CHAPTER XXVI. THE PERSONALITY AND CHARACTER OF CÆSAR
But yesterday the word of Cæsar might
Have stood against the world; now lies he there,
And none so poor to do him reverence.
—Shakespeare.
Cæsar was assassinated in his fifty-sixth year. He fell pierced with twenty-three wounds, only one of which, as the physician who examined his body affirmed, was in itself mortal. In early life his health had been delicate, and at a later period he was subject to fits of epilepsy, which attacked him in the campaign of Africa, and again before the battle of Munda. Yet the energy and habitual rapidity of all his movements seem to prove the robustness of his constitution, at least in middle life. It may be presumed that if he had escaped the dagger of the assassin, he might, in the course of nature, have attained old age; and against any open attack his position was impregnable. He might have lived to carry out himself the liberal schemes which he was enabled only to project. But it was ordained, for inscrutable reasons, that their first originator should perish, and leave them to be eventually effected by a successor, within a quarter of a century.
The judgment of the ancients upon this famous deed varied according to their interests and predilections. If, indeed, the republic had been permanently re-established, its saviour would have been hailed, perhaps, with unmingled applause, and commanded the favour of the Romans to a late posterity. Cicero, though he might have shrunk from participating in the deed, deemed it expedient to justify it, and saluted its authors in exulting accents, as tyrannicides and deliverers. But the courtiers of the later Cæsars branded it as a murder, or passed it over in significant silence. Virgil, who ventures to pay a noble compliment to Cato, and glories in the eternal punishment of Catiline, bestows not a word on the exploit of Brutus. Even Lucan, who beholds in it a stately sacrifice to the gods, admits the detestation with which it was generally regarded. Augustus, indeed, wisely tolerant, allowed Messalla to speak in praise of Cassius; but Tiberius would not suffer Cremutius to call him with impunity the last of the Romans. Velleius, Seneca, and, above all, Valerius Maximus, express their abhorrence of the murder in energetic and manly tones. It was the mortification, they said, of the conspirators at their victim’s superiority, their disappointment at the slowness with which the stream of honours flowed to them, their envy, their vanity, anything rather than their patriotism, that impelled them to it. The Greek writers, who had less of prejudice to urge them to extenuate the deed, speak of it without reserve as a monstrous and abominable crime. Again, while Tacitus casts a philosophic glance on the opinions of others, and abstains from passing any judgment of his own, Suetonius allows that Cæsar was, indeed, justly slain, but makes no attempt to absolve his assassins. From Livy and Florus, and the epitomiser of Trogus, we may infer that the sentiments expressed by Plutarch were the same which the most reasonable of the Romans generally adopted; he declared that the disorders of the body politic required the establishment of monarchy, and that Cæsar was sent by providence, as the mildest physician, for its conservation. On the whole, when we consider the vices of the times and the general laxity of principle justly ascribed to the later ages of Greek and Roman heathenism, it is interesting to observe how little sympathy was extended by antiquity to an exploit which appealed so boldly to it.[b]
The following extract from Suetonius’ Lives of the Cæsars is our chief source of knowledge as to Cæsar’s personality.
He is said to have been tall, of a fair complexion, round limbed, rather full faced, with eyes black and lively, very healthful, except that, towards the end of his life, he would suddenly fall into fainting-fits, and be frightened in his sleep. He was likewise twice seized with the falling sickness in the time of battle. He was so nice in the care of his person that he had not only the hair of his head cut and his face shaved with great exactness, but likewise had the hair on other parts of the body plucked out by the roots, a practice with which some persons upbraidingly charged him. His baldness gave him much uneasiness, having often found himself upon that account exposed to the ridicule of his enemies. He therefore used to bring forward his hair from the crown of his head; and of all the honours conferred upon him by the senate and people, there was none which he either accepted or used with greater pleasure than the right of wearing constantly a laurel crown. It is said that he was particular in his dress. For he used the latus clavus[129] with fringes about the wrists, and always had it girded about him but loosely. This circumstance gave origin to the expression of Sulla, who often advised the nobility to beware of “the loose-coated boy.”
He first lived in Subura in a small house; but, after his advancement to the pontificate, in a house belonging to the state in the Sacred way. Many writers say that he affected neatness in his person, and niceness in his entertainments: that he entirely took down again a country-seat, near the grove of Aricia, which he erected from the foundation, and finished at a vast expense, because it had not exactly suited his fancy, though he was at that time poor and in debt; and that he carried about in his expeditions marble pavement for his tent.
They likewise report that he invaded Britain in hopes of finding pearls, the bigness of which he would compare together, and examine the weight by poising them in his hand; that he would purchase at any cost gems, carved works, and pictures, executed by the eminent masters of antiquity; and that he would give for handsome young slaves a price so extravagant that he was ashamed to have it entered in the diary of his expenses.
The same authors inform us that he constantly kept two tables in the provinces, one for the officers of the army, or the gentlemen of the provinces, and the other for such of the Roman gentry as had no commission in the troops, and provincials of the first distinction. He was so very exact in the management of his domestic affairs, both small and great, that he once put a baker in fetters, for serving him with a finer sort of bread than his guests; and put to death a freedman, and a particular favourite, for debauching the lady of a Roman knight, though no complaint had been made to him of the affair.
It is admitted by all that he was much addicted to women, as well as very expensive in his intrigues with them, and that he debauched many ladies of the highest quality; among whom were Postumia the wife of Servius Sulpicius, Lollia the wife of Aulus Gabinius, Tertulla the wife of M. Crassus, and likewise Mucia the wife of Cn. Pompeius. For it is certain that the Curios, father and son, and many others, objected to Pompey in reproach, “that to gratify his ambition, he married the daughter of a man upon whose account he had divorced his wife, after having had three children by her, and whom he used, with a heavy sigh, to call Ægisthus.” But the mistress whom of all he most loved was Servilia, the mother of M. Brutus; for whom he purchased in his consulship, next after the commencement of their intrigue, a pearl which cost him six millions of sesterces; and in the Civil War, besides other presents, consigned to her, for a trifling consideration, some valuable estates in land, which were exposed to public auction. When many persons wondered at the lowness of the price, Cicero facetiously observed, “To let you know how much better a purchase this is than ye imagine, Tertia is deducted”; for Servilia was supposed to have prostituted her daughter Tertia to Cæsar.
That he had intrigues likewise with married women in the provinces appears from a distich, which was much repeated in the Gallic triumph.
In the number of his mistresses were also some queens, such as Eunoe, a Moor, the wife of Bogudes, to whom and her husband he made, as Naso reports, many large presents. But his greatest favourite was Cleopatra, with whom he often revelled all night till daybreak, and would have gone with her through Egypt in a pleasure-boat, as far as Ethiopia, had not the army refused to follow him. He afterwards invited her to Rome, whence he sent her back loaded with honours and presents, and gave her permission to call by his name a son, who, according to the testimony of some Greek historians, resembled Cæsar both in person and gait. Mark Antony declared in the senate that Cæsar had acknowledged the child as his own; and that C. Matius, C. Oppius, and the rest of Cæsar’s friends knew it to be true. On which occasion Oppius, as if it had been an imputation which he was called upon to refute, published a book to show that the child which Cleopatra fathered upon Cæsar was not his. Helvius Cinna, tribune of the commons, told several persons as a fact that he had a bill ready drawn up, which Cæsar had ordered him to get enacted in his absence, that, with the view of procuring issue, he might contract marriage with any one female, or as many as he pleased.
It is acknowledged even by his enemies that in respect of wine he was abstemious. A remark is ascribed to M. Cato, “that he was the only sober man amongst all those who were engaged in a design to subvert the government.” For in regard to diet, C. Oppius informs us, he was so indifferent for his own part, that when a person in whose house he was entertained had served him, instead of fresh oil, with oil which had some sort of seasoning in it, and which the rest of the company would not touch, he alone ate very heartily of it, that he might not seem to tax the master of the house with inelegance or want of attention.
He never discovered any great regard to moderation, either in his command of the army, or civil offices; for we have the testimony of some writers that he requested money of the proconsul his predecessor in Spain, and the Roman allies in that quarter, for the discharge of his debts; and some towns of the Lusitanians, notwithstanding they attempted no resistance to his arms and opened to him their gates, upon his arrival before them he plundered in a hostile manner. In Gaul, he rifled the chapels and temples of the gods, which were filled with rich presents; and demolished cities oftener for the sake of plunder than for any offence they had given him. By this means gold became so plentiful with him that he exchanged it through Italy and the provinces of the empire for three thousand sesterces the pound. In his first consulship he stole out of the Capitol three thousand pounds’ weight of gold, and placed in the room of it the same weight of gilt brass. He bartered likewise to foreign nations and princes, for gold, the titles of allies and kings; and squeezed out of Ptolemy alone near six thousand talents, in the name of himself and Pompey. He afterwards supported the expense of the Civil Wars and of his triumphs and public shows, by the most flagrant rapine and sacrilege.
In point of eloquence and military achievements, he equalled at least, if he did not surpass, the greatest men. After his prosecution of Dolabella, he was indisputably esteemed among the most distinguished pleaders. Cicero, in recounting to Brutus the famous orators, declares “he does not see that Cæsar was inferior to any one of them; that he had an elegant, splendid, noble, and magnificent vein of eloquence.” And in a letter to C. Nepos, he writes of him in the following terms: “What! which of all the orators, who, during the whole course of their lives, have done nothing else, can you prefer before him? Which of them is ever more pointed in expression, or more often commands your applause?” In his youth he seems to have chosen Strabo Cæsar as his model; out of whose oration for the Sardinians he has transcribed some passages literally into his Divinatio. He is said to have delivered himself with a shrill voice, and an animated action which was graceful. He has left behind him some speeches, among which are a few not genuine; as that for Q. Metellus. These Augustus supposes, and with reason, to be the production of blundering writers of shorthand, who were not able to follow him in the delivery, rather than anything published by himself. For I find in some copies the title is not “for Metellus,” but “what he wrote to Metellus”; whereas the speech is delivered in the name of Cæsar, vindicating Metellus and himself from the aspersions cast upon them by their common defamers. The speech addressed “to his soldiers in Spain,” Augustus considers likewise as spurious. Under this title we meet with two; one made, as is pretended, in the first battle, and the other in the last; at which time Asinius Pollio says, he had not leisure to address the soldiers, on account of the sudden assault of the enemy.
He has likewise left commentaries of his own transactions both in the Gallic and the civil war with Pompey; for the author of the Alexandrian, African, and Spanish wars is not known with any certainty. Some think they are the production of Oppius, and some of Hirtius; the latter of whom composed the last book, but an imperfect one, of the Gallic War. Of those memoirs of Cæsar, Cicero in his Brutus speaks thus: “He wrote his memoirs in a manner that greatly deserves approbation; they are plain, precise, and elegant, without any affectation of ornament. In having thus prepared materials for such as might be inclined to compose his history, he may perhaps have encouraged some silly creatures to enter upon such a work, who will needs be dressing up his actions in all the extravagance of bombast; but he has discouraged wise men from ever attempting the subject.” Hirtius delivers his opinion of the same memoirs in the following terms: “So great is the approbation with which they are universally perused, that, instead of exciting, he seems to have precluded the efforts of any future historian. Yet with regard to this subject, we have more reason to admire him than others; for they only know how well and correctly he has written, but we know likewise how easily and quickly he did it.” Pollio Asinius thinks that they were not drawn up with much care, or with a due regard to truth: for he insinuates that Cæsar was too hasty of belief with respect to what was performed by others under him; and that, in respect of what he transacted in person, he has not given a very faithful account—either with design, or through a defect of memory; expressing at the same time an opinion that Cæsar intended a new and more correct production on the subject.
Temple of Vesta, Rome
He has left behind him likewise two books of analogy, with the same number under the title of Anti-Cato, and a poem entitled The Journey. Of these books he composed the first two in his passage over the Alps, as he was returning to his army from holding the assizes in Hither Gaul; the second work about the time of the battle of Munda; and the last during the four-and-twenty days he was upon his expedition from Rome to Further Spain. There are extant some letters of his to the senate, written in a manner never practised by any before him, for they are divided into pages in the form of a pocket-book; whereas the consuls and generals, till then, used constantly in their letters to continue the line quite across the sheet, without any folding or distinction of pages. There are extant likewise some letters from him to Cicero, and others to his friends concerning his domestic affairs; in which, if there was occasion for secrecy, he used the alphabet in such a manner that not a single word could be made out. The way to decipher those epistles was to substitute “d” for “a” and so of the other letters respectively. Some things likewise pass under his name, said to have been written by him when a boy or a very young man; as the Encomium of Hercules, a tragedy entitled Œdipus, and a collection of apophthegms; all which Augustus forbid to be published, in a short and plain letter to Pompeius Macer, whom he had appointed to direct the arrangement of his libraries.
He was a perfect master of his weapons, a complete horseman, and able to endure fatigue beyond all belief. Upon a march, he used to go at the head of his troops, sometimes on horseback, but oftener on foot, with his head bare in all kinds of weather. He would travel in a post-chaise at the rate of a hundred miles a day, and pass rivers in his way by swimming, or supported with leathern bags filled with wind, so that he often prevented all intelligence of his approach.
In his expeditions, it is difficult to say whether his caution or boldness was most conspicuous. He never marched his army by a route which was liable to any ambush of the enemy, without having previously examined the situation of the places by his scouts. Nor did he pass over into Britain, before he had made due inquiry respecting the navigation, the harbours, and the most convenient access to the island. But when advice was brought to him of the siege of a camp of his in Germany, he made his way to his men, through the enemy’s guards, in a Gallic habit. He crossed the sea from Brundusium and Dyrrhachium, in the winter, through the midst of the enemy’s fleets; and the troops which he had ordered to follow him not making that haste which he expected, after he had several times sent messengers to expedite them, in vain, he at last went privately, and alone, aboard a small vessel in the night-time, with his head muffled up; nor did he discover who he was, or suffer the master to desist from prosecuting the voyage, though the wind blew strong against them, until they were ready to sink.
He was never discouraged from any enterprise, nor retarded in the prosecution of it, by any ill omens. When a victim which he was about to offer in sacrifice had made its escape, he did not therefore defer his expedition against Scipio and Juba. And happening to fall, upon stepping out of the ship, he gave a lucky turn to the omen, by exclaiming, “I hold thee fast, Africa.” In ridicule of the prophecies which were spread abroad, as if the name of the Scipios was, by the decrees of fate, fortunate and invincible in that province, he retained in the camp a profligate wretch, of the family of the Cornelii, who, on account of his scandalous life, was surnamed Salutio.
He engaged in battle not only upon previous deliberation, but upon the sudden when an occasion presented itself; often immediately after a march, and sometimes during the most dismal weather, when nobody could imagine he would stir. Nor was he ever backward in fighting, until towards the end of his life. He then was of opinion that the oftener he had come off with success, the less he ought to expose himself to new hazards; and that he could never acquire so much by any victory as he might lose by a miscarriage. He never defeated an enemy whom he did not at the same time drive out of their camp; so warmly did he pursue his advantage that he gave them no time to rally their force. When the issue of a battle was doubtful, he sent away all the officers’ horses, and in the first place his own, that being deprived of that convenience for flight they might be under the greater necessity of standing their ground.
He rode a very remarkable horse, with feet almost like those of a man, his hoofs being divided in such a manner as to have some resemblance to toes. This horse he had bred himself, and took particular care of, because the soothsayers interpreted those circumstances into an omen that the possessor of him would be master of the world. He backed him too himself, for the horse would suffer no other rider; and he afterwards erected a statue of him before the temple of Venus Genitrix.
He often alone, by his courage and activity, restored the fortune of a battle; opposing and stopping such of his troops as fled, and turning them by the jaws upon the enemy; though many of them were so terrified that a standard bearer, upon his stopping him, made a pass at him; and another, upon a similar occasion, left his standard in his hand.
The following instances of his resolution are equally, and even more remarkable. After the battle of Pharsalia, having sent his troops before him into Asia, as he was passing the Hellespont in a ferry boat, he met with L. Cassius, one of the opposite party, with ten ships of war; whom he was so far from avoiding, that he advanced close up to him; when, advising him to surrender, and the other complying, he took him into the boat.
At Alexandria, in the attack of a bridge, being forced by a sudden sally of the enemy into a boat, and several hurrying in with him, he leaped into the sea, and saved himself by swimming to the next ship, which lay at the distance of two hundred paces; holding up his left hand out of the water, for fear of wetting some papers which he held in it; and pulling his general’s cloak after him with his teeth, lest it should fall into the hands of the enemy.
He never estimated a soldier by his manners or fortune, but by his strength alone; and treated them with equal severity and indulgence; for he did not always keep a strict hand over them, except when an enemy was near. Then indeed he was so rigorous an exactor of discipline, that he would give no notice of march or battle until the moment he was to enter upon them; that the troops might hold themselves in readiness for any sudden movement; and he would frequently draw them out of the camp, without any necessity for it, especially in rainy weather, and upon holy days. Sometimes, giving them warning to watch him, he would suddenly withdraw himself by day or night, and would oblige them to long marches, on purpose to tire them, if they were tardy.
When at any time his soldiers were discouraged by reports of the great force of the enemy, he recovered them, not by denying the truth of what was said, or by diminishing the fact, but on the contrary by exaggerating every particular. Accordingly, when his troops were under great apprehensions of the arrival of King Juba, he called them together, and said, “I have to inform you that in a very few days the king will be here, with ten legions, thirty thousand horse, a hundred thousand light-armed foot, and three hundred elephants. Let none therefore presume to make any further inquiry, or to give their opinion upon the subject, but take my word for what I tell you, which I have from undoubted intelligence; otherwise I shall put them aboard a crazy old vessel, and leave them exposed to the mercy of the winds.”
He neither took notice of all their faults, nor proportioned his punishments to the nature of them. But after deserters and mutineers he made the most diligent inquiry, and punished them severely; other delinquencies he would connive at. Sometimes, after a successful battle, he would grant them a relaxation from all kinds of duty, and leave them to revel at pleasure; being used to boast that his soldiers fought nothing the worse for being perfumed. In his speeches, he never addressed them by the title of “soldiers,” but by the softer appellation of “fellow-soldiers”; and kept them in such fine condition that their arms were ornamented with silver and gold, not only for the purpose of making the better appearance, but to render the soldiers more tenacious of them in battle, from their value. He loved his troops to such a degree that, when he heard of the disaster of those under Titurius, he neither cut his hair nor shaved his beard until he had revenged it upon the enemy; by which means he engaged extremely their affection, and rendered them to the last degree brave.
Upon his entering into the Civil War, the centurions of every legion offered each of them to maintain a horseman at his own expense, and the whole army agreed to serve gratis, without either corn or pay; those amongst them who were rich charging themselves with the maintenance of the poor. No one of them, during the whole course of the war, went over to the enemy; and most of those who were made prisoners, though they were offered their lives upon the condition of bearing arms against him, refused to accept the terms. They endured want, and other hardships, not only when themselves were besieged, but when they besieged others, to such a degree that Pompey, when blocked up in the neighbourhood of Dyrrhachium, upon seeing a sort of bread, made of an herb, which they lived upon, said, “I have to do with wild beasts,” and ordered it immediately to be taken away; because, if his troops should see it, they might be impressed with a dangerous apprehension of the hardiness and desperate resolution of the enemy. With what bravery they fought, one instance affords sufficient proof; which is, that after an unsuccessful engagement at Dyrrhachium, they desired him to punish them; insomuch that their general found it more necessary to comfort than punish them.
In other battles, in different parts, they defeated with ease immense armies of the enemy, though they were much inferior to them in number. To conclude, one battalion of the sixth legion held out a fort against four legions belonging to Pompey, during several hours; being almost every one of them wounded, by the vast number of arrows discharged against them, and of which there were found within the ramparts a hundred and thirty thousand. This is no way surprising, when we consider the behaviour of some individuals amongst them; such as that of Cassius Scæva, or C. Acilius a common soldier. Scæva, after he had an eye struck out, was run through the thigh and the shoulder, and had his shield pierced in a hundred and twenty places, maintained obstinately the guard of a gate in a fort, with the command of which he was intrusted. Acilius, in the sea fight at Marseilles, having seized a ship of the enemy with his right hand, and that being cut off, in imitation of that memorable instance of resolution in Cynægirus amongst the Greeks leaped into the ship, bearing down all before him with the boss of his shield.
They never once mutinied during all the ten years of the Gallic War, but were sometimes a little refractory in the course of the Civil War. They always however returned quickly to their duty, and that not through the compliance but the authority of their general; for he never gave ground, but constantly opposed them on such occasions. The whole ninth legion he dismissed with ignominy at Placentia, though Pompey was at that time in arms; and would not receive them again into his service, until not only they had made the most humble submission and entreaty, but that the ringleaders in the mutiny were punished.
When the soldiers of the tenth legion at Rome demanded their discharge and rewards for their service, with great threats, and no small danger to the city, though at that time the war was warmly carried on against him in Africa, he immediately, notwithstanding all the efforts of his friends, who endeavoured to prevent him from taking such a measure, came up to the legion and disbanded it. But addressing them by the title of “quirites,” instead of “soldiers,” he by this single word so thoroughly regained their affections that they immediately cried out they were his “soldiers,” and followed him into Africa, though he had refused their service. He nevertheless punished the most seditious amongst them, with the loss of a third of their share in the plunder and the land which had been intended for them.
In the service of his clients, while yet a young man, he evinced great zeal and fidelity. He defended the cause of a noble youth, Masintha, against King Hiempsal, so strenuously that in a wrangle which happened upon the occasion he seized by the beard the son of King Juba; and upon Masintha being declared tributary to Hiempsal, while the friends of the adverse party were violently carrying him off, he immediately rescued him by force, kept him concealed in his house a long time, and when, at the expiration of his prætorship, he went to Spain, he carried him with him in his litter, amidst his sergeants, and others who had come to attend and take leave of him.
He always treated his friends with that good nature and kindness, that when C. Oppius, in travelling with him through a forest, was suddenly taken ill, he resigned to him the only place there was to lodge in at night, and lay himself upon the ground, and in the open air. When he had come to have in his own hands the whole power of the commonwealth, he advanced some of his faithful adherents, though of mean extraction, to the highest posts in the government. And when he was censured for this partiality, he openly said, “Had I been assisted by robbers and cut-throats in the defence of my honour, I should have made them the same recompense.”
He never in any quarrel conceived so implacable a resentment as not very willingly to renounce it when an opportunity occurred. Though C. Memmius had published some extremely virulent speeches against him, and he had answered him with equal acrimony, yet he afterwards assisted him with his vote and interest, when he stood candidate for the consulship. When C. Calvus, after publishing some scandalous epigrams against him, endeavoured to effect a reconciliation by the intercession of friends, he wrote of his own accord the first letter. And when Valerius Catullus, who had, as he himself observed, in his verses upon Mamurra put such a stain upon his character as never could be obliterated, begged his pardon, he invited him to supper the same day; and continued to take up his lodging with his father occasionally, as he had been accustomed to do.
His disposition was naturally averse to severity in retaliation. After he had made the pirates, by whom he had been taken, prisoners, because he had sworn he would crucify them, he did so indeed; but previously to the execution of that sentence, ordered their throats to be cut. He could never bear the thought of doing any harm to Cornelius Phagita, who had kidnapped him in the night, with the design of carrying him to Sulla; and from whose custody, not without much difficulty and a large bribe likewise, he had been able to extricate himself. Philemon, his secretary, who had made a promise to his enemies to poison him, he put to death only, without torture. When he was summoned as a witness against P. Clodius, his wife Pompeia’s gallant, who was prosecuted for a pollution of religious ceremonies, he declared he knew nothing of the affair, though his mother Aurelia and his sister Julia gave the court an exact and full account of the transaction. And being asked why then he had divorced his wife: “Because,” said he,“I would have those of my family untainted, not only with guilt, but with the suspicion of it likewise.”
Both in the administration of government and his behaviour towards the vanquished party in the Civil War, he showed a wonderful moderation and clemency. And whilst Pompey declared that he would consider all those as enemies who did not take arms in defence of the republic, he desired it to be understood that he should regard all those who remained neuter as his friends. In respect of all those to whom he had, on Pompey’s recommendation, given any command in the army, he left them at perfect liberty to go over to him, if they pleased. When some proposals were made at Ilerda for a surrender, which gave rise to a free communication between the two camps, and Afranius and Petreius, upon a sudden change of resolution, had put to the sword all Cæsar’s men that were found in the camp, he scorned to imitate the base treachery which they had practised against himself. In the field of Pharsalia, he called out to the soldiers “to spare their fellow-citizens,” and afterwards gave liberty to every man in his army to save an enemy. None of them, so far as appears, lost their lives but in battle, excepting only Afranius, Faustus, and young Lucius Cæsar; and it is thought that even they were put to death without his consent. Afranius and Faustus had borne arms against him, after their pardon had been granted them; and L. Cæsar had not only in the most cruel manner destroyed with fire and sword his freedmen and slaves, but cut to pieces the wild beasts which he had prepared for the entertainment of the people. And finally, a little before his death, he granted liberty to all whom he had not before pardoned, to return into Italy, and admitted them to a capacity of bearing offices both civil and military.
He even erected again the statues of Sulla and Pompey, which had been thrown down by the populace. And any machinations against him, or reflections upon him, he chose rather to put a stop to than punish. Accordingly, with regard to any conspiracies against him which were discovered, or nightly cabals, he went no further than to intimate by a proclamation that he knew of them; and as to those who indulged themselves in the liberty of reflecting severely upon him, he only warned them in a public speech not to persist in their obloquy. He bore with great moderation a virulent libel written against him by Aulus Cæcina, and the abusive lampoons of Pitholaus, most highly reflecting on his reputation.
His other actions and declarations, however, with regard to the public, so far outweigh all his good qualities, that it is thought he abused his power and was justly cut off. For he not only accepted of excessive honours, as the consulship every year successively, the dictatorship for life, and the superintendency of the public manners, but likewise the titles of “imperator,” and “father of his country,” besides a statue amongst the kings, and a throne in the place allotted to the senators in the theatre. He even suffered some things to be decreed for him that were unsuitable to the greatest of human kind; such as a golden chair in the senate house and upon the bench when he sat for the trial of causes, a stately chariot in the Circensian procession, temples, altars, images near the gods, a bed of state in the temples, a peculiar priest, and a college of priests, like those appointed in honour of Pan, and that one of the months should be called by his name. He indeed both assumed to himself, and granted to others, every kind of distinction at pleasure. In his third and fourth consulship he had only the title of the office, being content with the power of dictator, which was conferred upon him at the same time; and in both years he substituted other consuls in his room, during the three last months; so that in the intervals he held no assemblies of the people for the election of magistrates, excepting only tribunes and ædiles of the commons; and appointed officers, under the name of prefects, instead of the prætors, to administer the affairs of the city during his absence. The honour of the consulship, which had just become vacant by the sudden death of one of the consuls, he instantly conferred, the day before the 1st of January, upon a person who requested it of him, for a few hours.
With the same unwarrantable freedom, regardless of the constant usage of his country, he nominated the magistrates for several years to come. He granted the insignia of the consular dignity to ten persons of prætorian rank. He called up into the senate some who had been made free of the city, and even natives of Gaul, who were little better than barbarians. He likewise appointed to the management of the mint and the public revenue of the state some of his own servants; and entrusted the command of three legions, which he left at Alexandria, to an old catamite of his, the son of his freedman Rufinus.
He gave way to the same extravagance in his public conversation, as T. Ampius informs us; according to whom he said: “The commonwealth is nothing but a name, without substance, or so much as the appearance of any. Sulla was an illiterate fellow to lay down the dictatorship. Men ought to be more cautious in their converse with me, and look upon what I say as a law.” To such a pitch of arrogance did he proceed that, when a soothsayer brought him word that the entrails of a victim opened for sacrifice were without a heart, he said: “The entrails will be more favourable when I please; and it ought not to be regarded as any ill omen if a beast should be destitute of a heart.”
But what brought upon him the greatest and most invincible odium was his receiving the whole body of the senate sitting, when they came to wait upon him before the temple of Venus Genitrix, with many honourable decrees in his favour. Some say, as he attempted to rise, he was held down by C. Balbus. Others say he did not attempt it at all, but looked somewhat displeased at C. Trebatius, who put him in mind of standing up. This behaviour appeared the more intolerable in him because, when one of the tribunes of the commons, Pontius Aquila, would not rise up to him, as in his triumph he passed by the place where they sat, he was so much offended, that he cried out, “Well then, master tribune, take the government out of my hands.” And for some days after, he never promised a favour to any person, without this proviso, “if Pontius Aquila will allow of it.”
To this extraordinary affront upon the senate, he added an action yet more outrageous. For when, after the sacrifice of the Latin festival, he was returning home, amidst the incessant and unusual acclamations of the people, one of the crowd put upon a statue of him a laurel crown, with a white ribbon tied round it, and the tribunes of the commons, Epidius Marullus and Cæsetius Flavus, ordered the ribbon to be taken away and the man to be carried to prison; being much concerned either that the mention of his advancement to regal power had been so unluckily made, or, as he pretended, that the glory of refusing it had been thus taken from him, he reprimanded the tribunes very severely, and dismissed them both from their office. From that day forward, he was never able to wipe off the scandal of affecting the name of king; though he replied to the people, when they saluted him by that title, “My name is Cæsar, not King.” And at the feast of the Lupercalia, when the consul Antony in the rostra put a crown upon his head several times, he as often put it away, and sent it into the Capitol to Jupiter. A report was extremely current that he had a design of removing to Alexandria or Ilium, whither he proposed to transfer the strength of the empire, and to leave the city to be administered by his friends. To this report it was added that L. Cotta, one of the fifteen commissioners entrusted with the care of the Sibyl’s books, would make a motion in the house that, as there was in those books a prophecy that the Parthians should never be subdued but by a king, Cæsar should have that title.[130] This was why the conspirators precipitated the execution of their design.[c]
APPIAN COMPARES CÆSAR WITH ALEXANDER
“Happy in all things, magnificent; and with just reason comparable to Alexander; for they were both beyond measure ambitious, warlike, ready in the execution of what they had resolved and hardy in dangers; they spared not their bodies; and in war relied not so much upon their conduct, as upon their bravery and good fortune. The one went a long journey in a country without water to go to Ammon, happily crossed over the bottom of the Pamphylian Gulf, the sea being retired as if his genius had locked up the waters; as another time marching in the champian, it caused it to cease from raining. He navigated an unknown sea; being in the Indies, he first scaled the walls of a city, and leaped down alone into the midst of his enemies, receiving thirteen wounds; was always victorious; and whatever war he was engaged in, he ended it in one or two battles.
“In Europe he subdued many barbarous people, and reduced them under his obedience, together with the Grecians, a fierce people, and lovers of liberty, who never before obeyed any person but Philip; who commanded them for some time under the honourable title of general of the Greeks. He carried his arms almost through all Asia with an incredible celerity. And to comprise in a word the happiness and power of Alexander, all the countries he saw he conquered; and as he was designing to conquer the rest, he died.
“As for Cæsar, passing the Ionian Sea in the midst of winter, he found it calm, as well as the British Ocean, which he passed without any knowledge of it in a time when his pilots, driven by storm against the English rocks, lost their ships; another time embarking alone by night in a little boat, and rowing against the waves, he commanded the pilot to hoist sail and rather to consider the fortune of Cæsar than the sea. He threw himself more than once all alone into the midst of his enemies, when his men were all struck with panic fear; and is the only general of the Romans that ever fought thirty times in pitched battle against the Gauls, and subdued in Gaul forty nations, before so dreadful to the Romans, that in the law dispensing with priests and old men from going to war, the wars against the Gauls are excepted, and the priests and all men obliged to bear arms. Before Alexandria, seeing himself alone enclosed upon a bridge, he laid down his purple, threw himself into the sea, and pursued by his enemies, swam a long time under water, only by intervals lifting up his head to take breath; till coming near his ships, he held up his hands, was known, and so saved.
“For the civil wars, which he neither undertook out of fear (as he himself says), or out of ambition, he had to deal with the greatest generals of the age, fighting at the head of many great armies; not barbarian, but Romans, encouraged by their former actions, and by their good fortune, yet he defeated them all; and not one of them but he ruined in a fight or two. But we cannot say of him as of Alexander, that he was never overcome; for he suffered once a great loss against the Gauls, under the conduct of Titurius and Cotta, his lieutenants. In Spain his army was so near blocked up by Petreius and Afranius, that he wanted but little of being besieged. At Dyrrhachium and in Africa they turned their backs; and in Spain, against the young Pompeius they fled. But for Cæsar himself, he was always undaunted; and whatever war he engaged in, came off in the end victorious; and the Roman Empire, which now extends itself by sea and land, from the Euphrates to the Atlantic Ocean, was brought under his power, partly by his valour, and partly by his clemency. He settled himself much better than Sulla, and governed himself with more moderation; for being king in effect, in spite of all the world, he took not that name.
“At last, making his preparations for other wars, he was surprised by death as well as Alexander. Their armies were also alike; for the soldiers of both were cheerful in fight and hardy, but stubborn and mutinous when over-wrought with labour. The deaths of both of them were equally mourned and lamented by their armies, who attributed to them divine honours. They were both well made in body and of noble aspect; both descended from Jupiter; one by Eacus and Hercules, and the other by Anchises and Venus. Though they were inflexible when resisted, they were easier to pardon and be reconciled, and likewise to do good to such as they had vanquished; contented themselves with the victory.
“Hitherto the comparison is just, save only that their beginnings were not equal; for Alexander began with the quality of a king, in which he had been before instructed by his father Philip; but Cæsar was only a private man; and though he were of an illustrious race, yet his fortunes were much encumbered. They both despised the presages that threatened them, without injuring those divines who foretold their death; and almost the same signs happened to them, and a like event; for in the sacrifices made by one and the other twice, they found not the chief of the entrails of the victims; the first time they were only threatened with great danger. Alexander’s happened when besieging the Oxydracæ, being mounted first upon the wall, and the too great weight breaking the ladders behind him, he beheld himself deserted by his men, and threw himself into the midst of his enemies, where having received many wounds on his breast and a great blow on the neck, he was ready to die, when the Macedonians, touched with shame, broke open the gates and relieved him.
“The like happened to Cæsar in Spain in the fight between him and young Pompeius; where, seeing his men went on trembling, he advanced betwixt the two armies, received two hundred darts on his buckler, till such time as fear having given place to shame, all the army ran in and secured him from the danger. Thus the first entrails without the chief threatened only danger of death, but the second were certain presage of death itself. Pythagoras the divine, after having sacrificed, said to Apollodorus, who feared Alexander and Hephæstion, that he need fear nothing, for they both should shortly die. Hephæstion, dying some time after, Apollodorus, doubting lest there might be some conspiracy formed against the king, gave him notice of the prediction; he only laughed at it; and informing himself of Pythagoras what those presages meant, he told him it was a sign of death; whereupon he again laughed, praising Apollodorus’ love and the divine’s freedom.
“As for Cæsar, the last time he went to the senate, as we have said a little before, the same presage presenting, he said, smiling, he had seen the like in Spain, to which the augur answering that he was then in danger, but now the sign was mortal, he yielded in some measure to that advice, and offered another sacrifice; but tired with the length of the ceremony, entered the palace and perished. There happened to Alexander the same thing; for when he returned from the Indies to Babylon with his army, being come nigh the city, the Chaldeans counselled him to defer his entry; to whom having given this verse for answer,
‘Who promises most good’s the best divine,’
they besought him at last that he would not let his army enter with their faces to the west; but would fetch a compass, that in entering they might see the rising sun and the city. It is said he would have obeyed them in this; but in marching about he met with a marshy ground, which made him slight the second as well as the first advice, so that he entered the city with his face to the west. Some time after embarking upon the Euphrates, and going down to the river Pallakopas, which receives the Euphrates and carries its waters into marshes and pools which might happen to drown all Assyria, he resolved to make a dam; and it is said that going down the river he laughed at the Chaldeans because he had gone into Babylon and come out of it again in a boat without any harm; but death attended him at his return from this voyage.
“Cæsar’s raillery with the augur, who told him the ides of March were fatal to him, was much alike; he answered him jeering, the ides were come, and yet he was killed the same day. So that herein there was great agreement between them, both in the presages they received from the divines without being offended, their raillery, and the event of the prediction. They were likewise great lovers of the sciences, as well of their own country as strangers’. Alexander conferred with the Brachmanes, who were esteemed the most subtile and sagacious of the Indians, as the Magi are of the Persians. Cæsar did the like with the Egyptians when he re-established Cleopatra in her kingdom, which occasioned him when the peace was made to reform many things amongst the Romans; and that after the example of the Egyptians he regulated the year by the course of the sun, which before was governed by the moon; and so till then were unequal, by reason of the intercalary days. It happened to him likewise that one of those who conspired his death escaped, but were all punished as they deserved by his son, and as the murderers of Philip were by Alexander.”[e]
From this we turn to what is probably the most masterly estimate of Cæsar’s character and abilities ever penned by a student of Roman history. It is the estimate of one who is an enthusiastic admirer of Cæsar’s genius, but also a keen historical critic.
MOMMSEN’S ESTIMATE OF CÆSAR’S CHARACTER
The new monarch of Rome, the first ruler over the whole extent of Roman and Hellenic civilisation, Caius Julius Cæsar was in his fifty-sixth year—he was born the 12th of July, 100 B.C.—when the battle of Thapsus, the last of the long chain of victories which led to such important consequences, gave the decision of the world’s future into his hands. Few men’s quality has been so severely tested as that of this creative genius, the only one that Rome and the last that the ancient world produced—that world which was to continue to march in the paths he had marked out for it, till the time of its own downfall.
A scion of one of the oldest of the noble families of Latium, which traced its genealogy back to the heroes of the Iliad and the kings of Rome, and even as far as Venus Aphrodite, a goddess common to both nations, the years of his boyhood and young manhood had gone by as those of the noble youths of that epoch were wont to pass. He too had tasted both the froth and the lees of the cup of fashionable life, had recited and declaimed, had occupied his leisure with the pursuit of literature and the making of verses, had dallied with every species of love-making, and had been initiated into all the mysteries of shaving, hair-curling, and ruffles, which belonged to the science of dress as understood at that period, besides the far more difficult art of always borrowing and never paying. But the pliant steel of that nature resisted even these shallow and ruinous courses; Cæsar’s bodily vigour remained unimpaired, as did the temper of his mind and heart. In fencing and riding he was a match for any of his soldiers, and his swimming saved his life at Alexandria; the incredible speed with which he travelled, generally by night so as to gain time,—a direct contrast to the procession-like slowness with which Pompey moved from one place to another,—was the astonishment of his contemporaries and not the least important factor in his success.
As his body, so was his spirit. His marvellous insight revealed itself in the sureness and practical character of all his arrangements even when he gave orders without personal investigation. His memory was incomparable and it was easy for him to carry on several affairs concurrently and with equal precision. Gentleman, genius, and monarch, he still had a heart. As long as he lived he preserved the purest reverence for his excellent mother Aurelia, his father having died early; on his wife, and more especially on his daughter Julia, he bestowed a worthy affection which was not without its effect on politics. In their several ways the ablest and worthiest men of his time both of higher and lower rank stood to him in relations of mutual trust. As he never abandoned his adherents in Pompey’s ungenerous and heartless fashion, but stood by his friends unshaken in good and evil days, and this not merely from calculation, so also many of them, like Aulus Hirtius and Caius Matius, gave noble witness of their attachment to him even after his death.
If in a nature so harmoniously organised one particular side may be dwelt upon as characteristic, it is this that anything of an ideological or visionary character was far removed from it. It is needless to say that Cæsar was a passionate man, for there is no genius without passion; but his passions were never stronger than he. He had been young, and song, love, and wine had played their part in his joyous existence; but they did not penetrate the inmost heart of his being. Literature attracted his long and earnest attention; but if the Homeric Achilles kept Alexander awake, Cæsar in his sleepless hours prepared considerations on the inflections of Latin nouns and verbs. He made verses, as every one did at that time, but they were feeble; on the other hand he was interested in astronomical subjects and in those of physical science.
If for Alexander wine was and remained the dispeller of care, the temperate Roman entirely avoided it after the period of his youthful revels. Like all those who have been surrounded in youth by the full glow of the love of women, its imperishable glamour still rested on him; even in later years love adventures and successes with women still came in his way, and he still retained a certain dandyism in his outward bearing, or, more correctly, a joyous consciousness of the masculine beauty of his own appearance. The laurel wreaths with which he appeared in public in later years were carefully disposed so as to cover the baldness of which he was painfully sensible, and he would doubtless have given many of his victories if that could have brought back his youthful locks.
But however gladly he may have played the monarch amongst the women, he was only amusing himself with them and allowed them no influence over him; even his much-talked-of relations with Queen Cleopatra were only entered into for the purpose of masking a weak point in his political position. Cæsar was thoroughly matter-of-fact and a true realist; and what he attempted and performed was carried through and effected by that coolness which was his most essential quality and itself a manifestation of genius. To it he owed the power of living actively in the present and undisturbed by memory and expectation, as well as the ability to act at each moment with all his force and to apply his full genius to the smallest and most casual beginnings. He owed to it also the versatility with which he grasped and mastered whatever the understanding can seize and the will compel, the confident carelessness with which he commanded his words and sketched his plans of campaign, the “marvellous joyousness” which remained faithful to him in good and evil days, and the complete self-dependence which allowed no favourite nor mistress, nor even a friend to exercise power over him.
But it is to this perspicacity that we may also trace the fact that Cæsar never deluded himself concerning the power of fate and human capabilities; for him the kindly veil was lifted which hides from man the insufficiency of his toil. However cleverly he might lay his plans and weigh all the possibilities, there was always present with him a feeling that in all things fortune, that is chance, must contribute the largest part; and with this may be connected the fact that he so often gave odds to fate, and in particular again and again hazarded his person with foolhardy indifference. As men of unusual intelligence have betaken themselves to games of pure chance, so too there was in Cæsar’s rationalism a point where in a certain sense he came in touch with mysticism.
From such materials a statesman could not fail to be produced. Cæsar was a statesman from his earliest youth and in the deepest sense of the word, and his aim was the highest which a man may set before himself—the political, military, intellectual, and moral revival of his own deeply fallen nation and that still more deeply fallen Hellenic people which was so closely allied with his own. The hard school of thirty years’ experience had changed his views concerning the means by which this goal was to be attained; his aim remained the same in the days of hopeless depression as in the fullness of unlimited power, in the days when as a demagogue and conspirator he glided to it by obscure paths and in those in which as participant of the highest power and then as monarch, he created his works in the full sunshine before the eyes of a world. All the measures of a permanent character which originated with him at the most various times ranged themselves in their appropriate places in the great scheme. Strictly, therefore, we should not speak of solitary performances of Cæsar; he created nothing solitary.
Cæsar the orator has been justly praised for his virile eloquence, which made a mock of all the advocate’s art and like the clear flame gave light and warmth at the same time. Cæsar the writer has been justly admired for the inimitable simplicity of his composition, the singular purity and beauty of his language. The greatest masters in the military art in all periods have justly praised Cæsar the general who, emancipated as no other has been from the entanglements of routine and tradition, always managed to find that method of warfare by which in a particular case the enemy might be vanquished and which is consequently the right one in that case. With the certainty of a diviner he found the right means for every purpose, after defeat stood like William of Orange ready for battle, and ended every campaign without exception with victory. He applied in unsurpassed perfection that principle of warfare whose employment distinguishes military genius from the ability of an ordinary officer—namely, the principle of the swift movement of masses; and found security for victory not in great numbers but in swift movement, not in long preparations but in swift and even rash action even with inadequate resources.
But with Cæsar all this is only subsidiary; he was indeed a great orator, writer, and general, but he only became each of these because he was an accomplished statesman. The soldier in him, in particular, plays an entirely incidental rôle, and one of the most remarkable peculiarities which distinguishes him from Alexander, Hannibal, and Napoleon is that in him not the commander but the demagogue was the starting-point of his political activity. According to his original plan he had intended to attain his goal as Pericles and Caius Gracchus had done, without having recourse to arms; and as leader of the popular party he had moved for the space of eighteen years exclusively in the sphere of political plans and intrigues, before, unwillingly convinced of the necessity of military support, he placed himself at the head of an army at a time when he was already forty years old. It was explicable enough that at a later period he should have still remained more statesman than general; as Cromwell also transformed himself from leader of the opposition into a military chief and democratic king and, on the whole, little as the puritan prince may seem to resemble the dissolute Roman, he is of all statesmen perhaps the one who is most closely allied to Cæsar both in his development and in his aims and achievements.
Even in Cæsar’s manner of warfare his impromptu generalship is still clearly recognisable; the lieutenant of artillery who had risen to be general is not more distinctly apparent in Napoleon’s enterprises against England and Egypt than is the demagogue metamorphosed into a general in the like undertakings of Cæsar. A trained officer would hardly have laid aside the most important military considerations for political reasons of a not very imperative nature, as Cæsar frequently did, the most astonishing instance being the occasion of his landing in Epirus. Individual proceedings of his are consequently blameworthy in a military sense. But the general loses only what the statesman gains.
The statesman’s task, like Cæsar’s genius, is of a universal character; though he turns his attention to the most complex and diverse affairs, yet they all without exception have their bearing on the one great goal which he serves with boundless fidelity and consistency; and of all the numerous phases and directions of his great activity he never gave the preference to one above another. Although a master of the military art, he nevertheless, with a statesman’s foresight, did his utmost to avoid civil war, and even when he began it to earn no bloody laurels. Although the founder of a military monarchy, he exerted an energy unexampled in history to prevent the formation of either a hierarchy of marshals or a prætorian government. He preferred the sciences of arts and peace to those of war.
The most noteworthy characteristic of his work as a statesman is its perfect harmony. In fact all the necessary qualifications for this most difficult of all human tasks were united in Cæsar. Realist through and through, he never allowed consecrated tradition and the images of the past to trouble him; nothing was of any importance to him in politics save the living present and intelligent law, as in the character of a grammarian he set aside historical and antiquarian inquiry and only recognised, on the one hand the usages of the living language, on the other the laws of conformity. A born ruler, he swayed the minds of men as the wind drives the clouds, and compelled the most diverse characters to abandon themselves to him—the simple citizen and the rough soldier, the noble ladies of Rome and the fair princesses of Egypt and Mauretania, the brilliant cavalry leader and the calculating banker.
Roman Tripod
His talent for organisation was wonderful; Cæsar forced his coalition and his legions into close union and held them firmly together as no other statesman ever did with his allies, nor any general with an army composed of unruly and conflicting elements; never did ruler judge his instruments with so keen an eye and put each in its appropriate place. He was a monarch, but he never played the king. Even as absolute master of Rome he retained the bearing of a party leader; perfectly pliant and complaisant, easy and agreeable in conversation and courteous to all, he appeared to desire to be nothing more than the first among his equals. Cæsar entirely avoided the mistake of so many men otherwise as great as he—that of carrying the spirit of the military commander into politics; however great the temptation arising from his vexatious relations with the senate, he never had recourse to such acts of brute force as that of the 18th Brumaire. Cæsar was a monarch, but he was never caught by the glamour of tyranny. He is perhaps the only one among the Lord’s mighty ones, who in great things as in small never acted in response to fancy or caprice but in all cases in accordance with his duty as a ruler, and who, when he looked back on his life, might indeed deplore miscalculations but could repent of none of the errors of passion. There is nothing in the story of Cæsar’s life which can compare even in a small degree with those ebullitions of poetic sensuality, with the murder of Clitus or the burning of Persepolis, of which the history of his great predecessor in the East has to tell. Finally he is perhaps the only one of those mighty ones who preserved to the very end of his career a statesman-like sense of the possible and impossible and who did not shipwreck on the great problem which is the hardest of all for natures of the grand order, the problem of recognising the natural limits of success even at its very pinnacle.
What was practicable he performed, and never neglected the attainable good for the sake of the impossible better; never disdained at least to mitigate an incurable evil by some palliative. But where he perceived that fate had spoken he always listened. Alexander at the Hypanis, Napoleon in Moscow turned back because they were compelled to do so, and reproached fate because she granted only limited success. Cæsar at the Thames and the Rhine retired of his own free will, and at the Danube and Euphrates laid no extravagant schemes for the conquest of the world, but merely planned the execution of some carefully considered frontier regulations.
Such was this singular man whom it seems so easy and is so hopelessly difficult to describe. His whole nature is pellucidly clear, and concerning him tradition has preserved more abundant and vivid details than of any of his peers in the ancient world. Such a personality might indeed be conceived as shallower or more profound but not really in different ways; to every not wholly perverse inquirer this lofty figure has appeared with the same essential traits, and yet none has succeeded in restoring it in clear outline. The secret lies in its completeness. Humanly and historically speaking Cæsar stands at that point of the equation at which the great conflicting principles of life neutralise one another. Possessing the greatest creative force and yet at the same time the most penetrating intelligence, no longer a youth but not yet an old man, highest in will and highest in achievement, filled with republican ideals and yet a born king, a Roman to the deepest core of his being and again destined to reconcile and unite Roman and Hellenic civilisations both externally and in their inward relations—Cæsar is the complete and perfect man. This is why in him more than in any other historical personality we miss the so-called characteristic traits, which are really nothing else than deviations from the natural human development. What are taken for these at the first superficial glance reveal themselves on closer inspection, not as individual qualities, but as the peculiarities of the period of civilisation or of the nation; thus as his youthful adventures are common to him and to all his gifted contemporaries who were similarly situated, so his unpoetic but energetic and logical nature is mainly Roman.
Besides this it is in accordance with Cæsar’s perfectly human character that he was in the highest degree dependent on time and place; for there is no such thing as humanity pure and simple; the living man can but exhibit the qualities of a given nation and a particular stamp of civilisation. Cæsar was a perfect man only because he had placed himself, as none other had done, in the central stream of the tendencies of his day, and because more than any other he possessed the essential characteristic of the Roman nation, the true citizen quality in its perfection; while his Hellenism also was only that which had long since become closely intertwined with the national spirit of the Italians.
But herein lies the difficulty, we might perhaps say the impossibility, of giving a distinct portrait of Cæsar. As the artist can paint anything save perfect beauty, so also the historian, where once in a thousand years he encounters perfection, can only be silent before it. For the rule may indeed be laid down, but we have only a negative idea of the absence of defect; nature’s secret, of uniting the normal and the individual in their fullest manifestations, cannot be expressed. Nothing is left us but to duly appreciate those who saw this perfection and to obtain a dim idea of the imperishable reflection which rests on the works created by this great nature. It is true that these also show the mark of his age. The Roman himself might be compared with his young Greek predecessor not merely as an equal but as a superior; but the world had grown old since then and its youthful lustre had grown dim. Cæsar’s work was no longer, like that of Alexander, a joyous effort to advance towards the immeasurable distance; he was engaged in construction, and that from ruins, and was satisfied to work as profitably and securely as possible in the wide but defined sphere already indicated. The fine poetic sense of the nations is therefore justified in paying no heed to the unpoetic Roman, while it has surrounded the son of Philip with all the golden splendour of poetry and all the rainbow colours of legend. But with equal justice the political life of nations has for thousands of years returned again and again to the lines which Cæsar traced, and if the peoples to whom the world belongs still apply his name to the chiefest of their monarchs, there is in this a profound warning and one, unfortunately, also calculated to rouse feelings of shame.
MOMMSEN’S ESTIMATE OF CÆSAR’S WORK
Cæsar had been a leader of the popular party from a very early period and as it were by hereditary right, and for thirty years he had upheld its shield without ever changing or even hiding his colours; even as monarch he was still a democrat. As he entered into the entire inheritance of his party, of course with the exception of the wrong-headed notions of Catiline and Clodius, cherished the bitterest and even a personal hatred towards the aristocracy and the true aristocrats, and retained unaltered the principal watchwords of the Roman democracy—namely, the amelioration of the position of debtors, foreign colonization, the gradual abolition of the existing differences of privilege between the various classes in the state and the emancipation of the executive power from the senate; so his monarchy also was so little in conflict with the democracy that, on the contrary, it was through it that the latter first attained completion and fulfilment. For this monarchy was no oriental despotism by the grace of God, but a monarchy such as Caius Gracchus wished to found, such as Pericles and Cromwell founded—the representation of the people by the man who possessed its supreme and unlimited trust. Thus the ideas which underlie Cæsar’s work were not exactly new; but their development, in the last instance always the main thing, belongs to him, and to him the grandeur of the realisation which might have surprised even the originating genius could he have seen it, and which has inspired and will ever inspire all who have encountered it in actual operation or in the mirror of history, whatever the historical period or political complexion to which they may belong, with deeper and deeper emotion and wonder according to the measure of their capacity for comprehending human and historical greatness.
This is perhaps the right place to expressly declare what the historian always tacitly assumes and to enter a protest against the custom common alike to simplicity and dishonesty, the custom of employing the praise and blame of history independent of the special conditions, as phrases of general application, in this case of transforming the verdict on Cæsar into a judgment on so-called Cæsarism. In truth the history of past centuries should be the teacher of that in progress, but not in the common sense, as though men could read the junctures of the present in the records of the past and in those on the art of political diagnosis and prescriptions could read up the symptoms and their remedies; but history is only instructive in so far as the study of ancient civilisations reveals the general organic conditions of civilisation itself, with those primary forces which are everywhere the same and those combinations which are everywhere different, and in so far as, instead of producing unthinking imitation, it guides and inspires independent creations on old lines. In this sense the history of Cæsar and the Roman Cæsarship, with all the unsurpassed greatness of the master workman and all the historical necessity of the work, is verily a keener criticism of modern autocracy than the hand of man could write.
By the same law of nature in accordance with which the most insignificant organism is infinitely superior to the most cunning machine, any constitution, however defective, which allows free play for the spontaneous action of a majority of citizens is infinitely superior to absolutism, even though conducted with the greatest amount of humanity and genius; for the former is capable of development, and is therefore living, the latter remains what it is, that is it is dead. This law of nature also asserted itself in the case of the absolute military monarchy of Rome, and only the more completely because under the inspired guidance of its creator and in the absence of any real complications with foreign countries the development of that monarchy was less hampered and limited than any similar government. From the time of Cæsar, as Gibbon long ago pointed out, the Roman Empire had only an external cohesion and was only extended in mechanical fashion, whilst inwardly it wholly withered and expired with himself. If at the commencement of the autocracy and especially in Cæsar’s own mind there still prevailed a sanguine hope of a union of free popular development with absolute rule, even the government of the highly gifted emperors of the Julian line soon taught in terrible fashion how far it is possible to mingle fire and water in one vessel.
Cæsar’s work was necessary and beneficial, not because it did or could of itself bring blessing, but because an absolute military monarchy was the least of evils and the logical and necessary conclusion determined by the ancient organisation, founded as it was on slavery and entirely alien to republican and constitutional representation, and by the legal constitution of the city, which in the course of five hundred years had ripened into an oligarchical absolutism. But history will not consent to diminish the honour of the true Cæsar because where there are spurious Cæsars a similar device may bewilder simplicity and furnish evil with an opportunity for lying and fraud. History too is a bible, and if it no more than the latter can defend itself from being misunderstood by the fool or quoted by the devil, it too will be in a position to endure and render his due to each.[d]