interesting of all, appear in history as a confused and shapeless medley
of political, military and forensic activity, strongly coloured by
social scandals, which rested upon a foundation of truth, and darkened
by accusations of worse kind, for which there is no sort of evidence,
and which may be safely attributed to the jealousy of unscrupulous
adversaries.
The first account of him, which we have in the seventeenth year of his
age, evokes a picture of youthful beauty. The boy who is to win the
world is appointed high priest of Jove in Rome,--by what strong
influence we know not,--and we fancy the splendid youth with his tall
figure, full of elastic endurance, the brilliant face, the piercing,
bold, black eyes; we see him with the small mitre set back upon the dark
and curling locks that grow low on the forehead, as hair often does that
is to fall early, clad in the purple robe of his high office, summoning
all his young dignity to lend importance to his youthful grace as he
moves up to Jove's high altar to perform his first solemn sacrifice with
his young consort; for the high priesthood of Jove was held jointly by
man and wife, and if the wife died the husband lost his office.
He was about twenty when he cast his lot with the people, and within the
year he fled from Sylla's persecution. The life of sudden changes and
contrasts had begun. Straight from the sacred office, with all its
pomp, and splendour, and solemnity, Caesar is a fugitive in the Sabine
hills, homeless, wifeless, fever-stricken, a price on his head. Such
quick chances of evil fell to many in the days of the great struggle
between Marius and Sylla, between the people and the nobles.
Then as Sylla yielded to the insistence of the young 'populist'
nobleman's many friends, the quick reverse is turned to us. Caesar has a
military command, sees some fighting and much idleness by the shores of
the Bosphorus, in Bithynia--then in a fit of sudden energy, the
soldier's spirit rises; he dashes to the attack on Mytilene, and shows
himself a man.
[Illustration: CAIUS JULIUS CAESAR
After a statue in the Palazzo dei Conservatori]
One or two unimportant campaigns, as a subordinate officer, a civic
crown won for personal bravery, an unsuccessful action brought against a
citizen of high rank in the hope of forcing himself into notice, a trip
to Rhodes made to escape the disgrace of failure, and an adventure with
pirates--there, in a few words, is the story of Julius Caesar's youth, as
history tells it. But then suddenly, when his projected studies in quiet
Rhodes were hardly begun, he crosses to the mainland, raises troops,
seizes cities, drives Mithridates' governor out of the province, returns
to Rome and is elected military tribune. The change is too quick, and
one does not understand it. Truth should tell that those early years had
been spent in the profound study of philosophy, history, biography,
languages and mankind, of the genesis of events from the germ to the
branching tree, of that chemistry of fate which brews effect out of
cause, and distils the imperishable essence of glory from the rougher
liquor of vulgar success.
What strikes one most in the lives of the very great is that every
action has a cumulative force beyond what it ever has in the existence
of ordinary men. Success moves onward, passing through events on the
same plane, as it were, and often losing brilliancy till it fades away,
leaving those who have had it to outlive it in sorrow and weakness.
Genius moves upward, treading events under its feet, scaling Olympus,
making a ladder of mankind, outlasting its own activity for ever in a
final and fixed glory more splendid than its own bright path. The really
great man gathers power in action, the average successful man expends
it.
And so it must be understood that Caesar, in his early youth, was not
wasting his gifts in what seemed to be a half-voluptuous,
half-adventurous, wholly careless life, but was accumulating strength by
absorbing into himself the forces with which he came in contact,
exhausting the intelligence of his companions in order to stock his own,
learning everything simultaneously, forgetting nothing he learned till
he could use all he knew to the extreme limit of its value.
There is something mysterious in the almost unlimited credit which Caesar
seems to have enjoyed when still a very young man; and if the control of
enormous sums of money by which he made himself beloved among the people
explains, in a measure, his rapid rise from office to office, it is, on
the other hand, hard to account for the trust which his creditors placed
in his promises, and to explain why, when he was taken by pirates, the
cities of Asia Minor should have voluntarily contributed money to make
up the ransom demanded, seeing that he had never served in Asia, except
as a subordinate. The only possible explanation is that while there, his
real energies were devoted to the attainment of the greatest possible
popularity in the shortest possible time, and that he was making himself
beloved by the Asiatic cities, while his enemies said of him that he was
wasting his time in idleness and dissipation.
In any case, it was the control of money that most helped him in
obtaining high offices in Rome, and from the very first he seems to have
acted on the principle that in great enterprises economy spells ruin,
and that to check expenditure is to trip up success. And this is
explained, if not justified, by his close association with the people,
from his very childhood. Until he was made Pontifex Maximus he seems to
have lived in a small house in the Suburra, in one of the most crowded
and least fashionable quarters of Rome; and as a mere boy, it was his
influence with the common people that roused Sylla's anxiety. To live
with the people, to take their part against the nobles, to give them of
all he had and of all he could borrow, were the chief rules of his
conduct, and the fact that he obtained such enormous loans proves that
there were rich lenders who were ready to risk fortunes upon his
success. And it was in dealing with the Roman plebeian that he learned
to command the Roman soldier, with the tact of a demagogue and the
firmness of an autocrat. He knew that a man must give largely, even
recklessly, to be beloved, and that in order to be respected he must be
able to refuse coldly and without condition, and that in all ages the
people are but as little children before genius, though they may rise
against talent like wild beasts and tear it to death.
He knew also that in youth ten failures are nothing compared with one
success, while in the full meridian of power one failure undoes a score
of victories; hence his recklessness at first, his magnificent caution
in his latter days; his daring resistance of Sylla's power before he was
twenty, and his mildness towards the ringleaders of popular
conspiracies against him when he was near his end; his violence upon the
son of King Juba, whom he seized by the beard in open court when he
himself was but a young lawyer, and his moderation in bearing the most
atrocious libels, to punish which might have only increased their force.
Caesar's career divides itself not unnaturally into three periods,
corresponding with his youth, his manhood and his maturity; with the
absorption of force in gaining experience, the lavish expenditure of
force in conquest, the calm employment of force in final supremacy. The
man who never lost a battle in which he commanded in person, began life
by failing in everything he attempted, and ended it as the foremost man
of all humanity, past and to come, the greatest general, the greatest
speaker, the greatest lawgiver, the greatest writer of Latin prose whom
the great Roman people ever produced, and also the bravest man of his
day, as he was the kindest. In an age when torture was a legitimate part
of justice, he caused the pirates who had taken him, and whom he took in
turn, to be mercifully put to death before he crucified their dead
bodies for his oath's sake, and when his long-trusted servant tried to
poison him he would not allow the wretch to be hurt save by the sudden
stroke of instant death; nor ever in a long career of conquest did he
inflict unnecessary pain. Never was man loved of women as he was, and
his sins were many even for those days, yet in them we find no
unkindness, and when his own wife should have been condemned for her
love of Clodius, Caesar would not testify against her. He divorced her,
he said, not because he knew anything, but because his family should be
above suspicion. He plundered the world, but he gave it back its gold in
splendid gifts and public works, keeping its glory alone for himself. He
was hated by the few because he was beloved by the many, and it was not
revenge, but envy, that slew the benefactor of mankind. The weaknesses
of the supreme conqueror were love of woman and trust of man, and as the
first Brutus made his name glorious by setting his people free, the
second disgraced it and blackened the name of friendship with a stain
that will outlast time, and by a deed second only in infamy to that of
Judas Iscariot. The last cry of the murdered master was the cry of a
broken heart--'And thou, too, Brutus, my son!' Alexander left chaos
behind him; Caesar left Europe, and it may be truly said that the
crowning manifestation of his sublime wisdom was his choice of
Octavius--of the young Augustus--to complete the carving of a world
which he himself had sketched and blocked out in the rough.
The first period of his life ended with his election to the military
tribuneship on his return to Rome after his Asian adventures, and his
first acts were directed towards the reconstruction of what Sylla had
destroyed, by reestablishing the authority of tribunes and recalling
some of Sylla's victims from their political exile. From that time
onward, in his second period, he was more or less continually in office.
Successively a tribune, a quaestor, governor of Farther Spain, aedile,
pontifex maximus, praetor, governor of Spain again, and consul with the
insignificant Bibulus, a man of so small importance that people used to
date documents, by way of a jest, 'in the Consulship of Julius and
Caesar.' Then he obtained Gaul for his province, and lived the life of a
soldier for nine years, during which he created the army that gave him
at last the mastery of Rome. And in the tenth year Rome was afraid, and
his enemies tried to deprive him of his power and passed bills against
him, and drove out the tribunes of the people who took his part; and if
he had returned to Rome then, yielding up his province and his legions,
as he was called upon to do, he would have been judged and destroyed by
his enemies. But he knew that the people loved him, and he crossed the
Rubicon in arms.
This second period of his life closed with the last triumph decreed to
him for his victories in Spain. The third and final period had covered
but one year when his assassins cut it short.
Nothing demonstrates Caesar's greatness so satisfactorily as this, that
at his death Rome relapsed at once into civil war and strife as violent
as that to which Caesar had put an end, and that the man who brought
lasting peace and unity into the distracted state, was the man of
Caesar's choice. But in endeavouring to realize his supreme wisdom,
nothing helps us more than the pettiness of the accusations brought
against him by such historians as Suetonius--that he once remained
seated to receive the whole body of Conscript fathers, that he had a
gilded chair in the Senate house, and appointed magistrates at his own
pleasure to hold office for terms of years, that he laughed at an
unfavourable omen and made himself dictator for life; and such things,
says the historian, 'are of so much more importance than all his good
qualities that he is considered to have abused his power and to have
been justly assassinated.' But it is the people, not the historian, who
make history, and when Caius Julius Caesar was dead, the people called
him God.
Beardless Octavius, his sister's daughter's son, barely eighteen years
old, brings in by force the golden age of Rome. As Triumvir, with Antony
and Lepidus, he hunts down the murderers first, then his rebellious
colleagues, and wins the Empire back in thirteen years. He rules long
and well, and very simply, as commanding general of the army and by no
other power, taking all into his hands besides, the Senate, the chief
priesthood, and the Majesty of Rome over the whole earth, for which he
was called Augustus, the 'Majestic.' And his strength lay in this, that
by the army, he was master of Senate and people alike, so that they
could no longer strive with each other in perpetual bloodshed, and the
everlasting wars of Rome were fought against barbarians far away, while
Rome at home was prosperous and calm and peaceful. Then Virgil sang, and
Horace gave Latin life to Grecian verse, and smiled and laughed, and
wept and dallied with love, while Livy wrote the story of greatness for
us all to this day, and Ovid touched another note still unforgotten.
Then temple rose by temple, and grand basilicas reared their height by
the Sacred Way; the gold of the earth poured in and Art was queen and
mistress of the age. Julius Caesar was master in Rome for one year.
Augustus ruled nearly half a century. Four and forty years he was sole
monarch after Antony's fall at Actium. About the thirtieth year of his
reign, Christ was born.
All men have an original claim to be judged by the standard of their own
time. Counting one by one the victims of the proscription proclaimed by
the triumvirate in which Augustus was the chief power, some historians
have brought down his greatness in quick declination to the level of a
cold-blooded and cruel selfishness; and they account for his subsequent
just and merciful conduct on the ground that he foresaw political
advantage in clemency, and extension of power in the exercise of
justice. The death of Cicero, sacrificed to Antony's not unreasonable
vengeance, is magnified into a crime that belittles the Augustan age.
Yet compared with the wholesale murders done by Marius and Sylla, and by
the patricians themselves in their struggles with the people, the few
political executions ordered by Augustus sink into comparative
insignificance, and it will generally be seen that those who most find
fault with him are ready to extol the murderers of Julius Caesar as
devoted patriots, if not as glorious martyrs to the divine cause of
liberty.
[Illustration: OCTAVIUS AUGUSTUS CAESAR
After a bust in the British Museum]
It is easier, perhaps, to describe the growth of Rome from the early
Kings to Augustus, than to account for the change from the Rome of the
Empire at the beginning of our era to the Rome of the Popes in the year
eight hundred. Probably the easiest and truest way of looking at the
transition is to regard it according to the periods of supremacy,
decadence and ultimate disappearance from Rome of the Roman Army. For
the Army made the Emperors, and the Emperors made the times. The great
military organization had in it the elements of long life, together with
all sudden and terrible possibilities. The Army made Tiberius, Caligula,
Claudius and Nero, the Julian Emperors; then destroyed Nero and set up
Vespasian after one or two experiments. The Army chose such men as
Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, and such monsters as Domitian and Commodus;
the Army conquered the world, held the world and gave the world to
whomsoever it pleased. The Army and the Emperor, each the other's tool,
governed Rome for good and ill, for ill and good, by fear and bounty and
largely by amusement, but ultimately to their own and Rome's
destruction.
For all the time the two great adversaries of the Empire, the spiritual
and material, the Christian and the men of the North, were gaining
strength and unity. Under Augustus, Christ was born. Under Augustus,
Hermann the German chieftain destroyed Varus and his legions. By sheer
strength and endurance, the Army widened and broadened the Empire,
forcing back the Northmen upon themselves like a spring that gathers
force by tension. Unnoticed, at first, Christianity quietly grew to
power. Between Christians and Northmen, the Empire of Rome went down at
last, leaving the Empire of Constantinople behind it.
The great change was wrought in about five hundred years, by the Empire,
from the City of the Republic to what had become the City of the Middle
Age; between the reign of Augustus, first Emperor, and the deposition of
the last Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, by Odoacer, Rome's hired
Pomeranian general.
In that time Rome was transubstantiated in all its elements, in
population, in language, in religion and in customs. To all intents and
purposes, the original Latin race utterly disappeared, and the Latin
tongue became the broken dialect of a mixed people, out of which the
modern Italian speech was to grow, decadent in form, degenerate in
strength but renascent in a grace and beauty which the Latin never
possessed. First the vast population of slaves brought in their
civilized and their barbarous words--Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, or
Celtic, German and Slav; then came the Goth, and filled all Italy with
himself and his rough language for a hundred years. The Latin of the
Roman Mass is the Latin of slaves in Rome between the first and fifth
centuries, from the time of the Apostles to that of Pope Gelasius, whose
prayer for peace and rest is the last known addition to the Canon,
according to most authorities. Compare it with the Latin of Livy and
Tacitus; it is not the same language, for to read the one by no means
implies an understanding of the other.
Or take the dress. It is told of Augustus, as a strange and almost
unknown thing, that he wore breeches and stockings, or leg swathings,
because he suffered continually with cold. Men went barelegged and
wrapped themselves in the huge toga which came down to their feet. In
the days of Augustulus the toga was almost forgotten; men wore leggings,
tunics and the short Greek cloak.
In the change of religion, too, all customs were transformed, private
and public, in a way impossible to realize today. The Roman household,
with the father as absolute head, lord and despot, gradually gave way to
a sort of half-patriarchal, half-religious family life, resembling the
first in principle but absolutely different from it in details and
result, and which, in a measure, has survived in Italy to the present
time.
In the lives of men, the terror of one man, as each despot lost power,
began to give way to the fear of half-defined institutions, of the
distant government in Constantinople and of the Church as a secular
power, till the time came when the title of Emperor raised a smile,
whereas the name of the Pope--of the 'Father-Bishop'--was spoken with
reverence by Christians and with respect even by unbelievers. The time
came when the army that had made Emperors and unmade them at its
pleasure became a mere band of foreign mercenaries, who fought for wages
and plunder when they could be induced to fight for Rome at all.
So the change came. But in the long five hundred years of the Western
Empire Rome had filled the world with the results of her own life and
had founded modern Europe, from the Danube to England and from the Rhine
to Gibraltar; so that when the tide set towards the south again, the
Northmen brought back to Italy some of the spirit and some of the
institutions which Rome had carried northwards to them in the days of
conquest; and they came not altogether as strangers and barbarians, as
the Huns had come, to ravage and destroy, and be themselves destroyed
and scattered and forgotten, but, in a measure, as Europeans against
Europeans, hoping to grasp the remnants of a civilized power. Theodoric
tried to make a real kingdom, Totila and Teias fell fighting for one;
the Franks established one in Gaul, and at last it was a Frank who gave
the Empire life again, and conquests and laws, and was crowned by the
Christian Pontifex Maximus in Rome when Julius Caesar had been dead more
than eight hundred years.
One of the greatest of the world's historians has told the story of the
change, calling it the 'Decline and Fall of the Empire,' and describing
it in some three thousand pages, of which scarcely one can be spared for
the understanding of the whole. Thereby its magnitude may be gauged, but
neither fairly judged nor accurately measured. The man who would grasp
the whole meaning of Rome's name, must spend a lifetime in study and
look forward to disappointment in the end. It was Ampere, I believe, who
told a young student that he might get a superficial impression of the
city in ten years, but that twenty would be necessary in order to know
anything about it worthy to be written. And perhaps the largest part of
the knowledge worth having lies in the change from the ancient capital
of the Empire to the mediaeval seat of ecclesiastic domination.
And, indeed, nothing in all history is more extraordinary than the rise
of Rome's second power under the Popes. In the ordinary course of human
events, great nations appear to have had but one life. When that was
lived out, and when they had passed through the artistic period so often
coincident with early decadence, they were either swept away, or they
sank to the insignificance of mere commercial prosperity, thereafter
deriving their fashions, arts, tastes, and in fact almost everything
except their wealth, from nations far gone in decay.
[Illustration: THE CAMPAGNA
And Ruins of the Claudian Aqueduct]
But in Rome it was otherwise. The growth of the faith which subjected
the civilized world was a matter of first importance to civilization,
and Rome was the centre of that growing. Moreover, that development and
that faith had one head, chosen by election, and the headship itself
became an object of the highest ambition, whereby the strength and
genius of individuals and families were constantly called into activity,
and both families and isolated individuals of foreign race were
attracted to Rome. It was no small thing to hold the kings of the earth
in spiritual subjection, to be the arbiter of the new Empire founded by
Charlemagne, the director of the kingdoms built up in France and
England, and, almost literally, the feudal lord over all other temporal
powers. The force of a predominant idea gave Rome new life, vivifying
new elements with the vitality of new ambitions. The theatre was the
same. The actors and the play had changed. The world was no longer
governed by one man as monarch; it was directed by one man, who was the
chief personage in the vast and intricate feudal system by which strong
men agreed to live, and to which they forced the weak to submit.
The Barons came into existence, and Rome was a city of fortresses and
towers, as well as churches. Orsini and Colonna, Caetani and
Vitelleschi, Savelli and Frangipani, fought with each other for
centuries among ruins, built strongholds of the stones of temples, and
burned the marble treasures of the world to make lime. And fiercely they
held their own. Nicholas Rienzi wanders amid the deserted places,
deciphers the broken inscriptions, gathers a little crowd of plebeians
about him and tells them of ancient Rome, and of the rights of the
people in old times. All at once he rises, a grand shadow of a Roman, a
true tribune, brave, impulsive, eloquent. A little while longer and he
is half mad with vanity and ambition, a public fool in a high place,
decking himself in silks and satins, and ornaments of gold, and the
angry nobles slay him on the steps of the Aracoeli, as other nobles
long ago slew Tiberius Gracchus, a greater and a better man, almost on
the same spot.