Julius Caesar - Legislative Reforms and Colonies

Caesar's work remained unfinished at the time of his assassination, and this fact must be considered when reviewing his record of legislative and administrative reform. This is more fully discussed in other works, but it may be well to single out from the list of his measures (some of which, such as the restoration of exiles and the children of proscribed persons, were dictated by political expediency, while others, such as his financial proposals for the relief of debtors, and the steps which he took to restore Italian agriculture, were of the nature of palliatives) those which have a permanent significance as indicating his grasp of imperial problems.

The Social War had brought to the inhabitants of Italy as far as the Po the privileges of Roman citizenship; it remained to extend this gift to the Transpadane Italians, to establish a uniform system of local administration and to devise representative institutions by which at least some voice in the government of Rome might be permitted to her new citizens. This last conception lay beyond the horizon of Caesar, as of all ancient statesmen, but his first act on gaining control of Italy was to enfranchise the Transpadanes, whose claims he had consistently advocated, and in 45 B.C. he passed the Lex Julia Municipalis, an act of which considerable fragments are inscribed on two bronze tables found at Heraclea near Tarentum.

This law deals inter alia with the police and the sanitary arrangements of the city of Rome, and hence it has been argued by Mommsen that it was Caesar's intention to reduce Rome to the level of a municipal town.

It actually is not likely that such is the case.

Caesar made no far-reaching modifications in the government of the city, such as those afterwards carried out by Augustus, and the presence in the Lex Julia Municipalis of the clauses referred to is an example of the common process of "tacking" (legislation per saturam, as it was called by the Romans). The law deals with the constitution of the local senates, for whose members qualifications of age (30 years) and military service are laid down, while persons who have suffered conviction for various specified offences, or who are insolvent, or who carry on discreditable or immoral trades are excluded. It also provides that the local magistrates shall take a census of the citizens at the same time as the census takes place in Rome, and send the registers to Rome within sixty days.

The existing fragments tell us little as to the decentralization of the functions of government, but from the Lex Rubria, which applies to the Transpadane districts enfranchised by Caesar (it must be remembered that Cisalpine Gaul remained nominally a province until 42 B.C.) we gather that considerable powers of independent jurisdiction were reserved to the municipal magistrates. But Caesar was not content with framing a uniform system of local government [v.04 p.0942]for Italy. He was the first to carry out on a large scale those plans of transmarine colonization whose inception was due to the Gracchi.

As consul in 59 B.C. Caesar had established colonies of veterans in Campania under the Lex Julia Agraria, and had even then laid down rules for the foundation of such communities. As dictator he planted numerous colonies both in the eastern and western provinces, notably at Corinth and Carthage.

Mommsen interprets this policy as signifying that "the rule of the urban community of Rome over the shores of the Mediterranean was at an end," and says that the first act of the "new Mediterranean state" was "to atone for the two greatest outrages which that urban community had perpetrated on civilization."

This, however, cannot be admitted.

The sites of Caesar's colonies were selected for their commercial value, and that the citizens of Rome should cease to be rulers of the Mediterranean basin could never have entered into Caesar's mind. The colonists were in many cases veterans who had served under Caesar, in others members of the city proletariat. We possess the charter of the colony planted at Urso in southern Spain under the name of Colonia Julia Genetiva Urbanorum. Of the two latter titles, the first is derived from the name of Venus Genetrix, the ancestress of the Julian house, the second indicates that the colonists were drawn from the plebs urbana. Accordingly, we find that free birth is not, as in Italy, a necessary qualification for municipal office.

By such foundations Caesar began the extension to the provinces of that Roman civilization which the republic had carried to the bounds of the Italian peninsula. Lack of time alone prevented him from carrying into effect such projects as the piercing of the Isthmus of Corinth, whose object was to promote trade and intercourse throughout the Roman dominions, and we are told that at the time of his death he was contemplating the extension of the empire to its natural frontiers, and was about to engage in a war with Parthia with the object of carrying Roman arms to the Euphrates. Above all, he was determined that the empire should be governed in the true sense of the word and no longer exploited by its rulers, and he kept a strict control over the legati, who, under the form of military subordination, were responsible to him for the administration of their provinces.

Julius Caesar - Commentaries

Julius Caesar

Rome the Eternal City

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