e belonged to an outlawed family,
nor from ordering with great composure that men who had stood
by him and helped him in times of difficulty should be executed
before his eyes at the nod of the same master:(9) he was not cruel,
thoughhe was reproached with being so, but--what perhaps was worse--
he was cold and, in good as in evil, unimpassioned. In the tumult
of battle he faced the enemy fearlessly; in civil life he was a shy
man, whose cheek flushed on the slightest occasion; he spoke
in public not without embarrassment, and generally was angular, stiff,
and awkward in intercourse. With all his haughty obstinacy he was--
as indeed persons ordinarily are, who make a display of their
independence--a pliant tool in the hands of men who knew how
to manage him, especially of his freedmen and clients, by whom he had
no fear of being controlled. For nothing was he less qualified
than for a statesman. Uncertain as to his aims, unskilful in the choice
of his means, alike in little and great matters shortsighted
and helpless, he was wont to conceal his irresolution and indecision
under a solemn silence, and, when he thought to play a subtle
game, simply to deceive himself with the belief that he was
deceiving others. By his military position and his territorial
connections he acquired almost without any action of his own
a considerable party personally devoted to him, with which
the greatest things might have been accomplished; but Pompeius
was in every respect incapable of leading and keeping together a party,
and, if it still kept together, it did so--in like manner without
his action--through the sheer force of circumstances. In this,
as in other things, he reminds us of Marius; but Marius, with his
nature of boorish roughness and sensuous passion, was still less
intolerable than this most tiresome and most starched of all
artificial great men. His political position was utterly perverse.
He was a Sullan officer and under obligation to stand up for
the restored constitution, and yet again in opposition to Sulla
personally as well as to the whole senatorial government. The gens
of the Pompeii, which had only been named for some sixty years
in the consular lists, had by no means acquired full standing
in the eyes of the aristocracy; even the father of this Pompeius
had occupied a very invidious equivocal position towards
the senate,(10) and he himself had once been in the ranks
of the Cinnans(11)--recollections which