imarily on the support of the army nor generally
to place the military authority above the civil, but to incorporate
it with, and as far as possible subordinate it to, the civil
commonwealth. The invaluable pillars of a military state,
those old and far-famed Gallic legions, were honourably dissolved
just on account of the incompatibility of their esprit de corps
with a civil commonwealth, and their glorious names were only perpetuated
in newly-founded urban communities. The soldiers presented
by Caesar with allotments of land on their discharge were not,
like those of Sulla, settled together--as it were militarily--
in colonies of their own, but, especially when they settled in Italy,
were isolated as much as possible and scattered throughout the peninsula;
it was only in the case of the portions of the Campanian land
that remained for disposal, that an aggregation of the old soldiers
of Caesar could not be avoided. Caesar sought to solve
the difficult task of keeping the soldiers of a standing army
within the spheres of civil life, partly by retaining the former
arrangement which prescribed merely certain years of service,
and not a service strictly constant, that is, uninterrupted
by any discharge; partly by the already-mentioned shortening of the term
of service, which occasioned a speedier change in the personal
composition of the army; partly by the regular settlement
of the soldiers who had served out their time as agricultural colonists;
partly and principally by keeping the army aloof from Italy
and generally from the proper seats of the civil and political life
of the nation, and directing the soldier to the points,
where according to the opinion of the great king he was alone,
in his place--to the frontier stations, that he might ward off
the extraneous foe.

Absence of Corps of Guards

The true criterion also of the military state--the development of,
and the privileged position assigned to, the corps of guards--
is not to be met with in the case of Caesar. Although as respects
the army on active service the institution of a special bodyguard
for the general had been already long in existence,(38) in Caesar's
system this fell completely into the background; his praetorian
cohort seems to have essentially consisted merely of orderly
officers or non-military attendants, and never to have been
in the proper sense a select corps, consequently never an object
of jealousy to the troops of the line. While