nt the man
who in his lifetime was not unfrequently its laughing-stock
and its scandal. But the greatest of these marks of respect
was the involuntary homage which Caesar rendered to him, when he made
an exception to the contemptuous clemency with which he was wont
to treat his opponents, Pompeians as well as republicans,
in the case of Cato alone, and pursued him even beyond the grave
with that energetic hatred which practical statesmen are wont to feel
towards antagonists opposing them from a region of ideas
which they regard as equally dangerous and impracticable.

Chapter XI

The Old Republic and the New Monarchy

Character of Caesar

The new monarch of Rome, the first ruler over the whole domain
of Romano-Hellenic civilization, Gaius Julius Caesar, was in his
fifty-sixth year (born 12 July 652?) when the battle at Thapsus,
the last link in a long chain of momentous victories, placed
the decision as to the future of the world in his hands. Few men
have had their elasticity so thoroughly put to the proof as Caesar--
the sole creative genius produced by Rome, and the last produced
by the ancient world, which accordingly moved on in the path
that he marked out for it until its sun went down. Sprung from one
of the oldest noble families of Latium--which traced back its lineage
to the heroes of the Iliad and the kings of Rome, and in fact
to the Venus-Aphrodite common to both nations--he spent the years
of his boyhood and early manhood as the genteel youth of that epoch
were wont to spend them. He had tasted the sweetness as well as
the bitterness of the cup of fashionable life, had recited and declaimed,
had practised literature and made verses in his idle hours,
had prosecuted love-intrigues of every sort, and got himself
initiated into all the mysteries of shaving, curls, and ruffles
pertaining to the toilette-wisdom of the day, as well as
into the still more mysterious art of always borrowing and never paying.
But the flexible steel of that nature was proof against even
these dissipated and flighty courses; Caesar retained both
his bodily vigour and his elasticity of mind and of heart unimpaired.
In fencing and in riding he was a match for any of his soldiers,
and his swimming saved his life at Alexandria; the incredible rapidity
of his journeys, which usually for the sake of gaining time
were performed by night--a thorough contrast to the procession-like
slowness with which Pompeius moved from one p