The Historians' History of the World 05 [The Roman Republic]

The most noteworthy characteristic of his work as a statesman is its perfect harmony. In fact all the necessary qualifications for this most difficult of all human tasks were united in Cæsar. Realist through and through, he never allowed consecrated tradition and the images of the past to trouble him; nothing was of any importance to him in politics save the living present and intelligent law, as in the character of a grammarian he set aside historical and antiquarian inquiry and only recognised, on the one hand the usages of the living language, on the other the laws of conformity. A born ruler, he swayed the minds of men as the wind drives the clouds, and compelled the most diverse characters to abandon themselves to him—the simple citizen and the rough soldier, the noble ladies of Rome and the fair princesses of Egypt and Mauretania, the brilliant cavalry leader and the calculating banker.

Roman Tripod

His talent for organisation was wonderful; Cæsar forced his coalition and his legions into close union and held them firmly together as no other statesman ever did with his allies, nor any general with an army composed of unruly and conflicting elements; never did ruler judge his instruments with so keen an eye and put each in its appropriate place. He was a monarch, but he never played the king. Even as absolute master of Rome he retained the bearing of a party leader; perfectly pliant and complaisant, easy and agreeable in conversation and courteous to all, he appeared to desire to be nothing more than the first among his equals. Cæsar entirely avoided the mistake of so many men otherwise as great as he—that of carrying the spirit of the military commander into politics; however great the temptation arising from his vexatious relations with the senate, he never had recourse to such acts of brute force as that of the 18th Brumaire. Cæsar was a monarch, but he was never caught by the glamour of tyranny. He is perhaps the only one among the Lord’s mighty ones, who in great things as in small never acted in response to fancy or caprice but in all cases in accordance with his duty as a ruler, and who, when he looked back on his life, might indeed deplore miscalculations but could repent of none of the errors of passion. There is nothing in the story of Cæsar’s life which can compare even in a small degree with those ebullitions of poetic sensuality, with the murder of Clitus or the burning of Persepolis, of which the history of his great predecessor in the East has to tell. Finally he is perhaps the only one of those mighty ones who preserved to the very end of his career a statesman-like sense of the possible and impossible and who did not shipwreck on the great problem which is the hardest of all for natures of the grand order, the problem of recognising the natural limits of success even at its very pinnacle.

What was practicable he performed, and never neglected the attainable good for the sake of the impossible better; never disdained at least to mitigate an incurable evil by some palliative. But where he perceived that fate had spoken he always listened. Alexander at the Hypanis, Napoleon in Moscow turned back because they were compelled to do so, and reproached fate because she granted only limited success. Cæsar at the Thames and the Rhine retired of his own free will, and at the Danube and Euphrates laid no extravagant schemes for the conquest of the world, but merely planned the execution of some carefully considered frontier regulations.

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.