“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.