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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER XIV: WHO RULES THE WORLD?
Page 25
As genuine elections were impossible, it was necessary to falsify them, and the candidates organised gangs of bravoes from army veterans or circus athletes, whose business was to intimidate the voters. Without the support of a genuine suffrage democratic institutions are in the air. Words are things of air, and "the Republic is nothing more than a word." The expression is Caesar's. No magistracy possessed authority. The generals of the Left and of the Right- the Mariuses and the Sullas- harassed one another in empty dictatorships that led to nothing. Caesar has never expounded his policy, but he busied himself in carrying it out. That policy was Caesar himself, and not the handbook of Caesarism which appears afterwards. There is nothing else for it; if we want to understand that policy, we must simply take Caesar's acts and give them his name. The secret lies in his main exploit: the conquest of the Gauls. To undertake this he had to declare himself in rebellion against the constituted Power. Why? Power was in the hands of the republicans; that is to say the conservatives, those faithful to the City-State. Their politics may be summed up in two clauses. First: the disturbances in the public life of Rome arise from its excessive expansion. The City cannot govern so many nations. Every new conquest is a crime of lese-republique. Secondly to prevent the dissolution of the institutions of the State a Princeps is needed. For us the word "prince" has an almost opposite sense to what "princeps" had for a Roman. By it he understood a citizen precisely like the rest, but invested with high powers, in order to regulate the functioning of republican institutions. Cicero in his books, De Re Publica, and Sallust in his memorials to Caesar, sum up the thoughts of the politicians by asking for a princeps civitatis, a rector rerum publicarum, a moderator. Caesar's solution is totally opposed to the Conservative one. He realises that to remedy the results of previous Roman conquests there was no other way than to continue them, accepting to the full this stern destiny. Above all it was necessary to conquer the new peoples of the West, more dangerous in a not-distant future than the effete peoples of the East. Caesar will uphold the necessity of thoroughly romanising the barbarous nations of the West. It has been said (by Spengler) that the Graeco-Romans were incapable of the notion of time, of looking upon their existence as stretching out into time. They existed for the actual moment. I am inclined to think the diagnosis is inaccurate, or at least that it confuses two things. The Graeco-Roman does suffer an extraordinary blindness as to the future.