The Historians' History of the World 05

The liberal tendency of the dictator’s mind was shown by the manner in which he supplied the great gaps which the Civil War had made in the benches of the senate. Of late years the number of that assembly had been increased from its original three hundred.[126] Cicero on one occasion mentions 415 members taking part in the votes, and many of course were absent. But Cæsar raised it to nine hundred, thus greatly exceeding the largest number that had ever been counted in its ranks. Many of the new senators were fortunate soldiers who had served him well. In raising such men to senatorial rank he followed the example of Sulla. Many also were enfranchised citizens of the towns of Cisalpine Gaul. The old citizens were indignant at this invasion of barbarians. “The Gauls,” said one wit, “had exchanged the trews [trousers] for the toga, and had followed the conqueror’s triumphal car into the senate.” “It were a good deed,” said another, “if no one would show the new senators the way to the house.”

The curule offices, however, were still conferred on men of Italian birth. The first foreigner who reached the consulship was Balbus, a Spaniard of Gades, the friend of Cæsar; this was four years after the dictator’s death.

To revive a military population in Italy was not so much the object of Cæsar as that of former leaders of the people. His veterans received few assignments of land in Italy. The principal settlements by which he enriched them were in the provinces. Corinth and Carthage were made military colonies, and regained somewhat of their ancient splendour and renown.

He endeavoured to restore the wasted population of Italy by more peaceful methods. The marriage tie, which had become exceedingly lax in these profligate times, was encouraged by somewhat singular means. A married matron was allowed to use more ornaments and more costly carriages than the sumptuary laws of Rome permitted to women generally. A married man who had three children born in lawful wedlock at Rome, or four born in Italy, or five born in the provinces, enjoyed freedom from certain duties.

The great abuse of slave labour was difficult to correct. It was attempted to apply remedies familiar to despotic governments. An ordinance was issued that no citizens between twenty and forty years of age should be absent from Italy for more than three years. An ancient enactment was revived that on all estates at least one-third of the labourers should be free men. No doubt these measures were of little effect.d

Viewing the dominions over which he presided as a whole, endowed, or speedily to be endowed with a general equality of rights, and Rome herself no longer as an isolated municipium and a mistress-city, but the centre and capital of the Roman world, he proceeded to lay the groundwork of a comprehensive scheme of universal legislation. His first care was to develop the material unity of the vast regions before him, by an elaborate survey of their local features. A commission of geographers and mathematicians was appointed, as we have just said, to construct the map of the Roman Empire, a work so novel and so full of detail, as to require the labour, as it afterwards proved, of no less than thirty-two years. Another effort, not less gigantic, was required to impress a moral unity upon this vast machine. Cæsar prepared to collect and combine in a single code the fragments of Roman law, dispersed in thousands of precedents, the edicts of the prætors, the replies of the learned, the decisions of pontiffs, and the traditions of patrician houses. Such a mighty work had already been contemplated by Cicero, as the hopeless vision of the philanthropist and philosopher; but Cæsar’s practical sagacity saw that it not only ought to be done, but could be done, and doubtless had he but lived ten or twenty years longer, he would have anticipated by six centuries the glory of the imperial legislator Justinian.