-the charm of antiquity, entire dependence
on the government, and total insignificance. On all sides
the new sovereignty revealed itself.

Under a monarch thus practically unlimited there could hardly
be scope for a constitution at all--still less for a continuance
of the hitherto existing commonwealth based on the legal co-operation
of the burgesses, the senate, and the several magistrates. Caesar fully
and definitely reverted to the tradition of the regal period;
the burgess-assembly remained--what it had already been, in that period--
by the side of and with the king the supreme and ultimate expression
of the will of the sovereign people; the senate was brought back
to its original destination of giving advice to the ruler
when he requested it; and lastly the ruler concentrated in his person
anew the whole magisterial authority, so that there existed no other
independent state-official by his side any more than by the side
of the kings of the earliest times.

Legislation
Edicts

For legislation the democratic monarch adhered to the primitive maxim
of Roman state-law, that the community of the people in concert
with the king convoking them had alone the power of organically
regulating the commonwealth; and he had his constitutive enactments
regularly sanctioned by decree of the people. The free energy
and the authority half-moral, half-political, which the yea or nay
of those old warrior-assemblies had carried with it, could not indeed
be again instilled into the so-called comitia of this period;
the co-operation of the burgesses in legislation, which in the old
constitution had been extremely limited but real and living,
was in the new practically an unsubstantial shadow. There was therefore
no need of special restrictive measures against the comitia;
many years' experience had shown that every government--
the oligarchy as well as the monarch--easily kept on good terms
with this formal sovereign. These Caesarian comitia were an important
element in the Caesarian system and indirectly of practical significance,
only in so far as they served to retain in principle the sovereignty
of the people and to constitute an energetic protest against sultanism.

But at the same time--as is not only obvious of itself, but is also
distinctly attested--the other maxim also of the oldest state-law
was revived by Caesar himself, and not merely for the first time
by his successors; viz. that what the supreme, or rather sole