These evils, under which the national economy of Italy

lay prostrate, were in their deepest essence irremediable,

and so much of them as still admitted of remedy depended essentially

for its amendment on the people and on time; for the wisest government

is as little able as the more skilful physician to give freshness

to the corrupt juices of the organism, or to do more in the case

of the deeper-rooted evils than to prevent those accidents

which obstruct the remedial power of nature in its working.

The peaceful energy of the new rule even of itself furnished

such a preventive, for by its means some of the worst excrescences

were done away, such as the artificial pampering of the proletariate,

the impunity of crimes, the purchase of offices, and various others.

But the government could do something more than simply abstain

from harm. Caesar was not one of those over-wise people who refuse

to embank the sea, because forsooth no dike can defy some sudden influx

of the tide. It is better, if a nation and its economy follow

spontaneously the path prescribed by nature; but, seeing that they

had got out of this path, Caesar applied all his energies to bring back

by special intervention the nation to its home and family life,

and to reform the national economy by law and decree.

Measures against Absentees from Italy

Measures for the Elevation of the Family

With a view to check the continued absence of the Italians from Italy

and to induce the world of quality and the merchants to establish

their homes in their native land, not only was the term of service

for the soldiers shortened, but men of senatorial rank were

altogether prohibited from taking up their abode out of Italy

except when on public business, while the other Italians

of marriageable age (from the twentieth to the fortieth year)

were enjoined not to be absent from Italy for more than three

consecutive years. In the same spirit Caesar had already,

in his first consulship on founding the colony of Capua kept specially

in view fathers who had several children;(62) and now as Imperator

he proposed extraordinary rewards for the fathers of numerous families,

while he at the same time as supreme judge of the nation

treated divorce and adultery with a rigour according

to Roman ideas unparalleled.

Laws Respecting Luxury

Nor did he even think it beneath his dignity to issue a detailed law

as to luxury--which, among other points, cut down extravagance

in building at least in one of its most irrational forms,

that of sepulchral monuments; restricted the use of purple robes

and pearls to certain times, ages, and classes, and totally prohibited

it in grown-up men; fixed a maximum for the expenditure of the table;

and directly forbade a number of luxurious dishes. Such ordinances

doubtless were not new; but it was a new thing that the "master

of morals" seriously insisted on their observance, superintended

the provision-markets by means of paid overseers, and ordered

that the tables of men of rank should be examined by his officers

and the forbidden dishes on them should be confiscated. It is true

that by such theoretical and practical instructions in moderation

as the new monarchical police gave to the fashionable world,

hardly more could be accomplished than the compelling luxury to retire

somewhat more into concealment; but, if hypocrisy is the homage

which vice pays to virtue, under the circumstances of the times

even a semblance of propriety established by police measures

was a step towards improvement not to be despised.

The Debt Crisis

The measures of Caesar for the better regulation of Italian monetary

and agricultural relations were of a graver character and promised

greater results. The first question here related to temporary enactments

respecting the scarcity of money and the debt-crisis generally.

The law called forth by the outcry as to locked-up capital--that no one

should have on hand more than 60,000 sesterces (600 pounds) in gold

and silver cash--was probably only issued to allay the indignation

of the blind public against the usurers; the form of publication,

which proceeded on the fiction that this was merely the renewed

enforcing of an earlier law that had fallen into oblivion,

shows that Caesar was ashamed of this enactment, and it can hardly

have passed into actual application. A far more serious question

was the treatment of the pending claims for debt, the complete remission

of which was vehemently demanded from Caesar by the party which called

itself by his name. We have already mentioned, that he did not yield

to this demand;(63) but two important concessions were made

to the debtors, and that as early as 705. First, the interest

in arrear was struck off,(64) and that which was paid was deducted

from the capital. Secondly, the creditor was compelled to accept

the moveable and immoveable property of the debtor in lieu of payment

at the estimated value which his effects had before the civil war

and the general depreciation which it had occasioned. The latter

enactment was not unreasonable; if the creditor was to be looked on

de facto as the owner of the property of his debtor to the amount

of the sum due to him, it was doubtless proper that he should bear

his share in the general depreciation of the property. On the other hand

the cancelling of the payments of interest made or outstanding--

which practically amounted to this, that the creditors lost,

besides the interest itself, on an average 25 per cent of what

they were entitled to claim as capital at the time of the issuing

of the law--was in fact nothing else than a partial concession

of that cancelling of creditors' claims springing out of loans,

for which the democrats had clamoured so vehemently; and, however bad

may have been the conduct of the usurers, it is not possible thereby

to justify the retrospective abolition of all claims for interest

without distinction. In order at least to understand this agitation

we must recollect how the democratic party stood towards

the question of interest. The legal prohibition against

taking interest, which the old plebeian opposition had extorted

in 412,(65) had no doubt been practically disregarded by the nobility

which controlled the civil procedure by means of the praetorship,

but had still remained since that period formally valid;

and the democrats of the seventh century, who regarded themselves

throughout as the continuers of that old agitation as to privilege

and social position,(66) had maintained the illegality of payment

of interest at any time, and even already practically enforced

that principle, at least temporarily, in the confusion of the Marian

period.(67) It is not credible that Caesar shared the crude views

of his party on the interest question; the fact, that, in his account

of the matter of liquidation he mentions the enactment

as to the surrender of the property of the debtor in lieu of payment

but is silent as to the cancelling of the interest, is perhaps

a tacit self-reproach. But he was, like every party-leader,

dependent on his party and could not directly repudiate

the traditional maxims of the democracy in the question of interest;

the more especially when he had to decide this question,

not as the all-powerful conqueror of Pharsalus, but even before

his departure for Epirus. But, while he permitted perhaps rather than

originated this violation of legal order and of property, it is certainly

his merit that that monstrous demand for the annulling of all claims

arising from loans was rejected; and it may perhaps be looked on

as a saving of his honour, that the debtors were far more indignant

at the--according to their view extremely unsatisfactory--concession

given to them than the injured creditors, and made under Caelius

and Dolabella those foolish and (as already mentioned) speedily frustrated

attempts to extort by riot and civil war what Caesar refused to them.

New Ordinance as to Bankruptcy

But Caesar did not confine himself to helping the debtor

for the moment; he did what as legislator he could, permanently

to keep down the fearful omnipotence of capital. First of all

the great legal maxim was proclaimed, that freedom is not a possession

commensurable with property, but an eternal right of man,

of which the state is entitled judicially to deprive the criminal alone,

not the debtor. It was Caesar, who, perhaps stimulated in this case

also by the more humane Egyptian and Greek legislation, especially

that of Solon,(68) introduced this principle--diametrically opposed

to the maxims of the earlier ordinances as to bankruptcy--

into the common law, where it has since retained its place undisputed.

According to Roman law the debtor unable to pay became the serf

of his creditor.(69) The Poetelian law no doubt had allowed a debtor,

who had become unable to pay only through temporary embarrassments,

not through genuine insolvency, to save his personal freedom

by the cession of his property;(70) nevertheless for the really insolvent

that principle of law, though doubtless modified in secondary points,

had been in substance retained unaltered for five hundred years;

a direct recourse to the debtor's estate only occurred exceptionally,

when the debtor had died or had forfeited his burgess-rights

or could not be found. It was Caesar who first gave an insolvent

the right--on which our modern bankruptcy regulations are based--

of formally ceding his estate to his creditors, whether it might suffice

to satisfy them or not, so as to save at all events his personal freedom

although with diminished honorary and political rights, and to begin

a new financial existence, in which he could only be sued

on account of claims proceeding from the earlier period and not protected

in the liquidation, if he could pay them without renewed financial ruin.

Usury Laws

While thus the great democrat had the imperishable honour of emancipating

personal freedom in principle from capital, he attempted moreover

to impose a police limit on the excessive power of capital by usury-laws.

He did not affect to disown the democratic antipathy to stipulations

for interest. For Italian money-dealing there was fixed a maximum amount

of the loans at interest to be allowed in the case of the individual

capitalist, which appears to have been proportioned to the Italian

landed estate belonging to each, and perhaps amounted to half its value.

Transgressions of this enactment were, after the fashion of the procedure

prescribed in the republican usury-laws, treated as criminal offence

and sent before a special jury-commission. If these regulations

were successfully carried into effect, every Italian man of business

would be compelled to become at the same time an Italian landholder,

and the class of capitalists subsisting merely on their interest

would disappear wholly from Italy. Indirectly too the no less injurious

category of insolvent landowners who practically managed their estates

merely for their creditors was by this means materially curtailed,

inasmuch as the creditors, if they desired to continue their lending

business, were compelled to buy for themselves. From this very fact

besides it is plain that Caesar wished by no means simply to renew

that naive prohibition of interest by the old popular party,

but on the contrary to allow the taking of interest within certain limits.

It is very probable however that he did not confine himself

to that injunction--which applied merely to Italy--of a maximum amount

of sums to be lent, but also, especially with respect to the provinces,

prescribed maximum rates for interest itself. The enactments--

that it was illegal to take higher interest than 1 per cent per month,

or to take interest on arrears of interest, or in fine to make

a judicial claim for arrears of interest to a greater amount

than a sum equal to the capital--were, probably also after

the Graeco-Egyptian model,(71) first introduced in the Roman empire

by Lucius Lucullus for Asia Minor and retained there by his

better successors; soon afterwards they were transferred

to other provinces by edicts of the governors, and ultimately at least

part of them was provided with the force of law in all provinces

by a decree of the Roman senate of 704. The fact that these Lucullan

enactments afterwards appear in all their compass as imperial law

and have thus become the basis of the Roman and indeed of modern

legislation as to interest, may also perhaps be traced back

to an ordinance of Caesar.

Elevation of Agriculture

Hand in hand with these efforts to guard against the ascendency

of capital went the endeavours to bring back agriculture to the path

which was most advantageous for the commonwealth. For this purpose

the improvement of the administration of justice and of police

was very essential. While hitherto nobody in Italy had been sure

of his life and of his moveable or immoveable property, while Roman

condottieri for instance, at the intervals when their gangs

were not helping to manage the politics of the capital,

applied themselves to robbery in the forests of Etruria or rounded off

the country estates of their paymasters by fresh acquisitions,

this sort of club-law was now at an end; and in particular

the agricultural population of all classes must have felt

the beneficial effects of the change. The plans of Caesar

for great works also, which were not at all limited to the capital,

were intended to tell in this respect; the construction,

for instance, of a convenient high-road from Rome through

the passesof the Apennines to the Adriatic was designed to stimulate

the internal traffic of Italy, and the lowering the level

of the Fucine lake to benefit the Marsian farmers. But Caesar

also sought by more direct measures to influence the state

of Italian husbandry. The Italian graziers were required

to take at least a third of their herdsmen from freeborn adults,

whereby brigandage was checked and at the same time a source of gain

was opened to the free proletariate.

Distribution of Land

In the agrarian question Caesar, who already in his first consulship

had been in a position to regulate it,(72) more judicious

than Tiberius Gracchus, did not seek to restore the farmer-system

at any price, even at that of a revolution--concealed under

juristic clauses--directed against property; by him on the contrary,

as by every other genuine statesman, the security of that

which is property or is at any rate regarded by the public

as property was esteemed as the first and most inviolable

of all political maxims, and it was only within the limits assigned

by this maxim that he sought to accomplish the elevation of the Italian

small holdings, which also appeared to him as a vital question

for the nation. Even as it was, there was much still left for him

in this respect to do. Every private right, whether it was called

property or entitled heritable possession, whether traceable to Gracchus

or to Sulla, was unconditionally respected by him. On the other hand,

Caesar, after he had in his strictly economical fashion--

which tolerated no waste and no negligence even on a small scale--

instituted a general revision of the Italian titles to possession

by the revived commission of Twenty,(73) destined the whole

actual domain land of Italy (including a considerable portion

of the real estates that were in the hands of spiritual guilds

but legally belonged to the state) for distribution in the Gracchan

fashion, so far, of course, as it was fitted for agriculture;

the Apulian summer and the Samnite winter pastures belonging

to the state continued to be domain; and it was at least the design

of the Imperator, if these domains should not suffice, to procure

the additional land requisite by the purchase of Italian estates

from the public funds. In the selection of the new farmers provision

was naturally made first of all for the veteran soldiers,

and as far as possible the burden, which the levy imposed

on the mother country, was converted into a benefit by the fact

that Caesar gave the proletarian, who was levied from it as a recruit,

back to it as a farmer; it is remarkable also that the desolate

Latin communities, such as Veii and Capena, seem to have been

preferentially provided with new colonists. The regulation

of Caesar that the new owners should not be entitled to alienate

the lands received by them till after twenty years, was a happy medium

between the full bestowal of the right of alienation, which would have

brought the larger portion of the distributed land speedily

back into the hands of the great capitalists, and the permanent

restrictions on freedom of dealing in land which Tiberius Gracchus(74)

and Sulla (75) had enacted, both equally in vain.

Elevation of the Municipal System

Lastly while the government thus energetically applied itself

to remove the diseased, and to strengthen the sound, elements

of the Italian national life, the newly-regulated municipal system--

which had but recently developed itself out of the crisis

of the Social war in and alongside of the state-economy(76)--was intended

to communicate to the new absolute monarchy the communal life

which was compatible with it, and to impart to the sluggish circulation

of the noblest elements of public life once more a quickened action.

The leading principles in the two municipal ordinances issued in 705

for Cisalpine Gaul and in 709 for Italy,(77) the latter of which remained

the fundamental law for all succeeding times, are apparently, first,

the strict purifying of the urban corporations from all immoral elements,

while yet no trace of political police occurs; secondly, the utmost

restriction of centralization and the utmost freedom of movement

in the communities, to which there was even now reserved the election

of magistrates and an--although limited--civil and criminal jurisdiction.

The general police enactments, such as the restrictions on the right

of association,(78) came, it is true, into operation also here.

Such were the ordinances, by which Caesar attempted to reform

the Italian national economy. It is easy both to show their

insufficiency, seeing that they allowed a multitude of evils

still to exist, and to prove that they operated in various respects

injuriously by imposing restrictions, some of which were

very severely felt, on freedom of dealing. It is still easier

to show that the evils of the Italian national economy generally

were incurable. But in spite of this the practical statesman

will admire the work as well as the master-workman. It was already

no small achievement that, where a man like Sulla, despairing

of remedy, had contented himself with a mere formal reorganization,

the evil was seized in its proper seat and grappled with there;

and we may well conclude that Caesar with his reforms came as near

to the measure of what was possible as it was given to a statesman

and a Roman to come. He could not and did not expect from them

the regeneration of Italy; but he sought on the contrary to attain

this in a very different way, for the right apprehension

of which it is necessary first of all to review the condition

of the provinces as Caesar found them.

Provinces

The provinces, which Caesar found in existence, were fourteen in number:

seven European--the Further and the Hither Spain, Transalpine Gaul,

Italian Gaul with Illyricum, Macedonia with Greece, Sicily,

Sardinia with Corsica; five Asiatic--Asia, Bithynia and Pontus,

Cilicia with Cyprus, Syria, Crete; and two African--Cyrene and Africa.

To these Caesar added three new ones by the erection of the two new

governorships of Lugdunese Gaul and Belgica(79) and by constituting

Illyricum a province by itself.(80)

Provincial Administration of the Oligarchy

In the administration of these provinces oligarchic misrule

had reached a point which, notwithstanding various noteworthy

performances in this line, no second government has ever attained

at least in the west, and which according to our ideas it seems

no longer possible to surpass. Certainly the responsibility for this

rests not on the Romans alone. Almost everywhere before their day

the Greek, Phoenician, or Asiatic rule had already driven out

of the nations the higher spirit and the sense of right and of liberty

belonging to better times. It was doubtless bad, that every

accused provincial was bound, when asked, to appear personally

in Rome to answer for himself; that the Roman governor interfered

at pleasure in the administration of justice and the management

of the dependent communities, pronounced capital sentences, and cancelled

transactions of the municipal council; and that in case of war

he treated the militia as he chose and often infamously, as e. g.

when Cotta at the siege of the Pontic Heraclea assigned to the militia

all the posts of danger, to spare his Italians, and on the siege

not going according to his wish, ordered the heads of his engineers

to be laid at his feet. It was doubtless bad, that no rule

of morality or of criminal law bound either the Roman administrators

or their retinue, and that violent outrages, rapes, and murders

with or without form of law were of daily occurrence in the provinces.

But these things were at least nothing new; almost everywhere

men had long been accustomed to be treated like slaves,

and it signified little in the long run whether a Carthaginian overseer,

a Syrian satrap, or a Roman proconsul acted as the local tyrant.

Their material well-being, almost the only thing for which

the provincials still cared, was far less disturbed by those occurrences,

which although numerous in proportion to the many tyrants yet affected

merely isolated individuals, than by the financial exactions pressing

heavily on all, which had never previously been prosecuted

with such energy.

The Romans now gave in this domain fearful proof of their old master

of money-matters. We have already endeavoured to describe

the Roman system of provincial oppression in its modest

and rational foundations as well as in its growth and corruption

as a matter of course, the latter went on increasing. The ordinary taxes

became far more oppressive from the inequality of their distribution

and from the preposterous system of levying them than from their

high amount. As to the burden of quartering troops, Roman statesmen

themselves expressed the opinion that a town suffered nearly

to the same extent when a Roman army took up winter quarters

in it as when an enemy took it by storm. While the taxation

in its original character had been an indemnification for the burden

of military defence undertaken by Rome, and the community

paying tribute had thus a right to remain exempt from ordinary service,

garrison-service was now--as is attested e. g. in the case

of Sardinia--for the most part imposed on the provincials,

and even in the ordinary armies, besides other duties, the whole

heavy burden of the cavalry-service was devolved on them.

The extraordinary contributions demanded--such as, the deliveries

of grain for little or no compensation to benefit the proletariate

of the capital; the frequent and costly naval armaments and coast-

defences in order to check piracy; the task of supplying works of art,

wild beasts, or other demands of the insane Roman luxury in the theatre

and the chase; the military requisitions in case of war--

were just as frequent as they were oppressive and incalculable.

A single instance may show how far things were carried.

During the three years' administration of Sicily by Gaius Verres

the number of farmers in Leontini fell from 84 to 32, in Motuca

from 187 to 86, in Herbita from 252 to 120, in Agyrium from 250 to 80;

so that in four of the most fertile districts of Sicily 59 per cent

of the landholders preferred to let their fields lie fallow

than to cultivate them under such government. And these landholders were,

as their small number itself shows and as is expressly stated, by no means

small farmers, but respectable planters and in great part Roman burgesses!

In the Client-States

In the client-states the forms of taxation were somewhat different,

but the burdens themselves were if possible still worse,

since in addition to the exactions of the Romans there came

those of the native courts. In Cappadocia and Egypt the farmer

as well as the king was bankrupt; the former was unable to satisfy

the tax-collector, the latter was unable to satisfy his Roman creditor.

Add to these the exactions, properly so called, not merely

of the governor himself, but also of his "friends," each of whom fancied

that he had as it were a draft on the governor and a title accordingly

to come back from the province a made man. The Roman oligarchy

in this respect completely resembled a gang of robbers,

and followed out the plundering of the provincials in a professional

and business-like manner; capable members of the gang set to work

not too nicely, for they had in fact to share the spoil

with the advocates and the jurymen, and the more they stole,

they did so the more securely. The notion of honour in theft too

was already developed; the big robber looked down on the little,

and the latter on the mere thief, with contempt; any one, who had been

once for a wonder condemned, boasted of the high figure of the sums

which he was proved to have exacted. Such was the behaviour

in the provinces of the successors of those men, who had been

accustomed to bring home nothing from their administration but the thanks

of the subjects and the approbation of their fellow-citizens.

The Roman Capitalists in the Provinces

But still worse, if possible, and still less subject to any control

was the havoc committed by the Italian men of business among

the unhappy provincials. The most lucrative portions of the landed

property and the whole commercial and monetary business

in the provinces were concentrated in their hands. The estates

in the transmarine regions, which belonged to Italian grandees,

were exposed to all the misery of management by stewards, and never

saw their owners; excepting possibly the hunting-parks, which occur

as early as this time in Transalpine Gaul with an area amounting

to nearly twenty square miles. Usury flourished as it had never

flourished before. The small landowners in Illyricum, Asia, and Egypt

managed their estates even in Varro's time in great part practically

as the debtor-slaves of their Roman or non-Roman creditors,

just as the plebeians in former days for their patrician lords.

Cases occurred of capital being lent even to urban communities

at four per cent per month. It was no unusual thing for an energetic

and influential man of business to get either the title

of envoy(81) given to him by the senate or that of officer

by the governor, and, if possible, to have men put at his service

for the better prosecution of his affairs; a case is narrated

on credible authority, where one of these honourable martial bankers

on account of a claim against the town of Salamis in Cyprus

kept its municipal council blockaded in the town-house,

until five of the members had died of hunger.

Robberies and Damage by War

To these two modes of oppression, each of which by itself

was intolerable and which were always becoming better arranged to work

into each other's hands, were added the general calamities, for which

the Roman government was also in great part, at least indirectly,

responsible. In the various wars a large amount of capital

was dragged away from the country and a larger amount destroyed

sometimes by the barbarians, sometimes by the Roman armies.

Owing to the worthlessness of the Roman land and maritime police,

brigands and pirates swarmed every where. In Sardinia and the interior

of Asia Minor brigandage was endemic; in Africa and Further Spain

it became necessary to fortify all buildings constructed

outside of the city-enclosures with walls and towers. The fearful evil

of piracy has been already described in another connection.(82)

The panaceas of the prohibitive system, with which the Roman governor

was wont to interpose when scarcity of money or dearth occurred,

as under such circumstances they could not fail to do--

the prohibition of the export of gold or grain from the province--

did not mend the matter. The communal affairs were almost everywhere

embarrassed, in addition to the general distress, by local disorders

and frauds of the public officials.

The Conditions of the Provinces Generally

Where such grievances afflicted communities and individuals

not temporarily but for generations with an inevitable, steady,

and yearly-increasing oppression, the best regulated public

or private economy could not but succumb to them, and the most

unspeakable misery could not but extend over all the nations

from the Tagus to the Euphrates. "All the communities," it is said

in a treatise published as early as 684, "are ruined"; the same truth

is specially attested as regards Spain and Narbonese Gaul,

the very provinces which, comparatively speaking, were still

in the most tolerable economic position. In Asia Minor even towns

like Samos and Halicarnassus stood almost empty; legal slavery

seemed here a haven of rest compared with the torments to which

the free provincial succumbed, and even the patient Asiatic had become,

according to the descriptions of Roman statesmen themselves,

weary of life. Any one who desires to fathom the depths to which man

can sink in the criminal infliction, and in the no less criminal

endurance, of all conceivable injustice, may gather together

from the criminal records of this period the wrongs which Roman grandees

could perpetrate and Greeks, Syrians, and Phoenicians could suffer.

Even the statesmen of Rome herself publicly and frankly conceded

that the Roman name was unutterably odious through all Greece

and Asia; and, when the burgesses of the Pontic Heraclea on one occasion

put to death the whole of the Roman tax-collectors, the only matter

for regret was that such things did not occur oftener.

Caesar and the Provinces

The Optimates scoffed at the new master who went in person

to inspect his "farms" one after the other; in reality the condition

of the several provinces demanded all the earnestness and all the wisdom

of one of those rare men, who redeem the name of king from being regarded

by the nations as merely a conspicuous example of human insufficiency.

The wounds inflicted had to be healed by time; Caesar took care

that they might be so healed, and that there should be

no fresh inflictions.

The Caesarian Magistrates

The system of administration was thoroughly remodelled.

The Sullan proconsuls and propraetors had been in their provinces

essentially sovereign and practically subject to no control;

those of Caesar were the well-disciplined servants of a stern master,

who from the very unity and life-tenure of his power sustained

a more natural and more tolerable relation to the subjects

than those numerous, annually changing, petty tyrants. The governorships

were no doubt still distributed among the annually-retiring two consuls

and sixteen praetors, but, as the Imperator directly nominated

eight of the latter and the distribution of the provinces

among the competitors depended solely on him,(83) they were

in reality bestowed by the Imperator. The functions also

of the governors were practically restricted. The superintendence

of the administration of justice and the administrative control

of the communities remained in their hands; but their command

was paralyzed by the new supreme command in Rome and its adjutants

associated with the governor,(84) and the raising of the taxes

was probably even now committed in the provinces substantially

to imperial officials,(85) so that the governor was thenceforward

surrounded with an auxiliary staff which was absolutely dependent

on the Imperator in virtue either of the laws of the military

hierarchy or of the still stricter laws of domestic discipline.

While hitherto the proconsul and his quaestor had appeared as if

they were members of a gang of robbers despatched to levy contributions,

the magistrates of Caesar were present to protect the weak

against the strong; and, instead of the previous worse than useless

control of the equestrian or senatorian tribunals, they had to answer

for themselves at the bar of a just and unyielding monarch.

The law as to exactions, the enactments of which Caesar

had already in his first consulate made more stringent,

was applied by him against the chief commandants in the provinces

with an inexorable severity going even beyond its letter;

and the tax-officers, if indeed they ventured to indulge

in an injustice, atoned for it to their master, as slaves

and freedmen according to the cruel domestic law of that time

were wont to atone.

Regulation of Burdens

The extraordinary public burdens were reduced to the right proportion

and the actual necessity; the ordinary burdens were materially lessened.

We have already mentioned the comprehensive regulation of taxation;(86)

the extension of the exemptions from tribute, the general lowering

of the direct taxes, the limitation of the system of -decumae- to Africa

and Sardinia, the complete setting aside of middlemen in the collection

of the direct taxes, were most beneficial reforms for the provincials.

That Caesar after the example of one of his greatest democratic

predecessors, Sertorius,(87) wished to free the subjects from the burden

of quartering troops and to insist on the soldiers erecting

for themselves permanent encampments resembling towns, cannot indeed

be proved; but he was, at least after he had exchanged the part

of pretender for that of king, not the man to abandon the subject

to the soldier; and it was in keeping with his spirit, when the heirs

of his policy created such military camps, and then converted them

into towns which formed rallying-points for Italian civilization

amidst the barbarian frontier districts.

Influence on the Capitalist System

It was a task far more difficult than the checking of official

irregularities, to deliver the provincials from the oppressive

ascendency of Roman capital. Its power could not be directly broken

without applying means which were still more dangerous than the evil;

the government could for the time being abolish only isolated abuses--

as when Caesar for instance prohibited the employment of the title

of state-envoy for financial purposes--and meet manifest acts of violence

and palpable usury by a sharp application of the general penal laws

and of the laws as to usury, which extended also to the provinces;(88)

but a more radical cure of the evil was only to be expected

from the reviving prosperity of the provincials under a better

administration. Temporary enactments, to relieve the insolvency

of particular provinces, had been issued on several occasions

in recent times. Caesar himself had in 694 when governor

of Further Spain assigned to the creditors two thirds

of the income of their debtors in order to pay themselves

from that source. Lucius Lucullus likewise when governor of Asia Minor

had directly cancelled a portion of the arrears of interest

which had swelled beyond measure, and had for the remaining portion

assigned to the creditors a fourth part of the produce of the lands

of their debtors, as well as a suitable proportion of the profits

accruing to them from house-rents or slave-labour. We are not expressly

informed that Caesar after the civil war instituted similar

general liquidations of debt in the provinces; yet from what

has just been remarked and from what was done in the case of Italy,(89)

it can hardly be doubted that Caesar likewise directed his efforts

towards this object, or at least that it formed part of his plan.

While thus the Imperator, as far as lay within human power,

relieved the provincials from the oppressions of the magistrates

and capitalists of Rome, it might at the same time be with certaint

expected from the government to which he imparted fresh vigour,

that it would scare off the wild border-peoples and disperse

the freebooters by land and sea, as the rising sun chases away

the mist. However the old wounds might still smart, with Caesar

there appeared for the sorely-tortured subjects the dawn

of a more tolerable epoch, the first intelligent and humane government

that had appeared for centuries, and a policy of peace which rested

not on cowardice but on strength. Well might the subjects above all

mourn along with the best Romans by the bier of the great liberator.

The Beginning of the Helleno-Italic State

But this abolition of existing abuses was not the main matter

in Caesar's provincial reform. In the Roman republic, according

to the view of the aristocracy and democracy alike, the provinces

had been nothing but--what they were frequently called--country-estates

of the Roman people, and they were employed and worked out as such.

This view had now passed away. The provinces as such were gradually

to disappear, in order to prepare for the renovated Helleno-Italic nation

a new and more spacious home, of whose several component parts no one

existed merely for the sake of another but all for each and each for all;

the new existence in the renovated home, the fresher, broader, grander

national life, was of itself to overbear the sorrows and wrongs

of the nation for which there was no help in the old Italy. These ideas,

as is well known, were not new. The emigration from Italy

to the provinces that had been regularly going on for centuries

had long since, though unconsciously on the part of the emigrants

themselves, paved the way for such an extension of Italy. The first

who in a systematic way guided the Italians to settle beyond the bounds

of Italy was Gaius Gracchus, the creator of the Roman democratic monarchy,

the author of the Transalpine conquests, the founder of the colonies

of Carthage and Narbo. Then the second statesman of genius

produced by the Roman democracy, Quintus Sertorius, began to introduce

the barbarous Occidentals to Latin civilization; he gave to the Spanish

youth of rank the Roman dress, and urged them to speak Latin

and to acquire the higher Italian culture at the training institute

founded by him in Osca. When Caesar entered on the government,

a large Italian population--though, in great part, lacking stability

and concentration--already existed in all the provinces and client-

states. To say nothing of the formally Italian towns in Spain

and southern Gaul, we need only recall the numerous troops of burgesses

raised by Sertorius and Pompeius in Spain, by Caesar in Gaul,

by Juba in Numidia, by the constitutional party in Africa, Macedonia,

Greece, Asia Minor, and Crete; the Latin lyre--ill-tuned doubtless--

on which the town-poets of Corduba as early as the Sertorian war

sang the praises of the Roman generals; and the translations

of Greek poetry valued on account of their very elegance of language,

which the earliest extra-Italian poet of note, the Transalpine

Publius Terentius Varro of the Aude, published

shortly after Caesar's death.

On the other hand the interpenetration of the Latin and Hellenic

character was, we might say, as old as Rome. On occasion

of the union of Italy the conquering Latin nation had assimilated

to itself all the other conquered nationalities, excepting only

the Greek, which was received just as it stood without any attempt

at external amalgamation. Wherever the Roman legionary went,

the Greek schoolmaster, no less a conqueror in his own way, followed;

at an early date we find famous teachers of the Greek language

settled on the Guadalquivir, and Greek was as well taught as Latin

in the institute of Osca. The higher Roman culture itself

was in fact nothing else than the proclamation of the great gospel

of Hellenic manners and art in the Italian idiom; against the modest

pretension of the civilizing conquerors to proclaim it first of all

in their own language to the barbarians of the west the Hellene

at least could not loudly protest. Already the Greek every where--

and, most decidedly, just where the national feeling was purest

and strongest, on the frontiers threatened by barbaric denationalization,

e. g. in Massilia, on the north coast of the Black Sea,

and on the Euphrates and Tigris--descried the protector and avenger

of Hellenism in Rome; and in fact the foundation of towns by Pompeius

in the far east resumed after an interruption of centuries

the beneficent work of Alexander.

The idea of an Italo-Hellenic empire with two languages

and a single nationality was not new--otherwise it would have been

nothing but a blunder; but the development of it from floating projects

to a firmly-grasped conception, from scattered initial efforts

to the laying of a concentrated foundation, was the work of the third

and greatest of the democratic statesmen of Rome.

The Ruling Nations

The Jews

The first and most essential condition for the political

and national levelling of the empire was the preservation and extension

of the two nations destined to joint dominion, along with the absorption

as rapidly as possible of the barbarian races, or those termed barbarian

existing by their side. In a certain sense we might no doubt name

along with Romans and Greeks a third nationality, which vied with them

in ubiquity in the world of that day, and was destined to play

no insignificant part in the new state of Caesar. We speak of the Jews.

This remarkable people, yielding and yet tenacious, was in the ancient

as in the modern world everywhere and nowhere at home, and everywhere

and nowhere powerful. The successors of David and Solomon were of hardly

more significance for the Jews of that age than Jerusalem for those

of the present day; the nation found doubtless for its religious

and intellectual unity a visible rallying-point in the petty kingdom

of Jerusalem, but the nation itself consisted not merely of the subjects

of the Hasmonaeans, but of the innumerable bodies of Jews

scattered through the whole Parthian and the whole Roman empire.

Within the cities of Alexandria especially and of Cyrene the Jews

formed special communities administratively and even locally distinct,

not unlike the "Jews' quarters" of our towns, but with a freer position

and superintended by a "master of the people" as superior judge

and administrator. How numerous even in Rome the Jewish population

was already before Caesar's time, and how closely at the same time

the Jews even then kept together as fellow-countrymen, is shown

by the remark of an author of this period, that it was dangerous

for a governor to offend the Jews, in his province, because he might

then certainly reckon on being hissed after his return by the populace

of the capital. Even at this time the predominant business of the Jews

was trade; the Jewish trader moved everywhere with the conquering Roman

merchant then, in the same way as he afterwards accompanied the Genoese

and the Venetian, and capital flowed in on all hands to the Jewish,

by the side of the Roman, merchants. At this period too we encounter

the peculiar antipathy of the Occidentals towards this so thoroughly

Oriental race and their foreign opinions and customs. This Judaism,

although not the most pleasing feature in the nowhere pleasing picture

of the mixture of nations which then prevailed, was nevertheless

a historical element developing itself in the natural course of things,

which the statesman could neither ignore nor combat, and which Caesar

on the contrary, just like his predecessor Alexander, with correct

discernment of the circumstances, fostered as far as possible.

While Alexander, by laying the foundation of Alexandrian Judaism,

did not much less for the nation than its own David by planning

the temple of Jerusalem, Caesar also advanced the interests of the Jews

in Alexandria and in Rome by special favours and privileges,

and protected in particular their peculiar worship against the Roman

as well as against the Greek local priests. The two great men

of course did not contemplate placing the Jewish nationality

on an equal footing with the Hellenic or Italo-Hellenic.

But the Jew who has not like the Occidental received the Pandora's gift

of political organization, and stands substantially in a relation

of indifference to the state; who moreover is as reluctant

to give up the essence of his national idiosyncrasy, as he is ready

to clothe it with any nationality at pleasure and to adapt himself

up to a certain degree to foreign habits--the Jew was for this

very reason as it were made for a state, which was to be built

on the ruins of a hundred living polities and to be endowed

with a somewhat abstract and, from the outset, toned-down nationality.

Even in the ancient world Judaism was an effective leaven

of cosmopolitanism and of national decomposition, and to that extent

a specially privileged member in the Caesarian state, the polity

of which was strictly speaking nothing but a citizenship of the world,

and the nationality of which was at bottom nothing but humanity.

Hellenism

But the Latin and Hellenic nationalities continued to be

exclusively the positive elements of the new citizenship.

The distinctively Italian state of the republic was thus at an end;

but the rumour that Caesar was ruining Italy and Rome on purpose

to transfer the centre of the empire to the Greek east and to make

Ilion or Alexandria its capital, was nothing but a piece of talk--

very easy to be accounted for, but also very silly--of the angry

nobility. On the contrary in Caesar's organizations the Latin

nationality always retained the preponderance; as is indicated

in the very fact that he issued all his enactments in Latin,

although those destined for the Greek-speaking countries were

at the same time issued in Greek. In general he arranged the relations

of the two great nations in his monarchy just as his republican

predecessors had arranged them in the united Italy; the Hellenic

nationality was protected where it existed, the Italian was extended

as far as circumstances permitted, and the inheritance

of the races to be absorbed was destined for it. This was necessary,

because an entire equalizing of the Greek and Latin elements

in the state would in all probability have in a very short time

occasioned that catastrophe which Byzantinism brought about

several centuries later; for the Greek element was superior

to the Roman not merely in all intellectual aspects, but also

in the measure of its predominance, and it had within Italy itself

in the hosts of Hellenes and half-Hellenes who migrated compulsorily

or voluntarily to Italy an endless number of apostles apparently

insignificant, but whose influence could not be estimated

too highly. To mention only the most conspicuous phenomenon

in this respect, the rule of Greek lackeys over the Roman monarchs

is as old as the monarchy. The first in the equally long and repulsive

list of these personages is the confidential servant of Pompeius,

Theophanes of Mytilene, who by his power over his weak master

contributed probably more than any one else to the outbreak of the war

between Pompeius and Caesar. Not wholly without reason he was

after his death treated with divine honours by his countrymen;

he commenced, forsooth, the -valet de chambre- government

of the imperial period, which in a certain measure was just

a dominion of the Hellenes over the Romans. The government

had accordingly every reason not to encourage by its fostering action

the spread of Hellenism at least in the west. If Sicily was not simply

relieved of the pressure of the -decumae- but had its communities

invested with Latin rights, which was presumably meant to be followed

in due time by full equalization with Italy, it can only have been

Caesar's design that this glorious island, which was at that time

desolate and had as to management passed for the greater part

into Italian hands, but which nature has destined to be not so much

a neighbouring land to Italy as rather the finest of its provinces,

should become altogether merged in Italy. But otherwise

the Greek element, wherever it existed, was preserved and protected.

However political crises might suggest to the Imperator the demolition

of the strong pillars of Hellenism in the west and in Egypt, Massilia

and Alexandria were neither destroyed nor denationalized.

Latinizing

On the other hand the Roman element was promoted by the government

through colonization and Latinizing with all vigour and at the most

various points of the empire. The principle, which originated

no doubt from a bad combination of formal law and brute force,

but was inevitably necessary in order to freedom in dealing

with the nations destined to destruction--that all the soil

in the provinces not ceded by special act of the government

to communities or private persons was the property of the state,

and the holder of it for the time being had merely an heritable

possession on sufferance and revocable at any time--was retained

also by Caesar and raised by him from a democratic party-theory

to a fundamental principle of monarchical law.

Cisalpine Gaul

Gaul, of course, fell to be primarily dealt with in the extension

of Roman nationality. Cisalpine Gaul obtained throughout--

what a great part of the inhabitants had long enjoyed--

political equalization with the leading country by the admission

of the Transpadane communities into the Roman burgess-union,

which had for long been assumed by the democracy as accomplished,(90)

and was now (705) finally accomplished by Caesar. Practically

this province had already completely Latinized itself during

the forty years which had elapsed since the bestowal of Latin rights.

The exclusives might ridicule the broad and gurgling accent

of the Celtic Latin, and miss "an undefined something of the grace

of the capital" in the Insubrian or Venetian, who as Caesar's legionary

had conquered for himself with his sword a place in the Roman Forum

and even in the Roman senate-house. Nevertheless Cisalpine Gaul

with its dense chiefly agricultural population was even before

Caesar's time in reality an Italian country, and remained

for centuries the true asylum of Italian manners and Italian culture;

indeed the teachers of Latin literature found nowhere else

out of the capital so much encouragement and approbation.

The Province of Narbo

While Cisalpine Gaul was thus substantially merged in Italy,

the place which it had hitherto occupied was taken by the Transalpine

province, which had been converted by the conquests of Caesar

from a frontier into an inland province, and which by its vicinity

as well as by its climate was fitted beyond all other regions

to become in due course of time likewise an Italian land.

Thither principally, according to the old aim of the transmarine

settlements of the Roman democracy, was the stream of Italian

emigration directed. There the ancient colony of Narbo was reinforced

by new settlers, and four new burgess-colonies were instituted

at Baeterrae (Beziers) not far from Narbo, at Arelate (Aries)

and Arausio (Orange) on the Rhone, and at the new seaport Forum Julii

(Frejus); while the names assigned to them at the same time preserved

the memory of the brave legions which had annexed northern Gaul

to the empire.(91) The townships not furnished with colonists appear,

at least for the most part, to have been led on toward Romanization

in the same way as Transpadane Gaul in former times(92) by the bestowal

of Latin urban rights; in particular Nemausus (Nimes), as the chief place

of the territory taken from the Massiliots in consequence of their revolt

against Caesar,(93)was converted from a Massiliot village into a Latin

urban community, and endowed with a considerable territory and even

with the right of coinage.(94) While Cisalpine Gaul thus advanced

from the preparatory stage to full equality with Italy, the Narbonese

province advanced at the same time into that preparatory stage;

just as previously in Cisalpine Gaul, the most considerable

communities there had the full franchise, the rest Latin rights.

Northern Gaul

In the other non-Greek and non-Latin regions of the empire,

which were still more remote from the influence of Italy and the process

of assimilation, Caesar confined himself to the establishment

of several centres for Italian civilization such as Narbo had hitherto

been in Gaul, in order by their means to pave the way for a future

complete equalization. Such initial steps can be pointed out

in all the provinces of the empire, with the exception of the poorest

and least important of all, Sardinia. How Caesar proceeded

in Northern Gaul, we have already set forth;(95) the Latin language

there obtained throughout official recognition, though not yet

employed for all branches of public intercourse, and the colony

of Noviodunum (Nyon) arose on the Leman lake as the most northerly town

with an Italian constitution.

Spain

In Spain, which was presumably at that time the most densely peopled

country of the Roman empire, not merely were Caesarian colonists

settled in the important Helleno-Iberian seaport town of Emporiae

by the side of the old population; but, as recently-discovered

records have shown, a number of colonists probably taken

predominantly from the proletariate of the capital were provided for

in the town of Urso (Osuna), not far from Seville in the heart

of Andalusia, and perhaps also in several other townships

of this province. The ancient and wealthy mercantile city of Gades,

whose municipal system Caesar even when praetor had remodelled

suitably to the times, now obtained from the Imperator the full rights

of the Italian -municipia-(705) and became--what Tusculum had been

in Italy(96)--the first extra-Italian community not founded by Rome

which was admitted into the Roman burgess-union. Some years

afterwards (709) similar rights were conferred also on some other

Spanish communities, and Latin rights presumably on still more.

Carthage

In Africa the project, which Gaius Gracchus had not been allowed

to bring to an issue, was now carried out, and on the spot

where the city of the hereditary foes of Rome had stood, 3000 Italian

colonists and a great number of the tenants on lease and sufferance

resident in the Carthaginian territory were settled; and the new

"Venus-colony," the Roman Carthage, throve with amazing rapidity

under the incomparably favourable circumstances of the locality.

Utica, hitherto the capital and first commercial town in the province,

had already been in some measure compensated beforehand,

apparently by the bestowal of Latin rights, for the revival

of its superior rival. In the Numidian territory newly annexed

to the empire the important Cirta and the other communities assigned

to the Roman condottiere Publius Sittius for himself and his troops(97)

obtained the legal position of Roman military colonies.

The stately provincial towns indeed, which the insane fury of Juba

and of the desperate remnant of the constitutional party had converted

into ruins, did not revive so rapidly as they had been reduced to ashes,

and many a ruinous site recalled long afterwards this fatal period;

but the two new Julian colonies, Carthage and Cirta, became

and continued to be the centres of Africano-Roman civilization.

Corinth

The East

In the desolate land of Greece, Caesar, besides other plans

such as the institution of a Roman colony in Buthrotum (opposite Corfu),

busied himself above all with the restoration of Corinth. Not only

was a considerable burgess-colony conducted thither, but a plan

was projected for cutting through the isthmus, so as to avoid

the dangerous circumnavigation of the Peloponnesus and to make

the whole traffic between Italy and Asia pass through the Corintho-

Saronic gulf. Lastly even in the remote Hellenic east the monarch

called into existence Italian settlements; on the Black Sea,

for instance, at Heraclea and Sinope, which towns the Italian

colonists shared, as in the case of Emporiae, with the old inhabitants;

on the Syrian coast, in the important port of Berytus,

which like Sinope obtained an Italian constitution; and even in Egypt,

where a Roman station was established on the lighthouse-island

commanding the harbour of Alexandria.

Extension of the Italian Municipal Constitution to the Provinces

Through these ordinances the Italian municipal freedom was carried

into the provinces in a manner far more comprehensive than had been

previously the case. The communities of full burgesses--that is,

all the towns of the Cisalpine province and the burgess-colonies

and burgess-municipia--scattered in Transalpine Gaul and elsewhere--

were on an equal footing with the Italian, in so far as they administered

their own affairs, and even exercised a certainly limited jurisdiction;

while on the other hand the more important processes came before

the Roman authorities competent to deal with them--as a rule the governor

of the province.(98) The formally autonomous Latin and the other

emancipated communities-thus including all those of Sicily

and of Narbonese Gaul, so far as they were not burgess-communities,

and a considerable number also in the other provinces--had not merely

free administration, but probably unlimited jurisdiction; so that

the governor was only entitled to interfere there by virtue of his--

certainly very arbitrary--administrative control. No doubt even earlier

there had been communities of full burgesses within the provinces

of governors, such as Aquileia, and Narbo, and whole governors'

provinces, such as Cisalpine Gaul, had consisted of communities

with Italian constitution; but it was, if not in law, at least

in a political point of view a singularly important innovation,

that there was now a province which as well as Italy was peopled

solely by Roman burgesses,(99) and that others promised to become such.

Italy and the Provinces Reduced to One Level

With this disappeared the first great practical distinction

that separated Italy from the provinces; and the second--that ordinarily

no troops were stationed in Italy, while they were stationed

in the provinces--was likewise in the course of disappearing;

troops were now stationed only where there was a frontier to be defended,

and the commandants of the provinces in which this was not the case,

such as Narbo and Sicily, were officers only in name. The formal

contrast between Italy and the provinces, which had at all times

depended on other distinctions,(100) continued certainly

even now to subsist, for Italy was the sphere of civil jurisdiction

and of consuls and praetors, while the provinces were districts

under the jurisdiction of martial law and subject to proconsuls

and propraetors; but the procedure according to civil and according

to martial law had for long been practically coincident,

and the different titles of the magistrates signified little

after the one Imperator was over all.

In all these various municipal foundations and ordinances--

which are traceable at least in plan, if not perhaps all in execution,

to Caesar--a definite system is apparent. Italy was converted

from the mistress of the subject peoples into the mother

of the renovated Italo-Hellenic nation. The Cisalpine province

completely equalized with the mother-country was a promise

and a guarantee that, in the monarchy of Caesar just as

in the healthier times of the republic, every Latinized

district might expect to be placed on an equal footing

by the side of its elder sisters and of the mother herself.

On the threshold of full national and political equalization

with Italy stood the adjoining lands, the Greek Sicily

and the south of Gaul, which was rapidly becoming Latinized.

In a more remote stage of preparation stood the other provinces

of the empire, in which, just as hitherto in southern Gaul Narbo

had been a Roman colony, the great maritime cities--Emporiae, Gades,

Carthage, Corinth, Heraclea in Pontus, Sinope, Berytus, Alexandria--

now became Italian or Helleno-Italian communities, the centres

of an Italian civilization even in the Greek east, the fundamental

pillars of the future national and political levelling of the empire.

The rule of the urban community of Rome over the shores

of the Mediterranean was at an end; in its stead came the new

Mediterranean state, and its first act was to atone for the two

greatest outrages which that urban community had perpetrated

on civilization. While the destruction of the two greatest marts

of commerce in the Roman dominions marked the turning-point at which

the protectorate of the Roman community degenerated into political

tyrannizing over, and financial exaction from, the subject lands,

the prompt and brilliant restoration of Carthage and Corinth marked

the foundation of the new great commonwealth which was to train up

all the regions on the Mediterranean to national and political

equality, to union in a genuine state. Well might Caesar bestow

on the city of Corinth in addition to its far-famed ancient name

the new one of "Honour to Julius" (-Lavs Jvli-).

Organization of the New Empire

While thus the new united empire was furnished with a national character,

which doubtless necessarily lacked individuality and was rather

an inanimate product of art than a fresh growth of nature,

it further had need of unity in those institutions which express

the general life of nations--in constitution and administration,

in religion and jurisprudence, in money, measures, and weights;

as to which, of course, local diversities of the most varied character

were quite compatible with essential union. In all these departments

we can only speak of the initial steps, for the thorough formation

of the monarchy of Caesar into an unity was the work of the future,

and all that he did was to lay the foundation for the building

of centuries. But of the lines, which the great man drew in these

departments, several can still be recognized; and it is more pleasing

to follow him here, than in the task of building from the ruins

of the nationalities.

Census of the Empire

As to constitution and administration, we have already noticed

elsewhere the most important elements of the new unity--

the transition of the sovereignty from the municipal council of Rome

to the sole master of the Mediterranean monarchy; the conversion

of that municipal council into a supreme imperial council representing

Italy and the provinces; above all, the transference--now commenced--

of the Roman, and generally of the Italian, municipal organization

to the provincial communities. This latter course--the bestowal

of Latin, and thereafter of Roman, rights on the communities

ripe for full admission to the united state--gradually of itself

brought about uniform communal arrangements. In one respect alone

this process could not be waited for. The new empire needed

immediately an institution which should place before the government

at a glance the principal bases of administration--the proportions

of population and property in the different communities--

in other words an improved census. First the census of Italy

was reformed. According to Caesar's ordinance(101)--which probably,

indeed, only carried out the arrangements which were, at least

as to principle, adopted in consequence of the Social war--

in future, when a census took place in the Roman community,

there were to be simultaneously registered by the highest authority

in each Italian community the name of every municipal burgess

and that of his father or manumitter, his district, his age,

and his property; and these lists were to be furnished to the Roman

censor early enough to enable him to complete in proper time

the general list of Roman burgesses and of Roman property.

That it was Caesar's intention to introduce similar institutions

also in the provinces is attested partly by the measurement

and survey of the whole empire ordered by him, partly by the nature

of the arrangement itself; for it in fact furnished the general

instrument appropriate for procuring, as well in the Italian

as in the non-Italian communities of the state, the information

requisite for the central administration. Evidently here too

it was Caesar's intention to revert to the traditions

of the earlier republican times, and to reintroduce the census

of the empire, which the earlier republic had effected--

essentially in the same way as Caesar effected the Italian--

by analogous extension of the institution of the urban censorship

with its set terms and other essential rules to all the subject

communities of Italy and Sicily.(102) This had been

one of the first institutions which the torpid aristocracy allowed

to drop, and in this way deprived the supreme administrative authority

of any view of the resources in men and taxation at its disposal

and consequently of all possibility of an effective control.(103)

The indications still extant, and the very connection of things,

show irrefragably that Caesar made preparations to renew

the general census that had been obsolete for centuries.

Religion of the Empire

We need scarcely say that in religion and in jurisprudence

no thorough levelling could be thought of; yet with all toleration

towards local faiths and municipal statutes the new state needed

a common worship corresponding to the Italo-Hellenic nationality

and a general code of law superior to the municipal statutes.

It needed them; for de facto both were already in existence.

In the field of religion men had for centuries been busied

in fusing together the Italian and Hellenic worships partly

by external adoption, partly by internal adjustment of their respective

conceptions of the gods; and owing to the pliant formless character

of the Italian gods, there had been no great difficulty in resolving

Jupiter into Zeus, Venus into Aphrodite, and so every essential idea

of the Latin faith into its Hellenic counterpart. The Italo-Hellenic

religion stood forth in its outlines ready-made; how much

in this very department men were conscious of having gone beyond

the specifically Roman point of view and advanced towards

an Italo-Hellenic quasi-nationality, is shown by the distinction made

in the already-mentioned theology of Varro between the "common" gods,

that is, those acknowledged by Romans and Greeks, and the special gods

of the Roman community.

Law of the Empire

So far as concerns the field of criminal and police law,

where the government more directly interferes and the necessities

of the case are substantially met by a judicious legislation,

there was no difficulty in attaining, in the way of legislative action,

that degree of material uniformity which certainly was in this department

needful for the unity of the empire. In the civil law again,

where the initiative belongs to commercial intercourse and merely

the formal shape to the legislator, the code for the united empire,

which the legislator certainly could not have created, had been already

long since developed in a natural way by commercial intercourse itself.

The Roman urban law was still indeed legally based on the embodiment

of the Latin national law contained in the Twelve Tables.

Later laws had doubtless introduced various improvements

of detail suited to the times, among which the most important

was probably the abolition of the old inconvenient mode

of commencing a process through standing forms of declaration

by the parties(104) and the substitution of an instruction drawn up

in writing by the presiding magistrate for the single juryman

(formula): but in the main the popular legislation had only piled upon

that venerable foundation an endless chaos of special laws

long since in great part antiquated and forgotten, which can

only be compared to the English statute-law. The attempts to impart

to them scientific shape and system had certainly rendered

the tortuous paths of the old civil law accessible, and thrown light

upon them;(105) but no Roman Blackstone could remedy the fundamental

defect, that an urban code composed four hundred years ago

with its equally diffuse and confused supplements was now to serve

as the law of a great state.

The New Urban Law or the Edict

Commercial intercourse provided for itself a more thorough remedy.

The lively intercourse between Romans and non-Romans had long ago

developed in Rome an international private law (-ius gentium-;(106)),

that is to say, a body of maxims especially relating to commercial

matters, according to which Roman judges pronounced judgment,

when a cause could not be decided either according to their own

or any other national code and they were compelled--setting aside

the peculiarities of Roman, Hellenic, Phoenician and other law--

to revert to the common views of right underlying all dealings.

The formation of the newer law attached itself to this basis.

In the first place as a standard for the legal dealings

of Roman burgesses with each other, it de facto substituted

for the old urban law, which had become practically useless,

a new code based in substance on a compromise between the national law

of the Twelve Tables and the international law or so-called

law of nations. The former was essentially adhered to,

though of course with modifications suited to the times,

in the law of marriage, family, and inheritance; whereas

in all regulations which concerned dealings with property,

and consequently in reference to ownership and contracts,

the international law was the standard; in these matters indeed

various important arrangements were borrowed even from local

provincial law, such as the legislation as to usury,(107)

and the institution of -hypotheca-. Through whom, when,

and how this comprehensive innovation came into existence,

whether at once or gradually, whether through one or several authors,

are questions to which we cannot furnish a satisfactory answer.

We know only that this reform, as was natural, proceeded

in the first instance from the urban court; that it first took

formal shape in the instructions annually issued by the -praetor

urbanus-, when entering on office, for the guidance of the parties

in reference to the most important maxims of law to be observed

in the judicial year then beginning (-edictum annuum- or -perpetuum

praetoris urbani de iuris dictione-); and that, although various

preparatory steps towards it may have been taken in earlier times,

it certainly only attained its completion in this epoch. The new code

was theoretic and abstract, inasmuch as the Roman view of law

had therein divested itself of such of its national peculiarities

as it had become aware of; but it was at the same time practical

and positive, inasmuch as it by no means faded away into the dim

twilight of general equity or even into the pure nothingness

of the so-called law of nature, but was applied by definite

functionaries for definite concrete cases according to fixed rules,

and was not merely capable of, but had already essentially received,

a legal embodiment in the urban edict. This code moreover corresponded

in matter to the wants of the time, in so far as it furnished

the more convenient forms required by the increase of intercourse

for legal procedure, for acquisition of property, and for conclusion

of contracts. Lastly, it had already in the main become subsidiary law

throughout the compass of the Roman empire, inasmuch as--

while the manifold local statutes were retained for those legal relations

which were not directly commercial, as well as for local transactions

between members of the same legal district--dealings relating

to property between subjects of the empire belonging to different

legal districts were regulated throughout after the model

of the urban edict, though not applicable de jure to these cases,

both in Italy and in the provinces. The law of the urban edict

had thus essentially the same position in that age which the Roman law

has occupied in our political development; this also is, so far as

such opposites can be combined, at once abstract and positive;

this also recommended itself by its (compared with the earlier

legal code) flexible forms of intercourse, and took its place by the side

of the local statutes as universal subsidiary law. But the Roman

legal development had an essential advantage over ours in this,

that the denationalized legislation appeared not, as with us,

prematurely and by artificial birth, but at the right time

and agreeably to nature.

Caesar's Project of Codification

Such was the state of the law as Caesar found it. If he projected

the plan for a new code, it is not difficult to say what were

his intentions. This code could only comprehend the law of Roman

burgesses, and could be a general code for the empire merely so far as

a code of the ruling nation suitable to the times could not

but of itself become general subsidiary law throughout the compass

of the empire. In criminal law, if the plan embraced this at all,

there was needed only a revision and adjustment of the Sullan

ordinances. In civil law, for a state whose nationality

was properly humanity, the necessary and only possible formal shape

was to invest that urban edict, which had already spontaneously grown

out of lawful commerce, with the security and precision of statute-law.

The first step towards this had been taken by the Cornelian law

of 687, when it enjoined the judge to keep to the maxims set forth

at the beginning of his magistracy and not arbitrarily

to administer other law (108)--a regulation, which may well

be compared with the law of the Twelve Tables, and which became

almost as significant for the fixing of the later urban law

as that collection for the fixing of the earlier. But although

after the Cornelian decree of the people the edict was no longer

subordinate to the judge, but the judge was by law subject to the edict;

and though the new code had practically dispossessed the old urban law

in judicial usage as in legal instruction--every urban judge

was still free at his entrance on office absolutely and arbitrarily

to alter the edict, and the law of the Twelve Tables with its additions

still always outweighed formally the urban edict, so that

in each individual case of collision the antiquated rule had to be

set aside by arbitrary interference of the magistrates,

and therefore, strictly speaking, by violation of formal law.

The subsidiary application of the urban edict in the court

of the -praetor peregrinus- at Rome and in the different provincial

judicatures was entirely subject to the arbitrary pleasure

of the individual presiding magistrates. It was evidently necessary

to set aside definitely the old urban law, so far as it had not

been transferred to the newer, and in the case of the latter

to set suitable limits to its arbitrary alteration by each individual

urban judge, possibly also to regulate its subsidiary application

by the side of the local statutes. This was Caesars design,

when he projected the plan for his code; for it could not have been

otherwise. The plan was not executed; and thus that troublesome

state of transition in Roman jurisprudence was perpetuated

till this necessary reform was accomplished six centuries afterwards,

and then but imperfectly, by one of the successors of Caesar,

the Emperor Justinian.

Lastly, in money, measures, and weights the substantial equalization

of the Latin and Hellenic systems had long been in progress.

It was very ancient so far as concerned the definitions of weight

and the measures of capacity and of length indispensable for trade

and commerce,(109) and in the monetary system little more recent

than the introduction of the silver coinage.(110) But these older

equations were not sufficient, because in the Hellenic world itself

the most varied metrical and monetary systems subsisted side by side;

it was necessary, and formed part doubtless of Caesar's plan,

now to introduce everywhere in the new united empire, so far as

this had not been done already, Roman money, Roman measures,

and Roman weights in such a manner that they alone should be reckoned

by in official intercourse, and that the non-Roman systems

should be restricted to local currency or placed in a--once for all

regulated--ratio to the Roman.(111) The action of Caesar,

however, can only be pointed out in two of the most important

of these departments, the monetary system and the calendar.

Gold Coin as Imperial Currency

The Roman monetary system was based on the two precious metals

circulating side by side and in a fixed relation to each other,

gold being given and taken according to weight,(112) silver

in the form of coin; but practically in consequence of the extensive

transmarine intercourse the gold far preponderated over the silver.

Whether the acceptance of Roman silver money was not even

at an earlier period obligatory throughout the empire, is uncertain;

at any rate uncoined gold essentially supplied the place of imperial

money throughout the Roman territory, the more so as the Romans

had prohibited the coining of gold in all the provinces and client-

states, and the -denarius- had, in addition to Italy, de jure

or de facto naturalized itself in Cisalpine Gaul, in Sicily,

in Spain and various other places, especially in the west.(113)

but the imperial coinage begins with Caesar. Exactly like Alexander,

he marked the foundation of the new monarchy embracing the civilized

world by the fact that the only metal forming an universal medium

obtained the first place in the coinage. The greatness of the scale

on which the new Caesarian gold piece (20 shillings 7 pence

according to the present value of the metal) was immediately coined,

is shown by the fact that in a single treasure buried seven years

after Caesar's death 80,000 of these pieces were found together.

It is true that financial speculations may have exercised

a collateral influence in this respect.(114) as to the silver money,

the exclusive rule of the Roman -denarius- in all the west,

for which the foundation had previously been laid, was finally

established by Caesar, when he definitively closed the only

Occidental mint that still competed in silver currency with the Roman,

that of Massilia. The coining of silver or copper small money

was still permitted to a number of Occidental communities;

three-quarter -denarii- were struck by some Latin communities

of southern Gaul, half -denarii- by several cantons in northern Gaul,

copper small coins in various instances even after Caesar's time

by communes of the west; but this small money was throughout coined

after the Roman standard, and its acceptance moreover was probably

obligatory only in local dealings. Caesar does not seem any more

than the earlier government to have contemplated the regulation

with a view to unity of the monetary system of the east,

where great masses of coarse silver money--much of which too easily

admitted of being debased or worn away--and to some extent even,

as in Egypt, a copper coinage akin to our paper money

were in circulation, and the Syrian commercial cities would have felt

very severely the want of their previous national coinage corresponding

to the Mesopotamian currency. We find here subsequently

the arrangement that the -denarius- has everywhere legal currency

and is the only medium of official reckoning,(115) while the local coins

have legal currency within their limited range but according

to a tariff unfavourable for them as compared with the -denarius-.(116)

This was probably not introduced all at once, and in part perhaps

may have preceded Caesar; but it was at any rate the essential

complement of the Caesarian arrangement as to the imperial coinage,

whose new gold piece found its immediate model in the almost equally

heavy coin of Alexander and was doubtless calculated especially

for circulation in the east.

Reform of the Calendar

Of a kindred nature was the reform of the calendar.

The republican calendar, which strangely enough was still

the old decemviral calendar--an imperfect adoption of the -octaeteris-

that preceded Meton (117)--had by a combination of wretched mathematics

and wretched administration come to anticipate the true time

by 67 whole days, so that e. g. the festival of Flora was celebrated

on the 11th July instead of the 28th April. Caesar finally removed

this evil, and with the help of the Greek mathematician Sosigenes

introduced the Italian farmer's year regulated according to the Egyptian

calendar of Eudoxus, as well as a rational system of intercalation,

into religious and official use; while at the same time

the beginning of the year on the 1st March of the old calendar

was abolished, and the date of the 1st January--fixed at first

as the official term for changing the supreme magistrates and,

in consequence of this, long since prevailing in civil life--

was assumed also as the calendar-period for commencing the year.

Both changes came into effect on the 1st January 709, and along

with them the use of the Julian calendar so named after its author,

which long after the fall of the monarchy of Caesar remained

the regulative standard of the civilized world and in the main

is so still. By way of explanation there was added in a detailed edict

a star-calendar derived from the Egyptian astronomical observations

and transferred--not indeed very skilfully--to Italy, which fixed

the rising and setting of the stars named according to days

of the calendar.(118) In this domain also the Roman and Greek worlds

were thus placed on a par.

Caesar and His Works

Such were the foundations of the Mediterranean monarchy of Caesar.

For the second time in Rome the social question had reached

a crisis, at which the antagonisms not only appeared to be,

but actually were, in the form of their exhibition, insoluble and,

in the form of their expression, irreconcilable. On the former

occasion Rome had been saved by the fact that Italy was merged

in Rome and Rome in Italy, and in the new enlarged and altered home

those old antagonisms were not reconciled, but fell into abeyance.

Now Rome was once more saved by the fact that the countries

of the Mediterranean were merged in it or became prepared for merging;

the war between the Italian poor and rich, which in the old Italy

could only end with the destruction of the nation, had no longer

a battle-field or a meaning in the Italy of three continents.

The Latin colonies closed the gap which threatened to swallow up

the Roman community in the fifth century; the deeper chasm

of the seventh century was filled by the Transalpine and transmarine

colonizations of Gaius Gracchus and Caesar. For Rome alone history

not merely performed miracles, but also repeated its miracles,

and twice cured the internal crisis, which in the state itself

was incurable, by regenerating the state. There was doubtless

much corruption in this regeneration; as the union of Italy

was accomplished over the ruins of the Samnite and Etruscan nations,

so the Mediterranean monarchy built itself on the ruins of countless

states and tribes once living and vigorous; but it was a corruption

out of which sprang a fresh growth, part of which remains green

at the present day. What was pulled down for the sake of the new

building, was merely the secondary nationalities which had long since

been marked out for destruction by the levelling hand of civilization.

Caesar, wherever he came forward as a destroyer, only carried out

the pronounced verdict of historical development; but he protected

the germs of culture, where and as he found them, in his own land

as well as among the sister nation of the Hellenes. He saved

and renewed the Roman type; and not only did he spare the Greek type,

but with the same self-relying genius with which he accomplished

the renewed foundation of Rome he undertook also the regeneration

of the Hellenes, and resumed the interrupted work of the great Alexander,

whose image, we may well believe, never was absent from Caesar's soul.

He solved these two great tasks not merely side by side,

but the one by means of the other. The two great essentials

of humanity--general and individual development, or state and culture--

once in embryo united in those old Graeco-Italians feeding their flocks

in primeval simplicity far from the coasts and islands

of the Mediterranean, had become dissevered when these were parted

into Italians and Hellenes, and had thenceforth remained apart

for many centuries. Now the descendant of the Trojan prince

and the Latin king's daughter created out of a state without

distinctive culture and a cosmopolitan civilization a new whole,

in which state and culture again met together at the acme

of human existence in the rich fulness of blessed maturity

and worthily filled the sphere appropriate to such an union.

The outlines have thus been set forth, which Caesar drew for this work,

according to which he laboured himself, and according to which posterity--

for many centuries confined to the paths which this great man marked out--

endeavoured to prosecute the work, if not with the intellect

and energy, yet on the whole in accordance with the intentions,

of the illustrious master. Little was finished; much even

was merely begun. Whether the plan was complete, those who venture

to vie in thought with such a man may decide; we observe no material

defect in what lies before us--every single stone of the building

enough to make a man immortal, and yet all combining to form

one harmonious whole. Caesar ruled as king of Rome for five years

and a half, not half as long as Alexander; in the intervals

of seven great campaigns, which allowed him to stay not more

than fifteen months altogether(119) in the capital of his empire,

he regulated the destinies of the world for the present

and the future, from the establishment of the boundary-line

between civilization and barbarism down to the removal of the pools

of rain in the streets of the capital, and yet retained time

and composure enough attentively to follow the prize-pieces in the theatre

and to confer the chaplet on the victor with improvised verses.

The rapidity and self-precision with which the plan was executed

prove that it had been long meditated thoroughly and all its parts

settled in detail; but, even thus, they remain not much less wonderful than

the plan itself. The outlines were laid down and thereby the new state

was defined for all coming time; the boundless future alone could complete

the structure. So far Caesar might say, that his aim was attained;

and this was probably the meaning of the words which were sometimes

heard to fall from him--that he had "lived enough." But precisely because

the building was an endless one, the master as long as he lived restlessly

added stone to stone, with always the same dexterity and always the same

elasticity busy at his work, without ever overturning or postponing,

just as if there were for him merely a to-day and no to-morrow.

Thus he worked and created as never did any mortal before or after him;

and as a worker and creator he still, after wellnigh two thousand years,

lives in the memory of the nations--the first, and withal unique,

Imperator Caesar.