year on the 1st March of the old calendar
was abolished, and the date of the 1st January--fixed at first
as the official term for changing the supreme magistrates and,
in consequence of this, long since prevailing in civil life--
was assumed also as the calendar-period for commencing the year.
Both changes came into effect on the 1st January 709, and along
with them the use of the Julian calendar so named after its author,
which long after the fall of the monarchy of Caesar remained
the regulative standard of the civilized world and in the main
is so still. By way of explanation there was added in a detailed edict
a star-calendar derived from the Egyptian astronomical observations
and transferred--not indeed very skilfully--to Italy, which fixed
the rising and setting of the stars named according to days
of the calendar.(118) In this domain also the Roman and Greek worlds
were thus placed on a par.

Caesar and His Works

Such were the foundations of the Mediterranean monarchy of Caesar.
For the second time in Rome the social question had reached
a crisis, at which the antagonisms not only appeared to be,
but actually were, in the form of their exhibition, insoluble and,
in the form of their expression, irreconcilable. On the former
occasion Rome had been saved by the fact that Italy was merged
in Rome and Rome in Italy, and in the new enlarged and altered home
those old antagonisms were not reconciled, but fell into abeyance.
Now Rome was once more saved by the fact that the countries
of the Mediterranean were merged in it or became prepared for merging;
the war between the Italian poor and rich, which in the old Italy
could only end with the destruction of the nation, had no longer
a battle-field or a meaning in the Italy of three continents.
The Latin colonies closed the gap which threatened to swallow up
the Roman community in the fifth century; the deeper chasm
of the seventh century was filled by the Transalpine and transmarine
colonizations of Gaius Gracchus and Caesar. For Rome alone history
not merely performed miracles, but also repeated its miracles,
and twice cured the internal crisis, which in the state itself
was incurable, by regenerating the state. There was doubtless
much corruption in this regeneration; as the union of Italy
was accomplished over the ruins of the Samnite and Etruscan nations,
so the Mediterranean monarchy built itself on the ruins of countless
states and tribes once living and