Cæsar had gone as prætor to Spain, and there began to win military renown—much to the surprise of his friends—and money. He wanted the consulship for the next year, and therefore required the support of Pompeius, who had now been driven away from the aristocratic party to which he belonged by sympathy. Crassus came in as Cæsar’s creditor and as the necessary millionaire. Thus was formed the Triumvirate of the year 60, and in 59 Cæsar became consul. By this time he had conceived high, possibly the highest, ambitions. Marius and Sulla, not to mention Alexander and Æneas, had always been much in his mind. For the present his object was to acquire a lasting office and secure the allegiance of a trained army. Cæsar’s colleague in the consulship was a certain Bibulus, who tried to stop the dangerous proceedings of the democrat by seeing omens in the heavens every day, but no one, least of all Cæsar, took any notice of him. The only serious opposition came from Cato the Younger, who represented the genuine and respectable aristocracy. This Cato was a queer anachronism at Rome, an honest man. He was also, if biography may be trusted, a bigot and a priggish eccentric. He was the sort of man to go about Africa without a hat, or to sit on the judicial bench without shoes, because such was the mos maiorum. He tried to revive the ways which had been styled old-fashioned in his grandfather. Nevertheless he was upright and brave, a good soldier, and a man with a clear though impossible policy. Once again it is the fault of rhetorical history that all the good men of Rome appear as prigs and eccentrics. This man most courageously opposed his veto to the proceedings of Cæsar, though he was hustled and beaten by the democratic hirelings, then organised under that most notorious scoundrel Clodius. But the result was that though Cæsar’s laws might pass, they could afterwards be declared illegal, and Cæsar would be liable to prosecution as soon as he became a private citizen. However, he had no immediate intention of becoming a private citizen. He secured the province of Gaul for five years with four legions.
Now Gaul was not reckoned an important province. It was only the peaceful plain of Upper Italy to which the senate had added Narbonensian Gaul, a southern strip of France, chiefly considered as a step on the road to Spain. Four legions was a small consular army for those days; no one supposed that he would have much fighting. But either Cæsar had received secret intelligence or else he had very good luck. At the outset he was called to deal with a great immigration of the barbarian Helvetii, who were migrating out of Switzerland into Gaul and threatening the province.
The conservatives at Rome maintained that Cæsar’s conquests in Gaul were the result of wanton aggression—cheap victories over inoffensive savages, wholly unjustifiable and unauthorised. At this point it is scarcely possible to avoid entering upon the much-debated question of Cæsar’s real character. For orthodox Romans Cæsar was the founder of the empire, a person not only of divine descent, but himself divine. All emperors took his name, until that surname of Cæsar, once a mere nickname, came, in half the languages of Europe, to be synonymous with “Emperor.” For the Middle Ages he stood with Constantine, who christianised the Empire, and Charlemagne, who revived it, as the founder of that divinely instituted polity which shared with the Church God’s viceregency on earth. In the eyes of Dante, Cæsar stood very near to Christ, for the poet peoples the frozen heart of his Inferno with three tormented figures who writhe in the very jaws of Cocytus. Along with Judas Iscariot are the two murderers of Julius Cæsar. Though the Renaissance stripped him of much of his legendary greatness, Cæsar remained for the men of Shakespeare’s day the embodiment of imperial pride. Shakespeare himself was too great an artist to make any of his characters more or less than human, but it is evidently Brutus who has the sympathies of the dramatist. In the French Revolution, again, Brutus and Cassius were heroes and glorious tyrannicides. The reaction against early nineteenth-century liberalism brought Cæsar once more into honour, and Mommsen, the prophet of Cæsarism, makes him the hero of his great history. To Mommsen Cæsar was almost divine, the clear-sighted and magnanimous “saviour” who alone saw the true path out of the disorders of his city. From this view again we are apparently now in reaction once more. To the latest critics the greatness of Cæsar and of Mommsen are alike abhorrent, and Signor Ferrero depicts his greatest fellow-countryman as an unscrupulous demagogue who blundered into renown through treachery and bloodshed.
Plate XVI. TEMPLE OF FORTUNA VIRILIS, ROME
The historical principle by which this result is attained is rather typical of certain modern critical methods. Since the account of the Gallic Wars was written chiefly by Cæsar himself, and Cæsar is by hypothesis a scoundrel, the history of these wars must be found by reading between the lines of Cæsar’s account, putting the most unfavourable construction upon everything and preferring any evidence to his, even if it be that of two centuries later. If any gaps or inconsistencies are noticed they must be treated as concealing defeats or acts of treachery. Written in this spirit, the story of the Gallic Wars is a very black one for Cæsar and Rome. Yet unbiassed readers must generally admit that Cæsar was a very careful and on the whole an honest historian. The accusation that he was capable of relentless cruelty springs from his own admissions. It was in the Roman character to despise life, and when Cæsar thought that a rebellious tribe needed a lesson he did not hesitate to massacre defenceless women and children or to lay waste miles of territory with fire and sword. But, on the other hand, his preference was for clemency and justice.
Without making him a demigod, we ought to be able to see his greatness. As a young man his ardour of soul, working in a debased society without ideals, made him simply more extravagant and more foppish than the spendthrifts and rakes who surrounded him. Doubtless the scandalous Suetonius has embellished the story of his early follies. Many of his youthful escapades were, one suspects, carefully designed to bring him into notice. It is probable that from a very early age he was ambitious, and his family connections clearly marked out his career as a democrat. He had the failure of Sulla before his eyes. The greatness of his character lay chiefly in an instinctive hatred for muddle and pretence. He could not fail to see the hopeless confusion into which the Roman state had fallen. From the first, I think, he was aiming at power for himself in order to put things straight. Whether self or country came first in his calculations, it is hard, perhaps impossible, to decide; but the historian is not necessarily a cynic when he demands strong proof of altruism in the world of politics. To obtain power the democratic side was the only possible one, for the nobles stood for the predominance only of their class. Crassus was necessary to Cæsar as his banker and creditor until he had acquired a fortune for himself by conquest. Pompeius was the foremost soldier of the day, and it is probable that Cæsar deliberately sought to climb over the shoulders of Pompeius into monarchy. He saw—he could not help seeing, for it was written plainly in the history of the past century—that for power two things were necessary, the support of the mob in the forum and the backing of a veteran army. At the time when Cæsar got Gaul for his province there was a fresh movement towards imperial expansion. Foreign conquest afforded some relief for the chagrins of internal politics. By it Marius, Sulla, and Pompeius had become powerful. If Cæsar wanted to eclipse them all, he must present Rome with a new province, the most powerful of all bribes. It was in this spirit that he set out for Gaul. If his ulterior motive was selfish it is certain that he threw himself heart and soul, with all the burning energy of which his tireless spirit was capable, into the work of conquest and civilisation.
