lendidly lavish, exquisitely gracious, he was born
to charm, and his charm was such that it still subsists. Cato alone was
unenthralled. But Cato was never pleased; he laughed but once, and all
Rome turned out to see him; he belonged to an earlier day, to an
austerer, perhaps to a better one, and it may be that in "that woman,"
as he called Caesar, his clearer vision discerned beneath the plumage
of the peacock, the beak and talons of the bird of prey. For they were
there, and needed only a vote of the senate to batten on nations of
which the senate had never heard. Loan him an army, and "that woman"
was to give geography such a twist that today whoso says Caesar says
history.

Was it this that Cato saw, or may it be that one of the oracles which
had not ceased to speak had told him of that coming night when he was
to take his own life, fearful lest "that woman" should overwhelm him
with the magnificence of his forgiveness? Cato walks through history,
as he walked through the Forum, bare of foot--too severe to be simple,
too obstinate to be generous--the image of ancient Rome.

In Caesar there was nothing of this. He was wholly modern; dissolute
enough for any epoch, but possessed of virtues that his contemporaries
could not spell. A slave tried to poison him. Suetonius says he merely
put the slave to death. The "merely" is to the point. Cato would have
tortured him first. After Pharsalus he forgave everyone. When severe,
it was to himself. It is true he turned over two million people into so
many dead flies, their legs in the air, creating, as Tacitus has it, a
solitude which he described as Peace; but what antitheses may not be
expected in a man who, before the first century was begun, divined the
fifth, and who in the Suevians--that terrible people beside whom no
nation could live--foresaw Attila!

Save in battle his health was poor. He was epileptic, his strength
undermined by incessant debauches; yet let a nation fancying him months
away put on insurgent airs, and on that nation he descended as the
thunder does. In his campaigns time and again he overtook his own
messengers. A phantom in a ballad was not swifter than he.
Simultaneously his sword flashed in Germany, on the banks of the
Adriatic, in that Ultima Thule where the Britons lived. From the depths
of Gaul he dominated Rome, and therewith he was penetrating
impenetrable forests, trailing legions as a torch trails smoke,
erecting walls that a nation could