the earth, who in great matters and little
never acted according to inclination or caprice, but always
without exception according to his duty as ruler, and who,
when he looked back on his life, found doubtless erroneous calculations
to deplore, but no false step of passion to regret. There is nothing
in the history of Caesar's life, which even on a small scale(2)
can be compared with those poetico-sensual ebullitions--such as
the murder of Kleitos or the burning of Persepolis--which the history
of his great predecessor in the east records. He is, in fine,
perhaps the only one of those mighty ones, who has preserved
to the end of his career the statesman's tact of discriminating between
the possible and the impossible, and has not broken down in the task
which for greatly gifted natures is the most difficult of all--
the task of recognizing, when on the pinnacle of success,
its natural limits. What was possible he performed, and never left
the possible good undone for the sake of the impossible better,
never disdained at least to mitigate by palliatives evils
that were incurable. But where he recognized that fate had spoken,
he always obeyed. Alexander on the Hypanis, Napoleon at Moscow,
turned back because they were compelled to do so, and were indignant
at destiny for bestowing even on its favourites merely limited successes;
Caesar turned back voluntarily on the Thames and on the Rhine;
and thought of carrying into effect even at the Danube and the Euphrates
not unbounded plans of world-conquest, but merely well-considered
frontier-regulations.

Such was this unique man, whom it seems so easy and yet is so infinitely
difficult to describe. His whole nature is transparent clearness;
and tradition preserves more copious and more vivid information
about him than about any of his peers in the ancient world.
Of such a personage our conceptions may well vary in point
of shallowness or depth, but they cannot be, strictly speaking,
different; to every not utterly perverted inquirer the grand figure
has exhibited the same essential features, and yet no one
has succeeded in reproducing it to the life. The secret lies
in its perfection. In his character as a man as well as in his place
in history, Caesar occupies a position where the great contrasts
of existence meet and balance each other. Of mighty creative power
and yet at the same time of the most penetrating judgment;
no longer a youth and not yet an old man; o