were at once pardoned entirely or got off with fines, like the African capitalists who were impressed as members of the senate of Utica.  And even the others almost without exception got their freedom and property restored to them, if they could only prevail on themselves to petition Caesar to that effect; on several who declined to do so, such as the consular Marcus Marcellus, pardon was even conferred unasked, and ultimately in 710 a general amnesty was issued for all who were still unrecalled.

Amnesty

The republican opposition submitted to be pardoned; but it was not reconciled.  Discontent with the new order of things and exasperation against the unwonted ruler were general.  For open political resistance there was indeed no farther opportunity—­ it was hardly worth taking into account, that some oppositional tribunes on occasion of the question of title acquired for themselves the republican crown of martyrdom by a demonstrative intervention against those who had called Caesar king—­but republicanism found expression all the more decidedly as an opposition of sentiment, and in secret agitation and plotting.  Not a hand stirred when the Imperator appeared in public.  There was abundance of wall-placards and sarcastic verses full of bitter and telling popular satire against the new monarchy.  When a comedian ventured on a republican allusion, he was saluted with the loudest applause.  The praise of Cato formed the fashionable theme of oppositional pamphleteers, and their writings found a public all the more grateful because even literature was no longer free.  Caesar indeed combated the republicans even now on their own field; he himself and his abler confidants replied to the Cato-literature with Anticatones, and the republican and Caesarian scribes fought round the dead hero of Utica like the Trojans and Hellenes round the dead body of Patroclus; but as a matter of course in this conflict—­where the public thoroughly republican in its feelings was judge—­the Caesarians had the worst of it.  No course remained but to overawe the authors; on which account men well known and dangerous in a literary point of view, such as Publius Nigidius Figulus and Aulus Caecina, had more difficulty in obtaining permission to return to Italy than other exiles, while the oppositional writers tolerated in Italy were subjected to a practical censorship, the restraints of which were all the more annoying that the measure of punishment to be dreaded was utterly arbitrary.(4) The underground machinations of the overthrown parties against the new monarchy will be more fitly set forth in another connection.  Here it is sufficient to say that risings of pretenders as well as of republicans were incessantly brewing throughout the Roman empire; that the flames of civil war kindled now by the Pompeians, now by the republicans, again burst forth brightly at various places; and that in the capital there was perpetual conspiracy against the life of the monarch.  But Caesar could not be induced by these plots even to surround himself permanently with a body-guard, and usually contented himself with making known the detected conspiracies by public placards.