Caesar, A Creator of History

Editor’s note: The following is extracted from The Roman Historians, a Series of Lectures Delivered by Louis E. Lord (published 1927).

Julius Caesar was born, as one of our school editions naively says, “by common consent” in the year 100 B.C. It was an old, old world into which Julius Caesar was born. We are accustomed to speak of the Roman Republic, but as we use the term republic, it was not a republic at all. Not in the sense that Athens was a republic, or that a New England town-meeting is a republic; not in the sense that Switzerland is a republic, or our own country.

When the Roman kingship broke down (or was put into commission, as the English political writers say), its functions were inherited by a comparatively small group of patrician families. It is probable that no governing class ever displayed so high an ability or such real patriotism as did these patrician families, with the exception of the great governing houses that have made the little island of England first into a great European power and then into a great world federation. For the two hundred years that followed the establishment of the republic, so-called, the history of Rome was little more than a continuous conflict—a conflict between Rome and her enemies without, and an inner, but no less violent, conflict between the patrician families and the plebeians, who were struggling to secure representation for themselves in the government. The struggle was carried on with great tenacity on the part of the plebeians and with remarkable shrewdness on the part of the patricians. At first, all the offices were in the hands of the patricians; it was to gain the right to hold these offices that the plebeians were struggling. The patricians were, of course, forced to yield, as any small minority must yield to the economic pressure of the large majority, but they gave ground with remarkable slowness.

Their favorite method of resistance was one not used, so far as I know, by modern politicians. As soon as they realized that it was impossible longer to retain the exclusive right to hold a particular office, they reluctantly opened this office to the plebeians also, but immediately transferred its significant powers to a new office which could be held only by patricians. The plebeians were in this way put into the position of constantly attaining their ends, only to find these ends robbed of the qualities that made them desirable. The struggle must, they realized, begin all over again. They presented a remarkable resemblance to the boy who looks for the end of the rainbow and finds it ever retreating before him. They were like a cat chasing its own tail. Each of the great patrician houses had its special characteristics. Macaulay in his Lays of Ancient Rome has well summed up the character of several of these great houses:

“Though the great houses love us not, we owe, to do them right,
That the great houses, all save one, have borne them well in fight.
Still Gaius of Corioli, his triumphs and his wrongs,
His vengeance and his mercy, live in our camp-fire songs.
Beneath the yoke of Furius oft have Gaul and Tuscan bowed;
And Rome may bear the pride of him of whom herself is proud.
But evermore a Claudius shrinks from a stricken field,
And changes color like a maid at sight of sword and shield.
The Claudian triumphs all were won within the City-towers;
The Claudian yoke was never pressed on any necks but ours.
A Cossus, like a wild cat, springs ever at the face;
A Fabius rushes like a boar against the shouting chase;
But the vile Claudian litter, raging with currish spite,
Still yelps and snaps at those who run, still runs from those who smite.”

But the Claudii were really of much greater importance than the plebeian, who speaks these lines, will admit. The Claudii were about equally divided between geniuses and lunatics, and, after all, the line that divides genius from insanity is often a very narrow one. The genius is frequently only a successful lunatic.

Among these patrician houses none, perhaps, had blood as blue as the great Julian house. Publius Terentius Varro, who knew all that was worth knowing and a great many things that were not worth knowing, published a small book on the families who came over in the Mayflower, De Familiis Troianis, and among these families of Trojan origin the Julian family naturally held a very high place, for was it not a member of this family who commanded this expedition from Troy to Italy, Aeneas? Julius Caesar’s particular ancestor was, to be sure, the Governor Bradford of this pilgrim colony.

But with all its pride of aristocratic ancestry, the Julian family had always maintained a sturdy democratic tradition. They were always to be found on the side of the people, and they had given in each generation at least one consul to the Roman State. Of this proud family Julius Caesar was undoubtedly the proudest member. He was fond of tracing his ancestry back through Aeneas to the Goddess, Venus Aphrodite, that darling of men and gods whom his own contemporary, Lucretius, invoked in the exordium to his noble didactic poem, De Rerum Natura:—

“Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas.”

It is not necessary to believe all the tales that are told of Julius Caesar’s youth. They may not be literally true, but they have that deeper poetic truth which inheres in all tradition and mythology. The story of the cherry tree may not be true about George Washington, but you can scarcely imagine that story being told about Jesse James, or Cardinal Richelieu. So the tales of Julius Caesar’s youth all point to characteristics which he undoubtedly possessed. There is the story of his capture by pirates. When he learned at what price they had set his ransom, he demanded that the price be doubled, for he said no one should ever say that Julius Caesar had been ransomed for so slight a sum. He fraternized with the pirates, assuring them that on his release he would capture and crucify every one of them, a threat which he made good with his characteristic energy, in spite of the protests of the venal, provincial governor.

He assured his mother when he was a candidate for the office of Pontifex Maximus, as he left her on the morning of the election, that he would either return that night as Pontifex Maximus, or he would never return.

Sulla enrolled Caesar’s name on his proscription list because Caesar’s wife was the niece of his defeated enemy, Marius, but he offered Caesar his life if he would divorce his wife. Caesar promptly refused, and I have always thought that this refusal was inspired partly by love for his young wife, but quite as much by his determination that no man should ever dictate to Julius Caesar whom he should marry and whom he should divorce. Caesar’s friends finally secured his safety but Sulla with his keen judgment of men warned them, and he was justified in doing so, that there was many a Marius in that young man, Caesar.

These incidents all point to traits of character that are clearly revealed in Caesar’s subsequent life. It is not my purpose by any means even to sketch the life of the great Dictator, but I must speak of a few salient incidents, for it is only in the light of these that his writings can be correctly interpreted or adequately appreciated.

It is undoubtedly true, as Shakespeare says, that Caesar was ambitious. He may never have said that he preferred to be first in a little Iberian village than second at Rome, but he must have thought so many times, and his whole life is a proof of his belief in this principle. He strove to attain control of Rome for the first forty years of life by peaceable methods. He held in succession one after another the offices of state, only to find when he laid each one down that he was again powerless and again deeper in debt. For he had mastered, as Mommsen says, the art of always borrowing and never paying.

There is more than a suspicion that in this effort to win supreme power he was involved in the conspiracy of Catiline, but at forty-two, disillusioned and baffled, he realized that there was no way to the power he coveted, except the way of Sulla. To be master of an army was to be master of Rome, and so at forty-two he took up the trade of a soldier. It is not true that he was ignorant of military affairs, but it is true that he had never had experience as a commander, and that he stands with Cromwell alone as the only statesman who has in middle life taken up the profession of the soldier and made it a success.

I wonder if you have ever thought of the self-confidence of this man, now of middle age, who turned his back deliberately on the capital of the world and exiled himself for a period of ten years. As commander of his army, he could not enter Italy. When he left Rome with the imperium to collect his soldiers in hither and farther Gaul, he could not come south of Lucca or Ariminum again without laying aside that supreme command. Cicero, who reluctantly took up the governorship of a civilized eastern province for a year only, never ceases in his letters to bewail that fact and to beg his friends to allow nothing to interfere with his return. Here was a man who could leave Rome without a regret, not for one year but for ten, not for a cultured Greek community, but for the wilds of the north. Two things are clear from this. First, that he was self-sufficient, and that he did not value the capital of the world for its gay life and high culture as much as Cicero did; and second, that he knew if he were spared for these ten years he would have this regal city at his feet on his return. There must have been about him, too, as Shaw says, something of the spirit of the adventurer, of the explorer. The narratives of his expeditions to Britain and Germany have all the freshness that gives zest to records of Arctic exploration. They have all the vividness and the adventurous thrill of Stefansson’s brilliant accounts of his journeys to the north, and it may be noted in an aside that these northern climates, with their fogs and depressing cold, never elicited from him the criticism that Tacticus passes upon the gloom of Germany’s horizon:

“Who, then, would risk the danger of a rough and unknown sea, leaving Asia or Africa or Italy to seek Germany, an unkept land, with a foul climate, without culture and charm, unless it be his native land.”

Caesar was in Rome when the news of the first rising in the north and the march of the Helvetians reached him. He left the city in haste. With his characteristic energy he dashed north across the Po, over the Alps, and met the Helvetian chiefs at Geneva. The Helvetians were, as they said, intending to march through the Roman province without harm to its inhabitants. Caesar knew this to be impossible, but he also knew that he had not sufficient troops to dispute the passage of the Rhone. He therefore looked the Helvetian envoys in the eye and told them he could not decide the question now; they should return in two weeks. Now you would have thought that even a German-Swiss, looking at that keen patrician face with its thin lips and piercing eyes, would have known that it would not take this man two weeks to decide any question. But they were deceived. In two weeks they returned only to find that Caesar had collected his troops by his customary forced marches and stood there on the bank of the Rhone to say for the first time to those invading hordes, “They shall not pass.” “Ego more et exemplo Populi Romani iter nulli per provinciam dare possum.”

To review the history of these nine years of steady fighting in Gaul and Germany and Britain, which have given us the English language, is not my intention. We sometimes hear people say that we owe nothing to antiquity; that Rome is nothing to us. Has it ever occurred to such people that if Caesar had but merely fallen on “that day he overcame the Nervii,” the day he seized a sword from a soldier and pressed forward into the thick of the fight, if Caesar had fallen on that day, France and all it has meant to the world—French civilization, French culture, yes even the Latin and French words in our own language—would never have been. The German invasions would have swept on to the ocean and we would today probably be talking Pennsylvania Dutch.

Some historians have explained the break between Pompey and Caesar as due to the death of Caesar’s daughter, Pompey’s wife, and some have found the cause for the quarrel in the unjust treatment accorded Caesar in the matter of seeking his second consulship. Apparently, Caesar was right in the dispute with Pompey which marked the open breach in their relations, but there could be no lasting truce between these two men.

When the first triumvirate had been formed, Pompey had contributed his reputation, Crassus his wealth and Caesar his brains. The time had now come when Caesar’s brains were destined to inherit the wealth and the reputation of the other two members. There could be no lasting truce between Caesar’s clear-cut, incisive thinking and Pompey’s pious pomposity, and it mattered little that Caesar was technically right in the incident that caused the breach between them. Pompey stupidly boasted that at the stamp of his foot Italy would rise at his back and sweep Caesar into the sea. Pompey stamped his feet all the way from Rome to Brundisium in a rapid and undignified retreat, but no answering legions rose to protect him.

The campaigns in which Caesar completely defeated and annihilated his enemies are familiar to you all. Pompey’s overthrow at Pharsalus was followed by swift campaigns in Egypt, Asia, Spain and Africa. Only four short years of life were left Caesar after his defeat of Pompey and these years were occupied largely in quelling revolts of Pompey’s friends. He was left but little leisure to visit Rome. He was almost constantly at war, and of the many and varied activities to which he turned his attention, war was perhaps the least congenial to him. Moreover, it is in this occupation that his genius is least apparent. Bernard Shaw says:

“Able civilians taking up the profession of arms, like Caesar and Cromwell, in middle age, have snatched all its laurels from opponent commanders bred to it, apparently because capable persons engaged in military pursuits are so scarce that the existence of two of them at the same time in the same hemisphere is extremely rare. The capacity of any conqueror is therefore more likely than not to be an illusion produced by the incapacity of his adversary. At all events, Caesar might have won his battles without being wiser than Charles XII or Nelson or Joan of Arc, who were, like most modern ‘self-made’ millionaires, half-witted geniuses, enjoying the worship accorded by all races to certain forms of insanity. But Caesar’s victories were only advertisements for an eminence that would never have become popular without them. Caesar is greater off the battlefield than on it. Nelson off his quarterdeck was so quaintly out of the question that when his head was injured at the battle of the Nile and his conduct became for some years openly scandalous, the difference was not important enough to be noticed.”

Yet it is worth while to notice in this connection that Caesar had all the qualities of a great commander. He was personally without fear, as were Alexander and Napoleon. But this is a quality which a great general must share with the meanest soldier. Caesar, however, possessed, in common with the two other greatest of generals, the ability to move large bodies of troops with great rapidity, and this is the final test of military genius. Take a single example. Quintus Cicero is beleaguered in a winter encampment by a sudden unexpected uprising. After many unsuccessful attempts, a Gaul in his army, in gratitude for favors bestowed on him, risks his life in making his way through the encircling force to Caesar. Caesar receives the news an hour before sunset; couriers fly to his lieutenants, Crassus, Fabius, Labienus. Crassus is twenty-five miles away, but he is bidden to start at midnight. This allows only seven hours for a messenger to travel twenty-five miles, and a general to break camp and set his army in motion. Crassus was equal to the occasion. Caesar’s crisp phrase is almost inimitable: “Exit cum nuntio Crassus.” At eight o’clock next morning his advance guard reaches Caesar, who immediately starts and marches twenty miles that day. Crassus’ contingent did forty-five altogether. Fabius during the day joined the flying column, and Labienus sent word of another revolt which made it unwise for him to leave his position. Within eighteen hours three widely separated divisions have been turned out of winter quarters, concentrated into one strong army, and are bearing down on the foe by forced marches. As we might expect, the arrival of this swift relief threw consternation into the Gauls and successfully raised the siege. This is a single instance. Many others could easily be cited. He had the power to enkindle others with the torch of his own restless energy, that burned in him till at last it consumed even his almost deathless vitality.

It was a weary world which lay at Caesar’s feet. The belief in religion had perished almost utterly; morality, especially among the upper classes, was at a low and almost modern ebb; the Roman state was rotten, economically and industrially; the proletariat which had once been a sturdy farming class had been debased by competition with slave labor until the Roman citizens were little better than a dole-fed city mob. Yet it was this hopeless, outworn civilization, this decrepit, inefficient government, that Caesar is sometimes blamed for overthrowing.

The principal charges brought against Caesar are his debts and his liaisons. Of the former it may be said briefly that the debts were paid. There is no record of any creditors complaining. The truth of the latter charge must be admitted. His relations with women were notoriously free, even for his time and for his society. All that can be urged in extenuation of this is that women never played a large or deciding part in his life or his projects. At the close of Caesar and Cleopatra, Shaw represents Caesar as about to depart from Alexandria, after adjusting the affairs of Egypt. He devotes ten minutes to settling the Jewish question. He complains that there is one thing which he has forgotten. He cannot remember what it is, and finally he dismisses this unimportant trifle and decides to depart. Just then Cleopatra appears, and then Caesar says, “Ah, I knew there was something! How could you let me forget her, Rufio?” Not historically correct, but written with a deep insight into Caesar’s nature. Neither Cleopatra nor any other woman ever occupied a large space in Caesar’s thoughts, ever deflected him one inch from his firm resolve.

Caesar had what few men in history have had, the power of a rejuvenating touch. Into every phase of the old world upon which he put his hand he injected the rejuvenating elixir of life. He touched a tottering institution and it stood firm; he raised a fallen people and they looked again upon the sun; he touched the calendar, and that institution which was so faulty that the harvest festivals were constantly occurring along in July when the pumpkins were not yet ripe,—the only remedy which a harrassed commonwealth could devise being to inject bodily an extra month now and then into the winter to prevent the Fourth of July coming at the same time as the spring freshets—this calendar was so reformed that, with a very slight modification, it is the calendar on which all the world does business today. This was but a slight and passing phase of his activity. His projects for the rejuvenation of the Roman world, as we read them in Suetonius, sound fanciful; but who knows what might have been done if his genius could have been left to complete the work which he began. He proposed to cut a canal through the Isthmus of Corinth, a work that was completed nineteen hundred years later. He proposed to raise an army to defeat the Parthians and then to sweep north around the Caspian and Black Seas. If this project could have been carried out, if Roman civilization could have been spread north of the Danube and Rhine, through Russia and Bohemia and Germany, who knows but the dark ages might have been avoided and our civilization advanced a thousand years.

But one project which Caesar comtemplated would have been worth all the others, if it might have been achieved, and it was the knowledge of this project which did more than anything else to inspire the plot against his life. He proposed to remove the capital of the world to Byzantium, which we know as Constantinople. If he had done this, Rome would have been reduced to a provincial town, the center of the Empire would have been swung to the other end of the Mediterranean, and a whole new world, builded with Greek culture and Roman order, would have been the result. But the great aristocratic families of Rome would have been reduced to insignificance. The families that quarreled over the allotment of the provinces of the Empire would have found nothing to quarrel about except cleaning the streets of the provincial town. Caesar’s contempt for these families was well known. It was this contempt and the fear of the removal of the capital, together with petty, personal jealousy, that prompted his enemies to combine in the conspiracy that committed what Goethe called the stupidest crime in history.

Caesar moved among the men of his time and among the men of after generations as one of those beings who rise only once in a thousand years, who are kings not in name only. He was possessed of a great quality that belongs only to greatness of the very highest order—the utter inability to hate his enemies.

His genius was many-sided. Great as a warrior, he was supreme as a statesman, and as that prince of critics, Quintilian, says, if he had had time for the practice of oratory, he would have rivaled the eloquence of Cicero. His oratory was marked with the same eagerness and impetuosity that marked his actions as a general. His taste was impeccable and his speech was noted for an inimitable elegance that marked the patrician in him, the “mira sermonis elegantia.”

I have yet to speak of his distinction in literature. In his early youth he wrote poetry, probably mere school exercises. He wrote treatises on grammar, in which he displayed that same love of order and system which characterized all his work. As an historian, he is a maker rather than a writer of history, but even in the latter class he is unique.

He has left the account of two of his wars, the Conquest of Gaul and the Civil War. Both are political documents and are to be judged in that light. He is frequently pictured as writing the Gallic War of an evening beside the campfire in the midst of the campaign. As a matter of fact, references show that it was written in a very brief space of time after the beginning of 52 and before the end of 51 B.C. The Civil War was written after the close of that war, and was probably interrupted by Caesar’s own death. His friend Hirtius gives us a vivid picture of the way these commentaries were written. In a letter to Balbus he says:

“By your continual reproaches, Balbus, which seemed to regard my daily refusal not as a plea caused by difficulty, but as an evasion due to indolence, I have been constrained to undertake a most difficult task. I have tacked a supplement to the Commentaries of our great Caesar on the operations in Gaul, as his previous and his subsequent writings did not otherwise fit together; and his vast work, which was left unfinished from the operations at Alexandria onwards, I have completed as far as the conclusion, not indeed of civil discord, of which we see no end, but of Caesar’s life. And I trust that those who will read it may understand how unwillingly I have undertaken the task of writing this Commentary; for so shall I the easier free myself from the charge of folly and of presumption for having intruded myself in the middle of Caesar’s writings. For it is universally agreed that nothing was ever so elaborately finished by others that is not surpassed by the refinement of these Commentaries. They have been published that historians may not lack knowledge of those great achievements; and so strong is the unanimous verdict of approval as to make it appear that historians have been robbed of an opportunity rather than enriched with one. Yet herein is our admiration greater than all other men’s: the world knows how excellently, how faultlessly, but we know also how easily, how speedily he completed his Commentaries. Caesar possessed not only the great facility and refinement of style, but also the surest skill in explaining his own plans.” (Edwards’ Translation)

Caesar himself says that his works were not history, but that they were merely material for history. Yet Cicero, who had considerable self-confidence, said that no one would consider the possibility of rewriting these histories, and he compares them in their simple elegance to graceful, nude statues. Pollio, the most crabbed critic in history, says that Caesar would have re-written them.

We must admit that they are not perfect and perhaps parts of them would have been revised. It seems in the composition of the Gallic War Caesar learned much about the art of writing. Book VII is vastly superior to Book I. The long passages of indirect discourse that occur in Book I are unique in Latin literature. No other author resorts to this cumbrous device to the extent it is employed in Book I. Caesar himself discards it more and more as the narrative proceeds, and finally in Book IV a centurion bursts into actual direct speech. Thereafter the indirect discourse mania is abolished. In Book VII the proportion of indirect discourse is about the same as that employed by Livy. This book, the climax of the Gallic War, is justly regarded as Caesar’s literary masterpiece. It would be hard to find elsewhere a great narrative so simply told. It is the story of the final rising of almost all Gaul under the great leader, Vercingetorix. Caesar was twice almost beaten. The mobility of his army—of which I have spoken—alone saved him. When, after almost superhuman exertions, the revolt was mastered, when at last the surrender came, what a climax it was. Here is the account as Plutarch gives it, probably following a vivid description of Livy:

“For many reasons, then, and naturally, Caesar’s peril at Alesia was famous, since it produced more deeds of skill and daring than any of his other struggles; but one must be amazed above all that he engaged and conquered so many tens of thousands outside the city without the knowledge even of those inside, nay more, without the knowledge even of the Romans who were guarding the wall that faced the city. For these did not learn of the victory until the wailing of the men in Alesia and the lamentations of the women were heard, as they beheld in the quarters of the enemy many shields adorned with gold and silver, many corselets smeared with blood, and also drinking-cups and tents of Gallic fashion carried by the Romans into their camp. So quickly did so great a force, like a phantom or a dream, disperse and vanish out of sight, the greater part of them having fallen in the battle. Those who held Alesia, too, after giving themselves and Caesar no small trouble, finally surrendered. And the leader of the whole war, Vercingetorix, after putting on his most beautiful armor and decorating his horse, rode out through the gate. He made a circuit round Caesar, who remained seated, and then leaped down from his horse, stripped off his suit of armor, and seating himself at Caesar’s feet remained motionless, until he was delivered up to be kept in custody for the triumph.” (Perrin’s Translation)

Dio’s account differs but little:

“Now Vercingetorix might have escaped, for he had not been captured and was unwounded; but he hoped, since he had once been on friendly terms with Caesar, that he might obtain pardon from him. So he came to him without any announcement by herald, but appeared before him suddenly, as Caesar was seated on the tribunal, and threw some who were present into alarm; for he was very tall to begin with, and in his armor he made an extremely imposing figure. When quiet had been restored, he uttered not a word, but fell upon his knees, with hands clasped in an attitude of supplication. This inspired many with pity at the remembrance of his fortune and at the distressing state in which he now appeared. But Caesar reproached him in this very matter on which he most relied for his safety, and by setting over against his claim of former friendship his recent opposition, showed his offense to have been the more grievous. Therefore he did not pity him even at the time, but immediately confined him in bonds, and later, after sending him to his triumph, put him to death.” (Cary’s Translation) Caesar’s narrative is almost unbelievably concise. He simply says: “The arms were given up, the captives surrendered.”

Book VI is a very adroit performance. It is almost a political trick, for it is an elaborate account of an unsuccessful campaign, an account so elaborate that the lack of success would be entirely unnoticed by the Roman electorate. The entire year was spent in the unsuccessful pursuit of Ambiorix. To conceal the lack of substantial achievement during this year, Caesar has injected into this book interesting accounts of the customs of the Gauls and Germans. He has also added interesting descriptions of several fabulous animals, one in particular that could not lie down because it had no joints in its legs and slept reclining against trees, which peasants who hunted the animals undermined, thus capturing the animals when they had fallen down. Just how much of this Caesar believed, it is hard to say. In any case it would divert the attention of his readers from his hideously unsuccessful chase of Ambiorix, who was one of the few objectives that Caesar failed to overtake. Just how bitter a disappointment (to Caesar) his escape was, may be seen from the closing paragraph of Book VI:

“Caesar marched forth again to harass the enemy, and collecting a great host from the neighboring states, he sent them off in every direction. Every hamlet, every homestead that anyone could see was set on fire; captured cattle were driven from every spot; the corn-crops were not only being consumed by the vast host of pack-animals and human beings, but were laid flat in addition because of the rainy season, so that, even if any persons succeeded in hiding themselves for the moment, it seemed that they must perish for want of everything when the army was withdrawn. And with so large a force of cavalry scattered in every direction, it often came to pass that prisoners, when taken, were gazing about for Ambiorix, whom they had just seen in flight, and even insisting that he had not quite gone out of sight. The hope of catching the fugitive, now offered to them, inspired immense exertion, and the thought that they would win the highest favor with Caesar made their zeal almost more than human. Yet always it seemed that they had failed, by a little, to win supreme success, while Ambiorix stole away from covert or glade and, hidden by night, made for other districts or territories, with no more escort of horsemen than four troopers, to whom alone he durst entrust his life.” (Edwards’ Translation)

Caesar’s narrative is always direct and simple. In this quality it even approached the dignity of Hebrew narrative noted in an earlier lecture. Take this brief example from the Fifth Book:

“In that legion there were two most gallant centurions, not now far from the first class of their rank, Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus. They had continual quarrels together, which was to stand first, and every year they struggled in fierce rivalry for the chief posts. One of them, Pullo, when the fight was fiercest by the entrenchments, said: ‘Why hesitate, Vorenus? Or what chance of proving your pluck do you wait for? This day shall decide our quarrels.’ So saying, he stepped outside the entrenchments, and dashed upon the section of the enemy which seemed to be in closest array. Neither did Vorenus keep within the rampart, but in fear of what all men would think, he followed hard. Then, at short range, Pullo sent his pike at the enemy, and pierced one man as he ran forward from the host. When he was struck senseless, the enemy sought to cover him with their shields, and discharged their spears in a volley at the foeman, giving him no chance of retirement. Pullo’s shield was penetrated, and a dart was lodged in his belt. This accident threw his scabbard out of place, and delayed his right hand as he tried to draw his sword, and while he was in difficulty, the enemy surrounded him. His enemy, Vorenus, ran up to him and helped him in his distress. Upon him at once all the host turned, and left Pullo, supposing him to be slain by the dart. Vorenus plied his sword at close quarters, and by slaying one man drove all the rest a little. While he pressed on too eagerly, he fell down headlong into a dip in the ground. He was surrounded in his turn, but Pullo brought assistance; and both, unhurt, though they had slain several men, retired with the utmost glory within the entrenchments. In the eagerness of their rivalry, fortune so handled the two that, for all their mutual hostility, the one helped and saved the other, and it was impossible to decide which should be considered the better man in valor.” (Edwards’ Translation)

But there is more to this than good prose narrative. Here is a tribute of a great general to his faithful officers. One can imagine the devotion such praise would inspire; and this is no isolated instance. Throughout the whole history Caesar singles out for honorable mention men who have displayed conspicuous valor. His books thus become a sort of official gazette with these citations for honor. How careful he is to praise that doubtful vessel of valor, Q. Tullius Cicero, for his spirited defense of his camp (the narrative in Book V is fascinatingly interesting), and how careful he is to mention every extenuating circumstance that could palliate the guilt of his negligence, when Cicero allowed himself to be outwitted the next year. In the Civil War we find a like courtesy displayed toward his opponents. Caesar was too great for personal hatreds.

Compare Caesar’s narratives with any ancient history, except Thucydides, and they stand utterly unique, stripped of rhetoric and ornamentation; they are clear, direct, historical documents. As Cicero well says, they have all the qualities of clear-cut, unadorned statuary.

It has frequently been said that Caesar’s memoirs are not impartial. This is quite true. No good history is impartial. If the Gauls had written an account of Caesar’s conquests, it would have been quite different from that which he presents, and it would have been no more nearly correct or impartial. If Pompey or Cato had written an account of the Civil War, it would have been far from attaining that restrained abstraction which Caesar’s account presents. The record of a victorious leader is quite likely to be characterized by a magnanimous fairness, which that of the defeated party could not achieve. We have recently beheld the spectacle of a defeated Germany trying to re-write the history of the outbreak of hostilities in 1914,^[1] and we fail to see in any account yet produced any evidence that time has brought to the German writers anything like that sense of fairness and aloofness so conspicuous in Earl Gray’s memoirs.

The inferiority of the writing in the Civil War to that in the Gallic War has frequently been noted and many explanations have been offered for it. I think the true explanation has been suggested by Mr. Mackail in his remarkable history of Latin literature. He points out the fact that even Caesar’s energy and his apparently inexhaustible vitality had been sapped by the tremendous strain of carrying the world on his individual shoulders. It is a fact too little recognized that one of Caesar’s great difficulties in reorganizing the Roman state was the lack of efficient assistance. The men of the great houses, who were experienced in large affairs of government, were nearly all opposed to him. He had to choose his provincial governors and his subordinates in high office from the ranks of men who had had no training in statecraft. Such a problem not infrequently presents itself to the leader of a new party suddenly raised to power. Napoleon’s marshals furnish a fair example. Ramsey McDonald’s labor cabinet is another. And anyone who has seen the pitiful inefficiency and the petty dishonesty of the ordinary Italian official realizes what a gigantic task Mussolini has undertaken in his efforts to rejuvenate the Italian government. Such a task confronted Caesar, and this explains why so often he raised men of low rank to posts of great responsibility, and why he was so ready to accept among his officers men who had been his bitter personal enemies. It is little wonder, then, that in the hasty composition of his history of the war with Pompey, left unfinished as it is, we should find minor inconsistencies, small evidences of the great strain under which this mighty man was laboring.

An eighteenth-century classical scholar said that there were three reasons for studying Greek. First, to read the words of our Lord in the original; second, to secure places of honor and emolument; and third, to be able to look down with contempt upon one’s fellowmen. If this was ever true, it is certainly worth while for a student today to acquire the Latin language, if it be only that he may read in the original the words of that great maker of history, who in the loneliness of that isolation which his own genius imposed upon him might well address the Sphinx of Egypt in the words which Shaw puts into his mouth:

“I have wandered in many lands, seeking the lost regions from which my birth into this world exiled me, and the company of creatures such as I myself. I have found flocks and pastures, men and cities, but no other Caesar, no air native to me, no man kindred to me, none who can do my day’s deeds, and think my night’s thought. In the little world yonder, Sphinx, my place is as high as yours in this great desert; only I wander, and you sit still; I conquer, and you endure; I work and wonder, you watch and wait; I look up and am dazzled, look down and am darkened, look around and am puzzled, whilst your eyes never turn from looking out—out of the world—to the lost region—the home from which we have strayed. Sphinx, you and I, strangers to the race of men, are no strangers to one another; have I not been conscious of you and of this place since I was born? Rome is a madman’s dream: this is my Reality. These starry lamps of yours I have seen from afar, in Gaul, in Britain, in Spain, in Thessaly, signaling great secrets to some eternal sentinel below, whose post I never could find. And here at last is their sentinel—an image of the constant and immortal part of my life, silent, full of thoughts, alone in the silver desert. Sphinx, Sphinx, I have climbed mountains at night to hear in the distance the stealthy footfalls of the winds that chase your sands in forbidden play—our invisible children, O Sphinx, laughing in whispers. My way hither was the way of destiny; for I am he of whose genius thou art the symbol: part brute, part woman, and part God.”