The Caesars | Page 2

liberties. Doubtless, then,
Rome had risen immaculate from the arms of Sylla and of Marius. But,
if it were Caius Julius who deflowered Rome, if under him she
forfeited her dowery of civic purity, if to him she first unloosed her
maiden zone, then be it affirmed boldly--that she reserved her greatest
favors for the noblest of her wooers, and we may plead the justification
of Falconbridge for his mother's trangression with the lion-hearted
king--such a sin was self-ennobled. Did Julius deflower Rome? Then,
by that consummation, he caused her to fulfill the functions of her
nature; he compelled her to exchange the imperfect and inchoate
condition of a mere _fæmina_ for the perfections of a mulier. And,
metaphor apart, we maintain that Rome lost no liberties by the mighty
Julius. That which in tendency, and by the spirit of her institutions--that
which, by her very corruptions and abuses co-operating with her laws,
Rome promised and involved in the germ--even that, and nothing less
or different, did Rome unfold and accomplish under this Julian
violence. The rape [if such it were] of Cæsar, her final Romulus,
completed for Rome that which the rape under Romulus, her earliest
Cæsar, had prosperously begun. And thus by one godlike man was a
nation-city matured; and from the everlasting and nameless [Footnote:
"Nameless city."--The true name of Rome it was a point of religion to
conceal; and, in fact, it was never revealed.] city was a man produced--
capable of taming her indomitable nature, and of forcing her to
immolate her wild virginity to the state best fitted for the destined
"Mother of empires." Peace, then, rhetoricians, false threnodists of false
liberty! hollow chanters over the ashes of a hollow republic! Without
Cæsar, we affirm a thousand times that there would have been no
perfect Rome; and, but for Rome, there could have been no such man
as Cæsar.
Both then were immortal; each worthy of each. And the Cui viget nihil
simile aut secundum of the poet, was as true of one as of the other. For,
if by comparison with Rome other cities were but villages, with even
more propriety it may be asserted, that after the Roman Cæsars all
modern kings, kesars, or emperors, are mere phantoms of royalty. The
Cæsar of Western Rome--he only of all earthly potentates, past or to
come, could be said to reign as a monarch, that is, as a solitary king. He

was not the greatest of princes, simply because there was no other but
himself. There were doubtless a few outlying rulers, of unknown names
and titles upon the margins of his empire, there were tributary
lieutenants and barbarous reguli, the obscure vassals of his sceptre,
whose homage was offered on the lowest step of his throne, and
scarcely known to him but as objects of disdain. But these feudatories
could no more break the unity of his empire, which embraced the whole
_oichomeni_;--the total habitable world as then known to geography, or
recognised by the muse of History--than at this day the British empire
on the sea can be brought into question or made conditional, because
some chief of Owyhee or Tongataboo should proclaim a momentary
independence of the British trident, or should even offer a transient
outrage to her sovereign flag. Such a _tempestas in matulâ_ might raise
a brief uproar in his little native archipelago, but too feeble to reach the
shores of Europe by an echo--or to ascend by so much as an infantine
susurrus to the ears of the British Neptune. Parthia, it is true, might
pretend to the dignity of an empire. But her sovereigns, though sitting
in the seat of the great king, (o basileus,) were no longer the rulers of a
vast and polished nation. They were regarded as barbarians--potent
only by their standing army, not upon the larger basis of civic strength;
and, even under this limitation, they were supposed to owe more to the
circumstances of their position--their climate, their remoteness, and
their inaccessibility except through arid and sultry deserts--than to
intrinsic resources, such as could be permanently relied on in a serious
trial of strength between the two powers. The kings of Parthia,
therefore, were far enough from being regarded in the light of
antagonist forces to the majesty of Rome. And, these withdrawn from
the comparison, who else was there--what prince, what king, what
potentate of any denomination, to break the universal calm, that
through centuries continued to lave, as with the quiet undulations of
summer lakes, the sacred footsteps of the Cæsarean throne? The
Byzantine court, which, merely as the inheritor of some fragments from
that august throne, was drunk with excess of pride, surrounded itself
with elaborate expressions of a grandeur beyond what mortal eyes were
supposed able to sustain.
These