ed the rivers together, walked or rode
through woodland or open side by side, shared the same meagre rations, and
lay in the same tent at the end of the day's march, ready to spring from
the ground at a moment's warning to defend each other against attack from
the savage foe. Caesar's narrative of his campaigns in Gaul is a soldier's
story of military movements, and perhaps from our school-boy remembrance
of it we may have as little a liking for it as Horace had for the poem of
Livius Andronicus, which he studied under "Orbilius of the rods," but even
the obscurities of the Latin subjunctive and ablative cannot have blinded
us entirely to the romance of the desperate siege of Alesia and the final
struggle which the Gauls made to drive back the invader. Matius shared
with Caesar all the hardships and perils of that campaign, and with Caesar
he witnessed the final scene of the tragedy when Vercingetorix, the heroic
Gallic chieftain, gave up his sword, and the conquest of Gaul was
finished. It is little wonder that Matius and the other young men who
followed Caesar were filled with admiration of the man who had brought all
this to pass.

It was a notable group, including Trebatius, Hirtius, Pansa, Oppius, and
Matius in its number. All of them were of the new Rome. Perhaps they were
dimly conscious that the mantle of Tiberius Gracchus had fallen upon their
leader, that the great political struggle which had been going on for
nearly a century was nearing its end, and that they were on the eve of a
greater victory than that at Alesia. It would seem that only two of them,
Matius and Trebatius, lived to see the dawning of the new day. But it was
not simply nor mainly the brilliancy of Caesar as a leader in war or in
politics which attracted Matius to him. As he himself puts it in his
letter to Cicero: "I did not follow a Caesar, but a friend." Lucullus and
Pompey had made as distinguished a record in the East as Caesar had in the
West, but we hear of no such group of able young men following their
fortunes as attached themselves to Caesar. We must find a reason for the
difference in the personal qualities of Caesar, and there is nothing that
more clearly proves the charm of his character than the devotion to him of
this group of men. In the group Matius is the best representative of the
man and the friend. When Caesar came into his own, Matius neither asked for
nor accepted the political offices which Caesar would gladly have giv