The popular festivals had been allowed so to increase that the seven ordinary ones alone--the Roman, the Plebeian, those of the Mother of the Gods, of Ceres, of Apollo, of Flora(45) and of Victoria--lasted altogether sixty-two days; and to these were added the gladiatorial games and numerous other extraordinary amusements. The duty of providing grain at low prices-- which was unavoidably necessary with such a proletariate living wholly from hand to mouth--was treated with the most unscrupulous frivolity, and the fluctuations in the price of bread-corn were of a fabulous and incalculable description.(46) Lastly, the distribution of grain formed an official invitation to the whole burgess-proletariate who were destitute of food and indisposed for work to take up their abode in the capital.
Anarchy Of The Capital
The seed sown was bad, and the harvest corresponded. The system of clubs and bands in the sphere of politics, the worship of Isis and similar pious extravagances in that of religion, had their root in this state of things. People were constantly in prospect of a dearth, and not unfrequently in utter famine. Nowhere was a man less secure of his life than in the capital; murder professionally prosecuted by banditti was the single trade peculiar to it; the alluring of the victim to Rome was the preliminary to his assassination; no one ventured into the country in the vicinity of the capital without an armed retinue. Its outward condition corresponded to this inward disorganization, and seemed a keen satire on the aristocratic government. Nothing was done for the regulation of the stream of the Tiber; excepting that they caused the only bridge, with which they still made shift,(47) to be constructed of stone at least as far as the Tiber-island. As little was anything done toward the levelling of the city of the Seven Hills, except where perhaps the accumulation of rubbish had effected some improvement. The streets ascended and descended narrow and angular, and were wretchedly kept; the footpaths were small and ill paved. The ordinary houses were built of bricks negligently and to a giddy height, mostly by speculative builders on account of the small proprietors; by which means the former became vastly rich, and the latter were reduced to beggary. Like isolated islands amidst this sea of wretched buildings were seen the splendid palaces of the rich, which curtailed the space for the smaller houses just as their owners curtailed the burgess- rights of smaller men in the state, and beside whose marble pillars and Greek statues the decaying temples, with their images of the gods still in great part carved of wood, made a melancholy figure. A police-supervision of streets, of river-banks, of fires, or of building was almost unheard of; if the government troubled itself at all about the inundations, conflagrations, and falls of houses which were of yearly occurrence, it was only to ask from the state- theologians their report and advice regarding the true import of such signs and wonders. If we try to conceive to ourselves a London with the slave-population of New Orleans, with the police of Constantinople, with the non-industrial character of the modern Rome, and agitated by politics after the fashion of the Paris in 1848, we shall acquire an approximate idea of the republican glory, the departure of which Cicero and his associates in their sulky letters deplore.
Caesar's Treatment Of Matters In The Capital
Caesar did not deplore, but he sought to help so far as help was possible. Rome remained, of course, what it was-- a cosmopolitan city. Not only would the attempt to give to it once more a specifically Italian character have been impracticable; it would not have suited Caesar's plan. Just as Alexander found for his Graeco-Oriental empire an appropriate capital in the Hellenic, Jewish, Egyptian, and above all cosmopolitan, Alexandria, so the capital of the new Romano-Hellenic universal empire, situated at the meeting-point of the east and the west, was to be not an Italian community, but the denationalized capital of many nations. For this reason Caesar tolerated the worship of the newly-settled Egyptian gods alongside of Father Jovis, and granted even to the Jews the free exercise of their strangely foreign ritual in the very capital of the empire. However offensive was the motley mixture of the parasitic--especially the Helleno-Oriental-- population in Rome, he nowhere opposed its extension; it is significant, that at his popular festivals for the capital he caused dramas to be performed not merely in Latin and Greek, but also in other languages, presumably in Phoenician, Hebrew, Syrian, Spanish.
Diminution Of The Proletariate
But, if Caesar accepted with the full consciousness of what he was doing the fundamental character of the capital such as he found it, he yet worked energetically at the improvement of the lamentable and disgraceful state of things prevailing there. Unhappily the primary evils were the least capable of being eradicated. Caesar could not abolish slavery with its train of national calamities; it must remain an open question, whether he would in the course of time have attempted at least to limit the slave-population in the capital, as he undertook to do so in another field. As little could Caesar conjure into existence a free industry in the capital; yet the great building-operations remedied in some measure the want of means of support there, and opened up to the proletariate a source of small but honourable gain. On the other hand Caesar laboured energetically to diminish the mass of the free proletariate. The constant influx of persons brought by the corn-largesses to Rome was, if not wholly stopped,(48) at least very materially restricted by the conversion of these largesses into a provision for the poor limited to a fixed number. The ranks of the existing proletariate were thinned on the one hand by the tribunals which were instructed to proceed with unrelenting rigour against the rabble, on the other hand by a comprehensive transmarine colonization; of the 80,000 colonists whom Caesar sent beyond the seas in the few years of his government, a very great portion must have been taken from the lower ranks of the population of the capital; most of the Corinthian settlers indeed were freedmen. When in deviation from the previous order of things, which precluded the freedmen from any urban honorary office, Caesar opened to them in his colonies the doors of the senate-house, this was doubtless done in order to gain those of them who were in better positions to favour the cause of emigration.