had projected the scheme of attacking Burebistas king of the Getae,
who was greatly extending his power on both sides of the Danube,(37)
and of protecting Italy in the north-east by border-districts
similar to those which he had created for it in Gaul. On the other hand
there is no evidence at all that Caesar contemplated like Alexander
a career of victory extending indefinitely far; it is said indeed
that he had intended to march from Parthia to the Caspian
and from this to the Black Sea and then along its northern shores
to the Danube, to annex to the empire all Scythia and Germany as far as
the Northern Ocean--which according to the notions of that time was not
so very distant from the Mediterranean--and to return home through Gaul;
but no authority at all deserving of credit vouches for the existence
of these fabulous projects. In the case of a state which, like the Roman
state of Caesar, already included a mass of barbaric elements difficult
to be controlled, and had still for centuries to come more than enough
to do with their assimilation, such conquests, even granting their
military practicability, would have been nothing but blunders
far more brilliant and far worse than the Indian expedition
of Alexander. Judging both from Caesar's conduct in Britain
and Germany and from the conduct of those who became the heirs
of his political ideas, it is in a high degree probable that Caesar
with Scipio Aemilianus called on the gods not to increase the empire,
but to preserve it, and that his schemes of conquest restricted
themselves to a settlement of the frontier--measured, it is true,
by his own great scale--which should secure the line of the Euphrates,
and, instead of the fluctuating and militarily useless boundary
of the empire on the north-east, should establish and render defensible
the line of the Danube.

Attempts of Caesar to Avert Military Despotism

But, if it remains a mere probability that Caesar ought not
to be designated a world-conqueror in the same sense as Alexander
and Napoleon, it is quite certain that his design was not to rest
his new monarchy primarily on the support of the army nor generally
to place the military authority above the civil, but to incorporate
it with, and as far as possible subordinate it to, the civil
commonwealth. The invaluable pillars of a military state,
those old and far-famed Gallic legions, were honourably dissolved
just on account of the incompatibility of their espr