eculiar to him; as clients,
to requite whose services, and to avenge whose wrongs and death,
constituted in his view a sacred duty. Perhaps there never was an army
which was so perfectly what an army ought to be--a machine able
for its ends and willing for its ends, in the hand of a master,
who transfers to it his own elasticity. Caesar's soldiers were,
and felt themselves, a match for a tenfold superior force;
in connection with which it should not be overlooked, that under
the Roman tactics--calculated altogether for hand-to-hand conflict
and especially for combat with the sword--the practised Roman soldier
was superior to the novice in a far higher degree than is now the case
under the circumstances of modern times.(3) But still more
than by the superiority of valour the adversaries of Caesar
felt themselves humbled by the unchangeable and touching fidelity
with which his soldiers clung to their general. It is perhaps
without a parallel in history, that when the general summoned
his soldiers to follow him into the civil war, with the single exception
already mentioned of Labienus, no Roman officer and no Roman soldier
deserted him. The hopes of his opponents as to an extensive
desertion were thwarted as ignominiously as the former attempts
to break up his army like that of Lucullus.(4) Labienus himself
appeared in the camp of Pompeius with a band doubtless of Celtic
and German horsemen but without a single legionary. Indeed
the soldiers, as if they would show that the war was quite as much
their matter as that of their general, settled among themselves
that they would give credit for the pay, which Caesar had promised
to double for them at the outbreak of the civil war, to their commander
up to its termination, and would meanwhile support their poorer comrades
from the general means; besides, every subaltern officer
equipped and paid a trooper out of his own purse.

Field of Caesar's Power
Upper Italy

While Caesar thus had the one thing which was needful--
unlimited political and military authority and a trustworthy army
ready for the fight--his power extended, comparatively speaking,
over only a very limited space. It was based essentially
on the province of Upper Italy. This region was not merely
the most populous of all the districts of Italy, but also devoted
to the cause of the democracy as its own. The feeling
which prevailed there is shown by the conduct of a division of recruits
from Opitergiu