Detention of Caesar enables the Optimates to rally.--Ill Conduct of Caesar's Officers in Spain.--War with Pharnaces.-- Battle of Zela, and Settlement of Asia Minor.
CHAPTER XXIV.
The Aristocracy raise an Army in Africa.--Supported by Juba.--Pharsalia not to end the War.--Caesar again in Rome.--Restores Order.--Mutiny in Caesar's Army.--The Mutineers submit.--Caesar lands in Africa.-- Difficulties of the Campaign.--Battle of Thapsus.--No more Pardons.-- Afranius and Faustus Sylla put to Death.--Cato kills himself at Utica.-- Scipio killed.--Juba and Petreius die on each other's Swords.--A Scene in Caesar's Camp.
CHAPTER XXV.
Rejoicings in Rome.--Caesar Dictator for the Year.--Reforms the Constitution.--Reforms the Calendar--and the Criminal Law.-- Dissatisfaction of Cicero.--Last Efforts in Spain of Labienus and the Young Pompeys.--Caesar goes thither in Person, accompanied by Octavius.-- Caesar's Last Battle at Munda.--Death of Labienus.--Capture of Cordova.-- Close of the Civil War.--General Reflections.
CHAPTER XXVI.
Caesar once more in Rome.--General Amnesty.--The Surviving Optimates pretend to submit.--Increase in the Number of Senators.--Introduction of Foreigners.--New Colonies.--Carthage.--Corinth.--Sumptuary Regulations.-- Digest of the Law.--Intended Parthian War.--Honors heaped on Caesar.--The Object of them.--Caesar's Indifference.--Some Consolations.--Hears of Conspiracies, but disregards them.--Speculations of Cicero in the Last Stage of the War.--Speech in the Senate.--A Contrast, and the Meaning of it.--The Kingship.--Antony offers Caesar the Crown, which Caesar refuses.--The Assassins.--Who they were.--Brutus and Cassius.--Two Officers of Caesar's among them.--Warnings.--Meeting of the Conspirators.--Caesar's Last Evening.--The Ides of March.--The Senate-house.--Caesar killed.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Consternation in Rome.--The Conspirators in the Capitol.--Unforeseen Difficulties.--Speech of Cicero.--Caesar's Funeral.--Speech of Antony.-- Fury of the People.--The Funeral Pile in the Forum.--The King is dead, but the Monarchy survives.--Fruitlessness of the Murder.--Octavius and Antony.--Union of Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus.--Proscription of the Assassins.--Philippi, and the end of Brutus and Cassius.--Death of Cicero.--His Character.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
General Remarks on Caesar.--Mythological Tendencies.--Supposed Profligacy of Caesar.--Nature of the Evidence.--Servilia.--Cleopatra.--Personal Appearance of Caesar.--His Manners in Private Life.--Considerations upon him as a Politician, a Soldier, and a Man of Letters.--Practical Justice his Chief Aim as a Politician.--Universality of Military Genius.--Devotion of his Army to him, how deserved.--Art of reconciling Conquered Peoples.--General Scrupulousness and Leniency.--Oratorical and Literary Style.--Cicero's Description of it.--His Lost Works.--Cato's Judgment on the Civil War.--How Caesar should be estimated.--Legend of Charles V.-- Spiritual Condition of the Age in which Caesar lived.--His Work on Earth to establish Order and Good Government, to make possible the Introduction of Christianity.--A Parallel.
CAESAR: A SKETCH
CHAPTER I.
To the student of political history, and to the English student above all others, the conversion of the Roman Republic into a military empire commands a peculiar interest. Notwithstanding many differences, the English and the Romans essentially resemble one another. The early Romans possessed the faculty of self-government beyond any people of whom we have historical knowledge, with the one exception of ourselves. In virtue of their temporal freedom, they became the most powerful nation in the known world; and their liberties perished only when Rome became the mistress of conquered races, to whom she was unable or unwilling to extend her privileges. If England was similarly supreme, if all rival powers were eclipsed by her or laid under her feet, the Imperial tendencies, which are as strongly marked in us as our love of liberty, might lead us over the same course to the same end. If there be one lesson which history clearly teaches, it is this, that free nations cannot govern subject provinces. If they are unable or unwilling to admit their dependencies to share their own constitution, the constitution itself will fall in pieces from mere incompetence for its duties.
We talk often foolishly of the necessities of things, and we blame circumstances for the consequences of our own follies and vices; but there are faults which are not faults of will, but faults of mere inadequacy to some unforeseen position. Human nature is equal to much, but not to everything. It can rise to altitudes where it is alike unable to sustain itself or to retire from them to a safer elevation. Yet when the field is open it pushes forward, and moderation in the pursuit of greatness is never learnt and never will be learnt. Men of genius are governed by their instinct; they follow where instinct leads them; and the public life of a nation is but the life of successive generations of statesmen, whose horizon is bounded, and who act from day to day as immediate interests suggest. The popular leader of the hour sees some present difficulty or present opportunity of distinction. He deals with each question as it arises, leaving future consequences to those who are to come after him. The situation changes from period to period, and tendencies are generated with an accelerating force, which, when once established, can never be reversed. When the control of reason is once removed, the catastrophe is no longer distant, and then nations, like all organized creations, all forms of life, from the meanest flower to the highest human institution, pass through the inevitably recurring stages of growth and transformation and decay. A commonwealth, says Cicero, ought to be immortal, and for ever to renew its youth. Yet commonwealths have proved as unenduring as any other natural object:
Everything that grows Holds in perfection but a little moment, And this huge state presenteth nought but shows, Whereon the stars in silent influence comment.
Nevertheless, "as the heavens are high above the earth, so is wisdom above folly." Goethe compares life to a game at whist, where the cards are dealt out by destiny, and the rules of the game are fixed: subject to these conditions, the players are left to win or lose, according to their skill or want of skill. The life of a nation, like the life of a man, may be prolonged in honor into the fulness of its time, or it may perish prematurely, for want of guidance, by violence or internal disorders. And thus the history of national revolutions is to statesmanship what the pathology of disease is to the art of medicine. The physician cannot arrest the coming on of age. Where disease has laid hold upon the constitution he cannot expel it. But he may check the progress of the evil if he can recognize the symptoms in time. He can save life at the cost of an unsound limb. He can tell us how to preserve our health when we have it; he can warn us of the conditions under which particular disorders will have us at disadvantage. And so with nations: amidst the endless variety of circumstances there are constant phenomena which give notice of approaching danger; there are courses of action which have uniformly produced the same results; and the wise politicians are those who have learnt from experience the real tendencies of things, unmisled by superficial differences, who can shun the rocks where others have been wrecked, or from foresight of what is coming can be cool when the peril is upon them.
For these reasons, the fall of the Roman Republic is exceptionally instructive to us. A constitutional government the most enduring and the most powerful that ever existed was put on its trial, and found wanting. We see it in its growth; we see the causes which undermined its strength. We see attempts to check the growing mischief fail, and we see why they failed. And we see, finally, when nothing seemed so likely as complete dissolution, the whole system changed by a violent operation, and the dying patient's life protracted for further centuries of power and usefulness.
Again, irrespective of the direct teaching which we may gather from them, particular epochs in history have the charm for us which dramas have-- periods when the great actors on the stage of life stand before us with the distinctness with which they appear in the creations of a poet. There have not been many such periods; for to see the past, it is not enough for us to be able to look at it through the eyes of contemporaries; these contemporaries themselves must have been parties to the scenes which they describe. They must have had full opportunities of knowledge. They must have had eyes which could see things in their true proportions. They must have had, in addition, the rare literary powers which can convey to others through the medium of language an exact picture of their