Regulation of Africa

Without resistance Caesar regulated the affairs of Africa.  As Curio had already proposed, the kingdom of Massinissa was broken up.  The most eastern portion or region of Sitifis was united with the kingdom of Bocchus king of East Mauretania,(51) and the faithful king Bogud of Tingis was rewarded with considerable gifts.  Cirta (Constantine) and the surrounding district, hitherto possessed under the supremacy of Juba by the prince Massinissa and his son Arabion, were conferred on the condottiere Publius Sittius that he might settle his half-Roman bands there;(52) but at the same time this district, as well as by far the largest and most fertile portion of the late Numidian kingdom, were united as “New Africa” with the older province of Africa, and the defence of the country along the coast against the roving tribes of the desert, which the republic had entrusted to a client-king, was imposed by the new ruler on the empire itself.

The Victory of Monarchy

The struggle, which Pompeius and the republicans had undertaken against the monarchy of Caesar, thus terminated, after having lasted for four years, in the complete victory of the new monarch.  No doubt the monarchy was not established for the first time on the battle-fields of Pharsalus and Thapsus; it might already be dated from the moment when Pompeius and Caesar in league had established their joint rule and overthrown the previous aristocratic constitution.  Yet it was only those baptisms of blood of the ninth August 706 and the sixth April 708 that set aside the conjoint rule so opposed to the nature of absolute dominion, and conferred fixed status and formal recognition on the new monarchy.  Risings of pretenders and republican conspiracies might ensue and provoke new commotions, perhaps even new revolutions and restorations; but the continuity of the free republic that had been uninterrupted for five hundred years was broken through, and monarchy was established throughout the range of the wide Roman empire by the legitimacy of accomplished fact.

The End of the Republic

The constitutional struggle was at an end; and that it was so, was proclaimed by Marcus Cato when he fell on his sword at Utica.  For many years he had been the foremost man in the struggle of the legitimate republic against its oppressors; he had continued it, long after he had ceased to cherish any hope of victory.  But now the struggle itself had become impossible; the republic which Marcus Brutus had founded was dead and never to be revived; what were the republicans now to do on the earth?  The treasure was carried off, the sentinels were thereby relieved; who could blame them if they departed?  There was more nobility, and above all more judgment, in the death of Cato than there had been in his life.  Cato was anything but a great man; but with all that short-sightedness, that perversity, that dry prolixity, and those spurious phrases which have stamped him, for his own and for