the world, it fostered the peace and prosperity of the many nations united under its sway longer and more completely than any other leading power has ever succeeded in doing. It is in the agricultural towns of Africa, in the homes of the vine-dressers on the Moselle, in the flourishing townships of the Lycian mountains, and on the margin of the Syrian desert, that the work of the imperial period is to be sought and to be found. Even now there are various regions of the East, as of the West, as regards which the imperial period marks a climax of good government, very modest in itself, but never withal attained before or since; and if an angel of the Lord were to strike the balance whether the domain ruled by Severus Antoninus was governed with greater intelligence and the greater humanity at that time or in the pres ent day, whether civilization and national prosperity generally have since that time advanced or retrograded, it is very doubtful whether the decision would prove in favor of the present."

Theodor Mommsen was born at Garding in Schleswig, November 30th, 1817: graduated at Kiel, studied archæology in France and Italy 1844-7, and in 1848 became professor of jurisprudence at Leipzig. His political activity in those troublous years brought about his dismissal in 1850. From 1852 to 1854 he held the professorship of Roman law at Zurich; 1854-8 at Breslau; and finally in 1858 entered upon the professorship of ancient history at Berlin, where this sturdy octogenarian scholar is still (1897) actively engaged in his university lectures, as well as in his manifold literary and scholarly undertakings.

William Cranston Lawton,

TH

THE CHARACTER OF CÆSAR

From the History of Rome'

HE new monarch of Rome, the first ruler of the whole domain of Romano-Hellenic civilization, Gaius Julius Cæsar, was in his fifty-sixth year (born 12th July, 652 A. U. C.) when the battle of Thapsus, the last link in a long chain of momentous victories, placed the decision of the future of the world in his hands. Few men have had their elasticity so thoroughly put to the proof as Cæsar: the sole creative genius produced by Rome, and the last produced by the ancient world, which accordingly moved on in the track that he marked out for it until its sun had set. Sprung from one of the oldest noble families of Latium, which traced back its lineage to the heroes of the Iliad and the kings of Rome, and in fact to the Venus-Aphrodite common to

both nations, he spent the years of his boyhood and early manhood as the genteel youth of that epoch were wont to spend them. He had tasted the sweetness as well as the bitterness of the cup of fashionable life, had recited and declaimed, had practiced literature and made verses in his idle hours, had prosecuted love intrigues of every sort, and got himself initiated into all the mysteries of shaving, curls, and ruffles pertaining to the toilette. wisdom of the day, as well as into the far more mysterious art of always borrowing and never paying.

But the flexible steel of that nature was proof against even these dissipated and flighty courses: Cæsar retained both hist bodily vigor and his elasticity of mind and heart unimpaired. In fencing and in riding he was a match for any of his soldiers, and his swimming saved his life at Alexandria; the incredible rapidity of his journeys, which usually for the sake of gaining time were performed by night,—a thorough contrast to the procession-like slowness with which Pompeius moved from one place to another, was the astonishment of his contemporaries and not the least among the causes of his success. The mind was like the body. His remarkable power of intuition revealed itself in the precision and practicability of all his arrangements, even where he gave orders without having seen with his own eyes. His memory was matchless; and it was easy for him to carry on several occupations simultaneously with equal self-possession. Although a gentleman, a man of genius, and a monarch, he had still a heart. So long as he lived, he cherished the purest veneration for his worthy mother Aurelia (his father having died early). To his wives, and above all to his daughter Julia, he devoted an honorable affection, which was not without reflex influence even on political affairs. With the ablest and most excellent men of his time, of high and of humble rank, he maintained noble relations of mutual fidelity, with each after his kind. he himself never abandoned any of his partisans after the pusillanimous and unfeeling manner of Pompeius, but adhered to his friends and that not merely from calculation - through good and bad times without wavering, several of these, such as Aulus Hirtius and Gaius Matius, even after his death gave noble testimonies of their attachment to him.

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Cæsar was a man of passion, for without passion there is no genius; but his passion was never stronger than he could control. He had had his season of youth, and song, love, and wine had taken joyous possession of his mind; but with him they did not penetrate to the inmost core of his nature. Literature occupied him long and earnestly; but while Alexander could not sleep for thinking of the Homeric Achilles, Cæsar in his sleepless hours mused on the inflections of the Latin nouns and verbs. He made verses as everybody then did, but they were weak; on the other hand he was interested in subjects of astronomy and natural science. While wine was and continued to be with Alexander the destroyer of care, the temperate Roman, after the revels of his youth were over, avoided it entirely. Around him, as around all those whom the full lustre of woman's love has dazzled in youth, fainter gleams of it continued imperishably to linger; even in later years he had his love adventures and successes with women, and he retained a certain foppishness in his outward appearance, or to speak more correctly, a pleasing consciousness of his own manly beauty. He carefully covered the baldness which he keenly felt, with the laurel chaplet that he wore in public in his later years; and he would doubtless have surrendered some of his victories if he could thereby have brought back his youthful locks. But however much, even when monarch, he enjoyed the society of women, he only amused himself with them, and allowed them no manner of influence over him. Even his much-censured relation to Queen Cleopatra was only contrived to mask a weak point in his political position.

Cæsar was thoroughly a realist and a man of sense; and whatever he undertook and achieved was penetrated and guided by the cool sobriety which constitutes the most marked peculiarity of his genius. To this he owed the power of living energetically in the present, undisturbed either by recollection or by expectation; to this he owed the capacity of acting at any moment with collected vigor, and applying his whole genius even to the smallest and most incidental enterprise; to this he owed. the many-sided power with which he grasped and mastered whatever understanding can comprehend and will can compel; to this he owed the self-possessed ease with which he arranged his periods as well as projected his campaigns; to this he owed the "marvelous serenity" which remained steadily with him through good and evil days; to this he owed the complete independence

which admitted of no control by favorite, or by mistress, or even by friend. It resulted, moreover, from this clearness of judgment that Cæsar never formed to himself illusions regarding the power of fate and the ability of man; in his case the friendly veil was lifted up which conceals from man the inadequacy of his working. However prudently he planned and contemplated all possibilities, the feeling was never absent from his heart that in all things, fortune, that is to say accident, must bestow success; and with this may be connected the circumstance that he so often played a desperate game with destiny, and in particular again and again. hazarded his person with daring indifference. As indeed occasionally men of predominant sagacity betake themselves to a pure game of hazard, so there was in Cæsar's rationalism a point at which it came in some measure into contact with mysticism.

Gifts such as these could not fail to produce a statesman. From early youth, accordingly, Cæsar was a statesman in the deepest sense of the term; and his aim was the highest which man is allowed to propose to himself, the political, military, intellectual, and moral regeneration of his own deeply decayed nation, and of the still more deeply decayed Hellenic nation intimately akin to his own. The hard school of thirty years' experience changed his views as to the means by which this aim was to be reached; his aim itself remained the same in the times of his hopeless humiliation and of his unlimited plenitude of power, in the times when as demagogue and conspirator he stole. towards it by paths of darkness, and in those when as joint possessor of the supreme power and then as monarch, he worked at his task in the full light of day before the eyes of the world. All the measures of a permanent kind that proceeded from him at the most various times assume their appropriate places in the great building-plan. We cannot therefore properly speak of isolated achievements of Cæsar; he did nothing isolated.

With justice men commend Cæsar the orator for his masculine eloquence, which, scorning all the arts of the advocate, like a clear flame at once enlightened and warmed. With justice men admire in Cæsar the author the inimitable simplicity of the composition, the unique purity and beauty of the language. With justice the greatest masters of war of all times have praised Cæsar the general, who, in a singular degree disregarding routine and tradition, knew always how to find out the mode of warfare by which in the given case the enemy was conquered,

and which was consequently in the given case the right one; who, with the certainty of divination, found the proper means for every end; who after defeat stood ready for battle like William of Orange, and ended the campaign invariably with victory; who managed that element of warfare, the treatment of which serves to distinguish military genius from the mere ordinary ability of an officer, the rapid movement of masses, with unsurpassed perfection, and found the guarantee of victory not in the massiveness of his forces but in the celerity of their movements, not in long preparation but in rapid and bold action even with inadequate means. But all these were with Cæsar mere secondary matters: he was no doubt a great orator, author, and general, but he became each of these merely because he was a consummate statesman.

The soldier more especially played in him altogether an accessory part; and it is one of the principal peculiarities by which he is distinguished from Alexander, Hannibal, and Napoleon, that he began his political activity not as an officer but as a demagogue. According to his original plan he had purposed to reach his object, like Pericles and Gaius Gracchus, without force of arms; and throughout eighteen years, as leader of the popular party, he had moved exclusively amid political plans and intrigues: until, reluctantly convinced of the necessity for a military sup port, he headed an army when he was already forty years of age. It was natural that even afterwards he should remain still more statesman than general; like Cromwell, who also transformed himself from a leader of opposition into a military chief and democratic king, and who in general, little as the Puritan hero seems to resemble the dissolute Roman, is yet in his development, as well as in the objects which he aimed at and the results which he achieved, of all statesmen perhaps the most akin to Cæsar. Even in his mode of warfare this improvised generalship may still be recognized: the enterprises of Napoleon against Egypt and against England do not more clearly exhibit the artillery lieutenant who had risen by service to command, than the similar enterprises of Cæsar exhibit the demagogue metamorphosed into a general. A regularly trained officer would hardly have been prepared, through political considerations of a not altogether stringent nature, to set aside the best-founded military scruples in the way in which Cæsar did so on several occasions, most strikingly in the case of his landing in Epirus.