to the palace and destroyed the
great Alexandrine library, the most wonderful in the world. Caesar
himself only just escaped: he had to swim across the harbour, holding
his papers in one hand.

[Illustration: CLEOPATRA from a coin]

The danger was serious but brief. Reinforcements arrived from Cilicia:
the Egyptian rebels were defeated: the ex-vizier put to death: Cleopatra
and her brother made rulers over Egypt under the protection of Rome.
Caesar in the spring crossed to Asia Minor, where he came, saw, and
conquered, as he himself said. In September he was in Athens: in October
in Rome: in December in Africa. There, at the battle of Thapsus, he
crushed out the last spark of opposition. Cato, who had fled to Utica,
killed himself, much to Caesar's distress. He admired the sturdy
independence of the old man and would have spared him. His daughter
Portia was married to Marcus Junius Brutus, a Pompeian whom Caesar had
pardoned and loved as a son.

The secret of Caesar's clemency, which astonished his contemporaries,
lay partly in his own nature, partly in his clear purpose to
re-establish life in Rome on a firm and lasting foundation. His mind had
no bitterness. Bitterness arises out of some inner uncertainty; Caesar
had a rare certainty as to what he wanted to do and as to his being able
to do it. He was not afraid of other people or of their judgements. He
had no need to compare himself uneasily with them. He could stand on
what he did, irrespective of what they thought about it. He had come to
build, not to destroy. He had seen the failure of Marius and of Sulla.
Sulla had tried to restart Rome on a false basis--the rule of one party
in the State, standing on the bleeding bodies and broken fortunes of the
other. He had failed. His system had crumbled, and in its ruin it had
brought the whole State to the ground. Moreover, Sulla's system had left
no room for growth. Rome's task in the world had grown enormously and
the old machine was quite incapable of fulfilling it. Caesar wanted to
create a new machine that could govern not a city but a world.

[Illustration: A ROMAN COIN
celebrating the murder of Caesar]

Caesar worked with the energy and power of a giant at his colossal task.
Every part of the State was in disorder--the army, the navy, the
treasury, the laws, trade, the whole business of government. He had to
reconstruct the whole, and in the space of little more than a year he
did much towards this. An