CAESAR AND CHRIST—Will Durant—Simon & Schuster ($5).
In spite of his seven-league-boot habits of scholarship and composition, Will Durant is a master of synthesis arid luminous narrative. Caesar and Christ, third volume of the monumental Story of Civilization which he expects to finish by 1955 (already published: Our Oriental Heritage; The Life of Greece), may lack moral passion. But as clear exposition of an immensely complicated story, it is magnificent.
The End of Checks & Balances. The fate of Rome haunts a modern world that has been unable to solve its own social problems, either domestic or international, and Durant makes the most of hundreds of parallels. Rome, like the U.S.A., discovered the secret of check-&-balance republican government, yet forgot its secret when the clamor of pressure groups broke down the old tradition of limited terms of office. A Cincinnatus, called from his plow to save the State, returned to his farm as soon as the crisis was over. But when Sulla and Julius Caesar violated the precedent, the Republic sank back into the monarchy from which it had sprung.
Rome established the primacy of law, created a thriving economy, spread the advantages of universal citizenship from Gibraltar to the Crimea, and made the family the rock of civil life. Yet the law was overthrown by barbarians, the international Roman economy succumbed to a renewed provincialism, and the old Stoic families took to licentiousness and ceased to reproduce themselves.
The Republican Opposition. "Carthage must be destroyed," cried the dour elder Cato in speech after speech in the Roman Senate. Perhaps it was inevitable that Rome should wipe out its great rival for control of the west Mediterranean basin. But once the Carthaginian menace had been removed, a certain vital tension disappeared from Rome's internal life. With no immediately compelling external problem, Romans started fighting each other.
The Gracchi, well-to-do representatives of a great family tradition, allied themselves with the plebs, or common people. Yet the Gracchan attempt to solve the land crisis that had been caused by the growth of the monopolistic latifundia, or great estates, was beaten back by the republican Senate.
The shortsightedness of the republican aristocrats and businessmen pushed the plebs and the slaves into the arms of demagogues and military leaders. From 146 B.C., year of the destruction of Carthage, to 49 B.C., when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon on his way to make himself dictator, the story of Rome is told in terms that should be familiar to everyone who has seen a Hitler and a Mussolini rise to power with the support of the multitudes. Unlike modern precursors and advocates of totalitarianism, the Gracchi, Marius, Mark Antony and Julius Caesar had no great desire to overturn republican institutions. But they were pushed along the road to dictatorship by the fecklessness of the opposition.