THE HISTORY OF OLD ROME

V. The Establishment of the Military Monarchy

From: The History of Rome, by Theodor Mommsen
Translated with the sanction of the author by William Purdie Dickson

Chapter IX - Death of Crassus - Rupture between the Joint Rulers

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Page 57

And he spoke, not to the Clodian public whose republican enthusiasm had been long burnt down to ashes and dross, but to the young men from the towns and villages of Northern Italy, who still felt freshly and purely the mighty influence of the thought of civic freedom; who were still capable of fighting and of dying for ideals; who had themselves received for their country in a revolutionary way from Caesar the burgess-rights which the government refused to them; whom Caesar's fall would leave once more at the mercy of the -fasces-, and who already possessed practical proofs(26) of the inexorable use which the oligarchy proposed to make of these against the Transpadanes. Such were the listeners before whom such an orator set forth the facts-- the thanks for the conquest of Gaul which the nobility were preparing for the general and his army; the contemptuous setting aside of the comitia; the overawing of the senate; the sacred duty of protecting with armed hand the tribunate of the people wrested five hundred years ago by their fathers arms in hand from the nobility, and of keeping the ancient oath which these had taken for themselves as for their children's children that they would man by man stand firm even to death for the tribunes of the people.(27)

26. Cf. V. IX. Debates ss to Caesar's Recall ff.

27. Cf. II. II. Intercession

And then, when he-- the leader and general of the popular party--summoned the soldiers of the people, now that conciliatory means had been exhausted and concession had reached its utmost limits, to follow him in the last, the inevitable, the decisive struggle against the equally hated and despised, equally perfidious and incapable, and in fact ludicrously incorrigible aristocracy--there was not an officer or a soldier who could hold back. The order was given for departure; at the head of his vanguard Caesar crossed the narrow brook which separated his province from Italy, and which the constitution forbade the proconsul of Gaul to pass. When after nine years' absence he trod once more the soil of his native land, he trod at the same time the path of revolution. "The die was cast."

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