overpowering factor that penetrates to the very elementals of Becoming — the Cæsar-men. Before them the money collapses. The Imperial Age, in every Culture alike, signifies the end of the politics of mind and money. The powers of the blood, unbroken bodily forces, resume their ancient lordship. "Race" springs forth, pure and irresistible — the strongest win and the residue is their spoil. They seize the management of the world, and the realm of books and problems petrifies or vanishes from memory. From now on, new destinies in the style of the pre-Culture time are possible afresh, and visible to the consciousness without cloaks of causality. There is no inward difference more between the lives of Septimius Severus and Gallienus and those of Alaric and Odoacer. Rameses, Trajan, Wu-ti belong together in a uniform up-and-down of historyless time-stretches.[1]
Once the Imperial Age has arrived, there are no more political problems. People manage with the situation as it is and the powers that be. In the period of Contending States, torrents of blood had reddened the pavements of all world-cities, so that the great truths of Democracy might be turned into actualities, and for the winning of rights without which life seemed not worth the living. Now these rights are won, but the grandchildren cannot be moved, even by punishment, to make use of them. A hundred years more, and even the historians will no longer understand the old controversies. Already by Cæsar's time reputable people had almost ceased to take part in the elections.[2] It embittered the life of the great Tiberius that the most capable men of his time held aloof from politics, and Nero could not even by threats compel the Equites to come to Rome in order to exercise their rights. This is the end of the great politics. The conflict of intelligences that had served as substitute for war must give place to war itself in its most primitive form.
It is, therefore, a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of the period to presume, as Mommsen did,[3] a deep design of subdivision in the "dyarchy" fashioned by Augustus, with its partition of powers between Princeps and Senate. A century earlier this constitution would have been a real thing, but that would in itself suffice to make it impossible for such an idea to have entered the heads of the present force-men. Now it meant nothing but the attempt of a weak personality to deceive itself as to inexorable facts by mantling them in empty forms. Cæsar saw things as they were and was guided in the exercise of his rulership by definite and unsentimental practical considerations. The legislation of his last months was concerned wholly with transitional provi-
- ↑ See p. 48.
- ↑ Cicero, in his Pro Sestio, draws attention to the fact that five people for each tribe attended plebiscites, and these really belonged to tribes other than that which they were representing. But these five were present only in order to have themselves bought by the possessors of the real power. Yet it was hardly fifty years since the Italians had died in masses for this franchise.
- ↑ And, strangely, Ed. Meyer also, in his masterpiece Cæsars Monarchie, the one work of statesmanlike quality yet written about this epoch — and previously in his essay on Augustus (Kleine Schriften, pp. 441, et seq.).
