O Rome, thyself art cause of all these evils, O faintly joined friends, with ambition blind, LUCAN. Tr. Marlowe. The blood of the Roman and the Italian has mingled in one common current; . . . the contest has ended in raising individual statesmen to a position in which they can array their own private ambition against the general weal. Each great chieftain finds himself at the head of a faction whose interests centre in him alone, who are ready to fight under his banner and for his personal aggrandizement, and have ceased to invoke the watchwords of party or the principles of class. The Triumvirs are now leagued together to undermine the old form of government; by and by they will fly asunder, and challenge each other to mortal duel. Each will try to strengthen himself by an appeal to old names and prejudices, and the shadows of a popular and a Patrician party will again face each other on the field of Pharsalia; but the real contest will be between a Cæsar and a Pompeius, no longer between the commons and the nobility. MERIVALE. Cato wisely told those who charged all the calamities of Rome upon the disagreement betwixt Pompey and Cæsar [see page 93], that they were in error in charging all the crime upon the last cause; for it was not their discord and enmity, but their unanimity and friendship, that gave the first and greatest blow to the commonwealth. PLUTARCH. Cæsar, in a remarkable campaign of about eight years, Conquest conquered the whole country of Gaul, which beof Gaul. came reduced to a Roman province in 51 B. C. Conceive the languid and bloodless figure of Gaul, just escaped from a burning fever; remark how thin and pale she is; how she fears even to move a limb lest she bring on a worse relapse. Liberty was the sweet, cold draught for which she burned,-which was stolen from her. OROSIUS (fifth century). He took more than eight hundred cities by storm; worsted three hundred nations, and encountered at different times three millions of enemies, of whom he slew one million in action, and made prisoners of an equal number. PLUTARCH. CÆSAR RULER OF THE ROMAN WORLD. subsequent DURING Cæsar's campaign in Gaul and absence from Rome, Pompey intrigued against him, and an increasing rivalry between the two men culminated in the Caesar's bitterest enmity. In 49 B. C. Cæsar rebelled, career. crossed the Rubicon, and invaded Italy. Civil war now began between him and the forces of Rome under Pompey. The decisive battle took place at Pharsalia, and ended in the entire overthrow of Pompey. Until Cæsar came, Rome was a minor; by him she attained her majority and fulfilled her destiny. - DE QUINCEY. There mighty Cæsar waits his vital hour, Impatient for the world, and grasps his promised power. The madness of Cæsar and Pompey plunged the city, Italy, the provinces, in short the whole Roman dominion, into an inflammatory disorder, so that it is not rightly called a civil war, nor a social war, nor yet a foreign war, but rather a certain strange compound of them all, and more than a war. FLORUS. The First Triumvirate of Pompey, Cæsar, and Crassus was a certain presage of the fall of the republic. Crassus, who would not have had the genius to withstand Cæsar, fell in an expedition against the Parthians; and Pompey, who had lost much of his popularity in his later years, was compelled to fly from Rome after Cæsar had passed the Rubicon. . . . The rest is soon told. Pompey was defeated at Pharsalia, and murdered in Egypt in 48 B. C., and Cæsar became master of the world. - DYER. Never before had a greater number of Roman forces assembled in one place, or under better generals, forces which would easily have subdued the whole world had they been led against barbarians. EUTROPIUS. Of woes so great was Pharsalia the cause. Let Cannæ yield, a fatal name, and Allia, long condemned in the Roman annals. Rome has marked these as occasions of lighter woes, this day she longs to ignore. — LUCAN. When betwixt Marius and fierce Sulla tost, LUCAN. Tr. Rowe. Age, thou art shamed: SHAKESPEARE. Cæsar was now the master of the Roman world; but, a conspiracy having been formed against him, he was assassinated in the senate-house, at the foot of the statue of his rival Pompey, March 5, 44 B. C.1 In his mantle muffling up his face, Even at the base of Pompey's statue, Which all the while ran blood, great Cæsar fell. SHAKESPEARE. Strange and startling resemblance between the fate of the founder of the kingdom of this world and of the Founder of the kingdom not of this world, for which the first was a preparation. Each was denounced for making himself a king. Each was maligned as the friend 1 In deorum numerum relatus est non ore modo decernentium sed et persuasione vulgi. — SUETONIUS. of publicans and sinners; each was betrayed by those whom he had loved and cared for; each was put to death; and Cæsar also was believed to have risen again and ascended into heaven and become a divine being. — FROUDE. He first the fate of Cæsar did foretell, And pitied Rome, when Rome in Cæsar fell. VIRGIL, Georgic I. The foremost man of all the world. SHAKESPEARE. In the most high and palmy state of Rome, A little ere the mightiest Julius fell. SHAKESPEARE. Cæsar, the world's great master and his own ; POPE. Without Cæsar, we affirm a thousand times that there would have been no perfect Rome; and, but for Rome, there could have been no such man as Cæsar. Both, then, were immortal; each worthy of each. DE QUINCEY. We are now contemplating that man who, within the short space of fourteen years, subdued Gaul, thickly inhabited by warlike nations; twice conquered Spain; entered Germany and Britain; marched through Italy at the head of a victorious army; destroyed the power of Pompey the Great; reduced Egypt to obedience; saw and defeated Pharnaces; overpowered, in Africa, the great name of Cato and the arms of Juba; fought fifty battles, in which 1,192,000 men fell; was the greatest orator in the world, next to Cicero; set a pattern to all historians, which has never been excelled; wrote learnedly on the sciences of grammar and augury; and, falling by a premature death, left memorials of his great plans for the extension of the empire and the legislation of the world. — MÜLLER. Much has been said respecting the fortune of Cæsar; but that extraordinary man possessed so many great qualities in perfection,although he had many vices also, that it is difficult to conceive that he would not have been conqueror, no matter what army he had commanded, or that he would not have governed, no matter in what republic he had been born. - MONTESQUIEU. That there is a bridge connecting the past glory of Hellas and Rome with the prouder fabric of modern history; that Western Europe is Romanic, and Germanic Europe classic; that the names of Themistocles and Scipio have to us a very different sound from those of Asoka and Salmanassar; that Homer and Sophocles are not merely like the Vedas and Kalidasa attractive to the literary botanist, but bloom for us in our own garden, all this is the work of Cæsar; and while the creation of his great predecessor in the East has been almost wholly reduced to ruin by the tempests of the Middle Ages, the structure of Cæsar has outlasted those thousands of years which have changed religion and polity for the human race, and even shifted the centre of civilization itself, and it stands erect, for what we may term perpetuity. - MOMMSEN. ery. If from the intellectual, we turn to the moral character of Cæsar, the whole range of history can hardly furnish a picture of greater deformity. Never did any man occasion so large an amount of human misery with so little provocation. In his campaigns in Gaul he is said to have destroyed 1,000,000 of men in battle, and to have made prisoners 1,000,000 more, many of whom were destined to perish as gladiators, and all were torn from their country and reduced to slavThe slaughter which he occasioned in the civil wars cannot be computed; nor can we estimate the degree of suffering caused in every part of the empire by his spoliations and confiscations, and by the various acts of extortion and oppression which he tolerated in his followers. When we consider that the sole object of his conquests in Gaul was to enrich himself and to discipline his army, that he might be enabled the better to attack his country; and that the sole provocation on which he commenced the civil war was the resolution of the senate to recall him from a command which he had already enjoyed for nine years, after having obtained it in the beginning by tumult and violence, we may judge what credit ought to be given him for his clemency in not opening lists of proscription after his sword had already cut off his principal adversaries, and had levelled their party with the dust. ARNOLD. By wisedom, manhod, and by gret labour, Fro humblehede to royal majeste Up roos he, Julius the conquerour, That wan al thoccident by land and see, By strength of hond or elles of trete, And unto Rome made hem contributarie. CHAUCER. |