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n 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. 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 fulfil 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. (en) |
