sions, none of which were intended to be permanent. This precisely is what has generally been overlooked. He was far too deep a judge of things to anticipate development or to settle its definitive forms at this moment, with the Parthian War impending. But Augustus, like Pompey before him, was not the master of his following, but thoroughly dependent upon it and its views of things. The form of the Principate was not at all his discovery, but the doctrinaire execution of an obsolete party-ideal that Cicero — another weakling — had formulated.[1] When, on the 13th January 27, Augustus gave back the state-power to the "Senate and People" of Rome — a scene all the more meaningless because of its sincerity — he kept the Tribunate for himself. In fact, this was the one element of the polity that could manifest itself in actuality. The Tribune was the legitimate successor of the Tyrant,[2] and as long ago as 122. B.C. Caius Gracchus had put into the title a connotation limited no longer by the legal bounds of the office, but only by the personal talents of the incumbent. From him it is a direct line through Marius and Cæsar to the young Nero, who set himself to defeat the political purposes of his mother Agrippina. The Princeps,[3] on the other hand, was thenceforth only a costume, a rank — very likely a fact in society, certainly not a fact in politics. And this, precisely, was the conception invested with light and glamour by the theory of Cicero, and already — and by him of all people — associated with the Divus-idea.[4] The "co-operation" of the Senate and People, on the contrary, was an antiquated ceremonial, with about as much life in it as the rites of the Fratres Arvales — also restored by Augustus. The great parties of the Gracchan age had long become retinues — Cæsarians and Pompeians — and finally there only remained on the one side the formless omnipotence, the plain brutal "fact," the Cæsar — or whoever managed to get the Cæsar under his influence — and on the other side the handful of narrow ideologues who concealed dissatisfaction under philosophy and thenceforward sought to advance their ideals by conspiracy. What these Stoics were in Rome, the Confucians were in China — and, seen thus, the episode of the "Burning of the Books," decreed by the Chinese Augustus in 212, begins to be intelligible through the reproach of immense vandalism that the minds of later literates fastened upon it. But, after all, these Stoic enthusiasts for an ideal that had become impossible had killed Cæsar:[5] to the
- ↑ De Re Publica, 54 B.C, a monograph intended for Pompey.
- ↑ See p. 395.
- ↑ See p. 409.
- ↑ In Somnium Scipionis, VI, 26, he is a god who so rules the State quam hunc mundum ille princeps deus.
- ↑ It was with every justification that, in the presence of the corpse, Brutus called out the name of Cicero, while Antony, on his side, denounced him as the intellectual author of the deed. But this "freedom" meant nothing but the oligarchy of a few family for the masses had long ago become tired of their rights. Nor is it in the least surprising that Money was behind Intellect in the murder, for the great fortunes of Rome saw in Cæsarism the beginning of the end of their power.
