The Historians' History of the World 05

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.