f the highest energy of will
and the highest capacity of execution; filled with republican ideals
and at the same time born to be a king; a Roman in the deepest essence
of his nature, and yet called to reconcile and combine in himself
as well as in the outer world the Roman and the Hellenic
types of culture--Caesar was the entire and perfect man.
Accordingly we miss in him more than in any other historical personage
what are called characteristic features, which are in reality
nothing else than deviations from the natural course of human development.
What in Caesar passes for such at the first superficial glance is,
when more closely observed, seen to be the peculiarity
not of the individual, but of the epoch of culture or of the nation;
his youthful adventures, for instance, were common to him
with all his more gifted contemporaries of like position,
his unpoetical but strongly logical temperament was the temperament
of Romans in general. It formed part also of Caesar's full humanity
that he was in the highest degree influenced by the conditions
of time and place; for there is no abstract humanity--
the living man cannot but occupy a place in a given nationality
and in a definite line of culture. Caesar was a perfect man
just because he more than any other placed himself amidst
the currents of his time, and because he more than any other possessed
the essential peculiarity of the Roman nation--practical aptitude
as a citizen--in perfection: for his Hellenism in fact was only
the Hellenism which had been long intimately blended with the Italian
nationality. But in this very circumstance lies the difficulty,
we may perhaps say the impossibility, of depicting Caesar to the life.
As the artist can paint everything save only consummate beauty,
so the historian, when once in a thousand years he encounters
the perfect, can only be silent regarding it. For normality admits
doubtless of being expressed, but it gives us only the negative notion
of the absence of defect; the secret of nature, whereby
in her most finished manifestations normality and individuality
are combined, is beyond expression. Nothing is left for us
but to deem those fortunate who beheld this perfection, and to gain
some faint conception of it from the reflected lustre which rests
imperishably on the works that were the creation of this great nature.
These also, it is true, bear the stamp of the time. The Roman hero
himself stood by the side of his yo