Corinth - The East
In the desolate land of Greece, Caesar, besides other plans such as the institution of a Roman colony in Buthrotum (opposite Corfu), busied himself above all with the restoration of Corinth. Not only was a considerable burgess-colony conducted thither, but a plan was projected for cutting through the isthmus, so as to avoid the dangerous circumnavigation of the Peloponnesus and to make the whole traffic between Italy and Asia pass through the Corintho-Saronic gulf. Lastly even in the remote Hellenic east the monarch called into existence Italian settlements; on the Black Sea, for instance, at Heraclea and Sinope, which towns the Italian colonists shared, as in the case of Emporiae, with the old inhabitants; on the Syrian coast, in the important port of Berytus, which like Sinope obtained an Italian constitution; and even in Egypt, where a Roman station was established on the lighthouse-island commanding the harbour of Alexandria.
Extension of the Italian Municipal Constitution to the Provinces Through these ordinances the Italian municipal freedom was carried into the provinces in a manner far more comprehensive than had been previously the case. The communities of full burgesses - that is, all the towns of the Cisalpine province and the burgess-colonies and burgess-municipia - scattered in Transalpine Gaul and elsewhere - were on an equal footing with the Italian, in so far as they administered their own affairs, and even exercised a certainly limited jurisdiction; while on the other hand the more important processes came before the Roman authorities competent to deal with them - as a rule the governor of the province[98]. The formally autonomous Latin and the other emancipated communities-thus including all those of Sicily and of Narbonese Gaul, so far as they were not burgess-communities, and a considerable number also in the other provinces - had not merely free administration, but probably unlimited jurisdiction; so that the governor was only entitled to interfere there by virtue of his - certainly very arbitrary - administrative control. No doubt even earlier there had been communities of full burgesses within the provinces of governors, such as Aquileia, and Narbo, and whole governors' provinces, such as Cisalpine Gaul, had consisted of communities with Italian constitution; but it was, if not in law, at least in a political point of view a singularly important innovation, that there was now a province which as well as Italy was peopled solely by Roman burgesses[99], and that others promised to become such.
Italy and the Provinces Reduced to One Level
With this disappeared the first great practical distinction that separated Italy from the provinces; and the second - that ordinarily no troops were stationed in Italy, while they were stationed in the provinces - was likewise in the course of disappearing; troops were now stationed only where there was a frontier to be defended, and the commandants of the provinces in which this was not the case, such as Narbo and Sicily, were officers only in name. The formal contrast between Italy and the provinces, which had at all times depended on other distinctions[100], continued certainly even now to subsist, for Italy was the sphere of civil jurisdiction and of consuls and praetors, while the provinces were districts under the jurisdiction of martial law and subject to proconsuls and propraetors; but the procedure according to civil and according to martial law had for long been practically coincident, and the different titles of the magistrates signified little after the one Imperator was over all.
In all these various municipal foundations and ordinances - which are traceable at least in plan, if not perhaps all in execution, to Caesar - a definite system is apparent. Italy was converted from the mistress of the subject peoples into the mother of the renovated Italo-Hellenic nation. The Cisalpine province completely equalized with the mother-country was a promise and a guarantee that, in the monarchy of Caesar just as in the healthier times of the republic, every Latinized district might expect to be placed on an equal footing by the side of its elder sisters and of the mother herself. On the threshold of full national and political equalization with Italy stood the adjoining lands, the Greek Sicily and the south of Gaul, which was rapidly becoming Latinized. In a more remote stage of preparation stood the other provinces of the empire, in which, just as hitherto in southern Gaul Narbo had been a Roman colony, the great maritime cities - Emporiae, Gades, Carthage, Corinth, Heraclea in Pontus, Sinope, Berytus, Alexandria - now became Italian or Helleno-Italian communities, the centres of an Italian civilization even in the Greek east, the fundamental pillars of the future national and political levelling of the empire.
The rule of the urban community of Rome over the shores of the Mediterranean was at an end; in its stead came the new Mediterranean state, and its first act was to atone for the two greatest outrages which that urban community had perpetrated on civilization. While the destruction of the two greatest marts of commerce in the Roman dominions marked the turning-point at which the protectorate of the Roman community degenerated into political tyrannizing over, and financial exaction from, the subject lands, the prompt and brilliant restoration of Carthage and Corinth marked the foundation of the new great commonwealth which was to train up all the regions on the Mediterranean to national and political equality, to union in a genuine state. Well might Caesar bestow on the city of Corinth in addition to its far-famed ancient name the new one of "Honour to Julius", (Lavs Jvli).
Organization of the New Empire
While thus the new united empire was furnished with a national character, which doubtless necessarily lacked individuality and was rather an inanimate product of art than a fresh growth of nature, it further had need of unity in those institutions which express the general life of nations - in constitution and administration, in religion and jurisprudence, in money, measures, and weights; as to which, of course, local diversities of the most varied character were quite compatible with essential union. In all these departments we can only speak of the initial steps, for the thorough formation of the monarchy of Caesar into an unity was the work of the future, and all that he did was to lay the foundation for the building of centuries. But of the lines, which the great man drew in these departments, several can still be recognized; and it is more pleasing to follow him here, than in the task of building from the ruins of the nationalities.
Census of the Empire
As to constitution and administration, we have already noticed elsewhere the most important elements of the new unity - the transition of the sovereignty from the municipal council of Rome to the sole master of the Mediterranean monarchy; the conversion of that municipal council into a supreme imperial council representing Italy and the provinces; above all, the transference - now commenced - of the Roman, and generally of the Italian, municipal organization to the provincial communities. This latter course - the bestowal of Latin, and thereafter of Roman, rights on the communities ripe for full admission to the united state - gradually of itself brought about uniform communal arrangements. In one respect alone this process could not be waited for. The new empire needed immediately an institution which should place before the government at a glance the principal bases of administration - the proportions of population and property in the different communities - in other words an improved census. First the census of Italy was reformed. According to Caesar's ordinance[101] - which probably, indeed, only carried out the arrangements which were, at least as to principle, adopted in consequence of the Social war - in future, when a census took place in the Roman community, there were to be simultaneously registered by the highest authority in each Italian community the name of every municipal burgess and that of his father or manumitter, his district, his age, and his property; and these lists were to be furnished to the Roman censor early enough to enable him to complete in proper time the general list of Roman burgesses and of Roman property.
That it was Caesar's intention to introduce similar institutions also in the provinces is attested partly by the measurement and survey of the whole empire ordered by him, partly by the nature of the arrangement itself; for it in fact furnished the general instrument appropriate for procuring, as well in the Italian as in the non-Italia
n communities of the state, the information requisite for the central administration. Evidently here too it was Caesar's intention to revert to the traditions of the earlier republican times, and to reintroduce the census of the empire, which the earlier republic had effected - essentially in the same way as Caesar effected the Italian - by analogous extension of the institution of the urban censorship with its set terms and other essential rules to all the subject communities of Italy and Sicily[102]. This had been one of the first institutions which the torpid aristocracy allowed to drop, and in this way deprived the supreme administrative authority of any view of the resources in men and taxation at its disposal and consequently of all possibility of an effective control[103]. The indications still extant, and the very connection of things, show irrefragably that Caesar made preparations to renew the general census that had been obsolete for centuries.
Religion of the Empire
We need scarcely say that in religion and in jurisprudence no thorough levelling could be thought of; yet with all toleration towards local faiths and municipal statutes the new state needed a common worship corresponding to the Italo-Hellenic nationality and a general code of law superior to the municipal statutes. It needed them; for de facto both were already in existence. In the field of religion men had for centuries been busied in fusing together the Italian and Hellenic worships partly by external adoption, partly by internal adjustment of their respective conceptions of the gods; and owing to the pliant formless character of the Italian gods, there had been no great difficulty in resolving Jupiter into Zeus, Venus into Aphrodite, and so every essential idea of the Latin faith into its Hellenic counterpart. The Italo-Hellenic religion stood forth in its outlines ready-made; how much in this very department men were conscious of having gone beyond the specifically Roman point of view and advanced towards an Italo-Hellenic quasi-nationality, is shown by the distinction made in the already-mentioned theology of Varro between the "common" gods, that is, those acknowledged by Romans and Greeks, and the special gods of the Roman community.
Law of the Empire
So far as concerns the field of criminal and police law, where the government more directly interferes and the necessities of the case are substantially met by a judicious legislation, there was no difficulty in attaining, in the way of legislative action, that degree of material uniformity which certainly was in this department needful for the unity of the empire. In the civil law again, where the initiative belongs to commercial intercourse and merely the formal shape to the legislator, the code for the united empire, which the legislator certainly could not have created, had been already long since developed in a natural way by commercial intercourse itself. The Roman urban law was still indeed legally based on the embodiment of the Latin national law contained in the Twelve Tables.
Later laws had doubtless introduced various improvements of detail suited to the times, among which the most important was probably the abolition of the old inconvenient mode of commencing a process through standing forms of declaration by the parties[104] and the substitution of an instruction drawn up in writing by the presiding magistrate for the single juryman (formula): but in the main the popular legislation had only piled upon that venerable foundation an endless chaos of special laws long since in great part antiquated and forgotten, which can only be compared to the English statute-law. The attempts to impart to them scientific shape and system had certainly rendered the tortuous paths of the old civil law accessible, and thrown light upon them[105]; but no Roman Blackstone could remedy the fundamental defect, that an urban code composed four hundred years ago with its equally diffuse and confused supplements was now to serve as the law of a great state.
The New Urban Law or the Edict
Commercial intercourse provided for itself a more thorough remedy. The lively intercourse between Romans and non-Romans had long ago developed in Rome an international private law (ius gentium[106]), that is to say, a body of maxims especially relating to commercial matters, according to which Roman judges pronounced judgment, when a cause could not be decided either according to their own or any other national code and they were compelled - setting aside the peculiarities of Roman, Hellenic, Phoenician and other law - to revert to the common views of right underlying all dealings. The formation of the newer law attached itself to this basis.
In the first place as a standard for the legal dealings of Roman burgesses with each other, it de facto substituted for the old urban law, which had become practically useless, a new code based in substance on a compromise between the national law of the Twelve Tables and the international law or so-called law of nations. The former was essentially adhered to, though of course with modifications suited to the times, in the law of marriage, family, and inheritance; whereas in all regulations which concerned dealings with property, and consequently in reference to ownership and contracts, the international law was the standard; in these matters indeed various important arrangements were borrowed even from local provincial law, such as the legislation as to usury[107], and the institution of hypotheca. Through whom, when, and how this comprehensive innovation came into existence, whether at once or gradually, whether through one or several authors, are questions to which we cannot furnish a satisfactory answer.
We know only that this reform, as was natural, proceeded in the first instance from the urban court; that it first took formal shape in the instructions annually issued by the praetor urbanus, when entering on office, for the guidance of the parties in reference to the most important maxims of law to be observed in the judicial year then beginning (edictum annuum or perpetuum praetoris urbani de iuris dictione); and that, although various preparatory steps towards it may have been taken in earlier times, it certainly only attained its completion in this epoch. The new code was theoretic and abstract, inasmuch as the Roman view of law had therein divested itself of such of its national peculiarities as it had become aware of; but it was at the same time practical and positive, inasmuch as it by no means faded away into the dim twilight of general equity or even into the pure nothingness of the so-called law of nature, but was applied by definite functionaries for definite concrete cases according to fixed rules, and was not merely capable of, but had already essentially received, a legal embodiment in the urban edict. This code moreover corresponded in matter to the wants of the time, in so far as it furnished the more convenient forms required by the increase of intercourse for legal procedure, for acquisition of property, and for conclusion of contracts. Lastly, it had already in the main become subsidiary law throughout the compass of the Roman empire, inasmuch as - while the manifold local statutes were retained for those legal relations which were not directly commercial, as well as for local transactions between members of the same legal district - dealings relating to property between subjects of the empire belonging to different legal districts were regulated throughout after the model of the urban edict, though not applicable de jure to these cases, both in Italy and in the provinces. The law of the urban edict had thus essentially the same position in that age which the Roman law has occupied in our political development; this also is, so far as such opposites can be combined, at once abstract and positive; this also recommended itself by its (compared with the earlier legal code) flexible forms of intercourse, and took its place by the side of the local statutes as universal subsidiary law. But the Roman legal development had an essential advantage over ours in this, that the denationalized legislation appeared not, as with us, prematurely and by artificial birth, but at the right time and agreeably to nature.
Caesar's Project of Codification
Such was the state of the law as Caesar found it. If he projected the plan for a new code, it is not difficult to say what were his intentions. This code could only comprehend the law of Roman burgesses, and could be a general code for the empire merely so far as a code of the ruling nation suitable to the times could not but of itself become general subsidiary law throughout the compass of the empire. In criminal law, if the plan embr
aced this at all, there was needed only a revision and adjustment of the Sullan ordinances. In civil law, for a state whose nationality was properly humanity, the necessary and only possible formal shape was to invest that urban edict, which had already spontaneously grown out of lawful commerce, with the security and precision of statute-law.
The first step towards this had been taken by the Cornelian law of 687, when it enjoined the judge to keep to the maxims set forth at the beginning of his magistracy and not arbitrarily to administer other law[108] - a regulation, which may well be compared with the law of the Twelve Tables, and which became almost as significant for the fixing of the later urban law as that collection for the fixing of the earlier. But although after the Cornelian decree of the people the edict was no longer subordinate to the judge, but the judge was by law subject to the edict; and though the new code had practically dispossessed the old urban law in judicial usage as in legal instruction - every urban judge was still free at his entrance on office absolutely and arbitrarily to alter the edict, and the law of the Twelve Tables with its additions still always outweighed formally the urban edict, so that in each individual case of collision the antiquated rule had to be set aside by arbitrary interference of the magistrates, and therefore, strictly speaking, by violation of formal law.
The history of Rome. Book V Page 68