who, captured by the insinuations
and flatteries of the opposite side, swears to obey his own laws
"so far as they may be legal." There was Sulla, of the class
of men to which Alcibiades and Alexander belonged, but an
inferior specimen of the class and unscrupulous rip, and a brave
successful commander; personally beautiful, till his way of
living made his face "like a mulberry sprinkled with flour";--
with many elements of greatness always negatived by sudden
fatuities; much of genius, more of fool, and most of rake-helly
demirep; highly cultured, and plunderer of Athens and Delphi;
great general, who maintained his hold on his troops by unlimited
tolerance of undiscipline. There was Crassus the millionaire,
and all his millions won by cheatery and ugly methods; the man
with the slave fire-brigade, with which he made a pretty thing
out of looting at fires. There was Cicero, with many noble and
Roman qualities and a large foolish vanity: thundering orator
with more than a _soupcon_ of the vaudeville favorite in him: a
Hamlet who hardly showed his real fineness until he came to die.

And there was Pompey;--real honesty in Pompey, perhaps the one
true-hearted gentleman of the age: a man of morale, and a
great soldier,--who might have done something if his general
intelligence had been as great as his military genius and his
sense of honor:--surely Pompey was the best of the lot of them;
only the cursed spite was that the world was out of joint, and it
needed something more than a fine soldier and gentleman to set it
right.--And then Caesar--could he not do it? Caesar, the
Superman,--the brilliant all-round genius at last,--the man of
scandalous life--scandalous even in that cesspool Rome,--the
epileptic who dreamed of world-dominion,--the conqueror of Gaul,
says H.P. Blavatsky, because in Gaul alone the Sacred Mysteries
survived in their integrity, and it was his business, on behalf
of the dark forces against mankind, to quench their life and
light for ever;--could not this Caesar do it? No; he had the
genius; but not that little quality which all greatest
personalities,--all who have not passed beyond the limits of
personality: tact, impersonality, the power that the disciple
shall covet, to make himself as nothing in the eyes of men:--
and because he lacked that for armor, there were knives
sharpened which should reach his heart before long.--And then,
in literature, two figures mentionable: Lucretius, th