he true Caesar of his due honour, because her verdict
may in the presence of bad Caesars lead simplicity astray
and may give to roguery occasion for lying and fraud. She too
is a Bible, and if she cannot any more than the Bible hinder the fool
from misunderstanding and the devil from quoting her, she too will
be able to bear with, and to requite, them both.

Dictatorship

The position of the new supreme head of the state appears formally,
at least in the first instance, as a dictatorship. Caesar took
it up at first after his return from Spain in 705, but laid it down
again after a few days, and waged the decisive campaign of 706
simply as consul--this was the office his tenure of which was
the primary occasion for the outbreak of the civil war.(7)
but in the autumn of this year after the battle of Pharsalus
he reverted to the dictatorship and had it repeatedly entrusted to him,
at first for an undefined period, but from the 1st January 709
as an annual office, and then in January or February 710(8)
for the duration of his life, so that he in the end expressly dropped
the earlier reservation as to his laying down the office and gave
formal expression to its tenure for life in the new title of -dictator
perpetuus-. This dictatorship, both in its first ephemeral
and in its second enduring tenure, was not that of the old constitution,
but--what was coincident with this merely in the name--the supreme
exceptional office as arranged by Sulla;(9) an office,
the functions of which were fixed, not by the constitutional ordinances
regarding the supreme single magistracy, but by special decree
of the people, to such an effect that the holder received,
in the commission to project laws and to regulate the commonwealth,
an official prerogative de jure unlimited which superseded
the republican partition of powers. Those were merely applications
of this general prerogative to the particular case, when the holder
of power was further entrusted by separate acts with the right
of deciding on war and peace without consulting the senate
and the people, with the independent disposal of armies and finances,
and with the nomination of the provincial governors. Caesar could
accordingly de jure assign to himself even such prerogatives
as lay outside of the proper functions of the magistracy and even
outside of the province of state-powers at all;(10) and it appears
almost as a concession on his part, that he abstained from nominating
t