It was a bad example and one unhappily not lost sight of in the sequel, that every common soldier received for his participation in the civil war 20,000 sesterces (200 pounds), every burgess of the multitude in the capital for his non-participation in it 300 sesterces (3 pounds) as an addition to his aliment; but Caesar, after having once under the pressure of circumstances pledged his word, was too much of a king to abate from it. Besides, Caesar answered innumerable demands of honourable liberality, and put into circulation immense sums for building more especially, which had been shamefully neglected during the financial distress of the last times of the republic - the cost of his buildings executed partly during the Gallic campaigns, partly afterwards, in the capital was reckoned at 160,000,000 sesterces (1,600,000 pounds). The general result of the financial administration of Caesar is expressed in the fact that, while by sagacious and energetic reforms and by a right combination of economy and liberality he amply and fully met all equitable claims, nevertheless already in March 710 there lay in the public treasury 700,000,000 and in his own 100,000,000 sesterces (together 8,000,000 pounds) - a sum which exceeded by tenfold the amount of cash in the treasury in the most flourishing times of the republic[43].

But the task of breaking up the old parties and furnishing the new commonwealth with an appropriate constitution, an efficient army, and well-ordered finances, difficult as it was, was not the most difficult part of Caesar's work. If the Italian nation was really to be regenerated, it required a reorganization which should transform all parts of the great empire - Rome, Italy, and the provinces. Let us endeavour here also to delineate the old state of things, as well as the beginnings of a new and more tolerable time.

The good stock of the Latin nation had long since wholly disappeared from Rome. It is implied in the very nature of the case, that a capital loses its municipal and even its national stamp more quickly than any subordinate community. There the upper classes speedily withdraw from urban public life, in order to find their home rather in the state as a whole than in a single city; there are inevitably concentrated the foreign settlers, the fluctuating population of travellers for pleasure or business, the mass of the indolent, lazy, criminal, financially and morally bankrupt, and for that very reason cosmopolitan, rabble. All this preeminently applied to Rome. The opulent Roman frequently regarded his town-house merely as a lodging. When the urban municipal offices were converted into imperial magistracies; when the civic assembly became the assembly of burgesses of the empire; and when smaller self-governing tribal or other associations were not tolerated within the capital: all proper communal life ceased for Rome. From the whole compass of the widespread empire people flocked to Rome, for speculation, for debauchery, for intrigue, for training in crime, or even for the purpose of hiding there from the eye of the law.

These evils arose in some measure necessarily from the very nature of a capital; others more accidental and perhaps still more grave were associated with them. There has never perhaps existed a great city so thoroughly destitute of the means of support as Rome; importation on the one hand, and domestic manufacture by slaves on the other, rendered any free industry from the outset impossible there. The injurious consequences of the radical evil pervading the politics of antiquity in general - the slave-system - were more conspicuous in the capital than anywhere else. Nowhere were such masses of slaves accumulated as in the city palaces of the great families or of wealthy upstarts. Nowhere were the nations of the three continents mingled as in the slave-population of the capital - Syrians, Phrygians and other half-Hellenes with Libyans and Moors, Getae, and Iberians with the daily-increasing influx of Celts and Germans. The demoralization inseparable from the absence of freedom, and the terrible inconsistency between formal and moral right, were far more glaringly apparent in the case of the half or wholly cultivated - as it were genteel - city-slave than, in that of the rural serf who tilled the field in chains like the fettered ox. Still worse than the masses of slaves were those who had been de jure or simply de facto released from slavery - a mixture of mendicant rabble and very rich parvenus, no longer slaves and not yet fully burgesses, economically and even legally dependent on their master and yet with the pretensions of free men; and these freedmen made their way above all towards the capital, where gain of various sorts was to be had and the retail traffic as well as the minor handicrafts were almost wholly in their hands. Their influence on the elections is expressly attested; and that they took a leading part in the street riots, is very evident from the ordinary signal by means of which these were virtually proclaimed by the demagogues - the closing of the shops and places of sale.

Moreover, the government not only did nothing to counteract this corruption of the population of the capital, but even encouraged it for the benefit of their selfish policy. The judicious rule of law, which prohibited individuals condemned for a capital offence from dwelling in the capita, was not carried into effect by the negligent police. The police-supervision - so urgently required - of association on the part of the rabble was at first neglected, and afterwards[44] even declared punishable as a restriction inconsistent with the freedom of the people. The popular festivals had been allowed so to increase that the seven ordinary ones alone - the Roman, the Plebeian, those of the Mother of the Gods, of Ceres, of Apollo, of Flora[45] and of Victoria - lasted altogether sixty-two days; and to these were added the gladiatorial games and numerous other extraordinary amusements. The duty of providing grain at low prices - which was unavoidably necessary with such a proletariate living wholly from hand to mouth - was treated with the most unscrupulous frivolity, and the fluctuations in the price of bread-corn were of a fabulous and incalculable description[46]. Lastly, the distribution of grain formed an official invitation to the whole burgess-proletariate who were destitute of food and indisposed for work to take up their abode in the capital.

The seed sown was bad, and the harvest corresponded. The system of clubs and bands in the sphere of politics, the worship of Isis and similar pious extravagances in that of religion, had their root in this state of things. People were constantly in prospect of a dearth, and not unfrequently in utter famine. Nowhere was a man less secure of his life than in the capital; murder professionally prosecuted by banditti was the single trade peculiar to it; the alluring of the victim to Rome was the preliminary to his assassination; no one ventured into the country in the vicinity of the capital without an armed retinue. Its outward condition corresponded to this inward disorganization, and seemed a keen satire on the aristocratic government.