years he had love-adventures and successes with women,
and he retained a certain foppishness in his outward appearance,
or, to speak more correctly, the pleasing consciousness
of his own manly beauty. He carefully covered the baldness,
which he keenly felt, with the laurel chaplet that he wore in public
in his later years, and he would doubtless have surrendered
some of his victories, if he could thereby have brought back
his youthful locks. But, however much even when monarch
he enjoyed the society of women, he only amused himself
with them, and allowed them no manner of influence over him;
even his much-censured relation to queen Cleopatra was only contrived
to mask a weak point in his political position.(1) Caesar was thoroughly
a realist and a man of sense; and whatever he undertook
and achieved was pervaded and guided by the cool sobriety
which constitutes the most marked peculiarity of his genius.
To this he owed the power of living energetically in the present,
undisturbed either by recollection or by expectation; to this
he owed the capacity of acting at any moment with collected vigour,
and of applying his whole genius even to the smallest
and most incidental enterprise; to this he owed the many-sided power
with which he grasped and mastered whatever understanding can comprehend
and will can compel; to this he owed the self-possessed ease
with which he arranged his periods as well as projected his campaigns;
to this he owed the "marvellous serenity" which remained
steadily with him through good and evil days; to this he owed
the complete independence, which admitted of no control by favourite
or by mistress, or even by friend. It resulted, moreover,
from this clearness of judgment that Caesar never formed to himself
illusions regarding the power of fate and the ability of man;
in his case the friendly veil was lifted up, which conceals from man
the inadequacy of his working. Prudently as he laid his plans
and considered all possibilities, the feeling was never absent
from his breast that in all things fortune, that is to say accident,
must bestow success; and with this may be connected the circumstance
that he so often played a desperate game with destiny, and in particular
again and again hazarded his person with daring indifference.
As indeed occasionally men of predominant sagacity betake themselves
to a pure game of hazard, so there was in Caesar's rationalism a point
at which it came in some measur