Pompey recognized his old officer, and entered the boat alone, his wife and friends watching from the vessel as he was rowed ashore. On the beach a number of persons were collected, as if to receive him with honor. The boat stopped. Pompey took the hand of the person next him to assist him to rise. As he did so Septimius, who stood behind, struck him with his sword. Pompey, finding that he was among enemies, made no resistance, and the next blow laid him low in death. His assassins cut off his head and left his body on the beach. Here one of his freedmen and an old soldier of his army broke up a fishing-boat and made him a rude funeral pile. Such were the obsequies of the one-time master of the world.
The battle of Pharsalia practically ended the struggle that made Cæsar lord of Rome. Some more fighting was necessary. Africa was still in arms. But a few short campaigns sufficed to bring it to terms, while a campaign against a son of Mithridates ended in five days, Cæsar's victory being announced to the senate in three short words, "Veni, vidi, vici" (I came, I saw, I conquered). Then he returned to Rome, where he shed not a drop of the blood of his enemies, though that of gladiators and wild animals was freely spilled in the gorgeous games and festivals with which he amused the sovereign people.
THE ASSASSINATION OF CÆSAR.
The republic of Rome was at an end. The army had become the power, and the will of the head of the army was the law, of the state. Cæsar celebrated his victories with grand triumphs; but he celebrated them more notably still by a clemency that signified his innate nobility of character. Instead of dyeing the streets of Rome with blood, as Marius and Sulla had done before him, he proclaimed a general amnesty, and his rise to power was not signalized by the slaughter of one of his foes.
THE ASSASSINATION OF CÆSAR.
He signalized it, on the contrary, by an activity in civil reform as marked as had been his energy in war. The title and privilege of Roman citizenship had so far been confined to Italians. He extended it to many parts of Gaul and Spain. He formed plans to drain the Pontine marshes, to make a survey and map of the empire, to form a code of laws, and other great works, which he did not live to fulfil. Of all his reforms, the best known is the revision of the Calendar. Before his time the Roman year was three hundred and fifty-five days long, an extra month being occasionally added, so as to regain the lost days. But this was very irregularly done, and the civil year had got to be far away from the solar year. To correct this Cæsar was obliged to add ninety days to the year 46 B.C., which was therefore given the unprecedented length of four hundred and forty-five days. He ordered that the year in future should be three hundred and sixty-five and one-fourth days in length, a change which brought it very nearly, but not quite, to the true length. A new reform was made in 1582, by Pope Gregory XIII., which made the civil and solar years almost exactly agree.