o had braved for it
the daggers of assassins and the executioners of the aristocracy,
the swords of the Germans and the waves of the unknown ocean,
without ever yielding or wavering; who had torn to pieces
the Sullan constitution, had overthrown the rule of the senate,
and had furnished the defenceless and unarmed democracy with protection
and with arms by means of the struggle beyond the Alps. And he spoke,
not to the Clodian public whose republican enthusiasm had been
long burnt down to ashes and dross, but to the young men from the towns
and villages of Northern Italy, who still felt freshly and purely
the mighty influence of the thought of civic freedom; who were still
capable of fighting and of dying for ideals; who had themselves
received for their country in a revolutionary way from Caesar
the burgess-rights which the government refused to them;
whom Caesar's fall would leave once more at the mercy of the -fasces-,
and who already possessed practical proofs(26) of the inexorable use
which the oligarchy proposed to make of these against the Transpadanes.
Such were the listeners before whom such an orator set forth the facts--
the thanks for the conquest of Gaul which the nobility were preparing
for the general and his army; the contemptuous setting aside
of the comitia; the overawing of the senate; the sacred duty
of protecting with armed hand the tribunate of the people wrested
five hundred years ago by their fathers arms in hand from the nobility,
and of keeping the ancient oath which these had taken for themselves
as for their children's children that they would man by man stand firm
even to death for the tribunes of the people.(27) And then, when he--
the leader and general of the popular party--summoned the soldiers
of the people, now that conciliatory means had been exhausted
and concession had reached its utmost limits, to follow him in the last,
the inevitable, the decisive struggle against the equally hated
and despised, equally perfidious and incapable, and in fact ludicrously
incorrigible aristocracy--there was not an officer or a soldier
who could hold back. The order was given for departure; at the head
of his vanguard Caesar crossed the narrow brook which separated
his province from Italy, and which the constitution forbade
the proconsul of Gaul to pass. When after nine years' absence
he trod once more the soil of his native land, he trod at the same time
the path of revolution. "The die was cast