dinary
members who were added naturally fell in the main on adherents
of the new order of things, and introduced, along with -equites-
of respectable standing, various dubious and plebeian personages
into the proud corporation--former senators who had been erased
from the roll by the censor or in consequence of a judicial sentence,
foreigners from Spain and Gaul who had to some extent to learn
their Latin in the senate, men lately subaltern officers
who had not previously received even the equestrian ring,
sons of freedmen or of such as followed dishonourable trades,
and other elements of a like kind. The exclusive circles
of the nobility, to whom this change in the personal composition
of the senate naturally gave the bitterest offence, saw in it
an intentional depreciation of the very institution itself.
Caesar was not capable of such a self-destructive policy;
he was as determined not to let himself be governed by his council
as he was convinced of the necessity of the institute in itself.
They might more correctly have discerned in this proceeding the intention
of the monarch to take away from the senate its former character
of an exclusive representation of the oligarchic aristocracy,
and to make it once more--what it had been in the regal period--
a state-council representing all classes of persons belonging
to the state through their most intelligent elements, and not necessarily
excluding the man of humble birth or even the foreigner; just as those
earliest kings introduced non-burgesses,(24) Caesar introduced
non-Italians into his senate.

Personal Government by Caesar

While the rule of the nobility was thus set aside and its existence
undermined, and while the senate in its new form was merely a tool
of the monarch, autocracy was at the same time most strictly
carried out in the administration and government of the state,
and the whole executive was concentrated in the hands of the monarch.
First of all, the Imperator naturally decided in person every question
of any moment. Caesar was able to carry personal government
to an extent which we puny men can hardly conceive, and which
is not to be explained solely from the unparalleled rapidity
and decision of his working, but has moreover its ground
in a more general cause. When we see Caesar, Sulla, Gaius Gracchus,
and Roman statesmen in general displaying throughout an activity
which transcends our notions of human powers of working, the reason lies,
n