t make haste, or the man will have gone out
of office." Caesar's great success did not divert his natural
inclination for great deeds and his ambition to the enjoyment of that
for which he had laboured, but serving as fuel and incentives to the
future bred in him designs of greater things and love of new glory, as
if he had used up what he had already acquired; and the passion was
nothing else than emulation of himself as if he were another person,
and a kind of rivalry between what he intended and what he had
accomplished; and his propositions and designs were to march against
the Parthians,[583] and after subduing them and marching through
Hyrkania and along the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus, and so
encompassing the Euxine, to invade Scythia, and after having overrun
the countries bordering on the Germans and Germany itself to return
through Gaul to Italy, and so to complete his circle of the empire
which would be bounded on all sides by the ocean. During this
expedition he intended also to dig through the Corinthian
Isthmus,[584] and he had already commissioned Anienus to superintend
the work; and to receive the Tiber[585] immediately below the city in
a deep cut, and giving it a bend towards Circaeum to make it enter the
sea by Tarracina, with the view of giving security and facility to
those who came to Rome for the purpose of trade: besides this he
designed to draw off the water from the marshes about Pomentium and
Setia,[586] and to make them solid ground, which would employ many
thousands of men in the cultivation; and where the sea was nearest to
Rome he designed to place barriers to it by means of moles, and after
clearing away the hidden rocks and dangerous places on the shore of
Ostia[587] to make harbours and naval stations which should give
security to the extensive shipping. And all these things were in
preparation.

LIX. But the arrangement of the Kalendar[588] and the correction of
the irregularity in the reckoning of time were handled by him
skilfully, and being completed were of the most varied utility. For it
was not only in very ancient times that the Romans had the periods of
the moon in confusion with respect to the year, so that the feasts and
festivals gradually changing at last fell out in opposite seasons of
the year, but even with respect to the solar year at that time nobody
kept any reckoning except the priests, who, as they alone knew the
proper time, all of a sudden and when nobody expect