The history of Rome. Book V

by Theodor Mommsen

  This settlement of the commonwealth was acceptable to no party, and had to be imposed on his associates no less than on his opponents. Caesar's own position was now in a certain sense more imperilled than before the victory; but what he lost, the state gained.

  By annihilating the parties and not simply sparing the partisans but allowing every man of talent or even merely of good descent to attain to office irrespective of his political past, he gained for his great building all the working power extant in the state; and not only so, but the voluntary or compulsory participation of men of all parties in the same work led the nation also over imperceptibly to the newly prepared ground. The fact that this reconciliation of the parties was for the moment only externaland that they were for the present much less agreed in adherence to the new state of things than in hatred against Caesar, did not mislead him; he knew well that antagonisms lose their keenness when brought into such outward union, and that only in this way can the statesman anticipate the work of time, which alone is able finally to heal such a strife by laying the old generation in the grave. Still less did he inquire who hated him or meditated his assassination. Like every genuine statesman he served not the people for reward - not even for the reward of their love - but sacrificed the favour of his contemporaries for the blessing of posterity, and above all for the permission to save and renew his nation.

  Caesar's Work

  In attempting to give a detailed account of the mode in which the transition was effected from the old to the new state of things, we must first of all recollect that Caesar came not to begin, but to complete. The plan of a new polity suited to the times, long ago projected by Gaius Gracchus, had been maintained by his adherents and successors with more or less of spirit and success, but without wavering. Caesar, from the outset and as it were by hereditary right the head of the popular party, had for thirty years borne aloft its banner without ever changing or even so much as concealing his colours; he remained democrat even when monarch.

  as he accepted without limitation, apart of course from the preposterous projects of Catilina and Clodius, the heritage of his party; as he displayed the bitterest, even personal, hatred to the aristocracy and the genuine aristocrats; and as he retained unchanged the essential ideas of Roman democracy, viz. alleviation of the burdens of debtors, transmarine colonization, gradual equalization of the differences of rights among the classes belonging to the state, emancipation of the executive power from the senate: his monarchy was so little at variance with democracy, that democracy on the contrary only attained its completion and fulfilment by means of that monarchy. For this monarchy was not the Oriental despotism of divine right, but a monarchy such as Gaius Gracchus wished to found, such as Pericles and Cromwell founded - the representation of the nation by the man in whom it puts supreme and unlimited confidence. The ideas, which lay at the foundation of Caesar's work, were so far not strictly new; but to him belongs their realization, which after all is everywhere the main matter; and to him pertains the grandeur of execution, which would probably have surprised the brilliant projector himself if he could have seen it, and which has impressed, and will always impress, every one to whom it has been presented in the living reality or in the mirror of history - to whatever historical epoch or whatever shade of politics he may belong - according to the measure of his ability to comprehend human and historical greatness, with deep and ever-deepening emotion and admiration.

  At this point however it is proper expressly once for all to claim what the historian everywhere tacitly presumes, and to protest against the custom - common to simplicity and perfidy - of using historical praise and historical censure, dissociated from the given circumstances, as phrases of general application, and in the present case of construing the judgment as to Caesar into a judgment as to what is called Caesarism. It is true that the history of past centuries ought to be the instructress of the present; but not in the vulgar sense, as if one could simply by turning over the leaves discover the conjunctures of the present in the records of the past, and collect from these the symptoms for a political diagnosis and the specifics for a prescription; it is instructive only so far as the observation of older forms of culture reveals the organic conditions of civilization generally - the fundamental forces everywhere alike, and the manner of their combination everywhere different - and leads and encourages men, not to unreflecting imitation, but to independent reproduction. In this sense the history of Caesar and of Roman Imperialism, with all the unsurpassed greatness of the master-worker, with all the historical necessity of the work, is in truth a sharper censure of modern autocracy than could be written by the hand of man. According to the same law of nature in virtue of which the smallest organism infinitely surpasses the most artistic machine, every constitution however defective which gives play to the free self-determination of a majority of citizens infinitely surpasses the most brilliant and humane absolutism; for the former is capable of development and therefore living, the latter is what it is and therefore dead. This law of nature has verified itself in the Roman absolute military monarchy and verified itself all the more completely, that, under the impulse of its creator's genius and in the absence of all material complications from without, that monarchy developed itself more purely and freely than any similar state. From Caesar's time, as the sequel will show and Gibbon has shown long ago, the Roman system had only an external coherence and received only a mechanical extension, while internally it became even with him utterly withered and dead. If in the early stages of the autocracy and above all in Caesar's own soul[5] the hopeful dream of a combination of free popular development and absolute rule was still cherished, the government of the highly-gifted emperors of the Julian house soon taught men in a terrible form how far it was possible to hold fire and water in the same vessel. Caesar's work was necessary and salutary, not because it was or could be fraught with blessing in itself, but because - with the national organization of antiquity, which was based on slavery and was utterly a stranger to republican-constitutional representation, and in presence of the legitimate urban constitution which in the course of five hundred years had ripened into oligarchic absolutism - absolute military monarchy was the copestone logically necessary and the least of evils. When once the slave-holding aristocracy in Virginia and the Carolinas shall have carried matters as far as their congeners in the Sullan Rome, Caesarism will there too be legitimized at the bar of the spirit of history[6]; where it appears under other conditions of development, it is at once a caricature and a usurpation. But history will not submit to curtail the true Caesar of his due honour, because her verdict may in the presence of bad Caesars lead simplicity astray and may give to roguery occasion for lying and fraud. She too is a Bible, and if she cannot any more than the Bible hinder the fool from misunderstanding and the devil from quoting her, she too will be able to bear with, and to requite, them both.

  Dictatorship

  The position of the new supreme head of the state appears formally, at least in the first instance, as a dictatorship. Caesar took it up at first after his return from Spain in 705, but laid it down again after a few days, and waged the decisive campaign of 706 simply as consul - this was the office his tenure of which was the primary occasion for the outbreak of the civil war[7], but in the autumn of this year after the battle of Pharsalus he reverted to the dictatorship and had it repeatedly entrusted to him, at first for an undefined period, but from the 1st January 709 as an annual office, and then in January or February 710[8] for the duration of his life, so that he in the end expressly dropped the earlier reservation as to his laying down the office and gave formal expression to its tenure for life in the new title of dictator perpetuus. This dictatorship, both in its first ephemeral and in its second enduring tenure, was not that of the old constitution, but - what was coincident with this merely in the name - the supreme exceptional office as arranged by Sulla[9]; an office, the functions of which were fixed, not by the constitutional ordinances regarding the supreme single magistracy, b
ut by special decree of the people, to such an effect that the holder received, in the commission to project laws and to regulate the commonwealth, an official prerogative de jure unlimited which superseded the republican partition of powers. Those were merely applications of this general prerogative to the particular case, when the holder of power was further entrusted by separate acts with the right of deciding on war and peace without consulting the senate and the people, with the independent disposal of armies and finances, and with the nomination of the provincial governors. Caesar could accordingly de jure assign to himself even such prerogatives as lay outside of the proper functions of the magistracy and even outside of the province of state-powers at all[10]; and it appears almost as a concession on his part, that he abstained from nominating the magistrates instead of the Comitia and limited himself to claiming a binding right of proposal for a proportion of the praetors and of the lower magistrates; and that he moreover had himself empowered by special decree of the people for the creation of patricians, which was not at all allowable according to use and wont.

  Other Magistracies and Attributions

  For other magistracies in the proper sense there remained alongside of this dictatorship no room; Caesar did not take up the censorship as such[11], but he doubtless exercised censorial rights - particularly the important right of nominating senators - after a comprehensive fashion.

  He held the consulship frequently alongside of the dictatorship, once even without colleague; but he by no means attached it permanently to his person, and he gave no effect to the calls addressed to him to undertake it for five or even for ten years in succession. Caesar had no need to have the superintendence of worship now committed to him, since he was already pontifex maximus[12]. as a matter of course the membership of the college of augurs was conferred on him, and generally an abundance of old and new honorary rights, such as the title of a "father of the fatherland", the designation of the month of his birth by the name which it still bears of Julius, and other manifestations of the incipient courtly tone which ultimately ran into utter deification. Two only of the arrangements deserve to be singled out: namely that Caesar was placed on the same footing with the tribunes of the people as regards their special personal inviolability, and that the appellation of Imperator was permanently attached to his person and borne by him as a title alongside of his other official designations.

  Men of judgment will not require any proof, either that Caesar intended to engraft on the commonwealth his supreme power, and this not merely for a few years or even as a personal office for an indefinite period somewhat like Sulla's regency, but as an essential and permanent organ; or that he selected for the new institution an appropriate and simple designation; for, if it is a political blunder to create names without substantial meaning, it is scarcely a less error to set up the substance of plenary power without a name. Only it is not easy to determine what definitive formal shape Caesar had in view; partly because in this period of transition the ephemeral and the permanent buildings are not clearly discriminated from each other, partly because the devotion of his clients which already anticipated the nod of their master loaded him with a multitude - offensive doubtless to himself - of decrees of confidence and laws conferring honours.

  Least of all could the new monarchy attach itself to the consulship, just on account of the collegiate character that could not well be separated from this office; Caesar also evidently laboured to degrade this hitherto supreme magistracy into an empty title, and subsequently, when he undertook it, he did not hold it through the whole year, but before the year expired gave it away to personages of secondary rank. The dictatorship came practically into prominence most frequently and most definitely, but probably only because Caesar wished to use it in the significance which it had of old in the constitutional machinery - as an extraordinary presidency for surmounting extraordinary crises. On the other hand it was far from recommending itself as an expression for the new monarchy, for the magistracy was inherently clothed with an exceptional and unpopular character, and it could hardly be expected of the representative of the democracy that he should choose for its permanent organization that form, which the most gifted champion of the opposing party had created for his own ends.

  The new name of Imperator, on the other hand, appears in every respect by far more appropriate for the formal expression of the monarchy; just because it is in this application[13] new, and no definite outward occasion for its introduction is apparent. The new wine might not be put into old bottles; here is a new name for the new thing, and that name most pregnantly sums up what the democratic party had already expressed in the Gabinian law, only with less precision, as the function of its chief - the concentration and perpetuation of official power (imperium) in the hands of a popular chief independent of the senate. We find on Caesar's coins, especially those of the last period, alongside of the dictatorship the title of Imperator prevailing, and in Caesar's law as to political crimes the monarch seems to have been designated by this name. Accordingly the following times, though not immediately, connected the monarchy with the name of Imperator. To lend to this new office at once a democratic and religious sanction, Caesar probably intended to associate with it once for all on the one hand the tribunician power, on the other the supreme pontificate.

  That the new organization was not meant to be restricted merely to the lifetime of its founder, is beyond doubt; but he did not succeed in settling the especially difficult question of the succession, and it must remain an undecided point whether he had it in view to institute some sort of form for the election of a successor, such as had subsisted in the case of the original kingly office, or whether he wished to introduce for the supreme office not merely the tenure for life but also the hereditary character, as his adopted son subsequently maintained[14]. It is not improbable that he had the intention of combining in some measure the two systems, and of arranging the succession, similarly to the course followed by Cromwell and by Napoleon, in such a way that the ruler should be succeeded in rule by his son, but, if he had no son, or the son should not seem fitted for the succession, the ruler should of his free choice nominate his successor in the form of adoption.

  In point of state law the new office of Imperator was based on the position which the consuls or proconsuls occupied outside of the pomerium, so that primarily the military command, but, along with this, the supreme judicial and consequently also the administrative power, were included in it[15]. But the authority of the Imperator was qualitatively superior to the consular-proconsular, in so far as the former was not limited as respected time or space, but was held for life and operative also in the capital[16]; as the Imperator could not, while the consul could, be checked by colleagues of equal power; and as all the restrictions placed in course of time on the original supreme official power - especially the obligation to give place to the provocatio and to respect the advice of the senate - did not apply to the Imperator.

  Re-establishment of the Regal Office

  In a word, this new office of Imperator was nothing else than the primitive regal office re-established; for it was those very restrictions - as respected the temporal and local limitation of power, the collegiate arrangement, and the cooperation of the senate or the community that was necessary for certain cases - which distinguished the consul from the king[17]. There is hardly a trait of the new monarchy which was not found in the old: the union of the supreme military, judicial, and administrative authority in the hands of the prince; a religious presidency over the commonwealth; the right of issuing ordinances with binding power; the reduction of the senate to a council of state; the revival of the patriciate and of the praefecture of the city. But still more striking than these analogies is the internal similarity of the monarchy of Servius Tullius and the monarchy of Caesar; if those old kings of Rome with all their plenitude of power had yet been rulers of a free community and themselves the protectors of the commons against the nobility, Caesar too had not come to destroy liberty but to f
ulfil it, and primarily to break the intolerable yoke of the aristocracy. Nor need it surprise us that Caesar, anything but a political antiquary, went back five hundred years to find the model for his new state; for, seeing that the highest office of the Roman commonwealth had remained at all times a kingship restricted by a number of special laws, the idea of the regal office itself had by no means become obsolete.

  At very various periods and from very different sides - in the decemviral power, in the Sullan regency, and in Caesar's own dictatorship - there had been during the republic a practical recurrence to it; indeed by a certain logical necessity, whenever an exceptional power seemed requisite there emerged, in contradistinction to the usual limited imperium, the unlimited imperium which was simply nothing else than the regal power.

  Lastly, outward considerations also recommended this recurrence to the former kingly position. Mankind have infinite difficulty in reaching new creations, and therefore cherish the once developed forms as sacred heirlooms. Accordingly Caesar very judiciously connected himself with Servius Tullius, in the same way as subsequently Charlemagne connected himself with Caesar, and Napoleon attempted at least to connect himself with Charlemagne. He did so, not in a circuitous way and secretly, but, as well as his successors, in the most open manner possible; it was indeed the very object of this connection to find a clear, national, and popular form of expression for the new state. From ancient times there stood on the Capitol the statues of those seven kings, whom the conventional history of Rome was wont to bring on the stage; Caesar ordered his own to be erected beside them as the eighth. He appeared publicly in the costume of the old kings of Alba.