After appointing Sallust governor of Numidia, and reorganizing the provinces of Africa, Caesar in the fall of 46 returned to Rome. The frightened Senate, recognizing the advent of monarchy, voted him the dictatorship for ten years, and such a triumph as Rome had never seen before. He paid each of his soldiers 5000 Attic drachmas ($3000), much more than he had promised them. He feasted the citizens at 22,000 tables, and for their amusement provided a sham sea battle involving 10,000 men. Early in 45 he left for Spain, and at Munda defeated the last Pompeian army. When, in October, he reached Rome, he found all Italy in chaos. Oligarchic misrule and a century of revolution had disordered agriculture, industry, finance, and trade. The exhaustion of the provinces, the hoarding of capital, and the precariousness of investment had disturbed the flow of money. Thousands of estates had fallen into ruin; 100,000 men had been drawn from production into war; peasants beyond number had been driven by the competition of foreign grain or latifundia slaves to join the proletariat in the towns and listen hungrily to promising demagogues. The surviving aristocracy, unmelted by Caesar’s clemency, plotted against him in their clubs and palaces. He appealed to them in the Senate to recognize the necessity of dictatorship, and to co-operate with him in a healing reconstruction. They scorned the advances of the usurper, denounced the presence of Cleopatra as his guest in Rome, and whispered that he was planning to make himself king and move the seat of the Empire to Alexandria or Ilium.
Caesar alone, therefore, though prematurely old at fifty-five, set himself with Roman energy to remake the Roman state. He knew that his victories would be meaningless if he could not build something better than the wreckage that he had cleared away. When, in 44, his dictatorship for ten years was extended for life, he did not much exaggerate the difference, though he could hardly foresee that in five months he would be dead. The Senate heaped adulation and titles upon him, perhaps to make him odious to a people that hated the very name of king. It let him wear the laurel wreath, with which he hid his baldness, and carry even in peace the imperator’s powers. Through these he controlled the Treasury, and as pontifex maximus, the priesthoods; as consul he could propose and execute laws; as tribune his person was inviolable; as censor he could make or unmake senators. The assemblies kept the right to vote on proposed measures, but Caesar’s lieutenants, Dolabella and Antony, managed the assemblies, which in general favored his policies. Like other dictators he sought to base his power upon popularity with the people.
He subordinated the Senate almost to the role of an advisory council. He enlarged it from 600 to 900 members and permanently transformed it with 400 new appointees. Many of these were Roman businessmen; many were leading citizens of Italian or provincial cities; some had been centurions, soldiers, or sons of slaves. The patricians were alarmed to see the chieftains of conquered Gaul enter the Senate and join the rulers of the Empire; even the wags of the capital resented this and circulated a satiric couplet:
Gallos Caesar in triumphum ducit, idem in curiam;
Galli braccas deposuerunt, latum clavum sumpserunt—
“Caesar leads Gauls in his triumph, then into the Senate; the Gauls have removed their breeches, and put on the broad-rimmed toga” of the senators.52
Perhaps Caesar purposely made the new Senate too cumbersome a body for effective deliberation or unified opposition. He chose a group of friends—Balbus, Oppius, Matius, and others—as an informal executive cabinet, and inaugurated the bureaucracy of the Empire by delegating the clerical details of his government, and the minutiae of administration, to his household of freedmen and slaves. He allowed the Assembly to elect half the city magistrates; he chose the rest by “recommendations” which the Assembly regularly approved. As tribune he could veto the decisions of other tribunes or consuls. He increased the praetors to sixteen, and the quaestors to forty, to expedite municipal and judicial business. He kept a personal eye on every aspect of the city’s affairs, and tolerated no incompetence or waste. In the city charters that he granted he placed severe injunctions and penalties against electoral corruption and official malfeasance. To end the domination of politics by organized vote buying, and perhaps to secure his power against proletarian revolt, he abolished the collegia, except some of ancient origin and the essentially religious associations of the Jews. He restricted jury service to the two upper classes and reserved for himself the right to try the most vital cases; frequently he sat as judge, and none could deny the wisdom and impartiality of his decisions. He proposed to the jurists of his time an orderly codification of existing Roman law, but his early death frustrated the plan.
Resuming the work of the Gracchi, he distributed lands to his veterans and the poor; this policy, continued by Augustus, for many years pacified the agrarian agitation. To forestall the rapid reconcentration of landownership he ruled that the new lands could not be sold within twenty years; and to check rural slavery he passed a measure requiring that a third of the laborers on ranches should be freemen. Having turned many idle prolétaires into soldiers and then into peasant proprietors, he further diminished their ranks by sending 80,000 citizens as colonists to Carthage, Corinth, Seville, Aries, and other centers. To provide work for the remaining unemployed in Rome he spent 160,000,000 sesterces in a great building program. He had a new and more spacious meeting place for the assemblies set up in the Field of Mars, and relieved the congestion of business in the Forum by adding, near it, a Forum Iulium. He embellished likewise many cities in Italy, Spain, Gaul, and Greece. Having so eased the pressure of poverty, he required a means test for eligibility to the state dole of grain. At once the number of applicants fell from 320,000 to 150,000.
So far he had remained true to his role as a champion of the populares. But since the Roman revolution was more agrarian than industrial, and was aimed chiefly at the landed slave-driving aristocracy, then at the moneylenders, and only mildly at the business classes, Caesar continued the Gracchan policy of inviting businessmen to support the agrarian and fiscal revolution. Cicero sought to unite the middle classes with the aristocracy; Caesar sought to unite them with the plebs. Many of the great capitalists, from Crassus to Balbus, helped to finance him, as similar men helped the American and French Revolutions. Nevertheless, Caesar ended one of the richest sources of financial profiteering—the collection of provincial taxes through corporations of publicans. He scaled down debts, enacted severe laws against excessive interest rates, and relieved extreme cases of insolvency by establishing the law of bankruptcy essentially as it stands today. He restored the stability of the currency by basing it upon gold and issuing a golden aureus, equivalent in purchasing power to the British pound sterling in the nineteenth century. The coins of his government were stamped with his own features and were designed with an artistry new to Rome. A novel order and competence entered the administration of the Empire’s finances, with the result that when Caesar died the Treasury contained 700,000,000 sesterces, and his private treasury 100,000,000.
As a scientific basis for taxation and administration, he had a census taken of Italy, and planned a like census of the Empire. To replenish a citizenry decimated by war, he granted the Roman franchise widely—among others, to physicians and teachers in Rome. Long disturbed by the fall in the birth rate, he had in 59 given precedence in land allotments to fathers of three children; now he promulgated rewards for large families and forbade childless women under forty-five to ride in litters or wear jewelry—the weakest and most futile part of his varied legislation.
Still an agnostic, though not quite free from superstitions,53 Caesar remained high priest of the state religion and provided it with the usual funds. He restored old temples and built new ones, honoring above all his alma mater Venus. But he allowed full liberty of conscience and worship, withdrew old prohibitions against the Isis cult, and protected the Jews in the exercise of their faith. Noting that the calendar of the priests had lost all concord with the seasons, he commissioned the Alexandrian Greek Sosigenes to devise, on Egyptian models, the “Julian calendar”: henceforth the year was to consist of 365 days, with an added day in every fourth February. Cicero complained that Caesar, not content with ruling the earth, was now regulating the stars; but the Senate accepted the reform graciously, and gave the dictator’s family name, Julius, to the month Quinctilis—which had been fifth when March opened the year.
As impressive as these things done are the works begun or planned by Caesar but postponed by his assassination. He laid the foundations of a great theater, and of a temple to Mars proportioned to that god’s voracity. He appointed Varro to head an organization for the establishment of public libraries. He designed to free Rome from malaria by draining Lake Fucinus and the Pontine marshes, and reclaiming these acres for tillage. He proposed to raise dykes to control the Tiber’s floods; by diverting the course of that stream he hoped to improve the harbor at Ostia, periodically ruined by the river’s silt. He instructed his engineers to prepare plans for building a road across central Italy and for cutting a canal at Corinth.
The most resented of his undertakings was to make the freemen of Italy equal citizens with those of Rome, and the provinces ultimately equal with Italy. In 49 he had enfranchised Cisalpine Gaul; now (44) he drew up a municipal charter, apparently for all the cities of Italy, equalizing their rights with Rome’s; probably he was planning some representative government by which they would have had a democratic share in his constitutional monarchy.55 He took the appointment of provincial governors out of the hands of the corrupt Senate and himself named to these posts men of proved ability, who remained at every moment subject to recall at his will. He reduced provincial taxes by a third, and entrusted their collection to special officials responsible to himself. He overrode ancient curses to restore Capua, Carthage, and Corinth—completing again the work of the Gracchi. To the colonists whom he sent to found or people a score of cities from Gibraltar to the Black Sea, he gave Roman or Latin rights, and evidently hoped to extend Roman citizenship to all free adult males in the Empire; the Senate was then to represent not a class in Rome, but the mind and will of every province. This conception of government, and Caesar’s reorganization of Rome and Italy, completed the miracle whereby the youthful spendthrift and roisterer had become one of the ablest, bravest, fairest, and most enlightened men in all the sorry annals of politics.
Like Alexander he did not know where to stop. Contemplating his reordered realm, he resented its exposure to attack at the Euphrates, the Danube, and the Rhine. He dreamed of a great expedition to capture Parthia and avenge his old pocketbook Crassus; of a march around the Black Sea and the pacification of Scythia; of the exploration of the Danube and the conquest of Germany.56 Then, having made the Empire secure, he would return to Rome laden with honor and spoils, rich enough to end economic depression, powerful enough to ignore all opposition, free at last to name his successor, and to die with the pax Romana as his supreme legacy to the world.