No More Learning

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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;
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by
by ;
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;
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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.
155
V
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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*.
338
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. In respect of ownership indeed the private means of the monarch remained, of course, strictly separate from the property of the state; but Caesar took in hand the administration of the whole financial and monetary system of the state, and conducted entirely in the way in which
it
a
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it. it
a
a
it,
it
a
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
343
he and the Roman grandees generally were wont to manage the administration of their own means and sub stance. For the future the levying of the provincial revenues and in the main also the management of the coinage were entrusted to the slaves and freedmen of the
Imperator, and men of the senatorial order were excluded from it—a momentous step, out of which grew in course of time the important class of procurators and the " imperial household. "
Of the governorships on the other hand, which, after they
had handed their financial business over to the new imperial £°verno,% tax-receivers, were still more than they had formerly been essentially military commands, that of Egypt alone was transferred to the monarch's own retainers. The country
of the Nile, in a peculiar manner geographically isolated
and politically centralized, was better fitted than any other
district to break off permanently under an able leader from
the central power, as the attempts which had repeatedly
been made by hard-pressed Italian party-chiefs to establish themselves there during the recent crisis sufficiently proved. Probably it was just this consideration that induced Caesar
not to declare the land formally a province, but to leave the harmless Lagids there; and certainly for this reason the legions stationed in Egypt were not entrusted to a man
to the senate or, in other words, to the former government, but this command was, just like the posts of tax-receivers, treated as a menial office 281). In general however the consideration had weight with Caesar, that the soldiers of Rome should not, like those of Oriental kings,
be commanded by lackeys. It remained the rule to entrust
the more important governorships to those who had been consuls, the less important to those who had been praetors; and once more, instead of the five years' interval prescribed
by the law of 702 (p. 147), the commencement of the 62. governorship probably was the ancient fashion annexed
belonging
in the
in
(p.
344
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
in the
directly to the close of the official functions in the city. On the other hand the distribution of the provinces among the qualified candidates, which had hitherto been arranged sometimes by decree of the people or senate, sometimes by concert among the magistrates or by lot, passed over to the monarch. And, as the consuls were frequently induced to abdicate before the end of the year and to make room for after- elected consuls {consules suffectt) ; as, moreover, the number of praetors annually nominated was raised from eight to sixteen, and the nomination of half of them was entrusted to the Imperator in the same way as that of the half of the quaestors ; and, lastly, as there was reserved to the Imperator the right of nominating, if not titular consuls, at any rate titular praetors and titular quaestors : Caesar secured a sufficient number of candidates acceptable to him for filling up the governorships. Their recall remained of course left to the discretion of the regent as well as their nomination ; as a rule it was assumed that the consular governor should not remain more than two years, nor the praetorian more than one year, in the province,
Lastly, so far as concerns the administration of the city which was his capital and residence, the Imperator evi-
tntionof
the capital, dently intended for a time to entrust this also to magis
trates similarly nominated by him. He revived the old
of the regal period 83) on different occasions he committed during his absence the adminis tration of the capital to one or more such lieutenants nomi
nated him without consulting the people and for an indefinite period, who united in themselves the functions of all the administrative magistrates and possessed even the right of coining money with their own name, although of
47. course not with their own effigy. In 707 and in the first 46. nine months of 709 there were, moreover, neither praetors nor curule aediles nor quaestors; the consuls too were
city-lieutenancy
by
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chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
345
nominated in the former year only towards its close, and in the latter Caesar was even consul without a colleague. This looks altogether like an attempt to revive completely the old regal authority within the city of Rome, as far as the limits enjoined by the democratic past of the new monarch ; in other words, of magistrates additional to the king himself, to allow only the prefect of the city during the king's absence and the tribunes and plebeian aediles appointed for protecting popular freedom to con tinue in existence, and to abolish the consulship, the censorship, the praetorship, the curule aedileship and the quaestorship. 1 But Caesar subsequently departed from this ; he neither accepted the royal title himself, nor did he cancel those venerable names interwoven with the glorious history of the republic. The consuls, praetors, aediles, tribunes, and quaestors retained sub stantially their previous formal powers ; nevertheless their position was totally altered. It was the political idea lying at the foundation of the republic that the Roman empire was identified with the city of Rome, and in consistency with it the municipal magistrates of the capital were treated throughout as magistrates of the empire. In the monarchy of Caesar that view and this consequence
of it fell into abeyance ; the magistrates of Rome formed thenceforth only the first among the many municipalities of the empire, and the consubhip in particular became a purely titular post, which preserved a certain practical im portance only in virtue of the reversion of a higher governorship annexed to The fate, which the Roman community had been wont to prepare for the vanquished, now means of Caesar befell itself; its sovereignty over
Hence accordingly the cautious turns of expression on the mention at these magistracies in Caesar's laws cum censor aliusvc quit magistralus Romae populi censum aget (L. Jul. mun. 144) praetor isve quei Romae iure deicundo pram-it (L, Rubr. often) quaestor urianus queivt aerario praerit (L. Jul. mun. 37 et a I. ).
/-
1.
;
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;
;
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by
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The state- hierarchy,
the Roman empire was converted into a limited communal freedom within the Roman state. That at the same time the number of the praetors and quaestors was doubled, has been already mentioned; the same course was followed with the plebeian aediles, to whom two new " corn-aediles " (aediles Ceriales) were added to superintend the supplies of the capital. The appointment to those offices remained with the community, and was subject to no restriction as respected the consuls and perhaps also the tribunes of the people and plebeian aediles ; we have already adverted to the fact, that the Imperator reserved a right of proposal binding on the electors as regards the half of the praetors, curule aediles, and quaestors to be annually nominated. In general the ancient and hallowed palladia of popular freedom were not touched ; which, of course, did not prevent the individual refractory tribune of the people from being seriously interfered with and, in fact, deposed, and erased from the roll of senators.
As the Imperator was thus, for the more general and more important questions, his own minister; as he con trolled the finances by his servants, and the army by his adjutants ; and as the old republican state -magistracies were again converted into municipal magistracies of the city of Rome ; the autocracy was sufficiently established.
In the spiritual hierarchy on the other hand Caesar, though he issued a detailed law respecting this portion of the state-economy, made no material alteration, except that he connected with the person of the regent the supreme pontificate and perhaps also the membership of the higher priestly colleges generally ; and, partly in connection with this, one new stall was created in each of the three supreme colleges, and three new stalls in the fourth college of th'-
If the Roman state-hierarchy had hitherto served as a support to the ruling oligarchy, it might render precisely the same service to the new monarchy. The
banquet-masters.
char XI THE NEW MONARCHY
347
conservative religious policy of the senate was transferred to the new kings of Rome ; when the strictly conservative Varro published about this time his " Antiquities of Divine Things," the great fundamental repository of Roman state- theology, he was allowed to dedicate it to the Pontifex Maximus Caesar. The faint lustre which the worship of Jovis was still able to impart shone round the newly-estab lished throne ; and the old national faith became in its last stages the instrument of a Caesarian papacy, which, however, was from the outset but hollow and feeble.
In judicial matters, first of all, the old regal jurisdiction Regal was re-established. As the king had originally been judge jj? J£ in criminal and civil causes, without being legally bound in
the former to respect an appeal to the prerogative of mercy
in the people, or in the latter to commit the decision of the question in dispute to jurymen ; so Caesar claimed the right
of bringing capital causes as well as private processes for
sole and final decision to his own bar, and disposing of them in the event of his presence personally, in the event
of his absence by the city-lieutenant. In fact we find him,
quite after the manner of the ancient kings, now sitting in judgment publicly in the Forum of the capital on Roman burgesses accused of high treason, now holding a judicial inquiry in his house regarding the client princes accused of
the like crime ; so that the only privilege, which the Roman burgesses had as compared with the other subjects of the
king, seems to have consisted in the publicity of the judicial procedure. But this resuscitated supreme jurisdiction of
the kings, although Caesar discharged its duties with impartiality and care, could only from the nature of the
case find practical application in exceptional cases.
For the usual procedure in criminal and civil causes the Retention former republican mode of administering justice was sub- ^▼jons stantially retained. Criminal causes were still disposed of adminis- as formerly before the different jury-commissions competent justice.
348
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to deal with the several crimes, civil causes partly before the court of inheritance or, as it was commonly called, of the centumviri, partly before the single indices ; the super intendence of judicial proceedings was as formerly con ducted in the capital chiefly by the praetors, in the provinces by the governors. Political crimes too continued even under the monarchy to be referred to a jury-commis sion ; the new ordinance, which Caesar issued respecting them, specified the acts legally punishable with precision and in a liberal spirit which excluded all prosecution of opinions, and it fixed as the penalty not death, but banish ment. As respects the selection of the jurymen, whom the senatorial party desired to see chosen exclusively from the senate and the strict Gracchans exclusively from the eques trian order, Caesar, faithful to the principle of reconciling the parties, left the matter on the footing of the com promise-law of Cotta (iv. 380), but with the modification —for which the way was probably prepared by the law
66. of Pompeius of 699 138) — that the tribuni aerarii who came from the lower ranks of the people were set aside; so that there was established rating for jurymen of at least 400,000 sesterces (^4000), and senators and equites now divided the functions of jurymen which had so long been an apple of discord between them.
Appeal monarch,
The relations of the regal and the republican jurisdiction were on the whole co-ordinate, so that any cause might ba initiated as well before the king's bar as before the com petent republican tribunal, the latter of course in the event of collision giving way on the other hand the one or the other tribunal had pronounced sentence, the cause was thereby finally disposed of. To overturn verdict pro- nounced by the jurymen duly called to act in civil or in criminal cause even the new ruler was not entitled, except where special incidents, such as corruption or violence, already according to the law of the republic
a
a a
; if
(p.
a
chap. XI THE NEW MONARCHY
349
gave occasion for cancelling the jurymen's sentence. On the other hand the principle that, as concerned any decree emanating merely from magistrates, the person aggrieved by it was entitled to appeal to the superior of the decreeing authority, probably obtained even now the great extension, out of which the subsequent imperial appellate jurisdiction arose ; perhaps all the magistrates administering law, at least the governors of all the pro vinces, were regarded so far as subordinates of the ruler, that appeal to him might be lodged from any of their decrees.
Certainly these innovations, the most important of which
—the general extension given to appeal—cannot even be ? . . ? . reckoned absolutely an improvement, by no means healed system, thoroughly the evils from which the Roman administration
of justice was suffering. Criminal procedure cannot be
sound in any slave-state, inasmuch as the task of proceed
ing against slaves lies, if not de jure, at least de facto in the
hands of the master. The Roman master, as may readily
be conceived, punished throughout the crime of his serf,
not as a crime, but only so far as it rendered the slave useless or disagreeable to him ; slave crinr'nals were merely drafted off somewhat like oxen addicted to goring, and, as the latter were sold to the butcher, so were the former sold to the fencing- booth. But even the criminal procedure against free men, which had been from the outset and always in great part continued to be a political process, had amidst the disorder of the last generations become transformed from a grave legal proceeding into a faction- fight to be fought out by means of favour, money, and violence. The blame rested jointly on all that took part in on the magistrates, the jury, the parties, even the public who were spectators but the most incurable wounds were inflicted on justice the doings of the advo cates. In proportion as the parasitic plant of Roman
Decay
; by
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forensic eloquence flourished, all positive ideas of right became broken up ; and the distinction, so difficult of apprehension by the public, between opinion and evidence was in reality expelled from the Roman criminal practice. "A plain simple defendant," says a Roman advocate of much experience at this period, "may be accused of any crime at pleasure which he has or has not committed, and will be certainly condemned. " Numerous pleadings in
criminal causes have been preserved to us from this epoch; there is hardly one of them which makes even a serious attempt to fix the crime in question and to put into proper shape the proof or counterproof. 1 That the contemporary civil procedure was likewise in various respects unsound, we need hardly mention ; it too suffered from the effects of the party politics mixed up with all things, as for
•8-81. instance in the process of Publius
673), where the most contradictory decisions were given according as Cinna or Sulla had the ascendency in Rome ; and the advocates, frequently non-jurists, produced here also intentionally and unintentionally abundance of con fusion. But it was implied in the nature of the case, that party mixed itself up with such matters only by way of exception, and that here the quibbles of advocates could not so rapidly or so deeply break up the ideas of right ; accordingly the civil pleadings which we possess from this epoch, while not according to our stricter ideas effective compositions for their purpose, are yet of a far less libellous and far more juristic character than the contemporary
speeches
in criminal causes. If Caesar permitted the
1 Plura rnim multo, says Cicero in his treatise De Oratort (ii. 42, 178), primarily with reference to criminal trials, homines indicant odio ant amort cut cupiditate aut iracundia aut dolore out laetitia aul spe aut timoie aut errore aut aliqua permotione mentis, quam veritate aut praescripto aul iuris norma aliqua aut iudicii formula aut legibus. On this accordingly are founded the further instructions which he gives for advocates entering on their profession.
Quinctius (671-
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
351
curb imposed on the eloquence of advocates by Pom- peius (p. 138) to remain, or even rendered it more severe, there was at least nothing lost by this ; and much was gained, when better selected and better superintended magistrates and jurymen were nominated and the palpable corruption and intimidation of the courts came to an end. But the sacred sense of right and the reverence for the law, which it is difficult to destroy in the minds of the multitude, it is still more difficult to reproduce. Though the legislator did away with various abuses, he could not heal the root of the evil ; and it might be doubted whether time, which cures everything curable, would in this case bring relief.
The Roman military system of this period was nearly Decay of in the same condition as the Carthaginian at the time of mjijtary HannibaL The governing classes furnished only the system, officers ; the subjects, plebeians and provincials, formed
the army. The general was, financially and militarily,
almost independent of the central government, and,
whether in fortune or misfortune, substantially left to
himself and to the resources of his province. Civic
and even national spirit had vanished from the army,
and the esprit de corps was alone left as a bond of inward
union. The army had ceased to be an instrument of
the commonwealth ; in a political point of view it had
no will of its own, but it was doubtless able to adopt
that of the master who wielded it; in a military point
of view it sank under the ordinary miserable leaders into
a disorganized useless rabble, but under a right general
it attained a military perfection which the burgess-army
could never reach. The class of officers especially had
deeply degenerated. The higher ranks, senators and
equites, grew more and more unused to arms. While
formerly there had been a zealous competition for the
posts of stafif officers, now every man of equestrian rank,
352
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
who chose to serve, was sure of a military tribuneship, and several of these posts had even to be filled with men of humbler rank ; and any man of quality at all who still served sought at least to finish his term of service in Sicily or some other province where he was sure not to face the enemy. Officers of ordinary bravery and efficiency were stared at as prodigies ; as to Pompeius especially, his contemporaries practised a military idolatry which in every respect compromised them. The staff, as a rule, gave the signal for desertion and for mutiny; in spite of the culpable indulgence of the commanders proposals for the cashiering of officers of rank were daily occurrences. We still possess the picture —drawn not without irony by Caesar's own hand —of the state of matters at his own headquarters when orders were given to march against Ariovistus, of the cursing and weeping, and preparing of testaments, and presenting even of requests for furlough. In the soldiery not a trace of the better classes could any longer be discovered. Legally the general obligation to bear arms still subsisted ; but the levy, if resorted to alongside of enlisting, took place in the most irregular manner ; numerous persons liable to serve were wholly passed over, while those once levied were retained thirty years and longer beneath the eagles. The Roman burgess-cavalry now merely vegetated as a sort of mounted noble guard, whose perfumed cavaliers and exquisite high-bred horses only played a part in the festivals of the capital ; the so- called burgess -infantry was a troop of mercenaries swept together from the lowest ranks of the burgess-population ; the subjects furnished the cavalry and the light troops exclusively, and came to be more and more extensively employed also in the infantry. The posts of centurions in the legions, on which in the mode of warfare of that time the efficiency of the divisions essentially depended, and to which according to the national military constitu
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
353
tion the soldier served his way upward with the pike, were now not merely regularly conferred according to favour, but were not unfrequently sold to the highest bidder. In consequence of the bad financial management of the government and the venality and fraud of the great majority of the magistrates, the payment of the soldiers was extremely defective and irregular.
The necessary consequence of this was, that in the ordinary course of things the Roman armies pillaged the
mutinied against their officers, and ran off in presence of the enemy ; instances occurred where consider able armies, such as the Macedonian army of Piso in 697 (p. 104/), were without any proper defeat utterly ruined, simply by this misconduct Capable leaders on the other hand, such as Pompeius, Caesar, Gabinius, formed doubt less out of the existing materials able and effective, and to some extent exemplary, armies ; but these armies belonged far more to their general than to the common wealth. — The still more complete decay of the Roman marine which, moreover, had remained an object of antipathy to the Romans and had never been fully nationalized — scarcely requires to be mentioned. Here too, on all sides, everything that could be ruined at all had been reduced to ruin under the oligarchic govern ment
The reorganization of the Roman military system by Caesar was substantially limited to the tightening and strengthening of the reins of discipline, which had been relaxed under the negligent and incapable supervision previously subsisting. The Roman military system seemed to him neither to need, nor to be capable of, radical reform ; he accepted the elements of the army, just as Hannibal had accepted them. The enactment of his municipal ordinance that, in order to the holding of a
municipal magistracy or sitting in the municipal council
provincials,
67.
VOU T
156
I&reor- S"^^^
Foreign mercen aries.
Adjutants of the legion.
before the thirtieth year, three years' service on horseback —that as officer—or six years' service on foot should be required, proves indeed that he wished to attract the better classes to the army but proves with equal clearness that amidst the ever-increasing prevalence of an unwarlike spirit in the nation he himself held no longer possible to associate the holding of an honorary office with the fulfil ment of the time of service unconditionally as hitherto. This very circumstance serves to explain why Caesar made no attempt to re-establish the Roman burgess-cavalry. The levy was better arranged, the time of service was regulated and abridged otherwise matters remained on the footing that the infantry of the line were raised chiefly from the lower orders of the Roman burgesses, the cavalry and the light infantry from the subjects. That nothing was done for the reorganization of the fleet, surprising.
It was an innovation —hazardous beyond doubt even in the view of its author —to which the untrustworthy character of the cavalry furnished the subjects compelled him (p. 77), that Caesar for the first time deviated from the old Roman system of never fighting with mercenaries, and in corporated in the cavalry hired foreigners, especially Germans. Another innovation was the appointment of adjutants of the legion (legati legionis). Hitherto the military tribunes, nominated partly the burgesses, partly the governor concerned, had led the legions in such way that six of them were placed over each legion, and the command alternated among these single commandant of the legion was appointed by the general only as temporary and extraordinary measure. In subsequent times on the other hand those colonels or adjutants of legions appear as permanent and organic institution, and as nominated no longer by the governor whom they obey, but by the supreme command in Rome both changes seem referable to Caesar's arrangements connected with the Gabinian law
354
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND BOOK V
;
a
a
a
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is
by
; it
;
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;
it
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chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
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The reason for the introduction of this important intervening step in the military hierarchy must be sought partly in the necessity for a more energetic centralization of the command, partly in the felt want of capable superior officers, partly and chiefly in the design of providing a counterpoise to the governor by associating with him one or more colonels nominated by the Imperator.
The most essential change in the military system con- The sisted in the institution of a permanent military head in the 1^^°TM. person of the Imperator, who, superseding the previous ship-in- unmilitary and in every respect incapable governing cor
poration, united in his hands the whole control of the
army, and thus converted it from a direction which for
the most part was merely nominal into a real and energetic
supreme command. We are not properly informed as to the
position which this supreme command occupied towards the
special commands hitherto omnipotent in their respective
spheres. Probably the analogy of the relation subsisting
between the praetor and the consul or the consul and
the dictator served generally as a basis, so that, while the governor in his own right retained the supreme military
authority in his province, the Imperator was entitled at
any moment to take it away from him and assume it for
himself or his delegates, and, while the authority of the
governor was confined to the province, that of the Im
perator, like the regal and the earlier consular authority, extended over the whole empire. Moreover it is ex
tremely probable that now the nomination of the officers,
both the military tribunes and the centurions, so far as it
had hitherto belonged to the governor,1 as well as the nomi
nation of the new adjutants of the legion, passed
into the hands of the Imperator ; and in like manner even
now the arrangement of the levies, the bestowal of leave of
1 With the nomination of a part of the military tribunes by the burgesses (iit. 13) Caesar —in this also a democrat— did not meddle.
(iv. 388).
directly
Caesar's plans.
Defence frontfer
absence, and the more important criminal cases, may have been submitted to the judgment of the commander-in- chief. With this limitation of the powers of the governors and with the regulated control of the Imperator, there was no great room to apprehend in future either that the armies might be utterly disorganized or that they might be con verted into retainers personally devoted to their respective officers.
But, however decidedly and urgently the circumstances pointed to military monarchy, and however distinctly Caesar took the supreme command exclusively for himself, he was nevertheless not at all inclined to establish his authority by means of, and on, the army. No doubt he deemed a standing army necessary for his state, but only because from its geographical position it required a comprehensive regulation of the frontiers and permanent frontier garrisons. Partly at earlier periods, partly during the recent civil war, he had worked at the tranquillizing of Spain, and had established strong positions for the defence of the frontier in Africa along the great desert, and in the north-west of the empire along the line of the Rhine. He occupied himself with similar plans for the regions on the Euphrates and on the Danube. Above all he designed an expedition against the Parthians, to avenge the day of Carrhae ; he had destined three years for this war, and was resolved to settle accounts with these dangerous enemies once for all and not less cautiously than thoroughly. In like manner he had projected the scheme of attacking Burebistas king of the Getae, who was greatly extending his power on both sides of the Danube 06), and of protecting Italy the north-east by border-districts similar to those which he had created for in Gaul. On the other hand there no evidence at all that Caesar contemplated like Alexander
career of victory extending indefinitely far; said indeed that he had intended to march from Parthia to
356
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
a
it
is
is
in
it
(p. 1
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
357
the Caspian and from this to the Black Sea and then along its northern shores to the Danube, to annex to the empire all Scythia and Germany as far as the Northern Ocean—which according to the notions of that time was not so very distant from the Mediterranean —and to return home through Gaul ; but no authority at all deserving of credit vouches for the existence of these fabulous projects. In the case of a state which, like the Roman state of Caesar, already included a mass of barbaric elements difficult to be controlled, and had still for centuries to come more than enough to do with their assimilation, such conquests, even granting their military practicability, would have been nothing but blunders far more brilliant and far worse than the Indian expedition of Alexander. Judging both from Caesar's conduct in Britain and Germany and from the conduct of those who became the heirs of his political ideas, it is in a high degree probable that Caesar with Scipio Aemilianus called on the gods not to increase the empire, but to preserve
and that his schemes of conquest restricted themselves to settlement of the frontier — measured, true, by his own great scale —which should secure the line of the Euphrates and, instead of the fluctuating and militarily useless boundary of the empire on the north-east, should establish and render defensible the line of the Danube.
But, remains mere probability that Caesar ought
not to be designated world-conqueror in the same sense ° c&e^r as Alexander and Napoleon, quite certain that his military
design was not to rest his new monarchy primarily on the support of the army nor generally to place the military authority above the civil, but to incorporate with, and as far as possible subordinate to, the civil commonwealth. The invaluable pillars of military state, those old and far- famed Gallic legions, were honourably dissolved just on account of the incompatibility of their esprit de corps
"P0115"1-
Attempts
a
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THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
with a civil commonwealth, and their glorious names were only perpetuated in newly-founded urban communi ties. The soldiers presented by Caesar with allotments of land on their discharge were not, like those of Sulla, settled together—as it were militarily —in colonies of their own, but, especially when they settled in Italy, were isolated as much as possible and scattered throughout the penin sula ; it was only in the case of the portions of the Campanian land that remained for disposal, that an aggregation of the old soldiers of Caesar could not be avoided. Caesar sought to solve the difficult task of keeping the soldiers of a standing army within the spheres of civil life, partly by retaining the former arrangement which prescribed merely certain years of service, and not a service strictly constant, that uninterrupted by any discharge partly by the already- mentioned shortening of the term of service, which occasioned speedier change in the personal composition of the army partly the regular settlement of the soldiers who had served out their time as agricultural colonists partly and principally by keeping the army aloof from Italy and generally from the proper seats of the civil and political life of the nation, and directing the soldier to the points, where according to the opinion of the great king he was alone in his place —to the frontier stations, that he might ward off the extraneous foe.
The true criterion also of the military state —the develop- ^J2* °* ment of, and the privileged position assigned to, the corps of guards — not to be met with in the case of Caesar.
Although as respects the army on active service the institu tion of special bodyguard for the general had been already long in existence (iii. 460), in Caesar's system this fell completely into the background his praetorian cohort seems to have essentially consisted merely of orderly officers or non-military attendants, and never to have been in the
Absence
;
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;
;
a ;
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chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
359
proper sense a select corps, consequently never an object of jealousy to the troops of the line. While Caesar even as general practically dropped the bodyguard, he still less as king tolerated a guard round his person. Although constantly, beset by lurking assassins and well aware of
he yet rejected the proposal of the senate to institute a select guard dismissed, as soon as things grew in some measure quiet, the Spanish escort which he had made use of at first in the capital and contented himself with the retinue of lictors sanctioned by traditional usage for the Roman supreme magistrates.
However much of the idea of his party and of his youth Impracti- —to found Periclean government in Rome not by virtue SSS" of the sword, but by virtue of the confidence of the nation —Caesar had been obliged to abandon in the struggle with
realities, he retained even now the fundamental idea — of
not founding military monarchy —with an energy to which
history scarcely supplies parallel. Certainly this too was
an impracticable ideal— was the sole illusion, in regard
to which the earnest longing of that vigorous mind was
more powerful than its clear judgment. government,
such as Caesar had in view, was not merely of necessity
in its nature highly personal, and so liable to perish with
the death of its author just as the kindred creations of
Pericles and Cromwell with the death of their founders
but, amidst the deeply disorganized state of the nation,
was not at all credible that the eighth king of Rome would
succeed even for his lifetime in ruling, as his seven prede
cessors had ruled, his fellow-burgesses merely by virtue of
law and justice, and as little probable that he would suc
ceed in incorporating the standing army—after had during
the last civil war learned its power and unlearned its rever ence—once more as subservient element in civil society.
To any one who calmly considered to what extent reverence
for the law had disappeared from the lowest as from the
a
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it ;
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;
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;
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Financial admm1stra-
highest ranks of society, the former hope must have seemed almost a dream ; and, if with the Marian reform of the military system the soldier generally had ceased to be a citizen (iii. 461), the Campanian mutiny and the battle-field of Thapsus showed with painful clearness the nature of the support which the army now lent to the law. Even the great democrat could only with difficulty and imperfectly hold in check the powers which he had unchained ; thousands of swords still at his signal flew from the scabbard, but they were no longer equally ready upon that signal to return to the sheath. Fate is mightier
* than genius. Caesar desired to become the restorer of the civil commonwealth, and became the founder of the military monarchy which he abhorred ; he overthrew the rtgime of aristocrats and bankers in the state, only to put a military rtgime in their place, and the common wealth continued as before to be tyrannized and worked for profit by a privileged minority. And yet it is a privilege of the highest natures thus creatively to err. The brilliant attempts of great men to realize the ideal, though they do not reach their aim, form the best treasure of the nations. It was owing to the work of Caesar that the Roman military state did not become a police-state till after the lapse of several centuries, and that the Roman Imperators, however little they otherwise resembled the great founder of their sovereignty, yet employed the soldier in the main not against the citizen but against the public foe, and esteemed both nation and army too highly to set the latter as constable over the former.
3«o
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
The regulation of financial matters occasioned compara- jjveiy little difficulty in consequence of the solid foundations which the immense magnitude of the empire and the exclusion of the system of credit supplied. If the state had hitherto found itself in constant financial embarrass ment, the fault was far from chargeable on the inadequacy
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
361
of the state revenues'; on the contrary these had of late years immensely increased. To the earlier aggregate income, which is estimated at 200,000,000 sesterces
there were added 85,000,000 sesterces (,£850,000) by the erection of the provinces of Bithynia-
Pontus and Syria ; which increase, along with the other newly opened up or augmented sources of income, especi
ally from the constantly increasing produce of the taxes
on luxuries, far outweighed the loss of the Campanian rents. Besides, immense sums had been brought from extraordinary sources into the exchequer through Lucullus, Metellus, Pompeius, Cato and others. The cause of the financial embarrassments rather lay partly in the increase v of the ordinary and extraordinary expenditure, partly in
the disorder of management. Under the former head, the distribution of corn to the multitude of the capital claimed almost exorbitant sums ; through the extension given
to it by Cato in 691 (iv. 490) the yearly expenditure for 63. that purpose amounted to 30,000,000 sesterces (. £300,000) and after the abolition in 696 of the compensation hitherto 68. paid, it swallowed up even a fifth of the state revenues.
The military budget also had risen, since the garrisons
of Cilicia, Syria, and Gaul had been added to those of Spain, Macedonia, and the other provinces. Among the extraordinary items of expenditure must be named in the first place the great cost of fitting out fleets, on which,
for example, five years after the great razzia of 687, 67. 34,000,000 sesterces (^340,000) were expended at once. Add to this the very considerable sums which were consumed in wars and warlike preparations ; such as 18,000,000 sesterces (,£180,000) paid at once to Piso merely for the outfit of the Macedonian army, 24,000,000 sesterces (,£240,000) even annually to Pompeius for the maintenance and pay of the Spanish army, and similar sums to Caesar for the Gallic legions. But considerable
(£2,000,000),
Financial reforms of Caesar.
as were these demands made on the Roman exchequer, it would still have been able probably to meet them, had not its administration once so exemplary been affected by the universal laxity and dishonesty of this age ; the payments of the treasury were often suspended merely because of the neglect to call up its outstanding claims. The magistrates placed over two of the quaestors— young men annually changed—contented themselves at the best with inaction; among the official staff of clerks and others, formerly so justly held in high esteem for its in tegrity, the worst abuses now prevailed, more especially since such posts had come to be bought and sold.
As soon however as the threads of Roman state-finance were concentrated no longer as hitherto in the senate, but in the cabinet of Caesar, new life, stricter order, and more
compact connection at once pervaded all the wheels and springs of that great machine. The two institutions, which originated with Gaius Gracchus and ate like gangrene into the Roman financial system —the leasing of the direct taxes, and the distributions of grain—were partly abolished, partly remodelled. Caesar wished not, like his predecessor, to hold the nobility in check by the banker-aristocracy and the populace of the capital, but to set them aside and to deliver the commonwealth from all parasites whether of high or lower rank and therefore he went in these two important questions not with Gaius Gracchus, but with the oligarch Sulla. The leasing system was allowed to continue for the indirect taxes, in the case of which was very old and— under the maxim of Roman financial administration, which was retained inviolable also by Caesar, that the levying of the taxes should at any cost be kept simple and readily manageable —absolutely could not be dispensed with. But the direct taxes were thenceforth universally either treated, like the African and Sardinian deliveries of corn and oil, aa contributions in kind to be directly supplied to the state,
Leasing of
tales'1 abolished,
368
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
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chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
363
or converted, like the revenues of Asia Minor, into fixed
in which case the collection of the several sums payable was entrusted to the tax - districts
themselves.
The corn-distributions in the capital had hitherto been Reform of
looked on as a profitable prerogative of the community which ruled and, because ruled, had to be fed by its com. subjects. This infamous principle was set aside by Caesar
but could not be overlooked that multitude of wholly destitute burgesses had been protected solely by these largesses of food from starvation. In this aspect Caesar retained them. While according to the Sempronian ordinance renewed by Cato every Roman burgess settled
in Rome had legally claim to bread-corn without payment, this list of recipients, which had at last risen to
the number of 320,000, was reduced the exclusion of
all individuals having means or otherwise provided for to
150,000, and this number was fixed once for all as the maximum number of recipients of free corn at the same time an annual revision of the list was ordered, so that the places vacated by removal or death might be again filled up with the most needful among the applicants. By this conversion of the political privilege into provision for the poor, principle remarkable in moral as well as in historical point of view came for the first time into living operation. Civil society but slowly and gradually works its way to perception of the interdependence of interests earlier antiquity the state doubtless protected its members from the public enemy and the murderer, but was not bound to protect the totally helpless fellow-citizen from the worse enemy, want, by affording the needful means of subsistence. was the Attic civilization which first developed, in the Solonian and post-Solonian legislation, the principle that the duty of the community to provide for its invalids and indeed for its poor generally and was
money payments,
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Caesar that first developed what in the restricted compass of Attic life had remained a municipal matter into an organic institution of state, and transformed an arrangement, which was a burden and a disgrace for the commonwealth, into the first of those institutions —in modern times as count less as they are beneficial —where the infinite depth of human compassion contends with the infinite depth of human misery.
In addition to these fundamental reforms a thorough revision of the income and expenditure took place. The ordinary sources of income were everywhere regulated and fixed. Exemption from taxation was conferred on not a few communities and even on whole districts, whether indirectly by the bestowal of the Roman or Latin franchise, or directly by special privilege ; it was obtained e. g. by all the Sicilian communities 1 in the former, by the town of Uion in the latter way. Still greater was the number of those whose proportion of tribute was lowered ; the com munities in Further Spain, for instance, already after Caesar's governorship had on his suggestion a reduction of tribute granted to them by the senate, and now the most oppressed province of Asia had not only the levying of its direct taxes facilitated, but also a third of them remitted. The newly- added taxes, such as those of the communities subdued in Illyria and above all of the Gallic communities —which latter together paid annually 40,000,000 sesterces (^400,000) —were fixed throughout on a low scale. It is true on the other hand that various towns such as Little Leptis in Africa, Sulci in Sardinia, and several Spanish communities, had their tribute raised by way of penalty for their conduct during the last war. The very
1 Varro attests the discontinuance of the Sicilian decumat in a treatise published after Cicero's death (De R. R. a fraef. ) where he names —as the corn - provinces whence Rome derives her subsistence — only Africa and Sardinia, no longer Sicily. The Latinita], which Sicily obtained, must thus doubtless have included this immunity (comp. Staatsrecht, iii. 684).
364
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
wholly
char xi THE NEW MONARCHY
3«5
lucrative Italian harbour-tolls abolished in the recent times of anarchy (iv. 502) were re-established all the more readily, that this tax fell essentially on luxuries imported from the east To these new or revived sources of ordinary income were added the sums which accrued by
extraordinary means, especially in consequence of the civil war, to the victor —the booty collected in Gaul ; the stock of cash in the capital; the treasures taken from the Italian and
Spanish temples ; the sums raised in the shape of forced loan, compulsory present, or fine, from the dependent communities and dynasts, and the pecuniary penalties imposed in a similar way by judicial sentence, or simply by sending an order to pay, on individual wealthy Romans ; and above all things the proceeds from the estate of defeated opponents. How productive these sources of income were, we may learn from the fact, that the fine of the African capitalists who sat in the opposition-senate alone amounted to 100,000,000 sesterces (,£1,000,000) and the price paid by the purchasers of the property of
to 70,000,000 sesterces (,£700,000). This course was necessary, because the power of the beaten nobility rested in great measure on their colossal wealth and could only be effectually broken by imposing on them the defrayment of the costs of the war. But the odium of the confiscations was in some measure mitigated by the fact that Caesar directed their proceeds solely to the benefit of the state, and, instead of overlooking after the manner of Sulla any act of fraud in his favourites, exacted the
Pompeius
with rigour even from his most faithful adherents, e. g. from Marcus Antonius.
In the expenditure a diminution was in the first place The obtained by the considerable restriction of the largesses of budg^'
purchase -money
The distribution of corn to the poor of the capital tura. which was retained, as well as the kindred supply of oil newly introduced by Caesar for the Roman baths, were at least
grain.
366
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
in great part charged once for all on the contributions in kind from Sardinia and especially from Africa, and were thereby wholly or for the most part kept separate from the exchequer. On the other hand the regular expenditure for the military system was increased partly by the augmenta tion of the standing army, partly by the raising of the pay of the legionary from 480 sesterces (£5) to 900 (,£g)
Both steps were in fact indispensable. There was a total want of any real defence for the frontiers, and an indispensable preliminary to it was a considerable increase of the army. The doubling of the pay was doubtless employed by Caesar to attach his soldiers firmly to him 199), but was not introduced as a permanent innovation on that account The former pay of sesterces Jd. ) per day had been fixed in very ancient times, when money had an altogether different value from that which had in the Rome of Caesar's day could only have been retained down to period when the common day-labourer in the capital earned the labour of his hands daily on an average sesterces
because in those times the soldier entered the army not for the sake of the pay, but chiefly for the sake of the —in great measure illicit —perquisites of military service. The first condition in order to serious reform in the military system, and to the getting rid of those irregular gains of the soldier which formed burden mostly on the provincials, was an increase suitable to the times in the regular pay and the fixing of at sesterces id. ) may be regarded as an equitable step, while the great burden thereby imposed on the treasury was a necessary, and in its con sequences beneficial, course.
Of the amount of the extraordinary expenses which Caesar had to undertake or voluntarily undertook, difficult to form conception. The wars themselves consumed enormous sums; and sums perhaps not less
annually.
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chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
367
were required to fulfil the promises which Caesar had been obliged to make during the civil war. It was a bad example and one unhappily not lost sight of in the sequel, that every common soldier received for his partici pation in the civil war 20,000 sesterces (^200), every burgess of the multitude in the capital for his non-participa
tion in it 300 sesterces (jCz) as an addition to his aliment ; but Caesar, after having once under the pressure of circumstances pledged his word, was too much of a king to abate from it Besides, Caesar answered innumerable demands of honourable liberality, and put into circulation immense sums for building more especially, which had been shamefully neglected during the financial distress of the last times of the republic —the cost of his buildings executed partly during the Gallic campaigns, partly after wards, in the capital was reckoned at 160,000,000 sesterces (^1,600,000). The general result of the financial administration of Caesar is expressed in the fact that, while by sagacious and energetic reforms and by a right combination of economy and liberality he amply and fully met all equitable claims, nevertheless already in March 710 there lay in the public treasury 700,000,000 44. and in his own 100,000,000 sesterces (together ^8,000,000) —a sum which exceeded by tenfold the amount of cash in the treasury in the most flourishing times of the republic
(iii. 23).
But the task of breaking up the old parties and furnish- Social
ing the new commonwealth with an appropriate constitu- "^j"*0* tion, an efficient army, and well-ordered finances, difficult nation,
as it was, was not the most difficult part of Caesar's work.
If the Italian nation was really to be regenerated, it
required a reorganization which should transform all parts of the great empire — Rome, Italy, and the provinces. Let us endeavour here also to delineate the old state of things, as well as the beginnings of a new and more tolerable time.
Th» **'
The good stock of the Latin nation had long since wholly disappeared from Rome. It is implied in the very nature of the case, that a capital loses its municipal and even its national stamp more quickly than any subor dinate community. There the upper classes speedily with draw from urban public life, in order to find their home rather in the state as a whole than in a single city ; there are inevitably concentrated the foreign settlers, the fluctu ating population of travellers for pleasure or business, the mass of the indolent, lazy, criminal, financially and morally bankrupt, and for that very reason cosmopolitan, rabble. All this pre-eminently applied to Rome. The opulent Roman frequently regarded his town-house merely as a lodging. When the urban municipal offices were converted into im perial magistracies; when the civic assembly became the assembly of burgesses of the empire ; and when smaller self-governing tribal or other associations were not tolerated within the capital : all proper communal life ceased for Rome. From the whole compass of the widespread empire people flocked to Rome, for speculation, for debauchery, for intrigue, for training in crime, or even for the purpose of hiding there from the eye of the law.
These evils arose in some measure necessarily from the very nature of a capital; others more accidental and perhaps still more grave were associated with them. There has never perhaps existed a great city so thoroughly destitute of the means of support as Rome; importation on the one hand, and domestic manufacture by slaves on the other, rendered any free industry from the outset impossible there. The injurious consequences of the radical evil pervading the politics of antiquity in general— the slave-system —were more conspicuous in the capital than anywhere else. Nowhere were such masses of slaves accumulated as in the city palaces of the great families or of wealthy upstarts.