The Historians' History of the World 05

Such was this singular man whom it seems so easy and is so hopelessly difficult to describe. His whole nature is pellucidly clear, and concerning him tradition has preserved more abundant and vivid details than of any of his peers in the ancient world. Such a personality might indeed be conceived as shallower or more profound but not really in different ways; to every not wholly perverse inquirer this lofty figure has appeared with the same essential traits, and yet none has succeeded in restoring it in clear outline. The secret lies in its completeness. Humanly and historically speaking Cæsar stands at that point of the equation at which the great conflicting principles of life neutralise one another. Possessing the greatest creative force and yet at the same time the most penetrating intelligence, no longer a youth but not yet an old man, highest in will and highest in achievement, filled with republican ideals and yet a born king, a Roman to the deepest core of his being and again destined to reconcile and unite Roman and Hellenic civilisations both externally and in their inward relations—Cæsar is the complete and perfect man. This is why in him more than in any other historical personality we miss the so-called characteristic traits, which are really nothing else than deviations from the natural human development. What are taken for these at the first superficial glance reveal themselves on closer inspection, not as individual qualities, but as the peculiarities of the period of civilisation or of the nation; thus as his youthful adventures are common to him and to all his gifted contemporaries who were similarly situated, so his unpoetic but energetic and logical nature is mainly Roman.

Besides this it is in accordance with Cæsar’s perfectly human character that he was in the highest degree dependent on time and place; for there is no such thing as humanity pure and simple; the living man can but exhibit the qualities of a given nation and a particular stamp of civilisation. Cæsar was a perfect man only because he had placed himself, as none other had done, in the central stream of the tendencies of his day, and because more than any other he possessed the essential characteristic of the Roman nation, the true citizen quality in its perfection; while his Hellenism also was only that which had long since become closely intertwined with the national spirit of the Italians.

But herein lies the difficulty, we might perhaps say the impossibility, of giving a distinct portrait of Cæsar. As the artist can paint anything save perfect beauty, so also the historian, where once in a thousand years he encounters perfection, can only be silent before it. For the rule may indeed be laid down, but we have only a negative idea of the absence of defect; nature’s secret, of uniting the normal and the individual in their fullest manifestations, cannot be expressed. Nothing is left us but to duly appreciate those who saw this perfection and to obtain a dim idea of the imperishable reflection which rests on the works created by this great nature. It is true that these also show the mark of his age. The Roman himself might be compared with his young Greek predecessor not merely as an equal but as a superior; but the world had grown old since then and its youthful lustre had grown dim. Cæsar’s work was no longer, like that of Alexander, a joyous effort to advance towards the immeasurable distance; he was engaged in construction, and that from ruins, and was satisfied to work as profitably and securely as possible in the wide but defined sphere already indicated. The fine poetic sense of the nations is therefore justified in paying no heed to the unpoetic Roman, while it has surrounded the son of Philip with all the golden splendour of poetry and all the rainbow colours of legend. But with equal justice the political life of nations has for thousands of years returned again and again to the lines which Cæsar traced, and if the peoples to whom the world belongs still apply his name to the chiefest of their monarchs, there is in this a profound warning and one, unfortunately, also calculated to rouse feelings of shame.

MOMMSEN’S ESTIMATE OF CÆSAR’S WORK