t burden than
their mature mothers. And of Caesar's mother, though little is recorded,
and that little incidentally, this much at least we learn--that, if she
looked down upon him with maternal pride and delight, she looked up to
him with female ambition as the re-edifier of her husband's honours,--
looked with reverence as to a column of the Roman grandeur and with fear
and feminine anxieties as to one whose aspiring spirit carried him but
too prematurely into the fields of adventurous strife. One slight and
evanescent sketch of the relations which subsisted between Caesar and
his mother, caught from the wrecks of time, is preserved both by
Plutarch and Suetonius. We see in the early dawn the young patrician
standing upon the steps of his patrimonial portico, his mother with her
arms wreathed about his neck, looking up to his noble countenance,
sometimes drawing auguries of hope from features so fitted for command,
sometimes boding an early blight to promises so dangerously magnificent.
That she had something of her son's aspiring character, or that he
presumed so much in a mother of his, we learn from the few words which
survive of their conversation. He addressed to her no language that
could tranquillise her fears. On the contrary, to any but a Roman mother
his valedictory words, taken in connexion with the known determination
of his character, were of a nature to consummate her depression, as they
tended to confirm the very worst of her fears. He was then going to
stand his chance in a popular electioneering contest for an office of
the highest dignity, and to launch himself upon the storms of the Campus
Martius. At that period, besides other and more ordinary dangers, the
bands of gladiators, kept in the pay of the more ambitious or turbulent
amongst the Roman nobles, gave a popular tone of ferocity and of
personal risk to the course of such contests; and, either to forestall
the victory of an antagonist, or to avenge their own defeat, it was not
at all impossible that a body of incensed competitors might intercept
his final triumph by assassination. For this danger, however, he had no
leisure in his thoughts of consolation; the sole danger which _he_
contemplated, or supposed his mother to contemplate, was the danger of
defeat, and for that he reserved his consolations. He bade her fear
nothing; for that his determination was to return with victory, and with
the ensigns of the dignity he sought, or to return a corp