The History of Rome, Book V - Theodor Mommsen
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Caesar's Project of Codification
Such was the state of the law as Caesar found it. If he projected
the plan for a new code, it is not difficult to say what were
his intentions. This code could only comprehend the law of Roman
burgesses, and could be a general code for the empire merely so far as
a code of the ruling nation suitable to the times could not
but of itself become general subsidiary law throughout the compass
of the empire. In criminal law, if the plan embraced this at all,
there was needed only a revision and adjustment of the Sullan
ordinances. In civil law, for a state whose nationality
was properly humanity, the necessary and only possible formal shape
was to invest that urban edict, which had already spontaneously grown
out of lawful commerce, with the security and precision of statute-law.
The first step towards this had been taken by the Cornelian law
of 687, when it enjoined the judge to keep to the maxims set forth
at the beginning of his magistracy and not arbitrarily
to administer other law (108)--a regulation, which may well
be compared with the law of the Twelve Tables, and which became
almost as significant for the fixing of the later urban law
as that collection for the fixing of the earlier. But although
after the Cornelian decree of the people the edict was no longer
subordinate to the judge, but the judge was by law subject to the edict;
and though the new code had practically dispossessed the old urban law
in judicial usage as in legal instruction--every urban judge
was still free at his entrance on office absolutely and arbitrarily
to alter the edict, and the law of the Twelve Tables with its additions
still always outweighed formally the urban edict, so that
in each individual case of collision the antiquated rule had to be
set aside by arbitrary interference of the magistrates,
and therefore, strictly speaking, by violation of formal law.
The subsidiary application of the urban edict in the court
of the -praetor peregrinus- at Rome and in the different provincial
judicatures was entirely subject to the arbitrary pleasure
of the individual presiding magistrates. It was evidently necessary
to set aside definitely the old urban law, so far as it had not
been transferred to the newer, and in the case of the latter
to set suitable limits to its arbitrary alteration by each individual
urban judge, possibly also to regulate its subsidiary application
by the side of the local statutes. This was Caesars design,
when he projected the plan for his code; for it could not have been
otherwise. The plan was not executed; and thus that troublesome
state of transition in Roman jurisprudence was perpetuated
till this necessary reform was accomplished six centuries afterwards,
and then but imperfectly, by one of the successors of Caesar,
the Emperor Justinian.
Lastly, in money, measures, and weights the substantial equalization
of the Latin and Hellenic systems had long been in progress.
It was very ancient so far as concerned the definitions of weight
and the measures of capacity and of length indispensable for trade
and commerce,(109) and in the monetary system little more recent
than the introduction of the silver coinage.(110) But these older
equations were not sufficient, because in the Hellenic world itself
the most varied metrical and monetary systems subsisted side by side;
it was necessary, and formed part doubtless of Caesar's plan,
now to introduce everywhere in the new united empire, so far as
this had not been done already, Roman money, Roman measures,
and Roman weights in such a manner that they alone should be reckoned
by in official intercourse, and that the non-Roman systems
should be restricted to local currency or placed in a--once for all
regulated--ratio to the Roman.(111) The action of Caesar,
however, can only be pointed out in two of the most important
of these departments, the monetary system and the calendar.
Gold Coin as Imperial Currency
The Roman monetary system was based on the two precious metals
circulating side by side and in a fixed relation to each other,
gold being given and taken according to weight,(112) silver
in the form of coin; but practically in consequence of the extensive
transmarine intercourse the gold far preponderated over the silver.
Whether the acceptance of Roman silver money was not even
at an earlier period obligatory throughout the empire, is uncertain;
at any rate uncoined gold essentially supplied the place of imperial
money throughout the Roman territory, the more so as the Romans
had prohibited the coining of gold in all the provinces and client-
states, and the -denarius- had, in addition to Italy, de jure
or de facto naturalized itself in Cisalpine Gaul, in Sicily,
in Spain and various other places, especially in the west.(113)
but the imperial coinage begins with Caesar. Exactly like Alexander,
he marked the foundation of the new monarchy embracing the civilized
world by the fact that the only metal forming an universal medium
obtained the first place in the coinage. The greatness of the scale
on which the new Caesarian gold piece (20 shillings 7 pence
according to the present value of the metal) was immediately coined,
is shown by the fact that in a single treasure buried seven years
after Caesar's death 80,000 of these pieces were found together.
It is true that financial speculations may have exercised
a collateral influence in this respect.(114) as to the silver money,
the exclusive rule of the Roman -denarius- in all the west,
for which the foundation had previously been laid, was finally
established by Caesar, when he definitively closed the only
Occidental mint that still competed in silver currency with the Roman,
that of Massilia. The coining of silver or copper small money
was still permitted to a number of Occidental communities;
three-quarter -denarii- were struck by some Latin communities
of southern Gaul, half -denarii- by several cantons in northern Gaul,
copper small coins in various instances even after Caesar's time
by communes of the west; but this small money was throughout coined
after the Roman standard, and its acceptance moreover was probably
obligatory only in local dealings. Caesar does not seem any more
than the earlier government to have contemplated the regulation
with a view to unity of the monetary system of the east,
where great masses of coarse silver money--much of which too easily
admitted of being debased or worn away--and to some extent even,
as in Egypt, a copper coinage akin to our paper money
were in circulation, and the Syrian commercial cities would have felt
very severely the want of their previous national coinage corresponding
to the Mesopotamian currency. We find here subsequently
the arrangement that the -denarius- has everywhere legal currency
and is the only medium of official reckoning,(115) while the local coins
have legal currency within their limited range but according
to a tariff unfavourable for them as compared with the -denarius-.(116)
This was probably not introduced all at once, and in part perhaps
may have preceded Caesar; but it was at any rate the essential
complement of the Caesarian arrangement as to the imperial coinage,
whose new gold piece found its immediate model in the almost equally
heavy coin of Alexander and was doubtless calculated especially
for circulation in the east.
Reform of the Calendar
Of a kindred nature was the reform of the calendar.
The republican calendar, which strangely enough was still
the old decemviral calendar--an imperfect adoption of the -octaeteris-
that preceded Meton (117)--had by a combination of wretched mathematics
and wretched administration come to anticipate the true time
by 67 whole days, so that e. g. the festival of Flora was celebrated
on the 11th July instead of the 28th April. Caesar finally removed
this evil, and with the help of the Greek mathematician Sosigenes
introduced the Italian farmer's year regulated according to the Egyptian
calendar of Eudoxus, as well as a rational system of intercalation,
into religious and official use; while at the same time
the beginning of the year on the 1st March of the old calendar
was abolished, and the date of the 1st January--fixed at first
as the official term for changing the supreme magistrates and,
in consequence of this, long since prevailing in civil life--
was assumed also as the calendar-period for commencing the year.
Both changes came into effect on the 1st January 709, and along
with them the use of the Julian calendar so named after its author,
which long after the fall of the monarchy of Caesar remained
the regulative standard of the civilized world and in the main
is so still. By way of explanation there was added in a detailed edict
a star-calendar derived from the Egyptian astronomical observations
and transferred--not indeed very skilfully--to Italy, which fixed
the rising and setting of the stars named according to days
of the calendar.(118) In this domain also the Roman and Greek worlds
were thus placed on a par.
Caesar and His Works
Such were the foundations of the Mediterranean monarchy of Caesar.
For the second time in Rome the social question had reached
a crisis, at which the antagonisms not only appeared to be,
but actually were, in the form of their exhibition, insoluble and,
in the form of their expression, irreconcilable. On the former
occasion Rome had been saved by the fact that Italy was merged
in Rome and Rome in Italy, and in the new enlarged and altered home
those old antagonisms were not reconciled, but fell into abeyance.
Now Rome was once more saved by the fact that the countries
of the Mediterranean were merged in it or became prepared for merging;
the war between the Italian poor and rich, which in the old Italy
could only end with the destruction of the nation, had no longer
a battle-field or a meaning in the Italy of three continents.
The Latin colonies closed the gap which threatened to swallow up
the Roman community in the fifth century; the deeper chasm
of the seventh century was filled by the Transalpine and transmarine
colonizations of Gaius Gracchus and Caesar. For Rome alone history
not merely performed miracles, but also repeated its miracles,
and twice cured the internal crisis, which in the state itself
was incurable, by regenerating the state. There was doubtless
much corruption in this regeneration; as the union of Italy
was accomplished over the ruins of the Samnite and Etruscan nations,
so the Mediterranean monarchy built itself on the ruins of countless
states and tribes once living and vigorous; but it was a corruption
out of which sprang a fresh growth, part of which remains green
at the present day. What was pulled down for the sake of the new
building, was merely the secondary nationalities which had long since
been marked out for destruction by the levelling hand of civilization.
Caesar, wherever he came forward as a destroyer, only carried out
the pronounced verdict of historical development; but he protected
the germs of culture, where and as he found them, in his own land
as well as among the sister nation of the Hellenes. He saved
and renewed the Roman type; and not only did he spare the Greek type,
but with the same self-relying genius with which he accomplished
the renewed foundation of Rome he undertook also the regeneration
of the Hellenes, and resumed the interrupted work of the great Alexander,
whose image, we may well believe, never was absent from Caesar's soul.
He solved these two great tasks not merely side by side,
but the one by means of the other. The two great essentials
of humanity--general and individual development, or state and culture--
once in embryo united in those old Graeco-Italians feeding their flocks
in primeval simplicity far from the coasts and islands
of the Mediterranean, had become dissevered when these were parted
into Italians and Hellenes, and had thenceforth remained apart
for many centuries. Now the descendant of the Trojan prince
and the Latin king's daughter created out of a state without
distinctive culture and a cosmopolitan civilization a new whole,
in which state and culture again met together at the acme
of human existence in the rich fulness of blessed maturity
and worthily filled the sphere appropriate to such an union.
The outlines have thus been set forth, which Caesar drew for this work,
according to which he laboured himself, and according to which posterity--
for many centuries confined to the paths which this great man marked out--
endeavoured to prosecute the work, if not with the intellect
and energy, yet on the whole in accordance with the intentions,
of the illustrious master. Little was finished; much even
was merely begun. Whether the plan was complete, those who venture
to vie in thought with such a man may decide; we observe no material
defect in what lies before us--every single stone of the building
enough to make a man immortal, and yet all combining to form
one harmonious whole. Caesar ruled as king of Rome for five years
and a half, not half as long as Alexander; in the intervals
of seven great campaigns, which allowed him to stay not more
than fifteen months altogether(119) in the capital of his empire,
he regulated the destinies of the world for the present
and the future, from the establishment of the boundary-line
between civilization and barbarism down to the removal of the pools
of rain in the streets of the capital, and yet retained time
and composure enough attentively to follow the prize-pieces in the theatre
and to confer the chaplet on the victor with improvised verses.
The rapidity and self-precision with which the plan was executed
prove that it had been long meditated thoroughly and all its parts
settled in detail; but, even thus, they remain not much less wonderful than
the plan itself. The outlines were laid down and thereby the new state
was defined for all coming time; the boundless future alone could complete
the structure. So far Caesar might say, that his aim was attained;
and this was probably the meaning of the words which were sometimes
heard to fall from him--that he had "lived enough." But precisely because
the building was an endless one, the master as long as he lived restlessly
added stone to stone, with always the same dexterity and always the same
elasticity busy at his work, without ever overturning or postponing,
just as if there were for him merely a to-day and no to-morrow.
Thus he worked and created as never did any mortal before or after him;
and as a worker and creator he still, after wellnigh two thousand years,
lives in the memory of the nations--the first, and withal unique,
Imperator Caesar.
Chapter XII
Religion, Culture, Literature, and Art
State Religion
In the development of religion and philosophy no new element
appeared during this epoch. The Romano-Hellenic state-religion
and the Stoic state-philosophy inseparably combined with it
were for every government--oligarchy, democracy or monarchy--not merely
a convenient instrument, but quite indispensable for the very reason
that it was just as impossible to construct the state wholly without
religious elements as to discover any new state-religion fitted
to take the place of the old. So the besom of revolution swept doubtless
at times very roughly through the cobwebs of the augural bird-lore;(1)
nevertheless the rotten machine creaking at every joint
survived the earthquake which swallowed up the republic itself,
and preserved its insipidity and its arrogance without diminution
for transference to the new monarchy. As a matter of course,
it fell more and more into disfavour with all those who preserved
their freedom of judgment. Towards the state-religion indeed
public opinion maintained an attitude essentially indifferent;
it was on all sides recognized as an institution of political convenience,
and no one specially troubled himself about it with the exception
of political and antiquarian literati. But towards its philosophical
sister there gradually sprang up among the unprejudiced public
that hostility, which the empty and yet perfidious hypocrisy of set phrases
never fails in the long run to awaken. That a presentiment of its own
worthlessness began to dawn on the Stoa itself, is shown by its attempt
artificially to infuse into itself some fresh spirit in the way
of syncretism. Antiochus of Ascalon (flourishing about 675), who professed
to have patched together the Stoic and Platonic-Aristotelian systems
into one organic unity, in reality so far succeeded that his misshapen
doctrine became the fashionable philosophy of the conservatives
of his time and was conscientiously studied by the genteel dilettanti
and literati of Rome. Every one who displayed any intellectual vigour,
opposed the Stoa or ignored it. It was principally antipathy
towards the boastful and tiresome Roman Pharisees, coupled doubtless
with the increasing disposition to take refuge from practical life
in indolent apathy or empty irony, that occasioned during this epoch
the extension of the system of Epicurus to a larger circle
and the naturalization of the Cynic philosophy of Diogenes in Rome.
However stale and poor in thought the former might be, a philosophy,
which did not seek the way to wisdom through an alteration
of traditional terms but contented itself with those in existence,
and throughout recognized only the perceptions of sense as true,
was always better than the terminological jingle and the hollow
conceptions of the Stoic wisdom; and the Cynic philosophy
was of all the philosophical systems of the times in so far
by much the best, as its system was confined to the having
no system at all and sneering at all systems and all systematizers.
In both fields war was waged against the Stoa with zeal and success;
for serious men, the Epicurean Lucretius preached with the full accents
of heartfelt conviction and of holy zeal against the Stoical faith
in the gods and providence and the Stoical doctrine of the immortality
of the soul; for the great public ready to laugh, the Cynic Varro
hit the mark still more sharply with the flying darts of his extensively-
read satires. While thus the ablest men of the older generation
made war on the Stoa, the younger generation again, such as Catullus,
stood in no inward relation to it at all, and passed a far sharper
censure on it by completely ignoring it.
The Oriental Religions
But, if in the present instance a faith no longer believed in
was maintained out of political convenience, they amply made up
for this in other respects. Unbelief and superstition, different hues
of the same historical phenomenon, went in the Roman world
of that day hand in hand, and there was no lack of individuals
who in themselves combined both--who denied the gods with Epicurus,
and yet prayed and sacrificed before every shrine. Of course only
the gods that came from the east were still in vogue, and, as the men
continued to flock from the Greek lands to Italy, so the gods
of the east migrated in ever-increasing numbers to the west.
The importance of the Phrygian cultus at that time in Rome is shown
both by the polemical tone of the older men such as Varro and Lucretius,
and by the poetical glorification of it in the fashionable Catullus,
which concludes with the characteristic request that the goddess
may deign to turn the heads of others only, and not that
of the poet himself.
Worship of Mithra
A fresh addition was the Persian worship, which is said
to have first reached the Occidental through the medium of the pirates
who met on the Mediterranean from the east and from the west;
the oldest seat of this cultus in the west is stated to have been
Mount Olympus in Lycia. That in the adoption of Oriental worships
in the west such higher speculative and moral elements as they contained
were generally allowed to drop, is strikingly evinced by the fact
that Ahuramazda, the supreme god of the pure doctrine of Zarathustra,
remained virtually unknown in the west, and adoration there
was especially directed to that god who had occupied the first place
in the old Persian national religion and had been transferred
by Zarathustra to the second--the sun-god Mithra.
Worship of Isis
But the brighter and gentler celestial forms of the Persian religion
did not so rapidly gain a footing in Rome as the wearisome mystical host
of the grotesque divinities of Egypt--Isis the mother of nature
with her whole train, the constantly dying and constantly reviving
Osiris, the gloomy Sarapis, the taciturn and grave Harpocrates,
the dog-headed Anubis. In the year when Clodius emancipated
the clubs and conventicles (696), and doubtless in consequence
of this very emancipation of the populace, that host even prepared
to make its entry into the old stronghold of the Roman Jupiter
in the Capitol, and it was with difficulty that the invasion
was prevented and the inevitable temples were banished
at least to the suburbs of Rome. No worship was equally popular
among the lower orders of the population in the capital: when the senate
ordered the temples of Isis constructed within the ring-wall
to be pulled down, no labourer ventured to lay the first hand on them,
and the consul Lucius Paullus was himself obliged to apply
the first stroke of the axe(704); a wager might be laid,
that the more loose any woman was, the more piously she worshipped Isis.
That the casting of lots, the interpretation of dreams, and similar
liberal arts supported their professors, was a matter of course.
The casting of horoscopes was already a scientific pursuit;
Lucius Tarutius of Firmum, a respectable and in his own way learned man,
a friend of Varro and Cicero, with all gravity cast the nativity
of kings Romulus and Numa and of the city of Rome itself,
and for the edification of the credulous on either side confirmed
by means of his Chaldaean and Egyptian wisdom the accounts
of the Roman annals.
The New Pythagoreanism
Nigidius Figulus
But by far the most remarkable phenomenon in this domain
was the first attempt to mingle crude faith with speculative thought,
the first appearance of those tendencies, which we are accustomed
to describe as Neo-Platonic, in the Roman world. Their oldest apostle
there was Publius Nigidius Figulus, a Roman of rank belonging
to the strictest section of the aristocracy, who filled
the praetorship in 696 and died in 709 as a political exile
beyond the bounds of Italy. With astonishing copiousness of learning
and still more astonishing strength of faith he created
out of the most dissimilar elements a philosophico-religious structure,
the singular outline of which he probably developed still more
in his oral discourses than in his theological and physical writings.
In philosophy, seeking deliverance from the skeletons of the current
systems and abstractions, he recurred to the neglected fountain
of the pre-Socratic philosophy, to whose ancient sages thought
had still presented itself with sensuous vividness. The researches
of physical science--which, suitably treated, afford even now
so excellent a handle for mystic delusion and pious sleight of hand,
and in antiquity with its more defective insight into physical laws
lent themselves still more easily to such objects--played in this case,
as may readily be conceived, a considerable part. His theology
was based essentially on that strange medley, in which Greeks
of a kindred spirit had intermingled Orphic and other very old
or very new indigenous wisdom with Persian, Chaldaean,
and Egyptian secret doctrines, and with which Figulus incorporated
the quasi-results of the Tuscan investigation into nothingness
and of the indigenous lore touching the flight of birds,
so as to produce further harmonious confusion. The whole system obtained
its consecration--political, religious, and national--from the name
of Pythagoras, the ultra-conservative statesman whose supreme principle
was "to promote order and to check disorder," the miracle-worker
and necromancer, the primeval sage who was a native of Italy,
who was interwoven even with the legendary history of Rome,
and whose statue was to be seen in the Roman Forum. As birth
and death are kindred with each other, so--it seemed--Pythagoras
was to stand not merely by the cradle of the republic as friend
of the wise Numa and colleague of the sagacious mother Egeria,
but also by its grave as the last protector of the sacred bird-lore.
But the new system was not merely marvellous, it also worked marvels;
Nigidius announced to the father of the subsequent emperor Augustus,
on the very day when the latter was born, the future greatness
of his son; nay the prophets conjured up spirits for the credulous,
and, what was of more moment, they pointed out to them the places
where their lost money lay. The new-and-old wisdom, such as it was,
made a profound impression on its contemporaries; men of the highest rank,
of the greatest learning, of the most solid ability, belonging
to very different parties--the consul of 705, Appius Claudius,
the learned Marcus Varro, the brave officer Publius Vatinius--
took part in the citation of spirits, and it even appears
that a police interference was necessary against the proceedings
of these societies. These last attempts to save the Roman theology,
like the kindred efforts of Cato in the field of politics, produce at once
a comical and a melancholy impression; we may smile at the creed
and its propagators, but still it is a grave matter when even able men
begin to addict themselves to absurdity.