This was certainly true, but it does not alter the melancholy fact that this was the pass to which things had finally come; selfishness and lack of ideals, the concomitants of disintegration, had ended finally in this, that the cause of the individual was the only one that counted. His attitude towards the Republic is amusing, were it not tragic; he is ready to be a dutiful member of the Republic, provided its government does what he says; otherwise the Republic is disloyal to Caesar. When he calls upon the rump of the Senate to help him govern the Republic, it is the Republic against which he has moved his armies because, as he naïvely explains, his inimici were trying to destroy him. We need not be surprised that armies gave their loyalty to individuals; here, at Rome's crisis, men were asked to give their loyalty to an individual.

This is the consummation of the development of decades, and shows that what happened in the armies was but in tune with what men did in every sphere, attached themselves to an individual or a group, because they had no country. Caesar's defence shows the contending parties driven to their last position: the individual on the side of the Populares, whose story was the story of a series of great, ambitious individuals; on the side of the nobles a powerful clique (the inimici) manipulating the machinery of government in their own interest, and determined to perpetuate the practice under the sacred name of the Republic. To them the Republic was a catchword; to Caesar it meant only a system of government. When he invited the Senate to join him in governing the Republic, he was, I am certain, sincere; the problem as he saw it was one of efficient government, and it seemed to him that it would be quite reasonable for himself, with the help of the Senate as a civil service, to govern the Republic without doing violence to the very idea of ‘Republic'. For that we need not blame him; as an ideal the Republic was dead, except for a few men such as Cicero; he knew the facts, and what he planned did no injustice to the facts of the Republic. With Cicero the ideal of the Republic died, though Imperial discontents revived a sickly sentimental substitute, to which they gave all the virtues and qualities which seemed to them so lacking in their own government.

This is what happened at Rome as a result of what the Gracchi did. Tiberius' challenge to the Senate, made in the way in which it was, involved a challenge to the harmony of Rome's society, of which the Senate was so important a part; for inevitably the question must arise whether the Senate should be governing the Roman world; and the mob is not the best arbiter on so grave a matter. Yet to the mob Tiberius went, supposing that nothing but his legislation was at stake; his shrewder brother, and hence more culpable, of deliberate intent set his face against the Senate, and thought it clever to have raised the Equites against that body; what his shrewdness did not tell him--or at least, in his defence, we hope--was that he had provoked a question which must now be solved before all others; and the answer to that question took a hundred years to find. The clash of groups came into being, and nothing could heal the wound the body politic had sustained; the contest for power at Rome made it impossible for Rome to be in harmony, and the longer it continued, the worse became the disintegration, the lower the depths to which persons were prepared to go in their own or their group's interests. The ideals which had made Rome a society evaporated into near-nothingness, and Rome was a society only in name. What is surprising is the essential vitality of the Roman spirit, which after more than fifty years of strife and civil war emerged again as tough and strong as ever, like an acorn from beneath a concrete slab, to create the Augustan Age and make possible the Roman Empire.

Yet Rome could not sever herself from her past; what had been had been; the present was the child of the past, and Cicero's Republic could never more come into being. Facts and sentiments were to be constantly at war; with Augustus as the personal saviour of society they might seem to have agreed like lamb and wolf to live together; but the deep opposition between the two could not be obscured or denied for ever; as time passed, the antagonism became ever more open until in Tacitus we see the fatalistic acquiescence in the facts against which the spirit revolted--in vain. This was the final consequence of what the Gracchi did--the death of the Republic. No society can break with its past and start again; if it changes--and change there must assuredly be--it must remain the same thing. England was more fortunate than Rome; in its great crises and convulsions its leading men knew this instinctively, and the more violent the break with the past, the more anxious they were to unite themselves with that past by spiritual bonds.