until he brought matters to this extremity, Caesar had no cause to fear.
Nor was it at all certain, in any one instance, where this exemplary
chastisement overtook him, that the apparent unanimity of the actors went
further than the _practical_ conclusion of "abating" the imperial
nuisance, or that their indignation had settled upon the same offences. In
general the army measured the guilt by the public scandal, rather than by
its moral atrocity; and Caesar suffered perhaps in every case, not so much
because he had violated his duties, as because he had dishonored his
office.

It is, therefore, in the total absence of the checks which have almost
universally existed to control other despots, under some indirect shape,
even where none was provided by the laws, that we must seek for the main
peculiarity affecting the condition of the Roman Caesar, which peculiarity
it was, superadded to the other three, that finally made those three
operative in their fullest extent. It is in the perfection of the
stratocracy that we must look for the key to the excesses of the autocrat.
Even in the bloody despotisms of the Barbary States, there has always
existed in the religious prejudices of the people, which could not be
violated with safety, one check more upon the caprices of the despot than
was found at Rome. Upon the whole, therefore, what affects us on the first
reading as a prodigy or anomaly in the frantic outrages of the early
Caesars--falls within the natural bounds of intelligible human nature, when
we state the case considerately. Surrounded by a population which had not
only gone through a most vicious and corrupting discipline, and had been
utterly ruined by the license of revolutionary times, and the bloodiest
proscriptions, but had even been extensively changed in its very elements,
and from the descendants of Romulus had been transmuted into an Asiatic
mob;--starting from this point, and considering as the second feature of
the case, that this transfigured people, _morally_ so degenerate,