or long the development of the Roman
commonwealth had been tending towards such a catastrophe;
it was evident to every unbiassed observer, and had been remarked
a thousand times, that, if the rule of the aristocracy
should be brought to an end, monarchy was inevitable. The senate
had now been overthrown at once by the civic liberal opposition
and by the power of the soldiery; the only question remaining
was to settle the persons, names, and forms for the new order of things;
and these were already clearly enough indicated in the partly democratic,
partly military elements of the revolution. The events of the last
five years had set, as it were, the final seal on this impending
transformation of the commonwealth. In the newly-erected
Asiatic provinces, which gave regal honours to their organizer
as the successor of Alexander the Great, and already received
his favoured freedmen like princes, Pompeius had laid the foundations
of his dominion, and found at once the treasures, the army, and the halo
of glory which the future prince of the Roman state required.
The anarchist conspiracy, moreover, in the capital, and the civil
war connected with it, had made it palpably clear to every one
who studied political or even merely material interests,
that a government without authority and without military power,
such as that of the senate, exposed the state to the equally ludicrous
and formidable tyranny of political sharpers, and that a change
of constitution, which should connect the military power more closely
with the government, was an indispensable necessity if social order
was to be maintained. So the ruler had arisen in the east,
the throne had been erected in Italy; to all appearance the year 692
was the last of the republic, the first of monarchy.

The Opponents of the Future Monarchy

This goal, it is true, was not to be reached without a struggle.
The constitution, which had endured for five hundred years,
and under which the insignificant town on the Tiber had risen
to unprecedented greatness and glory, had sunk its roots into the soil
to a depth beyond human ken, and no one could at all calculate
to what extent the attempt to overthrow it would penetrate
and convulse civil society. Several rivals had been outrun by Pompeius
in the race towards the great goal, but had not been wholly set
aside. It was not at all beyond reach of calculation that all
these elements might combine to overthrow the new holder of p