at all permit—­ with his slaves freedmen, or clients of humble birth.  His works as a whole show what an organizing genius like his could accomplish with such an instrument; but to the question, how in detail these marvellous feats were achieved, we have no adequate answer.  Bureaucracy resembles a manufactory also in this respect, that the work done does not appear as that of the individual who has worked at it, but as that of the manufactory which stamps it.  This much only is quite clear, that Caesar, in his work had no helper at all who exerted a personal influence over it or was even so much as initiated into the whole plan; he was not only the sole master, but he worked also without skilled associates, merely with common labourers.

In Matters of Finance

With respect to details as a matter of course in strictly political affairs Caesar avoided, so far as was at all possible, any delegation of his functions.  Where it was inevitable, as especially when during his frequent absence from Rome he had need of a higher organ there, the person destined for this purpose was, significantly enough, not the legal deputy of the monarch, the prefect of the city, but a confidant without officially-recognized jurisdiction, usually Caesar’s banker, the cunning and pliant Phoenician merchant Lucius Cornelius Balbus from Gades.  In administration Caesar was above all careful to resume the keys of the state-chest—­which the senate had appropriated to itself after the fall of the regal power, and by means of which it had possessed itself of the government—­and to entrust them only to those servants who with their persons were absolutely and exclusively devoted to him.  In respect of ownership indeed the private means of the monarch remained, of course, strictly separate from the property of the state; but Caesar took in hand the administration of the whole financial and monetary system of the state, and conducted it entirely in the way in which he and the Roman grandees generally were wont to manage the administration of their own means and substance.  For the future the levying of the provincial revenues and in the main also the management of the coinage were entrusted to the slaves and freedmen of the Imperator and men of the senatorial order were excluded from it—­ a momentous step out of which grew in course of time the important class of procurators and the “imperial household.”

In the Governorships

Of the governorships on the other hand, which, after they had handed their financial business over to the new imperial tax-receivers, were still more than they had formerly been essentially military commands, that of Egypt alone was transferred to the monarch’s own retainers.  The country of the Nile, in a peculiar manner geographically isolated and politically centralized, was better fitted than any other district to break off permanently under an able leader from the central power, as the attempts which had repeatedly