Caesar: A Sketch | Page 7

fall like themselves under the authority of a
higher master could not much distress them. Their sympathies, if they
had any, would go with those nearest their own rank, the emancipated
slaves and the sons of those who were emancipated; and they, and the
poor free citizens everywhere, were to a man on the side which was

considered and was called the side of "the people," and was, in fact, the
side of despotism.

CHAPTER II.
The Roman Constitution had grown out of the character of the Roman
nation. It was popular in form beyond all constitutions of which there is
any record in history. The citizens assembled in the Comitia were the
sovereign authority in the State, and they exercised their power
immediately and not by representatives. The executive magistrates
were chosen annually. The assembly was the supreme Court of Appeal;
and without its sanction no freeman could be lawfully put to death. In
the assembly also was the supreme power of legislation. Any consul,
any praetor, any tribune, might propose a law from the Rostra to the
people. The people if it pleased them might accept such law, and
senators and public officers might be sworn to obey it under pains of
treason. As a check on precipitate resolutions, a single consul or a
single tribune might interpose his veto. But the veto was binding only
so long as the year of office continued. If the people were in earnest,
submission to their wishes could be made a condition at the next
election, and thus no constitutional means existed of resisting them
when these wishes showed themselves.
In normal times the Senate was allowed the privilege of preconsidering
intended acts of legislation, and refusing to recommend them if
inexpedient, but the privilege was only converted into a right after
violent convulsions, and was never able to maintain itself. That under
such a system the functions of government could have been carried on
at all was due entirely to the habits of self-restraint which the Romans
had engraved into their nature. They were called a nation of kings,
kings over their own appetites, passions, and inclinations. They were
not imaginative, they were not intellectual; they had little national
poetry, little art, little philosophy. They were moral and practical. In
these two directions the force that was in them entirely ran. They were
free politically, because freedom meant to them not freedom to do as
they pleased, but freedom to do what was right; and every citizen,

before he arrived at his civil privileges, had been schooled in the
discipline of obedience. Each head of a household was absolute master
of it, master over his children and servants, even to the extent of life
and death. What the father was to the family, the gods were to the
whole people, the awful lords and rulers at whose pleasure they lived
and breathed. Unlike the Greeks, the reverential Romans invented no
idle legends about the supernatural world. The gods to them were the
guardians of the State, whose will in all things they were bound to seek
and to obey. The forms in which they endeavored to learn what that
will might be were childish or childlike. They looked to signs in the sky,
to thunder-storms and comets and shooting stars. Birds, winged
messengers, as they thought them, between earth and heaven, were
celestial indicators of the gods' commands. But omens and auguries
were but the outward symbols, and the Romans, like all serious peoples,
went to their own hearts for their real guidance. They had a unique
religious peculiarity, to which no race of men has produced anything
like. They did not embody the elemental forces in personal forms; they
did not fashion a theology out of the movements of the sun and stars or
the changes of the seasons. Traces may be found among them of
cosmic traditions and superstitions, which were common to all the
world; but they added of their own this especial feature: that they built
temples and offered sacrifices to the highest human excellences, to
"Valor," to "Truth," to "Good Faith," to "Modesty," to "Charity," to
"Concord." In these qualities lay all that raised man above the animals
with which he had so much in common. In them, therefore, were to be
found the link which connected him with the divine nature, and moral
qualities were regarded as divine influences which gave his life its
meaning and its worth. The "Virtues" were elevated into beings to
whom disobedience could be punished as a crime, and the superstitious
fears which run so often into mischievous idolatries were enlisted with
conscience in the direct service of right action.
On the same principle the Romans chose the heroes and heroines of
their national history. The Manlii and Valerii were