But these noble arrangements were only the first steps towards a complete remodelling of Rome.  Projects were already formed for a new senate-house, for a new magnificent bazaar, for a theatre to rival that of Pompeius, for a public Latin and Greek library after the model of that recently destroyed at Alexandria—­ the first institution of the sort in Rome—­lastly for a temple of Mars, which was to surpass all that had hitherto existed in riches and glory.  Still more brilliant was the idea, first, of constructing a canal through the Pomptine marshes and drawing off their waters to Tarracina, and secondly, of altering the lower course of the Tiber and of leading it from the present Ponte Molle, not through between the Campus Vaticanus and the Campus Martius, but rather round the Campus Vaticanus and the Janiculum to Ostia, where the miserable roadstead was to give place to an adequate artificial harbour.  By this gigantic plan on the one hand the most dangerous enemy of the capital, the malaria of the neighbourhood would be banished; on the other hand the extremely limited facilities for building in the capital would be at once enlarged by substituting the Campus Vaticanus thereby transferred to the left bank of the Tiber for the Campus Martius, and allowing the latter spacious field to be applied for public and private edifices; while the capital would at the same time obtain a safe seaport, the want of which was so painfully felt.  It seemed as if the Imperator would remove mountains and rivers, and venture to contend with nature herself.

Much however as the city of Rome gained by the new order of things in commodiousness and magnificence, its political supremacy was, as we have already said, lost to it irrecoverably through that very change.  The idea that the Roman state should coincide with the city of Rome had indeed in the course of time become more and more unnatural and preposterous; but the maxim had been so intimately blended with the essence of the Roman republic, that it could not perish before the republic itself.  It was only in the new state of Caesar that it was, with the exception perhaps of some legal fictions, completely set aside, and the community of the capital was placed legally on a level with all other municipalities; indeed Caesar—­here as everywhere endeavouring not merely to regulate the thing, but also to call it officially by the right name—­ issued his Italian municipal ordinance, beyond doubt purposely, at once for the capital and for the other urban communities.  We may add that Rome, just because it was incapable of a living communal character as a capital, was even essentially inferior to the other municipalities of the imperial period.  The republican Rome was a den of robbers, but it was at the same time the state; the Rome of the monarchy, although it began to embellish itself with all the glories of the three continents and to glitter in gold and marble, was yet nothing in the state but a royal residence in connection with a poor-house, or in other words a necessary evil.