allowed his legions rest, though he allowed none to himself. He rarely fought a battle at a disadvantage. He never exposed his men to unnecessary danger, and the loss by wear and tear in the campaigns in Gaul was exceptionably and even astonishingly slight. When a gallant action was performed, he knew by whom it had been done, and every soldier, however humble, might feel assured that if he deserved praise he would have it. The army was Cæsar's family. When Sabinus was cut off he allowed his beard to grow, and he did not shave it till the disaster was avenged. If Quintus Cicero had been his own child, he could not have run greater personal risk to save him when shut up at Charleroy. In disci-15 pline he was lenient to ordinary faults, and not careful to make curious inquiries into such things. He liked his men to enjoy themselves. Military mistakes in his officers, too, he always endeavored to excuse, never blaming them for misfortunes unless there had been a defect of courage as well as judgment. Mutiny and desertion only, he never overlooked. And thus no general was ever more loved by, or had greater power over, the army which served under him. He brought the insurgent tenth legion into submission by a single word. When the Civil War began, and Labienus left him, he told all his officers who had served under Pompey that they were free to follow if they wished. Not another man forsook him.

Sentonius says that he was rapacious, that he plun- 16 dered tribes in Spain who were allies of Rome, that he pillaged shrines and temples in Gaul, and destroyed cities merely for spoil. He adds a story which Cicero would not have left untold and uncommented on if he had been so fortunate as to hear of it: that Cæsar when first consul took three thousand pounds weight of gold out of the Capitol and replaced it with gilded brass. A simi

lar story is told of the Cid and of other heroes of fiction How came Cicero to be ignorant of an act which, if done 17 at all, was done under his own eyes? When prætor, Cæsar brought back money from Spain to the treasury ; but he was never charged at the time with peculation or oppression there. In Gaul the war paid its own expenses; but what temples were there in Gaul which were worth spoiling? Of temples he was, indeed, scrupulously careful. Varro had taken gold from the Temple of Hercules at Cadiz. Cæsar replaced it. Metellus Scipio had threatened to plunder the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. Cæsar protected it. In Gaul the Druids were his best friends; therefore he certainly had not outraged religion there, and the quiet of the province during the Civil War is a sufficient answer to the accusation of gratuitous oppression. The Gauls paid the expenses of their conquest in the prisoners taken in battle, who were sold to the slave merchants; and this is the real blot on Cæsar's career. But the blot was not personally upon Cæsar, but upon the age in which he lived. The great Pomponius Atticus himself was a dealer in human chattels. That prisoners of war should be sold as slaves was the law of the time, accepted alike by victors and vanquished; and the crowds of libertini who assisted at Cæsar's funeral proved that he was not regarded as the enemy of these unfortunates, but as their special friend.

18

19

His leniency to the Pompeian faction has already been spoken of sufficiently. It may have been politic, but it arose also from the disposition of the man. Cruelty originates in fear, and Cæsar was too indifferent to death to fear anything. So far as his public action was concerned, he betrayed no passion save hatred of injustice; and he moved through life calm and irresistible, like a force of

nature.

Cicero has said of Cæsar's oratory that he surpassed 20 those who had practiced no other art. His praise of him as a man of letters is yet more delicately and gracefully emphatic. Most of his writings are lost, but there remain seven books of commentaries on the wars in Gaul (the eighth was added by another hand), and three books upon the Civil War, containing an account of its causes and history. Of these it was that Cicero said, in an admirable image, that fools might think to improve on them, but that no wise man would try it; they were nudi omni ornatu orationis, tanquam veste detractâ-bare of ornament, the dress of style dispensed with, like an undraped human figure, perfect in all its lines as Nature made it. In his composition, as in his actions, Cæsar is entirely simple. He indulges in no images, no labored descrip-21 tions, no conventional reflections. His art is unconscious, as the highest art always is. The actual fact of things stands out as it really was, not as mechanically photographed, but interpreted by the calmest intelligence, and described with unexaggerated feeling. No military narrative has approached the excellence of the history of the war in Gaul. Nothing is written down which could be dispensed with, nothing important is left untold, while the incidents themselves are set off by delicate and just observations on human character. The story is rendered 22 attractive by complimentary anecdotes of persons, while details of the character and customs of an unknown and remarkable people show the attention which Cæsar was always at leisure to bestow on anything which was worthy of interest, even when he was surrounded with danger and difficulty. The books on the Civil War have the same simplicity and clearness, but a vein runs through them of strong if subdued emotion. They contain the history of a great revolution related by the principal actor

in it; but no effort can be traced to set his own side in a favorable light, or to abuse or depreciate his adversaries. 23 The coarse invectives which Cicero poured so freely upon those who differed from him are conspicuously absent. Cæsar does not exult over his triumphs or parade the honesty of his motives.. The facts are left to tell their own story; and the gallantry and endurance of his own troops are not related with more feeling than the contrast between the confident hopes of the patrician leaders at Pharsalia and the luxury of their camp with the overwhelming disaster which fell upon them. About himself and his own exploits there is not one word of self-complacency or self-admiration. In his writings, as in his life, Cæsar is always the same-direct, straightforward, unmoved, save by occasional tenderness, describing with unconscious simplicity how the work which had been 24 forced upon him was accomplished. He wrote with extreme rapidity in the intervals of other labor, yet there is not a word misplaced, not a sign of haste anywhere, save that the conclusion of the Gallic war was left to be supplied by a weaker hand. The Commentaries, as an historical narrative, are as far superior to any other Latin composition of the kind as the person of Cæsar himself stands out among the rest of his contemporaries.

25

His other compositions have perished, in consequence, perhaps, of the unforgiving republican sentiment which revived among men of letters after the death of Augustus-which rose to a height in the "Pharsalia" of Lucan -and which leaves so visible a mark in the writings of Tacitus and Suetonius. There was a book, "De Analogiâ," written by Cæsar after the conference at Lucca, during the passage of the Alps. There was a book on the Auspices, which, coming from the head of the Roman religion, would have thrown a light much to be desired

on this curious subject. In practice Cæsar treated the auguries with contempt. He carried his laws in open disregard of them. He fought his battles careless whether the sacred chickens would eat or the calves' livers were of the proper color. His own account of such things in his capacity of Pontifex would have had a singular in

terest.

From the time of his boyhood he kept a commonplace 26 book, in which he entered down any valuable or witty sayings, inquiring carefully, as Cicero takes pains to tell us, after any smart observation of his own. Niebuhr remarks that no pointed sentences of Cæsar's can have come down to us. Perhaps he had no gift that way, and admired in others what he did not possess.

66

He left in verse an account of the stars". -some 27 practical almanac, probably, in a shape to be easily remembered; and there was a journal in verse also, written on the return from Munda. Of all the lost writings, however, the most to be regretted is the "Anti-Cato." After Cato's death Cicero published a panegyric upon him. To praise Cato was to condemn Cæsar; and Cæsar replied with a sketch of the Martyr of Utica as he had himself known him. The pamphlet, had it survived, would have shown how far Cæsar was able to extend the forbearance so conspicuous in his other writings to the most respectable and the most inveterate of his enemies. The verdict of fact and the verdict of literature on the great controversy between them have been summed up in the memorable line of Lucan

Victrix causa Deis placuit, sed victa Catoni.

Was Cato right, or were the gods right? Perhaps both. There is a legend that at the death of Charles V the ac- 28 cusing angel appeared in heaven with a catalogue of deeds