No More Learning

But Caesar was resolved to wait for his veteran legions. As these one after another arrived and appeared on the scene of strife, Scipio and Juba lost the desire to risk a pitched battle, and Caesar had no means of compelling them to fight owing to their extraordinary superiority in light cavalry. Nearly two months passed away in marches and skirmishes in the neighbourhood of Ruspina and Thapsus,
which chiefly had relation to the finding out of the concealed store-pits (silos) common in the country, and to the exten sion of posts. Caesar, compelled by the enemy's horsemen to keep as much as possible to the heights or even to cover his flanks by entrenched lines, yet accustomed his soldiers gradually during this laborious and apparently endless warfare to the foreign mode of fighting. Friend and foe hardly recognized the rapid general in the cautious master of fence who trained his men carefully and not unfrequently in person ; and they became almost puzzled by the masterly skill which displayed itself as conspicuously in delay as in promptitude of action
Battle at p
398 BRUNDISIUM, ILERDA, book v
At last Caesar, after being joined by his last reinforce-
ments, made a lateral movement towards Thapsus.
had, as we have said, strongly garrisoned this town, and thereby committed the blunder of presenting to his opponent an object of attack easy to be seized ; to this first error he soon added the second still less excusable blunder of now for the rescue of Thapsus giving the battle, which Caesar had wished and Scipio had hitherto rightly refused, on ground which placed the decision in the hands of the infantry of the line. Immediately along the shore, opposite to Caesar's camp, the legions of Scipio and
appeared, the fore ranks ready for fighting, the hinder ranks occupied in forming an entrenched camp; at the same time the garrison of Thapsus prepared for a sally. Caesar's camp-guard sufficed to repulse the latter. His legions, accustomed to war, already forming a correct estimate of the enemy from the want of precision in their mode of array and their ill-closed ranks, compelled —while yet the entrenching was going forward on that side, and before even the general gave the signal—a trumpeter to sound for the attack, and advanced along the whole line headed by Caesar himself, who, when he saw his men advance without waiting for his orders, galloped forward to lead them against the enemy. The right wing, in advance of the other divisions, frightened the line of elephants opposed to it—this was the last great battle in which these animals were employed — by throwing bullets and arrows, so that they wheeled round on their own ranks. The covering force was cut down, the left wing of the enemy was broken, and the whole line was overthrown. The defeat was the more destructive, as the new camp of the beaten army was not yet ready, and the old one was at a considerable distance ; both were successively captured
almost without resistance. The mass of the defeated army threw away their arms and sued for quarter; but Caesar's
Juba
Scipio
chap, X PHARSALUS, AND THAPSUS
299
soldiers were no longer the same who had readily refrained from battle before Ilerda and honourably spared the defenceless at Pharsalus. The habit of civil war and the rancour left behind by the mutiny asserted their power in a terrible manner on the battle-field of Thapsus. If the hydra with which they fought always put forth new energies, if the army was hurried from Italy to Spain, from Spain to Macedonia, from Macedonia to Africa, and if the repose ever more eagerly longed for never came, the soldier sought, and not wholly without cause, the reason of this state of things in the unseasonable clemency of Caesar. He had sworn to retrieve the general's neglect, and remained deaf to the entreaties of his disarmed fellow- citizens as well as to the commands of Caesar and the superior officers. The fifty thousand corpses that covered the battle-field of Thapsus, among whom were several Caesarian officers known as secret opponents of the new monarchy, and therefore cut down on this occasion by their own men, showed how the soldier procures for himself
The victorious army on the other hand numbered no more than fifty dead (6 April 708).
There was as little a continuance of the struggle in Africa after the battle of Thapsus, as there had been a year and a half before in the east after the defeat of Pharsalus. Cato as commandant of Utica convoked the senate, set forth how the means of defence stood, and submitted it to the decision of those assembled whether they would yield or defend themselves to the last man— only adjuring them to resolve and to act not each one for himself, but all in unison. The more courageous view found several supporters ; it was proposed to manumit on
behalf of the state the slaves capable of arms, which however Cato rejected as an illegal encroachment on
repose.
and suggested in its stead a patriotic appeal to the slave-owners. But soon this of resolution
private property,
46.
Catoin t"aL
fit
Hi* death,
in an assembly consisting in great part of African merchants passed off, and they agreed to capitulate. Thereupon when Faustus Sulla, son of the regent, and Lucius Afranius arrived in Utica with a strong division of cavalry from the field of battle, Cato still made an attempt to hold the town through them ; but he indignantly rejected their demand to let them first of all put to death the untrustworthy citizens of Utica en masse, and chose to let the last strong hold of the republicans fall into the hands of the monarch without resistance rather than to profane the last moments of the republic by such a massacre. After he had—partly by his authority, partly by liberal largesses —checked so far as he could the fury of the soldiery against the unfortunate Uticans ; after he had with touching solicitude furnished to those who preferred not to trust themselves to Caesar's mercy the means for flight, and to those who wished to remain the opportunity of capitulating under the most tolerable conditions, so far as his ability reached; and after having thoroughly satisfied himself that he could render to no one any farther aid, he held himself released from his command, retired to his bedchamber, and plunged his sword into his breast
Of the other fugitive leaders only a few escaped. The cavalry that fled from Thapsus encountered the bands of Sittius, and were cut down or captured by them; their leaders Afranius and Faustus were delivered up to Caesar, and, when the latter did not order their immediate execu tion, they were slain in a tumult by his veterans. The commander-in-chief Metellus Scipio with the fleet of the defeated party fell into the power of the cruisers of Sittius and, when they were about to lay hands on him, stabbed himself King Juba, not unprepared for such an issue, had in that case resolved to die in a way which seemed to him befitting a king, and had caused an enormous funeral pile to be prepared in the market-place of his city Zama,
300
BRUNDISIUM, ILERDA, book v
The
1he re. publicans
death.
chap, x PHARSALUS, AND THAPSUS
301
which was intended to consume along with his body all his treasures and the dead bodies of the whole citizens of Zama. But the inhabitants of the town showed no desire to let themselves be employed by way of decoration for the funeral rites of the African Sardanapalus ; and they closed the gates against the king when fleeing from the battle-field he appeared, accompanied by Marcus Petreius, before their city. The king — one of those natures that become savage amidst a life of dazzling and insolent en joyment, and prepare for themselves even out of death an intoxicating feast—resorted with his companion to one of his country houses, caused a copious banquet to be served up, and at the close of the feast challenged Petreius to fight him to death in single combat. It was the con queror of Catilina that received his death at the hand of the king ; the latter thereupon caused himself to be stabbed by one of his slaves. The few men of eminence that escaped, such as Labienus and Sextus Pompeius, followed the elder brother of the latter to Spain and sought, like Sertorius formerly, a last refuge of robbers and pirates in the waters and the mountains of that still half-independent land.
Without resistance Caesar regulated the affairs of Africa. Regulation As Curio had already proposed, the kingdom of Massinissa ° Afnca. was broken up. The most eastern portion or region of
Sitifis was united with the kingdom of Bocchus king of
East Mauretania (iii. 410), and the faithful king Bogud
of Tingis was rewarded with considerable gifts. Cirta
and the surrounding district, hitherto pos sessed under the supremacy of Juba by the prince Massinissa and his son Arabion, were conferred on the condottiere Publius Sittius that he might settle his half- Roman bands there ; 1 but at the same time this district,
1 The inscriptions of the region referred to preserve numerous traces of this colonization. The name of the Sittii is there unusually frequent ; the
(Constantine)
The monarchy,
as well as by far the largest and most fertile portion of the late Numidian kingdom, were united as "New Africa" with the older province of Africa, and the defence of the country along the coast against the roving tribes of the desert, which the republic had entrusted to a client-king, was imposed by the new ruler on the empire itself.
The struggle, which Pompeius and the republicans had undertaken against the monarchy of Caesar, thus terminated, after having lasted for four years, in the complete victory of the new monarch. No doubt the monarchy was not established for the first time on the battle-fields of Pharsalus and Thapsus ; it might already be dated from the moment when Pompeius and Caesar in league had established their joint rule and overthrown the previous aristocratic constitu tion. Yet it was only those baptisms of blood of the ninth
308
BRUNDISIUM, ILERDA, book \
48. 46. August 706 and the sixth April 708 that set aside the conjoint rule so opposed to the nature of absolute dominion, and conferred fixed status and formal recognition on the new monarchy. Risings of pretenders and
The end republic.
republican conspiracies might ensue and provoke new commotions,
perhaps even new revolutions and restorations; but the continuity of the free republic that had been uninterrupted for five hundred years was broken through, and monarchy was established throughout the range of the wide Roman empire by the legitimacy of accomplished fact
The constitutional struggle was at an end ; and that it was so' was proclaimed by Marcus Cato when he fell on his sword at Utica. For many years he had been the foremost man in the struggle of the legitimate republic against its oppressors ; he had continued long after he had ceased to cherish any hope of victory. But now the struggle itself had become impossible the republic which
African township Milev bears as Roman the name colonia Sarnennt I. , viii. p. 1094) evidently from the Nucerian river-god Sarnm
Sueton. Rhet 4).
! C. I.
;
it,
chap, x PHARSALUS, AND THAPSUS
303
Marcus Brutus had founded was dead and never to be revived ; what were the republicans now to do on the earth ? The treasure was carried off, the sentinels were thereby relieved ; who could blame them if they departed ? There was more nobility, and above all more judgment, in the death of Cato than there had been in his life. Cato was anything but a great man ; but with all that short sightedness, that perversity, that dry prolixity, and those spurious phrases which have stamped him, for his own and for all time, as the ideal of unreflecting republicanism and the favourite of all who make it their hobby, he was yet the only man who honourably and courageously championed in the last struggle the great system doomed to destruction.
Just because the shrewdest lie feels itself inwardly anni hilated before the simple truth, and because all the dignity and glory of human nature ultimately depend not on shrewdness but on honesty, Cato has played a greater part in history than many men far superior to him in intellect. It only heightens the deep and tragic significance of his death that he was himself a fool ; in truth it is just because Don Quixote is a fool that he is a tragic figure. It is an affecting fact, that on that world-stage, on which so many great and wise men had moved and acted, the fool was destined to give the epilogue. He too died not in vain. It was a fearfully striking protest of the republic
against the monarchy, that the last republican went as the first
monarch came—a protest which tore asunder like gossamer all that so-called constitutional character with which Caesar invested his monarchy, and exposed in all its hypocritical falsehood the shibboleth of the reconciliation of all parties, under the aegis of which despotism grew up. The unre lenting warfare which the ghost of the legitimate republic waged for centuries, from Cassius and Brutus down to Thrasea and Tacitus, nay, even far later, against the Caesarian monarchy —a warfare of plots and of literature
.
304 BRUNDISIUM, ILERDA, PHARSALUS, THAPSUS BK. v
—was the legacy which the dying Cato bequeathed to his enemies. This republican opposition derived from Cato its whole attitude — stately, transcendental in its rhetoric, pretentiously rigid, hopeless, and faithful to death ; and accordingly it began even immediately after his death to revere as a saint the man who in his lifetime was not un- frequently its laughing-stock and its scandal. But the greatest of these marks of respect was the involuntary homage which Caesar rendered to him, when he made an exception to the contemptuous clemency with which he was wont to treat his opponents, Pompeians as well as re
in the case of Cato alone, and pursued him even beyond the grave with that energetic hatred which practical statesmen are wont to feel towards antagonists opposing them from a region of ideas which they regard as equally dangerous and impracticable.
publicans,
ch. XI THE OLD REPUBLIC AND NEW MONARCHY
305
CHAPTER XI
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND THE NEW MONARCHY
The new monarch of Rome, the first ruler over the whole Character
Julius ° Caesar'
domain of Romano -Hellenic civilization, Gaius
Caesar, was in his fifty- sixth year (born 12 July 652? ) 102. when the battle at Thapsus, the last link in a long chain
of momentous victories, placed the decision as to the future
of the world in his hands. Few men have had their J elasticity so thoroughly put to the proof as Caesar — the
sole creative genius produced by Rome, and the last produced by the ancient world, which accordingly moved
on in the path that he marked out for it until its sun went down. Sprung from one of the oldest noble families of Latium—which traced back its lineage to the heroes of
the Iliad and the kings of Rome, and in fact to the Venus- Aphrodite common to both nations—he spent the years
of his boyhood and early manhood as the genteel youth of that epoch were wont to spend them. He had tasted the sweetness as well as the bitterness of the cup of fashionable
life, had recited and declaimed, had practised literature
and made verses in his idle hours, had prosecuted love- intrigues of every sort, and got himself initiated into all the myfteries of shaving, curls, and ruffles pertaining to the toilette-wisdom of the day, as well as into the still more mysterious art of always borrowing and never paying. But
the flexible steel of that nature was proof against even
vol. T
153
&*>
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND Boor v
these dissipated and flighty courses ; Caesar retained both his bodily vigour and his elasticity of mind and of heart unimpaired. In fencing and in riding he was a match for any of his soldiers, and his swimming saved his life at Alexandria ; the incredible rapidity of his journeys, which usually for the sake of gaining time were performed by night — a thorough contrast to the procession-like slowness with which Pompeius moved from one place to another— was the astonishment of his contemporaries and not the least among the causes of his success. The mind was like the body. His remarkable power of intuition revealed itself in the precision and practicability of all his arrange ments, even where he gave orders without having seen with his own eyes. His memory was matchless, and it was easy for him to carry on several occupations simulta neously with equal self-possession. Although a gentleman, a man of genius, and a monarch, he had still a heart So long as he lived, he cherished the purest veneration for his worthy mother Aurelia (his father having died early); to his wives and above all to his daughter Julia he devoted an honourable affection, which was not without reflex
influence even on political affairs. With the ablest and most excellent men of his time, of high and of humbler rank, he maintained noble relations of mutual fidelity, with each after his kind. As he himself never abandoned any of his partisans after the pusillanimous and unfeeling manner of Pompeius, but adhered to his friends —and that not merely from calculation —through good and bad times without wavering, several of these, such as Aulus
Hirtius and Gaius Matius, gave, even after his death, noble testimonies of their attachment to him.
If in a nature so harmoniously organized any one aspect of it may be singled out as characteristic, it is this—that he stood aloof from all ideology and everything fanciful. As a matter of course, Caesar was a man of passion, for
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
307
without passion there is no genius ; but his passion was never stronger than he could control. He had had his season of youth, and song, love, and wine had taken lively possession of his spirit ; but with him they did not penetrate to the inmost core of his nature. Literature occupied him long and earnestly ; but, while Alexander could not sleep for thinking of the Homeric Achilles, Caesar in his sleepless hours mused on the inflections of the Latin nouns and verbs. He made verses, as everybody then did, but they were weak ; on the other hand he was interested in subjects of astronomy and natural science. While wine was and continued to be with Alexander the destroyer of care, the temperate Roman, after the revels of his youth were over, avoided it entirely. Around him, as around all those
whom the full lustre of woman's love has dazzled in youth, fainter gleams of it continued imperishably to linger ; even in later years he had love-adventures and successes with women, and he retained a certain foppishness in his out ward appearance, or, to speak more correctly, the pleasing consciousness of his own manly beauty. He carefully covered the baldness, which he keenly felt, with the laurel chaplet that he wore in public in his later years, and he would doubtless have surrendered some of his victories, if he could thereby have brought back his youthful locks. But, however much even when monarch he enjoyed the society of women, he only amused himself with them, and allowed them no manner of influence over him ; even his
much-censured relation to queen Cleopatra was only con trived to mask a weak point in his political position 276).
Caesar was thoroughly realist and man of sense; y and whatever he undertook and achieved was pervaded
and guided by the cool sobriety which constitutes the most marked peculiarity of his genius. To this he owed the power of living energetically in the present, undisturbed either by recollection or expectation to this he owed
by
a
;
a
(p.
Caesar ai a states-
the capacity of acting at any moment with collected vigour, and of applying his whole genius even to the smallest and most incidental enterprise ; to this he owed the many-sided power with which he grasped and mastered whatever under standing can comprehend and will can compel ; to this he owed the self-possessed ease with which he arranged his periods as well as projected his campaigns; to this he owed the "marvellous serenity" which remained steadily with him through good and evil days ; to this he owed the complete independence, which admitted of no control by favourite or by mistress, or even by friend. It resulted, moreover, from this clearness of judgment that Caesar never formed to himself illusions regarding the power of fate and the ability of man ; in his case the friendly veil was lifted up, which conceals from man the inadequacy of his working. Prudently as he laid his plans and considered all possibilities, the feeling was never absent from his breast that in all things fortune, that is to say accident, must bestow success; and with this may be connected the circumstance that he so often played a desperate game with destiny, and in particular again and again hazarded his person with daring indifference. As indeed occasion ally men of predominant sagacity betake themselves to a pure game of hazard, so there was in Caesar's rationalism a point at which it came in some measure into contact with mysticism.
Gifts such as these could not fail to produce a states man. From early youth, accordingly, Caesar was a states man in the deepest sense of the term, and his aim was the highest which man is allowed to propose to himself —the political, military, intellectual, and moral regeneration of his own deeply decayed nation, and of the still more deeply decayed Hellenic nation intimately akin to his own. The hard school of thirty years' experience changed his views as to the means by which this aim was to be reached ; his
J08
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
309
aim itself remained the same in the times of his hopeless humiliation and of his unlimited plenitude of power, in the times when as demagogue and conspirator he stole towards it by paths of darkness, and in those when, as joint pos sessor of the supreme power and then as monarch, he worked at his task in the full light of day before the eyes of the world. All the measures of a permanent kind that proceeded from him at the most various times assume their appropriate places in the great building-plan. We cannot therefore properly speak of isolated achievements of
Caesar ; he did nothing isolated. With justice men com mend Caesar the orator for his masculine eloquence, which, scorning all the arts of the advocate, like a clear flame at once enlightened and warmed. With justice men admire in Caesar the author the inimitable simplicity of the com position, the unique purity and beauty of the language. With justice the greatest masters of war of all times have praised Caesar the general, who, in a singular degree dis regarding routine and tradition, knew always how to find out the mode of warfare by which in the given case the enemy was conquered, and which was thus in the given case the right one; who with the certainty of divination found the proper means for every end ; who after defeat stood ready for battle like William of Orange, and ended the campaign invariably with victory; who managed that element of warfare, the treatment of which serves to dis tinguish military genius from the mere ordinary ability of an officer — the rapid movement of masses — with unsur passed perfection, and found the guarantee of victory not in the massiveness of his forces but in the celerity of their movements, not in long preparation but in rapid and daring action even with inadequate means. But all these were
with Caesar mere secondary matters ; he was no doubt a great orator, author, and general, but he became each of these merely because he was a consummate statesman.
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THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book V
The soldier more especially played in him altogether an accessory part, and it is one of the principal peculiarities by which he is distinguished from Alexander, Hannibal, and Napoleon, that he began his political activity not as an officer, but as a demagogue. According to his original plan he had purposed to reach his object, like Pericles and Gaius Gracchus, without force of arms, and throughout eighteen years he had as leader of the popular party moved exclusively amid political plans and intrigues — until, re luctantly convinced of the necessity for a military support, he, when already forty years of age, put himself at the head of an army. It was natural that he should even afterwards remain still more statesman than general—just like Cromwell, who also transformed himself from a leader
of opposition into a military chief and democratic king, and who in general, little as the prince of Puritans seems to resemble the dissolute Roman, is yet in his development as well as in the objects which he aimed at and the results which he achieved of all statesmen perhaps the most akin to Caesar. Even in his mode of warfare this improvised generalship may still be recognized; the enterprises of Napoleon against Egypt and against England do not more clearly exhibit the artillery-lieutenant who had risen by service to command than the similar enterprises of Caesar exhibit the demagogue metamorphosed into a general. A regularly trained officer would hardly have been prepared, through political considerations of a not altogether stringent nature, to set aside the best-founded military scruples in the way in which Caesar did on several occasions, most strikingly in the case of his landing in Epirus. Several of his acts are therefore censurable from a military point of view ; but what the general loses, the statesman gains. The task of the statesman is universal in its nature like Caesar's genius ; if he undertook things the most varied and most remote one from another, they had all without
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
311
exception a bearing on the one great object to which with infinite fidelity and consistency he devoted himself; and of the manifold aspects and directions of his great activity he never preferred one to another. Although a master of the art of war, he yet from statesmanly considerations did his utmost to avert civil strife and, when it nevertheless began, to earn laurels stained as little as possible by blood. Although the founder of a military monarchy, he yet, with an energy unexampled in history, allowed no hierarchy of marshals or government of praetorians to come into exist ence. If he had a preference for any one form of services rendered to the state, it was for the sciences and arts of peace rather than for those of war.
The most remarkable peculiarity of his action as a . statesman was its perfect harmony. In reality all the con ditions for this most difficult of all human functions were united in Caesar. A thorough realist, he never allowed the images of the past or venerable tradition to disturb him ; for him nothing was of value in politics but the living present and the law of reason, just as in his character of grammarian he set aside historical and antiquarian research and recognized nothing but on the one hand the living usus loqtundi and on the other hand the rule of symmetry. A born ruler, he governed the minds of men as the wind drives the clouds, and compelled the most heterogeneous natures to place themselves at his service—the plain citizen and the rough subaltern, the genteel matrons of Rome and the fair princesses of Egypt and Mauretania, the brilliant cavalry-officer and the calculating banker. His talent for organization was marvellous ; no statesman has ever com pelled alliances, no general has ever collected an army out of unyielding and refractory elements with such decision, and kept them together with such firmness, as Caesar dis played in constraining and upholding his coalitions and his legions ; never did regent judge his instruments and assign
V*
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
each to the place appropriate for him with so acute an eye.
He was monarch ; but he never played the king. Even when absolute lord of Rome, he retained the deportment of the party-leader ; perfectly pliant and smooth, easy and charming in conversation, complaisant towards every one, it seemed as if he wished to be nothing but the first among his peers. Caesar entirely avoided the blunder into which so many men otherwise on an equality with him have fallen, of carrying into politics the military tone of command ; however much occasion his disagreeable rela tions with the senate gave for he never resorted to out rages such as was that of the eighteenth Brumaire. Caesar was monarch but he was never seized with the giddiness of the tyrant. He perhaps the only one among the mighty ones of the earth, who in great matters and little never acted according to inclination or caprice, but always without exception according to his duty as ruler, and who, when he looked back on his life, found doubtless erroneous calculations to deplore, but no false step of passion to regret. There nothing in the history of Caesar's life, which even on small scale1 can be compared with those poetico-sensual ebullitions —such as the murder of Kleitos or the burning of Persepolis —which the history of his great predecessor in the east records. He fine, perhaps the only one of those mighty ones, who has pre
served to the end of his career the statesman's tact of discriminating between the possible and the impossible, and has not broken down in the task which for greatly gifted natures the most difficult of all — the task of recognizing, when on the pinnacle of success, its natural
The affair with Laberius, told in the well-known prologue, has been quoted as an instance of Caesar's tyrannical caprices, but those who have done so have thoroughly misunderstood the irony of the situation as well as of the poet to say nothing of the naivtU of lamenting as a martyr the poet who readily pockets his honorarium.
;
1
is a
is
is, in
is
;
it,
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
313
limits. What was possible he performed, and never left the possible good undone for the sake of the impossible better, never disdained at least to mitigate by palliatives evils that were incurable. But where he recognized that fate had spoken, he always obeyed. Alexander on the Hypanis, Napoleon at Moscow, turned back because they were compelled to do so, and were indignant at destiny for bestowing even on its favourites merely limited successes ; Caesar turned back voluntarily on the Thames and on the Rhine; and thought of carrying into effect even at the Danube and the Euphrates not unbounded plans of world- conquest, but merely well-considered frontier-regulations.
Such was this unique man, whom it seems so easy and yet is so infinitely difficult to describe. His whole nature is transparent clearness ; and tradition preserves more copious and more vivid information about him than about any of his peers in the ancient world. Of such a personage our conceptions may well vary in point of shallowness or depth, but they cannot be, strictly speaking, different; to every not utterly perverted inquirer the grand figure has exhibited the same essential features, and yet no one has succeeded in reproducing it to the life. The secret lies in its perfection. In his character as a man as well as in his place in history, Caesar occupies a position where the great contrasts of existence meet and balance each other. Of mighty creative power and yet at the same time of the most penetrating judgment; no longer a youth and not yet an old man ; of the highest energy of will and the highest capacity of execution ; filled with republican ideals andatthesame timeborntobeaking; aRomaninthe deepest essence of his nature, and yet called to reconcile and combine in himself as well as in the outer world the Roman and the Hellenic types of culture —Caesar was the entire and perfect man. Accordingly we miss in him more than in any other historical personage what are called
3H
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
characteristic features, which are in reality nothing else than deviations from the natural course of human develop ment. What in Caesar passes for such at the first super ficial glance when more closely observed, seen to be the peculiarity not of the individual, but of the epoch of culture or of the nation; his youthful adventures, for instance, were common to him with all his more gifted contemporaries of like position, his unpoetical but strongly logical temperament was the temperament of Romans
It formed part also of Caesar's full humanity that he was in the highest degree influenced by the conditions
general.
of time and place for there
living man cannot but occupy
and definite line of culture.
just because he more than any other placed himself amidst the currents of his time, and because he more than any other possessed the essential peculiarity of the Roman nation — practical aptitude as citizen — in perfection for his Hellenism fact was only the Hellenism which had been long intimately blended with the Italian nationality. But in this very circumstance lies the difficulty, we may perhaps say the impossibility, of depicting Caesar to the life. As the artist can paint everything save only consummate beauty, so the historian, when once in thousand years he encounters the perfect, can only be silent regarding For normality admits doubtless of being expressed, but gives us only the negative notion of the absence of defect the secret of nature, whereby in her most finished manifesta tions normality and individuality are combined,
no abstract humanity —the place in given nationality Caesar was perfect man
beyond expression. Nothing left for us but to deem those fortunate who beheld this perfection, and to gain some
faint conception of from the reflected lustre which rests imperishably on the works that were the creation of this great nature. These also, true, bear the stamp of the time. The Roman hero himself stood by the side of his
it is
a is
it
is
;
a
a a
is :
; itit.
in
in
a
in a
is,
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
315
youthful Greek predecessor not merely as an equal, but as a superior ; but the world had meanwhile become old and its youthful lustre had faded. The action of Caesar was no longer, like that of Alexander, a joyous marching onward towards a goal indefinitely remote ; he built on, and out of, ruins, and was content to establish himself as tolerably and as securely as possible within the ample but yet definite bounds once assigned to him. With reason therefore the delicate poetic tact of the nations has not troubled itself about the unpoetical Roman, and on the other hand has invested the son of Philip with all the golden lustre of poetry, with all the rainbow hues of legend. But with equal reason the political life of the nations has during thousands of years again and again reverted to the lines which Caesar drew; and the fact, that the peoples to whom the world belongs still at the present day designate the highest of their monarchs by his name, conveys a warning deeply significant and, unhappily, fraught with shame.
If the old, in every respect vicious, state of things was Setting to be successfully got rid of and the commonwealth was to ^de^ be renovated, it was necessary first of all that the country parties, should be practically tranquillized and that the ground
should be cleared from the rubbish with which since the
recent catastrophe it was everywhere strewed. In this
work Caesar set out from the principle of the recon ciliation of the hitherto subsisting parties or, to put it
more correctly —for, where the antagonistic principles are irreconcilable, we cannot speak of real reconciliation —from
the principle that the arena, on which the nobility and
the populace had hitherto contended with each other, was
to be abandoned by both parties, and that both were to
meet together on the ground of the new monarchical constitution. First of all therefore all the older quarrels
of the republican past were regarded as done away for
316
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book V
ever and irrevocably. While Caesar gave orders that the statues of Sulla which had been thrown down by the mob of the capital on the news of the battle of Pharsalus should be re-erected, and thus recognized the fact that it became history alone to sit in judgment on that great man, he at the same time cancelled the last remaining effects of Sulla's exceptional laws, recalled from exile those who had been banished in the times of the Cinnan and Sertorian troubles, and restored to the children of those outlawed by Sulla their forfeited privilege of eligibility to office. In like manner all those were restored, who in the preliminary stage of the recent catastrophe had lost their seat in the senate or their civil existence through sentence of the censors or political process, especially through the im peachments raised on the basis of the exceptional laws
62. of 702. Those alone who had put to death the proscribed for money remained, as was reasonable, still under attainder; and Milo, the most daring condottiere of the senatorial party, was excluded from the general pardon.
Discontent of the democrats.
Far more difficult than the settlement of these questions which already belonged substantially to the past was the treatment of the parties confronting each other at the moment — on the one hand Caesar's own democratic adherents, on the other hand the overthrown aristocracy. That the former should be, if possible, still less satisfied than the latter with Caesar's conduct after the victory and with his summons to abandon the old standing -ground of party, was to be expected. Caesar himself desired doubtless on the whole the same issue which Gaius Gracchus had contemplated ; but the designs of the Caesarians were no longer those of the Gracchans. The Roman popular party had been driven onward in gradual progression from reform to revolution, from revolution to anarchy, from anarchy to a war against property ; they celebrated among themselves the memory of the reign of terror and now adorned the
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
317
tomb of Catilina, as formerly that of the Gracchi, with flowers and garlands; they had placed themselves under Caesar's banner, because they expected him to do for them what Catilina had not been able to accomplish. But as it speedily became plain that Caesar was very far from intending to be the testamentary executor of Catilina, and that the utmost which debtors might expect from him was some alleviations of payment and modifica tions of procedure, indignation found loud vent in the inquiry, For whom then had the popular party conquered,
if not for the people ? and the rabble of this description, high and low, out of pure chagrin at the miscarriage of their politico-economic Saturnalia began first to coquet with the Pompeians, and then even during Caesar's absence of nearly two years from Italy (Jan. 706 — autumn 707) to instigate there a second civil war within the first.
The praetor Marcus Caelius Rufus, a good aristocrat and bad payer of debts, of some talent and much culture, as a vehement and fluent orator hitherto in the senate and in the Forum one of the most zealous champions for Caesar, proposed to the people — without being instructed from any higher quarter to do so — a law which granted to debtors a respite of six years free of interest, and then, when he was opposed in this step, proposed a second law which even cancelled all claims arising out of loans and current house rents; whereupon the Caesarian senate deposed him from his office. It was just on the eve of the battle of Pharsalus, and the balance in the great contest seemed to incline to the side of the Pompeians ; Rufus entered into communication with the old senatorian
band-leader Milo, and the two contrived a counter-revolu tion, which inscribed on its banner partly the republican constitution, partly the cancelling of creditors' claims and the manumission of slaves. Milo left his place of exile Massilia, and called the Pompeians and the slave-herdsmen
48-47.
Caelius ^^
47. Dolabella.
Nevertheless there was found in the following year (707) a second fool, the tribune of the people, Publius Dolabella, who, equally insolvent but far from being equally gifted with his predecessor, introduced afresh his law as to creditors' claims and house rents, and with his colleague Lucius Trebellius began on that point once more — it was the last time — the demagogic war ; there were serious frays between the armed bands on both sides and various street - riots, till the commandant of Italy Marcus Antonius ordered the military to interfere, and soon afterwards Caesar's return from the east completely put an end to the preposterous proceedings. Caesar attributed to these brainless attempts to revive the projects of Catilina so little importance, that he tolerated Dolabella in Italy and indeed after some time even received him again into favour. Against a rabble of this sort, which had nothing to do with any political question at all, but solely with a war against property — as against gangs of banditti —the mere existence of a strong government is sufficient; and Caesar was too great and too considerate to busy himself with the apprehensions which the Italian alarmists felt regarding these communists of that
and thereby unduly to procure a false popularity for his monarchy.
While Caesar thus might leave, and actually left, the late democratic party to the process of decomposition which had already in its case advanced almost to the utmost limit, he had on the other hand, with reference to the former aristo
3i8
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND BOOK V
to arms in the region of Thurii ; Rufus made arrangements to seize the town of Capua by armed slaves. But the latter plan was detected before its execution and frustrated by the Capuan militia; Quintus Pedius, who advanced with a legion into the territory of Thurii, scattered the band making havoc there ; and the fall of the two leaders put
48. an end to the scandal (706).
Measures against Pompeians and re publicans.
day,
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
319
cratic party possessing a far greater vitality, not to bring about its dissolution —which time alone could accomplish —but to pave the way for and initiate it by a proper combination of repression and conciliation. Among minor measures, Caesar, even from a natural sense of propriety, avoided exasperating the fallen party by empty sarcasm ;
he did not triumph over his conquered fellow-burgesses ; l
he mentioned Pompeius often and always with respect, and caused his statue overthrown by the people to be re-erected at the senate-house, when the latter was restored,
in its earlier distinguished place. To political prosecutions after the victory Caesar assigned the narrowest possible limits. No investigation was instituted into the various communications which the constitutional party had held even with nominal Caesarians ; Caesar threw the piles
of papers found in the enemy's headquarters at Pharsalus and Thapsus into the fire unread, and spared himself and the country from political processes against individuals suspected of high treason. Further, all the common soldiers who had followed their Roman or provincial officers into the contest against Caesar came off with impunity. The sole exception made was in the case of those Roman burgesses, who had taken service in the army of the Numidian king Juba; their property was confiscated by way of penalty for their treason. Even
to the officers of the conquered party Caesar had granted unlimited pardon up to the close of the Spanish campaign
of "05 ; but he became convinced that in this he had 49. gone too far, and that the removal at least of the leaders among them was inevitable. The rule by which he was thenceforth guided was, that every one who after the
capitulation
of Ilerda had served as an officer in the
1 The triumph after the battle of Munda subsequently to be mentioned probably had reference only to the Lusitanians who served in great cumbers in the conquered army.
3*i
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
enemy's army or had sat in the opposition-senate, if he survived the close of the struggle, forfeited his property and his political rights, and was banished from Italy for life ; if he did not survive the close of the struggle, his property at least fell to the state; but any one of these, who had formerly accepted pardon from Caesar and was once more found in the ranks of the enemy, thereby forfeited his life. These rules were however materially modified in the execution. The sentence of death was actually executed only against a very few of the numerous backsliders. In the confiscation of the property of the fallen not only were the debts attaching to the several portions of the estate as well as the claims of the widows for their dowries paid off, as was reasonable, but a portion of the paternal estate was left also to the children of the deceased. Lastly not a few of those, who in consequence
of those rules were liable to banishment and confiscation of property, were at once pardoned entirely or got off with
fines, like the African capitalists who were impressed as members of the senate of Utica. And even the others almost without exception got their freedom and property restored to them, if they could only prevail on themselves to petition Caesar to that effect ; on several who declined to do so, such as the consular Marcus Marcellus, pardon
44. was even conferred unasked, and ultimately in 710 a general amnesty was issued for all who were still unre- called.
Amnesty.
The republican opposition submitted to be pardoned ; but it was not reconciled. Discontent with the new order of things and exasperation against the unwonted ruler were general. For open political resistance there was indeed no farther opportunity —it was hardly worth taking into account, that some oppositional tribunes on occasion of the question of title acquired for themselves the republican crown of martyrdom by a demonstrative intervention against
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
3a1
those who had called Caesar king — but republicanism found expression all the more decidedly as an opposition of sentiment, and in secret agitation and plotting. Not a hand stirred when the Imperator appeared in public. There was abundance of wall-placards and sarcastic verses full of bitter and telling popular satire against the new monarchy. When a comedian ventured on a republican allusion, he was saluted with the loudest applause. The praise of Cato formed the fashionable theme of oppositional pamphleteers, and their writings found a public all the more grateful because even literature was no longer free. Caesar indeed combated the republicans even now on their own field ; he himself and his abler confidants
to the Cato -literature with Anticatones, and the republican and Caesarian scribes fought round the dead hero of Utica like the Trojans and Hellenes round the dead body of Patroclus ; but as a matter of course in this conflict —where the public thoroughly republican in its feelings was judge —the Caesarians had the worst of it No course remained but to overawe the authors; on which account men well known and dangerous in a literary point of view, such as Publius Nigidius Figulus and Aulus Caecina, had more difficulty in obtaining permission to return to Italy than other exiles, while the oppositional writers tolerated in Italy were subjected to
a practical censorship, the restraints of which were all the more annoying that the measure of punishment to be dreaded was utterly arbitrary. 1 The underground machinations of the overthrown parties against the new monarchy will be more fitly set forth in another connec tion. Here it is sufficient to say that risings of pre tenders as well as of republicans were incessantly brewing
1 Any one who desires to compare the old and new hardships of authors will find opportunity of doing so in the letter of Caecina (Cicero, Att. fam. ri. 7).
replied
VOL. V
X54
Beanngof
towards the parties.
3a3 THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
throughout the Roman empire ; that the flames of civil war kindled now by the Pompeians, now by the republicans, again burst forth brightly at various places ; and that in the capital there was perpetual conspiracy against the life of the monarch. But Caesar could not be induced by these plots even to surround himself permanently with a body-guard, and usually contented himself with making known the detected conspiracies by public placards.
However much Caesar was wont to treat all things relating to his personal safety with daring indifference, he could not possibly conceal from himself the very serious danger with which this mass of malcontents threatened not merely himself but also his creations. If nevertheless, disregarding all the warning and urgency of his friends, he without deluding himself as to the implacability of the very opponents to whom he showed mercy, persevered with marvellous composure and energy in the course of pardon ing by far the greater number of them, he did so neither from the chivalrous magnanimity of a proud, nor from the sentimental clemency of an effeminate, nature, but from the
correct statesmanly consideration that vanquished
are disposed of more rapidly and with less public injury by their absorption within the state than by any attempt to extirpate them by proscription or to eject them from the commonwealth by banishment Caesar could not for his high objects dispense with the constitutional party itself, which in fact embraced not the aristocracy merely but all the elements of a free and national spirit among the Italian burgesses; for his schemes, which contemplated the re novation of the antiquated state, he needed the whole mass of talent, culture, hereditary and self-acquired distinction, which this party embraced; and in this sense he may well have named the pardoning of his opponents the finest reward of victory. Accordingly the most prominent chiefs of the defeated parties were indeed removed, but full pardon
parties
chaf. XI THE NEW MONARCHY
323
was not withheld from the men of the second and third rank and especially of the younger generation ; they were not, however, allowed to sulk in passive opposition, but were by more or less gentle pressure induced to take an active part in the new administration, and to accept honours and offices from it As with Henry the Fourth and William of Orange, so with Caesar his greatest difficulties
began only after the victory. Every revolutionary conqueror learns by experience that, if after vanquishing his opponents
he would not remain like Cinna and Sulla a mere party- chief, but would like Caesar, Henry the Fourth, and William of Orange substitute the welfare of the commonwealth for the necessarily one-sided programme of his own party, for the moment all parties, his own as well as the vanquished, unite against the new chief; and the more so, the more great and pure his idea of his new vocation. The friends of the constitution and the Pompeians, though doing homage with the lips to Caesar, bore yet in heart a grudge either at monarchy or at least at the dynasty ; the degen erate democracy was in open rebellion against Caesar from the moment of its perceiving that Caesar's objects were by
no means its own ; even the personal adherents of Caesar murmured, when they found that their chief was establishing instead of a state of condottieri a monarchy equal and just towards all, and that the portions of gain accruing to them were to be diminished by the accession of the vanquished. This settlement of the commonwealth was acceptable to no party, and had to be imposed on his associates no less than on his opponents. Caesar's own position was now in a certain sense more imperilled than before the victory ; but what he lost, the state gained. By annihilating the parties and not simply sparing the partisans but allowing every man
of talent or even mereiy of good descent to attain to office irrespective of his political past, he gained for his great building all the working power extant in the state ; and not
Caesar's work.
only so, but the voluntary or compulsory participation of men of all parties in the same work led the nation also over imperceptibly to the newly prepared ground. The fact that this reconciliation of the parties was for the moment only external and that they were for the present much less agreed in adherence to the new state of things
than in hatred against Caesar, did not mislead him; he knew well that antagonisms lose their keenness when brought into such outward union, and that only in this way can the statesman anticipate the work of time, which alone is able finally to heal such a strife by laying the old genera tion in the grave. Still less did he inquire who hated him or meditated his assassination. Like every genuine states man he served not the people for reward—not even for the reward of their love—but sacrificed the favour of his con temporaries for the blessing of posterity, and above all for the permission to save and renew his nation.
In attempting to give a detailed account of the mode in which the transition was effected from the old to the new state of things, we must first of all recollect that Caesar came not to begin, but to complete. The plan of a new polity suited to the times, long ago projected by Gaius Gracchus, had been maintained by his adherents and suc cessors with more or less of spirit and success, but without wavering. Caesar, from the outset and as it were by hereditary right the head of the popular party, had for thirty years borne aloft its banner without ever changing
or even so much as concealing his colours ; he remained democrat even when monarch. As he accepted without limitation, apart of course from the preposterous projects of Catilina and Clodius, the heritage of his party ; as he dis played the bitterest, even personal, hatred to the aristocracy and the genuine aristocrats ; and as he retained unchanged the essential ideas of Roman democracy, viz. alleviation of the burdens of debtors, transmarine colonization, gradual
324
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
325
equalization of the differences of rights among the classes belonging to the state, emancipation of the executive power from the senate : his monarchy was so little at variance with democracy, that democracy on the contrary only attained its completion and fulfilment by means of that monarchy. For this monarchy was not the Oriental despotism of divine right, but a monarchy such as Gaius Gracchus wished to found, such as Pericles and Cromwell founded —the representation of the nation by the man in whom it puts supreme and unlimited confidence. The ideas, which lay at the foundation of Caesar's work, were so far not strictly new ; but to him belongs their realization, which after all is everywhere the main matter ; and to him pertains the grandeur of execution, which would probably have surprised the brilliant projector himself if he could have seen and which has impressed, and will always impress, every one to whom has been presented in the living reality or in the mirror of history—to whatever his torical epoch or whatever shade of politics he may belong
—according to the measure of his ability to comprehend human and historical greatness, with deep and ever-deepen ing emotion and admiration.
At this point however proper expressly once for all to claim what the historian everywhere tacitly presumes, and to protest against the custom—common to simplicity and perfidy —of using historical praise and historical censure, dissociated from the given circumstances, as phrases of general application, and in the present case of construing the judgment as to Caesar into judgment as to what called Caesarism. It true that the history of past cen turies ought to be the instructress of the present; but not in the vulgar sense, as one could simply by turning over the leaves discover the conjunctures of the present in the records of the past, and collect from these the symptoms for political diagnosis and the specifics for prescription
a
a
if is
a
it is
it
; is
.
it,
&6
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
it is instructive only so far as the observation of older forms of culture reveals the organic conditions of civilization generally— the fundamental forces everywhere alike, and the manner of their combination everywhere different —and leads and encourages men, not to unreflecting imitation, but to independent reproduction. In this sense the history of Caesar and of Roman Imperialism, with all the unsur passed greatness of the master- worker, with all the historical necessity of the work, is in truth a sharper censure of
modern autocracy than could be written by the hand of man. According to the same law of nature in virtue of which the smallest organism infinitely surpasses the most artistic machine, every constitution however defective which gives play to the free self-determination of a majority of citizens infinitely surpasses the most brilliant and humane absolutism ; for the former is capable of development and therefore living, the latter is what it is and therefore dead. This law of nature has verified itself in the Roman absolute military monarchy and verified itself all the more com pletely, that, under the impulse of its creator's genius and in the absence of all material complications from without, that monarchy developed itself more purely and freely than any similar state. From Caesar's time, as the sequel will show and Gibbon has shown long ago, the Roman system
had only an external coherence and received only a mechanical extension, while internally it became even with him utterly withered and dead. If in the early stages of the autocracy and above all in Caesar's own soul (iv. 504) the hopeful dream of a combination of free popular development and absolute rule was still cherished, the government of the highly-gifted emperors of the Julian house soon taught men in a terrible form how far it was possible to hold fire and water in the same vessel. Caesar's work was necessary and
salutary, not because it was or could be fraught with bless ing in itself, but because —with the national organization of
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
327
antiquity, which was based on slavery and was utterly a stranger to republican-constitutional representation, and in presence of the legitimate urban constitution which in the course of five hundred years had ripened into oligarchic absolutism —absolute military monarchy was the copestone logically necessary and the least of evils. When once the slave-holding aristocracy in Virginia and the Carolinas shall have carried matters as far as their congeners in the Sullan Rome, Caesarism will there too be legitimized at the bar of the spirit of history ; 1 where it appears under other con ditions of development, it is at once a caricature and a usurpation. But history will not submit to curtail the true Caesar of his due honour, because her verdict may in the presence of bad Caesars lead simplicity astray and may give to roguery occasion for lying and fraud. She too is a Bible, and if she cannot any more than the Bible hinder the fool from misunderstanding and the devil from quoting her, she too will be able to bear with, and to requite, them both.
The position of the new supreme head of the state Dictator-
p-
appears formally, at least in the first instance, as a dictator- ship. Caesar took it up at first after his return from Spain
in 705, but laid it down again after a few days, and waged 49. the decisive campaign of 706 simply as consul — this was 48. the office his tenure of which was the primary occasion
for the outbreak of the civil war (p. 176), But in the autumn of this year after the battle of Pharsalus he reverted
to the dictatorship and had it repeatedly entrusted to him,
at first for an undefined period, but from the 1st January 709 as an annual office, and then in January or February 46. 710* for the duration of his life, so that he in the end 44.
1 When this was written —in the year 1857 —no one could foresee how aoon the mightiest struggle and 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.
' On the 26th January 710 Caesar is still called dictator IIII. (triumphal 44.
-
3*8
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND BOOK v
expressly dropped the earlier reservation as to his laying down the office and gave formal expression to its tenure for life in the new title of dictator perpetuus. This dictatorship, both in its first ephemeral and in its second enduring tenure, was not that of the old constitution, but — what was coincident with this merely in the name — the supreme exceptional office as arranged by Sulla (iv. i00) ; an office, the functions of which were fixed, not by the constitutional ordinances regarding the supreme single magistracy, but by special decree of the people, to such an effect that the holder re ceived, in the commission to project laws and to regulate the commonwealth, an official prerogative de jure un limited which superseded the republican partition of powers. Those were merely applications of this general prerogative to the particular case, when the holder of power was further entrusted by separate acts with the right of deciding on war and peace without consulting the senate and the people, with the independent disposal of armies and finances, and with the nomination of the provincial governors. Caesar could accordingly de jure assign to himself even such prerogatives as lay outside of the proper functions of the magistracy and even outside of the province of state-powers at all ; 1 and it appears almost as a concession on his part, that he abstained from nominating the magistrates instead of the Comitia and limited himself to claiming a binding right of proposal for a proportion of the praetors and of the lower magistrates ; and that he moreover had himself empowered by special decree of the people for the creation of patricians, which was not at all allowable according to use and wont.
table) ; on the 18th February of this year he was already dittator perpetuus (Cicero, Philip, 34, 87). Comp. Staatmcht, u\» 716.
The formulation of that dictatorship appears to have expressly brought into prominence among other things the " improvement of morals " but Caesar did not hold on his own part an office of this sort (Staatsrtcht,
ii. » 705).
;
1
ii.
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY 3*9
For other magistracies in the proper sense there remained Other
alongside of this dictatorship no room ; Caesar did not t^,^
take up the censorship as such,1 but he doubtless exercised *""* »«** —. , , buttons,
censorial rights particularly the important right of nomi nating senators —after a comprehensive fashion.
He held the consulship frequently alongside of the dictatorship, once even without colleague; but he by no means attached it permanently to his person, and he gave no effect to the calls addressed to him to undertake it for five or even for ten years in succession.
Caesar had no need to have the superintendence of worship now committed to him, since he was already pontifex maximus (iv. 460). As a matter of course the membership of the college of augurs was conferred on him, and generally an abundance of old and new honorary rights, such as the title of a " father of the fatherland," the designation of the month of his birth by the name which it
still bears of Julius, and other manifestations of the incipient courtly tone which ultimately ran into utter deification. Two only of the arrangements deserve to be singled out : namely that Caesar was placed on the same footing with the tribunes of the people as regards their special personal inviolability, and that the appellation of Imperator was permanently attached to his person and borne by him as a title alongside of his other official designations.
Men of judgment will not require any proof, either that Caesar intended to engraft on the commonwealth his supreme power, and this not merely for a few years or even as a personal office for an indefinite period somewhat like Sulla's regency, but as an essential and permanent organ ; or that he selected for the new institution an appropriate and simple designation ; for, if it is a political blunder to create
1 Caesar bears the designation of imperator always without any number indicative of iteration, and always in the first place after his name (StaatsruU, ii* 767, note 1).
S
33°
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
Caesar Imperator.
names without substantial meaning, it is scarcely a less error to set up the substance of plenary power without a name. Only it is not easy to determine what definitive formal shape Caesar had in view; partly because in this period of transition the ephemeral and the permanent buildings are not clearly discriminated from each other, partly because the devotion of his clients which already anticipated the nod of their master loaded him with a multitude —offensive doubtless to himself—of decrees of confidence and laws conferring honours. Least of all could the new monarchy attach itself to the consulship, just on account of the collegiate character that could not well be separated from this office ; Caesar also evidently laboured to degrade this hitherto supreme magistracy into an empty title, and subsequently, when he undertook he did not hold through the whole year, but before the year expired gave away to personages of secondary rank. The dictatorship came practically into prominence most frequently and most definitely, but probably only because Caesar wished to use in the significance which had of old in the constitutional machinery —as an extraordinary presidency for surmounting extraordinary crises. On the other hand
was far from recommending itself as an expression for the new monarchy, for the magistracy was inherently clothed with an exceptional and unpopular character, and could hardly be expected of the representative of the democracy that he should choose for its permanent organiza tion that form, which the most gifted champion of the opposing party had created for his own ends.
The new name of Imperator, on the other hand, appears in everv respect by far more appropriate for the formal
expression
of the monarchy just because in this
application new, and no definite outward occasion for its
During the republican period the name Imperator, which denotes the
victorious general, was laid aside with the end of the campaign as permanent title first appears in the case of Caesar.
1 it
it it it
1
is ;
a
it
;
it
it,
it
it
ckaf. XI THE NEW MONARCHY
331
introduction is apparent The new wine might not be put into old bottles ; here is a new name for the new thing, and that name most pregnantly sums up what the demo cratic party had already expressed in the Gabinian law, only with less precision, as the function of its chief—the concentration and perpetuation of official power (frnperiuni) in the hands of a popular chief independent of the senate. We find on Caesar's coins, especially those of the last period, alongside of the dictatorship the title of Imperator prevailing, and in Caesar's law as to political crimes the monarch seems to have been designated by this name. Accordingly the following times, though not immediately, connected the monarchy with the name of Imperator. To lend to this new office at once a democratic and religious sanction, Caesar probably intended to associate with it once for all on the one hand the tribunician power, on the other the supreme pontificate.
That the new organization was not meant to be restricted merely to the lifetime of its founder, is beyond doubt ; but he did not succeed in settling the especially difficult question of the succession, and it must remain an undecided point whether he had it in view to institute some sort of form for the election of a successor, such as had subsisted in the case of the original kingly office, or whether he wished to introduce for the supreme office not merely the tenure for life but also the hereditary^ character, as his adopted son subsequently maintained. 1 It is not improbable that he had the intention of combining in seme measure the
two systems, and of arranging the succession, similarly to the
1 That in Caesar's lifetime the imperium as well as the supreme pontificate was rendered by a formal legislative act hereditary for his agnate descendants — of his own body or through the medium of adoption —was asserted by Caesar the Younger as his legal title to rule. As our traditional accounts stand, the existence of such a law or resolution of the senate must be decidedly called in question ; but doubtless it remains possible that Caesar intended the issue of such* decree. (Com p. Staatsrakt, ii. * 787, 1106. )
333
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book V
course followed by Cromwell and by Napoleon, in such a way that the ruler should be succeeded in rule by his son, but, if he had no son, or the son should not seem fitted for the succession, the ruler should of his free choice nominate his successor in the form of adoption.
In point of state law the new office of Imperator was based on the position which the consuls or proconsuls occupied outside of the pomerium, so that primarily the military command, but, along with this, the supreme judi cial and consequently also the administrative power, were included in it1 But the authority of the Imperator was qualitatively superior to the consular-proconsular, in so far as the former was not limited as respected time or space, but was held for life and operative also in the capital ; * as the
1 The widely-spread opinion, which sees in the imperial office of Imperator nothing but the dignity of general of the empire tenable for life, is not warranted either by the signification of the word or by the view taken by the old authorities. Impcrium is the power of command, imperator is the possessor of that power ; in these words as in the corre sponding Greek terms rpdros, airroKpdrwp so little is there implied a specific military reference, that it is on the contrary the very characteristic of the Roman official power, where it appears purely and completely, to embrace in it war and process—that the military and the civil power of command —as one inseparable whole. Dio says quite correctly (liii. 17 com zliii. 44 lii. 41) that the name Imperator was assumed by the emperors "to indicate their full power instead of the title of king and dictator (rpdt SrjXucnv rrfl avtorcXout ff$wv i^ovatas, optI rift tov (5aci\/ws tov re durrd-
for these other older titles disappeared in name, but in reality the title of Imperator gives the same prerogatives (ro Si 5Jj tpyor avT&v tov avToKp&topos rparrryoptf j3if}<uodvt<u), for instance the right
of levying soldiers, imposing taxes, declaring war and concluding peace, exercising the supreme authority over burgess and non-burgess in and out of the city and punishing any one at any place capitally or otherwise, and in general of assuming the prerogatives connected in the earliest times with the supreme imperium. " It could not well be said in plainer terms, that imperator nothing at all but a synonym for rex, just as imperare coincides with regere.
When Augustus in constituting the principate resumed the Caesarian imperium, this was done with the restriction that should be limited as to space and in certain sense also as to time the proconsular power of the emperors, which was nothing but just this imperium, was not to come into application as regards Rome and Italy (Staatsrtcht, ii. * 854). On this element rests the essential distinction between the Caesarian imperium and the Augustan principate, just as on the other hand the real equality
rwpos frurX^reo*)
;
it
*; rjj
a
is
;
;
p.
is,
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
333
Imperator could not, while the consul could, be checked by colleagues of equal power ; and as all the restrictions placed in course of time on the original supreme official power — especially the obligation to give place to the provocatio and to respect the advice of the senate —did not apply to the Imperator.
In a word, this new office of Imperator was nothing else
than the primitive regal office re-established ; for it was
those very restrictions —as respected the temporal and local office, limitation of power, the collegiate arrangement, and the co operation of the senate or the community that was necessary
for certain cases — which distinguished the consul from the
king 318 /). There hardly trait of the new monarchy which was not found in the old the union of
the supreme military, judicial, and administrative authority
in the hands of the prince religious presidency over
the commonwealth the right of issuing ordinances with binding power the reduction of the senate to council
of state the revival of the patriciate and of the praefecture
of the city. But still more striking than these analogies
the internal similarity of the monarchy of Servius Tullius
and the monarchy of Caesar those old kings of Rome
with all their plenitude of power had yet been rulers of
free community and themselves the protectors of the commons against the nobility, Caesar too had not come
to destroy liberty but to fulfil and primarily to break
the intolerable yoke of the aristocracy. Nor need
surprise us that Caesar, anything but political antiquary,
went back five hundred years to find the model for his
new state for, seeing that the highest office of the Roman commonwealth had remained at all times
ship restricted number of special laws, the idea of
the regal office itself had no means become obsolete.
of the two institutions rests on the imperfection with which even in prin ciple and still more in practice that limit was realized.
king
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44.
At very various periods and from very different sides— in the decemviral power, in the Sullan regency, and in Caesar's own dictatorship —there had been during the republic a practical recurrence to it ; indeed by a certain logical necessity, whenever an exceptional power seemed requisite there emerged, in contradistinction to the usual limited imperium, the unlimited imperium which was simply nothing else than the regal power.
Lastly, outward considerations also recommended this recurrence to the former kingly position. Mankind have infinite difficulty in reaching new creations, and therefore cherish the once developed forms as sacred heirlooms. Accordingly Caesar very judiciously connected himself with Servius Tullius, in the same way as subsequently Charlemagne connected himself with Caesar, and Napoleon attempted at least to connect himself with Charlemagne. He did so, not in a circuitous way and secretly, but, as well as his successors, in the most open manner possible ; it was indeed the very object of this connection to find a clear, national and popular form of expression for the
new state. From ancient times there stood on the Capitol the statues of those seven kings, whom the conventional history of Rome was wont to bring on the stage ; Caesar ordered his own to be erected beside them as the eighth. He appeared publicly in the costume of the old kings of Alba. In his new law as to political crimes the principal variation from that of Sulla was, that there was placed alongside of the collective community, and on a level with
the Imperator as the living and personal expression of the people. In the formula used for political oaths there was added to the Jovis and the Penates of the Roman people the Genius of the Imperator. The outward badge of monarchy was, according to the view univerally diffused in antiquity, the image of the monarch on the coins from the year 710
the head of Caesar appears on those of the Roman state.
334
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
;
it,
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
335
There could accordingly be no complaint at least on the score that Caesar left the public in the dark as to his view
of his position ; as distinctly and as formally as possible he came forward not merely as monarch, but as very king of Rome. It is possible even, although not exactly probable,
and at any rate of subordinate importance, that he had it
in view to designate his official power not with the new name of Imperator, but directly with the old one of King. 1 Even in his lifetime many of his enemies as of his friends were of opinion that he intended to have himself expressly nominated king of Rome ; several indeed of his most vehement adherents suggested to him in different
and at different times that he should assume the crown; most strikingly of all, Marcus Antonius, when he as consul offered the diadem to Caesar before all the people (15 Feb. 710). But Caesar rejected these proposals without 44. exception at once. If he at the same time took steps against those who made use of these incidents to stir republican opposition, it by no means follows from this that he was not in earnest with his rejection. The
1 On this question there may be difference of opinion, whereas the hypo thesis that it was Caesar's intention to rule the Romans as Imperator, the non-Romans as Rex, must be simply dismissed. It is based solely on the story that in the sitting of the senate in which Caesar was assassinated a Sibylline utterance was brought forward by one of the priests in charge of the oracles, Lucius Cotta, to the effect that the Parthians could only be vanquished by a " king," and in consequence of this the resolution was adopted to commit to Caesar regal power over the Roman provinces. This story was certainly in circulation immediately after Caesar's death.
But not only does it nowhere find any sort of even indirect confirmation, but it is even expressly pronounced false by the contemporary Cicero (Dt Div. ii. 54, 119) and reported by the later historians, especially by Suetonius (79) and Dio (xliv. 15) merely as a rumour which they are far from wishing to guarantee ; and it is under such circumstances no better accredited by the fact of Plutarch (Cots. 60, 64 ; Brut 10) and Appian (B. C. no) repeating after their wont, the former by way of anecdote, the latter by way of causal explanation. But the story not merely unattested also intrinsically impossible. Even leaving out of account that Caesar had too much intellect and too much political tact
to decide important questions of state after the oligarchic fashion by stroke of the orarle-machinery, he could never think of thus formally and legally splitting uj the state which he wished to reduce to a level.
ways
a
ii. ;
it is
is
it
33«
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
assumption that these invitations took place at his bidding, with the view of preparing the multitude for the unwonted spectacle of the Roman diadem, utterly misapprehends the mighty power of the sentimental opposition with which Caesar had to reckon, and which could not be rendered more compliant, but on the contrary
The new court
necessarily gained a broader basis, through such a public recognition of its warrant on the part of Caesar himself. It may have been
the uncalled-for zeal of vehement adherents alone that occasioned these incidents ; it may be also, that Caesar merely permitted or even suggested the scene with Antonius, in order to put an end in as marked a manner as possible to the inconvenient gossip by a declinature which took place before the eyes of the burgesses and was inserted by his com mand even in the calendar of the state and could not, in fact, be well revoked. The probability is that Caesar, who
appreciated alike the value of a convenient formal designa tion and the antipathies of the multitude which fasten more on the names than on the essence of things, was resolved to avoid the name of king as tainted with an ancient curse and as more familiar to the Romans of his time when applied to the despots of the east than to their own Numa and Servius, and to appropriate the substance of the regal office under the title of Imperator.
But, whatever may have been the definitive title present to his thoughts, the sovereign ruler was there, and accord ingly the court established itself at once with all its due accompaniments of pomp, insipidity, and emptiness. Caesar appeared in public not in the robe of the consuls which was bordered with purple stripes, but in the robe wholly of
purple which was reckoned in antiquity as the proper regal attire, and received, seated on his golden chair and without rising from the solemn procession of the senate. The festivals in his honour commemorative of birthday, of victories, and of vows, filled the calendar. When Caesar
it,
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
337
came to the capital, his principal servants marched forth
in troops to great distances so as to meet and escort him.
To be near to him began to be of such importance, that
the rents rose in the quarter of the city where he dwelt Personal interviews with him were rendered so difficult
by the multitude of individuals soliciting audience, that
Caesar found himself compelled in many cases to com- munieate even with his intimate friends in writing, and
that persons even of the highest rank had to wait for hours
in the antechamber. People felt, more clearly than was agreeable to Caesar himself, that they no longer approached
a fellow-citizen. There arose a monarchical aristocracy,
which was in a remarkable manner at once new and old,
and which had sprung out of the idea of casting into the nobility, shade the aristocracy of the oligarchy by that of royalty,
the nobility by the patriciate. The patrician body still subsisted, although without essential privileges as an order, in the character of a close aristocratic guild 370) but as
could receive no new gentes 333) had dwindled away more and more in the course of centuries, and in the time of Caesar there were not more than fifteen or sixteen patrician gentes still existence. Caesar, himself sprung from one of them, got the right of creating new patrician gentes conferred on the Imperator by decree of the people, and so established, in contrast to the republican nobility, the new aristocracy of the patriciate, which most happily combined all the requisites of monarchical aristocracy— the charm of antiquity, entire dependence on the govern ment, and total insignificance. On all sides the new sove reignty revealed itself.
Under monarch thus practically unlimited there could hardly be scope for constitution at all — still less for continuance of the hitherto existing commonwealth based on the legal co-operation of the burgesses, the senate,
and the several magistrates. Caesar fully and definitely
The new P"? TM*"
vox.
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reverted to the tradition of the regal period ; the burgess- assembly remained — what it had already been in that period —by the side of and with the king the supreme and ultimate expression of the will of the sovereign people ; the senate was brought back to its original destination of giving advice to the ruler when he requested it ; and lastly the ruler concentrated in his person anew the whole magis terial authority, so that there existed no other independent state-official by his side any more than by the side of the kings of the earliest times.
For legislation the democratic monarch adhered to the primitive maxim of Roman state-law, that the community of the people in concert with the king convoking them had alone the power of organically regulating the common wealth ; and he had his constitutive enactments regularly sanctioned by decree of the people. The free energy and the authority half-moral, half-political, which the yea or nay of those old warrior-assemblies had carried with could not indeed be again instilled into the so-called comitia of this period; the co-operation of the burgesses in legisla tion, which in the old constitution had been extremely limited but real and living, was in the new practically an unsubstantial shadow. There was therefore no need of special restrictive measures against the comitia many years' experience had shown that every government—the
as well as the monarch—easily kept on good terms with this formal sovereign. These Caesarian comitia were an important element in the Caesarian system and indirectly of practical significance, only in so far as they served to retain in principle the sovereignty of the people and to constitute an energetic protest against sultanism.
But at the same time—as not only obvious of itself, but also distinctly attested —the other maxim also of the oldest state -law was revived by Caesar himself, and not merely fur the first time by his successors viz. that what
Edict*.
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THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
oligarchy
;
is
is
;
it,
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
339
the supreme, or rather sole, magistrate commands is un conditionally valid so long as he remains in office, and that, while legislation no doubt belongs only to the king and the burgesses in concert, the royal edict is equivalent to law at least till the demission of its author.
While the democratic king thus conceded to the com- The senate munity of the people at least a formal share in the sove- ^a*e rsignty, it was by no means his intention to divide his council authority with what had hitherto been the governing body, —JzJLj, the college of senators. The senate of Caesar was to be—
in a quite different way from the later senate of Augustus — nothing but a supreme council of state, which he made use of for advising with him beforehand as to laws, and for the issuing of the more important administrative ordinances through or at least under its name — for cases in fact occurred where decrees of senate were issued, of which none of the senators recited as present at their preparation had any cognizance. There were no material difficulties of form in reducing the senate to its original deliberative position, which had overstepped more de facto than de
jure but this case was necessary to protect himself from practical resistance, for the Roman senate was as much the headquarters of the opposition to Caesar as the Attic Areopagus was of the opposition to Pericles.
Chiefly for this reason the number of senators, which had hitherto amounted at most to six hundred in its normal condition (iv. 113) and had been greatly reduced by the recent crises,
was raised by extraordinary supplement to nine hundred; and at the same time, to keep at least up to this mark, the number of quaestors to be nominated annually, that of members annually admitted to the senate, was raised from twenty to forty. 1 The extraordinary filling up of the senate
According to the probable calculation formerly assumed (! ». 113), this would yield an average aggregate number of from 1000 to 1200 senators.
1
;
is
it
in
it
it
it,
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THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
was undertaken by the monarch alone. In the case of the ordinary additions he secured to himself a permanent influence through the circumstance, that the electoral colleges were bound by law1 to give their votes to the first twenty candidates for the quaestorship who were pro vided with letters of recommendation from the monarch ; besides, the crown was at liberty to confer the honorary rights attaching to the quaestorship or to any office superior to and consequently seat in the senate in particular, by way of exception even on individuals not qualified. The selection of the extraordinary members who were added naturally fell in the main on adherents of the new order of things, and introduced, along with equites of respectable standing, various dubious and plebeian person ages into the proud corporation —former senators who had been erased from the roll by the censor or in consequence of judicial sentence, foreigners from Spain and Gaul who had to some extent to learn their Latin in the senate, men lately subaltern officers who had not previously received even the equestrian ring, sons of freedmen or of such as
followed dishonourable trades, and other elements of like kind. The exclusive circles of the nobility, to whom this change in the personal composition of the senate naturally gave the bitterest offence, saw in an intentional depreciation of the very institution itself. Caesar was not capable of such self-destructive policy he was as deter mined not to let himself be governed by his council as he was convinced of the necessity of the institute in itself. They might more correctly have discerned this proceeding the intention of the monarch to take away from the senate its former character of an exclusive representation of the
oligarchic aristocracy, and to make once more—what
This certainly had reference merely to the elections for the years 711 42. and 71a (Staattrecht, ii. 3 730) but the arrangement was doubtless meant
to become permanent.
48.
;
a
*
a
it,
it
in
;
it
it a
a
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
341
had been in the regal period—a state-council representing all classes of persons belonging to the state through their most intelligent elements, and not necessarily excluding the man of humble birth or even the foreigner ; just as those earliest kings introduced non - burgesses (u 102, 329), Caesar introduced non-Italians into his senate.
While the rule of the nobility was thus set aside and its Personal
existence undermined,' and while the senate in its new form BoveTM- ment by
was merely a tool of the monarch, autocracy was at the same time most strictly carried out in the administration and government of the state, and the whole executive was concentrated in the hands of the monarch. First of all, the Imperator naturally decided in person every question of any moment. Caesar was able to carry personal govern ment to an extent which we puny men can hardly conceive, and which is not to be explained solely from the un paralleled rapidity and decision of his working, but has moreover its ground in a more general cause. When we see Caesar, Sulla, Gaius Gracchus, and Roman statesmen in general displaying throughout an activity which tran scends our notions of human powers of working, the reason lies, not in any change that human nature has undergone since that time, but in the change which has taken place since then in the organization of the household. The Roman house was a machine, in which even the mental powers of the slaves and freedmen yielded their produce to the master ; a master, who knew how to govern these, worked as it were with countless minds. It was the beau ideal of bureaucratic centralization ; which our counting- house system strives indeed zealously to imitate, but remains as far behind its prototype as the modern power of capital is inferior to the ancient system of slavery.
Caesar knew how to profit by this advantage ; wherever any post demanded special confidence, we see him filling it up on principle —so far as other considerations at all
Caesar
s
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permit —with his slaves, freedmen, or clients of humble birth. His works as a whole show what an organizing genius like his could accomplish with such an instrument ; but to the question, how in detail these marvellous feats were achieved, we have no adequate answer. Bureau cracy resembles a manufactory also in this respect, that the work done does not appear as that of the individual who has worked at but as that of the manufactory which stamps This much only quite clear, that Caesar in his work had no helper at all who exerted personal in fluence over or was even so much as initiated into the whole plan; he was not only the sole master, but he worked also without skilled associates, merely with common labourers.
With respect to details as matter of course in strictly political affairs Caesar avoided, so far as was at all possible, any delegation of his functions. Where was inevitable, as especially when during his frequent absence from Rome he had need of higher organ there, the person destined for this purpose was, significantly enough, not the legal deputy of the monarch, the prefect of the city, but confidant without officially-recognized jurisdiction, usually Caesar's banker, the cunning and pliant Phoenician merchant Lucius Cornelius Balbus from Gades. In ad-
in matters
""*' ministration Caesar was above all careful to resume the
keys of the state-chest —which the senate had appropriated to itself after the fall of the regal power, and by means of which had possessed itself of the government—and to entrust them only to those servants who with their persons were absolutely and exclusively devoted to him.