and that persons even of the highest rank had to wait for hours in the antechamber.  People felt, more clearly than was agreeable to Caesar himself, that they no longer approached a fellow-citizen.  There arose a monarchical aristocracy, which was in a remarkable manner at once new and old, and which had sprung out of the idea of casting into the shade the aristocracy of the oligarchy by that of royalty, the nobility by the patriciate.  The patrician body still subsisted, although without essential privileges as an order, in the character of a close aristocratic guild;(19) but as it could receive no new -gentes-(20) it had dwindled away more and more in the course of centuries, and in the time of Caesar there were not more than fifteen or sixteen patrician -gentes- still in existence.  Caesar, himself sprung from one of them, got the right of creating new patrician -gentes- conferred on the Imperator by decree of the people, and so established, in contrast to the republican nobility, the new aristocracy of the patriciate, which most happily combined all the requisites of a monarchical aristocracy—­the charm of antiquity, entire dependence on the government, and total insignificance.  On all sides the new sovereignty revealed itself.

Under a monarch thus practically unlimited there could hardly be scope for a constitution at all—­still less for a continuance of the hitherto existing commonwealth based on the legal co-operation of the burgesses, the senate, and the several magistrates.  Caesar fully and definitely reverted to the tradition of the regal period; the burgess-assembly remained—­what it had already been, in that period—­ by the side of and with the king the supreme and ultimate expression of the will of the sovereign people; the senate was brought back to its original destination of giving advice to the ruler when he requested it; and lastly the ruler concentrated in his person anew the whole magisterial authority, so that there existed no other independent state-official by his side any more than by the side of the kings of the earliest times.

Legislation
Edicts

For legislation the democratic monarch adhered to the primitive maxim of Roman state-law, that the community of the people in concert with the king convoking them had alone the power of organically regulating the commonwealth; and he had his constitutive enactments regularly sanctioned by decree of the people.  The free energy and the authority half-moral, half-political, which the yea or nay of those old warrior-assemblies had carried with it, could not indeed be again instilled into the so-called comitia of this period; the co-operation of the burgesses in legislation, which in the old constitution had been extremely limited but real and living, was in the new practically an unsubstantial shadow.  There was therefore no need of special restrictive measures against the comitia; many years’ experience had shown that every government—­ the oligarchy as well as the monarch—­easily kept on good terms with this formal sovereign.  These Caesarian comitia were an important element in the Caesarian system and indirectly of practical significance, only in so far as they served to retain in principle the sovereignty of the people and to constitute an energetic protest against sultanism.