a struggle "of life and death"--was awaiting them; and that in his opinion nothing could avert it, short of a great Parthian invasion, deluging the Eastern provinces-Greece, Asia Minor, Syria-such as might force "the two chieftains into an instant distraction of their efforts. Out of that would grow the absence of one or other; and upon that separation, for the present, might hang an incalculable series of changes. Else, and but for this one contingency, he announced the fate of Rome to be sealed.

The new year came, the year 705, and with it new consuls. One of these, C. Marcellus, was distinguished amongst the enemies of Cæsar by his personal rancour-a feeling which he shared with his twin-brother Marcus. In the first day of this month, the senate was to decide upon Caesar's proposals, as a basis for future arrangement. They did so; they voted the proposals, by a large majority, unsatisfactory-instantly assumed a fierce martial attitude-fulminated the most hostile of all decrees, and authorized shocking outrages upon those who, in official situations, represented Cæsar's interest. These men fled for their lives. Cæsar, on receiving their report, gave the signal for advance; and in forty-eight hours had crossed the little brook called the Rubicon, which determined the marches or frontier line of his province. Earlier by a month than this great event, Cicero had travelled southwards. Thus his object was-to place himself in personal communication with Pompey, whose vast Neapolitan estates drew him often into that quarter. But, to his great consternation, he found himself soon followed by the whole stream of Roman grandees, flying before Cæsar through the first two months of the year.

A majority of the senators had chosen, together with the consuls, to become emigrants from Rome, rather than abide any compromise with Cæsar. And, as these were chiefly the rich and potent in the aristocracy, naturally they drew along with themselves many humble dependants, both in a pecuniary and a political sense. A strange rumour prevailed at this moment, to which even Cicero showed himself maliciously credulous, that Cæsar's natural temper was cruel, and that his policy also had taken that direction. But the brilliant result with In the next six or seven weeks changed

the face of politics, disabused every body of their delusions, and showed how large a portion of the panic had been due to monstrous misconceptions. For already, in March, multitudes of refugees had returned to Cæsar. By the first week of April, that "monster of energy," (that reges of superhuman dispatch,) as Cicero repeatedly styles Caesar, bad marched through Italyhad received the submission of every strong fortress-had driven Pompey into his last Calabrian retreat of Brundusium, (at which point it was that this unhappy man unconsciously took his last farewell of Italian ground)— had summarily kicked him out of Brundusium-an, having thus cleared all Italy of enemies, was on his road back to Rome. From this city, within the first ten days of April he moved onwards to the Spanish war, where, in reality, the true strength of Rompey's cause-strong legions of soldiers, chiefly Italian-awaited him in strong positions, chosen at leisure, under Afranius and Petreius. For the rest of this year, 705, Pompey was unmolested. In 706, Cæsar, victorious from Spain, addressed himself to the task of overthrowing Pompey in person; and, on the 9th of August in that year, took place the ever-memorable battle on the river Pharsalus in Thessaly.

During all this period of about one year and a half, Cicero's letters, at intermitting periods, hold the same language. They fluctuate, indeed, strangely in temper; for they run through all the changes incident to hoping, trusting, and disappointed friendship. Nothing can equal the expression of his scorn for Pompey's inertia, when contrasted with energy so astonishing on the part of his antagonist. Cicero had also been deceived as to facts. The plan of the campaign had, to him in particular, not been communicated-he had been allowed to calculate on a final resistance in Italy. This was certainly impossible. But the policy of maintaining a show of opposition, which it was intended to abandon at every point, or of procuring for Cæsar the credit of so many successive triumphs, which might all have been evaded, has never received any explanation.

Towards the middle of February, Cicero acknowledges the receipt of letters from Rome, which in one sense are valuable, as exposing the system of

self-delusion prevailing. Domitius, it seems, who soon after laid down his arms at Corfinium, and with Corfinium, parading his forces only to make a more solemn surrender, had, as the despatches from Rome asserted, an army on which he could rely; as to Cæsar, that nothing was easier than to intercept him; that such was Cæsar's own impression; that honest men were recovering their spirits; and that the rogues at Rome [Romæ improbos] were one and all in consternation. It tells powerfully for Cicero's sagacity, that now, amidst this general explosion of childish hopes, he only was sternly incredulous. "Hæc metuo, equidem, ne sint somnia." Yes, he had learned by this time to appreciate the windy reliances of his party. He had an argument from experience for slighting their vain demonstrations ; and he had a better argument from the future, as that future was really contemplated in the very counsels of the leader. Pompey, though nominally controlled by other men of consular rank, was at present an autocrat for the management of the war. What was his policy? Cicero bad now discovered, not so much through confidential interviews, as by the mute tendencies of all the measures adopted-Cicero was satisfied that his total policy had been, from the first, a policy of de pair.

The position of Pompey, as an old invalid, from whom his party exacted the services of youth, is worthy of separate notice. There is not, perhaps, a more pitiable situation than that of a veteran reposing upon his past laurels, who is summoned from beds of down, and from the elaborate system of comforts engrafted upon a princely establishment, suddenly to re-assume his armour-to prepare for personal hardships of every kind-to renew his youthful anxieties, without support from youthful energies-once again to dispute sword in hand the title to his own honours-to pay back into the chancery of war, as into some fund of abeyance, all his own prizes, and palms of every kind to re-open every

decision or award by which he had ever benefited-and to view his own national distinctions of name, trophy, laurel crown,* as all but so many stakes provisionally resumed, which must be redeemed by services tenfold more difficult than those by which originally they had been earned.

Here was a trial painful, unexpected, sudden; such as any man, at any age, might have honourably declined. The very best contingency in such a struggle was, that nothing might be lost; whilst, along with this doubtful hope, ran the certainty-that nothing could be gained. More glorious in the popular estimate of his countrymen, Pompey could not become, for his honours were already historical, and touched with the autumnal hues of antiquity, having been won in a generation now. gone by; but on the other hand, he might lose every thing, for, in a contest with so dreadful an antagonist as Cæsar, he could not hope to come off unscorched; and, whatever might be the final event, one result must have struck him as inevitable, viz. that a new generation of men, who had come forward into the arena of life within the last twenty years, would watch the approaching collision with Cæsar as putting to the test a question much canvassed of late, with regard to the soundness and legitimacy of Pompey's military exploits. As a commander-in-chief Pompey was known to have been unusually fortunate. The bloody contests of Marius, Cinna, Sylla, and their vindictive, but perhaps, unavoidable, proscription, had thinned the ranks of natural competitors, at the very opening of Pompey's career. That interval of about eight years, by which he was senior to Cæsar, happened to make the whole difference between a crowded list of candidates for offices of trust, and no list at all. Even more lucky had Pompey found himself in the character of his appointments, and in the quality of his antagonists. All his wars had been of that class which yield great splendour of external show, but impose small exertion and less

The

risk.

In the war with Mithridates he succeeded to great captains who had sapped the whole stamina and resis tance of the contest; besides that, after all the varnishings of Cicero, when speaking for the Manilian law, the enemy was too notoriously effeminate. The bye-battle with the Cilician pirates, is more obscure; but it is certain that the extraordinary powers conferred on Pompey by the Gabinian law, gave to him, as compared with his predecessors in the same effort at cleansing the Levant from a nuisance, something like the unfair superiority above their brethren enjoyed by some of Charlemagne's paladins, in the possession of enchanted weapons. The success was already ensured by the great armament placed at Pompey's disposal; and still more by his unlimited commission, which enabled him to force these water-rats out of their holes, and to bring them all into one focus; whilst the pompous name of Bellum Piraticum, exaggerated to all after years a success which had been at the moment too partially facilitated. Finally, in his triumph over Sertorius, where only he would have found a great Roman enemy capable of applying some measure of power to himself, by the energies of resistance, although the transaction is circumstantially involved in much darkness, enough remains to show that Pompey shrank from open contest-passively, how far co-operatively it is hard to say, Pompey owed his triumph to mere acts of decoy and subsequent assassination.

Upon this sketch of Pompey's military life, it is evident that he must have been regarded, after the enthusiasm of the moment had gone by, as a hollow scenical pageant. But what had produced this enthusiasm at the moment? It was the remoteness of the scenes. The pirates had been a troublesome enemy, precisely in that sense which made the Pindarrees of India such to ourselves; because, as flying marauders, lurking and watching their opportunities, they could seldom be brought to action; so that not their power, but their want of power, made them formidable, indisposing themselves to concentration, and consequently weakening the motive to a combined effort against them. Then, as to Mithridates, a great error prevailed in Rome with regard to the quality of his power. The spacious

ness of his kingdom, its remoteness, his power of retreat into Armeniaall enabled him to draw out the war into a lingering struggle. These local advantages were misinterpreted. A man who could resist Sylla, Lucullus, and others, approved himself to the raw judgments of the multitude as a dangerous enemy. Whence a very disproportionate appreciation of Pompey-as of a second Scipio who had destroyed a second Hannibal. If

As

Hannibal had transferred the war to the gates of Rome, why not Mithridates, who had come westwards as far as Greece? And, upon that argument, the panic-struck people of Rome fancied that Mithridates might repeat the experiment. They overlooked the changes which nearly one hundred and fifty years had wrought. possible it would have been for Seindia and Holkar forty years ago, as possible for Tharawaddie at this moment, to conduct an expedition into England, as for Mithridates to have invaded Italy at the era of 670-80 of Rome. There is a wild romantic legend, surviving in old Scandinavian literature, that Mithridates did not die by suicide, but that he passed over the Black Sea; from Pontus on the south-east of that sea to the Baltic; crossed the Baltic; and became that Odin whose fierce vindictive spirit reacted upon Rome, in after centuries, through the Goths and Vandals, his supposed descendants: just as the blood of Dido, the Carthaginian queen, after mounting to the heavens-under her dying imprecation,

"Exoriare aliquis nostro de sanguine vindex'

came round in a vast arch of bloodshed upon Rome, under the retaliation of Hannibal, four or five centuries later. This Scandinavian legend might answer for a grand romance, carrying with it, like the Punic legend, a semblance of mighty retribution; but, as an historical possibility, any Mithridatic invasion of Italy would be extravagant. Having been swallowed, however, by Roman credulity as a danger, always in procinctu, so long as the old Pontic lion should be unchained, naturally it had happened that this groundless panic, from its very indistinctness and shadowy outline, became more available for Pompey's immoderate glorification than any service so much nearer to home

as to be more rationally appreciable. With the same unexampled luck, Pompey, as the last man in the series against Mithridates, stepped into the inheritance of merit belonging to the entire series in that service; and as the labourer who easily reaped the harvest, practically threw into oblivion all those who had so painfully sown it. But a special Nemesis haunts the steps of men who become great and illustrious by appropriating the trophies of their brothers. Pompey, more strikingly than any man in history, illustrates the moral in his catastrophe. It is perilous to be dishonourably prosperous; and equally so, as the ancients imagined, whether by direct perfidies, (of which Pompey is deeply suspected,) or by silent acquiescence in unjust honours. Seared as Pompey's sensibilities might be through long self-indulgence, and latterly by annual fits of illness, founded on dyspepsy, he must have had, at this great era, a dim misgiving that his good genius was forsaking him. No Shakspeare, with his unusual warnings, had then proclaimed the dark retribution which awaited his final year: but the sentiment of Shakspeare (see his sonnets) is eternal; and must have whispered itself to Pompey's heart, as he saw the billowy war advancing upon him in his old age"The painful warrior, famoused for fight,

once

After a thousand victories foil'd, Is from the book of honour razed quite, And all the rest forgot for which he toil'd."

To say the truth, in this instance as in so many others, the great moral of the retribution escapes us-because we do not connect the scattered phenomena into their rigorous unity. Most readers pursue the early steps of this mightiest amongst all civil wars with the hopes and shifting sympathies natural to those who accompanied its motions. Cicero must ever be the great authority for the daily fluctuations of public opinion in the one party, as Cæsar, with a few later authors, for those in the other. But inevitably these coeval authorities, shifting their own positions as events advanced, break the uniformity of the lesson. They did not see, as we may if we will, to the end. Sometimes the Pompeian partizans are cheerful; sometimes even they are sanguine;

once or twice there is absolutely a slight success to colour their vaunts. But much of this is mere political dissimulation. We now find, from the confidential parts of Cicero's correspondence, that he had never heartily hoped from the hour when he first ascertained Pompey's drooping spirits, and his desponding policy. And in a subsequent stage of the contest, when the war had crossed the Adriatic, we now know, by a remarkable passage in his De Divinatione, that, whatever he might think it prudent to say, never from the moment when he personally attached himself to Pompey's camp, had he felt any reliance whatever on the composition of the army. Even to Pompey's misgiving ear in solitude, a fatal summons must have been sometimes audible, to resign his quiet life and his showy prosperity. The call was in effect-"Leave your palaces; come back to camps-never more to know a quiet hour!" What if he could have heard arrière pensée of the silent call! "Live through a brief season of calamity; live long enough for total ruin; live for a morning on which it will be said-alt is lost; as a panic stricken fugitive, sue to the mercies of slaves; and in return, as a headless trunk, lie like a poor mutilated mariner, rejected by the sea, a wreck from a wreck—owing even the last rites of burial to the pity of a solitary exile." This doom, and thus circumstantially, no man could know. But, in features that were even gloomier than these, Pompey might, through his long experience of men, have foreseen the bitter course which he had to traverse. It did not require any extraordinary self-knowledge to guess, that continued opposition upon the plan of the campaign would breed fretfulness in himself; that the irritation of frequent failure, inseparable from a war so widely spread, would cause blame or dishonour to himself; that his coming experience would be a mere chaos of obstinacy in council, loud remonstrance in action, crimination and recrimination, insolent dictation from rivals, treachery on the part of friends, flight and desertion on the part of confidants. Yet even this fell short of the shocking consummation into which the frenzy of faction ripened itself within a few months. We know of but one case which resembles it, in one remarkable feature. Those readers who are ac

quainted with Lord Clarendon's History, will remember the very striking portrait which he draws of the king's small army of reserve in Devonshire and the adjacent districts, subsequently to the great parliamentary triumph of Naseby in June 1645. The ground was now cleared; no work remained for Fairfax but to advance to Northampton, and to sweep away the last relics of opposition. In every case this would have proved no trying task. But what was the condition of the hostile forces? Lord Clarendon, who had personally presided at their headquarters whilst in attendance upon the Prince of Wales, describes them in these emphatic terms as "a wicked beaten army." Rarely does history present us with such a picture of utter debasement in an army-coming from no enemy, but from one who, at the very moment of recording his opinion, knew this army to be the king's final resource. Reluctant as a wise man must feel to reject as irredeemable in vileness that which he knows to be indispensable for hope, this solemn opinion of Lord Clarendon's, upon his royal master's last stake, had been in earlier ages anticipated by Cicero, under the very same circumstances, with regard to the same ultimate resource. The army which Pompey had concentrated in the regions of northern Greece, was the ultimate resource of that party: because, though a strong nucleus for other armies existed in other provinces, these remoter dependencies were in all likelihood contingent upon the result from this-were Pompey prosperous, they would be prosperous; if not, not. Knowing, therefore, the fatal emphasis which belonged to his words, not blind to the inference which they involved, Cicero did, notwithstanding, pronounce confidentially that same judgment of despair upon the army soon to perish at Pharsalia, which, from its strange identity of tenor and circumstances, we have quoted from Lord Clarendon. Both statesmen spoke confessedly of a last sheet anchor; both spoke of an army vicious in its military composition: but also, which is the peculiarity of the case, both charged the onus of their own despair upon the non-professional qualities of the soldiers; upon their licentious uncivic temper; upon their open anticipations of plunder; and

upon their tiger-training towards great festival of coming revenge.

Lord Clarendon, however, it may be said, did not include the commander of the Devonshire army in his denunciation. No: and there it is that the two reports differ. Cicero did include the commander. It was the commander whom he had chiefly in his eye, Others, indeed, were parties to the horrid conspiracy against the country which he charged upon Pompey: for non datur conjuratio aliter quam per plures; but these "others" were not the private soldiers-they were the leading officers, the staff, the council at Pompey's headquarters, and generally the men of senatorial rank. Yet still, to complete the dismal unity of the prospect, these conspirators had an army of ruffian fo reigners under their orders, such as formed an appropriate engine for their horrid purposes.

This is a most important point for clearing up the true character of the war; and it has been utterly neglected by historians. It is notorious that Cicero, on first joining the faction of Pompey after the declaration of hostilities, had for some months justified his conduct on the doctrine-that the "causa," the constitutional merits of the dispute, lay with Pompey. He could not deny that Cæsar had grievances to plead; but he insisted on two things-1. that the mode of redress, by which Cæsar made his appeal, was radically illegal-2. that the certain tendency of this redress was to a civil revolution, Such had been the consistent representation of Cicero, until the course of events made him better acquainted with Pompey's real temper and policy. It is also notorious-and here lies the key to the error of all biographers that about two years later, when the miserable death of Pompey had indisposed Cicero to remember his wicked unaccomplished purposes, and when the assassination of Cæsar had made it safe to resume his ancient mysterious animosity to the very name of the great man, Cicero did undoubtedly go back to his early way of distinguishing between them. As an orator, and as a philosopher, he brought back his original distortions of the case. Pompey, it was again pleaded, had been a champion of the state, (sometimes he ventured upon saying, of liberty,) Cæsar