ago, the Roman system had only an external coherence and received only a mechanical extension, while internally it became even with him utterly withered and dead.  If in the early stages of the autocracy and above all in Caesar’s own soul(5) the hopeful dream of a combination of free popular development and absolute rule was still cherished, the government of the highly-gifted emperors of the Julian house soon taught men in a terrible form how far it was possible to hold fire and water in the same vessel.  Caesar’s work was necessary and salutary, not because it was or could be fraught with blessing in itself, but because—­ with the national organization of antiquity, which was based on slavery and was utterly a stranger to republican-constitutional representation, and in presence of the legitimate urban constitution which in the course of five hundred years had ripened into oligarchic absolutism—­ absolute military monarchy was the copestone logically necessary and the least of evils.  When once the slave-holding aristocracy in Virginia and the Carolinas shall have carried matters as far as their congeners in the Sullan Rome, Caesarism will there too be legitimized at the bar of the spirit of history;(6) where it appears under other conditions of development, it is at once a caricature and a usurpation.  But history will not submit to curtail the true Caesar of his due honour, because her verdict may in the presence of bad Caesars lead simplicity astray and may give to roguery occasion for lying and fraud.  She too is a Bible, and if she cannot any more than the Bible hinder the fool from misunderstanding and the devil from quoting her, she too will be able to bear with, and to requite, them both.

Dictatorship

The position of the new supreme head of the state appears formally, at least in the first instance, as a dictatorship.  Caesar took it up at first after his return from Spain in 705, but laid it down again after a few days, and waged the decisive campaign of 706 simply as consul—­this was the office his tenure of which was the primary occasion for the outbreak of the civil war.(7) but in the autumn of this year after the battle of Pharsalus he reverted to the dictatorship and had it repeatedly entrusted to him, at first for an undefined period, but from the 1st January 709 as an annual office, and then in January or February 710(8) for the duration of his life, so that he in the end expressly dropped the earlier reservation as to his laying down the office and gave formal expression to its tenure for life in the new title of -dictator perpetuus-.  This dictatorship, both in its first ephemeral and in its second enduring tenure, was not that of the old constitution, but—­what was coincident with this merely in the name—­the supreme exceptional office as arranged by Sulla;(9) an office, the functions of which were fixed, not by the constitutional ordinances regarding the supreme single magistracy, but by special