XIV

THE OLD REPUBLIC AND THE NEW MONARCHY: I

 

The new monarch of Rome, the first ruler over the whole Graeco-Roman civilization, Gaius Julius Caesar, was in his fifty-sixth year (he was probably born on July 12, 102 B.C.) when the battle at Thapsus, the last in a long chain of momentous victories, placed in his hands the power to decide the world’s future. Few men have had their elasticity so thoroughly tested as Caesar, sole creative genius of Rome and the last produced by the ancient world, which accordingly followed the path he marked for it until its sun was set. Sprung from one of Latham’s oldest noble families, tracing back its lineage to the heroes of the Iliad and the kings of Rome, he spent his boyhood and young manhood like the typical genteel youth of that epoch. He had tasted both the sweet and the bitter in the cup of fashionable life, had recited and declaimed, had attempted literature and verses in his idle hours, had pursued love affairs of every sort, and had learned all the mysteries of shaving, curls, and ruffles pertaining to the dandyism of the day, as well as the still more mysterious art of always borrowing and never paying.

But the flexible steel of that nature was proof against even these dissipations, for Caesar maintained unimpaired both his bodily vigor and his elasticity of mind and heart. In fencing and riding he was a match for any of his soldiers, and his proficiency at swimming saved his life at Alexandria. The incredible rapidity of his journeys, usually made at night for the sake of gaining time (in sharp contrast to Pompey’s procession-like slowness), astonished his contemporaries and was not the least among the causes of his success.

The mind was like the body. His remarkable intuitive powers revealed themselves in the precision and practicality of all his arrangements, even regarding situations which he himself had not seen. His memory was matchless, and he could easily carry on several occupations simultaneously with equal self-possession. Although a gentleman, a man of genius, and a monarch, he had still a heart. All his life he cherished the purest veneration for his mother Aurelia, his father having died early. To his wives and above all to his daughter Julia he displayed an honorable affection, which was not without influence even on political affairs. He maintained warm and faithful relations with the ablest and most excellent men of his time, high and low, each after his kind. As he never abandoned any of his partisans after the unfeeling manner of Pompey, but adhered to his friends unswervingly through good times and bad, several of these, such as Aulus Hirtius and Gaius Matius, even after his death gave noble testimonies of their attachment to him.

If in so harmoniously organized a nature any one aspect stands out, it is that he disdained everything theoretical or ideological. Caesar was of course a man of passion, for without passion there is no genius; but his passion was never stronger than he could control. Song and love and wine had taken lively possession of his spirit in the season of his youth, but they did not penetrate to the 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 Latin nouns and verbs. He made verses, as everybody then did, but they were weak. On the other hand, he was interested in astronomy and natural science. While wine continued to be Alexander’s destroyer of care, the temperate Roman, after the revels of his youth were over, avoided it entirely.

Around him, as around all those whose youth has felt the dazzling luster of woman’s love, fainter gleams continued ever to linger. Even in later years he had love adventures and successes with women, and retained a certain foppishness in his appearance—or, to speak more correctly, a pleasing consciousness of his own manly beauty. He carefully covered his baldness, which he felt keenly, with the laurel chaplet that he wore in public in later years; and he would doubtless have traded some of his victories for the return of his youthful locks. But however much he enjoyed the society of women, he allowed them no measure of influence over him. Even his much-censured relation to Cleopatra only served to mask a political weakness.

Caesar was thoroughly a realist and a man of sense; and whatever he undertook was pervaded and guided by the cool sobriety which is the most characteristic mark 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 fullest vigor, and of applying his whole genius even to the smallest 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 dictated his writings as well as projected his campaigns; to this he owed the “marvelous serenity” which remained steadily with him through good and evil days; to this he owed his complete independence, uninfluenced by favorite, by mistress, or even by friend.

As a result of this clarity of judgment Caesar never formed illusions regarding the power of fate and the ability of man; in his case the friendly veil was lifted which conceals the inadequacy of man’s works. Prudently as he laid his plans and considered all possibilities, he never forgot that in all things fortune (that is to say, accident) must bestow success. With this may be connected the circumstance that he so often played a desperate game, especially again and again risking his person with daring indifference. As occasionally the most sagacious men enter into a pure game of hazard, so Caesar’s rationalism at some points made contact with mysticism.

Such gifts could not fail to produce a statesman. From early youth, accordingly, Caesar was a statesman in the truest sense, with the highest aim which a man is allowed to set for himself—the political, military, intellectual, and moral regeneration of his own deeply decayed nation, and of the still more deeply decayed Hellenic nation joined to his own. The hard school of thirty years’ experience changed his views as to how this aim might be reached, but his aim itself remained constant both in time of hopeless humiliation and of unlimited power, both when as demagogue and conspirator he stole toward it by paths of darkness, and when as joint ruler and then as sole monarch he worked at his task before the eyes of the world.

All the permanent measures that Caesar set in motion at the most scattered times take their places in the great building plan. Therefore we cannot properly speak of his isolated achievements, for he did nothing isolated. With justice men admire the inimitable simplicity of Caesar the author, and the unique purity and beauty of his language. With justice the greatest masters of war have praised Caesar the general, who with a singular disregard for routine and tradition always discerned the mode of warfare by which the given enemy could be conquered, and which was thus the right one; who with prophetic certainty found the proper means for every end; who after defeat stood ready for battle like William of Orange, and invariably ended the campaign with victory; who managed the rapid movement of masses—that element of warfare which distinguishes military genius from mere ordinary ability—with unsurpassed perfection, and found the means of victory not in massive 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 especially played in him an altogether subsidiary part, and it is one of his principal distinctions from Alexander, Hannibal, and Napoleon that he began his public life not as an officer but as a politician. He had originally intended to reach his object, like Pericles and Gaius Gracchus, without the use of force, and for eighteen years as leader of the popular party he confined himself exclusively to political plans and intrigues. Then, reluctantly convinced at the age of forty that military support was necessary, he had put himself at the head of an army.

It was therefore natural that he should ever remain more statesman than general—just like Cromwell, who also transformed himself from opposition leader into 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, his objectives, and his achievements perhaps the closest to Caesar of all modern statesmen. Even in his mode of warfare this improvised generalship is apparent. Just as Napoleon’s campaigns against Egypt and England clearly exhibit the artillery lieutenant who had risen to command, so Caesar’s similar enterprises betray the demagogue transformed into a general. A dyed-in-the-wool officer would hardly have been prepared, for political reasons not altogether compelling, to ignore military considerations as Caesar did on several occasions, most strikingly in his landing in Epirus. Several of his acts are therefore censurable from a military viewpoint; but what the general loses, the statesman gains.

The statesman’s task is as universal as was Caesar’s genius. He undertook the most varied things, but all without exception bore on the one great object to which he faithfully and consistently devoted himself, and he never preferred one aspect of this great activity to another. A master of the art of war, he did his utmost to avert civil strife and, when it nevertheless began, to earn laurels with the least possible spilling of blood. Although the founder of a military monarchy, he was uniquely successful in preventing the formation of a hierarchy of marshals or a government of praetorians. If he had a preference for any one form of service 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 human functions were united in Caesar. A thorough realist, he never allowed the images of the past to disturb him. For him nothing was of value in politics but the living present and the law of reason—just as in his grammarian’s role he ignored historical and antiquarian research, recognizing nothing but the living language and 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 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 marvelous. No statesman ever compelled alliances, no general ever collected an army, out of such unyielding and refractory elements, and kept them together with the firmness that Caesar displayed in cementing his coalitions and his legions. Never did a regent judge his instruments, and assign to each its appropriate place, with so acute an eye.

He was monarch, but he never played the king. Even when absolute lord of Rome he deported himself like the party leader, pliant and smooth, easy and charming in conversation, complaisant towards everyone, seeming to wish nothing more than to be the first among his peers. Caesar entirely avoided the blunder into which so many similar men 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 that of the eighteenth Brumaire.¹ Caesar was monarch, but he was never seized with the giddiness of the tyrant. He is perhaps the only one among the earth’s great who in large matters and small never acted from impulse or caprice, but always according to his duty as ruler, and who might look back on his life and doubtless find erroneous calculations to deplore, but no false step of passion to regret. There is nothing in Caesar’s life even remotely comparable to those aberrant excesses, such as the murder of Clitus or the burning of Persepolis, which the history of Alexander records.

He is, in sum, perhaps the only great man who preserved to the end the statesman’s touch for discriminating between the possible and the impossible, and was not broken by that most difficult task for greatly gifted natures—the task of recognizing, when on the pinnacle of success, its natural limits. What was possible he performed, never ignoring the possible good for the sake of the impossible better, never disdaining at least to provide palliatives for evils that were incurable. But when he recognized that fate had spoken, he always obeyed. Alexander on the Hyphasis, Napoleon at Moscow, turned back because they had to, and were indignant at destiny for granting merely limited successes even to its favorites. Caesar turned back voluntarily on the Thames and on the Rhine; and even on the Danube and the Euphrates he thought not of world conquest, but merely of practical frontier regulation.

Such was this unique man, so easy and yet so infinitely difficult to describe. His whole nature is transparent clarity, and tradition preserves more copious information about him than about any of his peers in the ancient world. Our conceptions of such a person may well vary in shallowness or depth, but they cannot be truly different. The grand figure has exhibited the same essential features to every inquirer of the least discernment, and yet no one has succeeded in reproducing it to the life. The secret lies in its perfection. As a man no less than as a historical figure, Caesar occupies a position where the great contrasts of existence meet and balance. 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 Hellenic cultures—Caesar was the entire and perfect man.

Accordingly, we miss in him more than in any other historic figure what are called characteristic features, which are in reality mere deviations from the natural course of human development. What in Caesar passes for such at first glance is seen, on closer observation, to be the peculiarity not of the individual but of the epoch. His youthful adventures, for instance, were common to all his more gifted contemporaries of like position, and his unpoetical but strongly logical temperament was the temperament of Romans in general. It was also part of Caesar’s humanity that he was completely controlled by considerations of time and place; for there is no abstract humanity, and the living man cannot but occupy a place in a given nationality and culture. Caesar was a perfect man just because more than any other he placed himself amid the currents of his time, and because more than any other he epitomized the essential peculiarity of the Roman nation—practical aptitude as a citizen. His Hellenism was only the Hellenism which had long been intimately blended with the Italian nation.

In this very circumstance, however, lies the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of depicting Caesar to life. As the artist can paint everything save consummate beauty, so the historian, when once in a thousand years he encounters perfection, can only be silent. For normality is doubtless capable of being described, but only by the negative notion of the absence of defect. Nature’s secret, whereby she combines normality and individuality in her most finished productions, is beyond expression. We can only deem fortunate those who beheld this perfection, and gain some faint conception of it from the reflected luster which rests imperishably on the creations of so great a nature.

True, these also bear the stamp of the times. The Roman hero stood beside his youthful Greek predecessor not as an equal but as a superior, but meantime the world had grown old and faded. Caesar’s course was no longer, like that of Alexander, a joyous marching toward an infinitely remote goal. He built on and with ruins, and was content to establish himself as securely as possible within the ample yet limited scope assigned to him. With reason, therefore, the dreamers of succeeding ages have passed over the unpoetical Roman, while investing Alexander with the golden luster of poetry and the rainbow hues of legend. But with equal reason the political life of nations has for two thousand years reverted again and again to the lines which Caesar drew; and the fact that the peoples to whom the world belongs still designate their highest monarchs by his name is at once deeply significant and a source of shame.

If the old and totally vicious state of things was to be expunged and the commonwealth renovated, it was necessary first of all that the country be effectively pacified and the rubbish of the recent catastrophe cleared away. In this work Caesar adopted the principle of reconciling the existing parties—or, to put it more correctly (for where irreconcilable antagonisms exist we cannot speak of real reconciliation) the principle that the arena where the nobility and the people had hitherto contended was to be abandoned by both parties, which were to meet together on the ground of the new monarchical constitution.

First of all, therefore, the older quarrels of the republican past were regarded as finished forever. While Caesar ordered that Sulla’s statues, which had been thrown down by the mob on the news of the battle of Pharsalus, should be re-erected, thus recognizing that history alone should sit in judgment on that great man, at the same time he canceled the last of Sulla’s exceptional laws, recalled the exiles banished during the Cinnan and Sertorian troubles, and restored the children of the outlaws to eligibility to office. In like manner all those were restored who early in the recent catastrophe had lost their Senate seats or their civil rights through sentence of the censors or political processes, especially through impeachments based on the exceptional laws of 52 B.C. Only those who had killed for money remained under attainder (as was reasonable), and Milo, the most daring henchman of the senatorial party, was excluded from the general pardon.

Far more difficult than the settlement of these past questions was the treatment of the existing parties, Caesar’s own democratic adherents and the overthrown aristocracy. It was understandable that the former should be, if possible, still less satisfied than the latter with Caesar’s conduct after victory and with his summons to abandon the old political arena. Caesar himself doubtless desired the same general outcome that Gaius Gracchus had contemplated, but the objectives of the Caesarians were no longer those of the Gracchans. The Roman popular party had gradually been driven from reform to revolution, from revolution to anarchy, from anarchy to a war against property. They celebrated among themselves the memory of the reign of terror, and now adorned Catiline’s tomb, as formerly that of the Gracchi, with flowers and garlands. They had placed themselves under Caesar’s banner because they expected him to succeed where Catiline had failed.

But as it speedily became plain that Caesar had no intention of following Catiline’s course, and that the most which debtors might expect was some alleviation of payment and modification of procedure, the indignant partisans loudly inquired, For whom had the popular party conquered? This rabble high and low, chagrined at the miscarriage of their intended Saturnalia, began first to flirt with the Pompeians, and then during Caesar’s absence (from January 48 to autumn of 47 B.C.) to instigate a second civil war within the first.

The praetor Marcus Caelius Rufus, a good aristocrat and bad payer of debts, a man of some talent and much culture, and, as a vehement and fluent orator, one of Caesar’s most zealous champions in the Forum, on his own responsibility proposed a law which granted debtors an interest-free respite of six years. When he was opposed in this step, he proposed a second law canceling all claims arising out of loans and current house rents; whereupon the Caesarian Senate deposed him from office.

It was on the eve of the battle of Pharsalus, when the balance seemed to incline to the side of the Pompeians. Rufus entered into communication with Milo, the old street fighter for the aristocracy, and the two contrived a counterrevolution whose banner combined the republican constitution with the cancellation of creditors’ claims and the manumission of slaves. Milo left his place of exile in Massilia and called the Pompeians and the slave herdsmen to arms in the region of Thurii, while 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 plundering band there, and the fall of the two leaders put an end to the scandal.

Nevertheless, the following year (47 B.C.) a second fool, the tribune Publius Dolabella, equally insolvent but far less talented than his predecessor, reintroduced the law as to creditors’ claims and house rents. Then, with his colleague Lucius Trebellius, he sought to support his view (it was the last time) with demagogic incitement. There were street riots and serious frays between the armed bands on both sides until the commandant of Italy, Marcus Antonius, ordered the military to interfere; and Caesar’s early return from the East put a complete stop to the preposterous proceedings. Caesar attributed so little importance to these brainless projects that after some time he even received Dolabella again into favor. Against such a rabble, engaged not in political activity but solely in a bandit war against property, the mere existence of a strong government is sufficient; and Caesar did not deign to curry favor for his monarchy by concerning himself with alarmist apprehensions over these communists of that day.

While Caesar thus could and did leave the popular party to continue its already far-advanced disintegration, the aristocratic party possessed much greater vitality. His object here was not to bring about its dissolution—which time alone could effect—but to begin and pave the way for it by a nice blend of repression and conciliation. Among minor measures, from a natural sense of propriety, Caesar avoided exasperating the fallen party by empty sarcasm. He did not celebrate a triumph over his conquered fellow citizens, and he mentioned Pompey often and always with respect, causing his overthrown statue to be put back after the senate house had been restored.

Caesar assigned the narrowest possible limits to political prosecutions. There was no inquiry into the various communications between the constitutional party and nominal Caesarians. Caesar himself threw into the fire unread the piles of papers found in the enemy’s headquarters at Pharsalus and Thapsus, and spared himself and the country from political processes against suspected individuals. Further, all the common soldiers who had followed their Roman or provincial officers into the contest against Caesar came off with impunity, except for Roman citizens who had served in the army of King Juba; their property was confiscated as 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 49 B.C.; but he became convinced that he had gone too far, and that the removal of at least the leaders was inevitable. He therefore set up the rule that every one who had served as an officer in the enemy’s army or had sat in the opposition-senate after Ilerda forfeited his property and his political rights, and was banished from Italy for life. If he did not survive the war, his property was forfeited to the state. But those who had formerly accepted pardon from Caesar and were later found in the ranks of the enemy thereby forfeited their lives.

These rules, however, were materially modified in practice. The death sentence was carried out only against a very few of the numerous backsliders. In property confiscations not only were all the estate’s debts as well as widows’ claims for their dowries paid off (as was reasonable), but a part of the estate was also left to the children of the deceased. Lastly, not a few of those liable to banishment and confiscation of property were pardoned entirely or got off with fines, like the African capitalists who were impressed into the senate of Utica. And even the others almost without exception had their freedom and property restored, if they could only bring themselves to petition Caesar to that effect. Indeed, several who declined to do so, such as the consular Marcus Marcellus, received pardon unasked, and ultimately in 44 B.C. a general amnesty was issued for all who were still unrecalled.

The republican opposition submitted to pardon, but it was not reconciled. Discontent with the new order and exasperation against the ruler were general. There was no further opportunity for open political resistance, and it is hardly worth noting that some opposition tribunes acquired the republican crown of martyrdom by an intervention against those who had called Caesar king. But republicanism expressed itself all the more decidedly as an inner opposition, and in secret agitation and plotting. Not a hand stirred when the Imperator appeared in public. There were abundant 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. Praise of Cato was the most fashionable theme of opposition pamphleteers, and their writings found a more grateful audience because literature itself was no longer free.

Indeed, Caesar even now combated the republicans on their own ground. He 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 Greeks round the body of the Trojan Patroclus. But as a matter of course the Caesarians had the worst of this conflict, where the public with its thoroughly republican feelings was judge. No course remained but to overawe the authors. On this account well-known and dangerous literary men, such as Publius Nigidius Figulus and Aulus Caecina, had more difficulty in obtaining permission to return to Italy than other exiles, while the opposition writers in Italy were subjected to a practical censorship whose restraints were all the more annoying because the punishment to be dreaded was utterly arbitrary.

The underground machinations against the new monarchy will be 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 Pompeians and now by 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 with a permanent bodyguard, and usually contented himself with making known the detected conspiracies by public placards.

However much Caesar was wont to treat his personal safety with daring indifference, he could not conceal from himself the serious danger which this mass of malcontents represented to his creations. Yet disregarding the urgent warnings of his friends, and without deluding himself as to the implacability of the opponents to whom mercy was granted, he persevered with marvelous composure and energy in pardoning by far the greater number of them. He did so neither from the chivalrous magnanimity of a proud man, nor from the sentimental mercy of effeminacy, but from the statesmanlike consideration that vanquished parties are disposed of more quickly and less injuriously by their absorption into the state than by any attempt to wipe them out or to banish them from the commonwealth.

Caesar’s high purposes required the constitutional party itself, which in fact embraced not only the aristocracy but all the elements of a free national spirit among the Italian citizenry. His schemes, which sought to renovate the antiquated state, needed the whole mass of talent, culture, and hereditary and self-acquired distinction comprehended within this party, and in this sense he may well have regarded the pardoning of his opponents as the finest reward of victory. Accordingly the most prominent chiefs were indeed removed, but full pardon was not withheld from men of the second and third rank, especially younger men. These were not, moreover, allowed to sulk in passive opposition, but by more or less gentle pressure were made to take an active part in the new administration and to accept honors and offices from it.

As with Henry the Fourth and William of Orange, so Caesar’s greatest difficulties began only after the victory. Every revolutionary conqueror learns by experience that if after vanquishing his opponents he would not remain a mere party chief like Cinna and Sulla, but would like Caesar, Henry the Fourth, and William of Orange substitute the common welfare for his own party’s necessarily one-sided program, there is a point when he faces the united hostility of all parties including his own; and the purer his ideal the more this is true. The constitutionalists and the Pompeians paid homage with their lips, yet at heart hated the monarchy or at least the dynasty. The degenerate populists were in open rebellion from the moment they perceived that Caesar’s goals were by no means their own. Even Caesar’s personal adherents murmured when they found that their chief was establishing not a bandit state but a monarchy equal and just toward all, and that their personal gains were to be diminished by the raising up of the vanquished. This reorganization 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 in this sense weaker than before his victory, but what he lost the state gained. By annihilating the parties, while not simply sparing the partisans but allowing every man of talent or even merely of good family to hold office regardless of his political past, he focused on his great design the massed energies of the state; and the voluntary or compulsory participation of men of all parties in the same work imperceptibly led the nation over to the newly prepared ground. Nor was he misled by the fact that this reconciliation was for the moment only external, and that there was much less agreement about the new state of things than about hatred for Caesar. He knew well that antagonisms lose their keenness when brought into outward union, and that only thus can the statesman assist the working of time, which alone can heal such 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 for reward, nor even for the love of the people, but sacrificed the favor of his contemporaries for the blessing of posterity, and above all for the opportunity to save and renew his nation.

In Describing in detail the method by which this transition from the old to the new was effected, we must first of all recollect that Caesar came to complete rather than to begin. The plan of a new political framework suited to the times, long ago projected by Gaius Gracchus, had been maintained by his adherents and successors with more or less spirit and success but ever without wavering. Caesar, from the outset almost by hereditary right the head of the popular party, had for thirty years borne its banner without ever changing or concealing his colors, and he remained the democrat even when monarch. As he accepted without limitation (except for the preposterous projects of Catiline and Clodius) the heritage of his party; as he displayed the bitterest personal hatred for the aristocracy and the genuine aristocrats; and as he retained unchanged the essential ideas of Roman democracy—alleviation of the burdens of debtors, transmarine colonization, gradual equalization of the classes comprising the state, and emancipation of the executive power from the Senate—to this extent his monarchy differed so little from the older democracy that on the contrary that democracy attained its completion and fulfilment by means of his monarchy.

For this monarchy was not an Oriental despotism, but a monarchy such as Gaius Gracchus had wished to found and Pericles and Cromwell founded—the representation of the nation by the man in whom it puts supreme and unlimited confidence. The ideas which underlay Caesar’s work were not strictly new, but to him belongs their realization, which after all is the main point. To him belongs the grandeur of execution, which would probably have surprised the brilliant builder himself if he could have seen it. For it has always commanded the deepest admiration of everyone who has observed it, whether as living reality or in the mirror of history, whatever his historical epoch or political convictions, limited only by his ability to comprehend human and historical greatness.

At this point, however, it is proper to express once and for all what the historian ever tacitly assumes, and to protest against the custom—common alike to simplicity and perfidy—of using historical praise and censure as phrases of general application with no regard for circumstances. The present case involves construing the judgment of Caesar into a judgment of what is called Caesarism. It is true that history ought to instruct the present, but not in the vulgar sense, as if by simply turning over the leaves one could diagnose the ills of the present from the records of the past, and derive from these the specifics for a prescription. It is instructive only so far as observing older cultures reveals the organic conditions of civilization generally—the fundamental forces everywhere alike, the manner of their combination everywhere different—and leads and encourages men not to slavish 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 natural law by which the smallest organism infinitely surpasses the most artistic machine, every constitution, however defective, which expresses the free will of the majority infinitely surpasses the most brilliant and humane absolutism; for the former is capable of growth and therefore living, while the latter is what it is and therefore dead.

This law of nature demonstrates itself all the more completely in the Roman military monarchy, in that under the impulse of its creator’s genius, and in the absence of all foreign pressures, that monarchy developed in purer form than in any similar state. From Caesar’s time, as Gibbon has shown long ago, the Roman system had only an external coherence, repeating itself only mechanically; while internally, even under Caesar it was utterly withered and dead. If in its early stages, and above all in Caesar’s own soul, the hopeful dream of combining free popular development and absolute rule was still cherished, the government of the highly gifted emperors of the Julian house soon taught men a terrible lesson in how far it was possible to hold fire and water in the same vessel.

Caesar’s work was salutary and necessary not because it was or could be a blessing in itself. But given the social organization of antiquity based on slavery and utterly foreign to republican-constitutional representation, and under the organization of the urban constitution which during five hundred years had ripened into oligarchic absolutism, an absolute military monarchy was both a logical necessity and the least of evils. When the slave-holding aristocracy of Virginia and the Carolinas shall have carried matters as far as their predecessors in Sullan Rome, Caesarism will there too be legitimized at the bar of history; ² where it appears under other circumstances it is at once a caricature and a usurpation. But history will not deny the true Caesar his due honor, because her verdict in the presence of bad Caesars may lead fools astray and give rogues 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 requite them both.

The position of the new supreme head of the state appears formally, at least at the outset, as a dictatorship. Caesar took it up first after his return from Spain in 49 B.C., then laid it down again after a few days and waged the decisive campaign of the following year simply as consul. But in the autumn of that 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 January 1, 45 B.C., as an annual office, and then in January or February of 44 B.C. for the duration of his life, so that in the end he pointedly dropped the earlier reservation as to laying down the office and formally expressed his life tenure in the new title of dictator perpetuus.

This dictatorship, both in its initial transitory and its second enduring phase, was not that of the old constitution, but the supreme office devised by Sulla. It was an office whose functions were fixed not by the constitutional ordinances regulating the supreme single magistracy, but by special decree of the people granting the holder the power to project laws and to regulate the commonwealth, an unlimited official prerogative which superseded the republican partition of powers. It was a mere elaboration of this general prerogative when the holder of power was 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 choosing provincial governors.

Caesar could accordingly assume prerogatives which lay outside the proper functions of the magistracy, and even outside the traditional power of the state. It appears almost as a concession on his part that he abstained from nominating the magistrates in place of the comitia, limiting himself to proposing a proportion of the praetors and of the lower magistrates, and that he had himself empowered by special decree of the people to create patricians, which was not at all permissible according to use and custom.

For other magistracies the dictatorship in effect left no room. Caesar did not himself fill the censorship, but he doubtless made full use of censorial rights, particularly the important right of nominating senators. He frequently held the consulship alongside the dictatorship, once even without colleague. But he refused to attach it permanently to his person, and he ignored the pleas for him to undertake it for a five- or even a ten-year term.

Caesar had no need to undertake the superintendence of religion, since he was already pontifex maximus. Membership in the college of augurs was conferred on him as a matter of course, along with an abundance of old and new honors, such as the title of “father of the fatherland,” giving his name to the month of his birth, and other courtly manifestations which ultimately developed into outright deification. Two of these arrangements deserve to be singled out. First, Caesar was given the same personal inviolability as the tribunes of the people; and second, the title of Imperator was granted to him permanently alongside his other official designations.

Men of judgment will need no proof that Caesar intended to impose his supreme power permanently on the commonwealth, or that he chose a simple and fitting name for the new institution; for if it is a blunder to create names without power, it is scarcely less of an error to set up the substance of power without a name. Only it is not easy to determine what final shape Caesar had in mind, partly because in this period of transition it is difficult to distinguish the scaffolding from the permanent structure, and partly because his worshipful followers anticipated their master’s nod and loaded him (doubtless to his disgust) with a multitude of powers and honors.

Least of all could the new monarchy act through the consulship, just because its elective character could hardly be separated from it. Moreover, Caesar obviously labored to downgrade this hitherto supreme office into an empty title, and subsequently, when he accepted it, he gave it away to persons of secondary rank before the year expired. The dictatorship came most frequently and clearly into prominence, but probably only because Caesar wished to use it in its old significance of an extraordinary presidency for surmounting extraordinary crises. On the other hand it was far from suitable for the new monarchy, for it was inherently marked with an exceptional and unpopular character, and a democratic statesman could hardly be expected to choose a permanent organizational form which had been created by the most gifted champion of the opposition.

The new name of Imperator, on the other hand, seemed in every respect a more appropriate title for the monarchy, just because in this context it was entirely new, and without apparent reason for its introduction. The new wine might not be put into old bottles. Here is a new name for the new thing, summing up most pregnantly what the democratic party had already expressed (though less precisely) in the Gabinian law as the function of its chief—the concentration and perpetuation of official power in the hands of a popular chief independent of the Senate. On Caesar’s coins, especially those of the last period, we find the title of Imperator prevailing, and in Caesar’s law as to political crimes the monarch seems to have been designated by this name. Thus later generations came to connect the monarchy with the name of Imperator. To give this new office both a democratic and religious sanction, Caesar probably intended to combine in it the tribunician power along with the supreme pontificate.

Unquestionably the new organization was not meant to be limited to its founder’s lifetime. But Caesar did not succeed in settling the thorny problem of the succession, and it must remain moot whether he planned to institute some sort of election of a successor, such as marked the early Roman kings, or whether he wished to make the supreme office hereditary, as his adopted son subsequently claimed. It is not improbable that he had some notion of combining the two systems, and of arranging the succession (as did Cromwell and Napoleon) so that the ruler should be succeeded by his son; but if he had no son, or the son did not seem suitable, the ruler might choose his successor by adoption.

In law the new office of Imperator was based on the position which the consuls or proconsuls occupied outside Rome, so that primarily the military command, but along with it the supreme judicial and administrative power, were comprehended in it. But the Imperator’s authority exceeded that of the consular-proconsular, being not only unlimited in time and space and held for life, but also operative in the capital. Unlike the consul, the Imperator could not be checked by colleagues of equal power, and all the restrictions gradually imposed on the original supreme power did not apply to the Imperator.

In a word, this new office of Imperator was nothing else than the re-establishment of the old kingship; for it was those very limitations of power as regards time, place, colleagues, and the co-operation of the Senate or the community which distinguished the consul from the king. Hardly a trait of the new monarchy is lacking from the old: the union of the supreme military, judicial, and administrative authority in the hands of the prince; religious leadership of the commonwealth; the right of issuing ordinances with binding power; the reduction of the Senate to an advisory council; the revival of the patriciate and of the city praefecture.

But still more striking than these analogies is the internal similarity of the ancient Roman 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 protectors of the commons against the nobility, Caesar too had not come to destroy liberty but primarily to break the intolerable yoke of the aristocracy. Nor need it surprise us that Caesar, anything but a political antiquarian, went back five hundred years to find the model for his new state. Since the highest office of the Roman commonwealth had always remained a kingship restricted by a number of special laws, the idea of the regal office itself had by no means become obsolete. At various periods and from very different sides—in the decemviral power, in the Sullan regency, and in Caesar’s own dictatorship—the regal power had in fact recurred during the republic. Indeed, by a certain logical necessity, whenever exceptional powers seemed needed there emerged, as distinct from the usual limited imperium, the unlimited imperium which was simply nothing else than the regal power.

Lastly, surface considerations also recommended this recurrence to the former kingly position. Mankind has infinite difficulty in achieving new creations, and therefore cherishes established forms as sacred heirlooms. Accordingly Caesar judiciously connected himself with Servius Tullius, just as subsequently Charlemagne connected himself with Caesar, and Napoleon attempted at least to connect himself with Charlemagne. He did so not covertly and secretly, but like his successors in the most open manner possible. Indeed, the very object of this connection was 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 departure from the law of Sulla was that alongside and on a level with the collective community was placed the Imperator, as the living personal expression of the people. In the formula used for political oaths the genius of the Imperator was added to the Jupiter and Penates of the Roman people. The outward badge of monarchy was, according to the universal view of antiquity, the image of the monarch on the coins; from the year 44 B.C. the head of Caesar appears on those of the Roman state.

There could accordingly be no complaint 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 as king of Rome. It is conceivable (although not probable, and in any case unimportant), that he intended to designate his office not by the new title of Imperator but by the old one of King. Even in his lifetime many of his enemies and friends were of the opinion that he intended to have himself expressly so nominated. Indeed, several of his most vehement adherents suggested in different ways and at different times that he should assume the crown—most strikingly Marcus Antonius, when as consul he offered the diadem to Caesar before all the people in February of 44 B.C.

But Caesar rejected all these proposals at once. If at the same time he took steps against those who used these incidents to stir republican opposition, it by no means follows that he was not sincere in his rejection. The assumption that he encouraged these invitations, in order to prepare the multitude for the unfamiliar spectacle of the Roman diadem, utterly misjudges the mighty power of the sentimental opposition with which Caesar had to reckon. This opposition could not be rendered more compliant, but on the contrary gained strength from the fact that Caesar himself recognized its power. It may have been the uncalled-for zeal of his followers that occasioned these incidents. It may also be that Caesar permitted or even suggested the scene to Antonius, to bring the inconvenient gossip to a sharp halt by a refusal before the eyes of the citizens, a refusal which was inserted at his command in the state calendar and which therefore could hardly be revoked. The probability is that Caesar appreciated both the value of a convenient title as well as the popular prejudice which focuses on the names of things regardless of their essence. Thus he was resolved to avoid the name of king—tainted with an ancient curse, and connoting to the Romans of his time the despots of the East rather than their own Numa and Servius—and to appropriate the substance of the regal office under the title of Imperator.

But whatever title he gave himself in his thoughts, the sovereign ruler was there, and accordingly the court gathered itself at once with its usual accompaniments of pomp, insipidity, and emptiness. Caesar appeared in public not in the consular robe bordered with purple stripes, but in the all-purple robe regarded by antiquity as the proper regal attire. Seated on his golden chair, and without rising from it, he reviewed the solemn procession of the Senate. The festivals commemorating his birthday, his victories, and his vows filled the calendar. When Caesar came to the capital, his principal servants marched forth in troops to escort him over a considerable distance. To be near him began to be of such importance that rents rose in the quarter of the city where he dwelt. Personal interviews with him became so difficult, because of the multitude of individuals soliciting audience, that Caesar often found it necessary to communicate in writing even with his intimate friends, and persons of the highest rank sometimes had to wait for hours in his antechamber.

People felt, more clearly than Caesar liked, that they no longer approached a fellow citizen. There arose a monarchical aristocracy, to a remarkable degree both new and old, which sprang from the idea of overshadowing the aristocracy of the oligarchy by that of royalty, the nobility by the patriciate. The patrician body still existed, although without important privileges as an order, in the guise of a tight aristocratic guild. But as it could receive no new families it had dwindled away over the centuries, and by Caesar’s time no more than fifteen or sixteen patrician clans still survived. Caesar, himself sprung from one of them, received by popular decree the right of creating new patrician families, thus establishing, in contrast to the republican nobility, a new patrician aristocracy which met all the requisites of a monarchical privileged order—the charm of antiquity, complete dependence on the government, and total insignificance. On all sides the new sovereignty revealed itself.

Under a monarch thus practically unlimited there was little room for a constitution, and still less for continuing the old commonwealth based on legal co-operation of the citizens, the Senate, and the several magistrates. Caesar reverted completely to the old tradition: the citizen-assembly remained alongside the king the supreme expression of the sovereign people’s will; the Senate reverted to its original function of advising the ruler when requested; and the ruler again concentrated in his person the whole executive authority, with no independent official by his side any more than was true of the ancient kings.

For legislation the democratic monarch adhered to the primitive Roman maxim that the people alone, in concert with the king convoking them, had the power to regulate the commonwealth; and Caesar had his enactments regularly sanctioned by decree of the people. To be sure, the energy and authority, half-moral and half-political, which the yea or nay of those old warrior assemblies had carried could not again be instilled into the so-called comitia of this period. The co-operation of the citizens in legislation, which under the old constitution had been extremely limited but real and living, was under the new one a mere shadow. Thus there was no need of special restrictive measures against the comitia, many years’ experience having shown that every government—oligarchical as well as the monarchical—easily kept on good terms with this formal sovereign. These Caesarian comitia were practically important only in so far as by retaining in principle the sovereignty of the people they constituted a protection against absolutism. But at the same time Caesar also revived the other maxim of the old state law, that the command of the sole magistrate is unconditionally valid so long as he holds office, and that while legislation no doubt belongs only to the king and the citizens in concert, the royal edict is equivalent to law at least till the abdication of its author.

While the democratic king thus conceded to the community at least a formal share of sovereignty, it was by no means his intention to divide his authority with the previous governing body, the Senate. Caesar’s Senate was to be (in a quite different way from the later Senate of Augustus) merely a supreme state council with which he consulted as to laws, and in whose name the more important administrative ordinances might be issued; for cases in fact occurred where senatorial decrees were issued unbeknownst to any of the senators who were recorded as present at their preparation.

There were no serious legal obstacles to reducing the Senate to its original deliberative position, which it had overstepped more de facto than de jure. However, it was necessary for Caesar to protect himself from practical resistance, for the Roman Senate was as much the focus of the opposition to Caesar as the Attic Areopagus was to Pericles. Chiefly for this reason the number of senators, which had normally amounted at most to six hundred and had been greatly reduced by the recent crises, was raised by extraordinary supplement to nine hundred. At the same time, to keep it at least up to this mark, the number of quaestors to be nominated annually—that is, members annually admitted to the Senate—was raised from twenty to forty.

The extraordinary reinforcement of the Senate was undertaken by the monarch alone, while for the annual additions he secured a permanent influence through the law that the electoral colleges were required to vote for the first twenty quaestorship candidates who were recommended by the monarch. Besides, the crown could confer the honorary rights of the quaestorship or any superior office, and thus a seat in the Senate, even to individuals not formally qualified. The extraordinary appointments naturally went in the main to adherents of the new order, and introduced, along with equites of respectable standing, various dubious and plebeian personages into the proud corporation—former senators removed by the censor or expelled because of a judicial sentence, foreigners from Spain and Gaul who to some extent had to learn their Latin in the Senate, subaltern officers who had not previously received even the equestrian ring, sons of freedmen or of men who followed dishonorable trades, and similar elements.

The exclusive circles of the nobility, who naturally took bitterest offense at this change in the composition of the Senate, saw it as an intentional corruption of the institution itself. Caesar was not capable of such a self-destructive policy, but he was as determined not to be governed by his council as he was convinced of the necessity of its existence. They might more correctly have discerned in these actions his intention to change the Senate’s exclusively oligarchic character, and to make it once more what it had been in olden days—a state council representing all classes through their most intelligent elements, and not necessarily excluding the man of humble birth or even the foreigner. Just as the ancient kings introduced non-citizens, so Caesar introduced non-Italians into his senate.

While the nobility’s rule was thus set aside and its existence undermined, and while the Senate in its new form was merely a tool of the monarch, autocracy took firm root in the whole administration of the state, and the executive power was concentrated in the hands of the monarch. First, the Imperator decided in person every important question. Caesar was able to carry on personal government to an extent we puny men can hardly conceive, and for more general reasons than his unparalleled rapidity and decisiveness. When we see Caesar, Sulla, Gaius Gracchus, and Roman statesmen in general displaying a capacity for work that transcends our notions of human powers, the reason lies not in any change in human nature but in the different organization of the modern household. The Roman house was a machine in which even the mental powers of the slaves and freedmen yielded their produce to the master; and 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 countinghouse system indeed strives zealously to imitate, but still lags as far behind its prototype as the modern power of capital falls short of the power of ancient slavery.

Caesar knew how to profit by this advantage. Wherever any post demanded special confidence, we see him filling it, so far as other considerations at all permitted, with his slaves, freedmen, or followers of humble birth. His works show what such an organizing genius could accomplish with such an instrument; but how these marvelous feats were achieved in detail we have no adequate answer. Bureaucracy resembles manufacture in this respect, that the work done does not appear as that of the individual who made it, but as that of the factory in which it was produced. This much only is clear, that Caesar had no assistant who exerted a personal influence over his work or was even initiated into the whole plan. Not only was he the sole master; he also worked without skilled helpers, merely with common laborers.

In strictly political affairs Caesar avoided so far as possible any delegation of functions even as to details. Where it was inevitable, as when he needed a principal representative in Rome during his frequent absences, the person chosen was, significantly, not the monarch’s legal deputy, the prefect of the city, but a confidant without official status, usually Caesar’s banker, the cunning and pliant Phoenician merchant Lucius Cornelius Balbus from Gades. In administration Caesar was above all careful to take over the keys of the treasury—which the Senate had seized from the fallen kings, and through which it had established its government—and to entrust them only to servants absolutely and exclusively devoted to him. The monarch’s private wealth remained, of course, strictly separate from the property of the state. But Caesar took in hand the whole financial and monetary system, and conducted it as he and other Roman grandees were wont to manage their estates. The levying of provincial taxes, and also largely the coining of money, were entrusted to the Imperator’s slaves and freedmen to the exclusion of men of the senatorial order—a momentous step, from which in time grew the important class of procurators and the “imperial household.”

On the other hand, the governorships, now more than ever military commands after their financial functions had been taken over by the new imperial tax receivers, did not go to the monarch’s retainers except in the case of Egypt alone. The country of the Nile, geographically isolated and politically centralized in the extreme, was better suited than any other district to break off permanently from the central power, as witness the repeated attempts by hard-pressed Italian party chiefs to establish themselves there during the recent crisis. Probably just this consideration induced Caesar not to declare the land a province, but to leave the harmless Lagid dynasty there. This is surely the reason why the command of the legions stationed in Egypt were not entrusted to a man of the Senate (or, in other words, to the former government) but was treated as a menial office like taxgathering.

In general, however, Caesar felt that Roman soldiers should not, like Oriental armies, be commanded by lackeys. The more important governorships were thus normally entrusted to exconsuls, the less important to expraetors; and the five-year interval prescribed by the law of 52 B.C. was probably set aside, so that the governor ship followed hard on the heels of the term of office in Rome. On the other hand the distribution of the governorships, hitherto arranged sometimes by decree of the people or Senate, sometimes by agreement among the magistrates or by lot, passed over to the monarch. As the consuls were often induced to resign before the end of their year, to make room for replacement consuls (consules suffecti); as the number of praetors annually nominated was raised from eight to sixteen, with half being nominated by the Imperator (as in the case of the quaestors); and as the Imperator reserved the right of nominating titular praetors and titular quaestors—Caesar therefore never lacked a sufficient number of acceptable candidates for the governorships. Their recall was of course left to the regent’s discretion, though as a rule the consular governor did not remain more than two years or the praetorian more than one year in his province.

Lastly, as for the administration of the capital city, the Imperator for a time evidently intended to entrust this also to magistrates nominated by him. He revived the old city lieutenancy of the kings, and during several absences of indefinite duration he committed the administration of the capital to one or more such lieutenants nominated by him without consulting the people. These lieutenants united in themselves all the administrative functions including even the right of coining money with their own name, although of course not with their own likeness. In 47 B.C. and in the first nine months of 45 there were neither praetors nor curule aediles nor quaestors; even the consuls were not nominated until near the end of the former year, and in the latter Caesar was consul without colleague.

This looks quite like an attempt to revive the old regal authority inside Rome, limited only by the democratic past of the new monarch: in other words, an attempt to abolish the consulship, the censorship, the praetorship, the curule aedileship, and the quaestorship, leaving only the prefect of the city during the king’s absence and the tribunes and plebeian aediles appointed for protecting popular freedom. But Caesar subsequently abandoned this, neither accepting the royal title himself nor canceling those venerable names interwoven with the glorious history of the republic. The consuls, praetors, aediles, tribunes, and quaestors substantially retained their previous formal powers, but within a totally altered situation.

The foundation political idea of the republic was the identification of the Roman empire with the city of Rome, and by this token the city’s magistrates were treated as magistrates of the empire. In Caesar’s monarchy this view fell into abeyance. The magistrates of Rome governed thenceforth only the first among the empire’s many municipalities, the consulship especially becoming a purely titular post of practical importance only because of the major governorship appended to it.

Thus the fate which the Roman community had been accustomed to visit on the vanquished now befell itself, and its sovereignty over the empire was converted into a limited communal freedom within the Roman state. Like the praetors and quaestors, the plebeian aediles were doubled in number and two new “grain aediles” (aediles ceriales) were added to superintend the supplies of the capital. Candidates for those offices were chosen by the community, without the restriction that marked the consuls and perhaps also the tribunes of the people and plebeian aediles. In general the ancient safeguards of popular freedom were not touched—but this, of course, did not prevent a 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 in all 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 offices were again converted into municipal magistracies, the autocracy was sufficiently established.

In the spiritual hierarchy Caesar made little material alteration.³ If the Roman state religion had served to support the ruling oligarchy, it might render the same service to the new monarchy; thus the Senate’s conservative religious policy was transferred to the new king. When the conservative Varro published about this time his Antiquities of Divine Things, the great fundamental repository of Roman theology, he was allowed to dedicate it to the Pontifex Maximus Caesar. The faint luster still adhering to the worship of Jove shone round the newly established throne, and the old national faith became in its dying stages the instrument, however hollow and feeble, of a Caesarian papacy.

In judicial matters the old regal jurisdiction was reestablished. The king had once judged criminal and civil cases without being legally bound in the former to respect an appeal to the people for mercy, or in the latter to delegate the decision to jurymen. In like fashion Caesar claimed the right of bringing any case to his own bar, and disposing of it personally or (in his absence) through his city lieutenant. In fact we find him, quite after the manner of the ancient kings, now sitting publicly in judgment in the Forum on Roman citizens accused of high treason, now holding a judicial inquiry in his house regarding dependent kings similarly accused. Thus the only special privilege of Roman citizens seems to have consisted in the publicity of the judicial procedure. But exercise of this kingly judicial right, although Caesar discharged its duties with impartiality and care, was naturally limited to exceptional cases.

In criminal and civil cases the former republican judicial practices were substantially retained. Criminal cases were disposed of before various jury commissions competent to the crimes, civil cases partly before the court of inheritance (the centumviri) and partly before the single iudices. Judicial proceedings were supervised in the capital chiefly by the praetors, in the provinces by the governors. Even under the monarchy political crimes continued to be referred to a jury commission. The new ordinance which Caesar issued precisely specified the punishable acts, excluded all prosecution of opinions, and fixed banishment rather than death as the penalty. The jurymen were chosen not exclusively from the Senate, as the oligarchy wished, nor solely from the equestrian order, as the strict Gracchans would have desired, but on the basis of the compromise law of Cotta, with an eye to reconciling the parties. However, in line with Pompey’s law of 55 B.C., the tribuni aerarii who came from the lower ranka of the people were set aside by the requirement that jurymen must own property of at least 400,000 sesterces. Thus senators and equites now divided the judicial functions which had so long been an apple of discord between them.

Any case might be initiated either before the king’s bar or before the competent republican tribunal, the latter of course taking precedence in any conflict; but a sentence handed down by either tribunal finally disposed of the case. Even the monarch might not overturn the verdict of a qualified juryman except (as under the law of the republic) where corruption, violence, or similar circumstances warranted canceling the juryman’s sentence. On the other hand, the principle that an injured person might appeal any magisterial decree to the magistrate’s superior probably obtained sufficient currency as to give rise to the later imperial appellate jurisdiction. Perhaps all the magistrates, at least all the provincial governors, were regarded as subordinates of the ruler, so that any of their decrees might be appealed to him.

These innovations, even the most important of which (the general right of appeal) cannot be reckoned as an absolute improvement, by no means remedied all the evils in the Roman administration of justice. Criminal procedure cannot be sound in any slave state, since the task of proceeding against slaves lies at least de facto in the hands of the master. The Roman master naturally punished his slave only if the crime rendered the slave useless or disagreeable to him: slave criminals were treated somewhat like oxen addicted to goring, and, as the latter were sold to the butcher, so were the former sold to fight in the arena. But even criminal procedure against free men, which had always been partly a political process, had amid the recent disorderly generations become transformed from a grave legal proceeding into a factional fight employing favor, money, and violence.

The blame rested jointly on all parties—magistrates, jurymen, litigants, even the public as spectators. But the most incurable wounds were inflicted by the lawyers. As the parasitic plant of courtroom eloquence flourished, all ideas of right and wrong vanished, and the distinction between opinion and evidence (so difficult for the public to understand) disappeared from Roman criminal practice. “An ordinary defendant,” says an experienced Roman advocate of this period, “may be accused of any crime whether he has committed it or not, and will certainly be condemned.” Numerous pleadings in criminal cases have come down to us from this epoch, and hardly one of them makes even a serious attempt to define the crime and present the proof or counterproof.

That the contemporary civil procedure was in many ways likewise unsound goes without saying. It too suffered from the intrusions of party politics, as for instance in the process of Publius Quinctius in 83-81 B.C., where the most contradictory decisions were given depending on whether Cinna or Sulla had the ascendency in Rome; and the advocates, frequently nonjurists, also added abundant confusion both intentionally and unintentionally. But in the nature of such cases political considerations became involved only exceptionally, and lawyers’ quibbles could not so easily erode natural ideas of right. Accordingly, the civil pleadings handed down from this period, while not meeting our stricter tests of effectiveness, are yet far less libelous and more judicious than the contemporary speeches in criminal causes.

If Caesar retained Pompey’s curb on the eloquence of advocates, or even strengthened it, nothing was lost; and much was gained when better-selected and better-superintended magistrates and jurymen were nominated and the flagrant 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, is still more difficult to replace. Though the legislator did away with various abuses, he could not heal the root of the evil; and it was doubtful whether time, which cures everything curable, would in this case bring relief.

The Roman military system of this period was in nearly the same condition as that of Carthage in Hannibal’s time. The governing classes furnished only officers, the subjects, plebeians, and the provincials the army. Financially and militarily the general was almost independent of the central government, and in fortune or misfortune was left substantially to himself and the resources of his province. Civic and even national spirit had vanished from the army, and esprit de corps alone was left as an inner bond. The army had ceased to be an instrument of the commonwealth. Politically it had no viewpoint of its own, though it was doubtless able to adopt that of the master who commanded it. Militarily, under its usual miserable leaders it degenerated into a useless rabble, but under the right general it attained a military perfection which the citizen army could never match.

The officer class especially had degenerated. The higher ranks, senators and equites, grew more and more unused to arms. Where formerly there had been a zealous competition for the posts of staff officers, now every man of equestrian rank who chose to serve was sure of a military tribuneship; several of these posts had to be filled with men of humbler origin; and any man of quality who still served sought at least to finish his term in Sicily or some other province where he was sure not to face the enemy. Officers of ordinary bravery and efficiency were stared at as prodigies, Pompey especially becoming the object of a military idolatry by his contemporaries which displayed their own unfitness. As a rule the staff gave the signal for desertion and mutiny; in spite of the culpable indulgence of the commanders, proposals for cashiering officers of rank were daily occurrences. We still possess the picture drawn (not without irony) by Caesar’s own hand of the situation at his headquarters when orders were given to march against Ariovistus: of the cursing and weeping, the preparation of wills, and even the presentation of requests for furlough.

Among the soldiers no trace of the better classes could any longer be found. The general legal obligation to bear arms still existed, but the levy, if resorted to alongside of enlisting, took place in the most irregular manner. Numerous persons liable to serve were wholly passed over, while those once inducted were retained beneath the eagles for thirty years and longer. The Roman citizen-cavalry was merely a sort of mounted noble guard, whose perfumed cavaliers and exquisite highbred horses only appeared in the festivals of the capital. The so-called citizen-infantry was a troop of mercenaries swept together from the lowest ranks of the population. The subjects furnished all the cavalry and the light troops, and came to be more and more extensively employed in the infantry as well. The post of centurion, on which the efficiency of the legions essentially depended, and which according to the military constitution was to be filled by soldiers rising from the ranks, was not merely conferred as a favor, but often sold to the highest bidder. Because of the government’s bad financial management and the venality and fraud of nearly all the magistrates, the payment of the soldiers was extremely defective and irregular.

The inevitable result was that the Roman armies frequently pillaged the provincials, mutinied against their officers, and ran away from the enemy. Instances occurred where considerable armies, such as the Macedonian army of Piso in 57 B.C., though undefeated were utterly ruined by such misconduct. Capable leaders such as Pompey, Caesar, and Gabinius doubtless formed able and effective, and to some extent exemplary, armies out of these materials. But these armies belonged far more to their general than to the commonwealth. The still more complete decay of the Roman navy—which had remained an object of antipathy to the Romans and had never been fully nationalized—scarcely needs mention. Here, too, everything that could be injured had been reduced to ruin under the oligarchic government.

Caesar’s reorganization of the Roman military system was substantially limited to tightening and strengthening the reins of discipline, which had been relaxed under the previous negligent and incapable supervision. The system as a whole seemed to him neither to need nor to be capable of radical reform; therefore he accepted the elements of the army just as Hannibal had accepted them. His ordinance setting three years’ mounted service (i.e., as an officer), or six years of service on foot, as a prerequisite for holding a municipal magistracy or sitting in the municipal council before the thirtieth year, proves indeed that he wished to attract the better classes to the army. But it also proves with equal clarity that amid the steady decline of martial spirit he felt it no longer possible to associate unconditionally the holding of an honorary office with the completion of military service. This also explains why Caesar did not try to re-establish the Roman citizen-cavalry. The levy was better arranged, the time of service regulated and shortened, but otherwise the infantry of the line continued to come chiefly from the lower orders of the Roman citizens, the cavalry and the light infantry from the subjects. It is surprising that nothing was done to reorganize the fleet.

The untrustworthy character of the cavalry compelled Caesar to adopt the innovation—which doubtless seemed hazardous to him—of enlisting hired foreigners, especially Germans. Another innovation was the appointment of adjutants of the legion (legati legionis). Hitherto the legions had been led by military tribunes, nominated partly by the citizens and partly by the governor concerned. Six tribunes were placed over each legion, the command alternating among these; and only as a temporary and extraordinary measure was a single commandant appointed by the general. In later times these adjutants of legions, or colonels, appear as a permanent institution, nominated no longer by the governor whom they obey but by the supreme command in Rome; and both changes seem to stem from Caesar’s arrangements in connection with the Gabinian law. This important new step was inserted in the military hierarchy partly because of the need for a more energetic centralization of the command, and partly because of the lack of capable superior officers, but chiefly in order to provide a counterpoise to the governor by associating with him one or more colonels nominated by the Imperator.

The most essential change in the military system was the installation of the Imperator as a permanent military head. Superseding the previous unmilitary and incapable governing corporation, he united in his hands the whole control of the army, and thus converted a largely nominal supervision into a real and energetic supreme command. We are not properly informed as to the relation between this supreme command and the special commands hitherto omnipotent in their respective spheres. Probably the relation between the praetor and the consul, or the consul and the dictator, provided a pattern. thus, while the governor remained the supreme military authority in his province, the imperator was entitled to assume it for himself or his delegates at any moment; and while the governor’s authority was confined to the province, that of the imperator extended over the whole empire.

Furthermore, it is extremely probable that the nomination of military tribunes and centurions (so far as it had hitherto belonged to the governor) as well as the new adjutants passed directly into the hands of the Imperator. In like manner the arrangement of the levies, the granting of leaves of absence, and the more important criminal cases may also have devolved upon the commander-in-chief. With the regulated control by the Imperator, and with the governors’ powers thus limited, there was little need to fear that the armies might become disorganized or converted into the private troops of their respective officers.

But however decided were the indications of military monarchy, and however distinctly Caesar reserved the supreme command for himself, he was nevertheless quite disinclined to base his authority on the army. No doubt he deemed a standing army necessary, but only because the state’s geographical position required comprehensive regulation of the frontiers and permanent frontier garrisons. Both during the recent civil war and earlier, he had worked at the tranquilizing of Spain, and had established strong frontier defensive positions along the great African desert and on the Rhine. He also made similar plans for the regions of the Euphrates and the Danube. Above all he designed an expedition against the Parthians to avenge the defeat of Carrhae. He had scheduled three years for this war, and was resolved to settle accounts thoroughly yet cautiously with these dangerous enemies once for all. In like manner he had formed the scheme of attacking King Burebistas of the Getae (Goths), who was extending his power on both sides of the Danube, and of protecting Italy in the northeast by border districts similar to those which he had created in Gaul.

On the other hand, there is no evidence that Caesar contemplated like Alexander a career of victory extending indefinitely. It is indeed said that he had intended to march from Parthia to the Caspian to the Black Sea, and thence along its northern shores to the Danube; to annex all Scythia and Germany as far as the Northern Ocean (which according to the notions of those days was not so far from the Mediterranean); and to return home through Gaul. But no credible authority vouches for the existence of these fantastic projects. The Roman state already included a mass of barbaric elements difficult to control, and for centuries to come had more than enough to do in assimilating them. Hence such conquests, even granting their military practicability, would have been nothing but blunders far more brilliant and far worse than Alexander’s Indian expedition. Judging both from Caesar’s conduct in Britain and Germany, and from the conduct of those who became his political heirs, it is highly probable that Caesar (like Scipio Aemilianus) called on the gods not to increase the empire but to preserve it. His schemes of conquest apparently restricted themselves to a stabilization of the frontier—measured, it is true, on his own great scale—which should secure the line of the Euphrates and replace the fluctuating and militarily useless boundary of the empire on the northeast by establishing and rendering defensible the line of the Danube.

If it is merely probable that Caesar ought not to be designated a world conqueror in the same sense as Alexander and Napoleon, it is quite certain that his design was not to found his new monarchy primarily on the army. He did not seek to place the military authority above the civil, but to incorporate it into, and as far as possible subordinate it to, the civil commonwealth. The invaluable pillars of a military state, those old and farfamed Gallic legions, were honorably dissolved just because of the incompatibility of their esprit de corps with a civil commonwealth, and their glorious names were perpetuated only in newly founded urban communities. The soldiers who were allotted land by Caesar on their discharge were not, like those of Sulla, settled together in quasimilitary colonies of their own, but, especially in Italy, were isolated as much as possible and scattered throughout the peninsula. Only in the case of the Campanian land remaining for disposal was it impossible to avoid a concentration of the old soldiers of Caesar.

The difficult task of keeping the soldiers of a standing army within the civil community was attacked in various ways. The former arrangement merely prescribing certain years of service, which might be interrupted by temporary discharge, was retained, which occasioned a faster turnover in the army. Soldiers who had served out their terms were regularly settled as agricultural colonists. And perhaps most important, the army was kept away from Italy and centers of civil and political life, and directed toward what Caesar considered the soldier’s only proper place—that is, on the frontier, where he might ward off the foreign foe.

The true criterion of a military state—the development of a privileged corps of guards—is not to be found with Caesar. Although a special bodyguard for the general on active duty had long existed, under Caesar this fell completely into disuse. His praetorian cohort seems to have consisted essentially of orderlies rather than a select corps, and consequently was never an object of jealousy to the troops of the line. Even less as king than as general would Caesar tolerate a bodyguard. Although well aware of the lurking assassins who constantly beset him, he rejected the Senate’s proposal to create a select guard, soon dismissed the Spanish escort which he had used at first in the capital, and contented himself with the retinue of lictors traditional for Roman supreme magistrates.

However much of his and his party’s ideal—to found a Periclean government in Rome not on the sword but on the confidence of the nation—Caesar had been obliged to abandon in the struggle, he continued to strive against the idea of a military monarchy with an energy almost without parallel in history. This too was certainly an impracticable ideal, and the only instance in which the earnest longing of that vigorous mind was more powerful than its clear judgment. The government which Caesar had in mind was not only by necessity highly personal, and thus as likely to perish with its author as the creations of Pericles and Cromwell. Amid the deep disorganization of the nation, it was incredible that even for his lifetime the eighth king of Rome would succeed like his seven predecessors in ruling his fellow citizens merely through law and justice; and it was equally improbable that he would again successfully incorporate the standing army, which in the last civil war learned its power and unlearned its obedience, as a controllable part of civil society.

Anyone who has calmly considered the extent to which respect for law had disappeared from top to bottom of Roman society must regard the former hope as almost a dream. If with the Marian military reform the soldier had generally ceased to be a citizen, the Campanian mutiny and the battlefield of Thapsus showed with painful clarity what kind of support the army now lent to the law. Even the great democrat could scarcely hold in check the powers which he had unchained. At his signal thousands of swords still flew from the scabbard, but they were no longer equally ready at that signal to return to the sheath.

Fate is mightier than genius. Caesar sought to restore the civil commonwealth, and became the founder of the military monarchy which he abhorred. He overthrew the regime of aristocrats and bankers only to put a military regime in its place, and the commonwealth continued as before to be tyrannized and exploited by a privileged minority. And yet it is a privilege of the highest natures thus creatively to err. The brilliant failures of great men to achieve their ideals form the best treasures of nations. It was Caesar’s work that the Roman military state did not become a police state till after the lapse of several centuries; it is due to him that the Roman emperors, however little they otherwise resembled the great founder of their sovereignty, mainly employed the soldier not against the citizen but against the public foe, and esteemed both nation and army too highly to set the latter as constable over the former.

The regulation of financial matters was of slight difficulty, because of the empire’s immense magnitude and the absence of any extensive public borrowing. If the state had been in constant financial embarrassment, the fault was not chargeable to inadequate revenues, which in recent years had immensely increased. To the earlier estimated income of 200,000,000 sesterces, 85,000,000 more were added by the creation of the provinces of Bithynia-Pontus and Syria. This increase, along with the other new or augmented sources of income (especially the constantly increasing yield of the taxes on luxuries), far outweighed the loss of rent from the Campanian public lands. Besides, immense windfalls had been brought into the treasury through Lucullus, Metellus, Pompey, Cato and others.

The cause of the state’s financial embarrassments lay partly in increased ordinary and extraordinary expenditures, partly in poor management. Under the former head, the distribution of grain in the capital claimed almost exorbitant sums. Through its extension by Cato in 63 B.C. the yearly expenditure for that purpose amounted to 30,000,000 sesterces, and after 58 B.C., when the nominal price hitherto paid was abolished, it swallowed up a fifth of the state revenues. The military budget also had risen through the need for new garrisons in Cilicia, Syria, and Gaul. The extraordinary expenditures included the great cost of the navy, on which, for example, five years after the great pirate roundup of 67 B.C., 34,000,000 sesterces were expended at once. In addition, very considerable sums were consumed in wars and warlike preparations, such as 18,000,000 sesterces paid to Piso merely for outfitting his Macedonian army, 24,000,000 sesterces annually to Pompey for the maintenance and pay of the Spanish army, and similar sums to Caesar for the Gallic legions.

But considerable as were these demands, the Roman treasury would probably have been able to meet them had not its once efficient administration been affected by the universal laxness and dishonesty of the age. The treasury often had to suspend payments merely through failure to collect its outstanding claims. The two quaestors placed over it—young men annually changed—contented themselves at best with inaction; while the permanent staff, once so justly esteemed for its integrity, now perpetuated the worst abuses, more especially since such posts had come to be bought and sold.

As soon, however, as the financial threads were concentrated in the cabinet of Caesar, new life and stricter order at once pervaded all the wheels and springs of that great machine. The two innovations of Gaius Gracchus that ate like a gangrene into the Roman financial system—the leasing of the direct taxes, and the distribution of grain—were partly abolished and partly revised. Caesar, unlike his predecessor, did not seek to hold the nobility in check by the great capitalists and the populace of the capital, but to set them aside and to deliver the commonwealth from all parasites of whatever rank.

Therefore in these two important questions he followed Sulla rather than Gaius Gracchus. The leasing system was continued for indirect taxes, for which it was very old and (under the Roman financial maxim which Caesar retained inviolable, that tax collection should at any cost be kept simple and manageable) absolutely could not be dispensed with. But the direct taxes were thenceforth universally made either taxes in kind to be supplied directly to the state, as in the case of the African and Sardinian deliveries of grain and oil, or converted, like the revenues of Asia Minor, into fixed money payments whose collection was entrusted to the tax districts themselves.

The grain distribution in the capital had hitherto been regarded as a profitable prerogative of the community which ruled, and which therefore had to be fed by its subjects. Caesar set aside this infamous principle, but it could not be overlooked that only these largesses protected a multitude of destitute citizens from starvation. To this extent Caesar retained them. Under the Sempronian law as reaffirmed by Cato every citizen settled in Rome could legally claim free bread grain, and the list of recipients had risen to 320,000. This number was reduced, by excluding all individuals otherwise provided for, to 150,000, which was fixed once and for all as the maximum. At the same time the list was revised annually, so that places vacated by removal or death might be again filled by the most needy applicants.

By thus converting a political privilege into a provision for the poor, a unique moral and historical principle came into being. Civil society but slowly and gradually perceives its interdependence of interests. In earlier antiquity the state protected its members from the public enemy and the murderer, but it need not protect its helpless fellow citizens from a worse enemy, want. Greek civilization first developed, in the Solonian and post-Solonian legislation, the principle that the community was obligated to provide for its invalids and indeed for its poor generally. Caesar first transformed a restricted Greek municipal practice into an organic state institution, and converted what had been a burden and a disgrace for the commonwealth into the first of those institutions, now as countless as they are beneficial, where the depth of human compassion contends with the depth of human misery.

In addition to these fundamental reforms a thorough revision of income and expenditures took place. Not a few communities and even whole districts were exempted from taxation, either indirectly by receiving the Roman or Latin franchise, or directly by special privilege. Still more communities had their taxes lowered; and Asia, the most oppressed province of all, was not only granted direct taxation but had also a third of these remitted. New revenues, as from the communities subdued in Illyria and especially in Gaul—the latter alone paid 40,000,000 sesterces per year—were fixed throughout on a low scale.

On the other hand, various towns such as Little Leptis in Africa had their taxes raised as a penalty for their wartime conduct. The very lucrative Italian harbortolls so recently abolished were instituted all the more readily, in that this tax fell primarily on luxuries imported from the East. To these new or revived sources of ordinary income were added the extraordinary sums which accrued as a result of the civil war: the booty collected in Gaul; the stock of cash in the capital; the treasures taken from the Italian and Spanish temples; the sums raised in the shape of forced loans, compulsory presents, or fines from dependent communities and rulers; the pecuniary penalties imposed by judicial sentence, or simply by sending an order to pay, on individual wealthy Romans; and above all things the proceeds from the estates of defeated opponents.

How productive were these extraordinary sources may be seen from the fact that the African capitalists who sat in the opposition-Senate were fined 100,000,000 sesterces, while 70,000,000 more were received from the sale of Pompey’s property. This course was necessary because the power of the beaten nobility rested in great measure on their colossal wealth, and could be effectually broken only by imposing on them the costs of the war. But Caesar somewhat mitigated the odium of the confiscations by channeling their proceeds solely to the state. Unlike Sulla, who overlooked any act of fraud in his favorites, Caesar rigorously exacted the purchase price even from his most faithful adherents, such as Marcus Antonius.

Expenditures were lowered first of all by considerably restricting the distribution of grain. The supply to the poor of the capital, as well as the kindred supply of oil newly introduced by Caesar for the Roman baths, was in great part supported by contributions in kind from Sardinia and especially from Africa, and was thus kept wholly or largely separate from the state treasury. On the other hand regular military expenditures were increased partly by augmenting the standing army, and partly by raising the legionary’s pay from 480 to 900 sesterces annually.

Both these latter steps were in fact indispensable. There was a total want of any real frontier defense, whose prerequisite was a considerable increase of the army. Doubling the soldier’s pay was doubtless employed by Caesar to attach his soldiers firmly to him, but it was introduced permanently for a very different reason. The former pay of 1⅓ sesterces per day had been fixed in very ancient times, when money had an altogether different value than in Caesar’s day. In a period when day laborers in the capital earned an average of 3 sesterces, it could be retained only because the soldier entered the army chiefly for the sake of the perquisites, largely illicit, of military service. The first precondition to a serious reform in the military system, and to ending those irregular gains of the soldier which mainly burdened the provincials, was a suitable increase in pay; and fixing it at 2½ sesterces may be regarded as a necessary and beneficial step, despite the great burden thereby imposed on the treasury.

It is difficult to conceive of the extraordinary expenses which Caesar undertook voluntarily or otherwise. The wars themselves consumed enormous sums, and similar amounts were required to fulfil the promises which he had been obliged to make during the civil war. It was a bad example, and one unhappily not soon forgotten, that every common soldier received 20,000 sesterces for his participation, and every citizen in the capital 300 sesterces for his nonparticipation. But Caesar, having once pledged his word, was too much of a king to break it. Besides, he satisfied innumerable demands of honorable liberality, and put immense sums into building, which had been shamefully neglected during the last years of the republic. The cost of his buildings in the capital, executed partly during the Gallic campaigns and partly afterwards, was reckoned at 160,000,000 sesterces. The net result of Caesar’s financial administration is expressed in the fact that, while he fully met all equitable claims, nevertheless by March of 44 B.C. 700,000,000 sesterces lay in the public treasury and 100,000,000 in his own—a sum ten times that in the treasury in the republic’s palmiest days.

But difficult as it was, the task of breaking up the old parties and furnishing the new commonwealth with an appropriate constitution, an efficient army, and well-ordered finances was not the hardest part of Caesar’s work. Real regeneration of the Italian nation required a reorganization that would transform all parts of the great empire—Rome, Italy, and the provinces. Let us endeavor here also to delineate the old state of things, as well as the beginnings of a new and more tolerable time.

The good stock of the Latin nation had long since wholly disappeared from Rome. By its very nature, a capital loses its municipal and even its national stamp more quickly than any subordinate community. There the upper classes speedily withdraw from urban public life, in order to find their home in the state as a whole rather than in a single city. There are inevitably concentrated the foreign settlers, the fluctuating population of travelers for pleasure or business, the mass of the indolent, lazy, criminal, financially and morally bankrupt (and for that very reason cosmopolitan) rabble. All this applied preeminently to Rome. The rich Roman frequently regarded his town house merely as a lodging. When the urban municipal offices were converted into imperial magistracies, when the civic assembly became the governing assembly of the empire, and when smaller self-governing tribal or other associations were not tolerated within the capital, then all true community life ceased for Rome. From all the empire people flocked to Rome for speculation, for debauchery, for intrigue, for training in crime, or even to hide there from the eye of the law.

While these evils arose partly from the very nature of a capital, they were accompanied by others more accidental and perhaps still more grave. There has perhaps never existed a great city so thoroughly lacking means of support as Rome. Importation on the one hand, and home manufacture by slaves on the other, made any free industry impossible from the outset. The radical evil pervading all the societies of antiquity—slavery—showed its consequences most conspicuously in the capital. Nowhere were such masses of slaves accumulated as in the city palaces of the great families or the wealthy upstarts. Nowhere were the peoples of three continents mingled as in Rome’s slave population—Syrians, Phrygians and other half-Hellenes with Libyans and Moors, Getae and Iberians with the mounting influx of Celts and Germans. The demoralization inseparable from the absence of freedom, and the terrible inconsistency between formal and moral right, were far more glaringly apparent in the partially or wholly cultivated city slave than in the rural serf who tilled the field in chains like a fettered ox.

Still worse than the slave masses, however, were those who had been de jure or simply de facto released from slavery—a mixture of mendicant rabble and rich parvenus, no longer slaves and not yet citizens, economically and even legally dependent on their masters, but with the pretensions of free men. These freedmen were drawn above all toward the capital, where various profits could be had and where retail trade as well as the minor handicrafts were almost wholly in their hands. Their influence on elections is well known, and their leading part in the street riots is evident from the ordinary signal by which these were virtually proclaimed by the demagogues—the closing of shops and places of business.

The government not only did nothing to counteract this corruption, but even encouraged it from selfish policy. The judicious law which prohibited individuals condemned for a capital offense from dwelling in the city was winked at by the negligent police. The urgently needed supervision of popular associations was at first neglected, and afterwards was even forbidden as an unwarranted restriction of popular freedom. The public festivals had so increased that the seven ordinary ones alone—the Roman, the Plebeian, those of the Mother of the Gods, of Ceres, of Apollo, of Flora, and of victoria—lasted altogether sixty-two days; and to these were added the gladiatorial games and numerous other extraordinary amusements. The duty of providing grain at low prices—unavoidable with such a proletariat living wholly from hand to mouth—was treated with the most unscrupulous frivolity, and the fluctuations in the price of bread grain were incredible. These grain distributions formed as it were an official invitation to every citizen proletarian who was destitute of food and disinclined to work to move to the capital.

The bad seed yielded a corresponding harvest. The political system of clubs and bands, and the religious worship of Isis and similar pious extravagances, had their roots in this state of things. People constantly faced want, and not unfrequently utter famine. Nowhere was life less secure than in the capital, whose sole unique trade was murder professionally prosecuted by banditti. Luring the prospective victim to Rome was the preliminary to assassination, and no one ventured into the countryside near the capital without an armed retinue.

The city’s outward condition corresponded to this inward disorganization, and seemed a keen satire on the aristocratic government. Nothing was done to regulate the Tiber, except that the single bridge was rebuilt of stone at least as far as the Tiber-island. No more was done toward leveling the city of the Seven Hills, except perhaps where rubbish accumulation effected some improvement. The wretchedly kept streets were crooked, narrow, and steep, the footpaths small and ill-paved. The ordinary houses, poorly built of brick to a giddy height, were constructed mostly by speculative builders for the account of small proprietors, by which means the former became enormously rich while the latter were reduced to beggary. Like isolated islands amid this dreary sea rose the splendid palaces of the rich, which preempted the space for smaller houses just as their owners preempted the rights of lesser men in the state. The marble pillars and Greek statues of these palaces formed a striking contrast to the decaying temples, whose images were still in great part carved of wood.

Official supervision of streets, of river banks, of fires, or of building was almost unknown. If the government troubled itself at all about the frequent floods, conflagrations, and collapses, it was only to ask the state theologians for their advice on the true meaning of such signs and wonders. If we try to imagine a London with the slave population of New Orleans, with the police of Constantinople, with the nonindustrial character of modern Rome, and the political ferment of Paris in 1848, we can get some idea of the republican glory whose departure the sulky letters of Cicero and his associates deplore.

Caesar sought to help rather than deplore. Rome remained, of course, a cosmopolitan city. Any attempt to give it a specifically Italian character would not only have been impracticable, but also would not have suited Caesar’s plan. Just as Alexander found an appropriate capital for his Graeco-Oriental empire in the Hellenic, Jewish, Egyptian and above all cosmopolitan city of Alexandria, so the capital of the new Romano-Hellenic empire, situated between East and West, was to be not an Italian community but the denationalized capital of many nations. For this reason Caesar tolerated the worship of the newly introduced Egyptian gods alongside Father Jove, and even allowed the Jews to practice their strange foreign ritual in the capital. However offensive was the motley mixture of Rome’s parasitic population, he nowhere opposed its extension. Rather, at his popular festivals he caused dramas to be performed not only in Latin and Greek but also in other languages, presumably Phoenician, Aramaic, Syrian, and Spanish.

But if Caesar consciously accepted the existing fundamental character of the capital, he yet worked energetically to improve the lamentable and disgraceful conditions prevailing there. Unhappily, the basic evils were the most difficult to eradicate. Caesar could not abolish slavery, and it must remain an open question whether he might eventually have attempted at least to limit the number of slaves in the capital, as he undertook in another field. As little could he create a free industry in Rome. Yet his great building program partly remedied the lack of employment there, and offered the proletariat a source of small but honorable gain.

At the same time Caesar labored energetically to shrink the free proletariat. The constant influx brought to Rome by the grain distribution was materially restricted, if not wholly stopped, by converting this distribution into a provision for a fixed number of the poor. The ranks of the existing proletariat were thinned by the tribunals instructed to proceed rigorously against the rabble, and also by comprehensive transmarine colonization. Of the 80,000 colonists whom Caesar sent overseas in his few years of rule, a great majority must have come from the capital’s proletariat. Indeed, most of the Corinthian settlers were freedmen. Though freedmen were traditionally excluded from any urban honorary office, Caesar opened the senate house to them in his colonies, doubtless to encourage emigration by the better-situated freedmen.

This emigration must have been more than a mere temporary arrangement. Caesar, convinced like every sensible man that the proletariat’s misery could really be remedied only by a well-regulated system of colonization, and put in a position to realize it to an almost unlimited extent, must have intended to continue the process by keeping open a constant means of abating a constantly recurring evil. Measures were also taken to limit the market fluctuations of the most important means of subsistence in the capital. The reorganized and liberally administered state treasury furnished the means for this purpose, and two new magistrates, the grain aediles, were charged with supervising the contractors and the markets of the capital.

The club system was checked by constitutional change more effectually than was possible through prohibitive laws, since the corruption and violence of the electioneering automatically ended along with republican elections and the republic itself. Moreover, the combinations which grew up under the Clodian law were broken up, and the whole system of association was placed under supervision of the government. Except for the ancient guilds and associations, the religious unions of the Jews, and other specially exempted categories, for which a simple intimation to the Senate seems to have sufficed, permission to organize a permanent society with fixed dues and meetings was made a concession to be granted by the Senate, and, as a rule, doubtless only with the monarch’s consent.

To this was added a stricter policing and administration of justice. The laws, especially as regards violence, were strengthened, and the irrational republican law which permitted the convicted criminal to avoid a part of his penalty by self-banishment was set aside. Caesar’s detailed police regulations are in great part still preserved; they include regulations requiring house proprietors to put the streets into repair and pave the footpath in its whole breadth with hewn stones, as well as appropriate enactments regarding the movement of litters and wagons, which were allowed to move freely through the capital’s narrow streets only in the evening and at night. Supervision of the police remained as before chiefly in the hands of four aediles, each of whom now superintended a distinctly marked-off police district.

Lastly, public building in the capital received from Caesar, who combined in himself the Roman and the organizer’s love of building, a stimulus which not merely put to shame the mismanagement of recent times, but also left the best efforts of the Roman aristocracy as far behind as Caesar’s genius surpassed the honest talents of the Marcii and Aemilii. Caesar excelled his predecessors not merely by the extent of his buildings and the magnitude of his expenditures, but by a genuine statesmanly perception of the public good. Instead of building temples and other splendid structures, as did his successors, he relieved the market place of Rome, where the citizen-assemblies, the chief courts, the exchange, and the daily traffic of both business and idleness still were crowded together, by constructing a new place of assembly, the Saepta Julia in the Campus Martius, a new courthouse, and the Forum Julium, between the Capitol and the Palatine.⁴

But these achievements were but the first steps toward a complete remodeling of Rome. Projects were already formed for a new senate house, for a new magnificent bazaar, for a theater to rival that of Pompey, for a public Latin and Greek library modeled on that recently destroyed at Alexandria (the first institution of its sort in Rome), and for a temple of Mars intended to surpass all earlier rivals in riches and glory. Still more brilliant was the idea of draining the Pomptine marshes, and altering the lower course of the Tiber by leading it through a new channel to an adequate artificial harbor. By this gigantic plan the capital’s most dangerous enemy, malaria, would be banished; the extremely limited building space would be vastly enlarged; and the city would at the same time obtain a safe seaport, so long and painfully needed. It seemed as if the Imperator could remove mountains and rivers, and contend with nature herself.

However, much as Rome gained in commodiousness and magnificence by the new order of things, its political supremacy was irretrievably lost through that very change. The idea that the Roman state should coincide with the city had indeed gradually become preposterous, but the maxim was so central to the Roman republic that it could not perish before the republic itself. Only in Caesar’s new state was it completely set aside (except perhaps for some legal fictions), and the capital was placed on a level with other municipalities. Indeed, Caesar—here as always endeavoring not merely to regulate the thing, but also to call it by its right name—issued his Italian municipal ordinance both for the capital and for other urban communities. The Rome of the imperial period, just because it was incapable of a living as a community, was essentially inferior to other major municipalities. Republican Rome was a den of robbers, but it was also the state; the Rome of the monarchy, although beginning to embellish itself with all the glories of three continents and to glitter in gold and marble, was nothing more than a royal residence appended to a poorhouse—in other words, a necessary evil.

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1. The date, according to the revolutionary French calendar, on which Napoleon Bonaparte seized the state power.

2. When this was written—in the year 1857—no one could foresee how soon the mightiest struggle and the most glorious victory as yet recorded in human annals would save the United States from this fearful trial, and secure the future existence of an absolute self-governing freedom not to be permanently kept in check by any local Caesarism.—T. M. [This entire passage repudiating Caesarism was added to the second edition.]

3. The original describes here a few minor religious changes.

4. The original notes that he also supplied the public baths yearly with three million pounds of oil, so necessary to ancient concepts of hygiene.