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Please note that Mommsen uses the AUC chronology (Ab Urbe Condita), i.e. from the founding of the City of Rome. You can use this reference table to have the B.C. dates

THE HISTORY OF OLD ROME

V. The Establishment of the Military Monarchy

From: The History of Rome, by Theodor Mommsen
Translated with the sanction of the author by William Purdie Dickson


The History of Old Rome

Chapter XI - The Old Republic and the New Monarchy

ELPENOR EDITIONS IN PRINT

The Original Greek New Testament

» Contents of this Chapter

Page 28

According to the same law of nature in virtue of which the smallest organism infinitely surpasses the most artistic machine, every constitution however defective which gives play to the free self-determination of a majority of citizens infinitely surpasses the most brilliant and humane absolutism; for the former is capable of development and therefore living, the latter is what it is and therefore dead. This law of nature has verified itself in the Roman absolute military monarchy and verified itself all the more completely, that, under the impulse of its creator's genius and in the absence of all material complications from without, that monarchy developed itself more purely and freely than any similar state.

From Caesar's time, as the sequel will show and Gibbon has shown long ago, the Roman system had only an external coherence and received only a mechanical extension, while internally it became even with him utterly withered and dead. If in the early stages of the autocracy and above all in Caesar's own soul(5) the hopeful dream of a combination of free popular development and absolute rule was still cherished, the government of the highly- gifted emperors of the Julian house soon taught men in a terrible form how far it was possible to hold fire and water in the same vessel.

5. Cf. V. VI. Second Coalition of Pompeius, Crassus, and Caesar

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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/rome/5-11-old-republic-new-monarchy.asp?pg=28