and the meagreness of the result was commensurate with the crudity of the methods. Octavius was enough of a financier to have little respect for Rome’s financial apparatus.
He was enough of a moralist and philosopher, too, to be uneasy about less ponderable things. In the lower classes the old Roman stock was nearly extinct, and the men who voted in the Assembly were a conglomerate of all races. It has been calculated that some ninety per cent. were of foreign extraction,1 and their source of origin was largely the East. The poorer citizens were little more than parasites, fed with free state bread, amused, by free state shows, superb material for the demagogue. The middle classes were rarely industrialists or merchants in the honourable sense; the rich among them made their fortunes chiefly by farming the state rents and taxes, by army contracts, by dealing in slaves, and by a kind of banking which might be better described as speculative money-lending.1 The aristocrats by birth had either joined the “new men” in the race for wealth, or had become stiff relic-worshippers and pedants of ancestry. As sprung himself from the bourgeoisie, Octavius had suffered from their loutish arrogance. Except in the rural districts and a few old-fashioned city homes the traditional Roman “gravitas” and “pietas” had become things of the past.
It was not a pleasing picture to contemplate for a young man, country-bred, gravely educated, a lover of a life that seemed to be vanishing and of a past separated by a great gulf from the present. One thing was clear. The elaborate checks and balances of the constitution had resulted only in the loss of all responsibility. That constitution was “the chaotic result of attempts to arrest internal revolution, and of feeble and undirected efforts to adjust the relation of outworn powers. A state in which three popular assemblies has each the right of eliciting the sovereign will of the people, possesses no organization which can satisfy the need for which constitutions exist—the ordered arrangement of all the wants of civic life by means of a series of acts possessing perpetual validity.”2 The position of the Senate was no less anomalous and impotent. The power of the holders of successive High Commands was a return to barbarism. The whole of Rome’s government had broken down, and what was to replace it? Could it ever be replaced? Could a people that had failed to rule a city rule the world? Had not Rome’s success been her ruin?
He had heard the Senate’s defence, put magisterially by Cicero and angrily by the ordinary conservative. It was simply that the Republic had worked well enough till the machine was put out of gear by the triumvirate of Julius and Pompey and Crassus. The constitution was a balanced thing, as the Greek Polybius had long ago argued, an adroit mingling of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. The magistrates, with their right of initiative in Senate and Assembly, had ample executive powers, which were tempered by the Senate’s authority in matters of policy. The veto of the tribunes protected the individual. The Senate represented the embodied ability and experience of the state, while the popular election of magistrates gave public opinion a constitutional means of expressing itself.1 Let Rome return to the beaten track, to the old ways, and all would be well. But to the young man’s clear mind it was plain that there could be no such returning. The traditional machine had been cranky for a century and was now damaged past repair. So long as there was an empire the High Commands must remain, and with them the dictatorial armies with whom the power lay. Was there any solution? Must the choice lie between the dynasts and the bombasts, between barbarism and muddle?
These were academic meditations, Octavius suddenly reminded himself, for he had forgotten Julius. The dynast, who was his great-uncle, had driven all others from the field, and had the Senate awed into stillness by his shadow and the world quiet under his hand. This man had a new way of life for Rome. Octavius had heard him expound it during late watches in the camp, in his quiet reedy voice, when the eyes in the lean face seemed in the lamplight to have the masterful luminosity of Jove’s eagle. He had heard the matter discussed by Julius’s friends. Word had come during later weeks to Apollonia of edicts which were the first steps in the new policy. He tried to piece the fragments into a body of doctrine.
Law and order must be restored. The empire must be governed, and there must be a centre of power. The Roman world required a single administrative system. This could not be given by the People, for a mob could not govern. It could not be given by the Senate, which had shown itself in the highest degree incompetent, and in any case had no means of holding the soldiers’ loyalty. Only a man could meet the need, a man who had the undivided allegiance of an army, and that the only army. A general without an army was a cypher, as Pompey had found, and, since an army was now a necessity, he who controlled it must be the master of the state. The idea of a personal sovereign, which had come from Greece and the East and had long been hovering at the back of Roman minds, must now become a fact, for it was the only alternative to anarchy.
This was Julius’s cardinal principle. It followed from it that the old autocracy of the Optimates and the Senate must disappear. That indeed had happened. Julius had always denied—it was one of the few charges which annoyed him—that he had destroyed the Republic; he had only struck at the tyranny of a maleficent growth which had nothing republican about it. He had already quietly shelved the Senate, though he treated it with elaborate respect. He and the new civil service which he was creating would be the mechanism of rule. He himself would appoint all the provincial governors and would be responsible for their honesty and competence. He would rebuild the empire on a basis of reason and humanity.
It was to be a new kind of empire. Something had been drawn from the dreams of Alexander, but for the most part it was the creation of his own profound and audacious mind. There were to be wide local liberties. He proposed to decentralize, to establish local government in Italy as the beginning of a world-wide system of free municipalities. Rome was to be only the greatest among many great and autonomous cities. There was to be a universal Roman nation, not a city with a host of servile provinces, and citizenship in it should be open to all who were worthy.1 The decadence of the Roman plebs would be redeemed by the virility of the new peoples.
It was a great conception, and, as expounded by Julius’s eager, winning voice, with his famous “facultas dicendi imperatoria,” it had at first fired the young man’s fancy. It was practical too, not the whimsy of a philosopher but the policy of an experienced statesman. Combined with it were elaborate legal and financial reforms. There was a broad scheme of economic development, of which Octavius was getting word from correspondents who knew his interest in such things; colonizing on the grand scale, state help for Italian agriculture and empire commerce, new ports and harbours, the reclamation of waste lands, a ship canal through the isthmus of Corinth, the rebuilding of derelict cities which were commercial key-points. The spirit which had conquered a world was busy re-shaping that world.
The first impact of this policy on Octavius’s mind had left it in bewildered and docile admiration. But, as he thought over it during the winter months, he had begun to doubt not the wisdom but the feasibility of some of it. He did not care greatly for the imperial citizenship idea. He believed that the Italian race was immeasurably the superior of any other, and he did not wish to see it lost in a polyglot welter. He came of a business stock which prided itself on its tact des choses possibles. Conservative stock, too, for at least half of his kin had been on the side of the Optimates. He loved the old ways of the land, and had no natural craving for revolution. Militarism in itself he distrusted. So did Julius, who had often declared that no nation could be permanently ruled by martial law; but was the military element not dominant in his great-uncle’s plan? He had cordially disliked the wild talk he had heard in the camp from excited soldiers and in Rome from Caesarian demagogues. As he read the case, the world demanded peace and law, not liberties and privileges. That meant a return to the settled ways with which men were familiar, which in turn meant the restoration in some form of the Republic. Now to the ordinary Roman the Republic was meaningless without the Senate, and the Senate Julius had turned into a farce. There was a deep-seated public opinion which even genius could not flout with impunity. If Julius had not had this preponderantly on his side after he crossed the Rubicon he would never have defeated Pompey. In the long run popular sentiment would wear down the glory of any conqueror. The tough, exclusive urban conservatism of the old city-state was still a potent
