The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 05

by Unknown

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.