allay the indignation
of the blind public against the usurers; the form of publication,
which proceeded on the fiction that this was merely the renewed
enforcing of an earlier law that had fallen into oblivion,
shows that Caesar was ashamed of this enactment, and it can hardly
have passed into actual application. A far more serious question
was the treatment of the pending claims for debt, the complete remission
of which was vehemently demanded from Caesar by the party which called
itself by his name. We have already mentioned, that he did not yield
to this demand;(63) but two important concessions were made
to the debtors, and that as early as 705. First, the interest
in arrear was struck off,(64) and that which was paid was deducted
from the capital. Secondly, the creditor was compelled to accept
the moveable and immoveable property of the debtor in lieu of payment
at the estimated value which his effects had before the civil war
and the general depreciation which it had occasioned. The latter
enactment was not unreasonable; if the creditor was to be looked on
de facto as the owner of the property of his debtor to the amount
of the sum due to him, it was doubtless proper that he should bear
his share in the general depreciation of the property. On the other hand
the cancelling of the payments of interest made or outstanding--
which practically amounted to this, that the creditors lost,
besides the interest itself, on an average 25 per cent of what
they were entitled to claim as capital at the time of the issuing
of the law--was in fact nothing else than a partial concession
of that cancelling of creditors' claims springing out of loans,
for which the democrats had clamoured so vehemently; and, however bad
may have been the conduct of the usurers, it is not possible thereby
to justify the retrospective abolition of all claims for interest
without distinction. In order at least to understand this agitation
we must recollect how the democratic party stood towards
the question of interest. The legal prohibition against
taking interest, which the old plebeian opposition had extorted
in 412,(65) had no doubt been practically disregarded by the nobility
which controlled the civil procedure by means of the praetorship,
but had still remained since that period formally valid;
and the democrats of the seventh century, who regarded themselves
throughout as the continuers of that old agitation as to privilege
and social