonwealth;

the right of issuing ordinances with binding power; the reduction

of the senate to a council of state; the revival of the patriciate

and of the praefecture of the city. But still more striking

than these analogies is the internal similarity of the monarchy

of Servius Tullius and the monarchy of Caesar; if those

old kings of Rome with all their plenitude of power had yet

been rulers of a free community and themselves the protectors

of the commons against the nobility, Caesar too had not come

to destroy liberty but to fulfil it, and primarily to break

the intolerable yoke of the aristocracy. Nor need it surprise us

that Caesar, anything but a political antiquary, went back

five hundred years to find the model for his new state; for,

seeing that the highest office of the Roman commonwealth had remained

at all times a kingship restricted by a number of special laws,

the idea of the regal office itself had by no means become obsolete.

At very various periods and from very different sides--

in the decemviral power, in the Sullan regency, and in Caesar's

own dictatorship--there had been during the republic a practical

recurrence to it; indeed by a certain logical necessity,

whenever an exceptional power seemed requisite there emerged,

in contradistinction to the usual limited -imperium-,

the unlimited -imperium- which was simply nothing else

than the regal power.

Lastly, outward considerations also recommended this recurrence

to the former kingly position. Mankind have infinite difficulty

in reaching new creations, and therefore cherish the once developed forms

as sacred heirlooms. Accordingly Caesar very judiciously

connected himself with Servius Tullius, in the same way

as subsequently Charlemagne connected himself with Caesar,

and Napoleon attempted at least to connect himself with Charlemagne.

He did so, not in a circuitous way and secretly, but, as well as

his successors, in the most open manner possible; it was indeed

the very object of this connection to find a clear, national,

and popular form of expression for the new state. From ancient times

there stood on the Capitol the statues of those seven kings,

whom the conventional history of Rome was wont to bring on the stage;

Caesar ordered his own to be erected beside them as the eighth.

He appeared publicly in the costume of the old kings of Alba.

In his new law as to political crimes the principal variation

from that of Sulla was, that there was placed alongside

of the collective community, and on a level with it, the Imperator

as the living and personal expression of the people. In the formula

used for political oaths there was added to the Jovis and the Penates

of the Roman people the Genius of the Imperator. The outward badge

of monarchy was, according to the view univerally diffused in antiquity,

the image of the monarch on the coins; from the year 710

the head of Caesar appears on those of the Roman state.

There could accordingly be no complaint at least on the score

that Caesar left the public in the dark as to his view of his position;

as distinctly and as formally as possible he came forward

not merely as monarch, but as very king of Rome. It is possible even,

although not exactly probable, and at any rate of subordinate

importance, that he had it in view to designate his official power

not with the new name of Imperator, but directly with the old one

of King.(18) Even in his lifetime many of his enemies as of his friends

were of opinion that he intended to have himself expressly nominated

king of Rome; several indeed of his most vehement adherents

suggested to him in different ways and at different times

that he should assume the crown; most strikingly of all,

Marcus Antonius, when he as consul offered the diadem to Caesar

before all the people (15 Feb. 710). But Caesar rejected

these proposals without exception at once. If he at the same time

took steps against those who made use of these incidents to stir

republican opposition, it by no means follows from this that he was not

in earnest with his rejection. The assumption that these invitations

took place at his bidding, with the view of preparing the multitude

for the unwonted spectacle of the Roman diadem, utterly misapprehends

the mighty power of the sentimental opposition with which

Caesar had to reckon, and which could not be rendered more compliant,

but on the contrary necessarily gained a broader basis,

through such a public recognition of its warrant on the part

of Caesar himself. It may have been the uncalled-for zeal of vehement

adherents alone that occasioned these incidents; it may be also,

that Caesar merely permitted or even suggested the scene with Antonius,

in order to put an end in as marked a manner as possible

to the inconvenient gossip by a declinature which took place

before the eyes of the burgesses and was inserted by his command

even in the calendar of the state and could not, in fact,

be well revoked. The probability is that Caesar, who appreciated alike

the value of a convenient formal designation and the antipathies

of the multitude which fasten more on the names than on the essence

of things, was resolved to avoid the name of king as tainted

with an ancient curse and as more familiar to the Romans of his time

when applied to the despots of the east than to their own Numa

and Servius, and to appropriate the substance of the regal office

under the title of Imperator.

The New Court

The New Patrician Nobility

But, whatever may have been the definitive title present to his thoughts

the sovereign ruler was there, and accordingly the court

established itself at once with all its due accompaniments of pomp,

insipidity, and emptiness. Caesar appeared in public not in the robe

of the consuls which was bordered with purple stripes,

but in the robe wholly of purple which was reckoned in antiquity

as the proper regal attire, and received, seated on his golden chair

and without rising from it, the solemn procession of the senate.

The festivals in his honour commemorative of birthday, of victories,

and of vows, filled the calendar. When Caesar came to the capital,

his principal servants marched forth in troops to great distances

so as to meet and escort him. To be near to him began to be

of such importance, that the rents rose in the quarter of the city

where he dwelt. Personal interviews with him were rendered

so difficult by the multitude of individuals soliciting audience,

that Caesar found himself compelled in many cases to communicate

even with his intimate friends in writing, and that persons

even of the highest rank had to wait for hours in the antechamber.

People felt, more clearly than was agreeable to Caesar himself,

that they no longer approached a fellow-citizen. There arose

a monarchical aristocracy, which was in a remarkable manner at once

new and old, and which had sprung out of the idea of casting

into the shade the aristocracy of the oligarchy by that of royalty,

the nobility by the patriciate. The patrician body still subsisted,

although without essential privileges as an order, in the character

of a close aristocratic guild;(19) but as it could receive

no new -gentes-(20) it had dwindled away more and more in the course

of centuries, and in the time of Caesar there were not more than

fifteen or sixteen patrician -gentes- still in existence.

Caesar, himself sprung from one of them, got the right

of creating new patrician -gentes- conferred on the Imperator

by decree of the people, and so established, in contrast

to the republican nobility, the new aristocracy of the patriciate,

which most happily combined all the requisites of a monarchical

aristocracy--the charm of antiquity, entire dependence

on the government, and total insignificance. On all sides

the new sovereignty revealed itself.

Under a monarch thus practically unlimited there could hardly

be scope for a constitution at all--still less for a continuance

of the hitherto existing commonwealth based on the legal co-operation

of the burgesses, the senate, and the several magistrates. Caesar fully

and definitely reverted to the tradition of the regal period;

the burgess-assembly remained--what it had already been, in that period--

by the side of and with the king the supreme and ultimate expression

of the will of the sovereign people; the senate was brought back

to its original destination of giving advice to the ruler

when he requested it; and lastly the ruler concentrated in his person

anew the whole magisterial authority, so that there existed no other

independent state-official by his side any more than by the side

of the kings of the earliest times.

Legislation

Edicts

For legislation the democratic monarch adhered to the primitive maxim

of Roman state-law, that the community of the people in concert

with the king convoking them had alone the power of organically

regulating the commonwealth; and he had his constitutive enactments

regularly sanctioned by decree of the people. The free energy

and the authority half-moral, half-political, which the yea or nay

of those old warrior-assemblies had carried with it, could not indeed

be again instilled into the so-called comitia of this period;

the co-operation of the burgesses in legislation, which in the old

constitution had been extremely limited but real and living,

was in the new practically an unsubstantial shadow. There was therefore

no need of special restrictive measures against the comitia;

many years' experience had shown that every government--

the oligarchy as well as the monarch--easily kept on good terms

with this formal sovereign. These Caesarian comitia were an important

element in the Caesarian system and indirectly of practical significance,

only in so far as they served to retain in principle the sovereignty

of the people and to constitute an energetic protest against sultanism.

But at the same time--as is not only obvious of itself, but is also

distinctly attested--the other maxim also of the oldest state-law

was revived by Caesar himself, and not merely for the first time

by his successors; viz. that what the supreme, or rather sole,

magistrate commands is unconditionally valid so long as he remains

in office, and that, while legislation no doubt belongs only to the king

and the burgesses in concert, the royal edict is equivalent to law

at least till the demission of its author.

The Senate as the State-Council of the Monarch

While the democratic king thus conceded to the community of the people

at least a formal share in the sovereignty, it was by no means

his intention to divide his authority with what had hitherto been

the governing body, the college of senators. The senate of Caesar

was to be--in a quite different way from the later senate of Augustus--

nothing but a supreme council of state, which he made use

of for advising with him beforehand as to laws, and for the issuing

of the more important administrative ordinances through it,

or at least under its name--for cases in fact occurred where decrees

of senate were issued, of which none of the senators recited

as present at their preparation had any cognizance. There were

no material difficulties of form in reducing the senate to it

original deliberative position, which it had overstepped more de facto

than de jure; but in this case it was necessary to protect himself

from practical resistance, for the Roman senate was as much

the headquarters of the opposition to Caesar as the Attic Areopagus

was of the opposition to Pericles. Chiefly for this reason

the number of senators, which had hitherto amounted at most

to six hundred in its normal condition(21) and had been greatly reduced

by the recent crises, was raised by extraordinary supplement

to nine hundred; and at the same time, to keep it at least

up to this mark, the number of quaestors to be nominated annually,

that is of members annually admitted to the senate, was raised

from twenty to forty.(22) The extraordinary filling up of the senate

was undertaken by the monarch alone. In the case of the ordinary

additions he secured to himself a permanent influence through

the circumstance, that the electoral colleges were bound by law(23)

to give their votes to the first twenty candidates for the quaestorship

who were provided with letters of recommendation from the monarch;

besides, the crown was at liberty to confer the honorary rights

attaching to the quaestorship or to any office superior to it,

and consequently a seat in the senate in particular, by way of exception

even on individuals not qualified. The selection of the extraordinary

members who were added naturally fell in the main on adherents

of the new order of things, and introduced, along with -equites-

of respectable standing, various dubious and plebeian personages

into the proud corporation--former senators who had been erased

from the roll by the censor or in consequence of a judicial sentence,

foreigners from Spain and Gaul who had to some extent to learn

their Latin in the senate, men lately subaltern officers

who had not previously received even the equestrian ring,

sons of freedmen or of such as followed dishonourable trades,

and other elements of a like kind. The exclusive circles

of the nobility, to whom this change in the personal composition

of the senate naturally gave the bitterest offence, saw in it

an intentional depreciation of the very institution itself.

Caesar was not capable of such a self-destructive policy;

he was as determined not to let himself be governed by his council

as he was convinced of the necessity of the institute in itself.

They might more correctly have discerned in this proceeding the intention

of the monarch to take away from the senate its former character

of an exclusive representation of the oligarchic aristocracy,

and to make it once more--what it had been in the regal period--

a state-council representing all classes of persons belonging

to the state through their most intelligent elements, and not necessarily

excluding the man of humble birth or even the foreigner; just as those

earliest kings introduced non-burgesses,(24) Caesar introduced

non-Italians into his senate.

Personal Government by Caesar

While the rule of the nobility was thus set aside and its existence

undermined, and while the senate in its new form was merely a tool

of the monarch, autocracy was at the same time most strictly

carried out in the administration and government of the state,

and the whole executive was concentrated in the hands of the monarch.

First of all, the Imperator naturally decided in person every question

of any moment. Caesar was able to carry personal government

to an extent which we puny men can hardly conceive, and which

is not to be explained solely from the unparalleled rapidity

and decision of his working, but has moreover its ground

in a more general cause. When we see Caesar, Sulla, Gaius Gracchus,

and Roman statesmen in general displaying throughout an activity

which transcends our notions of human powers of working, the reason lies,

not in any change that human nature has undergone since that time,

but in the change which has taken place since then in the organization

of the household. The Roman house was a machine, in which even

the mental powers of the slaves and freedmen yielded their produce

to the master; a master, who knew how to govern these, worked as it were

with countless minds. It was the beau ideal of bureaucratic

centralization; which our counting-house system strives indeed

zealously to imitate, but remains as far behind its prototype

as the modern power of capital is inferior to the ancient system

of slavery. Caesar knew how to profit by this advantage;

wherever any post demanded special confidence, we see him filling it up

on principle--so far as other considerations at all permit--

with his slaves freedmen, or clients of humble birth. His works

as a whole show what an organizing genius like his could accomplish

with such an instrument; but to the question, how in detail

these marvellous feats were achieved, we have no adequate answer.

Bureaucracy resembles a manufactory also in this respect,

that the work done does not appear as that of the individual

who has worked at it, but as that of the manufactory which stamps it.

This much only is quite clear, that Caesar, in his work had no helper

at all who exerted a personal influence over it or was even so much as

initiated into the whole plan; he was not only the sole master,

but he worked also without skilled associates,

merely with common labourers.

In Matters of Finance

With respect to details as a matter of course in strictly political

affairs Caesar avoided, so far as was at all possible,

any delegation of his functions. Where it was inevitable,

as especially when during his frequent absence from Rome he had need

of a higher organ there, the person destined for this purpose was,

significantly enough, not the legal deputy of the monarch,

the prefect of the city, but a confidant without officially-recognized

jurisdiction, usually Caesar's banker, the cunning and pliant

Phoenician merchant Lucius Cornelius Balbus from Gades.

In administration Caesar was above all careful to resume the keys

of the state-chest--which the senate had appropriated to itself

after the fall of the regal power, and by means of which

it had possessed itself of the government--and to entrust them

only to those servants who with their persons were absolutely

and exclusively devoted to him. In respect of ownership indeed

the private means of the monarch remained, of course, strictly

separate from the property of the state; but Caesar took in hand

the administration of the whole financial and monetary system

of the state, and conducted it entirely in the way in which

he and the Roman grandees generally were wont to manage

the administration of their own means and substance. For the future

the levying of the provincial revenues and in the main also

the management of the coinage were entrusted to the slaves and freedmen

of the Imperator and men of the senatorial order were excluded from it--

a momentous step out of which grew in course of time the important class

of procurators and the "imperial household."

In the Governorships

Of the governorships on the other hand, which, after they had handed

their financial business over to the new imperial tax-receivers,

were still more than they had formerly been essentially military commands,

that of Egypt alone was transferred to the monarch's own retainers.

The country of the Nile, in a peculiar manner geographically isolated

and politically centralized, was better fitted than any other district

to break off permanently under an able leader from the central power,

as the attempts which had repeatedly been made by hard-pressed Italian

party-chiefs to establish themselves there during the recent crisis

sufficiently proved. Probably it was just this consideration

thatinduced Caesar not to declare the land formally a province,

but to leave the harmless Lagids there; and certainly for this reason

the legions stationed in Egypt were not entrusted to a man

belonging to the senate or, in other words, to the former government,

but this command was, just like the posts of tax-receivers,

treated as a menial office.(25) In general however the consideration

had weight with Caesar, that the soldiers of Rome should not,

like those of Oriental kings, be commanded by lackeys. It remained

the rule to entrust the more important governorships to those

who had been consuls, the less important to those who had been praetors;

and once more, instead of the five years' interval prescribed

by the law of 702,(26) the commencement of the governorship probably

was in the ancient fashion annexed directly to the close of the official

functions in the city. On the other hand the distribution

of the provinces among the qualified candidates, which had hitherto

been arranged sometimes by decree of the people or senate,

sometimes by concert among the magistrates or by lot, passed over

to the monarch. And, as the consuls were frequently induced

to abdicate before the end of the year and to make room for after-

elected consuls (-consules suffecti-); as, moreover, the number

of praetors annually nominated was raised from eight to sixteen,

and the nomination of half of them was entrusted to the Imperator

in the same way as that of the half of the quaestors; and, lastly,

as there was reserved to the Imperator the right of nominating,

if not titular consuls, at any rate titular praetors and titular

quaestors: Caesar secured a sufficient number of candidates

acceptable to him for filling up the governorships. Their recall

remained of course left to the discretion of the regent as well as

their nomination; as a rule it was assumed that the consular governor

should not remain more than two years, nor the praetorian

more than one year, in the province.

In the Administration of the Capital

Lastly, so far as concerns the administration of the city which was

his capital and residence, the Imperator evidently intended for a time

to entrust this also to magistrates similarly nominated by him.

He revived the old city-lieutenancy of the regal period;(27)

on different occasions he committed during his absence the administration

of the capital to one or more such lieutenants nominated by him

without consulting the people and for an indefinite period,

who united in themselves the functions of all the administrative

magistrates and possessed even the right of coining money

with their own name, although of course not with their own effigy

In 707 and in the first nine months of 709 there were, moreover,

neither praetors nor curule aediles nor quaestors; the consuls too

were nominated in the former year only towards its close,

and in the latter Caesar was even consul without a colleague.

This looks altogether like an attempt to revive completely

the old regal authority within the city of Rome, as far as the limits

enjoined by the democratic past of the new monarch; in other words,

of magistrates additional to the king himself, to allow only

the prefect of the city during the king's absence and the tribunes

and plebeian aediles appointed for protecting popular freedom

to continue in existence, and to abolish the consulship, the censorship,

the praetorship, the curule aedileship and the quaestorship.(28)

But Caesar subsequently departed from this; he neither accepted

the royal title himself, nor did he cancel those venerable names

interwoven with the glorious history of the republic. The consuls,

praetors, aediles, tribunes, and quaestors retained substantially

their previous formal powers; nevertheless their position

was totally altered. It was the political idea lying

at the foundation of the republic that the Roman empire was identified

with the city of Rome, and in consistency with it the municipal

magistrates of the capital were treated throughout as magistrates

of the empire. In the monarchy of Caesar that view and this consequence

of it fell into abeyance; the magistrates of Rome formed thenceforth

only the first among the many municipalities of the empire,

and the consulship in particular became a purely titular post,

which preserved a certain practical importance only in virtue

of the reversion of a higher governorship annexed to it. The fate,

which the Roman community had been wont to prepare for the vanquished,

now by means of Caesar befell itself; its sovereignty over

the Roman empire was converted into a limited communal freedom

within the Roman state. That at the same time the number

of the praetors and quaestors was doubled, has been already mentioned;

the same course was followed with the plebeian aediles, to whom

two new "corn-aediles" (-aediles Ceriales-) were added to superintend

the supplies of the capital. The appointment to those offices remained

with the community, and was subject to no restriction as respected

the consuls and perhaps also the tribunes of the people

and plebeian aediles; we have already adverted to the fact,

that the Imperator reserved a right of proposal binding on the electors

as regards the half of the praetors, curule aediles, and quaestors

to be annually nominated. In general the ancient and hallowed

palladia of popular freedom were not touched; which, of course,

did not prevent the individual refractory tribune of the people

from being seriously interfered with and, in fact, deposed and erased

from the roll of senators.

As the Imperator was thus, for the more general and more important

questions, his own minister; as he controlled the finances

by his servants, and the army by his adjutants; and as the old republican

state-magistracies were again converted into municipal magistracies

of the city of Rome; the autocracy was sufficiently established.

The State-Hierarchy

In the spiritual hierarchy on the other hand Caesar, although he issued

a detailed law respecting this portion of the state-economy,

made no material alteration, except that he connected with the person

of the regent the supreme pontificate and perhaps also the membership

of the higher priestly colleges generally; and, partly

in connection with this, one new stall was created in each

of the three supreme colleges, and three new stalls in the fourth college

of the banquet-masters. If the Roman state-hierarchy had hitherto

served as a support to the ruling oligarchy, it might render

precisely the same service to the new monarchy. The conservative

religious policy of the senate was transferred to the new kings of Rome;

when the strictly conservative Varro published about this time

his "Antiquities of Divine Things," the great fundamental

repository of Roman state-theology, he was allowed to dedicate it

to the -Pontifex Maximus- Caesar. The faint lustre which the worship

of Jovis was still able to impart shone round the newly-established

throne; and the old national faith became in its last stages

the instrument of a Caesarian papacy, which, however,

was from the outset but hollow and feeble.

Regal Jurisdiction

In judicial matters, first of all, the old regal jurisdiction

was re-established. As the king had originally been judge in criminal

and civil causes, without being legally bound in the former

to respect an appeal to the prerogative of mercy in the people,

or in the latter to commit the decision of the question in dispute

to jurymen; so Caesar claimed the right of bringing capital causes

as well as private processes for sole and final decision to his own bar,

and disposing of them in the event of his presence personally,

in the event of his absence by the city-lieutenant. In fact,

we find him, quite after the manner of the ancient kings, now sitting

in judgment publicly in the Forum of the capital on Roman burgesses

accused of high treason, now holding a judicial inquiry, in his house

regarding the client princes accused of the like crime;

so that the only privilege, which the Roman burgesses had as compared

with the other subjects of the king, seems to have consisted

in the publicity of the judicial procedure. But this resuscitated

supreme jurisdiction of the kings, although Caesar discharged its duties

with impartiality and care, could only from the nature of the case

find practical application in exceptional cases.

Retention of the Previous Administration of Justice

For the usual procedure in criminal and civil causes the former

republican mode of administering justice was substantially retained.

Criminal causes were still disposed of as formerly before the different

jury-commissions competent to deal with the several crimes,

civil causes partly before the court of inheritance or,

as it was commonly called, of the -centumviri-, partly before

the single -iudices-; the superintendence of judicial proceedings

was as formerly conducted in the capital chiefly by the praetors,

in the provinces by the governors. Political crimes too continued

even under the monarchy to be referred to a jury-commission;

the new ordinance, which Caesar issued respecting them, specified

the acts legally punishable with precision and in a liberal spirit

which excluded all prosecution of opinions, and it fixed

as the penalty not death, but banishment. As respects the selection

of the jurymen, whom the senatorial party desired to see chosen

exclusively from the senate and the strict Gracchans exclusively

from the equestrian order, Caesar, faithful to the principle

of reconciling the parties, left the matter on the footing

of the compromise-law of Cotta,(29) but with the modification--

for which the way was probably prepared by the law of Pompeius

of 699(30)-that the -tribuni aerarii- who came from the lower ranks

of the people were set aside; so that there was established a rating

for jurymen of at least 400,000 sesterces (4000 pounds), and senators

and equites now divided the functions of jurymen which had so long

been an apple of discord between them.

Appeal to the Monarch

The relations of the regal and the republican jurisdiction were

on the whole co-ordinate, so that any cause might be initiated as well

before the king's bar as before the competent republican tribunal,

the latter of course in the event of collision giving way;

if on the other hand the one or the other tribunal had pronounced

sentence, the cause was thereby finally disposed of. To overturn

a verdict pronounced by the jurymen duly called to act in a civil

or in a criminal cause even the new ruler was not entitled,

except where special incidents, such as corruption or violence,

already according to the law of the republic gave occasion

for cancelling the jurymen's sentence. On the other hand

the principle that, as concerned any decree emanating merely

from magistrates, the person aggrieved by it was entitled to appeal

to the superior of the decreeing authority, probably obtained

even now the great extension, out of which the subsequent imperial

appellate jurisdiction arose; perhaps all the magistrates

administering law, at least the governors of all the provinces,

were regarded so far as subordinates of the ruler, that appeal

to him might be lodged from any of their decrees.

Decay of the Judicial System

Certainly these innovations, the most important of which--

the general extension given to appeal--cannot even be reckoned

absolutely an improvement, by no means healed thoroughly the evils

from which the Roman administration of justice was suffering.

Criminal procedure cannot be sound in any slave-state, inasmuch as

the task of proceeding against slaves lies, if not de jure,

at least de facto in the hands of the master. The Roman master,

as may readily be conceived, punished throughout the crime of his serf,

not as a crime, but only so far as it rendered the slave useless

or disagreeable to him; slave criminals were merely drafted off

somewhat like oxen addicted to goring, and, as the latter

were sold to the butcher, so were the former sold to the fencing-booth.

But even the criminal procedure against free men, which had been

from the outset and always in great part continued to be

a political process, had amidst the disorder of the last generations

become transformed from a grave legal proceeding into a faction-

fight to be fought out by means of favour, money, and violence.

The blame rested jointly on all that took part in it, on the magistrates,

the jury, the parties, even the public who were spectators;

but the most incurable wounds were inflicted on justice by the doings

of the advocates. In proportion as the parasitic plant

of Roman forensic eloquence flourished, all positive ideas of right

became broken up; and the distinction, so difficult of apprehension

by the public, between opinion and evidence was in reality

expelled from the Roman criminal practice. "A plain simple defendant,"

says a Roman advocate of much experience at this period, "may be accused

of any crime at pleasure which he has or has not committed, and will be

certainly condemned." Numerous pleadings in criminal causes

have been preserved to us from this epoch; there is hardly one of them

which makes even a serious attempt to fix the crime in question

and to put into proper shape the proof or counterproof.(31)

That the contemporary civil procedure was likewise in various respects

unsound, we need hardly mention; it too suffered from the effects

of the party politics mixed up with all things, as for instance

in the process of Publius Quinctius (671-673), where the most

contradictory decisions were given according as Cinna or Sulla

had the ascendency in Rome; and the advocates, frequently non-jurists,

produced here also intentionally and unintentionally abundance

of confusion. But it was implied in the nature of the case,

that party mixed itself up with such matters only by way of exception,

and that here the quibbles of advocates could not so rapidly or so deeply

break up the ideas of right; accordingly the civil pleadings

which we possess from this epoch, while not according

to our stricter ideas effective compositions for their purpose,

are yet of a far less libellous and far more juristic character

than the contemporary speeches in criminal causes. If Caesar permitted

the curb imposed on the eloquence of advocates by Pompeius(32)

to remain, or even rendered it more severe, there was at least

nothing lost by this; and much was gained, when better selected

and better superintended magistrates and jurymen were nominated

and the palpable corruption and intimidation of the courts

came to an end. But the sacred sense of right and the reverence

for the law, which it is difficult to destroy in the minds

of the multitude, it is still more difficult to reproduce.

Though the legislator did away with various abuses, he could not heal

the root of the evil; and it might be doubted whether time,

which cures everything curable, would in this case bring relief.

Decay of the Roman Military System