might bear their old names and administer their old functions. But the authority of the executive government lay in the loyalty, the morality, and the patriotism of the legions to whom the power had been transferred. Fortunately for Rome, the change came before decay had eaten into the bone, and the genius of the empire had still a refuge from platform oratory and senatorial wrangling in the heart of her soldiers."
The flaw in the reasoning here consists in omitting to distinguish between the position occupied by Cæsar in his first consulship, before the Civil War, and the position which he occupied as dictator at the end of it. Sulla, before his decisive victory over the Marian party, might have tried in vain to carry the measures which he afterwards enforced during the period of his temporary supremacy. Cæsar, as consul in 59 B.C., may have found that the evils of the existing system could not be cured by such piecemeal remedies as the limited resources of ordinary legislation permitted. But it does not follow that a system which cannot be successfully tinkered is therefore incapable of being effectively reconstituted. As master of Rome in 45 B.C., Cæsar had an opportunity of applying such larger and more drastic measures as would have gone to the roots of the disease. He might have endeavoured, by the infusion of a sound element from the equestrian order, to make the Senate once more that which it so long was—not an oligarchy, but a real aristocracy. He might have made a vigorous attempt, for which no similar opening had presented itself since Sulla's time, to restore a healthy public opinion, as a
