an 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