"Bibulus kept to his house and contented himself with periodical announcements that the omens were unpropitious to legislation. Caesar administered public affairs without consulting him, so that the town wits referred to the year as 'the consulate of Julius and Caesar.'

"To bring the Senate under public scrutiny, he established the first newspaper by having clerks make a record of Senatorial and other public proceedings and news, and post these Acta Diurna, or 'Daily Doings,' on the walls of the forums. From these walls the reports were copied and sent by private messengers to all parts of the Empire.

"Toward the end of this historic consulate, Caesar had himself appointed governor of Cisalpine and Narbonese Gaul for the ensuing five years. As no troops could lawfully be stationed in Italy, the command over the legions stationed in north Italy gave its possessor military power over the whole peninsula. To guarantee the maintenance of his legislation, Caesar secured the election of his friends Gabinius and Piso as consuls for 58 and married Piso's daughter Calpurnia. To ensure continued support from the plebs he lent his decisive aid to the election of Clodius as tribune for 58.

"To redistribute the concentrated wealth of Rome and to destroy Cicero -- who had abused his sister Clodia and stood for the sanctity of property -- he served as a subaltern to Caesar until he could take power into his own hands. He admired Caesar's policies and loved Caesar's wife. To gain access to her he disguised himself as a woman, entered the house of Caesar, then (62) high priest, took part in the ceremonies offered by women alone to the Bona Dea, was detected, accused, and publicly tried (61) for having violated the mysteries of the Good Goddess.

"Caesar, called as a witness, said that he had no charge to make against Clodius. Why, then asked the prosecutor, had he divorced Pompeia? Said Caesar:-'Because my wife must be above suspicion.' It was a clever answer, which neither exonerated nor condemned a valuable political aide.

"Various witnesses -- perhaps bribed -- told the court that Clodius had had relations with Clodia and had seduced his siter Terria after her marriage to Lucullus. Clodius protested that he had been away from Rome on the day of the alleged sacrilege. Cicero, however, testified that Clodius had on that day been with him in Rome.

"The populace thought the whole affair a Senatorial plot to destroy a populares leader and cried out for acquittal. Caesar -- some say at Caesar's behest -- bribed a number of judges for Clodius. The radicals for once had the more money, and Clodius was freed.

"In 63 Cato had wooed the populace for the conservatives by renewing the state distribution of cheap corn. Now (58) Clodius countered by making the dole completely free to all who came for it. He passed bills through the Assembly forbidding the use of religious vetoes against legislative procedures and restoring the legality of the collegia, which the Senate had tried to disband. He reorganized these guilds into voting blocs and won such fealty from them that they provided him with an armed guard.

"Fearing that after his year as tribune had expired Cato or Cicero might attempt to undo Caesar's work, Clodius persuaded the Assembly to send Cato as commissioner to Cyprus, and to pass a decree banishing any man who had put Roman citizens to death without securing, as law required, the Assembly's consent. Cicero saw that the measure was aimed at him and fled to Greece, where cities and dignitaries rivaled one another in offering him hospitality and honors.

"The Senate appealed to all Roman citizens in Italy to come to the capital and vote on the proposal. Clodius brought an armed gang into the Field of Mars to supervise the balloting, and Pompey engaged a needy aristocrat, Annius Milo, to organize a rival band. Riot and bloodshed ensued, many men were killed, and Quintus barely escaped with his life.

"But his measure carried, and after months of exile Cicero returned in triumph to Italy (57). Multitudes greeted him as he passed from Brundisium to Rome. There the welcoming crowd was so great that Cicero feigned fear that he would be accused of having contrived his banishment for the sake of this glorious restoration.

"Apparently he had pledged himself to Pompey, and perhaps to Caesar, as the price of his recall. Caesar lent him large sums to recoup his finances and refused to take interest. For several years now Cicero became the advocate of the Triumvirs in the Senate. When a dearth of grain threatened Rome (57), he secured for Pompey an extraordinary commission with full power for six years over all the food supply of Rome and over all ports and trade. Pompey again acquitted himself well, but the constitution of the Republic suffered another blow, and government by men continued to replace government by laws.

"In 56 Cicero persuaded the Senate to vote a substantial amount for the payment of Caesar's troops in Gaul. In 54 he unsuccessfully defended the extortionate provincial administration of Aulus Gabinius, a friend of the Triumvirs. In 55 he canceled all the favor he had gained with Caesar by an abusive attack upon another provincial governor, Calpurnius Piso.

"Literature took on an anti-Caesarian tint. The epigrams of Calvus and Catullus flew like poisoned darts into the camp of the Triumvirs.

"As Caesar moved farther and farther into Gaul, and news came of the many dangers that he faced, hope sprung anew in noble breats. After all, said Cicero, there are many ways in which a man may die.

"If we may believe Caesar, several conservatives opened negotiations with Ariovistus, the German leader, for the assassination of Caesar. Domitius, running for the consulate, announced that if elected he would at once move for Caesar's recall -- which meaant Caesar's indictment and trial.

"One of these, the Aedui, appealed to Rome for help against the Germans (61). The Senate authorized the Roman governor of Narbonese Gaul to comply, but almost at the same time it listed Ariovistus among rulers friendly to Rome.

"Meanwhile 120,000 Germans crossed the Rhine, settled in Flanders, and so strengthened Ariovistus that he treated the native population as subject peoples and dreamed of conquering all Gaul. At the same time the Helveti, centering about Geneva, began migrating westward, 368,000 strong, and Caesar was warned that they planned to cross his province of Narbonese Gaul on their way to southwestern France.

"Deputies came now to Caesar from many Gallic tribes, asking for his protection. Caesar declared war against both Ariovistus and the Helvetii, marched northward, and met the Helvetian avalanche in a bloody battle at Bibracte, capital of the Aedui, near the modern Autun. Caesar's legions won, but by a narrow margin. In thse matters we must for the most part follow his own account.

"The Helvetii offered to return to their Swiss homeland. Caesar agreed to give them safe passage, but on condition that their territory should accept the rule of Rome. All Gaul now sent him thanks for its deliverance, and begged his aid in expelling Ariovistus.

"Caesar defeated their army on the banks of the Aisne. Then, with a celerity of movement that never allowed his foes to unite, he moved in succession against the Suessiones, Ambiani, Nervii, and Aduatici, conquered them, despoiled them, and sold the captives to the slave merchants of Italy. Somwwhat prematurely he announced the conquest of Gaul, the Senate proclaimed it a Roman province (56), and the common people of Rome, as imperialistic as any general, shouted the praises of the distant champion.

"His engineers then built in ten days a bridge over the great stream, there 1400 feet wide. Caesar's legions crossed, and fought long enough on German soil to establish the Rhine as a secure frontier. After two weeks he retraced his steps into Gaul.

"We do not know why he now invaded Britain. Possibly he was lured by rumors that gold or pearls abounded there. Or he wished to capture the tin and iron deposits of Britain for Roman exportation. Or he resented the aid that Britons had sent to the Gauls, and thought that Roman power in Gaul must be made secure in every direction.

"He led a small force across the Channel at its narrowest point, defeated the unprepared Britons, took a few notes, and returned (55).

"It was the lowest ebb of Caesar's fortunes, and for a time he considered himself lost. He staked everything upon a siege of Alesia (Alise Ste.-Reine), where Vercingerorix had gathered 30,000 troops. Caesar had hadly distribued a like number of soldiers around the city when word came that 250,000 Gauls were marching down upon him from the north.

"He ordered his men to raise two concentric walls of earth around the city, one before them, the other behind them. Against these walls and the desperate Romans the armies of Vercingetorix and his allies threw themselves in repeated vain attacks. After a week the army of relief broke up in disorder for lack of discipline and supplies, and melted into ineffectual bands at the very moment when the Romans had reached the end of their stores.

"Soon thereafter the starving city sent Vercingerorix at his own suggestion as a prisoner to Caesar, and then surrendered to the Roman's mercy (52). The town was spared, but all its soldiers were given to the legionaries as slaves.

"Vercingetorix was led in chains to Rome. There he later graced Caesar's triumph and paid with his life for his devotion to liberty.

"The siege of Alesia added to the Roman Empire a country twice the size of Italy and opened the purses and markets of 5,000,000 people to Roman trade. It saved Italy and the Mediterranean world for four centuries from barbarian invasion. It lifted Caesar from the verge of ruin to a new height of reputation, wealth, and power.

"After another year of sporadic revolts, which the angry general put down with uncharacteristic severity, all Gaul accepted subjection to Rome. Once his victory was certain Caesar became again the generous conqueror. He treated the tribes with such lenience that in all the ensuing Civil War, when he and Rome would have been helpless to retaliate, they made no move to throw off the yoke.

"For three hundred years Gaul remained a Roman province, prospered under the Roman peace, learned and transformed the Latin language, and became the channel through which the culture of classic antiquity passed into northern Europe.

"Instead of leading his legions to Spain, Pompey kept them in Italy, except for one which he lent to Caesar in the crisis of the Gallic revolt. In 54 the strongest tie that held him to Caesar was cut by the death of his wife Julia in childbirth. Caesar offered him his grandniece, Octavia, now Caesar's nearest female relative, and asked for the hand of Pompey's daughter. But Pompey refused both proposals.

"The debacle of Crassus and his army in the following year removed another balancing force, for a victorious Crassus would have opposed the dictatorship of either Caesar or Pompey.

"Henceforth Pompey openly allied himself with the conservatives. His plan to secure supreme power through legal forms had now only one obstacle -- the ambition and army of Caesar. Knowing that Caesar's command would expire in 49, Pompey secured decrees continuing his own command to the end of 46, and requiring all Italians capable of bearing arms to take an oath of military fealty to him personally.

"Verdicts, offices, provinces, and client kings were sold to the highest bidders. In the year 53 the first voting division in the Assembly was paid 10,000,000 sesterces for its vote.

"When money failed, murder was available.

"A man's past was raked over, and blackmail brought him to terms.

"Crime flourished in the city, brigandage in the country. No police force existed to control it.

"Rich men hired bands of gladiators to protect them, or to support them in the comitia.

"The lowest elements in Italy were attracted to Rome by the smell of money or the gift of corn, and made the meetings of the Assembly a desecration.

"Any man who would vote as paid was admitted to the rolls, whether citizen or not. Sometimes only a minority of those who cast ballots were entitled to vote.

"The privilege of addressing the Assembly had on several occasions to be won by storming the rostrum and holding it by main force.

"Legislation came to be determined by the fluctuating superiority of rival gangs.

"Those who voted the wrong way were, now and then, beaten to within an inch of their lives, after which their houses were set afire.

"One day Clodius assaulted Cicero in the street. Another day his warriors burned down Milo's house. At last Clodius himself was caught by Milo's gang and killed (52).

"The proletariat, not privy to all his plots, honored Clodius as a martyr, gave him a mighty funeral, carried the body to the senate house, and burned the building over him as his funeral pyre.

"Pompey brought in his soldiers and dispersed the mob. As reward he asked from the Senate, and received, appointment as 'consul without colleague,' a phrase that Cato recommended as more pleasant than 'dictator.'

"Pompey then put through the assembly -- cowed by his troops -- several measures aimed at political corruption, and another repealing the right (which his bill of 55 had granted to Caesar) to stand for the consulate while absent from Rome. He impartially supervised, with military force, the operation of the courts. Milo was tried for the murder of Clodius, was condemned despite Cicero's defense, and fled to Marseilles.

"Cicero went off to govern Cilicia (51), and acquitted himself there with a degree of competence and integrity which surprised and offended his friends.

"His friends informed him, however, that instead of being sent to Parthia these legions were being kept at Capua. Through his supporters in the Senate Caesar requested a renewal of the Assembly's earlier decree permitting him to stand for the consulship in absence. The Senate refused to submit the motion and demanded that Caesar dismiss his troops. Caesar felt that his legions were his only protection. Perhaps he had nourished their personal loyalty with a view to just such a crisis as this.

Nevertheless, he proposed to the Senate that both he and Pompey should lay down their commissions -- an offer which seemed to the people of Rome so reasonable that they garlanded his messenger with flowers. The Senate favored the plan, 370 to 22, but Pompey balked at it.

"In the last days of the year 50 the Senate declared Caesar a public enemy unless he should abandon his command by July 1. On the first day of 49 Curio read to the Senate a letter in which Caesar agreed to disband all but two of his ten legions if he might retain the governorship until 48. But he spoiled the offer by adding that he would look upon its rejection as a declaration of war. Cicero spoke for the proposal, and Pompey agreed to it. But the consul Lentulus intervened and drove Caesar's lieutenants, Curio and Antony, from the senate house.

"But to yield was to surrender the Empire to incompetence and reaction. Amid his deliberations he learned that one of is nearest friends and ablest lieutenants, Titus Labienus, had gone over to Pompey. He summoned the soldiers of his favorite Thirteenth Legion and laid the situation before them.

"His first word won them. Commilitones!--'fellow soldiers.' They who had seen him share their hardships and perils, who had had to complain that he risked himself too readily, recognized his right to use this word. He had always addressed them so rather than with the curt Milites! of less gracious commanders.

"Most of his men came from Cisalpine Gaul, to which he had extended Roman citizenship. They knew that the Senate had refused to recognize this grant and that one senator had flogged a Cisalpine Gaul just to show his contempt for Caesar's enfranchisment -- it was illegal to flog a Roman citizen.

"They had learned to respect Caesar -- even, in their rough mute way, to love him -- during their many campaigns. He had been severe with cowardice and indiscipline, but he had been lenient with their human faults -- had winked at their sexual escapades -- had spared them unnecessary dangers -- had saved them by skillful generalship -- had doubled their pay -- and had spread his spoils among them handsomely.

"He told them of his proposals to the Senate and how these had been received. He reminded them that an idle and corrupt aristocracy was unfit to give Rome order, justice, and prosperity. Would they follow him?

"Caesar's Twelfth Legion joined him at Picenum, the Eighth at Corfinium. He formed three legions more from prisoners, volunteers, and levies upon the population. He had little difficulty in getting recruits. Italy had not forgotten the Social War (88), and saw in Caesar a champion of Italian rights.

"One by one its cities opened their gates to him, some turned out en masse to welcome him. Wrote Cicero, 'the towns salute him as a god.' Cordinium resisted briefly, then surrendered. Caesar protected it from sack by his soldiers, freed all captured officers, and sent to Pompey's camp the money and baggage that Labienus had left behind.

"Although almost penniless, he refrained from confiscating those estates of his opponents that fell into his hands -- a characteristically wise measure, which won to neutrality most of the middle class. It would be his policy, he announced to consider all neutrals his friends.

"At every new advance he tried again for reconciliation. He sent a message to Lentulus begging him to use his consular influence for peace. In a letter to Cicero he offered to retire to private life and leave the field to Pompey, provided he should be allowed to live in security.

"The majority of the Senate remained in Rome, and vacillating Cicero, despising Pompey's vacillations, divided himself among his rural estates. Pompey marched to Brundisium and ferried his troops across the Adriatic. He knew that his undisciplined army needed further training before it could stand up to Caesar's legions.

"The tribunes convoked the Senate. Caesar asked it to name him dictator, but it refused. He asked it to send envoys to Pompey to negotiate peace, but it refused. He sought funds from the national Treasury. The tribune Lucius Metellus barred his way, but yielded when Caesar remarked that it was harder for him to utter threats than to execute them.

"Henceforth he made free use of the state's money. With unscrupulous impartiality he deposited in the Treasury the booty from his later campaigns. Then he returned to his soldiers, and prepared to meet the three armies that the Pompeians were organizing in Greece, Africa, and Spain.

"To secure the grain supply upon which Italy's life depended, he sent the impetuous Curio with two legions to take Sicily. Cato surrendered the island and withdrew to Africa. Curio pursued him with the recklessness of Regulus, gave battle prematurely, was defeated, and died in action, mourning not his own death, but the injury he had done to Caesar.

"Meanwhile Caesar had led an army to Spain, partly to ensure the renewal of its grain exports to Italy, partly to ensure the renewal of its grain exports to Italy, partly to forestall a rear attack when he marched to meet Pompey.

"In Spain, as in Gaul, he made serious blunders in strategy. For a time his outnumbered army faced starvation and defeat. But, as usual, he redeemed himself by brilliant improvisation and personal bravery. By altering the course of a river he turned blockade into counterblockade. He waited patiently for the entrapped army to surrender, although his troops fretted for action. At last the Pompeians gave in, and all Spain came over to Caesar (August, 49).

"The aristocrats in Pompey's camp exaggerated the victory at Dyrrhachium and supposed that the great issue had there been decided. Cicero, who had finally joined them, was shocked to hear them dispute as to their respective shares in the coming restoration, and to see with what luxury they lived in the midst of war -- their meals served on silver plate, their tents comfortable with carpets, brilliant with hangings, garlanded with flowers.

"Cicero wrote:-'Excepting Pompey himself, the Pompeians carried on the war with such rapacity, and breathed such principles of cruelty in their conversation, that I could not contemplate even their success without horror. There was nothing good among them but their cause. A proscription was proposed not only individually but collectively. Lentulus had promised himself Hortensius' house, Caesar's gardens, and Baiae.'

"Near relatives, even brothers, fought in the opposed armies. Caesar bade his men spare all Romans who should surrender. As to the young aristocrat Marcus Brutus, he said, they were to capture him without injuring him or, if this provied impossible, they were to let him escape.

"The Pompeians were overwhelmed by superior leadership, training, and morale. 15,000 of them were killed or wounded, 20,000 surrendered, the remainder fled.

"Pompey tore the insignia of command from his clothing and took flight like the rest.

"Caesar tells us that he lost but 200 men -- which casts doubt upon all his books. His army was amused to see the tents of the defeated so elegantly adorned, and their tables laden with the feast that was to celebate their victory.

"Brutus also escaped to Larissa, but there he dallied and wrote to Caesar. The victor expressed great joy on hearing that he was safe, readily forgave him, and at his requst forgave Cassius. To the nations of the East, which -- controlled by the upper classes -- had supported Pompey he was likewise lenient. He distributed Pompey's hoards of grain among the starving population of Greece, and to the Athenians asking pardon he replied with a smile of reproof:-'How often will the glory of your ancestors save you from self-destruction?"

"Probably he had been warned that Pompey hoped to resume the contest with the army and resources of Egypt, and the forces that Cato, Labienus, and Metellus Scipio were organizing at Utica. But when Pompey reached Alexandria, Pothinus, eunuch vizier of young Ptolemy XII, ordered his servants to kill Pompey, presumably in expectation of reward from Caesar.

" The general was stabbed to death as he stepped upon the shore, while his wife looked on in helpless terror from the ship in which they had come. When Caesar arrived, Pothinus' men presentd him with the severed head. Caesar turned away in horror and wept at this new proof that by diverse means men come to the same end.

"He reconciled her with Ptolemy, and re-established her with her brother on the throne of Egypt.

"Learning from his barber that Pothinus and the Egyptian general Achillas were plotting to kill him and slaughter the small force that he had brought with him, he delicately arranged the assassination of Pothinus. Achillas escaped to the Egyptian army and roused it to insurrection. Soon all Alexandria was alive with soldiers vowing death to Caesar. The Roman garrison which had been stationed in the city by the Senate was inspired by its officers to join in rising against this treasonable inteloper who presumed to settle the succession to the throne of the Ptolemies, and even to beget an heir for its future.

"In this emergency Caesar acted with his customary resourcefulness. He turned the royal palace and the near-by theater into fortresses for himself and his men, and sent for reinforcements from Asia Minor, Syria, and Rhodes. When he saw that his defenseless fleet would soon fall into the hands of his enemies, he ordered it burned. In the fire an uncertain portion of the Alexandrian library was consumed.

"By desperate sallies he captured, lost, and recaptured the island of Pharos, as being essential to the entry of the relief he awited. In one of these engagements he swam for his life, amid a storm of arrows, when the Egyptians drove him and 400 of his men off the connecting mole into the sea.

"Thinking the rebels victorious, Ptolemy XII left the foyal palace joined them, and disappeared from history. When reinforcements arrived, Caesar routed the Egyptians and the Senatorial garrison in the Battle of the Nile.

"He 'often feasted with Cleopatra until daybreak,' says Suetoinius, 'and would hve gone through Egypt with her in her royal barge almost to Ethiopia, had not his soldiers threatned mutiny.' They had not all found queens.

"Perhaps he gallantly waited to share the pains of her confinement. A child was born to her in 47 and was named Caesarion. According to Mark Antony, Caesar acknowledged the boy as his son.

"Re-forming his three legions, Caesar set out in June of 47, marched with characteristic speed along the coast of Egypt through Syria and Asia Minor into Pontus, defeated Pharnaces at Zela (August 2), and sent to a friend at Rome the laconic report, Veni, vidi, vidi -- 'I came, I saw, I conquered.'

"At Tarentum (September 26) he was met by Cicero, who asked forgiveness for himself and other conservatives. Caesar consented amiably. He was shocked to find that during his twenty months' absence from Rome the Civil War had become a social revolution:-that Cicero's son-in-law Dolabella had joined forces with Caelius, and had proposed to the assembly a bill canceling all debts. That Anthony had let loose his soldiers upon Dolabella's armed proletaires, and 800 Romans had been killed in the Forum.

"Caelius, as praetor, had recalled Milo. Together they had organized an army in southern Italy and had invited the slaves to unite with them in a thorough-going revolution. They had met with small success, but their spirit was in the air. At Rome the radicals were celebrating the memory of Catiline and again garlanding his tomb. Meanwhile the Pompeian army in Africa has grown as large as the one that had been beaten at Pharsalus. Pompey's son Sextus had organized a new army in Spain, and the grain supply of Italy was once more hanging in the balance.

"Juba committed suicide. Scipio fled and died in an engagement at sea. Cato with a small division escaped to Utica.

"When the officers wished to defend the city against Caesar, Cato persuaded them that it was impossible. He provided funds for those who planned flight, but advised his son to submit to Caesar.

"He himself rejected both courses. He spent the evening in philosophical discussion. Then he retired to his room and read Plato's Phaedo. Suspecting that he would kill himself, his friends took his sword from his bedside. When they had relaxed their vigil he compelled his servant to bring back the weapon.

"For a while he feigned sleep. Then suddenly he took the sword and plunged it into his abdomen. His friends rushed in. A physician put back the extruding intestines and sewed and bandaged the wound.

"As soon as they had left the room Cato removed the bandage, tore open the wound, pulled out his entrails, and died.

"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 pontifix maximus, the priesthoods. As consul he could propose and execute laws. As tribune his person was inviolable. As censor he cold 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.

"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.

"Perhaps Caesar purposely made the new Senate too combersome 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.

"Having turned many idle proletaires into soldiers and then into peasant proprietors, he further diminished their ranks by sending 80,000 citizens as colonists to Carthage, Corinth, Seville, Arles, 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 Inlium.

"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.

"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.

"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, although not quite free from superstitions, 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.

"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 Facinus 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.

"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 Gibralter 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.

"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.

"When news of this plan trickled through Rome, the common people, who love glory, applauded. The business classes, smelling war orders and provincial loot licked their chops.

"He had forgiven all surrendering foes and had condemned to death only a few officers who, defeated and pardoned, had fought against him again.

"He had burned unread the correspondence he had found in the tents of Pompey and Scipio.

"He had sent the captured daughter and grandchildren of Pompey to Pompey's son Sextus, who was still in arms against him.

"He had restored the statues of Pompey which his followers had thrown down.

"He had given provincial governorships to Brutus and Cassius, and high office to many others of their class.

"He bore silently a thousand slanders, and instituted no proceedings against those whom he suspected of plotting against his life.

"To Cicero, who had trimmed his wind to every sail, he offered not only pardon but honor, and refused nothing that the orator asked for himself or his Pompeian friends. He even forgave at Cicero's urging, the unrepentant Marcus Marcellus.

"In a pretty speech For Marcellus (46) Cicero acclaimed Caesar's 'unbelievable liberality,' and admitted that Pompey, victorious, would have been more vengeful.' Said Cicero:-'I have heard with regret your celebrated and highly philosophical remark, Iam satis vixi, 'I have lived enough, whether for nature or for fame.' Put aside, I beg you, that wisdom of the sage. Do not be wise at the cost of our peril. You are still far from the completion of your greatest labors. You have not yet laid their foundations.' Cicero solemnly promised Caesar, in the name of all the Senate, that they would watch over his safety and oppose with their own bodies any attack upon him.

"Cicero now prospered so well that he planned to buy still aother palace -- no less than that of Sulla himself. He enjoyed the dinners to which he was invited by Antony, Balbus, and others of Caesar's aides. Never before had his letters been so gay. Caesar was not deceived. He wrote to Matius;- 'If anyone is gracious, it is Cicero. But I doubt not that he hates me bitterly.'

"When reassured Pompeians resumed their opposition, this unctuous Talleyrand of the pen fell in with their hopes and wrote a culogy of the younger Cato that should have put Caesar on his guard. Caesar contented himself with writing a reply, the Anti-Cato, which did not show the dictator at his best. In this duel he had given Cicero the choice of weapons, and the orator had won.

"They looked with horror upon the presence of Cleopatra and Caesarion in Rome. It was true that Caesar was living with his wife Calpurnia apparently in mutual affection. But who could say -- who would not say -- what happened on his frequent visits to the gorgeous queen? Rumors persisted that he would make himself king, marry her, and place the capital of their united empires in the East.

"Had he not ordered his statue to be erected on the Capitol next to those of Rome's ancient kings? Had he not stamped his own image upon Roman coins -- an unprecedented insolence? Did he not wear robes of purple, usually reserved for kings?

"At the Lupercalia, on February 15, the consul Antony,sacerdotally naked, and impiously drunk, tried thrice to place a royal crown upon Caesar's head. Thrice Caesar refused, but was it not because the crowd murmured disapproval? Did he not dismiss from office the tribunes who removed from his statue the royal diadem placed upon it by his friends?

"When the Senate approached him as he sat in the Temple of Venus, he did not rise to receive them. Some explained tht he had been overcome by an epileptic stroke. Others, that he was suffering from diarrhea and had remained seated to avoid a movement of his bowels at so unpropitious a moment.

"But Decimus Brutus, who was one of his closest friends and was also one of the conspirators -- urged him to attend the Senate if only to adjourn it courteously in person. A friend who had learned of the plot came to warn him, but Caesar had already left.

"On his way to the Senate he met a soothsayer who had once whispered to him, 'Beware the ides of March.' Caesar remarked, smiling, that the ides had come and all was well. 'But they have not passed,' answered Spurinna. While Caesar was offering the usual precession sacrifice before Pompey's theater, where the Senate was to meet, a tablet informing him of the censpiracy was put into his hands.

"He ignored it, and tradition says that it was found in his hand after his death.

"Trebonius, a conspirator who had been a favored general of Caesar, detained Antony from the meeting by conversation. When Caesar entered the theater and took his seat, the 'Liberators' flung themselves upon him without delay. Reports Suetonius:-'Some have written that when Marcus Brutus rushed at him he said, in Greek, kai su teknon -- 'You, too, my child?' When Brutus struck him, says Appian, Caesar ended all resistance, drawing his robe over his face and head, he submited to the blows and fell at the foot of Pompey's statue.

"Men have divided on the issue ever since the Senate sat for a moment in consternation at the deed and then fled in tumult and terror from the hall. Antony, arriving after the event, saw valor in discretion and fortified himself in his house.

"Cicero's eloquence lost its tongue, even when Brutus, dagger in hand, hailed him as 'Father of His Country.' Emerging, the conspirators found an excited populace in the square. They tried to win it with catchwords of Liberty and the Republic, but the dazed crowd had no homage for phrases so long used to cover greed. Fearing for their lives, the assassins took refuge in the buldings on the Capitol and surrounded themselves there with their personal gladiatorial guards.

"The Liberators returned to the Capitol, and as the crowd thinned out they stealthily departed to their homes. Antony, thinking himself Caesar's heir, obtained from the stunned Calpurnia all the papers and funds that the dictator had left in his palace. At the same time he secretly summoned Caesar's veterans to Rome.

"On the 17th, by his authority as tribune, he convened the Senate and astonished all parties by his amiability and calm. He accepted Cicero's proposal for a general amnesty, and agreed that Brutus and Cassius should receive provincial governorships (i.e. flight with safety and power), on condition that the Senate should ratify all the decrees, legislation, and appointments of Caesar. Since a majority of the Senate owed office or emoluments to these acts, it consented. When it adjourned Antony was acclaimed as a statesman who had snatched peace out of the jaws of war. That evening he entertained Cassius for dinner.

"The dictator had devised his gardens to the people as a public park and had left 300 sesterces to every citizen of Rome. The news of these benefactions sped through the city. When, on the 20th, Caesar's body, which had been embalmed in his home, was brought into the forum for the last rites, a great concourse of people, including Caesar's veterans, gathered to do him reverence.

"Antony seems to have spoken at first with cautious restraint. As he went on, his pent-up feelings flared into eloquence.

"When he raised from the ivory bier the torn and bloody robe through which Caesar had been stabbed, the emotions of the crowd were stirred beyond control. Amid weird wailing and frenzied cries, men gathered wood anywhere and built a fire beneath the corpse. Veterans threw their weapons upon the pyre as an offering, actors threw their costumes, musicians their instruments, women their most precious ornaments.

"Taking brands from the fire, some enthusiasts sought to burn down the houses of the conspirators. But these buildings were well guarded, and their masters had fled from Rome.

"A large part of the crowd stayed all night long by the smoldering pyre. Many Jews, grateful for Caesar's sympathetic legislation, remained there three days, intoning their ancient funeral chants. During those days riot surged through the capital.

"He had scandalized even Caesar by keeping a harem of both sexes in Rome, and trveling with a Greek courtesan in his litter. He had bought in Pompey's house at auction, occupied it, and then refused payment.

"Now he found in Caesar's papers, or (some said) placed there, whatever it suited him to find -- appointments for his friends, decrees for his purposes, perequisites for himself. In two weeks' time he had paid off $1,500,000 in debts and had become a rich man. He seized the $25,000,000 that Caesar had deposited in the Temple of Ops and took another $5,000,000 from Caesar's private treasury.

"Noting that Decimus Brutus, whom Caesar had appointed governor of Cisalpine Gaul, had assumed that lucrative office despite sharing in the assassination of Caesar, Antony passed through the assembly a bill giving himself that strategic province and consoling Decimus with Macedonia. Likewise Marcus Brutus and Cassius were to surrender Macedonia to Decimus and Syria to Dolabella, and were to content themselves with sharing Cyrene and Crete.

"Alarmed by Antony's spreading power, the Senate invited to Rome, as a foil to him, Caesar's adopted son. Caius Octavius, who was to make himself the greatest statesman in Roman history, was eighteen years old in 44. By natural custom he took his adoptive father's name. Adding his own as a modifier, he became Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus until, seventeen years later, he received that lofty name of Augustus by which the centuries have known him.

"His grandmother was Caesar's sister Julia. His grandfather had been a banker of plebeian stock at Velitrae, in Latium. His father had served as plebeian aedile, then praetor, then governor of Macedonia. The boy was trained to Spartan simplicity, and educated in the literature and philosophy of Greece and Rome.

"In the last three years he had lived a good part of the time in Caesar's palace. It was one of the sorrows of Caesar's life that he had no legitimate son and one of his profoundest insights that he adopted Octavius. He took the boy with him to Spain in 45 and was pleased to see the courage with which the frail and nervous invalid endured the perils and hardships of the campaign. He had him carefully instructed in the arts of war and government.

"Many statues have made his features familiar -- refined, delicate, serious, at once diffident and resolute, yielding and tenacious -- an idealist forced to be a realist, a man of thought painfully learning to be a man of action.

"He rode down to the sea, crossed to Brundisium, and hastened to Rome. His relatives there advised him to stay in hiding lest Antony destroy him. His mother likewise recommended inaction. But when he scorned such a course she rejoiced, merely suggesting that whenever possible he should use patience and subtlety rather than open war. He followed this wise counsel to the end.

"He visited Antony and inquired what was being done against Caesar's enemies. He was shocked to find Antony busy planning to lead an army against Decimus Brutus, who had refused to surrender Cisalpine Gaul. He asked Antony to disburse Caesar's legacies according to will, especially the forty-five dollars bequested to every citizen. Antony saw many reasons for delay.

"Cicero took advantage of the quarrel to persuade him that Antony was a ruffian, who must be defeated. Octavian agreed, joined his two legions with those of the consuls Hirtius and Pansa, and marched with them northward to battle Antony.

"Cicero lent this new civil war the aid of his invective in fourteen powerful 'Philippics' against the public policy and private life of Antony, some delivered to the Senate or the Assembly, the rest published as propaganda broadcasts in the best tradition of martial blackening.

"In the ensuing engagement at Mutina (Modena), Antony lost and fled (44). But Hirtius and Pansa fell, and Octavian returned to Rome sole commander of the Senate's legions as well as his own. With this force behind him he compelled the Senate to name him consul, to repeal its amnesty to the conspirators, and to sentence them all to death.

" Discovering that Cicero and the Senate were not his enemies, and were merely using him as a temporary tool against Antony, he composed his differences with Antony and formed with him and Lepidus the Second Triumvirate (44-33). Their combined armies marched into Rome and took it without resistance. Many of the senators and conservatives fled to south Italy and the provinces.

"They listed 300 senators and 2000 business men for execution.

"They offered 25,000 drachmas ($15,000) to any freeman, and 10,000 to any slave, who would bring in the head of a person proscribed.

"To have money became a capital crime. Children to whom fortunes had been left were condemned and killed. Widows were shorn of their legacies. 1400 rich women were required to turn over a large share of their property to the Triumvirate.

"At last even the savings deposited with the Vestal Virgins were seized.

"The Triumverate set their soldiers to guard all exits from the city. The proscribed hid in wells, sewers, attics, chimneys. Some died resisting. Some submitted quietly to their slayers. Some starved, hanged, or drowned themselves. Some leaped from a roof or into a fire. Some were killed by mistake. Some, not proscribed, committed suicide on the bodies of slain relatives.

"Salvius, the tribune, knowing himself doomed, gave a last feast to his friends. The emissaries of the Triumvirate entered, cut off his head, left his body at the table, and bade the feast go on.

"Slaves took the opportunity to get rid of hard masters. Many fought to the death to protect their owners. One disguised himself as his master and suffered decapitation in his stead.

"Sons died to protect their fathers. Others betrayed their fathers to inherit a part of their fortunes.

"Adulterers or deceived wives surrendered their husbands. The wife of Coponius secured his safety by sleeping with Antony.

"Octavian protested, but not too long. He could not forget Cicero's glorification of Caesar's assassins and the pun by which that reckless wit had excused the conservatives his dalliance with Caesar's heir. Cicero tried to escape but being buffeted and sickened by the sea, he disembarked and spent the night in his villa at Formiae.

"The next day he wished to stay there and await his executioners, preferring them to a chopy sea. But his slaves forced him into a litter and were carrying him toward the ship when Antony's soldiers came upon them.

"The servants wished to resist, but Cicero bade them set the litter down and yield. Then, 'his person covered with dust, his beard and hair untrimmed, and his face worn with his troubles,' he stretched his head out so that the soldiers might more conveniently decapitate him (43). By Antony's command Cicero's right hand was also cut off and brought with the head to the Triumvir.

"Antony laughed in triumph, gave the assassins 250,000 drachmas, and had head and hand hung up in the Forum.

"Early in 42 the Triumvirs led their forces across the Adriatic and marched through Macedonia into Thrace. There Brutus and Cassius had massed the last republican army, financed by exactions beyond even Roman precedent. From the Eastern cities of the Empire they demanded, and received, ten years' taxes in advance.

"For the most part Brutus, loving philosophy, tarried in Athens. But the city was filling with young Roman nobles clamoring for a war of restoration. When sufficient funds had been raised Brutus closed his books, joined his troops with those of Cassius, and took the field.

"The rival armies met at Philippi in September of 42. Brutus' wing forced back Octavian's and captured his camp. Antony's routed the legions of Cassius. Cassius ordered his shield bearer to kill him and was obeyed.

"Antony could not follow up his success at once. Octavian was confined to his tent with illness, and his troops were in disorder. Antony reorganized the whole army and after a few days' rest led them against Brutus and put the last remnants of the republican forces to flight. Seeing his men yield, Brutus realized, perhaps with relief, that all was lost. He threw himself upon the sword of a friend and died.

"Always needing money, Antony forgave the Eastern cities their cntributions to his enemies on condition that they give him a like sum -- ten years' taxes within a year. His old geniality returned as victory made him seemingly secure.

"He reduced his demands upon the Ephesians when their women, dressed as Bacchantes, greeted him as the Dionysus, but he gave his cook the house of a Magnesian magnate as reward for a distinguished supper.

"He had sent messengers to bid Cleopatra present herself before hm at Tarsus and answer charges that she had aided Cassius to raise money and troops. She came, but in her own time and way. While Antony sat on a throne in the forum, waiting for her to plead and be judged, she sailed up the river Cydnus in a barge with purple sails, gilded stern, and silver oars that beat time to the music of flutes and fifes and harps.

"Her maids, dressed as sea nymphs and graces, were the crew, while she herself, dressed as Venus, lay under a canopy of cloth of gold. When the news of this seductive apparition spread among the people of Tarsus they flocked to the shore, leaving Antony solitary on his throne.

"Cleopatra invited him to dine with her on her ship. He came with an overawing retinue. She feted them with every luxury, and corrupted his generals with gifts and smiles. Antony had almost fallen in love with her as a girl in Alexandria. Now he found her, at twenty-nine, in tne full maturity of her charms.

"He began by reproving her, and ended by presenting her with Phoenicia, Coele-Syria, Cyprus, and parts of Arabia, Cilicia, and Judea. She rewarded him accordingly to his desire and invited him to Alexandria. There he spent a carefree winter (41-40), drinking the Queen's love, listening to lectures at the Museum, and forgetting that he had an empire to rule.

"She herself was not in love. She knew that Egypt, rich but weak, would soon attract the cupidity of omnipotent Rome. The only salvation for her country and her throne lay in marriage with Rome's lord. She had sought this with Caesar. She sought it now with Antony.

"Octavian himself was anything but an exemplar of chastity at this time. To perfect the confusion, Fulvia and Lucius raised an army and called upon Italy to oust him. Marcus Agrippa, Octavian's general, besieged Lucius in Perusia and starved him out (March, 40).

"Fulvia died of illness, frustrated ambition, and grief over Antony's neglect of her. Octavian pardoned Lucius in the hope of maintaining peace with Antony, but Antony crossed the sea and besieged Octavian's troops in Brundisium. The armies, showing more sense than their leaders, refused to fight each other, and compelled them to a peaceable agreement (40). As a pledge of good behavior Antony married Octavian's sister, the gentle and virtuous Octavia.

"He reduced taxes, returned 30,000 runaway slaves to their masters, and set himself patiently to restoring order in Italy. With the help of Agrippa, and of 120 ships contributed by Antony, he destroyed the fleet of Sextus Pompey, secured Rome's food supply, and ended the resistance of the Pompeians (36). The Senate by acclamation named him tribune for life.

"After marrying Octavia in a state ceremony at Rome, Antony went with her to Athens. There for a time he enjoyed the novel experience of living with a good woman. He put aside politics and war and, with Octavia at his side, attended the lectures of philosophers.

"Meanwhile, however, he studied the plans that Caesar had left for conquering Parthia. Labienus, son of Caesar's general, had entered the services of the Parthian king and had led Parthian armies victoriously into Cilicia and Syria -- lucrative provinces of Rome (40). To meet this threat Antony needed soldiers. To pay soldiers he needed money. Of this Ceopatra had plenty.

"Suddenly tiring of virtue and peace, he sent Octavia back to Rome and asked Cleopatra to meet him at Antioch. She brought him a few troops, but she disapproved of his grandiose plans and apparently gave him little of her fabulous treasury. He invaded Parthia with 100,000 men (36), tried in vain to capture its citadels, and lost almost half his forces in a heroic retreat through 300 miles of hostile country.

"On the way he annexed Armenia to the empire. He awarded himself a triumph and shocked Italy by celebrating it at Alexandria. He sent a letter of divorce to Octavia (32), married Cleopatra, confirmed her and Caesarion as joint rulers of Egypt and Cyprus, and bequeated the Eastern provinces of the Empire to the son and daughter that Cleopatra had borne him. Knowing that he would soon have to square accounts with Octavian, he abandoned himself to a year of frolic and luxury.

"He saw to it that Italy should realize the situation. Antony had married the Queen of Egypt, had assigned to her and her illegimate offspring the most tribute-yielding of Rome's provinces, was seeking to make Alexandria the capital of the empire, and would reduce Rome and Italy to subordinate roles.

"When Antony sent a message to the Senate (which he had for years ignored) proposing that he and Octavian should retire to private life, and that the institutions of the Republic should be restored, Octavian escaped a difficult situation by reading to the Senate what he claimed was Antony's will, which he had taken by force from the Vestal Virgins. It named Antony's children by Cleopatra his sole heirs, and directed that he should be buried beside the Queen in Alexandria. The last clause was as decisive for the Senate as it should have proved suspicious. Instead of raising doubts that a will filed in Rome should have made such provisions, it convinced the Senate and Italy that Cleopatra was scheming to absorb the empire through Antony.

"With characteristic subtlety Octavian declared war (32) against her rather than Antony, and made the conflict a holy war for the independence of Italy.

"In September, 32, the fleet of Antony and Cleopatra sailed into the Ionian Sea, 500 warships strong. No such armada had been seen before. Supporting it was an army of 100,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry, mostly supplied by Eastern princes and kings in the hope of making this a war of liberation from Rome.

"Octavian crossed the Adriatic with 400 vessels, 80,000 foot, 12,000 horse. For almost a year the rival forces prepared and maneuvered. Then, on September 2, 31, they fought at Actium, in the Ambracian Gulf, one of the decisive battles of history. Agrippa proved the better tactician, and his light ships more manageable than Antony's heavy towered leviathans. Many of these were consumed by fires set by burning brands cast upon them by Octavian's crews.

"Antony saw that he was losing and signaled to Cleopatra to carry out their prearranged plan for retreat. She headed her squadron southward and waited for Antony. Unable to extricate his flagship, he abandoned it and rowed out to hers.

"Antony had left Cleopatra and was staying on an island near Pharos. Thence he sent offers of peace, which Octavian ignored. Unknown to Antony, Cleopatra sent Octavian a golden scepter, crown, and throne as tokens of her submission. According to Dio he replied that he would leave her and Egypt untouched if she would kill Antony. The beaten Triumvir wrote to Octavian again, reminding him of their former friendship and of 'all the wanton pranks in which they shared as youths' and agreed to kill himself if the victor would spare Cleopatra. Again Octavian made no reply.

"Cleopatra gathered all that she could of the Egyptian treasury into a palace tower and informed Octavian that she would destroy it all, and herself, unless he granted an honorable peace. Antony led what small forces remained to him in a last fight. His desperate courage won a temporary victory. But on the next day, seeing Cleopatra's mercenaries surrender, and receiving a report that Cleopatra was dead, he stabbed himself.

"When he learned that the report was false he begged to be brought to the tower in whose upper chamgers the Queen and her attendants had locked themselves. They drew him up through the window, and he died in her arms.

"Octavian allowed her to come forth and bury her lover. Then he granted her an audience and, immune to what lure survived in a broken woman of thirty-nine, he gave her terms that made life seem worthless to one who had been a queen. Convinced that he intended to take her as captive to adorn a Roman trimph, she arrayed herself in her royal robes, put an asp to her breast, and died. Her handmaidens Charmion and Iris followed her in suicide.

"Octavian permitted her to be buried beside Antony. Caesarion, and Antony's eldest son by Fulvia, he slew. The children of Antony and the Queen he spared and sent to Italy, where Octavia reared them as if they were her own.

"The victor found the Egyptian treasury intact and as abundant as he had dreamed. Egypt escaped the indignity of being named a Roman province. Octavan merely mounted the throne of the Ptolemies, succeeded to their possessions, and left a praefectus to administer the country in his name. Caesar's heir had conquered those of Alexander, and absorbed Alexander's realm.

"The West again, as at Marathon and Magnesia, had triumphed over the East. The battle of the giants was over, and an invalid had won."

"The new Senate gratefully yielded its major powers to one who would plan, take responsibility, and lead.

"Dio Cassius represents Octavian as discussing the matter at great length with Maccenas and Agrippa. Since in their judgment all governments were oligarchies, the problem could not present itself to them as a choice among monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. They had to decide whether, under the given conditions of space and time, oligarchy was to be preferred in a monarchical form based upon an army, or an aristocratic form rooted in heredity, or a democratic form resting on the wealth of the business class.

"Vaguely they understood that their clumsy comitia, clogged with corruption and racked with violence, could not govern the Empire, could not restore health to Italy, could not even administer Rome. The difficulties of freedom multiply with the area it embraces. When Rome ceased to be a city-state, empire drove it inexorably toward the imitation of Egypt, Persia, and Macedon. Out of the collapse of freedom into individualism and chaos a new government had to be created to forge a new order for a widened realm. All the Mediterranean world lay in disorder at Octavian's feet, waiting for statesmanship.

"He succeeded where Caesar had failed, because he was more patient and devious, because he understood the strategy of words and forms -- because he was willing to move cautiously and slowly where his great-uncle had been forced by the brevity of time to wound living traditions and crowd a generation of changes into half a year of life.

"Moreover, Octavian had money. When he brought the treasury of Egypt to Rome, says Suetonius, 'money became so abundant that the interest rate fell' from twelve to four per cent, and 'the value of real estate rose enormously.' As soon as Octavian made it clar that property rights were again sacred -- that he was through with proscriptions and confiscations -- money came out of hiding, investment took courage -- trade expanded -- wealth resumed its accumulation -- and some of it trckled down to the workers and the slaves.

"To provinces suffering from political depredations or acts of God he remitted a year's tribute and sent large sums for relief. He forgave property owners all tax arrears and publicly burned the records of their debts to the state. He paid for the corn dole, provided prodigal spectacles and games, and presented cash to every citizen. He undertook great public works to end unemployment and beautify rome, and paid for them out of his purse.

"Was it any wonder that the nations looked upon him as a god?

"While all this money slipped through his hands this bourgeois empereur lived simply, shunning the luxuries of the nobles and the emoluments of office, wearing the garments woven by the women in his home, and sleeping always in one small room of what had been the palace of Hortensius.

"When this burned down after he had occupied it for twenty-eight years, he built his new palace on the plan of the old, and slept in the same narrow cubiculum as before. Even when away from the eyes of the city he lived like a philosopher rather than a prince.

"Octavian was chosen consul in 43 and 33, and in every year from 31 to 23. By the tribunician authority conferred upon him in 36, 30, and 23, he had for life the inviolability of a tribune, the right to initiate legislation in the Senate or the Assembly, and the power to veto the actions of any official in the government.

"History rightly calls his government, and that of his successors for two centuries, a 'principate' rather than strictly a monarchy. Until the death of Comodus all the 'emperors' recognized, at least in theory, that they were only the leaders (principes) of the Senate. To make the constitutional facade of his authority more imposing, Octavian in 27 surrendered all his offices, proclaimed the restoration of the Republic, and expressed his desire (at thirty-five) to retire to private life.

"Perhaps the drama had been arranged. Octavian was one of those cautious men who believe that honesty is the best policy, but that it must be practiced with discrimination. The Senate countered his abdication with its own, returned to him nearly all his powers, implored him to continue his guidance of the state, and conferred upon him the title of Augustus which history has mistaken as his name.

"As imperator and consul, he ruled the army and the Treasury and administered the laws. By his tribunician privileges he controlled all other activities of the government. His powers were not much greater than those of Pericles or Pompey, or any energetic American president. The difference lay in their permanence.

"In 23 he resigned the consulate, but received from the Senate a 'proconsular authority' that gave him control of all officials in all provinces. Again no one objected. On the contrary, when a scarcity of grain threatened, the people besieged the Senate with demands that Augustus be made dictator. They had fared so ill under the Senatorial oligarchy that they were inclined toward a dictatorship, which would presumably cultivate their favor as a foil to the power of wealth.

"The powers of the prince were at once legislative, executive, and judicial.

"He could propose laws or decrees to assemblies or Senate.

"He could administer and enforce them.

"He could interpret them.

"He could penalize their violation.

"Says Suetonius, Augustus regularly sat as a judge, sometimes until nightfall, 'having a litter placed upon the tribual if he was indisposed. He was highly conscientious and very lenient.' Bearing the duties of so many offices, Augustus organized an informal cabinet of counselors like Maecenas, executives like Agrippa, generals like Tiberius, and an incipient clerical and administrative bureaucracy chiefly composed of his freedmen and slaves.

"Caius Maccenas was a wealthy businessman who devoted half his life to helping Augustus in war and peace, in politics and diplomacy, at last, unwillingly, in love.

"His palace on the Esquiline was famous for its gardens and its swimming pool of heated water. His enemies described him as an effeminate epicurean, for he flaunted silks and gems and knew all the lore of a Roman gourmet. He enjoyed and generously patronized literature and art, restored Virgil's farm to him and gave another to Horace, inspired the Georgias and the Odes. He refused public office, though he might hve had almost nay. He labored for years over principles and details of administration and foreign policy. He had the courage to reprove Augustus when he thought him seriously wrong.

"The judicial and executive functions of the Senate now outweighed the lawmaking. It served as a supreme court, governed Italy through commissions, and directed the performance at various public works. It ruled those provinces which required no extensive military control, but foreign relations were now controlled by the Prince.

"Shorn in this way of its ancient authority, the Senate grew negligent in even its limited functions, and yelded ever more responsibility to the Emperor and his staff.

"He helped the Italian cities with gifts, embellished them with new buildings, and devised a plan whereby their local councilors might vote by mail in the assembly elections at Rome.

"He divided the provinces into two classes -- those that required active defense, and those that did not. The latter (Sicily, Baetica, Narbonese Gaul, Macedonia, Achaea, Asia Minor Bithynia, Pontus, Cyprus, Crete and Cyrene and north Africa) he allowed the Senate to rule. The others -- 'imperial provinces' -- were governed by his own legates, procurators, or prefects.

"This pleasant arrangement allowed him to keep control of the army, which was mostly quartered in the 'endangered' provinces. It gave him the lush revenue of Egypt. It enabled him to keep an eye on the Senatorial governors through the procurators whom he appointed to collect the tribute in all the provinces.

"Each governor now received a fixed salary, so that his temptation to mulct his subjects was moderately reduced. Furthermore, a body of civil servants provided a continuing administration and a check upon the malfeasance of their temporary superiors.

"The Senate, pleased to have so little responsibility while retaining honors and wealth, gladly heaped upon the Emperor this and other titles of praise. The business classes, now richer than ever, celebrated his birthday with a two-day festival year after year.

"When fire destroyed his old palace, every city, apparently every tribe and guild, in the Empire sent him a contribution to rebuild it. He refused to take more than a denarius from any individual, but nevertheless he had more than enough.

"All the Mediterranean world, after its long ordeal, seemed happy. Augustus might believe that his patience and labor had accomplished his great task.

"He destroyed his own happiness by trying to make people good as well as happy. It was an imposition that Rome never forgave him. Moral reform is the most difficult and delicate branch of statesmanship.

"Since freedmen were included in the dole, many citizens freed old or sickly slaves to have them fed by the state. Kinder motives freed more, and many slaves saved enough to buy their liberty.

"As the sons of freedmen automatically became citizens, the emancipation of slaves and the fertility of aliens combined with the low birth rate of the native stocks to change the ethnic character of Rome. Augustus wondered what stability there could be in so heterogeneous a population, and what loyalty to the Empire might be expected of men in whose veins ran the blood of subject peoples. By his urging, the lex Fufia Caninia (2 B.C.) and later measures enacted that an owner of not more than two slaves might free them all -- the owner of from three to ten slaves might free half of them -- the owner of from eleven to thirty one-third -- the owner of from thirty-one to one hundred one-fourth -- the owner of from 101 to 300 one-fifth -- and no master might free more than a hundred.

"One might wish that Augustus had limited slavery instead of freedom. But antiquity took slavery for granted, and would have contemplated with horror the economic and social effects of a wholesale emancipation, just as the employers of our time fear the sloth that might come from security.

"Augustus was thinking in terms of race and class. He could not conceive a strong Rome without the character, courage, and political ability that had marked the old Roman -- above all, the old aristocracy.

"The decay of the ancient faith among the upper classes had washed away the supernatural supports of marriage, fidelity, and parentage. The passage from farm to city had made children less of an asset, more of a liability and a toy. Women wished to be sexually rather than maternally beautiful. In general the desire for individual freedom seemed to be running counter to the needs of the race.

"To accentuate the evil, legacy hunting had become the most profitable occupation in Italy. Men without children were sure to be courted in their declining years by expectant ghouls. So large a number of Romans relished this esurient courtesy that it became an added cause of childlessness.

"Protracted military service drew a considerable proportion of young men from marriage in their most nubile years. A large number of native-stock Romans avoided wedlock altogether, preferring prostitutes or concubines even to a varied succession of wives.

"He read with aging seriousness the historians of Rome, and envied the virtues they ascribed to the ancients. He relished the speech of Quintus Metullus on marriage, read it to the Senate, and recommended it to the people by imperial proclamation.

"A large part of the older generation agreed with him. It formed a kind of puritan party eager to reform morals by law. Probably Livia lent them her influence.

"By his powers as censor and tribune Augustus promulgated -- or passed through the Assembly -- a series of laws of now uncertain date and sequence, aimed at restoring morals, marriage, fidelity, parentage, and a simpler life."

Where have I heard that -- back to old values? Augustus called the "new" values which disturbed him the "insignia of civilization." Is this the tendency of "older" people? Looking backward with fondness? Becoming concerned about the younger generation?

"The most important of these 'Julian laws' was the lex Iulia de pudicitia et de coercendis adulteris (18 B.C.) - 'The Julian law of chastity and repressing adultery.' Here for the first time in Rman history marriage was brought under the protection of the state, instead of being left to the patria potestas. The father retained the right to kill an adulterous daughter and her accomplice as soon as he discovered them. The husband was allowed to kill his wife's paramour if caught in the husband's house, but he might kill his wife only if he found her sinning in his own home.

"Within sixty days of detecting a wife's adultery, the husband was required to bring her before the court. If he failed to do this, the woman's father was required to indict her. If he too failed, any citizen might accuse her.

"The adulterous woman was to be banished for life, was to lose a third of her fortune and half her dowry, and must not marry again. Like penalties were decreed for a husband conniving at his wife's adultery. A wife, however, could not accuse her husband of adultery, and he might with legal impunity have relations with registered prostitutes.

"Marriage was to be obligatory upon all marriageable males under sixty and women under fifty. Bequests conditional on the legatee remaining unmarried were made void. Penalities were imposed upon celibates. They could not inherit, except from relatives, unless they were married within a hundred days after the testator's death. They could not attend public festivals or games.

"Widows and divorcees might inherit only if remarried within six months after the death or divorce of the husband. Spinsters and childless wives could not inherit after fifty, nor before if they possessed 50,000 sesterces ($7500).

"Men of the Senatorial class could not marry a freedwoman, an actress, or a prostitute. No actor or freedman could marry a senator's daughter. Women owning above 20,000 sesterces were to pay a one per cent annual tax until married.a After marriage this tax decreased with each child until the third, with whose coming it ceased.

"Of the two consuls the one with more children was to have pecedence over the other. In appointments to office the father of the largest family was as far as feasible to be preferred to his rivals.

"The exclusion of bachelors from public shows was considered too severe and impossible to enforce. Augustus had the clause rescinded in 12 B.C.

"In A.D.9 the les Papia Poppaea further softened the Julian laws by easing the conditions under which celibates might inherit, doubling the period in which widows and divorcees must remarry to inherit, and increasing the amount that childless heirs could receive.

"Mothers of three children were freed from those limits which the les Voconia (169 B.C.) had placed upon bequests to women.

"The age at which a citizen might stand for the various offices was lowered in proportion to the size of his family. After the law was passed men noted that the consuls who had framed it and given it their names were childless celibates. Gossip added that the reform laws had been suggested to Augustus, who had only one child, by Maecenas, who had none -- that, while the laws were being enacted Maecenas was living in sybaritic luxury, and Augustus was seducing Maecenas' wife.

"It is difficult to estimate the effectiveness of this, the most important social legislation in antiquity. The laws were loosely drawn, and recalcitrants found many loopholes. Some men married to obey the law and divorced their wives soon afterwards. Othes adopted children to secure offices or legacies and then 'emancipated' -- i.e. dismissed -- them.

"Tacitus, a century later, pronounced the laws a failure. 'Marriages and the rearing of children did not become frequent, so powerful are the attractions of a childless state.'

"Immorality continued, but was more polite than before. In Ovid we see it becoming a fine art, the subject of careful instructions from experts to apprentices. Augustus himself doubted the efficacy of his laws and agreed with Horace tht laws are vain when hearts are unchanged. He struggled heroically to reach people's hearts. In his box at the games he displayed the numerous children of the exemplary Germanicus -- gave a thousand sesterces to parents of large families -- raised a monument to a slave girl who (doubtless without patriotic premeditation) had borne quintuplets -- and rejoiced when a peasant marched into Rome with eight children, thirty-six grandchildren, and nineteen great-grandchildren in his train.

"Dio Cassius pictures him making public addresses denouncing 'race sicide.' He enjoyed, perhaps inspired, the moral preface of Livy's history. Under his influence the literature of the age became didactic and practical. Through Maecenas or in person he persuaded Virgil and HOrace to lend their muses to the propaganda of moral and religious reform. Virgil tried to sing the Romans back to the farm in the Georgics, and to the old gods in the Aeneid. Horace, after a large sampling of the world's pleasures, tuned his lyre to stoic themes.

"In 17 B.C. Augustus presented the ludi saeculares -- three days of ceremonies, contests, and spectacles, celebrating the return of Saturn's Golden Age. Horace was commissioned to write the carmen saeculare to be chanted in procession by twenty seven boys and as many girls.

"Even the cynical Ovid would soon write, Voltairenly:-expidit esse deos, et ut expedit esse putemus (It is convenient that there should be gods, and that we should think they exist.)

"Conservative minds traced the Civil War, and the sufferings it had brought, to neglect of religion and the consequent anger of Heaven. Everywhere in Italy a chastened people was ready to turn back to its ancient altars and thank the deities who, it felt, had spared it for this happy restoration.

"When, in 12 B.C., Augustus, having waited patiently for the tepid Lepidus to die, succeeded him as pontifex maximus, 'such a multitude from all Italy assembled for my election,' the Emperor tells us, 'as is never recorded to have been in Rome before.' He both led and followed the revival of religion, hoping that his political and moral reconstruction would win readier acceptance if he could entwine it with the gods. He raised the four priestly colleges to unprecedented dignity and wealth, chose himself to each of them, took upon himself the appointment of new members, attended their meetings faithfully, and took part in their solemn pageantry.

"He banned Egyptian and Asiatic cults from Rome, but he made an exception in favor of the Jews, and permitted religious freedom in the provinces. He lavished gifts upon the temples and renewed old religious ceremonies, processions, and festivals. The ludi saeculares were not secular. Every day of them was marked with religious ritual and song. Their chief significance was the return of a happy friendship with the gods.

"Nourished with such soveriegn aid, the ancient cult took on fresh life, and touched again the dramatic impulses and supernatural hopes of the people.

"When Augustus visited Greek Asia in 21 B.C. he found that his cult had made rapid headway there. Dedications and orations hailed him as 'Savior,' 'Bringer of Glad Tidings,' 'God the Son of God.' Some men argued that in him the long-awaited Messiah had come, bringing peace and happiness to mankind.

"The great provincial councils made his worship the center of their ceremonies. A new priesthood, the Augustales, was appointed by provinces and municipalities for the service of the new divinity. Augustus frowned upon all this, but finally accepted it as a spiritual enhancement of the Principate, a valuable cementing of church and state, a uniting common worship amid diverse and dividing creeds.

He was at once dull and fascinating -- no one more prosaic, yet half the world adored him -- a physical weakling not particularly brave -- but able to overcome all enemies, regulate kingdoms, and fashion a government that would give the vast realm an untrampled prosperity for two hundred years.

"Sculptors spent much marble and bronze in making images of him.

"Some showing him in the timid pride of a refined and serious youth.

"Some in the somber pose of a priest.

"Some half covered with the insignia of power.

"Once, it is said, he had the legs of his secretary Thallus broken for taking 500 denari to reveal the contents of an official letter. He forced one of his freedmen to kill himself when found guilty of adultery with a Roman matron.

"All in all, it is hard to love him. We must picture the frailty of his body and the sorrows of his old age before our hearts can go out to him as to the murdered Caesar or the beaten Antony.

"His failures and his tragedies were almost all within his home. By his three wives -- Claudia, Scribonia, Livia -- he had but one child. Scribonia unwittingly avenged her divorce by giving him Julia. He had hoped that Livia would bear him a son whom he might train and educate for government. Though she had rewarded her fine husband with two splendid children -- Tiberius and Drusus -- her marrige with Augustus proved disappointingly sterile. Otherwise their union was a happy one.

"She was a woman of stately beauty, firm character, and fine understanding. Augustus rehearsed his most vital measures with her and valued her advice as highly as that of his maturest friends. Asked how she had acquired such influence over him, she replied, 'by being scrupulously chaste -- never meddling with his affairs, and pretending neither to hear of nor to notice the favorites with whom he had amours.' She was a model of the old virtues, and perhaps expounded them too persistently. In her leisure she devoted herself to charity, helping parents of large families, providing dowries for poor brides, and maiantaining many orphans at her own expense.

"But the comeliness and vivacity of his daughter Julia must have given Augustus many happy moments in her childhood. When she had reached the age of fourteen he persuaded Octavia to allow the divorce of her son Marcellus, and induced the youth to marry Julia. Two years later Marcellus died, and Julia, after brief mourning, set out to enjoy a freedom she had long coveted.

"Soon the matchmaking Emperor, craving a grandson as heir, coaxed the reluctant Agrippa to divorce his wife and marry the merry widow (21 B.C.) Julia was eighteen, Agrippa forty-two, but he was a good and great man and agreeably rich. Rumor accused Julia of deceiving her new husband. When Agrippa died (12 B.C.) Augustus turned his hopes to Julia's oldest sons, Gaius and Lucius, overwhelmed them with affection and education, and had them promoted to office far sooner than was legally warranted by their years.

"Again a widow, Julia, richer and lovelier than ever, entered with saucy abandon upon a succession of amours which became at once the scandal and the joy of Rome. Augustus made a third match for Julia. Livia's son Tiberius was compelled to divorce his pregnant wife and to marry the equally reluctant Julia (9 B.C.).

"The young old Roman did his best to be a good husband, but Julia soon gave up the effort to adjust her epicurean to his stoic ways, and resumed her illicit loves. Augustus, now (2 B.C.) an invalid of sixty, suffered all that a father and ruler ccould bear from the simultaneous collapse of his family, his honor, and his laws. By these laws the father of an adulteress was bound to indict her publicly if her husband had failed to do so. Proofs of her miscondujct were laid before him.

"He issued a decree banishing his daughter to the island of Pandateria, a barren rock off the Campanian coast. One of her lovers, a son of Antony, was forced to kill himself. Julia's freedwoman Phoebe hanged herself rather than testify against her. The distraught Emperor, hearing of the act, said:-'I would rather have been Phoebe's father than Julia's.'

"Life's final tragedy is unwilling continuance -- to outlive one's self and be forbidden to die. When Julia went into exile Augustus was not in years an old man. Others were still vigorous at sixty. But he had lived too many lives, and died too many deaths, since he had come to Rome, a boy of eighteen, to avenge Caesar's murder and execute his will.

"How many wars and battles and near-defeats -- how many pains and illnesses -- how many conspiracies and perils, and bitter miscarriages of noble aims, had befallen him in those crowded forty-two years -- and the snatching away of one hope and helper after another, until at last only this dour Tiberius remained.

"Perhaps it had been wiser to die like Antony, at the peak of life and in the arms of love. How sadly pleasant must have seemed, in retrospect, the days when Julia and Agrippa were happy. Grandchildren frolicked on the palace floor. Now another Julia, daughter of his daughter, had grown up and was following her mother's morals as if resolved to illustrate all the amatory arts of her friend Ovid's verse.

"In A.D. 8, having received proofs of her adultery, Augustus exiled her to an isle in the Adriatic, and at the same time banished Ovid to Tomi on the Black Sea. Mourned the feeble and shrunken Emperor:-'Would that I had never married or that I had died without offspring!" Sometimes he thought of starving himself to death.

"All the great structure that he had built seemed to be in ruins. The powers that he had assumed for order's sake had weakened into degeneration the Senate and the assemblies from which he had taken them. Tired of ratifications and adulations, the senators no longer came to their sessions, and a mere handful of citizens gathered in the comitia. Offices that had once stirred creative ambition by the power they brought were now shunned by the able as empty and expensive vanities.

"The very peace that Augustus had organized, and the security that he had won for Rome, had loosened the fibre of the people. No one wanted to enlist in the army, or recognize the inexorable periodicity of war. Luxury had taken the place of simplicity. Sexual license was replacing parentage.

"Like Leonardo, he thought that he had failed.

"Death came to him quietly at Nola in the seventy-sixth year of his age (A.D. 14). To the friends at his bedside he uttered the words often used to conclude a Roman comedy:-'Since well I've played my part, clap now your hands, and with applause dismiss me from the stage.'

"He embraced his wife, saying;-'Remember our long union, Livia. Farewell.' With a simple parting he passed away.

"Peace after successful war has all the stimulus of a rapid convalescence. Men then rejoice at mere being, and sometimes break into song.

"The Romans were astonished to find themselves rich so soon after devastation. They were elated to note that despite their recent defenseless disorder they were still masters of what seemed to them the world.

"They looked back upon their history, from the first to this second Romulus, from creator to restorer, and judged it epically wonderful. They were hardly surprised when Virgil and Horace put their gratitude, their glory, and their pride into verse, and Livy into prose.

"Better still, the region they had conquered was only partly barbarous. A large area of it was the realm of Hellenistic culture -- of refined speech, subtle literature, enlightening science, mature philosophy, and noble art. This spiritual wealth was now pouring into Rome, stirring imitation and rivalry, compelling language and letters to spruce up and grow.

"Until his final irascible years Augustus followed a liberal policy toward literature. He was glad to have letters and art take up the energies that had disturbed politics. He would pay men to write books if they would let him govern the state. His generosity to poets became so renowned that a swarm of them buzzed around him wherever he went.

"When a Greek persisted, day after day, in pressing verses into his hand as he left his palace, Augustus retaliated by stopping, composing some lines of his own, and having an attendant give them to the Greek. The latter offered the Emperor a few denari and expressed his regret that he could not give more.

"Juvenal thought that a compelling reason for living in the country was to escape the poets who infested Rome. In the bookshops that crowded a district called the Argiletum, writers assembled to compute literary genius, while impecunious bibliiophiles furtively read snatches of the books they could not buy. Placards on the walls announced new titles and their cost. Small volumes sold for four or five sesterces, average volumes for ten $1.50), elegant editions like Martial's epigrams, usually illustrated with a portrait of the author, brought some five denarii ($3).

"Books were exported to all parts of the Empire, or were published simultaneously in Rome, Lyons, Athens, and Alexandria. Martial was pleased to learn that he was bought and sold in Britain.

"Even poets now had private libraries. Ovid affectionately describes his. We gather from Martial that there were already book fanciers who collected de luxe editions, or rare manuscriipts.

"Augustus established two public libraries. Tiberius, Vespacian, Domitian, Trajan, and Hadrian built others. By the fourth century there were twenty-eight in Rome. Foreign students and writers came to study in these libraries and in public archives. So Dionysius came from Halicarnassus, and Diodorus from Sicily.

"Letters and the arts took on new dignity. Grammarians lectured on living authors, people sang snatches from them in the streets. Writers mingled with statesmen and highborn ladies in luxurious salons such as history would never know again until the flowering of France.

"The aristocracy became literary. Literature became aristocratic. The lusty vigor of Enneus and Platus, Lucretius and Catullus, was exchanged for a delicate beauty, or a teasing complexity, in expression and thought. Writers ceased to mingle with the people, ceased therefore to describe their ways or speak their language. A divorce set in between literature and life that finally sucked the sap and spirit out of Latin letters.

"Forms were set by Greek models, themes by Greek tradition or Augustus' court. Poetry, when it could spare time from Theocritean shepherds or Anacreontic love, was to sing didactically the joys of agriculture, the morality of ancestors, the glory of Rome, and splendor of its gods.

"Literature became a handmaiden of statesmanship, a polyphonic sermon calling the nation to Augustan ideas.

"Two forces opposed this conscription of letters by the state. One was Horace's hated and 'profane crowd,' which liked the salty tang and independence of the old satires and plays rather than the curled and perfumed beauty of the new. The other was that demimonde of jollity and sin to which Clodia and Julia belonged.

"The younger set was in full rebellion against the Julian laws, wanted no moral reform, had its own poets, circles, and norms. In letters as in life the two forces fought each other -- crossing in Tibullus and Propertius -- marching the chaste piety of Virgil with the oscene audacities of Ovid -- crushing two Julias and one poet with exile, and at last exhausting each other in the Silver Age.

"Perhaps Virgil's veins contained some Celtic blood for Mantua had long been peopled by Gauls. Technically he was a Gaul by birth. It was only twenty-one years later than Cisalpine Gaul received the Roman franchise from Caesar. The man who most eloquently sang the majesty and destiny of Rome would never show the hard masculinity of the Roman stock, but would touch Celtic strings of mysticism, tenderness, and grace rare in the Roman breed.

"His father saved enough as a court clerk to buy a farm and raise bees. In that murmurous quietude the poet spent his boyhood. The full foliage of the well-watered north lingered in his later memory and he was never really happy away from those fields and streams.

"At twelve he was sent to school at Cremona -- at fourteen to Milan -- at sixteen to Rome. There he studied rhetoric and allied subjects under the same man who was to teach Octavius. Probably after this he attended the lectures of Siro the Epicurean at Naples.

"Virgil tried hard to accept the philosophy of pleasure, but his rural background had ill-equipped him. He seems to have returned north after his education, for in 41 B.C. we find him swimming for life to escape a soldier who seized by force his father's farm. Octavian and Antony had confiscated it because the region had favored their enemies.

"The quasi-royal court welcomed the optimism of the poet's verse. Maecenas invited him, liked him, and saw in him a popular instrument of Octavian's reforms. This judgment showed insight. To all appearances Virgil, now thirty-three, was an awkward rustic, shy to the point of stammering, shunning any public place where he might be recognized and pointed out, ill at ease in the voluble and aggressive fashionable society of Rome.

"Besides, even more than Octavian, he was an invalid, suffering from headaches, throat ailments, stomach disorders, and frequent spitting of blood. Virgil never married, and seems to have felt no more than his Aeneas the full abandon of love.

"Says Hector, 'Seek for these sacred symbols. The city which, when you have wandered over the sea, you shall at last establish.' Aeneas escapes with his old father Anchises and his son Ascanius. They set sail and stop at divers places. But always the voices of the gods command them to go on. Winds drive them ashore near Carthage, where a Phoenician princess, Dido, is founding a city. Aeneas falls in love with her.

"A convenient storm enables them to take refuge in the same cave and to consummate what Dido considers their marriage. For a time Aeneas accepts her interpretation, and shares with her and his willing men the tasks of construction.

"But the relentless gods -- who, in classic myth, never cared much for marriage -- warn him to depart. This is not the capital that he must make. Aeneas obeys, and leaves the mourning queen with a theme song in his words:-

"I will never deny, O Queen that thous hast deserved of me the utmost thou canst set forth in speech...
I never held out the bridegroom's torch, nor took the marriage vow ...
But now Apollo has bidden me sail...
Cease then to consume thyself and me with these complaints. Not of my own will do I seek Italy."

Italiam non sponte sequot:-this is the secret of the tale. We who, after eight centuries of sentimental literature, judge Virgil and his hero in its terms, attach far more significance to romantic love, and to extramarital relations, than did either Greece or Rome.

"Marriage was to the ancients a union of families rather than of bodies or souls. The demands of religion or fatherland were placed above the rights or whim of the individual. Virgil treats Dido sympathetically, and rises to one of his finest passages in telling how she flings herself upon a funeral pyre and is burned alive.

"The destiny of Rome moves the plot, and all the tribulations of the tale find meaning in 'the heavy task of establishing the Roman race' -- tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem. The poet is so proud of the Empire that he looks with no envy upon the superior culture of the Greeks.

"Nor does Virgil resent the death of the Republic. He knows that class war, not Caesar, killed it. At every stage of his poem he foreshadows the restorative rule of Augustus, hails it as Saturn's reign returned, and promises him, as reward admission to the company of the gods. No man ever fulfilled a literary commission more perfectly.

"Why do we retain a warm affection for this pietistic, moralistic, chauvinistic, imperialistic propagandist? Partly because the gentleness of his spirit is on every page. Because we feel that his sympathies have spread from his own fair Italy to all men, even to all life.

"He knows the sufferings of the lowly and the great -- the obscene ghastliness of war -- the brief mortality that stalks the noblest men -- the griefs and pains -- the lacrimae rerum, or 'tears in things' that mar and accentuate the sunshine of our days. He is not merely imitating Lucretius when he writes of 'the nightingale mourning beneath the poplar's shade the loss of her young ones, whom some hard plowman has seen and torn unfledged from their nest. All night long she cries, and perched on a spray, renews her pitiful song, filling the woods with her sad lament.'

"What draws us back to Virgil again and again is the persistent loveliness of his speech. It is not in vain that he pored over every line, 'licking it into shape as the she-bear does her cubs.' Only the reader who has tried to write can guess the toil that made this narrative so smooth and adorned it with so many passages of sonorous melody that every second page cries out for quotation, and tempts the tongue.

"Perhaps the poem is too uniformly beautiful. Even beauty palls upon us if its eloquence is prolonged. There is a delicate feminine charm in Virgil, but seldom the masculine power and thought of Lucretius or the surging tide of that 'many-billowed sea' called Homer.

"We begin to understnd the melancholy ascribed to Virgil when we picture him preaching beliefs that he could never rcapture, writing for ten years an epic whose every episode and line required the effort of artificial art, then dying with the haunting thought that he had failed, that no spark of spontaneity had set his imagination on fire or spurred his figures into life.

"In 1935 Italy celebrated the two thousandth birthday of Quintus Horatius Flaceus. He was born in the little town of Venusia, in Apulia. His father was an ex-slave who had risen to the dignity of a tax collector -- or, some said, a fishmonger.

Flaccus meant flap-eared. Horatius was probably the name of the master whom the father had served. Somehow the freedman prospered, sent Quintus to Rome for rhetoric, and to Athens for philosophy. There the youth joined the army of Brutus, and received command of a legion.

It was dulce et decorum pro patria mori -- 'sweet and honorable to die for one's country' but Horace, who often imitated Archilochus, dropped his shield in the midst of battle and took to is heels. After the war was over he found himself shorn of all property and patrimony, and 'bare-faced poverty drove me to writing verses.'

"Actually, however, he buttered his bread by being a quaestor's clerk."

Discretion is the better part of valor.

And can you imagine having a two-thousandth birthday being celebrated?

"He wrote of prostitutes with scholarly restraint and intricate prosody, and thought he deserved much for not seducing married women. Too poor to ruin himself sexually, he took to books and composed Greek and Latin lyrics in the most recondite of Greek meters.

"Virgil saw one of these poems and praised it to Maecenas. The kindly epicure was complimented by Horace's stammering timidity and found a sly relish in his sophisticated thought. In 37 Maecenus took Virgil, Horace, and some others on a jaunt by canal boat, stagecoach, litter, and foot across Italy to Brusdisium. Shortly afterward he introduced Horace to Octavian, who proposed that Horace should become his secretary. The poet excused himself, having no passion for work. In 34 Maecenas gave him a house and income-producing farm in the Sabine valley of Ustica, some forty-five miles from Rome.

"Horace was now free to live in the city or the country, and to write as authors dream of writing -- with lazy leisure and laborious care.