To be near to him began to be of such importance, that the rents rose in the quarter of the city where he dwelt.

Personal interviews with him were rendered so difficult by the multitude of individuals soliciting audience, that Caesar found himself compelled in many cases to communicate even with his intimate friends in writing, and that persons even of the highest rank had to wait for hours in the antechamber.
People felt, more clearly than was agreeable to Caesar himself, that they no longer approached a fellow-citizen.

There arose a monarchical aristocracy, which was in a remarkable manner at once new and old, and which had sprung out of the idea of casting into the shade the aristocracy of the oligarchy by that of royalty, the nobility by the patriciate.

The patrician body still subsisted, although without essential privileges as an order, in the character of a close aristocratic guild;( 19) but as it could receive no new -gentes-( 20) it had dwindled away more and more in the course of centuries, and in the time of Caesar there were not more than fifteen or sixteen patrician -gentes- still in existence.
Caesar, himself sprung from one of them, got the right of creating new patrician -gentes- conferred on the Imperator by decree of the people, and so established, in contrast to the republican nobility, the new aristocracy of the patriciate, which most happily combined all the requisites of a monarchical aristocracy--the charm of antiquity, entire dependence on the government, and total insignificance.

On all sides the new sovereignty revealed itself.
Under a monarch thus practically unlimited there could hardly be scope for a constitution at all--still less for a continuance of the hitherto existing commonwealth based on the legal co-operation of the burgesses, the senate, and the several magistrates.