Page:Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic.djvu/197

62 B.C.] the two had always proved mutually exclusive. The question then which pressed for solution was this: How can a free State be at the same time a conquering and governing State? How can an Empire be organised without the sacrifice of political liberty? In the absence of representative government, the sole forms of free State known to the ancients were the Confederation, an organisation which common-sense at once discarded as too loose and inefficient for the purpose, and the City-state, as it had been elaborated by Greek politicians and political philosophers. To the mind of all Roman statesmen, excepting perhaps Augustus, liberty and the City-state were inextricably bound up together, and under these conditions the task of uniting liberty and Empire was in truth an insuperable labour. Cæsar's failure to perform it was at least as conspicuous as that of Cicero and Cato. It is to Cæsar's credit that he saw that the Empire must be maintained and organised at whatever sacrifice; but his plan of organising it was simply to throw up in despair the problem which he was called to solve. He reverted to the method of primitive despotism, that crude and long discredited form of government by which Egypt, Assyria, and Persia had ruled and degraded vast populations. He renounced all the political inheritance of the civilised West, and all the glorious